Posts by VicMortimer

Claude is getting worse, according to Claude

Clod

It's almost truth in advertising.

"Claude" sounds a lot like "Clod".

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

There's always one....

No. It's not the same.

Updates are annoying. But the level of annoyance is not even close to the same.

Apple is just better at this.

Linux distros are just better at this.

Micro$loth is really, really, really bad at this.

Deere oh Deere: Tractor repair row heads for $99M settlement

Re: This Settlement is **NOT** an excellent result for the Class

Apple products aren't particularly hard to open. The big problem with Apple products is the same thing as Deere products, parts pairing should be illegal.

Criminal wannabes even more dangerous than the pros, says ex-FBI cyber chief

Want to stop ransomware? Ban paying ransom.

The ONLY way ransomware is ever going to stop is if paying becomes a crime - with actual prison time for CEOs who pay.

Ransomware exists because getting money is possible. Stop the money, stop the ransomware.

Researchers didn’t want to glamorize cybercrims. So they roasted them

Is it just me, or does Evil Ferret actually sound pretty cool?

When a billboard survives the wind, but not the boot

Is it really a Britishism at all?

Maybe it's my bad memory, but it sounds more "old west" to me.

Re: ROFL with this:-

They still do that here.

My city didn't manage to ban billboards entirely, they just banned new ones going up.

But they did manage to ban electronic ones early enough that none got installed and grandfathered.

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

Won't work

This would literally kill open source. If you have to pay to use it, it's not open any more.

No, what we really need is for open source developers to realize that garbage licenses like BSD are a huge problem. Switch everything you're working on to the GNU Affero General Public License to force the freeloaders to release any changes they make even if they just put the changed software on a server and don't distribute it. Stop using licenses that let trillion dollar corporations take and not give back.

Stop recognizing licenses like BSD as open.

Ohio citizens tell hyperscalers to take their supersized datacenters elsewhere

Ohio? Pretty?

It's flat and full of corn. I hate driving through Ohio.

Apple’s MacBook Neo turns out to be its most repairable lappy in 14 years

Re: What's not to like?

The RAM did not have to be soldered. Other ARM chip designs don't need soldered RAM.

And let's not pretend shared VRAM is an advantage for anything but cost. It's NOT new, and integrated graphics has never been better than a discrete GPU and VRAM.

Re: If

https://www.ifixit.com/Parts/Mac_Laptop

Check there in about a month, the parts will be available for this too.

Re: Based on pricing of M1 Macbooks

Apple has known that for decades.

They've built education-only machines before. And normal consumers always went nuts until Apple started selling them to everybody.

Re: 8 GB ram is good enough.

So delete Chrome. Firefox and Safari are fine.

Chrome is garbage anyway.

Re: Another Apple rant with zero basis?

8GB would be a problem for me.

That said, I'm using a MacBook Air with 24GB, I'm not doing heavy duty video with it so I didn't need a Pro. 16GB was a bit constraining.

But for most users, 8GB is adequate.

The 2011 13" was fine, the GPUs in the 15" have pretty much all failed now.

As I recall, OCLP just disables it by default because it's so failure prone.

The 2012s are rock solid. I've got one beside me right now, running 10.14 because it still supports 32-bit apps. It's got 4TB of SSD storage and 16GB RAM. Mac OS 15 is a bit slow on the 2012s, but it'll run.

Huh? You can still get new 3rd party batteries for the 2006 MacBook and MacBook Pro. New PowerBook 100 batteries are available. PowerBook 140 batteries are rebuildable, they use A size NiCad cells.

There are even new replacement lead acid batteries for the original 1989 Macintosh Portable available. I might even get one, would be nice to get mine running again.

There's pretty much no vintage Apple that doesn't have parts available.

Apple still did it to be annoying. Pentalobes are ONLY used for the outside screws, early iPhones used phillips for the two screws near the Lightning port, Apple actually switched them out for pentalobe if you took the phone in for service - and pentalobe drivers were hard to find back then. I remember somebody was actually selling kits with a tiny screw extractor and replacement phillips screws.

I'm honestly surprised they haven't changed screws again now that pentalobe drives are everywhere.

AFRINIC accuses litigant of trying to ‘paralyse’ it

Re: A consequence of IPv6's poor design and many failures

Yep. IPv6 was the stupidest possible way to get more addresses. There was ZERO need for it to do "other stuff" - it just needed to expand the address space.

Brits fear AI will strip the human touch from public services

Re: Please wait, your call is important to us

Honestly, sitting on hold to talk to a person is generally preferable to dealing with AI slop.

And it's not like that's gone away, you just have to force your way through the AI gatekeeper first, then you get to sit on hold.

60 years since humanity first touched the surface of another planet

Re: Wrong title

I'm going with rage bait. What an absolutely asinine headline.

Do better, Reg editors.

Oracle and OpenAI's Texas Stargate datacenter expansion reportedly on the skids

Re: Gigawatts

Eh, it's actually a pretty good thing to talk about.

It's a good indication of exactly how disastrous these data centers are for the environment, and for what they're going to do to the electric rates of everybody in the general vicinity of one of them. AI is hurting everybody.

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Re: Still running with no Apple account

You can absolutely create one without a payment method.

And I think mine has a 'birthday' of 1/1/1970. Definitely not my real birthday.

Stop macOS 26 nagging with one tiny policy tweak

This is a must-do with OCLP

So, I don't hate macOS 26. I mean, once you turn on "Reduce transparency" that is, but I've had that turned on for years because the menu bar should be black text on a light background.

But for Macs running OpenCore Legacy Patcher, it's a no-go for now - as in, it'll break lots of stuff like your keyboard and mouse, and your computer will be unusable. And those computers will happily offer you 26. Not a big deal if you know not to click the button, but I've got users who can't resist, and then I get to wipe and reinstall a machine. Good for my wallet, bad for my and my client's annoyance level.

So this is INCREDIBLY helpful. Thanks for letting us know about it.

Attacker gets into France's database listing all bank accounts, makes off with 1.2 million records

Surprise!

And does anybody wonder why governments should not be allowed to collect this sort of info yet?

US tech giants open their wallets for AI-friendly politicians

Re: You say fund/influence

I think the word you're looking for is "BRIBE".

Agile Manifesto turns 25 – just in time for vibe coding to test it

So I'm not a code monkey.

But this "Agile" thing always sounded like an incredibly stupid way to write software. And given the bloat plague, and the buggy mess that seems to result, I have a feeling I'm right.

DEF CON bans three Epstein-linked men from future events

Re: Inappropriate knee jerk reaction.

It's been known that Epstein was a pedo for over 20 years. By 2010, when these asshats were associating with him, he was already a convicted sex offender.

Not sure you want to compare yourself to these guys.

Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

Yuck

The whole point of Wine is to not have to run the nightmare that is Windoze.

These are a step backwards.

OpenAI introduces ads...for the people!

I wonder how long it'll be before somebody 'vibe codes' an adblocker for it.

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

No kidding.

A major research university is where "not invented here" needs to be the near-absolute rule. If a university can't produce this sort of system internally, they should shut down their computer science and computer engineering departments.

There's no excuse for this outsourcing crap.

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Nobody is disputing that it is currently legal to use facial recognition software.

We are disputing that it should be legal to use facial recognition software.

Failure to ban facial recognition software is a failure of government that should be recognized and rectified.

Poe's law.

There are people so stupid as to actually sincerely believe anything. There is no position so extreme that nobody sincerely takes it.

No /s or ;) and you almost have to take the stupidest things to be meant literally.

Ban it

Society functioned for thousands of years without invasive surveillance cameras everywhere.

The real answer is not just to ban face recognition, it's to ban the cameras that enable it. Get them out of the stores, get them off the streets. If a single camera is not operated by a single human, make it illegal to operate at all. No automated recording systems, not even a wall of screens that one person can see, one camera, one person operating it, if you want 50 cameras in your shop you better have a room with desks for 50 people, and if no one is in the seat, the camera had better be off.

Oh, it wouldn't be any cheaper than just hiring security people to walk around the store? THAT'S THE IDEA.

Brussels eyes crowbar for Meta's WhatsApp AI lockout

What'sCrapp is the problem

Yeah, you're an idiot if you're using one of these LLM chatbots.

But you're a bigger idiot if you're using a F*c*book platform like What'sCrapp. They're lying to you about security, they can see everything you do on there. Yeah, it's end to end encrypted - and one of the ends is their server.

If you care AT ALL about security, remove their garbage spyware from all of your devices.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"

Meh.

Their quality has gone down. I've seen LOTS of reports of Speed Queen failures recently. Turns out mechanical timers are ALL low quality garbage now.

Meanwhile my computer controlled Whirlpool front loader is about 20 years old now. It was a LOT cheaper than a Speed Queen, and has outlasted the current batch of Speed Queens with NO failures. Made in Germany, dunno if they still make them there or if quality has suffered like it has with German garbage cars.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Re: Its why

Oh, it materialized. Several times, actually. It normally takes a few hours for the uBlock devs to work around it and release a patch.

End result is most people don't even notice it happened.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

Keep your Juche to yourself. I'll take the strawberries.

Self sufficiency - the idea that North Korea is doing everything right, and every country should aspire to be more like North Korea.

CISA orders federal agencies to rip out EOL edge kit before cybercrooks move in

Wrong approach

This is the US government we're talking about.

They have the clout to order tech companies to continue support, both for their own gear and for other perfectly functional equipment that's been dropped for planned obsolescence reasons. There are laws already in place (like the defense production act) that would enable it.

Instead they're enabling and encouraging bad corporate behavior.

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

Criminalize paying ransom

It should be a crime to pay ransom anyway.

The ONLY way ransomware is going to stop is if a few CEOs go to jail for paying.

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Re: Sorry you don't get to "both sides" Trump's authoritorian governance

Calling those murderous thugs "law enforcement" is an idiotic take.

The judges aren't going far enough. But it's WELL within their power to block unlawful arrests.

Re: Not a Trump thing.

I saw what he said. The orange idiot literally suggested UV light or bleach as internal treatments for humans. And he kept pushing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin LONG after they were shown not to work.

Oblig. XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1217/

Re: Not a Trump thing.

I think that one is pretty well known. I'm American and I know exactly what it's talking about.

It was a pretty pivotal moment in public health.

Sony no longer home of the Bravia as it plans TV biz spin-out to China’s TCL

Re: Akio Morita

The MiniDisc was the end of Sony for me. Copy protection unless you pay for the "pro" crap? No thanks.

Re: Not sure why the dissing of TCL

Has nobody learned that you DO NOT connect a TV to your network?

Having the network connection not function is a feature, not a bug.

Bond, debt bond: Investors shaken, not stirred by Oracle’s borrowing spree sue Big Red

Hey, if the AI bubble bursting also destroys Oracle...

Kind of a no-lose scenario, don't you think?

They won't be missed.

US regulator tells GM to hit the brakes on customer tracking

Re: Which is it?

Yes, obviously. It means they still have access to the data, which is still a problem.

Re: we ended that program due to customer feedback

It's NEVER acceptable to collect customer driving data.

Not "brief time leading up to the incident", not ever.

Your things should not be spying on you.

As agents run amok, CrowdStrike's $740M SGNL deal aims to help get a grip on identity security

Trust Clownstrike?

Seems like a bad idea to use anything they touch.