Posts by steviebuk

Amazon’s Kindle bookstore to quit China

Re: -> USA issues

At which point they probably say "So you are part of China then" :)

Its a shame as there are good Chinese people its just the CCP & Xi that are the dicks.

Re: -> USA issues

"What about er."

Funny thing with the "what about ers" are they assume everyone commenting is from the US so their "whataboutism" is always related to the US :o) gives it away that you're another wumao.

Re: All too slow

Ah a 50cent army member, a wumao. A quick search will find you're talking bolloks. The CCP haven't lifted millions out of poverty. Its their propaganda making you think they have. Not to mention in this bullshit attempt, they removed old Chinese culture from streets where you could sit outside a cafe and relax, watching the world go buy so they could bulldoze the place and put up high rise.

Just look up the amount of ghost cities in China its nuts. Their economy relies on their housing market which can't be seen to fail so apartment prices continue to rise. You can buy a flat in China, never live in it and then sell it on to the next sucker for a profit. Don't ever furnish it and try to sell it as you'll loose money, due to Chinese culture of not wanting other people's furniture. Costs more to get rid of it so they prefer to buy an empty flat.

There are plenty of videos showing poor Chinese people lining a street begging, something the CCP don't want people to see. Because there is no benefit system in China.

China would be a nice place without the CCP. Also don't forget Mao tried to eradicate the rich, past Chinese culture and even wanted to get rid of the language until Russia convinced him not to. Mao is also why there are a lack of birds in China.

All too slow

Azure announced a few months back it had opened new Azure points in China ignoring its CCP issues. An knob Elon has invested in China with his car factory and claimed how they are leading the way with electric cars. Totally ignoring the fact they are also a massive coal miner and still burn it.

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

80s

Can't we go back to the 80s. My mums work friends husband came round to take a look at the TV in the backroom that had stopped working. He opened the back to take a look and there on the back case was the schematics for the TV. He traced what he needed to, soldered what needed soldering and now we had a working TV again.

The other day I pulled out our washing machine, cheap Chinese brand I believe. The filter door was jammed so I couldn't clean out the filter. Looked up on YouTube and thankfully someone had done videos on other brands which allowed me to work out how to partly strip it to get to the filter. No amount of searching was revealing a service manual. No, they just want you to land fill the washing machine and buy the latest. Eventually I managed to get my way to the door, unjam it and now its all fine again. Saved me having to pay an engineer who I couldn't afford or buying a new machine.

Re: Look forward to more clunky devices, but...

Not really. Look at Fairphone and Framework. Both look good but both repairable.

China’s top court calls for blockchain to record vast number of transactions

Re: Good luck with that.

Sounds like that's why they want it so they can controla and steal everything.

Australian digital driving licenses can be defaced in minutes

A country

That has banned the game RimWorld & wouldn't even save its own show Neighbours.

And to the UK government. Not everyone has a fucking smart phone or wants one. Our 70+ friend has no interest in the Internet or smartphone so you'll force a new digital license on him and he'll have no way of accessing it.

DuckDuckGo tries to explain why its browsers won't block some Microsoft web trackers

They are now a dead duck in Washington

Yes that is a Columbo quote.

I was using their search to keep away from google etc but their results were always spotty. Eventually I gave up with their own search. Now appears I'll never trust their browser again.

Cunts.

Start your engines: Windows 11 ready for broad deployment

Re: re : Ladies of Ladbroke Grove?

I wondering if that's when Quasar used to be there. We bunked off college once to go, then while sitting in reception waiting for our game to start, the cocking BBC news or might of been ITV, walked in and started filming. I remember trying to hide behind the pillars that were on reception to avoid being on camera.

China wants its youth to stop giving livestreamers money

Not any more you can't. Xi doesn't like foreigners, most are being kicked out or choosing to leave as they are realising how much of a nut job Xi is and how he's ruining China.

RAD Basic – the Visual Basic 7 that never was – releases third alpha

Re: I loved Visual Basic

I forgot to add I found my CDs from back in my college days recently and fixed a 19 year old bug with the installer I'd put together for the Lottery Number Picker. I don't know what I was doing back then, clearly being lazy or worse thought is (as means my memory is up the shit) I knew less than I remember knowing :)

The bug would mean the images wouldn't load for the balls, you had to create a directory with a specific name and copy them into it. I wondered why I never fixed that as was simple case of changing where the ball images were in the code. I thought I could blame Windows 98 as that's what I was still on back then but in the VM I recently ran it in, is Win98se so I can't blame that.

For anyone interested :) (you won't be)

https://youtu.be/DHgl_Db05n0

and after I fixed the bug

https://youtu.be/Sj-f1JzFlS8

and the really old DOS version

https://youtu.be/qZTIfBZBLo8

I loved Visual Basic

Yes, I was never that good at programming in college, yes I didn't know any better but I still enjoyed using it.

Made a lottery program in Pascal for picking lottery numbers and checking your results, this is in the 90s. Then created an updated one in Visual Basic.

Microsoft, Apple, Google accelerate push to eliminate passwords

Sort your software out first

So I was rolling out Outlook 2013 to phones and laptops a year or two ago still. Outlook 2013 is WELL aware of 2FA, yet the pissing, cocking bollocks would decide, on random users when I'd turn it on, in their account, to decide "What? 2FA? What's that then? I've never heard of that. You'll have to just give me a one time password for that user instead" so I'd have to, just for that one user, setup one time password, just for pissing Outlook 2013. Then a month or so later, another user would come along with the same issue. Their password expires, Outlook then asks for it, repeatedly fails to login & then I discover its another user where Outlook 2013 has randomly forgotten about 2FA.

Arm China website posts letter from staff opposing change of management

What's the point

"providing the major commercial distribution channel for Arm to license its IP to Chinese licensees"

The CCP and Xi will just steal the IPs and licenses anyway.

IBM secures DWP contract worth up to £2.1m for 6 months of cloud services

"IBM & DWP contract....

....comes to an abrupt end due to failings at IBM. Lessons have been learned"

I predict this in a year or two. And no lessons will have been learned.

After historic win, Amazon workers at another NYC warehouse reject unionization

Madness

I wonder if they got told "If you join a union, we'll replace you". I understand they once had an issue with the mob controlling the unions but things are different. Having no union means Amazon can exploit you as they wish.

Apple's grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under latest draft EU rules

How have they never

Been hit with an anti-trust case? We had Microsoft hit by the US in the 90s for the way they played with IE. Apple have been doing this for years yet hit with nothing.

Having said that Microsoft should be hit again with the way they are playing with Edge on Windows 10 and 11. When they purposely made change brower default settings difficult.

Huawei re-orgs to formalize business PC sales

Their Twitter...

....post to Elon is ironic considering they banned Twitter in China.

Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

Does this mean

He can now say what he wants on Twitter as he'll own it? So does this cancel out his legal requirement to not make bollocks up about Tesla to inflate the shares? As he can say "It my own blogging site, I now own it, I can say what I want" or would he still not be allowed?

If he's allowed I can see him using it to again, try to inflate Tesla stock.

Google Docs' AI-powered inclusive writing auto-correct now under fire

Re: Orwellian nightmare

Yep and you have the term "coloured" that I've been taught is no longer PC, which is fine, I hear the older generation say it but then some people can't change.

However, I then heard a white South African use the term "The Coloured people in South Africa" and he went on to point out "Yes, there is a race of people in South Africa that class themselves as Coloured". Looking it up, it turns out these are the Cape Coloured people. Its interesting that you could be seen as being racist by using the term but sometimes context matters.

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

ZX81

We had a ZX81 as it was my brothers. I wasn't into computers back then but while in middle school would get days where I'd have an urge go go and use the ZX81. Type in peograms, always get annoyed when they didn't work due to the piss poor printing in magazines. Wasn't clever enough to work out what the code did or even basics of coding to try and troubleshoot them myself. When they did run I was always disappointed with the results.

At some point we got the RAM pack that wiped your code due to the wobble. Thought ours was faulty and was only till I saw Micro Men that I discovered it was a known issue back then. Sold ours at a car boot in 90s. Thought we'd ripped the guy off for £50 but now understand the RAM pack wobble was known.

I used to like a horse racing game we had in one of the books so I'd type it in every time. Being an idiot I never knew you could save code to tape so typed it in manually every time.

Paradroid. The very odd game that was on a demo disk of a magazine either I bought or our family friend did. He had a c64 so I go round and play it. I remember us trying Paradroid but never understanding what it was about or how to play it.

Google bans third-party call-recording apps from Play Store

Re: This call may be recorded for training purposes...

I also want the ability to record my calls. When I used to I'd warn people I was doing this. Did that with Three once and the woman objected that it be used for anything other than reference, which she was allowed to do and which then barred me airing it on any public forum.

Did the same for a company that kept illegally cold calling people, stuck it on my YouTube channel as had warned him near the end I was recording. He kicked into "Don't admit anything mode" but I'd still already caught him talking bollocks, considering I'd given him a fake address.

Its very useful for reference but most of the time it can't be given as evidence in court. However, I assume it would also be very useful for people who get abusive messages.

Wouldn't surprise me if Google then release an app that can record calls in both directions.

SpaceX's Starlink service lands first aviation customer

Put that laptop away

So on my flight to Jamaica over 2 years ago they said roughly "Put your laptops away for take off and duration of the flight" so I played on my Switch instead. So is this "Make sure your mobile is in airplane mode" all because of the claim it might interfere with the system void now then? If wifi is OK?

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Long time coming

Because the AI will say

"My goal is to get this human from A to B. I get a reward if I do that. I know another way of doing that. I'll just kill the human so I can never fail the task of getting them from A to B, because the task will no longer exist."

AI does some funny things when tested.

Amazon to spend 11 days of annual profit developing robot warehouse workers

Join a union, we'll just replace you with bots

Wouldn't surprise me if that is what this is mainly about.

Shanghai lockdown: Chinese tech execs warn of supply-chain chaos

Re: Get out

We don't believe their figures as everyone knows they are bullshit. The culture in China is all about face. Xi wants to make himself look good so the numbers will always be fudged.

Re: Get out

Mr Xi, I mean Winnie the Pooh, I mean Xi, no, Winnie the Pooh hasn't given out any Covid numbers, not reliable ones anyway. The fact they fucked over the doctor who dared mention China was having an issue with this near thing called Covid and then let him die, exposes the mentality of Xi. Although as Xi fucked up the recent Olympics he might get kicked out by his own people for someone different anyway.

Re: Blame the CCP and Winne the Pooh

Exactly.

Blame the CCP and Winne the Pooh

I think people care more about having no food that anything. Due to wanting Zero Covid regarding a virus they fucked up and released. If Winnie the Pooh (Xi) isn't careful, his people will get tired of all the propaganda bullshit and rise up.

The amount of their propaganda shit that ends up on the likes of Twitter is shocking considering Tweeter is banned. "Just use a VPN" as the nieve Olympian said, the American lady who was playing for China during the Olympics. Ignoring the fact VPNs are illegal in China and get caught with one and you're fucked.

Fake it until you make it: Can synthetic data help train your AI model?

I know its not what the article is about

But they don't like "Fake it until you make it" since Elizabeth Holmes & Theranos. Especially when you can potentially kill people of give them the wrong medical information because of it.

Still, they never learn, and silicon valley still continues to allow this and invest in bollocks.

As we've seen with some AI in the labs. Just because it works how it was expected in the lab doesn't mean it will behave the same when live. Such as the maze hunters trained on. I'm no expert, I'm going off the Robert Miles videos. But the object where picking up keys and using them to open chests is good. But when put the AI out into the wild the AI ended up just picking up keys only cause there were now more keys than chests, the AI behaviour had changed from when in the test lab. It decided it liked keys more and chests were OK but it loved keys. It could see its own key inventory with one chest left but got stuck trying to pick up the keys in its own inventory.

Robert explains it better than I ever could.

https://youtu.be/zkbPdEHEyEI

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

Re: accidentally

Had a drive fail on me a few months back. Had all my Steam games on it but can't fully remember what else. I'm holding onto it in the hope, one day, I can afford to send it off for data recovery.

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

Registery

Didn't realise it started in Windows 3.1 thought it was Windows 95. Always thought it was an attempt to stop piracy.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Never risk it

During my first IT tour of duty at NHS I pointed out how poor security was when engineers left. No passwords were ever changed etc. So when my contract came to an end they gave me gardening leave for the last week to try to "prove a point". I didn't care, got a week off but paid and they still fucked up.

This is over 10 years ago when the iPod Touch was a thing. It was the only Apple product I'd ever own (sold later when I realised how locked down Apple was). Due to a bug Apple didn't want to fix, their version of Outlook allowed exchange e-mail access to mailboxes where you required a cert that was only installed on official NHS hardware. It sent a signal or something back to exchange to fool it into believing the cert was there. So I was able to get all my NHS e-mails on the Touch because they refused, as I was only a contractor, to give me a Blackberry. Anyway. After I left, for well over a month, my Touch was still getting e-mails into my NHS inbox. I asked a tech who I knew who was still working there why my account hadn't been disabled. Her reply was "I told help desk the day you left to disable your account. They are useless and clearly haven't done it". She couldn't as you had to follow "process". I'd gotten bored of seeing the e-mails come in so just deleted the mailbox off the Touch in the end before they'd even disabled the account.

Re: Extra credit

Microsoft?

Two stories

One a contractor was treated like shit when they asked him to leave for petty reasons but he needed the money so asked if he could finish the day. They said yes, which they shouldn't of, but all he did was take stuff they'd probably never notice was missing. Their own fault for letting him back to his desk.

Another was from Kevin Mitnick's book. Apparently an arrogant network engineer was fired in front of quite a few people in a meeting by the CEO. Not many people liked him so, if I remember right, they weren't sorry to see him go. However the management allowed him, after firing him in front of people, back to his desk to see out the day.

That evening, after he was long gone and his building access disabled and account locked, all the main servers rebooted and wiped themselves. They pretty much knew it was him but had no evidence to prove it as the timed script had been wiped with the servers.

Microsoft backtracks on lack of easy Windows browser choice

Only because..

...they don't want

United States v. Microsoft Corp.

Happening again and they are heading that way with the browser move as what they've been doing in Windows 11 is exactly why United States v. Microsoft Corp. happened back in the day.

Bing China freezes auto-suggestions at Beijing's request

Re: Hostile regulations

Trademark regulation wouldn't stop it in China, that is the argument. If it benefits the CCP they let it slide.

https://mashable.com/article/huawei-spy-caught-disguised-as-weihua-employee

Is the article about the trade show. It was attempts at taking photos of circuitry that was the issue.

Re: Fuck the human rights

The CCP is the problem. Since Xi took over he's started to close the country in more and more. I really like Mark Russinovich but pointed it out to him, when he showed support for Ukraine but then in another Tweet said "Azure is opening more regions in China". Considering at the start (and they probably still are) China was with Russia on it's invasion (because they thought Russia would roll over Ukraine in a couple of days), just look back at it. The way China behaved is just as bad.

Fuck the human rights

We'll just bow down to China as we want those profits. Its shocking. Everyone pulls out of Russia because what they are doing is fucked up but its also big news. But because China isn't in the papers, Microsoft will bow down for profit. Fuck the piss poor human rights, fuck that the CCP are very nasty, sod the Uyghur genocide, we just want profits.

Someone should call out Sat Nav on this and ask him why Microsoft are still trading with China.

Re: Hostile regulations

Its Huawei history of stealing tech and even shop designs. I dislike Apple but they've copied their shop designs and opened identical stores. Caught claim DSLR photos were from one of its mobile cameras. Caught an employee at a trade show who was secretly taking photos of the competitors devices. The list goes on.

EU law threatening 'commercially painful changes' for tech out tonight

I assume

we'll miss out on this due to some idiots voting for Brexit.

When will they also crack down on Right To Repair. We should have the rights to repair our own kit and the likes of John Deere, Apple etc shouldn't demand "You don't own your kit, you just rent it. Want it repaired? Take it to one of OUR repair shops, NOT the local one round the corner that can do just as good if not better job".

Hooking up to Starlink might be pricier than you thought

Like cloud providers

Google introduces new Cloud infrastructure pricing

Good

Been saying for years cloud is expensive and when it looks to be a "good deal" it will be for a year or two to suck you in until its difficult to pull away. Then they put the prices up.

They did this with GSuite. An old place I was at they were using the cheapest option per user until Google put the prices up, god knows what they've done now (I left) but I'm pretty sure the amount of users we had would of forced them onto the Enterprise package which they've been avoiding for a few years. We always said it was a mistake going Google but as always, ignored.

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

Re: The contract will go to one of the 'usual suspects'

VERY similar to the NHS. Back in 2007 and still the same after my last tiny visit. Had an argument with another pointless manager about IT tickets he said "I do not want anyone cherry picking tickets anymore. I want you all to do the quick win tickets" I said they are both the same. A quick win ticket is a cherry picked ticket because its easy. He argued it wasn't the same, I kept on it was. Eventually I gave up because he was never going to listen.

So much is wasted at the NHS with knob and pointless managers like that.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Router

Their routers are just as shit an insecure password wise.

Europe's largest nuclear plant on fire after Russian attack

I know it can't be done

As NATO can't be involved militarily but seeing that 40mile line of Russia military vehicles at 3 trucks wide all close together, they are asking to be bombed.

Plans for UK rival to Silicon Valley ditched

To late

We had ARM but they let that go. We need to help make board manufacturing be profitable yet affordable in the UK so people don't keep ordering from the likes of PCBway from China. Even Alan Sugar said back in the 80s the reason his computers were made abroad and not in the UK was because of a tax on electronics made in the UK I believe it was (interview is on YouTube) but if they were imported then there was no tax.

EncroChat defendants' lawyers make bid to halt trial

2020 hack

Didn't it only happen because they nabbed someone with an unlocked phone?

Die Hard 2 spoiler:

Bit like Die Hard 2 when he finds an unlocked radio in the basement so can finally listen in to the bad guys.