Posts by Gnisho

Take this rob and shove it! Salesforce issues stern retort to ransomware extort

There is nobody to root for in this story, except maybe the reporter.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: Make Your Peace With M$ Cloud Services Already

Winston Smith approves of your message.

So sure, you have to work at it to preserve any semblance of privacy online. Make the pigfuckers work for it, just on general principle. It's still somewhat doable. Also, not everything you do needs to be online.

Enterprise customers still won't put up with the worst of this. So for those still forced to use Windows who have sufficient motivation, loopholes will remain.

The best (read: least shitty) option will likely remain Win 10 LTSC versions, including IoT Enterprise.

In the meantime ... if you can get away, why haven't you?

Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT authority

Considering how many places where there's a legal requirement for data confidentiality, it isn't just irresponsible, immoral, and idiotic of Microsoft to make the suggestion, it may well venture into inducement of illegal activity as well.

Windows 11 25H2 is mostly 24H2 with bits bolted on or ripped out

Re: Excuse Me?

That's standard marketing boilerplate, which the better LLMs (remember, AI does not exist as of yet, and anybody who tells you it does is lying) are often suitable to do with some light editing.

Your AI conversations are a secret new treasure trove for marketers

Re: All secrets belong to us* .... that which and/or those who dare care share win winning

Any bad actor is just fine, no matter how obvious they make any particular trap. The world continues to build better idiots.

AI that once called itself MechaHitler will now be available to the US government for $0.42

Completely on brand. Grok spouts made-up bullshit that often enough should be counted as hate crimes.

Relatedly, it's always fun hitting automated moderation when posting analysis of Executive Orders, as the EOs themselves evaluate as hate speech by the platform in question.

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Re: "gives people the freedom¹ to live² happier³, more fulfilling lives²."

If their work quality and response time remain fine, few meetings require rescheduling, and they're not working for your direct competitors ... then it's completely immaterial, and none of your goddamned business anyway other than noting you're underutilizing them and probably underpaying them as well.

If they're double-dipping and not performing as well as you need? You'll get that sorted at some point.

Re: Message to CEOs : it's hopeless

At least with manufacturing you can come up with useful and fairly easily obtained metrics, rate of production, uptime/downtime, materials waste, maintenance costs changes over time, and so on and so on. With an awful lot of office work, it can get a bit more nebulous and you start to see metrics gathering for its' own sake, more often based on what kind of metrics are easy to gather rather than anything really properly useful.

Microsoft thinks cloud PCs might be overkill, starts streaming just apps under Windows 365

All things considered, this is simply a natural progression path for O365. If you're already a user, or are a prospective user, this could easily be seen as a decent upgrade as would allow feature and interface parity between Office applications in local install vs. the somewhat clunkier web version. Extra latency aside, of course. That drawback and various others are addressed in thread already...

But, the real drawback is how Microsoft is so, so hungry for your subscription money (and EVERY LAST BIT of your personal and organizational data) and is willing to do all kinds of things to gently guide users (read: effectively force the issue by making it is entirely too much effort for most to avoid) into giving these up.

Just watch the progression on how hard it is to avoid having OneDrive, Copilot, Recall, etc. installed and active as deeper application integration is achieved when many users and orgs { already || should } consider them a hazard for one reason or another. How far will they ramp up the underhanded activities, advertising, and other gentle nudges to get Windows users deeper into the ecosystem? Given history, as far as they're allowed, always playing games with (or simply ignoring or bribing their way past) the legal limits.

Data destruction done wrong could cost your company millions

Last I dealt with this ... net boot from SCCM into a killdisk task which did a multipass wipe, saved certificate showing device serial number, time stamp, process log, who did it, etc Then return the machine to OEM for whatever it's worth.

HybridPetya: More proof that Secure Boot bypasses are not just an urban legend

Amazing how much flak one got for calling Secure Boot either of vendor lock-in or security theater from day one, and how much one still gets for either.

Microsoft readies Windows 11 25H2 while Windows 10 circles the drain

Re: Drain? What drain?

Getting away from Windows can be an uphill battle, especially for less technically inclined users or those well and truly locked in to niche applications. Microsoft keeps displaying a belief, which market share numbers help to affirm, that they can weather some losses.

My response is: Help others check if a switch away from Windows could be helpful for their use cases.

Re: "the installation is little more than an enablement package"...

"While it is potentially abusable, it's not quite the same [...] a computer which only turns [...] on if you pay up."

Uh ... yeah ... well ...

Would say "let's not give them any ideas" but honestly it's far far too late by now.

Laravel inventor tells devs to quit writing 'cathedrals of complexity'

Re: There was a very old term for this

Bum.

http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/b/bum.html

How Windows 11 is breaking from its bedrock and moving away

Re: 'Many of us'?

Yeah, about that "Mac is Unix" line. There's some argumentation about how much of the testing the current versions of MacOS conform to, which is apparently a lot less than when the certification was first done. Word I've read is that it can only technically claim for that to still be true, but it is a nice line to have in the product info.

Edit: On a quick check, I may well have been underselling what that cert is still worth. Eh... https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/11/macos_15_is_unix/

We all live in a virtual machine, a virtual machine, a virtual machine

Oh, I am more than aware and had some interesting conversations about that when some of such was my personal responsibility. Cannot imagine it's gotten any less stupid since then.

I have difficulty with the idea that software which may reduce or disable functionality dependent on outside data comms should ever be allowed to be used in this kind of a military context.

It is complete and utter madness to allow this kind of dependency to creep in to critical operations roles of any sort.

Microsoft can't guarantee data sovereignty – OVHcloud says 'We told you so'

Re: Microsoft can't guarantee anything...

While you're not wrong, Trump is decades late to this party. Amazing how many people fail to remember why HTTPS took off. Part of the push came from Google after finding their comms tapped. Not seeing much point in re-hashing the discussion about the timetables on this with forced public disclosures, admissions from the US government, and how some of it was made (more or less) legal after the fact. Just boggles me how thin some of the pretexts are that get accepted.

Microsoft tweaks Windows Out of Box Experience for enterprises to adjust control freakery

Clearly labeled configuration options in a unified, consistent interface, with well thought out settings hierarchies that don't get shuffled every six months or so, actually doing what they're labeled for, with documentation that manages to avoid lying to the system administrator ... all of these are anathema to Microsoft. Why build something that *works* when you can build something that is "beautifully complicated" and provides differentiation from your predecessors' work (entirely for internal organizational political reasons having absofuckinglutely nothing to do with functionality) while guaranteeing "Jorb Securimty"?

Generative AI isn't just a matter of life and death. It's far more important than that

And THAT conversation has yet to get past the definition of terms.

Tencent doesn’t care if it can buy American GPUs again – it already has all the chips it needs

Re: You'll need a drone...

The expectation remains that nVidia will keep trying to chase the bigger profits and won't go back to shoveling product that's both attractive to gamers and reasonably priced.

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

Re: More Shite being flung against the wall

Ask Munich about that.

Crooks can't let go: Active attacks target Office vuln patched 8 years ago

Older installs linger for a host of reasons, most of them bad.

I've seen smaller orgs hold on to older Office versions far too long because of "that stupid ribbon interface".

You've got drought: UK gov suggests you save water by deleting old emails

Re: it's not immediately clear how big an impact clearing out your spam folder will really have.

It's more insidious than that. The act of cleaning out those folders will trigger additional analytics trying to find patterns, to create more useful targeting information for the advertising-industrial complex. Of course, petaflops will be burned to generate what is likely to be "marginally useful data" like attempting to sell drugs for prevention of ovarian cysts to a senior citizens mens club no-reply email address. (Why, yes! I am feeling particularly snarky about marketing this lifetime. Why do you ask?)

Politically hot parts of US Constitution briefly deleted thanks to 'coding error'

All things considered

Given the staggering number of incidents with this administration, it's entirely possible this was any of incompetence, incontinence, or outright malice and a calculated statement.

By this point in time, I see a huge negative benefit to giving this administration any benefit of the doubt on any point at all.

Windows 11 leads as October looms, but millions still cling to Windows 10

Re: "an uphill struggle remains to get Windows 11 on desktops"

Exactly how long it's been is partially a matter of perspective, but for quite some time now, Microsoft has been diligent in their efforts to get users to view them as abusive jerks. I for one cannot call it zealotry to advocate for getting away from that. The tradeoffs can stink on ice part of the time, and simply aren't feasible for some. But! In general, I do believe it's worth a great deal of pain and effort to do so.

Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress

Re: Just don't use Windows

It's a good start, but only a partial mitigation and by its' nature will be playing catch-up on patch days as MS renames registry keys, adjusts GPO hierarchies, and introduces new elements.

If one can get away from Windows for common use cases, FLEE, FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES (or at least to recoup some free time and sanity after the initial learning curve).

Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show

Re: Who could've predicted...

A pox upon the House of Mouse.

The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive

Re: Windows vs Linux

Majority? What are you basing this off of? Sources, please.

WSL is a great convenience for those who have have reason to experiment with Linux, but need to keep Windows as their primary OS

Sadly, it is also a trap, already being in the second 'E' phase of the traditional Microsoft EEE maneuver. I've run across a few projects here and there that list WSL2 as a hard requirement for one reason or another. BUT, good luck to Microsoft on that final E, as Linux usage percentages keep slowly trending upwards. A proper inflection point would be nice sooner rather than later though.

Xlibre forks to the rescue – but Kubuntu gives X11 the boot

Re: Rumors of X11's death are greatly exaggerated

Politics doesn't have to enter in to it.

According to what I've found elsewhere, his attitude aside, his code is pretty shit anyway.

Re: Rumors of X11's death are greatly exaggerated

More choice is good, and this very much could wind up serving a useful purpose.

But ...

I take *great* issue if you're implying the developer getting the ball rolling is sane.

He may have some valid technical points, but his attitude, presentation, and willingness to start fights with everyone before anything else does not paint a pretty picture for longevity of this project.

If, and I do mean *if* the project manages to take off and start setting a pattern of successes, I will be pleasantly surprised.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

Re: Always get downvoted

Then one could, I don't know, actually make some sort of statement about that in the first place?

One should not be surprised at being misunderstood when one doesn't just say what they mean.

Re: Always get downvoted

Many protocols you can wrap it with ssh and port forwarding as needed, and call it a day. Granted, I'll stick to Xvnc and not raw X, but...

Your mileage (and local security requirements) may vary...

Windows 11 migration heats up... on desktops

Re: Really?

>> In what world do 3-4 year old desktop business PCs, which only run perhaps 50 hours a week, need to be replaced? Microsoft's world apparently.

Speaking from personal experience: A world where procurement process was more than gently encouraged to underspec leased PC's so they were only marginally fit for purpose (worst models at 4 GB RAM, spinning rust for storage, running Win7 and getting upgraded in place to Win10, no less than three separate antimalware and endpoint management toolsets installed) just before the pandemic hit, then new hardware "could not be sourced" ... Workers coming in 45 minutes before shift to have time to get a reboot for stability, logon, and apps loaded.

Enterprise AI adoption stalls as inferencing costs confound cloud customers

Re: Alchemy and snake oil

Yeah, the thing is currently the top performing models are *narrowly* useful, and one needs to be intimately familiar with the knowledge domains required for their own work while understanding the current limitations of current LLMs in order to effectively farm out busywork and extract useful time savings from the process. This favors having highly skilled workers over just giving chatbot access to a couple of interns. And yet! It's being hawked as an easy way to boost worker productivity, shave headcount, and pay lower wages to less skilled workers. Maybe some of the could be true in a few more years, but sure isn't now, and model capabilities growth continues to slow even as model sizes and training data repositories balloon. Yet still, "You need to use AI to enhance your toothbrush! Put it on your breakfast cereal! Punch up shareholder meetings! Renegotiate contracts! Handle those incoming lawsuits!" and watch as model hallucinations very visibly crop up at just the wrong moment and the judge in the case asks you about this cite from Pooky Bear. Sorry, suckers.

Microsoft is opening Windows Update to third-party apps

Re: an interesting shift!

Am I confabulating a memory that a Microsoft rep flatly stated this at some point?

When LLMs get personal info they are more persuasive debaters than humans

Re: Surprising

That's why one experiments on redditors instead of humans, as per the University of Zurich.

(All kidding aside, these researchers simply bypassed the ethics committee)

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/07/nx-s1-5387701/a-controversial-experiment-on-reddit-reveals-the-persuasive-powers-of-ai

https://www.science.org/content/article/unethical-ai-research-reddit-under-fire

The future of LLMs is open source, Salesforce's Benioff says

"The current commercialized models had not come up with these approaches. They were moving to these. It's a transformation from a technical model called transformer to another technical model called MOE [mixture of experts] that's like, 'Wow, if we do this, we're going to save a lot of money'," he added.

-- tell us you're a typical c-suite know-nothing without just stating that you're a typical c-suite know-nothing.

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

First reaction: "How did something this stupid get proposed?"

Second reaction: "Oh. Cotton. Entirely on brand for him."

Windows 11 24H2 now 'broadly available' ... complete with yet another 'known issue'

Pure, distilled Microsoft - Arguably a useful idea in concept (though certainly only useful for some) and a completely botched execution.

They remain consistent.

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

Not yet dug into this to see what's going on, but my first reaction to seeing the v3.0 download showing at 35GB was "Have they not heard of package managers?"

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

Re: Great

Yup. As of 2021, US Census showing ~90% of US homes have desktop or laptop systems. Cell phone usage a bit higher, with better odds of multiple cell phones.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer-internet-use-2021.html

> They will have to put on their thinking caps to sabotage that system…

OS updates will tank system performance, with the cure being a new system. Already established practice from multiple vendors.

Microsoft 'resolves' and 'mitigates' Windows Server 2025 update whoopsie

Can't even lie properly

SCCM is a "third party" tool now? Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

Microsoft readies Windows Autopatch to free admins from dealing with its fixes

Since this article doesn't clarify, clicking through to other linked articles ... this is addon to endpoint management tools for admins renting cloud desktops from Microsoft. Most have no need to panic just yet.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

Re: nothing to do with OS/2

Shortly after the MS/IBM split on OS/2, word was the only difference between NTFS and HPFS was the filesystem header though they evolved apart quickly afterwards.

Microsoft does and doesn't want you to know it won't stop you manually installing Windows 11 on older PCs

Re: Restrictions

You can still use a local-only account, but that requires the Pro version. Skip the home version.

No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft

Re: What's a

> [64K machines] There's no point trying to poke a ROM.

Eh, had both C64 and Atari 800XL at different points, both had 64K RAM installed and bank switching available between RAM and ROM for the various address spaces. IIRC on both models a poke would write directly to the RAM bank no matter which bank was selected for read at the time. Can't say about models from other manufacturers though.