* Posts by HolySchmoley

116 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2018

Page:

Hey, remember that California privacy law? Big Tech is trying to ram a massive hole in it

HolySchmoley

Dealers don't want nasty laws getting in their way

"At least in my company's case, we don't sell or share your data (*)... the next phase is trying to figure out how to remove it, or even if it can be removed without breaking dozens of downstream processes."

Sounds like a long-term drug dealer trying to figure out how to remove the damage his business has done to other people's lives over the years.

(*) Neither did Facebook or Google in their early days.

Europe's home PC buyers reach for their collective smartphone, sigh: We don't need a new desktop. This is a computer, right?

HolySchmoley
Facepalm

Smartphone vs actual PC

"as people continue to move towards using their smartphones for the sort of tasks you'd normally want an actual PC for"

People who move towards using their smartphones for the sort of tasks [you'd] they'd normally want an actual PC for aren't doing the sort of tasks you'd want an actual PC for.

Smartphone: messaging, simple email, maps, games / social media / other kiddie stuff.

PC: substantial typing, spreadsheets, programming, substantial web... actual work.

Huge news from Apple: No, not mags, games or TV – more than 50 security bugs to patch

HolySchmoley

>teasing the world with a glimpse

Announcing?

Fan boy 3: Huawei overhauls Air-a-like MateBooks

HolySchmoley

Re: Stop, just stop

Apple... Beatles...

Just saying.

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

HolySchmoley

Re: Heavenly Source are Almighty Sees ..... in Bare Naked Territories*

>Oh please, HolySchmoley ..... silly random words?... Welcome to the Journeys.

You don't frighten us, digital pig-dog! Go and boil your bottom, son of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called martian man-substitute. I don't wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper!

I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!

HolySchmoley

Re: Heavenly Source are Almighty Sees ..... in Bare Naked Territories*

@'amanfromMars 1'

Oh do be quiet you silly random word generating program.

iPhone price cuts are coming, teases Apple CEO. *Bring-bring* Hello, Apple UK? It's El Reg. You free to chat?

HolySchmoley

Re: The reasons for the iPhone sales slump were threefold

>They are still THE premium smartphone.

Except for people who value function over form, control over their own device, adherence to standards (headphone and charging sockets), replaceable battery, micro SDHC slot, reasonable screen and cable resilience, USB connectivity to move music / images / other data, access to the file system, transparency about flaws and bugs and the resolution status, not being one of the herd, being ably to think differently (not using 'different' as if it was an adverb), not being a hipster / chav clone, etc.

For the rest, it's THE premium smartphone.

Irish data watchdog to Facebook: Hang about, what's all this about a WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger merger now?

HolySchmoley

Re: Creepy

>I wouldn't use anything to do with.Facebook if I could avoid it but thanks to my family I can't as they use WhatsApp.

Have you thought of telling them you don't?

Whats(goes)App must come down... World in shock as Zuck decides to intertwine Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

HolySchmoley

Re: blissfully aware

>Most users remain blissfully aware of what Facebook actually does,

The linked article says /un/aware.

Stalk my pals on social media and you'll know that the next words out of my mouth will be banana hammock

HolySchmoley

Re: Clearly bollocks.

>That's easy. I don't have friends who use that :)

The only way you could be sure is to know that no one regards you as their 'friend', enemy, contact, etc., sufficiently to put details in their Contacts list. How would you know that? How would you be aware of people who /do/ know you and store information about you without realising to whom it's sent to or thinking it worth mentioning?

>Them having my publicly available phone # and email addresses aren't exactly a matter of concern.

... web history... dating apps... financial history... tagged images...etc... etc?

Such information is accumulated, indexed and sold on. Companies and their data assets are bought and amalgamated. The pieces that hang from an IP address, a MAC address, a Wi-fi access point are amalgamated. Somewhere, some day, someone adds a piece of information that humans recognise and you are no longer a number, or a free man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW-bFGzNMXw

Good on you for trying, but the Zuckerborg, Googleplex, etc. are enormously more powerful.

HolySchmoley

Re: Clearly bollocks.

>Not with me. FB's known IPs and URLs get blocked at the DNS level

etc.

And how did you block the Apps / OS on your friends' mobiles?

E.g.

Almost everyone I know who uses a mobile uses Zuckerberg's WhatsApp and not one asked me whether I'd object to them saying yes to uploading contact details, including mine.

Zuck's 2019 tech talk tour should tackle the questions Facebook spent 2018 dodging

HolySchmoley

Engineer, but not as we know it Jim

>"I used to just build out my ideas and hope they'd mostly speak for themselves," Zuckerberg said in his reflection of his time as an engineer.

Someone who bedroom-hacks someone else's PHP is an engineer?

Think I'll boil an egg and be a Cordon Bleu chef.

German competition watchdog toys with ban on some Facebook data-slurps

HolySchmoley

Re: The Like button is at least visible

"there is at least a clear marker of Facebook's presence on the page"

Oh no there isn't, on most of the pages that slurp data for the creepy Zuckerberg surveillance corporation. Have you not heard of the 'Facebook pixel'?

Nobody in China wants Apple's eye-wateringly priced iPhones, sighs CEO Tim Cook

HolySchmoley

Re: Why can't I feel sympathy?

>its first year-over-year decline since 2016

Or, put another way:

Its continuing year-over-year decline except for the 2017 blip.

Who writes this stuff?!

HolySchmoley

Re: There's disposable income then there's

>A cheap phone attracts poor people

A phone with a high performance / price ratio attracts smart people.

A fashion-statement phone attracts the sort of person who would believe that Trumpian fake hair does something for their public image whilst being ignorant of exactly what it does and why people laugh at them.

2018 ain't done yet... Amazon sent Alexa recordings of man and girlfriend to stranger

HolySchmoley

Reach out?

"Amazon didn't actively reach out."

"And when we reached out today"

Has either party tried contacting people or speaking to them rather than "reaching out"?

Scumbag hackers lift $1m from children's charity

HolySchmoley

Re: Asswipes and arseholes

Hopefully using a different wipe for the rest of the ass from the one used for its arsehole.

Apple to splash $10bn raisin' American bit barns

HolySchmoley

Re: Green Credentials

>robots to pick apart the phones so everything within can be recycled

How do they recycle the glue, which is well on its way to becoming the dominant component in recent years?

Home users due for a battering with Microsoft 365 subscription stick

HolySchmoley

Re: Enterprise...

>There is no such thing as a free lunch in the MS dictionary.

>Beware the Ides of Redmond.

True.

And another company makes you book an appointment with a Genius to sit at a table,

GOPwned: Republicans fall victim to email hack

HolySchmoley

"What's interesting is that Trump appointed Giuliani as "Cybersecurity adviser". I suppose that chimes with him appointing people who know fuck-all about science to science positions." (*)

And people who know fuck-all about politics, the world, science, culture, most civilised things to political positions?

(*) Upvoted.

HolySchmoley

Re: All we can do is wait

What?!!!

Are you saying that politicians play politics to line their pockets?

Whodathunkit?

Tumblr resorts to AI in attempt to scrub itself clean from filth

HolySchmoley

"female-presenting nipples"

Have they been playing with this?

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2016/03/buzz-phrase-generator.html

OM5G... Qualcomm teases next Snapdragon chip for phones: The 855 with a fingerprint Sonic Screwdriver, er, Sensor

HolySchmoley

"Qualcomm teases next Snapdragon chip"

How did the chip respond?

Blighty: We spent £1bn on Galileo and all we got was this lousy T-shirt

HolySchmoley

"Those of us who voted in favour wanted a clean break"

A what?

Impressed that you know what a "clean break" is whilst those in the politics industry have been arguing the toss for two years still don't have the vaguest idea. Or perhaps you don't either.

Haven't Got a Clue means Haven't Got a Clue, as Ms. May might have said with the deep insight of a politician.

HolySchmoley

Re: FFS

"Soon you and your fellow South Britons will be driving around in your C5's, knocking up spiffing apps on your Amstrads and laughing at the Scots farmers for wanting to stay in business rather than eat new Zealand lamb like the English."

Hang on! I'm English. I live in the "Home Counties", and if anyone could show a way for those counties to become an annexe of Scotland rather than of self-serving Westminster Bozos I'd be there in a flash. So would many other "South Britons" I know.

HolySchmoley

Re: FFS

"We'll just have to take the bull by the horns, re-build our Industry again and become the technological force again that we once were. We need innovative ideas from innovative people like there used to be..."

That speech would've made a good Monty Python sketch, with the orator sinking into the sea as the sun sets on the British Empire...

HolySchmoley

Re: Three weeks...

>the EU has announced this was its plan all along, despite lying their faces off

That'll be the EU that the UK has been a core and influential member of for 45 years?

Facebook spooked after MPs seize documents for privacy breach probe

HolySchmoley

Re: Off to the tower with Zuck

"The USA has made a habit of trying to snatch and charge people for espionage when they haven't even set foot in that country, etc etc."

Not to mention send to outsourced torture chambers...

Openreach names 81 lucky locations to be plugged into its super-zippy Gfast pipe

HolySchmoley

"Up to"

If they ever charge "up to" £x / month for "up to" y Mbps I'll have up to a small amount of confidence in their reasons to upgrade.

To date, "up to" £x / month = £x / month

and "up to" y Mbps << y Mbps.

If supermarkets and petrol stations tried the same con I wonder how long they'd last.

Facebook to appeal against ICO fine – says it's a matter of principle not to pay 18 mins' profit

HolySchmoley

Re: "it's a matter of principle"

>Precisely: from their point of view, they did nothing wrong that they should

>apologize for — not to the UK.

Because UK people don't count to a creepy surveillance company?

1,700 lucky Brit kids to visit Apple Stores for 'Year of Engineering'

HolySchmoley

Not an Apple strong point

"think different"

"the creatives"

Speak English.

Congrats from 123-Reg! You can now pay us an extra £6 or £12 a year for basically nothing

HolySchmoley

Re: No email here

I've had this email, as has a friend who also uses 123-Reg.

Apple boss decries 'data industrial complex' while pocketing, er, billions to hook Google into iOS

HolySchmoley

The CEO of a company that exploits stupid people's belief in fairy stories telling them they are getting a magic potion at little cost berates companies that exploit stupid people's belief in fairy stories telling them they are getting a magic potion at little cost.

Euro eggheads call it: Facebook political ads do change voters' minds – and they worked rather well for Trump in 2016

HolySchmoley

Re: lots of capitals in mid sentence there

>So the rest of your snide comment simply shows that you are the sort of obnoxious prick that

Do only obnoxious pricks describe others as obnoxious pricks?

Apple to dump Intel CPUs from Macs for Arm – yup, the rumor that just won't die is back

HolySchmoley

Re: It would be another world changing innovation of Apple

"After Apple changed the world with its smart phones in 2007"

The only world that changed was the world of the aimless slurping their Starbucks. 99.99999% of 'the world' has little to do with staring and dabbing at a small slab of glass for hours every day.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

HolySchmoley

Re: Influence on the UK

>Corbyn would love to buddy up to Putin

Too late. Trump already has.

And Teresa's not really got anyone left to buddy up to, now that the DUP is caching in its share of her Magic Money Tree.

Raspberry Pi fans up in arms as Mathematica disappears from Raspbian downloads

HolySchmoley

Re: Cake?

>What the hell good is cake* if you can't eat it? What a ridiculous idiom!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_can't_have_your_cake_and_eat_it

RIP Paul Allen: Microsoft cofounder billionaire dies at 65 after facing third bout with cancer

HolySchmoley
Mushroom

Re: Say what you will

"Regards Zuck being a hoarder, Ellison a cretin, Bezos a miser, I think ALL these guys will be giving their riches away sooner or later."

>I believe the phrase is 'trying to buy a ticket to Heaven'

Too late. For a couple of them a thin asbestos suit in the other place is the most they can aspire to,

Facebook mass hack last month was so totally overblown – only 30 million people affected

HolySchmoley

Re: Appropriate choice of words

"People's privacy and security is incredibly important..."

Perhaps the Zuckerborg interprets that to mean,

"It's not credible that people's privacy and security are important..."

HolySchmoley

Re: Hmmm

Upvoted, but...

'I don't know, but every "hack" I've seen is always after fast money. Always!'

I guess you haven't been following recent years' news about political motives...?

That 'Surface will die in 2019' prediction is still a goer, says soothsayer

HolySchmoley

Re: So the logic is

'An iPad Pro is only a substitute for the five Surface owners who actually use it as a tablet.'

I've seen 2-3 Surfaces in use (amongst hundreds of independently purchased PCs I see most weeks). The 1 person I've talked to about it loves it. I wouldn't. Too expensive / restrictive.

I've yet to see an iPad Pro.

HolySchmoley

Re: Is there anything wrong with Windows 10?

'If they are trying to optimise and improve the OS used by a billion people then of course they are going to need to collect diagnostic data!'

Stop being so paranoid.'

No one doubts they are trying to optimise and improve the OS. Only the naive imagine that's all they're doing.

HolySchmoley

Re: Is there anything wrong with Windows 10?

'"And you get your pick when it comes to updates?"

With Win 10 Pro, the answer is YES. You can defer feature updates by a year and other updates by a few weeks, enough time for any issues to be ironed out.'

It's not under the users' control if it's merely 'defer'. And I've yet to see any 'ironing out' of spying / controlling concerns of users.

HolySchmoley

Re: Is there anything wrong with Windows 10?

"If you don't force an update most (non technical) people don't bother and end up running an unpatched and hence very very vulnerable machine."

True, but only part of the picture. MS and Apple have also used updates, for years, to erode / remove users' control of their own hardware.

HolySchmoley

>I think Windows 10 getting worse is pretty much a given

Yep.

Ditto Mac OS / OS X, iOS, Android, Chrome OS.

They've all been increasingly 'cloudifying', taking control away from users, spying, restricting, for years, and all seem to get worse as each year passes, data lock-in ratchets up another notch, and UIs change for little reason other than to persuade the masses that there's something New and Significant about the latest release, which there hasn't been for most people for ages.

Page: