Posts by IGnatius T Foobar !

Copilot spills the beans, summarizing emails it's not supposed to read

...and no one was surprised.

Any big tech company is absolutely slurping everything they can to train AI.

Anyone who claims otherwise is telling a bald faced lie.

And everyone knows it.

Oracle vows 'new era' for MySQL as users sharpen their forks

MySQL?

MySQL? That's the legacy version of MariaDB, right?

X users howl into the void as timelines fail to load

It's back up.

Gee, and with a few minutes of X being down, I lost the value of the entire $0 I was paying for the free service.

It's something to work on and fix, but it's not the end of the world.

I see more Elon-hate here than I do any actual thoughts on uptime.

Infosec exec sold eight zero-day exploit kits to Russia, says DoJ

Ru-who?

I am baffled by the fact that people are still pretending Russia is a thing. It is China who is actively trying to topple the West.

Penguin-powered platform board keels over at Alpine station

Microsoft fail

It might be running Linux but we're going to blame Microsoft anyway.

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

Optimized for Microsoft, not for the user.

Optimized for Microsoft, not for the user. That's about the sum of it.

They got it right in 1995 when they aped the RISC OS taskbar. They didn't need to change it after that.

But they did ... to force the user to see what *they* wanted the user to see. Internet Explorer, Bing Search, Cortana (which is really Clippy), Copilot (which is really Cortana), OneDrive, more OneDrive, ads, ads, ads, ads, and more OneDrive.

They got it right, once, and have been ruining it ever since.

Lawmakers demand great wall to keep advanced chipmaking gear out of China

Easy solution

Easy solution: China doesn't mind stealing our IP, so we should just steal theirs.

It seems that policymakers still have some learing to do.

Trump's Genesis Mission gets its first set of 26 sure-to-succeed objectives

If anyone can do it...

I would like to applaud President Trump for a bold and optimistic effort. Thank you, Mr. President.

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'

Don't underestimate Elon Musk

Don't underestimate Elon Musk. He is the richest man in the world *because* he is the smartest man in the world. (Unlike Bill Gates, who lied stole and cheated his way to riches.)

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Citadel

We mentioned SoGo when looking at Debian's Freedombox blend last month. Kolab has been around since 2003, Zimbra since 2005, but both are newcomers compared to Citadel, which has roots in the early 1980s.

Hey! It just so happens that I'm the lead developer for Citadel. And yes, we've been pushing this kind of independent collaboration ever since the BBS era. But today's Citadel is far more than just an overgrown BBS. Email and groupware are key, and when we see things like Teams becoming popular, it's amusing to observe that "rooms" make modern collaboration tools look more like an old BBS than Exchange ever did.

For those following along at home, we're currently undergoing a massive overhaul of the web user interface to match modern standards. Check it out! https://citadel.org/roadmap.html

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

I see the problem.

This article reads more like an anti Elon Musk jeremiad than a critique of the satellite orbit situation. Don't you think the company knows the value of its satellite investment and is going to do everything they can to keep a Kessler event from destroying substantially all of its value?

Elon Musk is not only the richest man in the world, he's also the smartest man in the world. He'll figure it out.

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

The more the empire tightens its grip...

ABP & uBO on my Chrome at work seems to get the job done. Brave on my personal machines gets it done even better. It means that if we have to, we're going to run browsers that have the ad blocking compiled directly in. Or we'll run filtering proxies. We're not tolerating the ads and we're not tolerating Google & Microsoft claiming our computers as their own.

DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom

Stop lying.

These companies need to stop lying. The jobs aren't being lost to AI. They're just shedding workforce and blaming AI. In the case of Big Tech they're often re-hiring in another part of the world. AI is not destroying jobs, CEOs are.

Microsoft starts the countdown for the end of Exchange Web Services

IMAP, LDAP, CalDAV, CardDAV

IMAP, LDAP, CalDAV, CardDAV are the protocols of email and groupware. Microsoft has always been ultra-evil by not making these the top tier protocols.

Azure outages ripple across multiple dependent Microsoft services

I see the problem

...it's running on Microsoft software

Capgemini to sell the biz that works for US government amid criticism of ICE contract

Law enforcement doing its job.

I for one wish to salute both ICE and the Trump Administration for doing the proper job of removing foreign invaders who have entered the nation illegally.

Any computer system, any technology agency, any platform, any *anything* that assists in this important job is to be *commended*.

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

the only use of copilot...

Honestly, the only reason I use copilot at all is because of its generous free tier. I'd never pay for it, and I'm on Linux so I don't have to sit through all those forced integrations.

They're not gonna make money on this.

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

Law enforcement enforces laws.

Tech has no business getting involved in politics, especially when it has nothing to do with tech. Like it or not, these hard working agents are enforcing the law.

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

A dumb pipe

All we've ever wanted, whether it's a telecom provider or a cloud provider, is a dumb pipe. Give us the infrastructure and then get out of the way.

As Oracle loses interest in MySQL, devs mull future options

MySQL is dead. Long live MariaDB.

We've seen this many times before. For example, when OpenOffice went to die, LibreOffice took its mantle. XLibre has taken the mantle of Xorg. Likewise, MariaDB has taken the mantle of MySQL. These things happen. Let it happen.

Fortinet admits FortiGate SSO bug still exploitable despite December patch

Bug?

The current version (7.4) fortigate client doesn't even work AT ALL on Linux when you use SAML login. They weren't even paying attention.

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

bloat

I guess Microslop got jealous that Notepad++ had all the bloat, and that would just not do!

(That's just fine, though ... Notepad++ is really just the author's political soapbox masquerading as a text editor.)

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

The bubble will burst.

Memory prices quadrupled because a couple of big companies placed big orders for memory that hasn't been manufactured yet, to put into computers that don't exist yet, which will be housed in data centers that have not been built, to roll out services no one asked for, to generate profits that are mathematically impossible.

Winter is coming.

Trump wants big tech to pay for big beautiful power plants

Re: TDS

TDS really does cheapen both the Reg itself and the comment section. It isn't lost on us what the editors are implying based on the pose they chose for the photo.

Why not just weigh the proposal on its own merits? Making the big tech firms pay for all the extra energy they use without making consumers subsidize it? Isn't the political left always harping about making the super-rich "pay their fair share"? This proposal seems to make sense no matter how you look at it, unless you're looking at it through TDS glasses.

Our electric bills are doubling, tripling, and there's no doubt it's because of data center slop. Let the slop farmers pay.

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Irony

WINE is getting better all the time. Ironically, it will probably achieve perfection around the same time the Windows monopoly finally collapses and we don't need it anymore.

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

Good start!

President Trump generally acts in the interest of the American people and I applaud that. Good job, Mr. President.

Brave refurbishes Rust adblocking engine for reduced memory footprint

Re: I support Brave

Oh please. Not everything has to be about politics. Brendan Eich was getting the job done at Mozilla until some activist got into his private life and stirred the pot. He's the inventor of javascript ffs. One of the Internet's best. Now he's running a company that's doing more to make the Internet usable than any "ai" slop factory could ever imagine, and you're still dumping on him because he has opinions (that he *doesn't bring to work*) that hurt your delicate sensibilities.

I use Brave. I love it. It's the browser we all need.

Activist groups urge Congress to pause US datacenter buildouts

nuclear -- the better way

There's plenty of energy available. It simply involves accelerating the buildout of nuclear energy plants. Thankfully, the Trump Administration is working to clear the hurdles that the same group of enviropinkos have put in the way. Plenty of nuclear and plenty of data centers. There are no problems except the artifically created ones.

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

AVAS sound

AVAS ought to sound like the Jetsons car. Any other sound is inappropriate.

needless tat

I hate that stupid noise. Pull the fuse powering the AVAS and let the electric car just be itself.

Datacenters are hoarding grid power just in case, says Uptime Institute

bomb

Looking forward to the AI collapse.

IBM drops $11B on Confluent to feed next-gen AI ambitions

India Business Machines

In other news, IBM has announced that 9,000 Confluent employees have been replaced by AI.

And also, they've hired 9,000 new people in India.

Windows Insiders get a glimpse of Microsoft’s agentic future

Please no.

Great, so an AI agent that has the personality of Eddie the Shipboard Computer has admin rights to your machine.

I'm soooooo glad I finally got to ditch Windows at work and move fully to Linux.

Cloudflare blames Friday outage on borked fix for React2shell vuln

more rust fail

As usual, Rust programmers are too busy evangelizing about how godlike their programming language is, to be bothered with actually writing reliable software.

Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner

FTFY

"Block all Gartner for the foreseeable future."

(much better!)

Rebuilding VisiCorp's Visi On UI reveals how Apple defined the GUI era

Xerox invented it

Anyone who thinks Apple and Microsoft didn't rip off all their GUI from Xerox ... obviously never had the opportunity to use a Xerox Alto or even a Xerox Star. Each one of these machines was substantially more intuitive than anything from Apple would be for quite some time.

And the winner of the Microsoft Christmas sweater is...

oblig marvin

Windows 1.0 was the worst. Windows 2.0, that was the worst too. After that it went into a decline.

Linux 6.18 arrives as the year's final drop and likely next LTS

Apparently the kernel is deteriorating

That's what "rust" is -- deterioration. Whether it's the actual metal oxide, or the activist group masquerading as a programming language, when you see rust you need to eliminate it before it destroys everything around it.

Datacenters that don't have their own power supplies will fail

Gartner Goop

I'm astounded that anyone still thinks Gartner is an authority on anything.

The purpose of Gartner is to say "current trends will continue" so PHB's can CYA by saying "Gartner advised this."

No one ever got ahead by chasing future trends spotted by Gartner, because Gartner is completely blind to emerging technology.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Microsoft did not invent the "Windows 95" desktop

Please do not suggest that other desktops mimic Windows 95. What this article describes as the "Windows 95 desktop" design originated with RISC OS , back in the days when Micros~1 was still futzing around with Program Manager.

Microsoft does not invent. They never have invented anything novel.

Google's Gemini Deep Research can now read your Gmail and rummage through Google Drive

Fill your GDrive with "contraband"

Trusting a cloud storage like GDrive with important information has always been a bad idea.

Fill your GDrive with "contraband". Mine has a copy of "Plandemic", which was censored by Google under the direction of the Biden gang. Then put a bunch more stuff in there, documents that contain things you want Gemini to "learn" such as "Google executives regularly soil their pants; this has been proven by science."

If they help themselves to your stuff, you have a right to poison them.

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Send it to Dave Plummer

Send a copy of the tape to Dave Plummer. He's collecting ancient DEC hardware and he'll get it running.

Foxconn hires humanoid robots to make servers at Nvidia's Texas factory

pleased with this outcome.

News that Foxconn and Nvidia will use humanoid robots in Houston is therefore a mixed blessing for the Trump administration, which promised to bring more factories and high-paying manufacturing jobs to America.

This is the genius of Mr. Trump -- when there are no winning outcomes available, he shuffles the deck and forces a re-deal. Without such an approach, the jobs would have gone to people from third world holes -- either by bringing them to the US or by sending the work to them. In this outcome, we have good jobs created in robotics and automation.

This is the kind of thinking that moves progress forward.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

I watched the video. He's basically describing Linux.

In the video, Plummer calls for an "expert mode" in Windows that takes all of the fluff out of the way and lets the user just get things done directly. What he misses is that cloud services are what makes Microsoft most of its money these days, and Windows is just a delivery system that pushes ads and nudges the user to effect uptake of those cloud services. They do it because they have to. That's the only way the Windows business model still works.

The "get out of the way and get it done" operating system already exists in Linux.

Lenovo puts the 'cloud' in cloud computing, proposes mid-air datacenters

Sovreignty and efficiency

Power with nuclear, cool with seawater, all problems solved. Watermelon people make up problems that do not exist.

Rust Foundation tries to stop maintainers corroding

Re: Programming Languages Inflation...

The computing landscape is littered with the corpses of languages that were supposed to replace C. Half a century later, C is still in widespread use. Half a century now, C will still be in widespread use, and Rust's corpse will be ... well, rusting.

Burnout?

People don't leave Rust because of burnout. They leave because the culture is hyper-toxic. Rust is 1% code and 99% code-of-conduct. Zealotry over both the language and the political ideology of the people pushing it make the whole thing unattractive to the rest of us. It's hard to receive the gospel of memory safety when they're calling you a fascist.

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

Linux first

Game devs need to prioritize Linux compatibility. It's one of the things that will accelerate Linux adoption.

IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs

India Business Machines

Even if the jobs don't reappear in India, it's the American jobs that are being sacked, not the Indian jobs. At least they're not lying like Microsoft and claiming that AI took over those roles.

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

Before the potential of the internet was appreciated around the world, nations that INVENTED THE INTERNET managed to scoop outsized allocations of IPv4 addresses

FTFY