Posts by Natalie Gritpants Jr

Cybercrims plant destructive time bomb malware in industrial .NET extensions

Possibly a plausible deniability cover for an insider saboteur. Claim stupidity if caught, rather than having to explain why you installed the malware from a USB stick found in your pocket.

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

Shift-alt-print

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

Buy an SD card, but also learn and use ansible to manage your pi herd. Much better than trying to remember what you did two years ago to get it going.

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist

Re: This is a cross party issue

That's because there hasn't been a breach that revealed the names of MPs visiting porn sites. Just a matter of time.

Jaguar Land Rover gets £1.5B government jump-start after cyber breakdown

The numbers do not add up for me

An expert estimating a daily loss of £5M to £10M says the losses could total to £2B. By my reckoning, that would take 200 to 400 business days, or 1 to 2 years. Are they not going to get back up to speed for a year?

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Hopefully this is peak Starmer, and we can start the Prime Minister conveyor belt that was stopped after the last lot ran out.

Re: IDs..

Lots of horses around here. I'll just have to wait for the right light and mood.

Boffins fool a self-driving car by putting mirrors on traffic cones

Re: Just Stop It

Start stop crash was much worse before variable speed limits came in. My Yaris adaptive cruise is much better at detecting the speed change of the car in front than I. And it doesn't tail gate when speeding up either. Think you have a rubbish car make.

Re: Perty cool study

Sounds like it makes you a safer driver. Plus, you've learnt that leasing a car is foolish.

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

"'100 Most Useful Excel Functions' which I eagerly borrowed and applied all through that summer at the workplace"

Have they recovered yet?

Trump backpedals as Hyundai factory ICE raid enrages South Korea

Re: Work visas, really? Where are they?

He's white, english-acented

Two wrongs don’t make a copyright

Re: entertaining advertisement could be part of a narrative left hanging

I lived close to the guy in the Nescafe adverts, he was not impressed when I told him they were like a weekly 30 second snippet of a porno intro. They were popular, but I have no idea why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsN4YwbM9kw

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Me too. If it's not a steam train I lose interest.

Latest Windows 11 insider builds hide secret File Explorer dark mode

Has everybody forgotten about "Contrast Themes"? Shift-Alt-PrintScreen flips between normal and whatever high contrast theme you have chosen (that can be dark-mode). OK, lots of system UI and programs don't flip, but it's nice to be able to flip scheme when I take the laptop out to the patio for a daiquiri.

Power cuts, cable damage, and government shutdowns behind Q2 internet outages

Re: How many straws?

Have you ever tried to design a camel? It's hard

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

"Historically, putty was the substance glaziers used to secure glass in window frames."

I still can do a fine bead of putty you insensitive clod.

UK eyes new laws as cable sabotage blurs line between war and peace

If you're going to stop the enemy, you have to hurt them. A fine isn't going to do it. Nor is seizing the ship, sinking it, imprisoning or killing the crew. The ships are junk and Russia does not mind losing personnel. Sinking some warships might do it, cutting off Kaliningrad might work, but those will have to wait for the post-Trump era.

Terrible tales of opsec oversights: How cybercrooks get themselves caught

"examination of an opened latop at his residence ... Cazes died while in custody"

Note to self: don't live in Thailand and be a cybercriminal. In the UK, you usually just fall down the stairs in the police station.

/e/ OS 3.0: Slightly less clunky, slightly more private

slashy-slash sounds like a nightmare clown

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

Re: Indicative of a better way?

Also, how bad is the software they are using that you have to ask AI how to format a paragraph or align some cells in a spreadsheet?

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

Re: To quote a fictional

Russia is already doing everything they can.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Markdown is already a confusing mess of different versions and implementations. Microsoft is wasting its time if it thinks it can bugger up another standard

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

Re: Were all the good names taken?

I think it should have been Threedafone, or Vodathrone

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Still do, it prevents dust settling on the screen.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

Re: the fish rots from the head down

Which way round is your fish?

Re: Partners are leaving to start their own firm

If Microsoft is banned from doing any work for the federal govt, does that mean no more security fixes if you have a .gov domain? Putin will like that.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

"we use our most sensitive, precise and exquisitely constructed anatomy to directly control it"

I am never going to borrow your keyboard

Royal Navy freshens up ships' electromagnetic warfare defenses

Gatling gun with tinfoil dispenser

Signal chat app clone used by Signalgate's Waltz was apparently an insecure mess

Re: A quote from Forrest Gump comes to mind.

You can photograph your secure app with another phone. Useful for a get-out-of-jail-free situation

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

How about once you want to hire a person, you interview them in person to hand over the laptop and security things. No need for them to come to head office, just use a trusted agent near them.

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

There's a saying from Ireland: when two people tell you you're drunk, go and lie down.

Google Cloud’s so-called uninterruptible power supplies caused a six-hour interruption

Re: Unbelievable

All well and good till you discover the diodes are backwards

Mobile ad world drama: AppLovin not lovin' short seller assault claiming fraud

Hmmm, who to side with? Ad slinger or short seller. Is there a way for both to lose?

From MP3 to Web3 to now 3D, Napster gets a new owner

Almost nobody remembers Napster (oldies keep quiet, you're not of interest to the new owners as you're too savvy to buy from them). Would be better as the name of some modern trendy environmentally friendly daipers - nappies for hipsters

UK satellite smartphone services could get green light this year

Re: Impressive

The satellites from AST are the size of a basket ball court and divided into a hundred or so antenna arrays, each one is more than 1m^2 and can steer some number of beams very accurately. This is not an ordinary mobile phone mast, this is an AST mobile phone mast in space.

FTC's $25.5M scam refund treats victims to $34 each

Re: WOOT!

Ever tempted to say "let's get the duck out of here"?

Open Source Initiative defends disallowing board candidate after timezone SNAFU

OSI is the international standards organization, but is actually some french phrase so if you're going to make assumptions about timezone I would pick Paris

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

Re: Colour me surprised. Not.

The OP is probably employed in the private sector where performance like Brum council would have resulted in real bankruptcy and job losses, so yes, the OP could probably have done much, much better for a fraction of the price.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Yes, sheet music and concert tickets. Phone batteries are not that reliable, especially when the insurance black box in my car connects to the app and turns the phone GPS on so it can track me, that flattens the battery in hours if I forget to connect the charge cable in the car.

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: The Trump administration’s plans for the future of NIST are not clear.

Can we start calling him Agent Orange?

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

If Trump annexes Greenland, he may well let Russia have Ukraine. If that happens, there will really be nothing stopping China taking Taiwan. You can expect that to disrupt the supply of chips to such an extent you will probably see a massive economic depression and a lot of redundant IT professionals.

India's banking on the bank.in domain cleaning up its financial services sector

In related news, the fruit preserve regulator is aiming to tackle the fake spread epidemic with the jam.in domain name

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

We've all seen this playbook in several countries in the last few decades: Elect a strong-man leader, fuck stuff up, declare an emergency, cancel elections, dispose of opposition

Nobody works 120 hours in a week. That results in 6 hours per day to eat, wash and sleep. Anyone who thinks they do that should not be trusted with anything sharper than a crayon.

Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

Nvidia chips soldered to a motherboard means that motherboard is on my do-not-buy list, same as Realtek network chips

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Re: What's in a name...

Well somebody did, and we're not going home till they admit it. I can stay here all night.

Sonos CEO steps down after smart speaker app upgrade hit bum note

Going to be more common with smart devices

They make a handsome profit on the initial sale, but a loss on backend compute resources needed to keep the product "smart". They could charge a realistic fee for the cloudy stuff instead of pretending it's free, or just open source it and let the geeks come up with a way. Shelly do this with their switches and stuff, and it is a joy to work with.

UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters

90% of turkeys surveyed

said that Christmas was the biggest problem they faced

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: making an essential appliance too damn complicated

You could just flip the circuit breaker

Chinese RISC-V project teases 2025 debut of freely licensed advanced chip design

"hasn’t progressed as quickly as hoped and argues that’s because developing high-end chips is hard."

If you think that's hard, try verifying it. If you think verifying high-end chips is hard, try debugging a failing test