Posts by ITMA

Eufy security cams 'ignore cloud opt-out, store unique IDs' of anyone who walks by

Re: Hello!

Unfortunately this is all too common.

End users (both home and business) sleep walking into a security quagmire and privacy fiasco all in the name of "convience". They're becoming addicted to controlling things via apps on their phone (laziness?) which almost invariably require some sort of "cloud" service to work.

Manufacturers are equally to blame by encouraging it - realesing products which do not work, or are hard to make work, except via some (usually the manufacturer's) "cloud" service.

All business MUST have a policy for internet connected and IoT devices, as part of or in addition to their IT and security policies. It is grave mistake not to.

And a recommendation to everyone - STOP making or wanting everything under the sun to be "connected". There are even internet connected ovens FFS! It is getting ridiculous.

Cosmic rays more likely to glitch out water-cooled computers

And what size overshoes do you take sir?

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

Re: How boring am I?

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to watch my lawn turn brown"

You'll have a long wait - that's astroturf you're looking at....

Capital crunch: Virgin Orbit confirms all ops on pause until Tuesday

My. That;s a BIG one

They pic used gives the distinct impression that it is one HUGE missile delivery system.

Microsoft's Copilot AI to pervade the whole 365 suite

"As I've said in other comments, these things are tools"...

Oh Microsoft are "tools" alright...

Re: On no not again!

After you've done all that is when they will tell you the only way to disable it is to "request" your tenant is added to an "exclusion list".

Having raised said request it will then take them ages to get around to doing it.... And then keep pestering you to review their "very helpful" support....

On no not again!

I really hope that Microsoft are not going to roll this out wihtout a mechanism ALREADY in place so admins can kill it stone dead.

Something tells me after the "fiaso" of "Reactions" that they will roll it out without a way of killing it.

What data does it collect and what does it do with it? There could be major privacy issues using this.

Enter Tinker: Asus pulls out RISC-V board it hopes trumps Raspberry PI

Re: Yikes.

So you are the ****** hoarding them all!

Quick everyone - this is the bugger who is causing the Pi shortage....

Re: Yikes.

But, it doesn't matter how much cheaper Raspberry Pi boards are if you can't get them...

Cloud upstart offers free heat if you host its edge servers

Re: Nothing new?

"but I also reckon that there are some problems with it that previous entrepreneurs might have run into, such as the uneven demand for heating throughout the year"

Which could well be the (or at least a significant) reasoin why the radiators idea failed. Great in winter, but what do you do with all that heat from the "server on your living room wall" during a hot summer?

Re: Nothing new?

Very true.

Let's call it a better iteration. After all, most innovations are built on a foundation of lots of other ideas and innovations.

Nothing new

Not exactly a new idea.

From 2015:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-32739497

"The server that could heat your home at no cost

A radiator fitted with a computer server could help provide free heating for homes.

The heat generated by servers has been exploited on an industrial scale to warm buildings, but this is the first time somebody else's server has been used to heat a home.

'The eRadiators are not being used for permanent storage,' said Boaz Leupe the CEO of Nerdalize, 'They are really meant for firms, or universities, or research institutes that have a need for computation power.'

Mr Leupe said the amount of electricity the Eneco eRadiators used was monitored and the home owners reimbursed for the running costs."

Anyone want an International Space Station? Slightly used

Re: I've got a better idea...

I only asked as the answer was unclear:

- than leaving it in Earth orbit

- than deorbitting it

- then blasting it off into the "inky-black" of "outer space".

Re: I've got a better idea...

More energy than.... what?

Re: I've got a better idea...

A great idea and the best way of dealing with nuclear waste - assuming it can be reliably and safely put in space in the first place. That's the hard part

Although there are bound to be some who would complain about "polluting the sun".....

Re: I've got a better idea...

I can imagine it now.

Rocket sends the ISS off into the "inky-black beyond".

Several years later very angry alien arrives with interstellar lawyers and written off "flying saucer" in tow wanting to know who is responsible so he/she/it can sue their asses off. And the thing that pisses him off the most - it's cost him his no-claims bonus.

Windows 11 puts 'disgusting' Remote Mailslots protocol out of its misery

Re: The trouble is…

"And it has arguably the worst UI Microsoft has ever inflicted on software"

No, no, no, no.

THAT is when some dispshit within Microsoft inflicted Metro on Windows Server 2012 r2.

Re: The trouble is…

You can.

But if you start Teams it turns that back on.... You have to turn it off within Teams and, just like Skype, you can only do that when signed in to Teams.

Yes - TWO ways to stop it starting when you sign in and you have to use BOTH to kill it properly.

Re: The trouble is…

I can tell Microsoft what is far more "disgusting":

1. Forcing shite like "Focussed Inbox" out turned on.

2. Forcing upgrades to Windows 10 even though users had said NO.

3. Forcing out "reactions" on 365 without even putting in a mechanism for admins to turn that shite off. You have to ask Microshaft to put your tenant on an "exclusion" list.

4. Constant changes to application UIs for no reason other than some idiot in Microshite thinks they need to "improve" it.

Utter morons.

Rebel without a clause: ISP promises broadband with no contract

Re: If a customer lives in a fiber-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) area

You have fire!?!?!?

You lucky, lucky b******... LOL

Re: If a customer lives in a fiber-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) area

"<presses submit and listens to the relays clicking, counting the bits as they sent up the line>"

Relays! You have relays!?!?!?

F**king showoff LOL

I'm still trying to find "wet string" switching "fabric"....

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop

Re: single-tap, double-tap

"I stand by my statement: I hate them. They are stupid."

I'm with you there.

I absolutely loathe tapping. Every single touchpad I've came across NEVER gets the way my fingers work right and contantly misinterpret me changing the position of my finger as a tap.

Result - God knows what being selected, dragged and dropped to God knows where.

It is positively dangerous.

Yet every manufacturer has the bloody thing turned ON.

STOP IT!

Yes I know I can turn it off, but the havoc wrought until I do is a royal pain.

I much prefer seperate physical buttons I can give an unambiguous push.

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

Re: Reminds me...

Those were the days when hardware inventory scans where common. Kaspersky used to have that feature (before it became unstable, unreliable bloatware).

Back when lots of people built their own PCs for home from components and work 'puters were all to easy "unwilling" donors.

Re: Reminds me...

My normal reaction to a machine stopping working is to check the user....

"What the f*** have you been doing to it?"

:)

NASA fixes solar observation spacecraft by turning it off and turning it on again

Re: IBM satellites.

I can picture it now....

Mission Control: "Ok, now press CTRL-ALT-DEL.... "

Astronaut: "Ok done it".

Mission Control: "Nothing is happening. Try again"...

Astronaut: "Ok done it again."

Mission Control: "Hmm... Still not working. Are you sure you are doing it right?"

Astronaut: "Of course I'm f******g doing it right! I'm doing exactly what you told me to do - I'm pressing CTRL, then I'm pressing ALT and then I'm pressing DEL"..

Mission Control: "Agghh... You F**&**** s**8 c&***.. Your are supposed to press them ALL AT THE SAME F*****G TIME!"

Astronaut: "You didn't say anything about having to press them at the same time... tw***s".

LOL

Elon Musk yearns for AI devs to build 'anti-woke' rival ChatGPT bot

Re: It will write a positive poem about Trump

Cremation or burial - either way he is likely to hit laws relating to ground contamination or air pollution. LOL

At Citrix, 'perpetual licenses' means 'we'd rather move you to a subscription'

I agree entirely about .doc to docx.

I also appreciate that changes to internal file formats may be needed to provide worthwhile improvement.

I think the issue with Solidworks is that they provide no route or mechanism for backwards compatibility - the ability to open the new format files in older software. Something which Microsoft (to a degree) has done.

I'm not an expert on CAD file formats, but I don't think Autodesk have went down the same route as Solidworks in almost building in (what seems) deliberate changes to "encourage" customers to maintain the maintenance subscriptions by making new file formats unusuable in older software. Then compounding that by the new software "helpfully and automatically upgrading" anything you open to edit to the new format making useless in older versions.

Re: Eh?

"Subscription-based licenses (considerably newer - came along from 4 / 5 years ago) - you pay annually or monthly but never own the product, are expected to refresh/renew as required to maintain the support."

Not just to maintain the support. Every subscription based software I've came across, you stop paying it stops working. Which is exactly what you would expect.

"If you restart support you paid a back payment to cover missed support years."

A la Solidworks....

I can see the point with that, but it can be crippling. Especially if, like Solidworks, each new major version introduces "one way" file format changes which render your data incompatible with previous versions.

Re: Eh?

There does seem to be a fair amount of misunderstanding around what a perpetual license is.

(old) Zemax used the term "perpetual". Ansys use the more common sense "paid-up", but both are perhaps more familair to most of us as "buy".

You pay your money and you get a license to use that specific version of the software forever (or as long as you have a system capablle of running it and the OS it needs to run on which gets older and older and more difficult as time goes on).

Re: Hmmm ... are they related to Sage ???

Something similar is happening with the Ansys aquisition of Zemax, but there are plus sides to it.

If you have (what is now called) a legacy Zemax "perpetual" license it has to be assigned to a specific My Zemax user ID. If you don't wish to migrate to the Ansys version of the Zemax software, you can quite happily not migrate.

However, you will get no more product development (even WITH a support subscription) and Ansys make no committment to maintain the My Zemax portal without which your legacy Zemax perpetual license is useless (the software checks in regularly).

On the plus side, gone are the draconian limitations which (old) Zemax imposed such as not being able to change the assigned user on a standard SUL (single user license) more than once every 30 days.

Re: "the vendor will stop maintaining products sold [..] under that scheme"

Well item 1 is a complete non-starter.

This is the real world.... If such a proposal ever became law it would jsut shift all software vendors to the SAAS model and kill "perpetual" licenses stone dead.

Eh?

"Citrix has not previously set the expectation that such customers could be denied maintenance. Indeed the very word 'perpetual' more or less implies the opposite".

"Perpetual" doesn't imply ongoing maintenance at all.

It simply means that you pay once and the license never expires. So as long as you have a platform that supports it, it will (or should*) keep working without having to pay any more money. It does NOT mean that you will continue to get updates and security fixes for it.

*There is an exception to this. Zemax OpticStudio "perpetual" licenses (prior to their aquisition to Ansys) require the perpetual license be assigned to a My Zemax user ID on their My Zemax portal. Shutdown the portal and your "so-called perpetual" license becomes useless.

Rather like all those devices which won't work without a subscription (free or paid) on the manufacture's "cloud" system. Shutdown that and all that shiny hardware becomes scrap.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Re: It doesn't think you are dead now.

"Tweaking

Slang. behaving in a wildly excited or agitated manner, especially as an effect of using methamphetamine, cocaine, or other stimulant drugs:

He was pacing around and bursting in and out of emotional fits like a tweaking junkie."

from: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tweaking

A junkie AI Chatbot... Now THAT's progress!

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

Re: BOFH tampering..

Yup I should have typed TWOC ;)

Re: BOFH tampering..

We have that in the UK already - it is called TWOKing....

OpenAI opens ChatGPT floodgates with dirt-cheap API

Hmmmm

Who actually, really wants this sh*te???

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

"Programmer says 'Works fine on my machine' "

Because programmer is too stupid to check the dependecies properly. So of course of it works on THEIR machine...

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Re: zero credit score

Not really.

Even with what appears a "good" credit score you will still often get refused credit if you don't have a track record of managing debt. I know from experience.

Re: what credit scores assess

Especially since they now all have "offers" on their websites for credit cards.

They're all just loan sharks or facilitators for loan sharks.

Re: Care

It is, on a the face of it, a compete con. Only because one needs to understand what a credit score actually measures.

The "pinnacle" of good money management, to most, is to be able to live "debt free". But that is NOT what credit scores assess.

Credit scores assess your ability to manage debt, not money.

Ego, if you have no debt there is nothing by which your ability to manage it can be assessed, so zero or very low credit score.

Plus, they don't make anything like as much profit from people who are good at managing money. They make it from people who are in debt.

Go figure...

Mozilla says 80 percent of Google Play's app safety labels are inaccurate

Re: RBS are just as bad

As the old saying goes - don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Have multiple accounts with different banks. Ideally, banks NOT part of the same group.

Keep the bulk of your funds in accounts NOT accessed via a mobile app.

NEVER have credit cards from the same bank (or bank group) as your main account(s). They can use "right of offset" to help themseves to money in any of those accounts to service any debt on the card even if it pushes those accounts into unauthorised overdraft and then hit you with all sorts of additional fees for that too.

RBS are just as bad

And the RBS android mobile banking app has a serious bug which RBS refuse to fix despite the Financial Services Ombudsman ruling against them.

If you go into the "Manage my card & Google Pay" it blocks access to the card management section and insists you select one of the Google accounts on your phone - even if you have NOT nor any intention of setting up or using Google Pay.

There is NO WAY to get past it.

If you select one of the Google accounts just to get at the card management function - minor things like BEING ABLE TO BLOCK A LOST/STOLEN CARD, there is NO WAY to tell it to forget that account. The only way is to uninstall their app and re-install it.

Utterly shite programming and blatant disregard for GDPR which even after numerous complaints and the Ombudsmans ruling, RBS REFUSE to fix.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Re: Defacement

What really pisses me off is he constant "Switch to Microsoft browser settings" and "make Edge your default browser" and "have our defaut home page with all these shite feeds etc on"...

No.... Just F*CK OFF!

I have it set how I want... LEAVE ALONE!

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Re: Portmanteau

Influencers are still not as good as The Persuaders...

Tony Curtis's toupee was very entertaining....

Microsoft injects AI into Teams so no one will ever forget what the meeting decided

Re: Sort out the basics

And now Microsoft have foisted "reactions" into 365 email with NO WAY TO TURN THE F**KERS OFF!

Yet another idea from the morons at Microsoft....

That's not a TP-Link access point, it's a… vacuum?

Re: Vaccumming up for you

"So yes, we know what mops are..."

No, those are called toupees LOL

Re: Vaccumming up for you

"Then it'll not only clean your floors"

It will probably not even do that....

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: Losing face

I agree with you 1,000,000% there.

Mistakes from which one doesn't learn anything are bound to be repeated.