Posts by Dinanziame

Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet

Did we ever have privacy or security?

People around you have always known who you were, what you did, and could easily steal from you. The only thing that the internet has changed is the scale of "people around you"

Musk, Tesla win securities fraud battle over that 'funding secured' tweet

Re: You missed out the stock splits

Probably a good part of the reason why they won the lawsuit is that, accounting for stock splits, the stock is now six times higher than the promised number of $420... It's harder to sue for damage when you probably made a shit ton of money. This is known as "Sini Plenis Piscis"

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Planned obsolescence

I can only assume that device makers will now invent ways to make their equipment stop working after a couple of years.

Meanwhile, in Japan, pet fish run up credit card bill on Nintendo Switch

"For those without small children at home"

Ha ha. Pokémon came out in 1996, that's 27 years ago. Today's parents of small children played the game when they were themselves young... And might well still play.

Google institutional investor calls for wider cuts: 30k jobs

Nobody claims Google is listening though... His fund lost money last year but being on Google and Microsoft, so now he's trying to shift the blame.

Break up Google now, says US govt in ad monopoly lawsuit

I wonder who's going to buy these services? Who can be trusted with them?

Hey, online pharmacies: Quit spreading around everyone's data already

The location history is not so precise and complete that you can figure out what happened between two data points.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

Re: Moral Guidance

1 is not prime!

Tone deaf? Microsoft must have booked Sting for Davos because he's a good singer

Yeah, yeah, everybody knew... Except that one year ago, the narrative was that the pandemic had fast-forwarded history and nothing would be again the same. I don't know if everybody believed it, but the stock market certainly did.

NSA asks Congress to let it get on with that warrantless data harvesting, again

Re: Password age limits

Thanks for pointing this out. Password age limits have never worked well, and they are actively encouraging people to use bad passwords.

Ex-Twitter Brits launch legal challenge against dismissal

Re: Non-flattering flattering

It's likely he also holds the world record for biggest wealth increase in a year, from 2020 or 2021. You win some, you lose some...

Apple just cut Tim Cook's pay by 40%. How ever will he get by on that $50m?

Rocket companies are the way to go when yachts are not enough, apparently.

German cartel watchdog objects to the way Google processes user data

Re: In Before...

My readings tell me the British say "Heavens" and "Good Lord". Or alternatively, "Gallopin’ gorgons" and "Merlin's beard".

Re: Good for Germany

Users are not told about this let alone given the opportunity to opt out.

Isn't that included in the "our website uses cookies" GDPR banner?

China follows through on plan to ban deepfake tech

Good luck with that

Banning technology rarely works. I can't find any example that has worked, ever.

Elon Musk's cost-cutting campaign at Twitter extended to not paying rent, claims landlord

I'm aware that large companies sometimes fail to pay bills timely, and it's sometimes claimed that they hope the vendors will give up on the bill rather than bother with a lawsuit (could be incompetence as well!)

However, it seems the strategy can't possibly work on your landlord, because they also want to get paid in the future. And that goes double when all the media are reporting on your decision not to pay your bills...

But obviously, I'm not a billionaire, so maybe I'm just thinking too small.

An IT emergency during a festive visit to the in-laws? So sorry, everyone, I need to step out for a while

Re: Missing information?

It was corrupted in the server. And the data on the previous week's backup has been deleted when they automatically tried to backup the corrupted data.

Though from what I understand, data from two weeks ago should have been properly backed up and safe, so two weeks of data loss instead of one.

Risk-averse Kyocera gambles nearly $10b of own shares on semiconductor growth

Makes sense to me. If we're seeing capability issues in the middle of a downturn, then what will it be when the economy picks up? The alternative being that the economy never picks up.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: Serves Google right

I don't think Gmail costs a lot to maintain. Even with the ginormous number of accounts, storage is probably little compared to the black hole that is YouTube. And don't forget files are certainly deduplicated across accounts.

Google may have 99 problems, but Gmail ain't one.

Alphabet reshuffles to meet ChatGPT threat

Nice to have politicians worrying about the uses artificial intelligence... Though I have a feeling it's not something that can be stopped or regulated much. The convenience to do whatever you want and ignore the consequences is such that people will always find a way to skirt regulations.

Big Apple locals hire Russians to game New York's taxi system

Re: What is this shit?

Another reason is to make sure that it's worth it for taxis to come to the airport looking for a customer; an airport without enough taxis sounds like a pretty bad idea.

Carmack quits Meta, brands it inefficient and unprepared for competition

Perhaps Musk was right with Twitter and the first thing to do is dramatically reduce the size of the workforce.

Perhaps, but when you have issues belong profitable you don't save money by firing the sales staff.

Meta, Google, TikTok and friends sue California to block kids privacy law

Schrödinger's laws

They want children to be verified — without invading their privacy. Identified — but anonymous.

Twitter will lose 32 million users by end of 2024, Insider Intelligence predicts

Re: Twitter costs

Nope, the group of investors (led by Musk) who bought Twitter did.

No. The debt falls on Twitter. Another way to see it is that Twitter borrowed money to give it to its shareholders, which instantly reduced its own worth by the same amount, becoming cheap enough to be bought by the group of investors with a smaller amount of money. That's why Elon said that the company was losing $4M a day, that's the debt interest Twitter has to pay.

Re: Twitter costs

The biggest difference compared to before is that Twitter borrowed $13B in order to buy itself from shareholders. This is now costing $1B in interest per year. Which is a bit more than what Twitter is saving by having fired 5k employees.

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

To be honest, I think this vastly overestimates what the makers get our of these assistants. Beyond hopefully locking users in their ecosystem, it seems improbable they get anything at all. Even what private data they can scrounge is probably of little value compared to all the others way they get your data.

Personally, outside of ostensibly using it as a party trick, I only use the Google assistant while driving; that's the only time talking is preferable to touching the screen.

Microsoft launches full-court press to save $69B Activision deal

Re: Everything Microsoft touches dies

Minecraft is still successful though, eight years later!

Using personal info for ads without consent puts Meta in EU's gunsights

Re: Who else does this apply to ?

Google does ask for your consent, for example every time you do a search in incognito mode. It used to be you needed more clicks to reject all cookies than to accept all cookies, and they got fined for that, so now it's one click for both.

Tech contractor who uses an umbrella company? UK tax is coming after them

How many IT contractors are there in the UK?

I'm asking because the subject keeps coming back so often. I think in most countries, hardly anybody works in IT as a contractor; including deregulated US.

Twitter tries to lure brands back with spend-matching scheme

Re: Twitter

I think there's a widespread attempt to enjoy as much schadenfreude as possible

Almost 300 predatory loan apps found in Google and Apple stores

Re: @trevorde - Obvious flaw here

A theft is only a crime if reported to the authorities

I was going to protest, but then I saw your username... So I've got nothing to say, carry on

Criminals use trending TikTok challenge to make data-stealing malware invisible

Scamming the dishonest

Reminds me of the YouTube videos that claimed you could steal your friends' World of Warcraft accounts by sending your own account username and password to [e-mail]

Sandworm gang launches Monster ransomware attacks on Ukraine

Illegal attack

I hate Putin, and I hope Ukraine kicks out the Russian invaders. That said, I always have to roll my eyes at statements like "Illegal attack". It's not like there are rules on when you're allowed to invade other countries. There's no such thing as international law, at best there's international peer pressure.

France says non to Office 365 and Google Workspace in school

Re: So much BS.

You can write microformats annotations in US English, and the user-visible text in UK English, so everybody is happy.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Re: Twitter “poll”

Surely Elon doesn't need an army of bots to rig a poll on his own website

IBM manager sues for $5m claiming postnatal demotion

Re: Nothing new...

At this point, I wonder who is actually trying to work for IBM

Investor tells Google: Cut costs now and stop paying staff so much

Indeed clearly Google is doing it wrong

As can be observed by the fact it is a failing and unprofitable company. Oh wait.

Amazon reportedly considers laying off 10k employees

Amazon has 1.4 million employees, but how many are in warehouses or driving trucks, and how many are tech workers? I assume the article is about 10k tech workers fired, because they probably fire 10k warehouse employees every single day.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Re: You get what you order

I'm not sure China counts as socialist, or even communist these days. They're approaching empire from the other side.

Europe wants Airbnb and pals to cough up rental property logs

Re: Imagine if it was China asking for this information

They are required to do it, but they're not doing it. That's the point. When Airbnb has to declare them, they won't have a choice anymore.

What about income tax?

I assume making sure people who rent their flat declare it as income is also coincidentally a benefit for governments...

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

Re: pseudonymization

You should do that twice, for even more anonymity!

Google cut contractors off from online 'Share My Salary' spreadsheet, union claims

I assume the spreadsheet is still available to employees, just not contractors

Google settles with Uncle Sam over data that vanished during cryptocurrency biz probe

Re: "That data was lost before the case could be settled."

Since they pay multi-billion dollar fines?

Re: "That data was lost before the case could be settled."

There are also laws which force companies to delete user data on request, even the offsite backups. Even write-only cold storage is "deleted", by deleting the cryptographic key:

https://cloud.google.com/docs/security/deletion

Oracle's Larry Ellison shares fears of bankrupting Western civilization with healthcare

Re: Experience

I remember an Oracle database used by a project I was working on in the early naughties. It was replicated in five data centers, so the schema appropriately looked like a pentagram.

Musk reportedly wants to gut Twitter workforce by up to 75%

Re: Shoutld be an easy task...

Or El Daverino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing

Amazon hit with $1bn claim that secretive Buy Box algorithm screws shoppers

Re: And this is news to just about nobody?

If that sticks, i would very much like to see similar lawsuits brought up against google. bing and any other forced advertisment/"search" engine in the world.

Looks like you missed this, then:

Google hit with record antitrust fine of €2.4bn by Europe

'Fully undetectable' Windows backdoor gets detected

Not windows use here

But do people really just have to open the document and the macro runs, no questions asked?

I mean, if I open a document that pretends to be a LinkedIn offer and it asks for permission to run a macro, there's not a chance I'll allow it.

China dumps dud chips on Russia, Moscow media moans

Re: Russian SMO

Google gave a very confusing translation of this. Apparently, the word брака means both marriage and defect, so the title of the article ended up as "Marriage is growing in popularity in Russia"