Posts by Hubert Cumberdale

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

And facial-recognition fishing expeditions.

ChatGPT wants access to your health records so it can be a better not-doctor

"Florida Man"

Says it all.

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

Re: it strips all the BS formatting off

What an absolute Scunthorpe.

Re: re: or anything else

Chillies is what does it for me. I tend to get the old Johnny Cash the morning after some good chilli beef noodles.

California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

Re: ridiculous

"Nitrates have been restricted for some time in the UK because they've been used in home made explosives"

I beg to differ.

Cloud-managed earbuds sound strange - as a concept, and on a plane

Good luck finding things not made in China.

EU browser choice rules send millions more users Firefox's way

"alleging that Microsoft deploys deceptive design tactics to push its Edge browser"

Srsly. "Alleging". Pretty damned fuckin obvious they are doing that. Cunts. But then so are Google. (Both, before you ask.)

GPT-5.5 may burn fewer tokens, but it always burns more cash

Much as it pains me, this fella might be on the money (so to speak). A wide range of jobs is changing, and we're going to have to either change with them to keep up or get undercut by someone else who does. Not saying I like it.

England's school phone ban gets teeth, just in time to bite no one

I wonder if these kids have ever encountered magnets before. Seriously, those pouches (like security tags) are trivial to remove with a decent magnet.

If you want into Anthropic's Claude club, you may have to show ID

Re: I am curious

Not sure how you came to either of those conclusions.

Re: I am curious

I suggest that people should pause and refer to history before referring to any particular group of people, especially in Europe, as "vermin".

California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

Re: Super

Woop woop woop! Sound o' da police!

Notepad sheds Copilot from toolbar as Microsoft gives subtlety a try

Re: It's not all bad...

Nope. The whole point of Notepad for me is its lack of features. If I want shit like that, I'll use something else. Meanwhile, that 196KB executable is coming with me to any version of Windows that will run it. Same goes for the 901KB of the old calc.exe.

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

Re: Linux,

If you don't have windows, it's probably time you left the basement.

Re: Linux,

Maybe you should get a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Actually, just getting a friend would do. Or maybe even just look out of the window. Anything to stop you spouting this stuff and confirming the worst suspicions of anyone who has ever looked at Microsoft/Apple/Google alternatives and thought, "Hmm, not if I have to have anything to do with guys like that". You're clearly intelligent, and that could likely be put to some good use somewhere. But you're not helping anyone by doing what you seem to be repeatedly doing. Over. And. Over. Again.

Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience

Re: Surely Edge can be nuked from space ?

You can completely nuke Edge, and I did – empty the relevant folders and deny permissions to everyone. But then I needed to use Teams for work and it needed WebView2. And loads of other things apparently do too. So I had to un-kill it (which was actually a bit tricky in the end). Yes, people, we're heading back to the dark ages of IE6 being embedded deeply in Windows XP. What can possibly go wrong?

Google embraces third party app stores and payments to put Epic Games case behind it

Re: Not convinced

Yeah, how does this affect F-Droid, for example?

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Re: Vivaldi

I'm disappointed by your lack of punning. You could have at least said something like "it lets you orchestrate your own settings", or "you can fiddle with the composition of its tabs" or something. Are they good? No. But at least I'm trying.

Rather than "rocks", I'd say that Vivaldi probably Baroques. I suppose you could say it's a browser for all Four Seasons.

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

*her

Has to at least partly be your fault, then :P

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Re: Recycle / re-use?

Srsly, wtf were you paying $800/yr for in the first place?

Re: Which is why I bought new smartphone two weeks ago...

Much like the situation with modern PCs has been for some time, they don't actually need to be better, as far as I can tell. The only tangible improvements of late have been in the cameras. For pretty much everything most people actually do with them, something at the entry level will probably be fine. Anything else is just bells and whistles. Or screens so big you can't fit them in your pocket.

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Re: Biometrics

::eyeroll::

Any more debunked bullshit you want to wheel out to go with that steaming pile? And yes, contrary to AI-generated nonsense, the UK is doing pretty well compared to the Republic of Gilead USA right now. At least until the next election – that's when we'll get to find out just how successfully dumb the flag-shagging, Brexit-voting, definitely-not-racist segment of the population is. Sadly, it's looking a bit like we're heading in a troubling direction and it's all feeling a bit 1933. I'd suggest that you have no idea exactly what you're wishing for.

O say, can you see: FCC pushes patriotic programming for US 250th

I was pondering the same (typos aside). No doubt they'll turn up soon enough.

Microsoft teases ‘reimagined SharePoint experience’ with added AI

Re: Valuable path length ...

Thanks for that explanation. It makes sense of some shit I'd been wondering about for a while.

Break free of Ring's servers, earn a five-figure bounty

Re: Ring bashing

And of course a wood pecker is possibly the last thing you want your ring to be bashed with. Imagine the splinters.

Re: Why even bother?

In truth, most "crooks" are really not that bright. My cameras are about 3-4m off the ground, so difficult but not impossible to tamper with. But the drug-craving city-dwellers round here are just looking for an easy win (and from my observations, most of them are even oblivious to the presence of the cameras).

If someone is determined enough to get a ladder and nick them, you may have bigger problems anyway. Plus, the fact that most cameras now seem to do the cloud thing by default will probably put a large fraction of the brighter crims off, as they might perceive there's a high chance of footage being remotely stored whether or not they nick/tamper with the devices and cards.

Re: I assume that Ring has been asked ...

My Tapo (TP-Link) cameras do go via servers/an app by default (subscription optional), but they also store on a local MicroSD card and can easily be configured for RTSP (and blocked from accessing the wider web at the router level, if you like). I really don't see why others can't be like this too.

Flush with potential? Activist investor insists Japanese toilet giant is an AI sleeper

Re: New ad idea?

Japan? I thought Toto had something to do with Africa...

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

To paraphrase the Thin Blue Line, "it's their cockup, his arse!".

Smartphones cleared for launch as NASA loosens the rulebook

It's still common (in both senses) round these parts.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

Re: "Disabled"

Maybe it should get PIP to help it.

Mozilla starts offering RPMs of Firefox Nightly

Re: Packaging...?

So you enjoy ads, then?

Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking

Anything that claims to improve security by fundamentally breaking security through installing its own certificates to act as a MITM is an absolute fuckup of an idea that needs to be killed.

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

Re: What?

"I don't send important stuff in an editable format."

Not so useful when you're sending it to an actual editor. Clue's in the name.

Re: What?

Wow. You really aren't a fan of reality. I'll say it one more time. It's not about me: I can't change what my clients require. Doesn't matter how much anyone screams into the void that "it doesn't have to be like this!". Neither you nor I can change the fact that to stop using Word, I would essentially have to change career entirely. Tell me that's my choice if you like, but the economy is currently not good and I have to eat.

I get that people want this to work, but "better" compatibility is not 100% compatibility. And sometimes it's hard enough to stop my clients from sending me PDFs to "edit" – I'm not about to try to befuddle their (non-technical) minds further by asking for ODF. To use a weird metaphor, if I were a mechanic, I couldn't just tell people they'd brought me the wrong car and I only work on Hondas* – I'd go out of business pretty quickly. Sadly, people drive Teslas whether we like it or not.

Believe me, I'd dump MS if I could – I've already dumped Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop for Darktable and GIMP, respectively, and boy were those steep learning curves, but totally worth it.

^{_{*Yes, yes – I know that's kinda how main dealers work, but you see my point.}}

Re: What?

Yeah, this is the point I guess. I'm not blaming anyone for non-100% compatibility (I really don't care who is at "fault", if anyone – LibreOffice is impressive, as is OSS in general, and I support and use it where I can). The need to use Word is just my reality. People often seem to downvote reality on here though, like it will somehow make it go away.

Came here to ask just that. Running Word smoothly in Wine is what would make using a Linux distro on my day-to-day desktop viable for me. (And don't tell me to run LibreOffice – I like it well enough, but even 99.97% compatibility wouldn't be enough for my use case – sadly it just has to be Word or my clients will have problems sooner rather than later [formatting, comments, tracked changes, etc.].)

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Well, nobody could have seen this coming. ^{_{(Apart from everybody.)}}

Google offers bargain: Sell your soul to Gemini, and it'll give you smarter answers

Re: Personalised Predictions

"Google on Wednesday began inviting Gemini users to let its chatbot read their Gmail, Photos, Search history, and YouTube data in exchange for possibly more personalized responses."

Nope. ^{_{Nope. Nope. Nope.}} Also, Nope.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: Not here

Worth noting: https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/SmartTV.txt.

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome

Re: Hey downvoters

"replace Google with Microsoft"

[s]Great idea![/s]

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Re: pretty pointless

I'll say it again, as you clearly didn't read my post:

"And don't tell me "but it's only a [whatever] website and it doesn't matter". Sometimes you don't know exactly what might be sensitive information until its too late."

This is purely about the real and present danger of eavesdropping in transit, not some vague notion of "website security". And JS is an entirely different problem (hint: use NoScript).

Re: pretty pointless

"browsers make it hard to use http these days"

Quite right, too. There's no excuse for an unencrypted website these days when Let's Encrypt (et al.) make it free and almost trivial to implement. And don't tell me "but it's only a [whatever] website and it doesn't matter". Sometimes you don't know exactly what might be sensitive information until its too late. Like having Jewish heritage in 1930s Germany.

Re: Seriously...

Nope.

China turns on a vast experimental network it says is an heir to ARPANET

Re: JANET

Damn it, JANET!