Posts by Hubert Cumberdale

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

List<string> thingsThatActuallyWork = new List<string>();

"In the last year, we released more than 1,100 features across Microsoft 365, Security, Copilot, and SharePoint."

And I'm completely willing to pay extra for all of the features in that list that I actually want. Guess how many that is.

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Re: Damn.

Ditto. Was thinking about doubling it recently and found exactly what you did. Should've held on to my old sticks and sold them at massive profit, too...

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

Re: Big picture

"consent through "nudge" policies."

I somehow misread that as "nudage" policies.

"VPN usage with children was estimated to be about 8% last time I looked"

I'm guessing that would have been before age verification came in.

"Maybe 90% if your sample data consists solely of teenage boys in the 14-18 category"

Well, yes. That would be the target demographic. But if a kid of any age is looking for pr0n, they're going to find it, and sooner rather than later. A simple image search with SafeSearch turned off will get you there in seconds (so to speak).

So... the watchdog snaps ineffectively at a site with no lock on the front door while 90% of kids just use a VPN to sneak in round the back...

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Quiet, piggy!

Re: Micro- and Soft- Brain ?

What's mindblowing is their lack of contact with reality.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Up and down...

...like a fiddler's elbow?

Mozilla's Firefox 145 is heeeeeere: Buffs up privacy, bloats AI

Meanwhile it gets less and less reliable at correctly rendering websites web designers get increasingly lazy and design websites that don't follow standards and only work in Chrome.

FTFY.

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Re: Environmental damage

Just because you start using $productA doesn't mean you automatically have to hate $productB. These aren't football teams.

Re: Environmental damage

Believe me, I'm no fan of Microsoft. I just think you're annoying.

Re: Environmental damage

I see no circular logic here nor any straw men – these are actual scenarios that exist. I wonder what the logical fallacy of incorrectly invoking logical fallacies is called?

Re: Environmental damage

Oh do give it a rest. This isn't a thread about Linux, much as you (and others) are trying to make it one. Some people choose Windows – that's fine; some people can't choose Linux – that's probably not really fine, but it'd be nice to be able to have a conversation about Windows without someone extremely unhelpful piping up about Linux being the answer.

This security hole can crash billions of Chromium browsers, and Google hasn't patched it yet

Re: How about Brave get off their arses and write some code

^{[citation needed]}

Re: How about Brave get off their arses and write some code

Good choice.

Re: How about Brave get off their arses and write some code

How about you just stop using Brave, as should everyone.

Re: JavaScript has been doing this for years.

Yeah, my local rag causes NoScript's list of domains trying to run JS to fall off the bottom of the screen, needing a scroll bar.

You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training

Re: Am I paranoid, or....

I get that too. But it still doesn't help if that domain is then blocked by my router's DNS...

Re: Am I paranoid, or....

I often have problems with "unsubscribe" links (and indeed opt-out clickys) redirecting via tracking websites and thus being blocked by my DNS-based filters. Makes for a faff.

Re: Am I paranoid, or....

I created an account under a ludicrous name just so I could see people's pages properly when they directed me to them. Hoping that this small effort will help to taint their training pool ever so slightly. For this reason, I shall remain firmly opted in (but mostly logged out)!

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

I last "replaced" my PC in about 1999. Since then, I've just been able to gradually upgrade all of its parts as and when I needed to, and pretty cheaply each time (I think the current oldest part in it – a rarely used CD/DVD drive – is from about 2006; the newest is the processor, which was first produced in 2022; the motherboard dates back about 7 years). I strongly doubt anyone has been able to do that with any Mac from that era.

Re: My company switched

"Linux isn't even an OS."

And I bet that kind of pedantry gets all the girls excited.

Re: there's never an actual need for a Mac

RTFP.

Re: My nerdy formner CEO offered me a choice ...

^ This guy gets it. But srsly. Looks like I struck a raw nerve in some people.

Re: My nerdy formner CEO offered me a choice ...

Mac has never been the choice of true nerds, only of people who adopt the nerd aesthetic for fashion reasons.

Re: Another point of anecdata

Yeah, but really,

"for some tasks like design work and some development work, users find it more efficient to use are stubborn and inflexible and insist on using a Mac"

To be fair, Windows has become very enshittified of late, and Apple has weirdly become a less-worse option in that regard. But in truth, unless you're developing for Mac, there's never an actual need for a Mac other than unfamiliarity with alternatives (and of course pure vanity).

Re: We only run mac

Yeah, but how many people are really going to leave everything behind. If it's winter, I'm grabbing my coat. And while I'm at it, I might as well pick up my laptop (unless it's a Mac, in which case I'll happily watch it burn).

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Well, they at least "think different". Especially when it comes to knowing the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

"After all if quarantine has been properly enacted, COVID would have been eradicated within 3 weeks."

Oh do fuck off.

China is building a thriving semi industry off US leftovers, export controls be damned

Re: You'd think

Yup. Xi's and Putin's droids are out in force, it seems.

Re: You'd think

Wow. Seeing a lot of anti-anti-US downvote hate on this thread. Interesting.

^{(Also "a thriving semi"? Seriously? Good to see that the Reg innuendo machine is keeping its end up.)}

UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

The question I have,

is why people put up with this invasive keylogging in the first place. Either a person produces the output required by their job, or they don't. The amount of time spent on presenteeism should therefore be irrelevant.

If I'm contracted to be paid X to do Y in a certain time period, and I do Y to the satisfaction of my employers, then I say it's nobody's business how much time it took me to do it. But then again, I am self-employed, so maybe I just have an unusually rational view of the nature of labour. I simply wouldn't agree to be monitored in this way.

Britain's policing minister punts facial recog nationwide

Re: Funnily enough....

Now that is deeply troubling.

Re: In Dubai you are never not on a camera

"Every Brit LOVES Dubai no?"

No. Personally, I think Dubai is part of a deeply disturbing totalitarian state that I have no intention of ever visiting.

YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump 'censorship' case go away

Re: Finally they admit guilt

I won't dignify this with a point-by-point contradiction of your nonsense. Your handle says it all.

Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop,' Stanford study says

Re: Humans will be humans

Don't diss Smalltalk. It's awesome. And you probably don't know that a certain nontrivial engineering consultancy still uses it for the front end of its software (albeit with Fortran doing the heavy lifting round the back).

ChatGPT: Why do most of your users ask for help writing – prose, not code?

Re: Seems...

Also worth noting that ChatGPT is actually really shit at writing. Specifically, it copies all of the errors people constantly make, presumably because it just copies everything.

One specific and infuriating example is its complete inability to correctly hyphenate compound adjectives (e.g. "a well-known woman" vs. "the woman is well known"). Then you ask it about what it's done with that hyphen and why, and it will tell you something utterly nonsensical and often not even self-consistent. It also throws comma splices in all over the place. You simply can't trust it when it comes to grammar. And that's not even considering the whole "delve" problem.*

^{*See also: augment, bespoke, crucial, dive, embark, emphasize, elevate, enhance, facilitate, foster, game changer, harness, highlight, journey, key, leverage, meticulous, navigating, realm, revolutionize, strive, synergy, synergies, synergistic, tailored, the world of, ultimately, underscores, underpins, unveil, utilize, vital...}

It's the final countdown: Windows 10 hits end of support in less than 30 days

Re: Windows 10 security upgrades - not an option

Do this:

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/how-to-extend-windows-10-support-now-published-by-ghacks/#post-2796782

Works fine for me.

Re: This will, for many users still running Windows 10, require a hardware purchase.

Just FYI, you can still get free updates for a year:

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/how-to-extend-windows-10-support-now-published-by-ghacks/#post-2796782

UK Lords take aim at Ofcom's 'child-protection' upgrades to Online Safety Act

Re: The UK already had porn blocks. It didn't need the OSA.

"No, no, no – let me finish!"

Shouts Farage, mouse in one hand...

^{(with apologies to Dead Ringers)}

Fire up the gas turbines, says US Interior Secretary: We gotta win the AI arms race

Re: Fusion power will eventually save the planet

And apparently basic climate science is too big to fit in your imagination.

Microsoft readies Windows 11 25H2 while Windows 10 circles the drain

Sooo... someone point me to the registry-hack workaround or whatever it will be. There's obviously going to be one.

Word to autosave new docs to the cloud before you can even hit Ctrl+S

Re: TLDR

You can still disable "connected services" to avoid that, I believe.

China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday

Re: FML

Where, exactly?

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Re: They already know

"If I log into Reddit, for instance using a third party service, eg. a gmail or apple account"

And why on Earth would you do that? Centralising your logins is a very bad idea.

"don't send sensitive information to an untrusted third party"

I count even my email address as sensitive information. Having several of my own domains, I tend to use a different email address (and of course a different, strong, password) for every new account I'm forced to set up for one pointless reason or another (before you ask: KeePassXC, locally hosted and shared across devices). That way, if some service gets compromised (or sells my data to spamming scum), I know exactly which one it was, and I can just turn it off. This also has many other benefits in terms of ID theft.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

'Without action, she warned, the government's long-awaited age verification rules risk being rendered "inadequate."'

Lol. The rules were always inadequate. They just didn't understand that. Even if the VPN thing somehow gets enacted (and ffs I really hope it won't), there will be ways round it that are accessible to any mildly savvy teenager (and therefore all of their friends).

There is only one solution: mandatory sex education for all, with no religious exemptions. And I don't mean just the "how to put a condom on a banana" sort. Discussions of (enthusiastic) consent, power imbalance/coercive control, porn, what is legal and illegal, risks (both physical and internet-based), and, yes, pleasure (shock!). All this must be included. Probably from about age 8 (although obvs. with age-appropriate adjustments of language and content). That's the only way to prepare kids for what they will, at some point, inevitably encounter.

UK secretly allows facial recognition scans of passport, immigration databases

Re: False positives

"Fortunately, we still live in a world of grown-ups."

Indeed, it's heartening to see the almost unilateral balance of downvotes on your posts. It restores my faith that the people on this forum mostly have good sense. Present company excepted.

No more 'Sanity Checks.' Inclusive language guide bans problematic tech terms

Re: My inclusive reply

No more sanity checks? That's nuts.