Posts by ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo

Cryptocoin Ponzi scheme AirBit Club co-founder jailed

C'mon, it was in the name ...

AirBit

... what better name could one find for such a thing?

Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power?

Judging from the way micros~1 dump crap upon Windows users

I guess, everyone gets nuclear waste sent by mail, in order for micros~1 to dispose of the their nuclear waste in the way they are used to ... just dump it onto the users.

If you can't spot the sentiment: I would very much not hand over nuclear reactors to internet companies who "move fast, and break things" or who abandoned "don't be evil" a long time ago.

Google promises eternity of updates for Chromebooks – that's a decade for everyone else

Re: SUSE LE v ChromeOS

So, since SUSE committed to 13 years of support in 2009 (14 years ago), one might be able to judge their commitment by their actions.

Unless they launched nothing in 2009 with the 13-years commitment.

Call me cynical, but I suspect the latter.

Ex-Twitter employees pull Musk back to money table over missing severance

next step: the nay check

Since, Twex is bleeding money left, right and center, I guess some time in the future MusX will axe the pay checks of his employees.

So, when you have the privilege to work for such a splendid company, how dare you to demand pay. So nay to pay checks.

Sadly, I think there would be non-zero group of people, who would put up with that for a certain while.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Layboy - the magazine for the connoisseur of the external anatomy of the opposite sex.

Having slammed brakes on hiring, Google says it no longer needs quite so many recruiters

Re: Google Bard

Chad G. Peetee

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

It was only after the implementation began that they revealed that they couldn't.

Shouldn't the contract state, that if vendor is unable to provide the goods/services, vendor will not be paid, and op top of that will have to pay compensation for wasting everyone's time?

What are all the lawyers for, when this sort of thing isn't handled properly?

Texas cryptomining outfit earns more from idling rigs than digging Bitcoin

That's a nice electricity grid you have there, ...

... it would be such a shame, if we were to turn on our mining rigs and something were to happen to your grid.

Fortunately, we have an insurance for you.

'AI-written history' of Maui wildfire becomes Amazon bestseller, fuels conspiracies

If the book contains the true reason for the wildfires?

Lasers, from space

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/how-a-5-year-old-spacex-photo-fueled-maui-wildfire-conspiracy-theorists/

The internet will go down in future history as the great dumbness amplifier

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

If all the other execs call in their people, it can't be wrong. Or can it?

Rule 1 of Manglement: look what other Mangler are doing.

Rule 2 of Manglement: if you have no clue what to do, apply Rule 1

Also, when the pandemic hit and everbody worked from home, real estate prices soared. Even before, houses and flats were becoming more expensive at a rate higher than inflation probably because of the years of zero interest rate. Cheap money needs somewhere to go to, right?

With everybody locked up at home with plenty of time on their hands, searching a larger home was a natural thing to do for those with the necessary funds.

I guess, the remaining 91 percent were simply priced out of the market.

Hacktivists attack Japanese government over Fukushima wastewater release

Carbon 14

Will this mess with future C-14 datings?

Northern Ireland police may have endangered its own officers by posting details online in error

Threat level midnight

"Sir, we have had a data breach. He have errected a Gold Structure around it."

"Very good. A mere Gold Plating would be sufficient. Carry on."

ChatGPT's odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip

ConGPT

It probably wrong, but is sounds so nice.

Twitter ad revenue has halved since Elon Musk took over

Re: What about censorship?

I wouldn't worry about censorship on Threads.

Since it is mostly text based - I have no real idea how it actually looks, but as a surrogate of Twatters 280 characters or less, I assume text - there is no danger of Meta censoring any nipples; unless you discuss lubrication schedules ...

M&A - murder and acquisition

Musks takeover of Twatter might make it into future textbooks on economy as a textbook example of corporate murder and acquisition.

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

Re: Gas guzzlers

The real use for such cars is to post selfies of them on the asocial media, because apart from renting time on a race track, those vehicles when being driven are merely a nuissance to bystanders.

Australia's 'great example of government using technology' found to be 'crude and cruel'. And literally lethal to citizens

Re: Oz just like UK

I am sure that it would be so far down under the carpet.

- there, I fixed it for you

Europe's largest city council runs parallel systems to cover Oracle rollout mess

All Cloud Strategy

Customers need to submit themselves to all the Clouds.

One may hope that all the bits and pieces are covered by some of the coulds.

The death of the sysadmin has been predicted for years – we're not holding our breath

Re: The pointy-haired manglers and the clueless c-suite

Plenty of young start-ups founded by middle-aged and old specialists have been brought into this world exactly like that: manglement "cutting costs" and firing specialized personnell, and a while later, when the proverbial hit the air recirculation equipment; those specialists were brought in as external advisers at a befitting hourly rate.

You may have heard about AI defeating voice authentication. This research kinda proves it

Automation giveth, and automation taketh away

... my 2 cents

Metaverses are flopping – hard – says Gartner

use case?

If one really wants immersive meetings, one can meet in too small, hardly ventillated, cramped meeting rooms and get the full range of blah. sweat and farts from all the participants.

VR can't beat that experience.

If I want less immersion, I join online and seclude myself to where ever I currently am.

VR can't beat that experience, either.

So, what's exactly the use case?

Is there a Gartner-Cycle for Gartner-Cycles?

When did Gartner predict each phase for the meh-ta-verse Gartner-Cycle, and is there a Gartner-Cycle for Gartner-Cycles?

-> Icon, Where's the key to my Gartner-Cycle Cyclotron?

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

Re: A fitting epitaph

I am not sure about the "letting kids die" part of the argument, but the prices are insane in the US, e.g. insulin, see https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2021/01/the-astronomical-price-of-insulin-hurts-american-families.html

While R&D and other stuff is expensive, the steep price difference between europe and the US is striking.

Re: A fitting epitaph

Not feeling very bad, when something bad happens to bad people is a vital part of psychological hygiene. Of course, one can argue that loss of life is far more serious, and one should refrain from comments in a similar vein as "he had it coming".

But, we humans are nasty, petty and quite emotional creatures. Millennia of rational philosophy be damned.

I believe, we would go insane, were it not for the occasional Schadenfreude (in less severe cases) or lessened amount of commiseration (in severe cases).

At some point, we're all potential casualties in someone else's beta test

"You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste. ... . I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."

*Karma has entered the room*

While the loss of life is tragic; one needs to separate the "art" from the "artist", and I for one don't feel sorry for the CEO in his capacity of CEO of that company.

When the most likely fate was still slow asphyxiation, I asked myself whether the CEO would ask forgiveness from his 4 passengers for selling them an unsafe ride to their doom. But since now, their fate has pretty much been established to be near-instant death, such musings are moot.

-> Icon: these empty pockets are my safety concept, the certification of my safety concept and the written guarantee that everything was done according to all the standards.

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

Re: Man-in-the-middle

Mole in the middle -> thus, we can at least keep the abbreviation, provided the language despots allow it

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

Set the firewall to block all traffic to .zip domains

... done.

Who wants to do business with users of dodgy TLDs anyways?

Why Microsoft just patched a patch that squashed an under-attack Outlook bug

"Ah. So we are still paying for Internet Explorer's "integration" with Windows."

More like technical ransom than technical debt

Microsoft - bringing cross-site scripting (XSS) vulns to the OS near you

Who in their right mind thinks such a feature would be a good idea?

EU's Cyber Resilience Act contains a poison pill for open source developers

How about making a distinction

If it's open source, and for free - apply no/lesser rules

If one is taking money for it - apply rules

If it needs to be super-safe - require third-party audit, apply rules for super-safely

Musk decides to bury dead Twitter accounts, warns users follower counts could sink

A racket?

Now, it's "log in within 30 days, or loose your account"

Later is will be "Log in daily, or loose your account"

Then it's "Subscribe, or loose your account"

... and finally: "What a nice following you have there, it's would be a shame if anything were to happen to it"

-> somewhere there are the terms of service, but they keep changing (their location) all the time

Meta wheels out Deloitte to plug the metaverse. Is anyone actually convinced?

No legs to stand on

When your products has no merits, so you're forced to hire soulless consultants to praise your product.

-> Somewhere, there's the bible of Zuck, which says salvation lies within the meta-thingy

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

New religion - there's isn't any truth anymore

Rogozin is clearly an adherent to this new religion.

-> Here's the New-Bible, it says "Everything is a lie"

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

I for one welcome the quite creative mess that is the world of Linux distributions

With Windows or macOS, you get the current release and that's it.

Whatever the powers the reside in Remond or Cupertino thought is best for you, is what you get. Nothing less, nothing more. If you're lucky, they allow some sort of customisation.

With Linux on the other hand, if you don't like X, take Y. If that also isn't to your liking, try Z.

For me, as an interested lay person, it's like buying a car or choosing a flat/house.

Why would one think, that one thing can make everybody happy? Different people have different needs, and more so, even more different preferences.

Let them all have, that they like best.

There are many Linux distros out there?

Hell yeah, I like that.

PS: The (good) thing is, while one may lament the fracture of the ecosystem into tiny fiefdoms; the Linux world is rather good at adhering to common standards. While there are countless distros, there's only one kernel. While the init vs. systemd debate can become quite heated, the ecosystem as a whole has been pretty consistent in using either of those two. Yes, there are other ones out there, but in general, it's one or the other.

Stop OpenAI training its models on your chats by turning off history

Feed us your corporate data, we're not saving it for future use. Honestly.

Yeah, but no.

Microsoft may stop bundling Teams with Office amid antitrust probe threat

If you get a new computer with Win 10/11 bloat OS pre-installed, then the pre-installed Teams client is incompatible with a micros~365 business account.

So, you need to un-install Teams and then install (the other) Teams.

Thank you for nothing.

Musk tells Twitter advertisers: You're welcome back, but don't make demands

Re: I have been meaning to ask ...

Next rename: squatter

To improve security, consider how the aviation world stopped blaming pilots

Re: Many years ago...

What was the underlying reason for this culture?

My take from your description would be money, or the potential of losing money.

For an commodities exchange, downtime would be quite a loss-maker.

So, you had an overarching goal (avoiding downtime) and everything else (personal ego, etc.) was subordinated.

This makes your case special in my view, because many IT businesses lack that sort of motivation.

For many IT businesses downtime is bad, but losing your personal data?

They have backups, so it's not really lost; and it being out there isn't a problem as long as the leak isn't attributable to them.

And even then, they promise to do better and simply carry on.

Apart from stopping to blame pilots: regulation, and that's unlikely to happen

Being grounded by the FAA, or any other large aviation regulator, is a pretty strong incentive to stop ones planes from crashing.

However, I can not imagine any regulation nearly as strong in the IT sector, so the problem will persist.

It also doesn't help that bits and bytes are quite invisible. While it's hard to hide the crashing of plane, even those that simply vanish from the face of the earth create quite some media attention.

Your personal data gets stolen or simply leaks away from an IT biz?

Nobody will be any wiser until the data is up for sale on some forum or it is being actively used by malicious actors.

And even then, you have no indication who lost your data, or worse, the malicious use does not get noticed.

Cyber-security is inherently different to physical aviation safety. Massively so.

While there surely are valid lessons to learn from an established well-working safety-culture, I am afraid that the whole IT biz isn't susceptible to work safety consciously. After all, "move fast and break things" and "fake it til you make it" seem to be the among the driving dogmas of the industry.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

Re: Too little grist for the mill?

I agree with the sentiment "If the ads don't appear to match yourself, then you have been successful with hiding yourself from the ad-spionage".

However, while the privacy-minded smart folks exhibit a certain level of smartness; the platforms occasionally exhibit a certain level of dumbness.

I use a browsing setup for YouTube that is mildly good at suppressing tracking, nothing sophisticated but better than out-of-the-box browsers with no precautions.

And then, you watch videos on military history and you get ads for cosmetics clearly targeted at young women.

I guess any old-school advertiser would laugh at such "targeting". If you don't know anything about the eyes watching the video into which you cram your ads, at least learn something about the video you cram your ads into.

Pentagon super-leak suspect cuffed: 21-year-old Air National Guardsman

Bragging

For achievement locked up

Virgin Obit: Launch company files for bankruptcy in US

I wonder if the Brit Govt will buy it, as with OneWeb.

Tesla Semi, out since December, already facing a recall over brakes

Unsafe at no speed

That's an improvement

School principal resigns after writing $100,000 check to Elon Musk impersonator

He, who was never scammed/tricked, throws the first scorn

... but using other people's money when falling for a scam is just something different.

Hybrid-criminal?

For once, the scammer exhibits criminal energy for setting up and running with the scam.

But also the victim exhibits criminal energy for using school funds well beyond her own power.

-> What if we cross the two streams of criminal energy?

Google denies Bard trained using OpenAI ChatGPT responses

That's sweet

AIs feeding each other factually doubtful information, lies and internet hate.

How long, until <insert AI 1> turns <insert AI 2> into a hateful internet-Nazi racist?

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

Shitty Clippy

Since, the large language models were all trained using the (whole available?) internet, there is no guarantee that the "information" provided by the LLM is either factually nor syntactically correct, because the training data is most likely to be riddled with errors.

So, apart from automating the Nigerian Prince scams, what are the LLMs to be used for?

A shitty Clippy is what comes to mind.

-> Where're the wet wipes?

After 11 years, Atlassian customers finally get custom domains ... they don't want

So what is it they're selling? A product/service or being part of a brand? Both? Both, mandatorily?

That would be akin to a landlord demanding all the walls in a flat being painted brown while the tenant is renting the flat.

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

Money for nothing, it's the best

--> sipping a cool one at the shores of the rivers of cash flow

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

Forwarding, anybody

Will Teams be able to forward messages, like in any messaging app, or would this be too innovative?

--> I must have forwarded something