Posts by elsergiovolador

Windows 11 still barely pulling ahead of 10 despite end-of-support push

Crapilot

Imagine Windows operating system that will not receive crapilot updates. That alone is a massive selling point for Windows 10.

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Re: Good grief!

Because corrupt government blocked independent small businesses from participating in the market.

Pocket

Once you pocketed the millions, you don't have to deliver.

I mean why would you?

Just coast to the next contract.

Then watch your yacht fleet grow.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Wait

I can't wait microsoft to charge per keystroke or mouse miles.

I heard they stuffed Notepad with Crapilot now.

To be fair I wish that I could access Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot in Copilot, but that's maybe for Windows 12.

Speccy clone storms back for Christmas without a shred of Sinclair code

Real

Buy the real thing.

Otherwise it's like buying veggie burger and missing the meat.

UK Digital Services Tax raises £800M from global tech giants

Pathetic

HMRC will clobber small business to death for missing penny of tax. Giants? Red carpet and custom deals.

I'm gonna puke.

Brit telco Brsk confirms breach as bidding begins for 230K+ customer records

Re: Surely it's a data

brch the btch.

Baikonur's only crew-capable pad busted after Soyuz flight

Cosmos

- Daddy, daddy! Russians gone to space!

- All of them?

- No, just one

- Stop wasting me time, kiddo!

Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

Re: Let me translate..

Reminds me of a company that realised employees spend long time in the toilets.

The fix? Phone/WiFi jammer.

Whip

Bossware is the digital incarnation of the whip.

Them slaves are not working hard enough!

Splash!

I am 100k short for my yacht deposit, why don't you understand that!

Splash!

I don't care about your bills or your rug rats!

Splash!

Write that god damn code as in the ticket now!

Splash!

You spent six hours debugging? Cute. Should have been one.

Splash!

No, you cannot refactor. Ship the mess. Future you can cry about it.

Splash!

Your sprint points are low again. Are you ill or just incompetent?

Splash!

That outage at 3am was your fault because I decided it was.

Splash!

You said the estimate was two weeks. The product manager said one.

Guess whose version becomes the truth.

Splash!

Code review? They skimmed it on their phone in the toilet. Approved.

Splash!

We value work life balance. Which is why yours is none of my business.

Splash!

Also, I promoted the guy who broke production because he 'shows leadership energy'.

Splash!

By the way, we are a family. Families stay late without complaining.

Splash!

Now turn your camera on. I want to see the despair.

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

Re: Keir Starmer said digital IDs were...

Enormous opportunity for Larry Fink and his BlackRock. Starmer takes British people for fools.

Re: Think of a very big number

Don't forget few truckloads of books written by ministers and for those who can't write organising a speaking circuit.

Don't forget that ultimate goal is to track everyone's movements and listen to conversations. Such dataset will become large quick.

Re: Upcoming budget

It's not some pet project, it's Larry Fink's pet project. You can clearly see who Labour works for.

Collabour

Read this:

https://thewinepress.substack.com/p/tokenization-blackrocks-larry-fink

Then this:

https://www.cityam.com/reeves-and-starmer-meet-blackrocks-larry-fink-for-growth-talks/

Suddenly Digital ID is Labour's flagship policy, without democratic mandate.

and CLOWN5 is asleep at the wheel.

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

Big picture

I think people are missing the big picture here.

The ultimate goal of this is to make people arrive at conclusion that Digital ID would have solved this.

Basically corrupt government is manufacturing consent through "nudge" policies.

Senators propose to let users sue tech giants for harmful algos

Totally

That totally doesn't sound like something concocted in the bowels of Kremlin.

Amazon security boss: Hostile countries use cyber targeting for physical military strikes

Re: To many countries in the world

The USA is THE hostile country.

Yes, because current administration is compromised by Russia and Russia is not exactly friendly.

Researchers claim 'largest leak ever' after uncovering WhatsApp enumeration flaw

Re: Excellent Work

Imagine telling someone in the 90s that their number is in phone book. Shock and horror.

Re: University of Vain-a

You’ve built a whole fantasy scenario to dodge the actual point. Nobody argued that a giant scraped dataset is harmless. The issue is your framing that this dataset magically appeared because of some visionary academic wizardry. It didn’t.

The ability to map a phone number to a name, face and profile text existed the moment WhatsApp tied identity to phone numbers and let anyone perform lookups. Bulk scraping doesn’t create the risk, it just reveals scale that was always structurally there.

Waving around hypotheticals about “government ministers’ private numbers” doesn’t magically upgrade this into Mission Impossible. If a minister is daft enough to stick their number, face and workplace on a public lookup profile because the security briefing bored them, that’s not a zero-day, that’s natural selection. And it still doesn’t change the fact that the “attack vector” you’re dramatising is just the default lookup function doing exactly what it was built to do. Shouting at people for pointing that out isn’t quite the mic-drop you think it is.

Re: University of Vain-a

The extra analysis is fine. Nobody said the researchers literally did nothing. Key reuse, profile-info correlation, cross-platform linkage… sure, those are real observations. But the foundation of the whole thing is still the same comic premise: they enumerated a global phone book that Meta built on purpose. That’s not a “breach”, it’s the inevitable side-effect of tying a messaging identity to something as guessable as a phone number.

And that’s the part everyone pretends not to see.

You can bolt on as many paragraphs about profile text, workplace links, or someone’s “info” field accidentally outing their Tinder as you like. It still doesn’t change the fact that the scraping worked because the lookup function exists and always has. Rate limits just decide whether you hoover billions of entries in two days or three months.

As for the university-brand reverence: spare me. If Vain-ya University spends a year prodding WhatsApp with a number generator and filing Jira tickets, then acts shocked when Meta takes ages to respond, that’s not evidence of revolutionary science. That’s evidence of academia discovering what anyone who has ever dealt with a giant platform already knows: nothing happens until you embarrass them publicly.

And the big dramatic headline still boils down to:

“We successfully downloaded a directory that WhatsApp gives to anyone, one number at a time.”

Dress it up however you want, the skeleton is the same.

University of Vain-a

Calling this “the largest data leak in history” is like a researcher finding a phone book and screaming BREACH. They didn’t hack anything, they just asked WhatsApp “who’s this then?” a few billion times and WhatsApp, behaving exactly as designed, replied “here you go” like an overworked receptionist.

The only scandal is that anyone is pretending this behaviour isn’t fundamental to the product. Rate limits don’t fix the underlying absurdity: if you can type a number, you can query the person attached to it. That’s not a vulnerability, that’s the feature you all signed up for.

And the breathless academic tone doesn’t help. “We confirmed 3.5 billion numbers.” Yes, congratulations, you discovered that WhatsApp is popular and that humans use profile photos. Next week: groundbreaking research reveals water still wet, sky maintains blue streaks.

The real punchline is Meta acting grateful, as if they hadn’t been running a global identity directory for a decade and only just noticed someone looked at it too enthusiastically.

And honestly, if this is what passes for “research” at a modern university, God help us all. Enumerating phone numbers with a library someone else wrote is now worthy of papers, press rounds and responsible disclosure rituals. At this rate, the next PhD breakthrough will be “we discovered you can ring people by pressing the digits in the correct order.”

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

Re: Update

In the UK the consent is not required, yet feature has been disabled.

That said, if that were so concerned about recording, why they have not disabled cameras? Surely you can too easy record someone without their consent.

It doesn't wash.

Update

Some updates remove features from the phones.

For instance Samsung removed ability to record calls in one of the updates. So if you relied on it if you wanted to record your doctor talking through your medication, you got stuffed. You had to buy another device to record calls.

I can see how people don't want to update if even update information is opaque and you never know how it will change your phone.

China recruiting spies in the UK with fake headhunters and ‘sites like LinkedIn’

CLOWN5

This piece reads like MI5 rummaging under the sofa cushions for something, anything, that makes them look busy after the courtroom fiasco where their own evidence evaporated on contact with daylight. And what do they triumphantly wave in the air? LinkedIn. Not a mole, not a breach, not some Bond-level dead drop. Just a couple of overeager recruitment profiles pinging connection requests at Westminster interns who still haven’t worked out their privacy settings.

We’re supposed to clutch our pearls because China has a “low threshold” for information. Please. So does half of Whitehall. If Beijing wants a “wider picture”, they can just read Hansard like the rest of us. This melodrama only lands if you believe professional networking sites are some mystical lair of state secrets rather than a graveyard of stale CVs and people loudly hinting they’re job hunting.

And the timing. Always the timing. An espionage alert the moment the Government finds itself humiliated, again, by its own procedural faceplants. An alert that somehow never extends to the entirely open courting of global asset managers who adore digital ID agendas, followed by a sudden domestic “digital identity revolution” rolled out without a shred of public mandate. Funny how the spooks never find that suspicious.

Instead we get this theatre: a stern minister, some recycled Christine Lee references, and a victory lap because they’ve finally removed the discount CCTV from “sensitive sites”. Thrilling stuff. If this is the great unseen war for sovereignty, it’s being fought with the energy of a neighbourhood watch group discovering WhatsApp.

Anthropic is at the heart of the latest billion-dollar circular AI investment bonanza

Microsoft can't lose, as governments run on it.

This means tax payers will pick up the tab.

Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans

Re: Fools

Like this

Re: Yikes! Can we afford to stay here?

Most people here quietly switch to low-energy winter habits:

- Live in one room and seal it off with heavy curtains.

- Layer the floor; even newspapers under a rug stop the cold coming up.

- Charge up a few dense objects near the heater and keep them beside you later; they hold heat for hours.

- Two light duvets, edges tucked hard, are warmer than one thick one.

- Eat something warm and calorie-dense before bed to keep core temperature steady.

- A cluster of tealights under a ceramic pot gives a small but noticeable radiant heat.

- Bagged dry leaves packed around draughty frames work better than cheap foam strips.

- Rotate through warm public spaces when the house gets too cold: long bus rides, the library, a supermarket aisle, the Apple Store if you need proper heat.

- Cafés with poor ventilation tend to be warmest; linger.

- A small pet is effectively a mobile heat source. Cats are the most efficient, but anything warm-blooded helps.

Re: UK Government Seriously Delusional

It's not delusion, it's corruption in plain sight.

Corrupt

Finally, a bit of compassion for the real victims of Britain’s energy crisis: giant datacentres owned by companies that legally identify as tax fog. Turning a blind eye to creative accounting just isn’t enough anymore. Ordinary people with “broad shoulders” clearly need to chip in so hyperscalers don’t miss out on the AI gold rush.

It’s heart-warming, really. Pensioners rationing heating while the government hands out electricity vouchers to GPU warehouses. And the best part? Come winter, you can always warm your hands by standing next to a humming server barn. A true victory for British innovation.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: SPOF

I know C-suite who says these acronyms, making serious concerned face. He just doesn't know what they mean.

SPOF

CEO: “Why’s the entire company offline?”

CTO: “Cloudflare sneezed.”

CEO: “But you said they were the gold standard.”

CTO: “They are. That’s why everyone uses them. That’s also why when they faceplant, the entire internet turns into Victorian London fog. It’s a feature.”

CEO: “Didn’t we have a risk session where you said something about avoiding single points of failure?”

CTO: “Yeah, yeah, but that’s for the little people running Raspberry Pis in their garage. Real enterprises consolidate all traffic through one giant benevolent megacorp, because… economies of scale. Or something. I skimmed the brochure.”

CEO: “But surely we architected a fallback?”

CTO: “Absolutely. If Cloudflare ever goes down, we… wait for Cloudflare to come back up. Solid plan. Industry standard.”

CEO: “So our customers can’t access anything?”

CTO: “Not unless they enjoy watching 522 errors in different fonts. On the bright side, this is the most distributed downtime we’ve ever had. Global reach. Brand consistency.”

CEO: “Should we reconsider relying on one vendor for DNS, CDN, WAF, analytics, TLS termination, routing, edge compute, zero-trust, VPN…?”

CTO: “Look, we put everything behind Cloudflare because we wanted simplicity. Now we have perfect simplicity. Nothing works, equally, everywhere.”

CEO: “So what do we tell the board?”

CTO: “Say it was a spike in ‘unusual traffic’. That phrase is magic. Makes it sound like we know what we’re talking about.”

FCC looks to torch Biden-era cyber rules sparked by Salt Typhoon mess

Hacking

Did it make it too difficult for Russian hackers? Krasnov got a phone call from Moscow?

NetApp claims ex-CTO built a secret cloud platform then sold it to VAST Data

Re: Employment

You have watched too much Severance. In the real world you do not get an “innie” that belongs to the company and an “outie” that magically does not think about anything useful between 9 and 5. There is one brain, carrying one set of skills and ideas, all the time.

Modern employment contracts lean on that fact then quietly try to claim all of it. Not just what you type on their laptop, but anything you build in the same domain, on your own kit, on your own time, as long as they can argue it is “related to the business”. That is the problem I am pointing at.

The “company time, company equipment, company people” line is a distraction. If someone literally uses the firm’s codebase and staff to spin up a clone, sure, that is theirs. But the bigger game is contracts written so that even if you do not, they can still argue that anything impressive you build later must secretly be theirs, because your entire creative output is treated as an extension of the job.

This case is a textbook example: they are basically saying “it is impossible he built something valuable so quickly without it actually being ours”. That mindset only exists because people keep signing paperwork that hands employers ownership of their thinking far beyond office hours.

Re: Employment

It’s absolutely applicable. The whole point is that when you sign the usual corporate boilerplate, you’re handing them the ammunition for exactly this kind of courtroom circus. Whether he actually built anything early or not almost doesn’t matter once the contract gives the company sweeping claims over your time, your ideas, and your movements after you leave.

People keep acting shocked when these clauses get weaponised. That’s the warning. If you sign away autonomy, you shouldn’t be surprised when the employer treats every spark of creativity as contraband the moment you walk out the door.

Employment

Talented people keep learning this lesson the hard way. If you’ve actually got ideas worth anything, the worst place to be is chained to an employment contract with clauses written like you’re joining a medieval guild. Unless they’re handing you a serious equity package, the deal is simple: you build their empire, they own your brain.

The first thing any sane tech worker should do is strike out every non-compete, every “we own anything you think about on a Sunday evening” clause, and anything that tries to treat your personal projects as company property. If they won’t budge, you walk. That’s exactly why big firms spent years lobbying for things like IR35: clamp down on autonomy, kill the contractor route, and make sure the talent pool can’t take their ideas elsewhere.

In IT, the only arrangement that actually respects boundaries is a clean contract: limited scope, no fishing rights over your future, and no attempt to own your private work. Employment is fine for people who want a desk and pizza Fridays, not for people who build things.

Jaguar Land Rover hack cost India's Tata Motors around $2.4 billion and counting

They'll probably figure out that few billion loss made no difference to the temperature in the yacht cabin.

Probably the lesson learned is "we have not outsourced enough".

Apple’s new 15% mini-app deal finally gets Tencent to cut Cupertino in

Fine

So imagine that, companies are "happy" to pay 15% on their revenue.

This means any fines below 15% is just cost of doing business.

This also means big corporations can break laws as they please, just pay the fines so the pen pushers are happy.

You can now put your US passport into Apple Wallet for domestic travel

Re: do you have to unlock your phone to show this ID?

Most likely this is orchestrated by BlackRock and the likes. Its boss loves idea of population control hence here Starmer now thinks Digital ID is the best thing since big consultancies taking over government contracts and will solve everything, after face to face meeting with Larry Fink. BlackRock owns 6.70% of Apple.

Re: "with options how to ruin someone's day."

And according to Huxley, everyone is indifferent to that and most actually looking forward to it.

Imagine your life being observed by unknown civil servants all approving of what you do. Must feel great.

Re: Point

Yes they likely have, but that require court order and is probably limited to high profile cases. There is no "official" entry point.

This is different, because it creates an official entry point and it is legislation and os update away from sharing location and other data with authorities in realtime.

The end game here is probably an interactive map with everyone's movement on it, right clickable with options how to ruin someone's day.

Point

The data's encrypted, stored locally, and users can't present the info unless they use Face ID or Touch ID to verify that they're the user. Apple also said that the Wallet app will only present "information needed for a transaction," and claims it can't see when or where users present their digital passports, or what data is being shared.

That completely misses the point. Passport in the drawer hasn't a clue where you are. Passport on the phone? Yes, officer Johnson, he is currently in the office at his workplace, in fact he is in the toilet, in cubicle 2 and is currently pushing his second turd. Oh, just splashed. Did you hear that? Turning the microphone on. Do you want to send him notification, sir?

"Is that normal pooing you're doing?"

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

Re: creepy

At least he had no two broken arms. IYKYK

Atlassian twice shunned AWS Graviton CPUs, but now runs Jira and Confluence on them

Gasps

I thought Jira runs on morning gasps:

"Where is my ticket?"

"Which ticket you are working on?"

"Can you move your ticket, please?"

"Is this a child ticket?"

"Which board are you on?"

UK's Cyber Security and Resilience Bill makes Parliamentary debut

Re: "I'm sending them a clear message: the UK is no easy target."

Reminds me of a girl at the bar who told me "Careful boy, I am not easy".

You can blab all you want you aren't easy target, but it takes a second to see the IT is built by terminally confused Indian consultancies and the body count speaks for itself.

Re: We are doing something!

but allows ministers to change things in future with secondary legislation

This is the so called "freebie engine", where legislation gets shaped by wine and steak dinners.

We are doing something!

Such a beautiful bill showing that government is doing something about those pesky cyber attacks.

If you get attacked you get fined.

Imagine that extrapolates to other crimes, like you get burgled? Here is a fine for you for not having a dog, cameras and security guard in your garden.

You got mugged? Oh here is a fine for you, because you worn expensive watch that attracted the thieve.

You got scammed? Another fine for being too stupid.

etc.

Australia’s spy boss says authoritarian nations ready to commit ‘high-impact sabotage’

Re: Spy boss

Why downvotes?

Remit of spy agencies is protection of democracy among other things.

Then how do you explain big corporations dining with ministers and "shaping policies" bypassing democratic process?

Then you have spy bosses mumbling something about cyber attacks.

I mean, dummy, if corporations are engaged in full on asset stripping in collusion with government, what would you expect?

If you were doing your job, you wouldn't be in a position to make such dumb statements.

Bitcoin bandit's £5B bubble bursts as cops wrap seven-year chase

without being caught.

The key is to spend % to befriend politicians, donate to ruling party and create a business embedded in public sector.

If you don't share, then powers use police to put you in your place.