Posts by douglasac10

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

Re: WTH

Unless Game Bar is installed by default on an upcoming version of Windows Server, I haven't seen it on our many, many Windows Servers running 2016 or 2019, let alone the store. On a fresh install you basically get the admin tools, IE, Paint, the Snipping Tool and Notepad.

They don't even put Edge on Server 2016 or 2019, you get IE.

Australian ponders requiring multiple IDs to sign up for social media, plus more crypto-busting backdoors

I'm reasonably sure this is just a dead cat thrown on the table, meant to distract from the fact that the government seems to have an ongoing problem with how women are treated in their party.

Much like any of their other insane thought bubbles (like facial recognition age verification for access to adult websites) it will go away. Or they'll ignore all the advice on the matter and just do it anyway and be shocked when it doesn't work.

LG Electronics finally gives up cellphone business

Surprised it didn't happen sooner

I had an LG G3 which was a nice enough phone, up until it forgot that had the ability to access a cellular network and proceeded to run like a three legged rhinoceros. Was able to get it "fixed" under warranty, but battery life was shot to pieces after that.

Wasn't in any particular rush to buy another one of their phones after that.

Use Windows and POS in the same sentence... Yes, that's right: Point of Sale. What were you thinking?

Never used OS/2, but back when I worked retail we used IBM 4690

Apart from the fact it was not the prettiest due to a custom Java GUI designed by people who clearly had questionable design taste, and the fact it would go slow when the store got hot due to the system units being in poorly ventilated cupboards under the desks (as mangement's solution to the problem of "the entire store has bad air conditioning" was apparently "fix the air conditioning in the managers offices, do nothing for air conditioning on the floor"), we never had any problems with it.

They're still using it now ten years after I've left (and started using a few years before I started, so at least 15 years), albeit with newer Toshiba hardware and what looks like some oh so slight tweaks to the GUI.

LastPass to limit fans of free password manager to one device type only – computer or mobile – from next month

Re: Hey guys password managers are not safe

I'm also more likely to lose said notepad vs. someone managing to guess my 20+ character complex master password used by me nowhere else and getting the 2FA code from my phone to be able to log in and decrypt the contents of my password manager.

Australia to refund $720m in 'debts' determined by dodgy algorithm

I've had many, uh, "fun" dealings with whatever name Centrelink are going by this time. They tried to slap me with a robodebt, picking a financial year where for the first six months of the year, I was away from home at university, was recieving a payment and only worked four weeks (during uni breaks). Once uni finished, I went back home and worked full time and stopped receiving the payment.

Of course, they averaged out the income from all 7 months I was working over the 12 months, and reached the conclusion that I was some kind of welfare cheat. I was able to get my payslips from my employers, so off I toddled to their website, where I was presented with a form that split that year into their fortnights. Their fortnights started and ended on a Wednesday, so I had to sort my pay information into their buckets because I wasn't paid fortnightly on a Wednesday.

Naturally, once I'd done this and submitted the form (no more than 15 minutes) it timed out, so start again - fortunately I had the good sense to keep the spreadsheet with the info in it.

In a move that should surprise precisely nobody with more than two functioning braincells, no debt existed.

In this case I was lucky in that I had the resources, time and ability to get the payslips, sort the information out and send it to them and that my employers still existed so they could retrieve that information. Not everybody had this, particularly when they got one of the first versions of the letter that said "by the way, you owe us $10000 plus 10% for being a dirty welfare cheat" years after the fact.

It also didn't help that they themselves frequently couldn't calculate the debt properly. Here's an article where one person went from a debt of just over $1300 to a debt of nothing: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/august/1564581600/robert-skinner/how-i-fought-robodebt - tl;dr, after several recalculations, each spitting out a new supposed debt (including one where they owed him money), they reached the conclusion that no debt existed.

This was purely an ideological system, solely to punish those who dared to be poor or unemployed and needed help from the government. I don't believe they ever got more back from it than they ever spent on it even before this, and if they don't settle with the class action for compensation, I expect there's going to be some very dirty laundry come out as a result.