Posts by Doctor Trousers

Dutch cops reveal takedown of 'world's largest dark web market'

Re: The noose is closing

I read your comment in the voice of Sheriff John Bunnell from World's Wildest Police Videos.

Exposed: Chinese smartphone farms that run thousands of barebones mobes to do crime

sure, but talking non-theoritically, there definitely are a whole bunch of apps and games, out there right now, which do make use of google safetynet to ensure that they can't run on devices with modified, rooted, or non-official firmware. in some cases, even just unlocking your bootloader, so as you can unbrick your device by manually flashing the unmodified official firmware, is enough to stop these apps working. we're talking a whole bunch of banking apps, streaming apps, online games with microtransactions, even some apps where there's no clear reason why they would prevent them running on modified firmware.

I can guarantee you none of these apps would work in a VM or in emulation, and it is really not easy to fake or bypass. there is a constant arms race between app developers and the people who develop things like magisk modules for bypassing Safetynet, and still there are always apps that just can't seem to ever be forced to work on a modified phone.

so if you were going to run a bunch of instances of these apps, for example to farm in-game currency, or manipulate streaming stats, the way to go would definitely be to bulk buy a bunch of phone motherboards. they're probably not even that expensive if they're from discontinued devices, it's the screens that keep their value.

No, I mean that whatever apps these phones are attacking/manipulating/defrauding/whatever might be apps that make use of Safetynet, or some other security features, to ensure that they can't be run on anything other than genuine devices, with official, unmodified firmware and locked bootloaders. That is likely why they're using racks of physical phones rather than VMs or emulators.

Could the advantage of using physical phones be to do with Google Safetynet verification, which would likely fail for Android apps running in a VM or in emulation?

UN: E-waste is growing 5x faster than it can be recycled

Re: Recycling not that easy

Sure you can recover data from a failing or corrupt hard drive, IF it hasn't been fully formatted/D-Banned/overwritten. The physical health of the hard drive, or the state of the partition table, is a separate issue from how intact the data is. PhotoRec can recover data in a partition agnostic way anyway.

Recovering from the internal storage of a phone or tablet is nothing like recovering from an SD card. You put a SD card into a PC, it mounts it as an external storage device.

How are you going to get your PC to do that with the internal flash memory of a phone?

Re: Recycling not that easy

There's a huge difference between phones and PCs.

If a PC hard drive has only been quick formatted, or if Windows has just been factory reset, then it's trivially easy to recover the data that has previously been on it. Literally just run something like PhotoRec on it and you'll get back pretty much anything that's not on a sector of hard drive that's been written over. No special skill or gear needed. That's why you've heard horror stories about data being recovered from second hand PCs.

It's a far, far more complicated process to recover anything from a phone or tablet that's been reset. It's not something that anyone can just have a go at and see what they can find, you need to have an inkling that there's something there you want to find.

I fully support any campaigning and lobbying for the right to repair, but what we need is regulation for how devices are designed and manufactured. Companies should be being fined or taxed up the wazoo for making stuff that breaks and can't be repaired.

if it was up to me, the amount of duty that had to be paid to import devices made by any particular company would be directly proportional to their iFixit repairability score. You want to make a phone out of glass and design it so the damned screen or battery can't be replaced? you're free to do that, but it'll be a luxury product at luxury prices, and it won't be the phone that every network pushes people to take with their contract.

Add bacteria to the list of things that can run Doom

Enough of this. I want to see the opposite. What's the most egregious example of misusing incredibly powerful, expensive, important and specialist hardware to run Doom?

Hijack the search for a cure for cancer. Jeapordise the lives of the ISS. Misuse your country's ballistic missile defence system.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Re: Qwant search engine

I just checked the settings on my phone and tablet, and qwant is already there as choice for default search engine in firefox for android without the need for an add-on. Presumably it will be there in the desktop version too if you update to the latest version.

Re: Qwant search engine

Thank you! I just tested it out, and I am very impressed. Tried it with a search term that I know gives poor results in google and only marginally better ones in duckduckgo. The article that google fails to find at all was the top result, every result was relevant, and the relevance ranking was pretty much how I would want it. Very much like the results google used to return..... 10 years ago, maybe? I don't even know how long it's been garbage for.

I'm not sure if this fully accounts for the problem.

If you search for something relatively obscure, something that there just isn't a bunch of SEO content for, you will often find that there is relevant content you know is there, but which just doesn't show up in a search at all. It's not that it's relegated to the second page of results, it's just not coming up at all.

Searching for an exact phrase using quotation marks seems to be totally borked now as well, garbage results still show up above exact matches. Sometimes stuff that definitely matches the exact phrase, and is definitely indexed by google, doesn't show up.

I don't think these things can be entirely explained by an overabundance of spam and low quality SEO content.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

All the major social media platforms hold a summit over how best to handle the 2024 UK and US elections, and collectively agree to prioritise social responsibility over maximizing engagement.

they tweak their algorithms towards facilitating meaningful, nuanced and satisfying human interactions, pushing people towards balanced, factual and informative content over sensationalism, disinformation and polarising culture war bollocks. Once the election is over, they continue to use their enormously influential position for the greater good, even though it leads to people spending less time overall gawping at their phones. Mark Zuckerberg is nominated for the Nobel peace prize.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Re: power

Maybe because an advanced civilization solves the problem of recreating the universe inside a simulation, long before it solves the potentially impossible problem of travelling thousands of light years across the universe?

Right now, we can kind of imagine how a model of the universe could be recreated inside a simulation, but we only have some very vague ideas about how we could ever travel much further than the limits of our own solar system, and most of those rely on the idea that we could ever travel through wormholes.

A model universe inside a simulation both allows us to observe any point in space-time, any potential point in space-time in any parallel universe, and possibly also demonstrates that it's impossible to ever solve the problem of long distance physical travel in the universe we inhabit?

A simulated universe gives us the answer to any question we could ever have, and essentially makes us gods. I don't think it's hard to imagine why we would expend unbelievably vast amounts of energy on such a project.

We're all NPCs in a satirical VR experience, set in an alternative timeline, where World President Harambe was shot and killed before the great breakthrough in human-gorilla communication of 2030

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Am I correct in thinking that HSPA+ will go along with the 3G switch-off? Or is it more complicated then that?

Top Google boffin Hinton quits, warns of AI danger, partly regrets life's work

I think there's a more pressing concern with these AI language models than the impending rise of true machine consciousness. What these things do extremely well is churn out a very good approximation of the answer you want, but without necessarily having any factual basis for it. As in, you can ask it a question, and it may well give you something that reads exactly like a satisfactory answer, even when it doesn't have any actual data to work with. In fact, even before the recent boom in ChatGPT type language models, you could already see Google Translate's algorithm doing this sometimes, making up definitions for words based on machine-learnt language rules, without telling you that the definition its given you is a guess. Or at least I've certainly seen it do this with Welsh, and I can't imagine that's the only language it does this with.

Now consider the current state of the internet. We have social media run on the principle of maximising engagement, where algorithms decide what content you see, based on what will keep you scrolling, clicking, liking, sharing, commenting. This of course isn't the same thing as what you actually want to see, what you enjoy reading about, or what creates meaningful, satisfying interactions with other human beings. In fact, all to often it's the opposite, it pushes the stuff that invokes "high arousal emotions", or in other words the stuff that gets you pissed off, anger reacting, arguing in the comment section.

Then we have the rest of the internet basing its content on what will fare best in that algorithmically arranged, engagement focused social media environment. And we are already seeing the beginning of AI language models generating content optimised for that environment. What happens when these supercharged chatbots do become fully integrated into the infrastructure of the internet? When companies like Meta, who have no responsibility other than to maximise value for their shareholders, employ AI language models to churn out a never-ending timeline of content, tweaked to the exact parameters of each individual user, with no concern for facts, social or political consequences, or individual mental health?

Or when those same principles are employed to generate a fully immersive metaverse, or augmented reality overlay, using your real time biofeedback to fine tune the content?

Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop

Windows machines have a lifespan of 3 years? Only because of all the people who buy a new machine whenever Windows starts running like crap instead of just reinstalling their OS.

I say this as a Windows hating Linux advocate. I'm not saying you're wrong overall, but I really hate to see this kind of perpetuation of premature obsolescence.

3 years is ridiculous. Just keep backups of anything important, then format and reinstall with the latest installation media when Windows' horrible update system inevitably breaks itself.

Sure that shouldn't happen, and sure you shouldn't have to reinstall your OS occasionally as a matter of routine, but you do. In the name of sanity quit buying a new PC every 3 years, that's absurd.

Samsung adds 'repair mode' that hides data on Galaxy smartphones in South Korea

It's a good idea in theory, but I feel it may be of limited use in practice, certainly for the large number of devices that are completely non-functional at the point where they are brought to me (doesn't switch on, screen is smashed, charging port is knackered and they've waited until the battery is totally flat to do anything about it etc)

If the customer can't get into the phone, they can't leave it in repair mode, so after repairing it, I'm generally still not going to be able to test that it's fully functional until the customer unlocks it, or trusts me with the unlock code.

What we need is a technician's testing mode that does not require getting past the user's security settings to enable it. Something that can be accessed through the recovery menu, that allows us to fully test the functionality of the device without accessing or overwriting the user's data, and without potentially giving a route to turning a stolen phone into a sellable one. Perhaps a mode that only functions when USB tethered to a technician's computer? Or engineer's firmware that can be flashed to RAM without overwriting the ROM?

Of course, if they just designed the things so users were able to create an encrypted back up of a broken device via USB, without needing a functional screen to do it, this would be far less of a problem to start with.

Weird Flex, but OK: Now you can officially turn these PCs, Macs into Chromebooks

There was a thing called project croissant, formerly known as chromify, that could turn some chromium OS builds into full, official chrome OS, including android app support. Anyone know if this still works with flex?

Exactly. If you're not giving us the ability to run Android apps, there's not a chance in hell I'm choosing it over Linux.

Genuine, non-rhetorical question: what makes administrating multiple chrome flex machines easier than adminstrating multiple linux mint machines?

"manageable for any IT department that can manage to install Windows and usable by any user who can click things in Chrome"

Like Linux Mint then?

Re: Specs

I would still maintain that if it needs 4GB of RAM, it's just not a lightweight distro, in fact it's not even comparable to a lightweight distro, even by 2022 standards. I'm pretty sure even the mainline version of Linux Mint still sets its minimum requirements as 2GB, but recommends 4GB to run comfortably.

The most mainstream lightweight distros, like Lubuntu, have a minimum requirement of 1GB, and some of the more specialised ones require even less.

I get that the attraction of Flex is the perceived lack of faff, but that's just it, 'perceived' lack of faff. I highly doubt that it's actually less faff than Linux Mint or Ubuntu to install. Linux generally doesn't come with a disclaimer that it might not work properly if your machine isn't on the list of approved devices either.

People perceive Windows as being less faff than Linux too, and they are incredibly wrong about that. I don't think we should encourage the perception that Google branding equals more reliability and less faff than a well established Linux distro.

It's always worth pointing out that a machine that came with a 32-bit OS doesn't necessarily have a 32-bit CPU. I've seen so many technically literate people who assume they need to put a 32-bit Linux distro on their machine because it came with a 32-bit version of Windows.

If it's new enough to have come with Windows 7, the CPU is most likely 64-bit capable. Probably likewise the majority of machines that came with Vista, and a sizeable number of machines from later on in the XP era. They came with a 32-bit OS because RAM was expensive then, basically. You may well know this already, but it's good to get it out there for the benefit of people browsing the comments.

I don't know why every headline about Flex talks about resurrecting old hardware, when the system requirements are comparable to those of any mainline version of any major Linux distro. In fact they're comparable to the sort of specs you could still fairly comfortably run Windows 10 on with a few graphic settings disabled.

If the main talking point of an OS is its suitability for older hardware, then I expect system requirements along the lines of a lightweight distro like Lubuntu, Linux Lite etc.

Cookie consent crumbles under fresh UK data law proposals

I fully agree with cookie consent requirements in principle, I don't believe the requirements should be lifted.

In practice, unfortunately, most people have no idea what they are consenting to, and it has just put people in the habit of blindly clicking 'Accept' on anything that pops up on a website, which means they also blindly give consent to websites to bombard them with pop-up notifications, which leads to me getting phone calls from people who think they have "a virus or something"

Google's Chrome OS Flex could revive old PCs, Macs

Re: four gigabytes

"This Linux user would maintain that (a) 4GB is not little, and (b) a 64-bit system ought to be capable of a RAM upgrade to more than 4GB. Otherwise, what was its point?"

Not really, the majority of machines with DDR2 RAM in them (which was still commonplace for the first couple of years of the Windows 7 generation) have actually got 64-bit capable CPUs in them, even if they came with a 32-bit OS installed. Good luck upgrading a DDR2 laptop beyond 4GB of RAM.

There actually were a handful of DDR2 machines, particularly high end business laptops, that could accept up to 8GB DDR2 RAM, but the 4GB sticks themselves are insanely expensive and hard to find, to the point where you may as well just buy a second hand DDR3 laptop with 8GB already installed.

I'll be excited when it runs Android apps. At the moment, the news amounts to "Cloudready is pretty much still the same thing it was before, just with Google branding"

Notes on the untimely demise of 3D Pinball for Windows

Sure it might be too much of a relic to include as an official feature, but if the fixed 64 bit version exists, it seems a damned shame not to include it as an easter egg.

Apple says it will no longer punish those daring to repair their iPhone 13 screens

i do wonder, and i realise that this is pure fantasy, but if all of us independent repair technicians were to start telling people "screw you for buying these damned things, if you want it fixed, you can pay through the nose to apple", would enough people stop buying them that it would harm apple's profits?

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

SkinnerBox. one for the behavioural psychology nerds.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

it's going to be a long time before i'll have any reason to use windows 11. i only boot into windows for a couple of specific things, which is music production, and software for flashing firmware on various devices. i use linux mint for everything else. i expect i won't even see a computer running windows 11 until someone brings me one to fix.

Linux Mint 20.2 is a bit more insistent about updating but not as annoying as Windows or Mac, team promises

Re: painless

Rebooting without asking is terrible, even worse for me is the opposite, ie I want to reboot or switch off the machine, but when I try I get "Windows is configuring updates, please do not switch off your machine"

This is infuriating as hell when the reason I'm switching the damned thing off is because it's a laptop and the battery is about to run out. Even more infuriating when, to the best of my knowledge, the thing is completely up to date, it's been rebooted since the last update was installed, yet somehow, out of the blue, we get 20 minutes of "Windows is configuring updates......."

Yeah. Linux definitely never does that.

I'm all for it. I think a lot of people move over from Windows to Mint (or Ubuntu), and then ignore updates because they assume that they will be a giant pain in the ass. It's a reasonable assumption to make too, if your only experience of using a PC is using Windows, because Windows updates really are just utterly, relentlessly terrible. Give people a little bit of a push to install updates, just to get rid of the notification, and they'll realise that updates on Mint are completely painless, quick, unobtrusive, and 99% of the time don't even require you to reboot.

So, what exactly are you planning to do with this new PC? Windows Insiders face new questions during OOBE

What am I planning to do with this PC?

Well Microsoft, I would like to start by installing Windows 10 on a SINGLE hard drive, without first having to physically disconnect my other drives to stop it from putting the system reserved partition somewhere other than the drive I want it to be on. Is that one of the options?

Or perhaps "I would like to have some damned control over how many partitions your OS creates, and I would like it to leave all my other partitions the hell alone during updates"? Any of that included in the list of questions about how I would like to use my PC?