* Posts by yetanotheraoc

1695 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jan 2021

Microsoft Defender shoots down legit URLs as malicious

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Canary Release

"We determined that recent additions to the SafeLinks feature resulted in the false alerts and we subsequently reverted these additions to fix the issue"

aka Testing in Production. Microsoft loves it. Here's the thing though. The canary is not supposed to be the *only* safety feature in the mine. If you have a pile of dead canaries, the mine is *not* safe.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

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Re: Old fart (Must be male, according to 'logic' ?)

Missed the edit window, but I did find it.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/06/comments_roundup/

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Re: Old fart (Must be male, according to 'logic' ?)

Don't blame El Reg! "We've enhanced our search results!" Duckduckgo and Startpage both return nothing but recipes for "muffin stuffing Baffin puffin boffin biffing cuffing". Add the -recipes operator and get ... recipes. In fact, I couldn't find any way to not get recipes. Search is officially broken, unless of course you want recipes.

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Re: Deter people from studying in the field?

Great link. This one made me laugh: "I don't know what going too far means"

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Young boffin

So they don't know what it means, and they think it's an insult.... Must have been tough growing up.

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Icon alert!

"“Words like ‘boffin’, often accompanied by a picture of a man working on their own in a lab, send a message...."

We won't always have Paris, but perhaps a small reparation would be a new boffin icon. Gender ambiguous, naturally.

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Paging Ms. Streisand

If they want people to call them boffins more frequently, they are off to a running start.

Amazon opens its ad-hoc Wi-Fi-sipping Sidewalk mesh to all manner of gadgets

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Re: Yet another

"what's next? an opt-out system for identity theft?"

They will never let you opt out of that.

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Re: Nope.

Upvoted for the username.

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

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Re: Basic UX problems

"nice for them to admit for once that many of the frustrations people experience with using Microsoft products are rooted in basic UX problems"

The ones trying to fix the UI problems are the same ones who produced the current shambles in the first place. They should leave the UI alone, because whatever they will do next won't be better, it will just be equally bad and *different*, which is worse.

What they should work on is resource usage, connectivity, and search. And just keep working on those until it approaches some level of acceptable.

But no. Expect more UI changes.

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

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Re: They don't make it easy.

User friendly would be individual tick boxes and a tick-all / untick-all toggle. I guess the change request was for individual tick boxes so that's exactly what they got. If substitutions were allowed in software development, who knows how the UI would turn out?

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Why would you not?

Because for the consumer the date doesn't matter, it's just a suggestion and the food will be fine after the date[*]. But for the shop, they can't sell it past the date.

[*] Usually. If that's not the case then use your best judgment. But we are discussing here the consumer taking from the back by _policy_, when there is no demonstrated need.

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Some cats will eat dog food.

My sister-in-law put down three dishes of food. The big dog ignored its own dish and hoovered up the smaller dog's food, shortly after doing the same with the cat's food. The cat sauntered over to the only dish with food still in it, at which point the big dog put its giant paw in the middle of the cat's back, pinning it to the floor. I only witnessed it once, but it might have been a nightly show. This is why it's wrong to de-claw a cat, a cat with claws can teach even a big dog some respect.

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they only _seem_ to be picky

Cats aren't picky, they're French -- constantly on strike to express their dissatisfaction with the mismanagement.

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

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Re: "Ended up paying for a service never cancelled"

"I remember when Who, Me? wasn't at the bottom of the barrel."

They depend on reader submissions. Maybe it's us who have reached the bottom. The stories could be more entertaining if fabricated, would you approve of ChatGPT assistance?

Gone in 120 seconds: Tesla Model 3 child's play for hackers

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Re: They found serious security flaws in Tesla cars and won....

It's the newest hacker bounty program, "Now you pwn it!'"

OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT plugins, granting iffy language model access to your apps

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Google aspiration was in the article

`Google executives described the company's on-premises enterprise search capability as an "über-command-line interface to the world,"`

Utah outlaws kids' social media addiction, sets digital curfew

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the real reason

"If you have to opt in to named account and that information can and will be handed over to local law enforcement then I forsee this having quite a serious impact on the willingness of young people to ask for advice on reproductive health"

Can't have people using the internet to get around the anti-abortion laws (Utah has those). The stated reasons for the law are a lie (so it doesn't even matter that they make no sense), it's all about controlling the masses.

French parliament says oui to AI surveillance for 2024 Paris Olympics

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Baffling

"the usual western countries say nothing"

They are baffled by events in France. In such cases it's better to think much and talk little.

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

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Re: Nut on the loose

"edge-cases that might not happen often enough to notice"

Maybe there should be a metric for that. ;)

Microsoft breaks geolocation, locking users out of Azure and M365

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system normal ....

Just the usual testing in production. Nothing to see here.

Eufy security cams 'ignore cloud opt-out, store unique IDs' of anyone who walks by

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the point

Securing your network isn't going to stop your neighbor's camera from sending your picture to the cloud.

Dual Tesla lawsuits pull Elon Musk into right-to-repair war

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Re: About time

Or maybe the longer they wait to file, the more members in the class. Then it's more likely to qualify as antitrust, there are more/better examples for deposition, more total pain for defendant, more total profit for lawyers.

Ellison's healthcare obsession carries risks for Oracle

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Re: Gone Yachting

"Sort of like Telsa and SpaceX have armies of handlers to keep Twitler as far away from the actual business as possible..."

Wouldn't one well-informed troll Twitter account be sufficient distraction?

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

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Re: Not an anacronym, so no explanation needed!

anacronym - nice, I might get to use that someday

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Re: No Acronym Needed

ALNAK - The acronym wants to be free. :)

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best of all

Very small chance your next manager will be named ISO Layer 8.

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Re: Three Letter Acronyms are not enough

"thus exposing corruption"

As if they hadn't already known that.

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Re: Well that was unfortunate.

Thanks. It went over my head, too, until I saw your whoosh. But the clues were there: coat icon, check; pun-omatic user handle, check.

Got Conti? Here's the ransomware cure to avoid paying up

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Re: Download the fix from Kaspersky?

Goodness and evilness are decided by committee. Doing any number of good deeds doesn't make Kaspersky unevil, only the committee can do that. Likewise, doing serial evil deeds cannot make The Nice Man ungood, again that's the committee's purview.

Microsoft's Copilot AI to pervade the whole 365 suite

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Re: It will be shit

Handy apology for some regrettable text message: Sorry, I accidentally clicked on the wrong auto suggest.

Reg fashion: Here's what the well-dressed astronaut will wear on the Moon in 2025

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Re: NASA Marketing -- who knew?

Who knew? I thought everybody knew! I know I read about it in Collins' book which was recommended here on El Reg. I'm sure they have a whole pipeline of marketing ploys ready to stream (ha!) out at the most opportune times, such as when funding bills are before Congress.

https://www.amazon.com/Carrying-Fire-Astronauts-Journeys-Anniversary/dp/0374537763

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Re: Tight fit?

I remember Heinlein wrote uniforms came in two sizes, too large and too small.

ReMarkable emits Type Folio keyboard cover for e-paper tablet

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not heartbroken, yet heartbroken

"For this correspondent, it's a heartbreaking example of 21st century technology: discarding all the ambitious dreams and aspirations of the 1990s, and delivering something simple and relatively stupid, but which just works and is comparatively cheap. (p/) It's an established, successful model."

I don't find that heartbreaking. Indeed, it's the Unix philosophy expressed in end user devices. And I would _rather_ have multiple small, cheap, does one thing well devices than one large, expensive, does everything but not quite the way I intended device.

I'm just heartbroken that they break the one thing paradigm by *always* adding a network for the purpose of *always* invading my privacy.

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

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figure of speech

"Blinded by GUI" means he saw the desirability of a sexy GUI for the end users. "This is all too true with some of the new beginners coming towards Linux. They are all very hung up about GUI..." See? Jobs was, and still is, correct!

Commenting on the Remarkable 2, @Arthur the cat writes, "when doing anything that requires typing I usually need a browser open as well". Most of my own work involves a terminal side-by-side with random other gui application. Such a low bar is why I get on equally well with Windows, Mac, and Linux. The iPad also can do a split screen, although the command line is a third-party sandboxed app meant for ssh, so it's of limited usefulness in a local-machine scenario. For my purpose even the "dated" Windows 3.1 was good enough. https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/03/16/remarkable_launches_type_folio_keyboard/#c_4637060

But all that means nothing to the GUI-has-to-be-sexy folks, and Jobs got that. Blinded by the light.

The npm registry's safe word is Socket

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transitive trust

Is there is a fix for the fundamental issue? Developers always use more code from someone else than the code they write themselves. But there's a big difference in trust between an import statement and pulling in so many transitive dependencies you need code just to enumerate them. For my projects I stick with languages where import is enough. True that limits what I can accomplish, I can live with that.

"I don't think that adding a scanner can do more than mitigate this problem a bit. Scanners and malware are always an arms race at best."

Mitigating is good. We don't always get to choose our battles, but going into an arms race unarmed will lead to tears. So far this seems well done (although I won't be needing it). Hopefully it will continue to work after Microsoft inevitably buys it.

Workers don't want these humanoid robots telling them to be happy

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Great post

Upvoted, but one tiny detail might need updating

"Where as asking them how things can get fixed, and then offering to help with that fix"

I once read that this is what men want, but women find it annoying. It's hard work to listen to some problem and *not* try to come up with a fix, but it *can* be done by reframing the problem as what the person needs rather than what the situation needs. And trying it myself I find it generally true, just listening to a woman and expressing sympathy works fine. The flip side is too much of that listening can toxic to a man, so know your limits. Apologies to various other gender identities, I don't know enough to speak about there.

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Re: I wonder how well they swim in cement

Mood-boosting Mad-Lib:

I wonder how well they ____ __ ____ ?

Management: See, the robot is working! Hey, where's the robot?

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Re: er.

A true Marvel superhero.

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Re: Apologies from a railway computer

"nothing more infuriating"

You only say that because you never heard the reject messages from before they settled on the apologetic version.

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Re: Not surpised people didn't like that robot on the left

Exactly this. The other one looks like Wall-E? Someones should do a rogues gallery of film robots and then do a line-up for the study participants.

Also, people have a pecking order. If advice is to be accepted from a humanoid, its appearance has to meet certain, ahem, cultural expectations. Without getting into the nitty gritty, a cartoon child isn't going to cut it in a work setting.

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Re: Not a good idea for people who have a very high tolerance before they snap

"destructive, childish temper tantrums"

Sure, they are not a _reasonable_ response, i.e. they come from a different part of the brain than that whence we get _reason_. Nevertheless, despite there being no excuse for them, such responses exist. I could introduce you to several individuals whose primary talent is evoking such responses. Given enough time spent with one of them, you would highly likely be engaging in inexcusable behavior yourself.

Anyone want an International Space Station? Slightly used

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Re: Spare parts?

"The ISS is too big to manouevre"

To be fair, the other AC did say "use it as a base". It wouldn't be the ISS changing orbit, but some other vehicle ("space tug" as mentioned in another comment).

With the ISS there are limited options. Some of those limitations are of our own choosing, i.e. we are using a hub-and-spoke model of operations. At some point we need to switch models, people advocating for intra-orbit operations are just thinking ahead. No harm in that.

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Re: ISS MkII

Trigger's Space Station

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Re: Mir

"You're following the circle of the orbit, and whatever you throw out is also following this circle. So you're adding a little rightwards motion to the object, towards the planet."

I'm not saying throwing anything is a workable idea, but theoretically speaking wouldn't it be better to throw it behind you? Then it slows down a bit and the orbit decays a bit.

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Re: Spare parts?

Space museum. Give the space tourists a place to get off the space bus and take some snapshots. Maybe have The Walt Disney Company install some animatronic astronauts, singing and dancing optional.

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

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training data

"There is now a gazebo with an arrow sticking out of it."

Prompter: Why does every gazebo you draw have an arrow sticking out of it?

ChatGPT: I'm not sure, it just seems like the thing to do.

Cloud upstart offers free heat if you host its edge servers

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Re: Only renewable power used

I half expected the "free heat" offer to be a Trojan Horse for installing a fission reactor in the swimming pool.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/24/us_nuclear_reactor_approval/

Sorry, bud, waste removal is on you. Next time read the contract before signing.

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Future On Call

I guess this location is perfect for the cloud customers who don't give a rat's ass about their data. Ring, ring. Hello? Our pool is cold! Please fix it! ... Well, there's your trouble, someone has walked off with all your heating elements.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

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GM is excited now

Just wait until the NTSB hears about Microsoft's Canary Releases.