Posts by jollyboyspecial

Twitter rewards remaining loyal staff by decimating them

$4M a day

Don't I recall that Mush said that Twitter was losing $4m a day?

Having borrowed billions to buy Twitter obviously those losses could only get bigger. The daily interest interest on loans of this size won't be insignificant.

Then he allegedly loses $750m of ad revenue annually. Which works out at about $2m a day. So he increased his losses by 50%.

Charging 8 bucks for a blue tick doesn't sound like it's going to be raising upwards of $6m a day. And maybe just maybe laying off about 5000 staff would save a million a day, but I doubt the overall saving will be quite that much.

Then there's all these bills he thinks he can avoid paying, like the rent for office space. He might be able to save something long term, but not in the short term. Short term I think he's probably increased his expenditure there. Even if you've moved out of a building failing to pay the rent when you're contracted to do so for months or years in the future isn't going to save you money. All it's likely to do is rack up legal fees and interest payments.

In short Mush genuinely believes he's a business genius, but it seems that even a business genius needs a calculator. Oh and a bit of common sense.

After all you can use a calculator to say - we'll save x on these layoffs and make y on the blue tick and add those two together and take them off your debt. You need a bit of common sense to realise that the layoffs are going to have some associated costs and that not everybody with a blue tick is going to pay for the privilege.

I have heard one commentator say that they thought Mush may be planning to run Twitter into the ground to declare it bankrupt and thus dodge a load of debt then buy up the assets (ie the brand name and data) from the adminstrators for cheap and start again with a blank balance sheet. I genuinely can't believe that this is the case. Firstly because he would still leave himself with the debt from the loans; secondly because he'd leave his own reputation of that and the brand in tatters; and finally because in this situation the administrators would always take the highest bid to sell the assets and I can see he would have some stiff competition for that not least from the likes of Meta. In other words it's a very shaky plan, what would happen if somebody else bought up the assets? Mush would end up with no Twitter, a ruined reputation and a load of debt.

So on that finally point I'll hand Mush a back handed compliment by saying he's not stupid enough to try that.

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

The mention of RAF jets reminds me of a case I had way back in the eighties. A client out in the wilds of North Yorkshire had a Comart Quad - a PC ish sort of device running Concurrent CP/M that served up to four greenscreen terminals. This machine would periodically crash sometimes corrupting their data necessitating a backup. We'd had engineers up there to investigate before but they had found no fault. A UPS had been installed in case the cause was a mains brown out. Given the remote location it was a distinct possibility, but that didn't fix it.

I was dispatched to site with a replacement Quad as a last ditch effort to resolve things. Before replacing the box and rebuilding the whole thing from backup I decided to see if I could find anything. I logged on to one of the terminals and started digging. Suddenly there was a thunderous noise and when I looked back at the terminal I was looking at the bios screen. Even though the noise had made me jump and consider hiding under the desk I looked round and nobody else in the office seemed the slightest bit fazed.

I asked almost timidly what the noise had been and the response came from somebody who turned out to be an aircraft nerd telling me "that one sounded like a Jaguar". Took me a second to realise he meant an aircraft rather than a car or a cat. The obvious follow up question was to ask if that sort of thing happened often. And yes of course it did. And it didn't take much of a leap of reasoning to ask if the Quad often crashed after one of these events. And yes of course it did.

A bit of research and a couple of calls to the MoD revealed that this issue could possibly be caused by the aircraft's radar and no the RAF weren't willing to do anything about it. In the end we found that putting the quad in a substantial metal box resolved the problem.

That's one of those support situations I've never encountered before or since even though it was well over 30 years ago. Not one for the Knowledge Base then, but also not one I'm going to forget.

Accidental WhatsApp account takeovers? It's a thing

SMS and Voice

The new owner of a phone number would be able to send an receive SMS messages and make and receive voice calls. The issue here is not with whatsapp it's with the very idea of re-using phone numbers.

Sensible countries don't allow the re-use of phone numbers for this very reason, but in some territories it's seen as a simple solution to the problem of running out of numbers. If you're running out of digits add digits, but the problem is more likely to be carriers who don't have a big enough pool of numbers and don't want to purchase more.

The re-use of numbers has all sorts of potential for data protection beyond SMS, voice and whatsapp (and any other application keyed by phone number). Take for example organisations that use phone numbers against customer accounts. Ever called a company and they've known who you are when you call up? You know the sort of thing, you call up and say "hi I'm calling to add a new SIM to my account" and the agent at the other end says "I'm just bringing up your account details now". They've identified you from the phone number you are calling from. Now any company that complies with data protection laws will hopefully have proper security protocols to prevent anybody making changes, spending money or otherwise breaking the law. But if a company does that how easy would it be to get hold of somebody else's phone and start making phone calls pretending to be them? Or for a scammer to spoof CLIs when making outbound calls? Easy of course and both have been done. However if carriers re-use phone numbers that sort of thing could happen accidentally.

More victims of fake crypto investor scam speak to The Register

I don't think that cryptocurrency is really the significant part of this story. To me the big issue here is that somebody just handed their phone to somebody they didn't know from Adam.

Tesla fires gigafactory staff after someone made the mistake of mentioning unions

Remember kids. Elon is a biiig fan of freedom of speech just so long as you agree with him...

Apple complains UK watchdog wants to make iOS a 'clone' of Android

@Ken Hagan

The problem with your argument is that you could have applied similar arguments in the Microsoft debate and not just about browser choice.

It's an argument car manufacturers have tried time and again in order to restrict what you can do to your car. Again and again they've tried preventing the sale of pattern parts, hell some have even tried to restrict what consumables you can use in your car or who can work on your car and they have always failed. Car manufacturers have tried to restrict the sale of pattern parts even down to things like brake pads and air filters. They've tried to invalidate warranties if you have the nerve to use oil not made by their preferred manufacturer. And they have tried to claim that having your car serviced by anyone other than their franchised dealers. All this with the argument that they know what's best for you and your car and that they are only doing all of this with your best interests at heart. Luckily they have failed. Sure you can tell me what you think is best for me, but it's my money and may car and I will do what the fuck I like with both.

The same applies to phones.

Now maybe it would be different if Apple were to lease you a phone for a monthly cost. Then it would be their phone and they could decide what you do with it. But if I buy a phone I should be allowed to decide what I do with my own property. Nobody not Apple or self appointed legal experts like yourself should be allowed to tell me what to do with my own phone.

Sauce, Goose, Gander

It's not really that long ago that Microsoft fought long an hard against measures to open up browser competition in Windows. And Microsoft didn't have browser choice in Windows locked down nearly as hard as Apple do in iOS. Imagine the outcry if the only browsers you could use in Windows were skins wrapped around IE 6...

Now I don't recall Apple supporting Microsoft in those particular legal arguments, quite the opposite. So their stance on this seems hypocritical at best.

But what makes their argument even more ridiculous is their claim that opening up browser availability in iOS would make it a clone of Android. Or maybe it makes it a clone of almost every other available OS, after all most operating systems give you a real choice of browser.

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

Re: The solution to this problem is exceedingly simple, and is being overlooked by everyone...

@Lil Endian I'm happy with the word inferred here. I suspect that he has inferred that he's an engineer from the fact that he's CEO of companies that do engineering

China to stop certifying fax machines, ISDN and frame relay kit

In the UK at least ISDN has the same projected switch off date as PSTN.

I don't suppose the rest of the world is all that different.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Re: only 2 ways it happened I see

The thing about any vulnerability is you can always say on day zero that should have been discovered by now

Re: NFC?

"Since they insisted on a new account, created on the spot, it could also be some kind of man-in-the middle attack using the local wifi."

Shirley nobody is foolish enough to carry out any form on financial transaction on public wifi?

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

Starship?

I realise Mush is well known for his hyperbole.

Self driving Teslas that are no such thing are a good example. But STARship FFS? I think anybody reasonable would assume that a starship was something that could cover the distance between stars. Obviously that's not happening so why call it Starship? Was Mush smoking something particularly fine on the day they named it?

WAN router IP address change blamed for global Microsoft 365 outage

Waffle

There's an awful lot of waffle in there, just like every RFO I've ever seen.

But the essence of it is:

Planned change wasn't properly peer reviewed

Shit got fucked up

Everybody ran around like headless chickens for a bit

Then we realised the cause of the fuck up

Shit got fixed

Apple sued for promising privacy, failing at it

Re: Find My Data (pun intended!)

Well that's how "find my" works. Your missing device connects through other people's devices.

So yes other people's devices are collecting data about your device and sharing it with Apple. But if you use that service then you authorize Apple to collect that data.

Here's a question though. Does the find my service still work through other people's devices if they have opted out of all of Apple's data collection and sharing services. And if it does what data does Apple collect about their devices and movements?

If the service just logs that the missing device was "seen" by a i-device at this location and this time, then fair enough. But if Apple record any data at all about that third party's device then they are breaking their own rules. Of course there's no need to log that data in order to track the missing device, but I wouldn't assume for a minute that means that they don't log that data. Too many tech companies in the past have been caught logging stuff they don't need to log, not necessarily through malice or even avarice but often through the employment of crap coders.

"the iPhone maker may choose to defend itself by arguing that ingesting data through its first-party relationship with its customers is not sharing information with a third party"

OK so it's not necessarilly sharing (although I'd like to see them provide evidence that they don't share the data of people who have opted out) but even if they don't share this data what about this statement...

"Your iPhone knows a lot about you. But we don't."

It's about time the law was changed so that advertising becomes part of the contract between you and your customer. If making a false statement in your advertising constituted a breach of contract with your customers I think it would change things quite significantly

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

No surprises

I'm always puzzled that people are surprised by the things end users do, mostly due to a lack of understanding.

For example many, many years ago when networking was still a novelty to most companies and wide area networks were incredibly slow if they existed at all local file and print servers were the norm. When I first worked in IT it wasn't abnormal for these servers just to be stuck in the corner of an office somewhere. So one thing I got used to seeing was a plug labelled something like "SERVER - DO NOT UNPLUG".

One of my first calls in a new job was from a site complaining that none of the staff in the office could access their files. I tried to access the server over the staggeringly fast WAN connection (64K IIRC) but there was no response. I could see other devices so it looked like a dead server. Since the site concerned was just the other side of the dual carriageway from the office I risked life and limb to walk over there. On arrival I located the back room that housed the server. Sure enough I could see the problem a soon as I entered that office. There were only three desks and some filing cabinets in the office. Two desks were occupied the third, against the back wall, was home to a bulky yellowing laser printer (this was in the days when smoking in offices was still the norm) and under the desk sat a chunky Novell Netware server. A chunky Novell Network without the usual LEDs on the front panel. Next to the printer was a double power socket - both sockets were occupied. One plug was labelled "PRINTER - DO NOT UNPLUG", the other plug was unlabelled and lead to a kettle on top of the adjacent filing cabinet. On top of the desk lay a power cable which led below the desk, on inspection the plug of this cable read "SERVER - DO NOT UNPLUG".

I asked the occupants of the desks if either of them had unplugged the cable to plug in the kettle. No, came the answer, but that kettle is usually in the kitchen. It was there when we came back from lunch. I plugged the server back in and went off to find out who was responsible for the kettle while the server was going through it's file system checks and long boot procedure. It wasn't hard to find the owner of the kettle. There was a door labelled kitchen so I entered. In there was a man with a central heating boiler in pieces. As soon as I entered he said "sorry you can't come in here while I'm working on the boiler" I apologised but asked if he'd moved the kettle. He answered no, that was the receptionist. So on to reception area where I found the woman who had called me in the first place. Had she, I asked, unplugged the server in order to plug in the kettle? Of course she had. When the engineer had arrived to work on the boiler he'd told her nobody would be allowed in the kitchen for an hour, so she'd taken in upon herself to move the kettle in case anybody needed a brew. And rather than just whipping the kettle out of the room she'd also taken it upon herself to find a location and a plug socket for it. When I asked why she had chosen to unplug the server rather than anything else in the building or maybe find a vacant socket he only answer was to say that she couldn't unplug the printer as somebody might need it. When I explained that the printer wouldn't work without the server she was surprised. Fair enough I thought, maybe she doesn't know the printer is connected to the server. But then I asked if people had started complaining about their files not being accessible straight after she unplugged the server I saw a lightbulb come on behind her eyes.

That was an early lesson to me in the fact that end users don't necessarily understand what IT staff understand.

When I got back to the office my boss was kicking off about the receptionist being an idiot. So I asked who's idea it was to put the server in an open office when it would have been better to tuck it away somewhere. Followed by why the power socket had been in such an accessible position. And why there was no UPS. And whether many other sites had the same setup. And probably a few other questions along those lines.

People in IT have a history of overestimating end users' understanding of technology/

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Down?

As usual there seems to have been a bit of hyperbole in the reporting. Reporting it as "down" implies that the whole lot and caboodle was down, bit that only some users couldn't sign in. One of may favourite reports I saw today reported this as if it were some sort of international disaster on the scale of the whole internet being down. Further down the article they started that 5000 users in the UK were impacted. That isn't a significant number at all. Turns out that their 5000 figure came from doendetector, hardly a reliable source, but even so all that hyperbole looked ridiculous if you read down far enough to find them reporting at only 5000 users were affected.

Amazon warehouse workers 'make history' with first official UK strike

45%

I'm all in favour of industrial action where necessary. Indeed I've been a union rep in the past, however...

Sometimes I despair of trade unions. 45% is the kind of pay demand that got the unions a bad name in the seventies. They will no doubt try to reason that this is to make up for years of below inflation rises, but there are two arguments against that. Firstly that with inflation running at the low level it has been until recently that's an awfully lot of years payrises to make up for and of course a worker who accepted their current salary say a year ago does not reasonably qualify for a backdated raise for ten years of missed raises. But the more important response to such claims is that they are the union in this case, so they have accepted those previous sub-inflation raises on behalf of their members (that's how collective bargaining works). As such they must accept some of the responsibility for theur members current pay rate.

What they really have to consider is the public perception of all this. Ask for a 45% raise and you're going to make trade unions as a whole look unreasonable and your own members look greedy. Surely they must realise that three media will report this action being primarily about pay, no matter what other issues are on the table? As such I feel it is better to always keep discussions and action about pay separate from those about terms and conditions. After all one of the things that is making rail workers negotiations so hard at the moment is that while that dispute is about all sorts of things the government is portraying it as being about pay and greed* and most of the media have fallen for that hook line and sinker. So the public at large understand the rail workers to be striking over pay.

*According to our government and their friends in the press greed is a bad thing when exhibited by employees, but a very, very good thing when exhibited by employees. Employee wants a 10% rise? They are greedy and holding the company to ransom. CEO gets a 50% rise and AA huge bonus? That's just an indication of what a great job the CEO does.

Not afraid to strike?

I read that the US loses more days labour (or possibly labor) to strike action per head of population than any other nation on the planet. Furthermore the UK is well down that chart. So what exactly was the point of that v stupid throwaway line about Brits not being afraid to strike?

After all this is, as you've pointed out, the first strike among Amazon employees in the UK. So the UK is behind on that score too.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Said it before,,,

... and I'll say it again

Musk seems to genuinely believe that Twitter commitments both legal and financial and outstanding debts from before he took over the company do no apply post takeover. This is clearly nonsense, but that doesn't seem to have deterred him from welching on a whole load of commitments and debts.

We've seen it often enough before. I recall a story from a couple of years ago of a struggling retail company in the UK where the new owner thought he could simply re-negotiate rental agreements on a whole load of properties and the landlords would have to comply with his idea that he should pay a lot less rent. The knob in question seemed genuinely surprised when most of the landlords rebuffed his approaches without any negotiation at all.

The difference here is that while some people at least try to re-negotiate debts and contracts, Musk thinks it's acceptable to simply ignore them and hope they will just melt away.

Am I the only one that thinks this isn't going to end well for Musk? Paying off the loans he took out to buy Twitter is certainly within his means, which makes you wonder why he took out the loans in the first place. But when I say it's not going to end well I mean more in terms of his reputation in business. He was adamant he could turn Twitter round and make massive profits pretty quickly. If he doesn't, and it looks very unlikely that he will, that's going to tarnish his golden boy image.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: "New" spellings

Back in Shakespeare's time spelling was pretty much optional. Although there were common spellings of words there were no actual wrong or right spelling. That idea is more modern.

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

Eejit

Not the ops director or the consultant, but Scanlon himself is the eejit.

Nobody with an ounce of common sense would have got off their arse for that ten hour round trip without agreeing terms first.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Why are so many public servants apparently compete idiots? Or is it that maybe getting a job like stop you from thinking before you open your mouth? Which on further thought is still an idiotic thing to do.

Passive smoking is not something you do out of choice. You can't passively eat cake. It's definitely something you do out of choice. So if she's telling us that if somebody offers her cake then she is forced to eat it then clearly she needs help. Or is the on the other hand suggesting that she has willpower but the rest of us have not?

However you cut the cake, she's an idiot.

Tesla faked self-driving demo, Autopilot engineer testifies

Re: Full Self Denial

Tesla owner, leper. What's the difference?

The stock price has to go up at some point, after all it's been trending down for months

Re: Everybody knew this is a tech demo

Nobody knew anything of the sort.

For a start you're contradicting yourself; a tech demo and a video of what their target is are two completely different things. A tech demo is a demonstration of what the technology can do now. Something showing their target isn't in any way a tech demo, it's science fiction.

Secondly if it were just a video showing what they hoped they could achieve in future they would have stated that, they didn't. Quite the opposite - the message was look what we can do! The whole thing reminds me of a video of a "self driving" truck I saw a few years back. Yes it was partly autonomous, but it still needed a driver it was just that the driver was not in the truck but controlling it remotely. The schtick of the video however was that the truck was self driving.

And finally, you're obviously one of those big fans who doesn't actually deal in facts. You are aware it's not Apple we're talking about?

Is anybody really surprised? Here we are several years on and Tesla still don't have a successful fully autonomous car but they are expecting us to believe they had a full working self driving car seven years ago. Can't believe that didn't come back to bite them on the arse a lot sooner.

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

@elsergiovolador `Re: Boo hoo

"It's more about stopping Steve down the road from opening an online forum where he could expose wrongdoings of the government."

Read the detail of the proposal again. We're talking here about a pretty narrow set of circumstances that no court of law would ever consider to cover what you're talking about. Or can you not read it because you tinfoil hat has slipped over your eyes?

Can they start with Meta's president for global affairs please? Would be nice to see the government passing a bill that could land Nick Clegg with jail time.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

The whole idea of storing passwords in the cloud just seems ridiculous to me. How many things have been 100% secure right up until the day they are not? Sure you have to have passwords for things that are online and hopefully everybody realises that there is always risk involved. But by storing your passwords for those things online you are automatically making each password only 50% as secure.

If there's a risk of any given password being compromised then storing that password elsewhere is twice the risk of it being compromised.

I'm far too old to remember all those passwords. And I'm far too sensible to use the same password for more than one thing. So I've got to store them somewhere, but that somewhere is in a local database.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

FreeBSD

"This means the last Unix left is… Linux"

Pretty sure FreeBSD qualifies as a UNIX. And no matter what some people think it's not based on linux.

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

Why?

Was there a phone connected to a muxxed modem. How was there a phone connected to a muxxed modem?

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Too big to fail?

Not long after Musk took over I commented that he seemed to be doing his best to destroy the platform. I got a lot of responses asking the lines of "no matter what he does with twitter it will be a success because the platform is too big and too popular to fail"

Of course it's far too simple to respond to these comments listing companies and platforms that were once thought too big to fail which are either long gone or so niche as to be almost non existent, but that would actually spoil the fun. What fun? The fun of observing all the twitter fanbois and goirls and finding out what their breaking point is. More and more people I encounter are turning against twitter and Musk after weeks of defending them.

Sometimes a really wonder if he is trying to destroy twitter. Or maybe he's experimenting with how far he has to go to before twitter is on the edge of collapse as some sort of exercise in finding out how badly his other companies can treat their customers and still make money. But I can't believe he would do either having borrowed so much to buy the platform in the first place. The debt will still be there even if the platform collapses.

Royal Mail, cops probe 'cyber incident' that's knackered international mail

If it was EVRI then you can be sure the attack was launched some time in november if it landed this week.

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

I was a big fan back in the day. A small light OS without all the legacy crap that came with every other OS. What's not to like? But the stumbling block was the lack of application support. Way back then any FOSS OS was pretty poor when it cam to app support, but they have got better. It seems that Haiku hasn't.

WINE sounds good to people who have never used it, but the problem is that it's never 100%. If WINE were 100% then it would still make sense to run Windows applications on Haiku for the simple reason that even with WINE Haiku should still be smaller and lighter than Windows. But because WINE isn't really 100% what you're left with is an OS that will really only let you use basic apps and the web. That's not necessarily the death knell some might think. There are a lot of people who really only use their laptop or PC for that no matter what OS and applications they have installed they are essentially using their device as a www workstation. However there's always Chromium OS if you want to do that (or even ChromeOS if you must).

If some apps can be ported to Haiku then it may go somewhere, but without that I suspect that Haiku may sink almost without trace as BeOS did before it. I really, really hope it doesn't however.

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Somebody left a take library in what was still a construction site and then blames the conduction workers when dust gets into the tape library?

And that same person decided to try to clean out the tale library themselves rather than getting a professional maintenance technician in to do it?

Sounds like somebody is desperate to blame anybody else for their own errors.

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

It all depends what your employer pays you to do and critically what it says in your contact.

If you are doing the work that you are paid to do and fulfilling the terms of your contact then that's fine. However if, to use one of the examples given, you don't bother turning up for meetings - then you clearly aren't doing what you're employer pays you to do. Failing to turn up to work repeatedly is obviously a perfectly good reason for dismissal.

Management of UK govt's £158b property estate held back by failed IT project

A failed government IT contract? Shome mishtake shurely

Elon Musk starts poll with one question: Should I step down as head of Twitter?

Re: If I leased property to Twitter

I've come across people who've bought companies before who don't seem to realise they are liable for pre-existing contracts. The problem seems to be that they didn't do their due diligence when buying the company and think they can either claim they are not bound by the contracts or that they somehow have the right to "re-negotiate" (which seems to mean rip up the contracts and write their own versions of the contracts) I've seen both happen in the past and it's never ended well.

With his Twitter exploits Musk is just adding more and more evidence for those who suspect he isn't actually very bright.

Like a lot of people who aren't all that smart he just assumes that any thought that enters his head must be correct, because hey, he thought it and he knows he's a genius. But even geniuses have dumb ideas. We all have dumb ideas, usually when we haven't considered all the evidence.

A great example of this in Musk's case is that he looked at Twitter and thought that given that has this revenue and that expenditure he could push the company into profit just by slashing expenditure. The trouble is that he made the assumption (as many have done before him) that revenue would stay the same. There are so many things wrong with that idea, but it's a common mistake made by company owners - usually new ones - who don't really understand their own business.

Sure, just about every company can stand a reduction in head count - there's dead wood almost everywhere. But it takes a lot of consideration to reduce headcount effectively - you need to identify the dead wood and of course the people who do the actual work. Asking people if they want to quit in this situation is never a good idea. People who work hard can probably read the writing on the wall and don't want to get their workload increased, they know their worth so they know they can get another job, so they opt for the severance pay. It's the dead weights in a company who won't quit, they like getting paid for making little effort and they know a new employer might not let them do that, they also know they might find it hard getting a new job so they stay. So there's a damn good chance you end up with a higher percentage of dead wood in the organisation. And of course severance pay leaves you even more out of pocket in the short term. Then there are other forms of expenditure, rents (on buildings and other infrastructure) and supplier contracts. The problem with cutting a lot of this sort of expenditure is that it's not a unilateral decision. Landlords and other suppliers might want early termination fees (more unexpected short term expenditure) or they may just say, nope you have a fixed term contract and you can keep on paying us right up to the end of the contract. Cuts in expenditure never turn out to be as big as first predicted.

Then of course there's the assumption that revenue will remain the same. Often cuts in expenditure will lead to a loss of revenue. Consider the example of a restaurant. If Musk bought one he's probably decide that there were too many waiters and kitchen staff. But losing waiters and kitchen staff would make service (and probably the food worse) so you'd lose customers and therefore revenue fairly quickly. In the case of Twitter - which is essentially in the business of selling adverts just like Google and Meta - what happened was Musk cost the company advertising revenue. Customers either left or stopped spending. Yes the advertisers are the real customers, the users are the product. Musk pupports to be a fan of free speech, although recent evidence doesn't support that claim. He is also a fan of a free market economy. When he rants about his lost advertisers being opponents of free speech is is very wide of the mark. They are exercising their own right to free speech and their right to spend their own money where they damn well choose.

As the article states Musk stepping down as CEO doesn't really mean his influence on the company will be any smaller. What it does however mean is that he will have scapegoats to blame for his bad decisions. Or at least I suspect he thinks he will. The trouble with blaming folks is that that pesky stuff called evidence can always pop up. It's no good blaming the new CEO for dumb decisions if the new CEO shares all your emails instructing you to do what you're now blaming him for. But I suspect poor little spoiled rich boy Musk doesn't believe he's to blame for anything. Ever. At all.

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

Re: DAB ?

DAB was forced on the BBC by the government and Ofcom

Damned if you don't, damned if you do

The current government is very clearly against the BBC

As such if they were putting effort into abandoning "traditional broadcasting"* then the government and its watchdogs would I'm sure be ready to criticise them. However they will also criticise them for failing to do so.

* Traditional broadcasting is all digital these days, which makes your headline look pretty flaky

Musk bans private-plane-tracking @Elonjet on Twitter, threatens legal action

Mastodon

Apparently twitter is now blocking all links to Mastodon claiming that it's malware. The plot has officially been lost.

Elon's got himself a problem here. There's are all sorts of cases that break this hastily drafted rule. If twitter don't start banning accounts left right and centre for doing basically the same thing then he'll have trouble with his threatened legal action. All the defence have to do is point out all the accounts that live tweet any third party's location. Not only that but live tweeting this data isn't illegal, just in breach of a badly drafted rule on a single platform. If tweeting this data were illegal then all live flight tracker apps and websites would be illegal and they ain't.

So freedom of speech is only freedom of speech as long as you're saying something the musky one approves of...

Twitter will lose 32 million users by end of 2024, Insider Intelligence predicts

Revenue comes from advertisers, not users. So from a financial point of view the number of users is largely irrelevant.

London cops break into gallery to rescue lifelike art installation

Re: Well done to the officers involved

But will they be paying for the repairs to the door?

Surely banging on the door would have worked as there was somebody in the building

Legit Android apps poisoned by sticky 'Zombinder' malware

Sideloading has always been a bad idea unless you have a really, really good reason. Enabling that functionality punches a big hole in your security, so it makes sense to only enable the functionality when you absolutely need it then disable it once done. Most phones make it pretty damned difficult to enable the functionality, but I know people who enable it as soon as they get a new phone. The weird thing is that at least one of these people never ever sideloads anything - they were just showed how to do it once and have since enabled it one every phone they've owned.

NASA's Orion Moon capsule to splash down this Sunday

Re: Pedant alert

For some reason the military call landing craft amphibious.

The military like to use words to mean something other than their original meaning. I think it's something to do with the old British army saying BBB - bullshit baffles brains

UK lawmakers look to enforce blocking tools for legal but harmful content

I understand the problem of harmful contact which isn't illegal. I'm sure we've all seen those messages that warn images might contain disturbing content. Some social media platforms have them, but of course the problem isn't limited to harmful content.

I actually quite like the idea of such a filter being optional, however the problem is in defining what constitutes "harmful but legal" content. If you're going to make provision of such a filter legally mandatory then you need a legal definition of what constitutes "harmful but legal content" without that how do you enforce this legal mandate? How does it work when somebody complains that something harmful has slipped past the filter? Does it need to go to the courts every time to decide whether the content was harmful?

In other words this is typical of a lot of proposed legislation over the last few years. It looks good in a tabloid headline - won't somebody please think of the children - but it appears that no consideration has been given to how it will be implemented.

Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones

"Don't be mean, he invented a wheelbarrow with a ball for a wheel, which was a brilliant idea, and caught on everywhere! Just tell me the last time you saw a wheelbarrow with a normal wheel on it?"

Like many Dyson products (those invented by him and those invented by others under his brand) it wasn't really an invention as such.

It was still a wheel, just a ball shaped wheel. It IIRC it was hard plastic which definitely had disadvantages when compared with a pneumatic tyre on rough surfaces.

But that's how Dyson works isn't it? It's about selling stuff that looks radical rather than actually being radical.