Posts by devin3782

Death to one-time text codes: Passkeys are the new hotness in MFA

Re: What is so bad about SMS

SMS isn't encrypted that's the main problem with it, also you can clone/spoof sim cards there was/is a spate of it in the US

Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever

Sure I'll take it who wouldn't want a ugly jumper with microsofts greatest aquisitions, extensions and extinctions for the good of humanity

A jumper with all of Microsoft's greatest hits, extensions and extinctions sure I'll take it off your hands for the good humanity

Firefox 144 brings fixes, features, and farewells for 32-bit Linux die-hards

Re: Password manager

Oh yes! the "why don't allow pasting for security" I've come across this a lot, Three for example had different password rules depending on whether you were signing up or resetting your password, pasting blocked of course, banks mortgage portal logins are often very very poor. You do have to wonder how many have been breached but the banks simply don't know about these old archaic systems. You can always tell a plaintext offender when there's a character limit

Still on the password management its KeepassXC for me i'll have a cprng generate one and store it for me and a Yubi key for 2FA

Britain's AI gold rush hits a wall – not enough electricity

Well there's a lot of roof space, why not place solar panels on those, granted not all roofs are suitable but its a lot of land unused. Also, lets not forget that ghoul Thatcher created most of this when she sold our infrastructure even though she's dead her policies still haunt our economy from beyond the grave, and pre-pandemic the Tory government was selling off the gas storage which we rely upon, so when the gas prices rise it hits us hard.

In gold rush times the most money was made by the spade manufacturer, now in this instance what is the equivalence of the spade?

Ubuntu 25.10 lands: Rustier and Wayland-ier, but Flatpak is broken

Re: After trying different distros.....

I'd add Debian for servers.

But... yes, Fedora for power users, there's a joy in things which work and Fedora seems to be the most reliable in this regard, personally I go with xfce or cinnamon, kde is still too cluttered and weird.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Well, I feel thoroughly justified in the deleting of my Windows 10 VM which I used solely for gaming, by the way all my games seem to run as well if not better under Linux. However I'm not sure if this change will make any difference to people ultimately, probably only to us privacy concious.

I would welcome a law which made software providers give us users a log of exactly what information they're collecting on us and a way to opt out, does anyone know how much business sensitive data has been collected in this way? There are laws about corporate espionage surely this would fall foul of no?

EV charging biz zaps customers with data leak scare

I don't understand this about EV chargers, they should be simply putting £'s in a meter, any amount of additional complication here is totally unnecessary I don't need to register to fill up a car with petrol, the same should be true of drawing electricity from the charger. I think there needs to be some legislation for this, the providers won't do it willingly

Laravel inventor tells devs to quit writing 'cathedrals of complexity'

Indeed he should take his own advice, considering a lot of Laravel is built upon Symfony which could be argued is easier to understand. But I agree with Eloquent, there's too much "magic" happening and, several documented, but for the initiated only code features, which would have someone who's trying to read the code come to a dead end scratching their head without knowing about Laravel's automagic table wiring.

I've long considered one of the easiest ways to handle getting data from a database is simple decide on the methods you'd like for getting the data write an interface, then you can have an implementation class with simple PDO calls and SQL statements, because you've used a interface you can then add decorators for event dispatchers and loggers.

Possibly, but I think it's because it's a copy of .NET razor templating syntax.

Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

I removed Virtualbox on Windows a while ago and went with Hyper-V by far the safer option (an odd statement for sure). But as Windows 10 is nearly out of support, my work machine will finally be graced with Linux seeing how Windows 11 is akin to Ghost pepper infused eye drops.

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Palantirs were the Spying orbs of Sauron, so I guess company's name is apt based on Peter Tiels thoughts on society I'd be keeping him as far away from everyone's medical data as possible and indeed society as whole.

C-suite at Alphabet make B-A-N-K from 2024 equity awards

Yeah they did, they had to announce lay offs, projects they were killing </sarcasm>

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Re: Hollywood Plot

That was the plot for Total Annihilation. Although our current timeline seems to have more in common with the Fallout universe.

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

I thinik theres possibly another way this could be achieved would be to have a DNS record similar to the SFP for email. It could work thus:

TXT "child-safe:true, min-age=13, country=GB"

min-age (see film classifications or something similar)

country (2 letter country code)

- Any website without this record is classed as child unsafe by default.

- Perhaps social media sites could be classed as adult only by default (we'll simply single out the big ones here: any owned by publicly traded company )

- Parents enable parental controls, any time their kid goes to a new website with say a PG or is less than their age the parent gets a notification of the URL so they can check the site and has a log of what they're looking at, then the parent can allow or deny. This should be pretty trivial to implement on all devices and can operate solely on those devices i.e. doesn't need the cloud to compute whether a site is safe or not.

Obviously this is still marking your own homework, but so is the current law also who decides what's safe for their children? the current law doesn't define it and its moving goal posts this gives the tools to parents. The nice thing is this would work globally for everyone, although the age classifications depending on territory could be challenging... but DNS zoning does exist so maybe it would work even with that and using a VPN to a different country.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

It's a shame isn't it as we're effectively lending them our money we should be able to charge them interest on it at a rate we agree (see dictate) with them. I had to ring them to get my £500 credit back even though there's an option on their website which of course doesn't work.

SAP says GenAI will help solve legacy migration skills shortage

Re: Skills shortages?!

Hang on... didn't all of these companies fire a load of people and they're now wondering why there's a shortage of workers? <sarcasm>Hmmmm I wonder if those two things are related in some way... nah couldn't possibly be the case</sarcasm>

UK council still hadn't fully costed troubled Oracle project 2 years in

Re: “ no fully costed and resourced plan in place to enable delivery of the program to completion.”

I'd have written it thus "I don't think you'd ever deliver Oracle ERP"

Gang of monkeys escape South Carolina biomedical research facility

Re: Sounds like a "farm" run with minimal funding

If they were paying peanuts they'd still have the monkeys

UK watchdog hints Voda-Three merger will likely pass

Re: Why bother with a regulator?!

We call this Enshittification.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Damn Shame

I concur for Windows Foobar 2000 with columns ui, Linux Rhythm Box works as well on large libraries.

Uncle Sam may force Google to sell Chrome browser, or Android OS

How about they're have to spin off both, while they're at lets see Apple finally taken to task on their (same) anticompetitive behaviours.

Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support while Mint 22.1 polishes desktop routine

Yes you'll take more dark themes god damn it, and bloody well use them and to make sure, we'll remove your light theme so there! I don't get the dark themes personally but clearly someone does so good for them.

I'm more excited about a new version of xfce though, I love the monitor profiles if only the other desktop environments had that.

The more annoying bit is the constant buggering about cinnamon has to do because of gnome

Open source orgs strengthen alliance against patent trolls

Surely if one lives in the UK or in fact Europe you can simply say, sorry software patent owner (troll) but your software patent isn't legal in my jurisdiction kindly don't darken my door again.

Pat Gelsinger's grand plan to reinvent Intel is in jeopardy

I think I'd spend some time making some good products, but here I am waist deep trying to persuade the tide to turn back.

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Someone in Oracle got a new Ferrari as a bonus for that one.

Traditionally it was a Honda NSX

Dell starts new round of layoffs while it looks to 'unlock modern AI'

Re: Layoffs Should Be From The Marketing Department

A mate of mine was telling me his 3 year old Dell laptop has a 10/100 ethernet rather than a gigabit, we could only conclude they've been using stuff from the turn of century's parts bin.

Mozilla Thunderbird finally gets system tray notifications

Re: It's shit like this...

But maybe those paid developers were paid to care about other bugs first?

Epic accuses Apple of foul play over iOS access, wants EU to show DMA red card

When two dicks go to war pettiness is all that you can score. Grow up Tim.

Beijing says state owns China's rare earth metals

Re: Ah the resource wars

As long as it's not vault tek...

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

Re: Just looked at the Total Recall code.......

As its a sql lite file then it should be possible to open the database change the schema to make the image field too small or add an extra column which doesn't allow nulls and has no default value set.

I use Windows in VM so on VM shutdown I could just have a script in Linux which mangles that file completely and clears the images assuming those are just image files on the file system. If it ends up being saved to the cloud after all it should be possible to block that on the VM's host

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

Re: Sounds Ideal

Derby(shire) has delightfully poor reception

Windows 11 tries to escape Windows 10's shadow with AI muscle

If microsoft remove the telemetry, copilot, and stop badgering me about logging in with a microsoft account or using edge and make the start menu search, search my computer first without searching the web i'll happily buy windows 11 pro. As it is Windows 11 isn't an upgrade.

UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords

Re: A good start...

Yes! this! have more up votes, this is essential.

Open sourcerers say suspected xz-style attacks continue to target maintainers

Nah it's decided purely on whether or not they've played D&D

Cloud vendor lock-in is shocking, but there's a get out of jail card

I've long been of the opinion you should have stuff on prem or in a data centre but its your kit and use the cloud to augment that infrastructure.

The UK Digital Information Bill: Brexit dividend or data disaster?

Re: create a more business-friendly regime

"Financial engineering" Is that a new synonym for money laundering?

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

In fairness only a few really big ISP's do this and usually those whom have mobile networks as well, you need to take care with ISP's in the UK as some provide routers with amazon alexa built in, reading the terms and conditions on those are eye opening.

AI researchers have started reviewing their peers using AI assistance

Re: Who raised you people?

"Why is it that people with book smarts have zero common sense?"

Ah yes those who have rolled a natural 20 on intellgence but a natural 1 in wisdom. Intellgence and Wisdom (common sense) are separare things. The other problem is difference between specialists and experts, a specialists knows everything about their subject, experts know nothing else.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

Quite then spend the savings on commercial support if you need that and give the developers a hefty donation. I don't have an M$ office licence I instead took that money and gave it to the libreoffice devs, they're more deserving. I honestly think this would be a very fair way to help open source developers.

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

Sometimes malware/ransomware can write itself into firmwares of the devices in the server or the boot loader or indeed the bios, we have Sony were the first to do this with their rootkits on music CD's so we really have them to thank, although i'm sure others would have come up with it sooner or later. As far as I know there's no way to tell for sure especially as a lot of firmware isn't available so you can compare and re-flash as needed or indeed fix it.

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

Re: Ah yes, Mr Hunt...

Mr Hunt, I think James Naughtie said it best.

Microsoft trying to stop Copilot generating fake Putin comments on Navalny's death

What I really love is hubris/laziness in the decision to train large language models on things on the internet where we can safely say most of it is crap. The crap in crap out principle still stands.

AI still has no intelligence, Steven Pinker was right, as usual, its just a manages to copy and paste in a vaguely none gibberish way with no concept of facts and zero wisdom

What's going on with Eos, Nvidia's incredible shrinking supercomputer?

According to Jenson, the more you buy the more you save... so my guessing is that was the problem, by adding so many cores they saved too much money, so, reduce the core count, they save less and ngreedia makes more.

Microsoft's Notepad goes from simple text editor to Copilot conspirator

I can see notepad as being a great vector to paste malware in and infect the AI running on Microsoft's servers. Also think of all the juicy little tid bits of secret information Microsoft will be able to scrape because we all know the co-pilot won't run locally.

Data regulator fines HelloFresh £140K for sending 80M+ spams

The fines should be at least a percentage of global turnover and it should be a tangible integer and not less than 5%

AMD brings its AI engines to the desktop with Ryzen 8000G APUs, RX 7600 XT graphics cards

Re: Accumulated TOPS ?

The comsumer use case is extra energy consumption and to say I have an AI core, all the AI processing happens in the cloud rendering this sort of thing utterly pointless as the master of the artifical universe would never permit us to process things locally.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: If car manufacturers did this...

They did, but then went back on it with some weasel words about it and then said but customers will happily pay for more for software tweaks/updates and we're going to do this anyway via the back door just not heated seats.

I don't understand this mind set, are these people that detached from reality? I'm glad I made the decision long ago not to buy anything HP.

HP has for a long time stood for Horrible Products and they're really plumbing depths of crap-tac-u-la

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Ah yes the societal memory of 90 days so wait for an amount of time after that, then change it slightly and republish, for gods sake stop this nonsense.

Storing more data about kids on-line isn't going to make them safer on-line, it'll make them less safe and more easily identifiable, which is the opposite of what we should be doing. To make children safer online make strong encryption mandatory, ensure no data is stored about anyone and most importantly accompany them when they're browsing the internet.