Posts by vekkq

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

That is some aggressive kerning in the screenshot texts. Do people like reading it like that?

How Chinese insiders are stealing data scooped up by President Xi's national surveillance system

would be funny if the chinese government falls because of this.

just a bias in training data for those facial recognition systems. i'm sure they used first and foremost freely available data like prison mugshots, and asians are somewhat rare there.

Eurocops take down 'secure' criminal chat system known as Matrix

Wouldn't be so hard to avoid name clashes, if you wouldn't just take words right from the dictionary.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Odd take to make it to easily replace C but then require to rewrite every malloc.

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

I miss the times were you didn't need constant security updates because it was shipped sufficiently secure.

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

Re: Approach? What approach?

That explanation came too late and is hardly sufficient.

That explanation came a week after it already exploded. And yet the explanation is still insufficient for cutting out contributors, seemingly based on email address TLDs alone.

Microsoft admits Outlook crashes, says impact 'mitigated'

I've been struggling for a year to keep Windows Mail running. MS is so busy having it replaced with their ad-ridden, privacy-breaking, slowass, ugly and broken Outlook. Who the F wants that?

The .io domain isn't going anywhere anytime soon amid treaty

IMO .io should be made into a generic tld, given its country-unrelated adoption by tech bros.

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

it was a good move. what newbie would know from their original names what these programs are?

We know 'Linux is a cancer' but could CentOS chaos spell opportunity for Microsoft?

benign cancer so to speak.

NASA swings budget axe, kills $400M+ VIPER lunar trundlebot

NASA has a contractional limited budget per project, a fixed percentage of the total NASA budget. If a project exceeds it, NASA has to trash the project.

They would have to ask congress for an exception, to save the project.

A portion of the budget was wasted on unexpected delays and as they now approach the limit, they have to scrap it.

Google can totally explain why Chromium browsers quietly tell only its websites about your CPU, GPU usage

Software monoculture is not much of an issue, when code can be freely modified. Can always fork ungoogled-chromium instead, to be a step ahead of Google.

EU grants €15M funding for ICARUS inflatable heat shield

You need a nose cone on a rocket. A cone-shaped capsule is ideal for launch and reentry.

You could argue that for a non-uniform craft, a wide inflatable shield makes more sense, but it has nothing to do with size.

You won't get around having to deal with a lot of heat. Even more heat on a wide inflatable shield. The heat has to be dumped somewhere, if not in ablative material, of which you would need even more of on a wide shield because of safety margins. The whole concept is also more risky - have you seen how often panels and chutes fail to deploy? Any moving parts are a risk. Assuming someone even tries, an inflatable heat shield for reentry on Earth is entirely impractical.

> It's a relatively simple concept. Rather than carry a hefty rigid heat shield spacecraft and rocket stages could carry an inflatable heat shield deployed from a compact container to permit components to be safely returned to Earth, or land on other planets.

This inflatable heat shield will be heavier and bulkier than existing heat shields. The only use case for an inflatable heat shield is on Mars.

Re: The Cosmic Johnny...

Classic heatshields are already made of rubber or plastic.

Apple says if you want to ship your own iOS browser engine in EU, you need to be there

All the ungoogled Chromium forks work just fine. While the technical diversity in browser engines is nice to have, it is not necessary, when the one engine is freely modifiable to your needs.

German plod defend Tesla gigafactory from eco-warriors

Burning hydrogen would be harmless. His rockets burn kerosene however.

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

kinda what I thought. As long as MS owns the company, its subject to US law.

Linux Foundation is leading fight against fauxpen source

amen.

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

"for use in exceptional circumstances"

I believe these circumstances stem from GDPR rules. No other way for MS to make a buck than to release an offline version.

NASA warns as huge solar flare threatens comms, maybe astronauts too

Re: A, B, C, . . M ?

Missed opportunity to just go ABCDE, with D for dense flare.

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

Erase hundreds of terabytes with one simple scratch!

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Flattr

We had that with Flattr. It died last year.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

when you type your pw after the device has been tampered with.

Robots with a 'Berliner Schnauze' may appear more trustworthy to locals

Wouldn't be surprised if all robots eventually speak in kawaii anime girl voices.

Japan's lunar lander is dying before our eyes after setting down on Moon

Re: Space is Hard

Landing safely on uneven ground would be a bigger challenge than navigating to a better spot.

Vodafone signs a 10-year, $1.5B deal with Microsoft that sheds European DCs

I never heard Azure and saving money in the same article.

Teardown finds Huawei's 5nm notebook processor was made in Taiwan, not China

meanwhile exactly no one checked if the chip is even 5nm.

Suffering from tab overload? Vivaldi unveils Session Panels

I use multiple accounts in Vivaldi to meet those needs. Having a separate browser history beats the other options imo.

Vivaldo? Java? Worse. the UI runs on node & react.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

i'm waiting for DRM on rockets. What could possibly go wrong ..

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

FV in 2024

Formal verification is adopted as the only means to write software. Cybersecurity incidents become so rare that El Reg has nothing to write about. Reg follows 2023's greatest trend and fires half the sods tasked to read comments today. A great year for IT, but at what cost?

What's really going on with Chrome's June crackdown on extensions – and why your ad blocker may or may not work

Re: This, coupled with YouTube's recent blitz

It isn't illegal to block ads. Rather, EU folks are questioning whether scanning for adblocking is illegal. Google won't get far. It will be a bumpy ride however.

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Re: Twitter^h^h^h^h^h^h^hX

Just Twitter is fine. Everyone understands that name. Thank you. Have Musk change names all he wants - it won't stick.

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

so its basically what the recommendation algorithms would give you.

Re: Mastodon remains the most exciting alternative

Mastodon servers differ in rules, ui coloring, emotes and blocks. it might interest you, whether you can repost nsfw stuff or memes of darker humor on a server.

Volkswagen stuck in neutral after 'IT disruption'

I heard a whisper saying that they forgot to pay the license fees for their switches.

Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

I can understand why though. All the nonsensical names for preinstalled programs, which didn't give a hint for what they are for, are an obstacle for beginners to adopt the platform.

Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

Re: Sneaky

Brave is rather suspect. E.g. for having a built-in cryptocurrency wallet. Would you trust someone who thinks crypto is a good idea?

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

Re: if it ain't broke, don't fix it

I don't see how anything of that has something to do with Internet infrastructure governance.

if it ain't broke, don't fix it

> The UN doesn't appear to cause planes to fall out of the sky etc, so i'm not sure why people appear inclined to believe that they'd accidentally break the internet.

Right now, the internet works good enough. Better wait til its broken, before changing its governance.

X may train its AI models on your social media posts

its still Twitter

> "X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter"

Elon and his company can try to rename it all they want. They are only in the position to make suggestions. Most people still call it Twitter, therefore that is its name.

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

Re: Never go full twit.

And then everybody forgets to ever open the door again

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Liam writing more articles in the comment section than the main page. Heh.

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

Re: Math Functions

Cryptography computations typically run with special hardware flags to avoid the known pitfalls, including issues with speculative execution (see e.g. ssbd, psfd). These computations are a lot less likely to be affected by this new bug.

I'm not sure how far this extends to login fields, but they could technically be protected too. Only thing to worry about applying protection are performance hits, which I doubt would be that big, if applied with precision.

This AI is better than you at figuring out where a street pic was taken just by looking at it

Re: Once again, powerful pattern matching being dressed up as "AI"

If you ask the people who dressed up AI as something exclusively-futuristic about a century ago, their mind would be blown by this pattern recognition ability.

You can either keep up the chase of making AI always something inherently unachievable, which I think is pointless, or go with the current sense that AI is just a synonym for modern machine learning.

Prepare for a meme massacre: Snap snuffs out Gfycat in September

According to the Wikipedia article, Digital Dark Age doesn't really seem to refer to information loss through corps closing their libraries (or DRM servers shutting down). It should perhaps.

Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

Oracle finally figured out that you can make a lot of money with deception too. Took em long enough.