Posts by YetAnotherXyzzy

Google fires sueball at alleged Chinese phishers over AI-powered fraud ops

And when is Google going to sue the scammers behind the AI-powered misleading advertising on YouTube?

TomTom’s route planner takes an unplanned detour into oblivion

For any frustrated TomTom users considering alternatives, I've been a happy user of OsmAnd for several years. It is open source and no cost, though I choose to support them by subscribing. Let me acknowledge caveats however:

- I've never been a TomTom user so I cannot make comparisons.

- Although OsmAnd data is stored locally and thus works fine if I am offline, there is a sync component, and I can imagine this and most any sync service failing in the way that TomTom's seems to have failed.

Apropos the latter point, OsmAnd makes it easy to back up your data to a place of your choosing, which I do periodically. Presumably if there is a sync failure, the workaround would be to take the navigation device offline then restore one's local data backup, though happily I've never had reason to test that.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

Duplicate articles in RSS

This morning (in the Americas) I noticed that some, though not all, articles in one of my RSS readers were duplicated. That problem went away (was fixed?) before I had a chance to determine if the problem was with the feed or with my fead reader. If it was a bug, kudos on the quick fix.

Betting shop bug ends in kidnap plot as staff turn ransom artists

Re: Have the Pronoun Police been in /s

Indeed, I found the article needlessly difficult to read because of the repeated use of their as singular.

If it is El Reg's policy to use a person's preferred pronouns even when it might make the article difficult to read, then I suggest that upon first use this use be so stated so as to help the poor reader.

Ubuntu 26.04 beta arrives packing GNOME 50, which no longer supports Google Drive

Re: Apparently, it's because

I switched my personal life from GDrive to Nextcloud and I'm happy I did. YMMV but there's no downside that I've found.

My employer loves GDrive and everything from Google, so it's a good thing I don't use Ubuntu for work. Several devs here do, and I'm glad I'm not in their boat.

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Re: Password are fine.

I used to do that, and I thought myself clever. Then I had to travel for work, which of course meant bringing the password book with me. Which I lost, while traveling far from home and office. That was many years ago but I still remember not just the hours of panic followed by weeks of trouble.

One possible lesson you could learn from my experience is to be infallible. Never ever mislay an important item or make a mistake, ever. The lesson I chose to learn, however, is that resilience is a good thing. I now trade away some security by using a password manager, in order to not be completely doomed the next time I mislay a notebook/phone/USB stick/what have you. Naturally everyone's threat profile will be different, so make your own tradeoffs.

Accenture down to buy Downdetector as part of $1.2 billion deal

Goodbye, Ookla speedtest.net, hello librespeed.org.

Rackspace tests customer loyalty with brutal email price hike

Pair Networks, perhaps? I've been happy with Pair for 18 years, now suddenly this, and with not enough advance notice to do anything except delete less important mailboxes.

US regulator tells GM to hit the brakes on customer tracking

Re: Privacy respecting safe driving or economical driving app?

Amid all the hate for simply wanting to get better at something, this is a sensible and helpful suggestion. Thank you.

Privacy respecting safe driving or economical driving app?

This reminds me that some time ago I rented a Toyota Prius, which gave feedback on my driving. Over the course of a week the app helped me get into the habit of accelerating and braking smoother, and generally becoming a better driver. I hoped to find a phone app that would give me similar feedback while driving my own car, but the few options I found all had either dodgy privacy policies or none at all that I could find.

Does anyone know of a privacy respecting one? One that doesn't sell my data would presumably have to be be paid, and that is fine.

How California built one of the world's biggest public-sector IT systems

Re: Huh !!!

"I am surprised it happened in the US of A, people are supposed to be more tech savvy there""

Many are, yes. Those who aren't are pretty much unemployable so they wind up in the public sector. (And yes, I'm a former US Federal employee myself.)

Hegseth needs to go to secure messaging school, report says

Ha! When that story broke, I jumped on Strava to see what I could see on my wife's base. There were lots of tracks, as expected, but nothing interesting like the entrance to a secret bunker. Rats!

Anecdote re the second report: My wife for many years was a civilian Department of Defense employee on a U.S. military base. The most common means of communication among uniformed members, including regarding operational details, was WhatsApp. Nope, not even Signal. I'll also note that most of the phones sold on base were from Huawai and ZTE.

Canonical CEO says no to IPO in current volatile market

Re: Linux on the desktop ? You 'aving a larf ?

I was going to say the same thing. For a while I made good money moving smallish organizations from Outlook to Evolution, and there were surprisingly few complaints from the end users. They wanted (no, strike that, *needed*) something Outlook-like but reliable, and Evolution gave them that.

Then my prospects started moving to Gmail and etc., and I moved on.

Fedora council approves policy allowing AI-assisted contributions

As much as I have been conditioned by AI hype to recoil at anything involving it, I don't understand why projects don't take a pragmatic approach that focuses on the results. Something like "we don't care what tools you used to make this submission, we only ask that (1) you the submitter be human, not a bot, and (2) you the submitter take full accountability". Point 1 is to let pesky bot firehose accounts be banned on sight, and point 2 is to avoid any vapid arguments such as "well it was AI, don't blame me for the crap or plagiarized code".

When I say "I don't understand", I mean literally that. There's probably a reason why my idea is naive and I don't mind being educated.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Are you hiring, blcollier? Asking for a friend.

Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal

Re: Let's hasten the demise of AI.

Would you please have a chat with the CEO where I work? Please? Please?

The icon has only one beer, but you deserve a lot more for this good idea.

US Navy: I can't quit you, Azure

Re: Get OUT of the uncontrolled commercial clouds

I'm surprised King Donald hasn't announced a vaporware Trump Gold Cloud service that USG elements are strongly advised to migrate to. Or at least start making monthly payments to now, in anticipation of a future migration.

"Other cloud providers have mere silver linings. Only Trump Gold Cloud has a golden lining."

Doesn't surprise me. One of my former employers provided a cloud service to, not NAVSEA specifically, but an analogous part of the U.S. Navy. At their insistence and against our repeated counsel that it was a poor idea, they insisted that we make a highly customized version of our service when our off-the-shelf service would have ticked all their boxes. What they got was functional but largely unmaintainable. Then they kept insisting on changes, often for change's sake, withholding payment to force our hand, and pretty soon it was not just unmaintainable but too fragile for purpose as well. That contract ended in tears, and NAV[redacted] probably swears to this day that we were either inept or crooks or both.

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

I agree with all you say, but the upvote is for cow-orkers.

Inventor who encouraged Elon Musk to make Optimus says most humanoid robots today are 'terrifying'

"Yogi can greet you in a really natural, comfortable way and deliver value by maybe answering your questions and by guiding you around, being a concierge in a hospitality-type setting. It might show you to a patient's room in a healthcare setting, with more advanced capabilities emerging as more training happens – not solely by us, but also by the end user."

If I were the general manager of a hotel, hospital, or the like, and I needed an entity with those abilities, and you told me I can have my choice of human or robot, well of course I'm going to choose human. For tasks requiring empathy and humanity, why would anyone choose otherwise?

I'm out, says OpenSUSE: We're dropping bcachefs support from next kernel version

Long time OpenSUSE user here. My one and only complaint with the distro over the years has been it being too quick to adopt new shiny things that turn out to be not as ready for production as they seemed. Their too-quick adoption of btrfs was years ago but still leaves me scarred. So I applaud their decision to press the pause button on this particular new shiny fs.

I'm not dissing bcachefs and I wish the project well. But of course it's not yet ready for a mainstream distro billed as stable.

WhatsApp's former security boss claims reporting infosec failings led to ousting

Re: Anyone dumb enough

Alas, if only it were so easy. I tried for a long time to get my wife and daughter to use Signal with at least me, but that went nowhere. And never mind all the businesses and government agencies that use it exclusively. I don't trust it, I don't like it, but either I use it or I live alone in a Unabomber cabin.

Everyone needs an AI phone. No, don't hang up, it's true

Re: I'm going to live in a cave.

Bicycle repair was what kept the wolf from my door when I had the bad timing to graduate from uni in the middle of a recession. Sadly, that didn't let me escape knowing what a smartphone is.

Atlassian acquisition drives dream of AI-powered ChromeOS challenger

$610 million for something that no one is asking for? Yep, sounds like Atlassian.

Sainsbury's eyes up shoplifters with live facial recognition

My favorite hardware store uses RFID tags on their higher value items, and there is a sensor at the exit. Every single time I shopped there I would set it off, even when not having purchased anything. Happily they are nice people and there was never any drama, but the question of how was on my mind for more than it should have. Once when that happened I took off my shoes (purchased elsewhere long ago) and asked the check-out girl to run them through the device to deactivate the tags. Sure enough that was the fix and I never set off the alarm there again.

Pentagon ends Microsoft's use of China-based support staff for DoD cloud

That's a good question. Many years ago I was a consultant to a local government. I wasn't just proposing stuff and cashing my check; I got to implement them too, which I really enjoyed about that gig. One thing I wanted to do there was move them from Windows to Linux, but I didn't tell anyone that. Instead I was going to first move everyone to applications available on Linux, one at a time, starting with MS Office to LibreOffice. Dear mother of God what a hornet's nest that was. People just don't want to change. I had other fish to fry so I backed down from that idea and made other improvements instead.

At the same time I was the owner/operator of the town's first internet café (which tells you how long ago this was). The machines were all Linux, albeit with a DE that had a Win95-like start button and taskbar. In all the years of operation only one customer even commented on it.

I guess the conclusion to be drawn from those two examples is, get the OS and applications right from the beginning, and users will take what they're given. But heaven help you if you ever dare change those choices later.

Google kneecaps indie Android devs, forces them to register

Re: FDroid?

Looks like I need to send a 25 USD donation to each of my favorite F-Droid apps, with a link to this article and my thanks for their putting up with Google's ever-increasing nonsense.

You've got drought: UK gov suggests you save water by deleting old emails

I wonder how much water could be saved by government agencies voluntarily reducing their output of drivel like this by 10%.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

I too am issued a Mac for work and I too dislike the keyboard. I use an external keyboard more to my liking. Of course that only works if you are able to do all your work at a desk, as I do.

Back to the article, I like TrackPoints and wish my otherwise perfect Kinesis Advantage360 had one (or two, being a split board) but I can't imagine that being a popular option.

Nothing to see here: Brave browser blocks privacy-busting Microsoft Recall

Re: searching what you've seen..

I thought all browsers offered a history search. In Brave, Command-Y (or your OS's equivalent) opens history, and there click the "search history" icon. It only searches the text of page titles, not page content text. If you're looking for the latter, I don't know of a privacy-respecting way to do that today.

The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I can't say that my core preference has changed, but now I better understand the logic and even see some utility. Especially given the (sadly, uncommon) quality of commentards here. Cheers!

See icon.

As I've observed before, there is a place for such articles, and it is good that they are published and thought about and commented on, but a tech publication isn't the place. If Just Stop Oil's website is suddenly running opinion pieces on the relative merits of vi and Emacs, then I stand corrected.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine humans checking AI didn't make a mistake – forever

Re: A phrase to remember for your managers

May I suggest the Twilight Zone episode "The Brain Center at Whipple's"?

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

Boris reported this mess to the HR person who sent the emails, then demonstrated the problem.

She exploded in a fit of rage.

"Why would you do that?!" she shouted. "This is a disciplinary offence!"

This, in four short sentences, sums up my every interaction with every HR person at every employer that had one, ever.

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

Re: "reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11"

And the worst DE.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

Re: Just....

Ha, typical landlord behavior around these parts is to observe if the leasee's business is going well, and if so, extort him at next lease renewal. You could view that as an ever increasing subscription, yes.

Re: Just....

A former employer had us in a rented building with foot thick adobe brick walls. No way was Wi-Fi going to go beyond a single room there. That employer was awful in many ways, but they set up the network well, with Ethernet to a modest AP in each room. All those visible cables probably sound like they would be an eyesore, but they were run neatly and sensibly and didn't look awful. Problem solved.

Re: Just....

I discovered by accident the advantages of turning down the power. A former home was served (I used the term loosely) by an electrical utility that would regularly have multi-hour unscheduled blackouts, so it behooved me to maximize the runtime I could get out of my UPS. (I also had to obtain backup power generation, but that's another matter). By simply backing off the power that my AP was blasting out, I got a lot more runtime, and was a good neighbor to boot.

Sergey Brin promises next generation of Glassholes will be much less conspicuous

Re: Point

...and generate collectable NFTs of the event.

Samsung admits Galaxy devices can leak passwords through clipboard wormhole

Bitwarden, and presumably some other password managers, can clear your device's clipboard some seconds after copying a password to it. Which seems to me to be a better way to do this than rely on the OS or a skin provider to try to guess if what you put in the clipboard might be sensitive and to give it special treatment.

In Bitwarden for Android this is set at Settings - Other - Clear clipboard. I don't recall what the default setting is.

Where it Hertz: Customer data driven off in Cleo attacks

This is the same Hertz that has filed false police reports against its own customers. Hertz needs to die in a car crash.

https://viewfromthewing.com/hertz-shouldnt-emerge-from-bankruptcy-until-they-stop-filing-false-police-reports-against-customers/

Vivaldi bakes Proton VPN into browser to boost privacy

Re: Proton's "neutrality"

The email address I provided to read the article was [e-mail]. Imagine my joy when, after providing it (and not before), they revealed that they will be spamming it.

Euro businesses flummoxed by Scope 3 emissions

"40 percent of companies say they are prepared to pay fines, as they do not see adhering to CSDR regulations as important enough"

I'd like to see a list of such companies. I want to direct my, and my employer's, purchases to those firms that do not let themselves be distracted from their responsibility to provide quality products and services.

Firefox 136 finally brings the features that fans wanted

Some time ago Brave said it was their intention to stay on Manifest v2. Time will tell how long that lasts, but in the meantime uBlock Origin does run fine on latest stable Brave. I hardly need it -- as beast666 points out, Brave has very good built in tracker blocking, but I happen to like having UBO around to block the rare annoyance that Brave doesn't block.

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

Re: Alternatives for calling U.S. toll free numbers

"What's really annoying is having a debit/credit card that has a toll-free number printed on it for service but not a direct dial line so when they cancel the card when you use it overseas, you are sunk until you can find a way to call them and get something resolved"

True. On my "things to do upon receiving a new credit or debit card" checklist is a reminder to look up the direct dial phone number to use in case the card is lost or stolen, and to record that in my password manager's entry for that card. I also record the toll-free number, because having it on the card is of little use if what I need it for is to report the card has been lost.

Alternatives for calling U.S. toll free numbers

The only thing I use Skype for is calling U.S. toll free numbers. What alternatives are there?

Google binning SMS MFA at last and replacing it with QR codes

Re: What about all the people who don't have smartphones?

It's not that QR codes have any special security. But in their favor, they don't suffer from the insecurities that SMS messages have.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

"The sharp-eyed Reg reader will notice..."

See icon.

California goes ape with bill to crown Bigfoot official state cryptid

Re: Seriously?

I grew up in the area, and I second Jake: It's lovely country to visit, so much so that locals are somewhat ambivalent about tourism: yes they need your tourist dollars, but they don't want folks to decide to stay and wind up ruining paradise. I vaguely and perhaps wrongly remember the chorus from a local folk song popular during my childhood: "Bring your money, bring your dope / and we all sincerely hope / that you don't forget to leave when you get through."