Posts by OhForF'

Microsoft blames AI for delayed Exchange update, can’t say when it will arrive

Re: Cumulative?

Looks like so far all the prompts they tried to get the AI to create a collection of what they rolled out failed the minimal Micros~1 internal tests (= patch can not even be applied).

Icon for Micros~1 ==>

Cyber vulnerability sweep picks up Royal Navy drones sending data to China

My problem with (national) security being the "first duty of government" is that it implies everything else including individuals fundamental rights is less important starting the slippery slope of "for the greater good".

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

WMT and Surveillance at the workplace should not require consent of the workers but be outlawed.

Plenty of other reasons but stopping "automated decision-making and algorithmic management" where real people are affected should be sufficient to put WMT on the strictly verboten list.

Listen up, England. The Health Secretary is going to be data controller for everyone's Single Patient Record

>he government is likely to lessen risks by offering a series of contracts for the SPR, rather than award a single deal<

How does involving more external companies lessen risks? Why is it a good idea to split implementation but necessary to have a single data controller?

Is any logic or intelligence involved when politicians produce a statement?

DVLA's 14-week driving license fiasco – the tech, people and chatbot trying to clear it

Useless metric

>the agency's always-on chat-bot answered 498,780 contacts in the 2025/26 financial year "without any human intervention."<

How many of those contacts ended with the human party giving up working with the chat-bot and contacted DVLA using more traditional means?

Without any indication how often the contact provided a correct answer or solution to a problem those 498.780 contacts doesn't tell us much.

EU waves through open source age-check tool to keep kids safe online

Re: Unbreakable security?

Yeah, as it is totally impossible that a youngster manages to physically access Dad's mobile when Dad is sleeping in on Sunday morning.

much more sane than American states

If i understand what the app does it only proves whoever provides the age check to some web site has access to an app where someone not necessarily the current user of the app) previously enrolled and passed using one of the supported age verification methods.

It is of course totally impossible that someone sympathetic would enroll on their younger friends mobile so the system is 100% secure. /s

SUSE's sovereignty pitch meets an inconvenient $6 billion question

>Europe is relatively well-positioned in software<

Considering almost all bigger companies in Europe depend on services like O365, Teams, AWS, Entra, CloudFlare "relatively" is doing some heavy lifting in that statement.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Re: Brentry

No Some man is are an island

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

Re: Is it time to ditch FireFox?

>it doesn't do passwords<

I use LibreWolf on fedora fc42 installed from the repo at https://repo.librewolf.net/librewolf.repo and it happily stores passwords for the websites i tell it to.

An external password manager might be a good idea and better than store stuff in the browser but it works fine for me.

HackerOne slams supplier for delayed breach notice after staff data exposed

Timelines don't add up

>allowing unauthorized access to sensitive data between December 22, 2025, and January 15, 2026.<

>Navia detected "suspicious activity" on January 23 and began investigating<

How did suspicious activity go on after the unauthorized access was no longer allowed and how was that access shut down before noticing suspicious activity?

Microsoft breaks Microsoft account sign-ins in Windows 11 with latest update

Re: Named meats?

Dibbler: Oh, you want one of the gourmet pies..

Payment biz pulls plug on open source charity after KYC spat

Re: percentages and counts, and counters

Are banks although expected to ask their customer receiving the funds to identify the source if the bank can not?

Is the bank expected to cut off the well known customer when they receive money from a number of sources the bank can't properly identify?

I think the logical thing to do is to block the credit cards/accounts providing the money if those can't be properly identified, not the account the try to send money to.

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

>It consists of about 10,000 lines of code written in a Microsoft .NET C++ environment <

Is that really C++ or C#?

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Re: Payslips

>Factory comes to them and wants 4 staff for 4 weeks, and the client is meant to provide them an email account to send their payslip to?<

The employer is required to provide the pay slip in a way that keeps personal information private.

Sending a pay slip in a plain text to an external mail server would put you in hot water with local privacy laws. Most likely not something you can do anywhere where GDPR or an equivalent is in place,

That event still looks strange to me. So far every company that employed me provided a business email address and sent administrative stuff there and expected me to pick it up from the company email server. That way the mail never leaves the company network neatly avoiding issues with spam and privacy.

Sending pay slips to private email addresses and probably in plain text doesn't look like a professional setup.

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Re: RFI?

Competent people would have sent out that RFI when Ukraine managed to hit the russian Black Sea vessels and probably although asked for systems targeting sea bound threats (repurposed jet skis).

CIOs told: Prove your AI pays off – or pay the price

Re: Few - if any companies

Expecting a CEO candidate to already have defined goals and know how to measure them and realistic achievable figures for those metrics is during the first interview is a bit much.

If you didn't expect him to have that and still asked what his KPIs are he isn't the only one who did not know what a KPI is.

Not that i'd expect the average head hunter/recruiter/HR bod to know the difference between a metric and a KPI.

Capita taps Microsoft Copilot to dig it out from UK pensions backlog

<Copilot automatically reads and understands<

No it doesn't understand ....

Microsoft dials up the nagging in Windows, calls it security

Re: Actually, per-app permissions are a good idea.

If Micros~1 had provided a list of changes that are coming in a future release and provided a preview so app developers can change the installation process to include a list of permissions the app needs for a clearly stated purpose to allow the admin/user to deal with this at installation time (or first run of the app) that would be fine.

Microsoft's announcement linked in the article says:

"We recognize that change takes time. That’s why this will roll out through a phased approach guided by clear principles".

I fear they'll use an "agile process" to keep changing stuff forcing users and admins and app developers to play catch up and keep configuring permissions for applications even if they were in daily use for years.

Use case for agentic AI

Hey Copylot, start an agent that automatically confirms those annoying security pop ups unless you are sure they are triggered by malware.

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

Start with a delay that is an upper limit of the time needed to check a correct password and double every time wrong credentials are passed consecutively to make it harder for someone attempting to brute force the password. Doesn't really seem to be a new idea.

>The user types in a password, which gets checked against a database, character by character. Once the first character doesn't match, an error message is returned.<

My concern here would not be a side channel attack but how to keep that database secure Storing the password in clear text in the database in 2026, really?

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: "Papiere, Bitte!"

He has to leave the store when they ask him to do so but unless he wants to be able to go back he doesn't have to do anything else they ask him to.

Should that happen to me I'd not want to go back to that store ever and take my business elsewhere.

Google to foist Gemini pane on Chrome users in automated browsing push

>an open standard for bot-driven commerce<

>Don't spend more than $n<

Will Google take responsibility and reimburse me if the bot gets it wrong and spends way more than $n?

If the answer is no why do they expect me to authorize the bot to access my funds?

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

> the warehouse manager was the union rep<

In sane countries a union rep can't be in a managerial position as this is a conflict of interests.

AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty

Re: Performative hyperscaling

So all it takes to avoid US jurisdiction is to completely get out of the US market and make sure none of the managers and owners live in or ever visit the US or any country with an extradition treaty. Now why has Amazon not implemented that yet? /s

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Re: If you

Can you install office 365 on a windows box with no glitches, nerfs, bugs, ....?

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: Not here

>All I use it for is to connect my VirginMedia box.<

Assuming there is no channel to the internet provided by the VirginMedia box it won't matter what data the TV collects - with a setup like that you have to check what data the VirginMedia box collects and sends home.

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

586ml certainly is better than 0.5l or even 0.4l. I heard the EU wanted to define the standard unit of beer to 0.4l but Germany had to veto that idea to prevent riots in Bavaria.

Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits

Re: Not just your normal "Social Media" sites going bad - and as for the kids...

>i'm not trying to sell anyone anything<

That might be the problem, can't have someone posting stuff that doesn't promote Capitalism.

Ban those social warriors before we end up with Communism.

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Re: How do you handle users who push back with nonsense diagnoses?

>How do you handle users who push back with nonsense diagnoses?<

Only way to handle that is to ask them to tell what actually happened and what they expect the system to do instead if it worked properly and do your own diagnosis based on that.

Occasionally the uses diagnosis is correct but there are more cases where there is no problem but the user expects the system to do things it was never designed to do.

Unfortunately the more effort you put into clean up procedures and initializing those system components that might otherwise cause issues after a restart the more likely it is the operators will just restart the server instead of investigating which component has an issue and fix the problem causing the system to fail.

It can get to the point where the customer starts complaining they have to reset the control software multiple times in a shift and it can't be another component failure as restarting the software always fixes the problem.

Turn it off and on again is done for a reason - most of the time it does fix the problem.

Microsoft RasMan DoS 0-day gets unofficial patch - and a working exploit

What the blog does not explain is how the exploit manages to get the service to call the exploited code with a pointer to a corrupted list containing that null entry. While that micro-patch seems to fix that specific issue it would probably be a good idea to check and improve the input validation in the service.

How to answer the door when the AI agents come knocking

Audits

I'm sure share holders and the board will be delighted when we are able to tell them our advanced audit capabilities allowed us to prove the incident stopping operations for half a day was caused by AI agents behaving in an unexpected way. /s

Trump says Nvidia can sell H200s to China – if Washington gets a 25 percent cut

Having to pay a base 25% for incoming goods and for outgoing stuff in sectors where there is no mass production in the US is more like an extra sales tax than tariffs. However it seems to be easier to convince the US population this is a good thing if you call it a tariff.

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

Re: silly statement old chap

So the EU should not be allowed to restrict what foreign (or at least US) entities the companies in its jurisdiction may do business with while at the same time it is perfectly fine for the US to go after European companies when they do business with anyone on their sanction list including Karim Khan, Prosecutor of the ICC.

You need to be a pretty firm believer the US are the goods guys and can't ever do harm to buy into that argument.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

I doubt AI will accomplish total destruction of copyright law. In a legal fight between IP holders like Sony and Disney vs. AI companies the only winners will be the lawyers,

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

Re: Hang on

Giving technicians based in Canada access to other regions allows them to support those regions during normal working hours in Canada. OVH did probably not set up separate teams and infrastructure for Europe, North America, Africa, Singapore but tries to balance both work and other load between the regions.

While they do mention "enhanced compliance" and "Improved data compliance" ¹ for their Local Zones in Public Cloud they can probably not guarantee data sovereignity any more than Micros~1 can.

¹ What does "enhanced" or "improved" compliance mean? You are either compliant or you are not.

EU's reforms of GDPR, AI slated by privacy activists for 'playing into Big Tech’s hands'

Re: European Commission

The legislative power in the EU is the council of ministers. Nowadays the claim is that parliament shares that legislative power with the council on equal footing as parliament has to approve the laws in the normal process. Why the council should have the same (or in some cases more) power than the parliament that is directly elected by the people is still a valid question. I do not see a compelling reason why parliament needs the commission to put forward a proposal either.

The bigger problem for votes on changes to GDPR that benefit big companies is that big companies can afford more lobbyists than the ordinary people in the EU. Most members of the european parliament act in a way that suggests they are not aware their primary job is to represent the people and act in the peoples interest.

Apple’s AirDrop makes weird latency spikes for Wi-Fi wonks, researcher finds

Re: Give me everything!

I see another reason why network experts have troubles with it. Ad hoc connections to the outside world while the device is on a supposedly secure internal network sure is a feature beloved by cyber security specialists.

Re: Give me everything!

>What other option is there? <

Changing the way the "social channel" work, e.g. having the device joining an ip multcast group which should be transparent to the WiFi part of the net and doesn't require to drop out of the user assigned frequency to monitor channels selected by Apple.

Not sure if that would work for this specific service as i am using option 1 (don't use the service).

Your average user will not be able to figure out why less used channels aren't working properly for streaming and will not be aware of the option to fix it by disabling a service they might not be using consciously. Apple should at least communicate more proactively that this is happening when the service is running if even network researcher are surprised by it.

Norks droning on about your dream job while pwning your PC

If i were to discuss future job prospects outside the current company I'd want to do that outside any system the current employer can monitor and i am not working in a sector considered sensitive like defense.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

With customers like that you need to be more specific if you give them instructions. They followed your advice and bought a UPS.

How should the have guessed they have to properly install and test the UPS?

Tribunal wonders if Microsoft has found a legal hero after pivot to copyright gambit

Re: "Is Office an artistic work"

If a majority of customers bought the office suite to get specific tasks done and not because they are art lovers it should be straight forward for a court to decide if that product is a tool or a work of art.

Re: "Is Office an artistic work"

I'd be checking if a fine for contempt of court is in order. Micros~1 would love to have the case thrown out.

Salesforce's Benioff warns of AI 'false prophets' while promising true profits by 2030

>Could an AI do that?<

Sure, but it would probably use much more resources for the same reliability as something simpler like

if (Math.random()<0.5) then

return "Hail the true AI prophet";

else

return "He is not the messiah, he is a very nasty boy";

end;

End of support for older Office and Windows Server versions pile on the pain for admins

Too many SMEs have built critical workflows (usually billing an accounting related) on Excel spreadsheets so flimsy they do not work with a different Excel version. Updating the Excel magic to work with a different version is not possible because anyone that understood how that deep magic works has left long ago.

Micros~1 is only partially responsible for that.

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

Re: Requires the new RVA23S64 ISA profile

The Ubuntu life cycle say 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) is in standard support until Apr 2029 so for now there is no argument that you can't just keep *using* RISCV unless you have some compelling reasons to upgrade.

Canon claims its nanoimprint litho machines capable of 5nm chip production

>Whats the difference between Gartner and Twitter ?

There's lots of differences, e.g. Gartner is able to charge a lot for their output while Twitter struggles doing that.

Oh, you were talking about the qualtity of content?