* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Own goal: $280,000 GDPR fine for soccer app that snooped on fans' phone mics to snare pub telly pirates

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Cyberstalking, in all its splendor!

It's in the EULA, and that's the Spanish League's argument for being allowed to do it.

I think they had delusions of being Google or Facebook, but unfortunately are based in the country and have to contend with the legal system instead of just ignoring it until it goes away.

It is with a heavy heart that we must report that your software has bugs and needs patching: Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, Intel emit security fixes

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: WTF?

That's nice, but what about the users?

What Google just did wasn't responsible disclosure.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: WTF?

I think "it's in QA" is a pretty valid reason. What do MS do now, rush it out without full testing and increase the chances of hosing computers (which admittedly is par for the course from MS these days) or get accused of allowing a month for a zero-day to be exploited?

Google's an 800lb gorilla throwing its weight around when perhaps it should be concentrating on its own problems with Android.

The difference between October and May? About 16GB, says Microsoft: Windows 10 1903 will need 32GB of space

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: what I am curious about...

FUZIX is the future (until it bloats too).

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: what I am curious about...

GWX said: "Free Windows 10 valid for the lifetime of your device".

Now we know why.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Dan 55 Silver badge

Be careful on that high horse of yours or you might fall off, Windows regularly mixes up desktop icons if you plug and unplug external displays.

By the way, on the OP I first read that as "T2 crippled machines" and my first take was probably right.

IT, gotta hate 'em all.

Dan 55 Silver badge

It seems very odd that Apple goes out of its way to disable so many things on the login screen. If you have an external display or keyboard, there's probably a reason for it... if you sit down at the computer and find the brightness is wrong then you'd probably want to adjust it before logging in... but it seems Apple know better.

Oh, and genius bars seem to have problems following step one in diagnosing screen/backlight problems.

Money laundering and crypto-coin legislation could hurt open-source ecosystem – activists

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "the fact that technology could be used to violate the law does not mean we should ban it"

Actually, when criminals can put you under treat, you're less free.

I've never liked Halloween, now I know why.

Hate your IT job? Sick of computers? Good news: An electronics-frying Sun superflare may hit 'in next 100 years'

Dan 55 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Yeah let's frrrryyyyyyy

Imagine the younger generation who won't even be able to answer the door.

Wondering where that upcoming meeting with 'Cheap Viagra' came from? Spammers beat Gmail filters by abusing Google Calendar, Forms, Photos, Analytics...

Dan 55 Silver badge
Big Brother

"we scan content on Photos for spam"

I bet you do.

Give my regards to Reigate: Print biz Canon to up sticks in the sticks

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Let's place a bet on what the next step could be

Move the EMEA office to a rEU country...?

UK taxman spent six times more with AWS last year than cloud firm paid in corporation tax

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Double Irish with a Dutch sandwich

Won't it be lovely when we leave the EU and companies that make money here have to pay tax here rather than licensing through tax havens

If only you had read something like this first...

History of tax havens

This Free software ain't free to make, pal, it's expensive: Mozilla to bankroll Firefox with paid-for premium extras

Dan 55 Silver badge

Never had a problem with setting the options in Firefox to turn turn off the background updater and never update.

Pimp My PowerApp: Microsoft touts AI Builder and augmented reality tools for low-code apps maker

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Are they that desperate to make pseudo-AI look useful ?

There's already an LG telly with AI highlighted as a selling feature.

I facepalmed.

'Cynical and bullying' TalkTalk hackerhacker getsgets 4 yearsyears behindbehind barsbars

Dan 55 Silver badge
Joke

Re: I've been caught ...... I must have Asperger's.

Is this a standard tactic by the defence or is it just all hackers have Asperger's ???

Nothing changes. In the 80s we were all on the spectrum too, except for those on the C64.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Skilled cyber-criminal left traces of own IP address

He may be prolific and cynical but not so skilled, then.

(Is being cynical a crime now, BTW?)

You're responsible for getting permission from subjects if you want to use Windows Photos' facial recog feature

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Consent nonsense

If you check MS' privacy statement it doesn't say where the processing is done. It talks about "Photos' background processes" but they could easily upload photos to MS for tagging and download the results when they're ready.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: GDPR

"Facial groupings "are not accessible beyond the context of the device file system'" could mean the tags are not uploaded to Onedrive but the work to generate the tags could still be done on Azure somewhere.

The fact that they're speaking in legalese and the UI is confusing aren't reasons to be optimistic.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Deceptive user interfaces, some user interfaces are unhelpful by design

I was naive enough to think this was on-device facial recognition like Apple's Photos and just a case of bad UI design, but you're right, if they're misdirecting people like this then farmed out to the mothership it is.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

My first thought (could be an overreaction)

The company has also come up with a great counter-example of intuitive UI by presenting a confirmatory dialogue that makes it unclear whether you should click Accept or Decline to disable the feature.

It seems this is official confirmation if any were needed that designing an understandable useful UI is an now a lost art down at Redmond.

Instead of this dialog up being waved through in review, What should have happened was the person responsible should have been immediately strung up by the balls by Mark Russinovich from the highest lamppost outside One Microsoft Way while Redmond Chen stood next to them shouting, "and if the rest of you fuckers don't fucking learn Microsoft Windows User Experience book which was published in 2002 inside out then you're fucking next".

Amazon teases package drone, US civil rights folk want facial recog tech ban and AI carumba – YouTube!

Dan 55 Silver badge

Harassment and YouTube

YouTube is so useless/screwed up (delete as applicable), you'd have better luck getting a video harassing you taken down if you copyrighted the word in question then filed a DMCA takedown notice on the harasser's video.

Like using the latest version of Microsoft Office? Love Offline Files? Not for long!

Dan 55 Silver badge

But according to TFA seems there's a problem with all files in Offline Files opened with Office, not just the copy protected ones?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sup with the devil...

There's also WPS Office if all this China kerfuffle doesn't bother you.

Dan 55 Silver badge

No LibreOffice is not affected. It seems MS went out of their way to bork offline files (which is an OS feature and therefore should work with all software) on Office.

Samsung goes Marie Kondo on its public cloud outfit: Does this bring me Joyent? Nope. Then in the bin it goes

Dan 55 Silver badge

I am shocked that Samsung bought a software company and then didn't know what to do with it.

NASA goes commercial, publishes price for trips to the ISS – and it'll be multi-millionaires only for this noAirBNB

Dan 55 Silver badge

Obviously not, he clearly didn't say he'd give up a pint to bring him back.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: International Space Station

At that price per GB and toilet visit, they'd be the most expensive presidential Tweets ever.

There's a reason why my cat doesn't need two-factor authentication

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Schengen sucks and everyone is looking the other way

I don't think anything I said about Schengen and FoM contradict anything you said about the games French and Spanish police play 1km from the border. In fact I did mention more stop and search within countries.

I've never been stopped and asked for ID anywhere in the Schengen area, and I live within it. I guess I must look too inoffensive.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Schengen sucks and everyone is looking the other way

The Schengen area does not allow passportless (or ID-less) travel, it's borderless travel, there's a difference.

Residency cards aren't valid for travel in other EU countries, you need your own ID for identifying yourself, although residency cards help explain extended stays in the Schengen area or why you're bringing other non-EU family members with you.

Dan 55 Silver badge

But then security authentication is one of those functions whose philosophical concept is hampered by self-contradictory details of its own design. To pick a topical example, it is the right of European Union citizens to enjoy free movement between EU countries without being stopped by border controls. However, how can the border controls know whether you are an EU citizen or not unless they stop you to ask for your EU identification? So it's only by presenting your passport or ID card that you can exercise your right not to have to present your passport or ID card.

FoM is more about having the right to live and work on equal terms in other EU countries.

Schengen is the right to not be stopped by border controls. If you fly from a Schengen country to a Schengen country, you won't have to present your passport/ID card in the destination country. If you go by car, you won't get stopped at the border, you just pass the country's roadsign (if there is any) and be happy you've taken back control.

The counterpoint to FoM and Schengen is having to register your residency and having to possibly put up with more stop and search.

Silly rEU countries, if they didn't have FoM (the UK is about to get rid of it) and didn't have Schengen they could have intra-EU border controls and stop and search just like the UK... all the responsibilities, none of the rights. Who'd vote for that? Oh.

Who left a database of emails, credit cards, plain-text passwords, and more open to the web this week? Tech Data, come on down!

Dan 55 Silver badge

Huawei, but according to GCHQ's big cheese they're "shoddy".

This isn't shoddy, this is an open server.

Zorin OS 15 nods at Ubuntu and welcomes Windows escapees

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Back in time

PBKAC. Works for me.

Visual Studio Code 1.35: Remote Development, TypeScript and (sigh) another new icon

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Some, of course, prefer to stick with the likes of Vim,

VSCodeVim.

Oh, and your data trail will thank you for using VSCodium.

Alexa Conversations: Amazon's AI assistant is about to get a whole lot more like Clippy

Dan 55 Silver badge

Apple strips clips of WWDC devs booing that $999 monitor stand from the web using copyright claims. Fear not, you can listen again here...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 10% may have bought the stand

Of course, that's why they'd use antigravity.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 10% may have bought the stand

Do you really think Apple have created this beautiful object of desire to allow it to be sullied with something so base as a VESA mount and screws in the back? Of course not, you need the magnetic adaptor (dongle).

If Apple's still going in 100 years, we'll have monitors held in place by antigravity, just because.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yeah right

YouTube copyright claims are broken anyway. It works something like this:

1. Bigcorp dings a video with a copyright claim.

2. Channel owner appeals and says no because four seconds of song is fair use or an audience booing doesn't fall copyright or whatever.

3. Bigcorp handles the appeal and has the final say.

Hence the likes of Nintendo (or Apple) just rampaging round YouTube taking down stuff.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coat

Re: 10% may have bought the stand

I know what you're thinking. "Does the stand use six magnets or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, while reading the description on Alibaba, I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a Pro Display XDR, the most expensive display in the world, and would blow your budget if it fell off, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?

Dan 55 Silver badge

You get nothing extra, you have to choose whether you're going to add $/€/£200 to the price or $/€/£1000 or prop it against the wall.

The mount and stand use some special magnetic gubbins to attach to the back of the monitor which is probably patented so you won't be getting a third party one, or if you do Apple's PR will make sure you know that the guarantee for the screen is voided if was attached to a Lucky Rainbow Dragon stand when it fell off.

Barbie Girl was wrong? Life is plastic, it's not fantastic: We each ingest '121,000 pieces' of microplastics a year

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What fraction of a gram ?

There are a whole series of interesting digestive disorders (Chron, LGS, IBS, etc...) which feature things passing through the digestive wall lining that in theory shouldn't.

I don't think enough studies have been done on the effect of microplastics on the digestive system or after passing through the digestive wall and ending up in other places in the body to be claim that they have no effect. Microplastics on the 130µm scale are about the same size as human cells (up to 100µm).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What fraction of a gram ?

I think number of particles is an entirely reasonable measure. If you were to ingest one small piece of plastic it would probably appear out the other end a day or two later. But what's your body going to do against the same weight of plastic delivered in micrometer-sized bits?

It's official! The Register is fake news… according to .uk overlord Nominet. Just a few problems with that claim, though

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

The problem with "fake news"...

... is it allows any idiot to respond to a fact-checked article by bleating a two word response, the hard of thinking stay in their comfort zone and blindly believe them, and it means a reasoned argument is no better or worse than an opinion or just some made-up shit. It's the worst thing that's happened in the past decade, it's rolling back evidence-based decision-making and debate which is responsible for most advances over the past 500 years.

So Nominet deserve it with both barrels.

Labs are for nerds, it's simply Kaspersky now – just hold still while we cyber-immunise you

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: mint green

Thanks for that info, every day's a school day.

Now not only can I tell my other half she's wrong, but she's genetically wrong too.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Changing the wrong bit

Casper the Friendly Lab?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: mint green

Turquoise.

But it is more blue than green or more green than blue?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "geometric and mathematically exact letter forms"

Think of it in the same way as the handwavey bullshit programmers have been known to come out with from time to time to justify work which was charged for an afternoon but actually took 10 minutes.

Still sniggering at that $999 monitor stand? Apple just got serious about the enterprise

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: yeah, right...

Tell that to a CxO who wants their shiny.

And you're going to be setting up that $1000 monitor stand for them too.

Musk loves his Starlink sat constellation – but astroboffins are less than dazzled by them

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Far Side of the Moon

5. Musk's car photobombing the pictures.