* Posts by ecofeco

8156 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2010

Tipsy tongues tell all: How your sloshed speech could snitch to Siri

ecofeco Silver badge

I am still gobsmack

... that people WILLINGLY buy machines that actively spy on them. Smart phones are bad enough. But if you are savvy enough, you can at least mitigate its spying.

Child psychiatrist jailed after making pornographic AI deep-fakes of kids

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: At what point do artificial images become "wrong"?

"...we can't be far from AI generated images being indistinguishable from real..."

About...oh... yesterday. And moving past it, quickly.

Once again, somehow people think current laws are somehow magically suspended because "digital". Slander, libel, incitement to violence, fraud, discrimination, and underage porn are pretty obvious "points of wrong."

And AI, hell just plain old sophisticated algorithms, are being used for those for a few years now.

It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Consent

If they had only used their powers for niceness instead of evil!

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: I can see two cases here

LOL!

Making everything difficult and adding extra steps is what all the cool kids are doing, grandpa!

(I hope you understood this for the joke it is and not a personal insult. I too am sick of people complaining they can't make simple things more complicated)

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: I can see two cases here

Well stated, Mishak. It's just another info device, knowingly bought. People wanted full feature smart phone connections on their cars. How did they think this would happen? Magic?

Of course they did. Becasue numpties.

But I see the professionally offended mob is out for blood today.

Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5 million bank transactions

ecofeco Silver badge

What was the famous quote?

The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Idiot VP Alert...

I would upvote you more if I could.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: So nobody did economics in school?

Sorry, you act like we OWE them patronage.

Maybe if Google had not spent, checks notes, 26 BILLION dollars on monopolizing search engine placement, they might not have such onerous overhead?

Think of the Internet as street busking writ large. Got something good? You might make money. Anything less and too bad for you. Oh wait, that's how all business works. Unless it's been gamed and rigged.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Chrome

MS did. It's called Windows 11.

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time turning off the spyware crap in Win 11.

It's a decent OS, except for all the spying. It's just one big spyware system. I thought 10 was bad. 10 was nothing compared to 11.

But so is Apple and Google these days. Big Brother is here and his name is Googleapplesoft.

Microsoft pins hopes on AI once again – this time to patch up Swiss cheese security

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Wait what?

"...priced themselves out of the reach of..."

Sheesh

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Wait what?

I will never understand why the whole world picked the worst possible operating system.

In the early days, we used DOS because it was mostly free. Then, when GUIs came about, we mostly used Win 3 because it was, free(ish). (not really free, we pirated the hell out of it actually) The other choice was Apple. (a lot harder to pirate).

The other reason was IBM-PC clones were also cheap and, most important, modular, and Apples were not.

What we should have ended up with was Workbench, but Commodore priced themselves out reach of everyone. So that was never a real option.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Training set?

LOL! I wonder if anyone got this joke?

Well played. Well played.

ecofeco Silver badge

I can smell it from way over here

Microsoft gaslighting and vaporware, that is.

It's the smell of... failure.

Brit pensions scheme flushed £74M when it walked from Atos deal

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Is there anything easier

Pissing on someone's leg and telling them it's raining?

Or trickle down? No action needed whatsoever?

Revamped Raspberry Pi OS boasts Wayland desktop and improved imager tool

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Re: Neatly summaries ...

2016 called, they wanted their stereotype back.

In the meantime, do try and keep up.

https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/a-year-in-microsoft-bugs-the-most-critical-overlooked-and-hard-to-patch

Mozilla tells extension developers to get ready to finally go mobile

ecofeco Silver badge

Mobile? Becasue I've been waiting for FF mobile to enable add-in for security and it's seems they finally done it, whereas early this year, there were no add ons.

ecofeco Silver badge

To get ready?

I've already seen new add ons for mobile this week and even installed a couple.

And Chrome can now kiss my grits.

In quest to defeat Euro red-tape, Apple said it had three Safari browsers – not one

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Re: The title is no longer required.

I've worked for many global scale corporations.

Their disdain is the same.

ecofeco Silver badge

Well, you're not connected to the right people with the right schools, now are you?

There's your problem!

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: through the competition of the free market comes the prosperity and equal opportunity

And look at all the stans downvoting you.

The bad intent of every corporation is proven over and over, yet people still believe the fairy tale, on a website that shows examples of corporate malfeasance and jiggery pokery, every, single, day.

I wish the stans would find somewhere else to gaslight and astroturf.

They insist the benefits will trickle down. One day.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Smoke and mirrors

"They have made mockery of capitalism"

No, it's always been that way.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/06/offshoring-wealth-capitalism-pandora-papers

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: The title is no longer required.

They are in the good company of thousands of other corporations, aren't they.

Google bins integrity API that looked more than a bit like horrible DRM for websites

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Integrity

Ever heard of Frontpage?

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Victory! for a month

Every walled garden attempt of the Internet has eventually failed.

I'm loving each failure.

Microsoft 365 Copilot 'generally available' – if you can afford 300 seats

ecofeco Silver badge

First...

First they have to prove of what use it is.

Or maybe not considering how many rubes there are in the world who just see "shiny" and think, "the precious!"

IBM to scrap 401(k) matching, offer something else instead

ecofeco Silver badge

Many once mighty companies once thought invincible are littered throughout history.

ecofeco Silver badge

There's a lot of corporate stans that hang out here.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: 5% WTAF

Most Americans have no retirement fund.

Most Americans like to blame the worker, but the fact is, you can't save what you are not being paid.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Not sure...

Wow. So not much has changed in the last 10 years. This was my experience as well.

One big circle jerk producing absolutely nothing.

It took seven years but over-40s fired by HP win $18m settlement

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: What's the logic here?

Legal fictions have been a thing long before any of us were born.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Forget the legalities a minute

Every single day, in fact.

Growing a corporation is so last century. Asset stripping and stock boosting is what all the cool kids are doing.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Forget the legalities a minute

It will never make sense because psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists are never logical.

Cisco fixes critical IOS XE bug but malware crew way ahead of them

ecofeco Silver badge

The whole world is currently the Mrk 14 torpedo writ large all over again.

But ESPECIALLY in the tech sector.

SEC boss warns it's 'nearly unavoidable' that AI will cause financial crash

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1987

So 1987 all over again.

Why am I not surprised?

Microsoft opens early access to AI assistant for infosec, Security Copilot

ecofeco Silver badge

This never gets old

“All too often, technologists solve problems by introducing additional layers of technology abstractions and disregarding simpler solutions, such as outreach and engagement,”

- Duane Wessels

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: the pain caused by its productivity tool

Far too many people talk about the "productivity" of Microsoft (not the just the stans that show up here) that I have to wonder if we are using the same software.

MS did not get rid of Clippy, it just hid it in every single action you take to get the job at hand, done. I spend more time fighting to turn off the pop-ups and auto-whatevers that productivity goes right out the window.

And even after turning it all off, it gets turned right back on again after any major updates. Or some new annoying "feature" is added whose control is hidden 3-4 layers down.

Yeah and updates? Seems like one every week.

MS has turned just running and maintaining Windows into a full time job. I consider it a good month when I don't have to chase down and kill some annoying "help" feature during that four weeks.

Productivity? For who?

And LOL, how about that Bitlocker boat anchor? Kills 50% performance on your SSD.

Still got a job at the end of this week? You're lucky, as more layoffs hit the tech industry

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: But the job market is booming....

The job market in the U.S. is the best I've seen in 45 years.

The high profile whales are NOT the job market.

ecofeco Silver badge

No need to worry

No snark here. High profile companies are not the end all, be all of the computer world.

I've said this before, there are millions of high tech jobs that nobody hears about that are the real heart and soul of our modern world. If you find yourself laid off from the high profile zaibatsu, there is still plenty of work out there.

But you'll have to set your expectations lower. Not real low, but lower. Like, middle class, low. And taking time to get rehired.

As another poster said the other day, it's almost like a start-up is more stable employment than working for the whales these days. This is as dysfunctional as it gets.

The problem with Jon Stewart is that Apple appears to have cancelled his show

ecofeco Silver badge

Hmmm

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/19/china_biden_ai/

Methinks Apple is not happy.

Biotech exec sentenced to eight years for COVID-19 testing finger-stick fraud

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: You would have thought there would be some regulatory oversight

It's not corruption, it's lack of resources. In other words, the "watchdog" agencies have all been deliberately crippled by, well, take a wild guess at who is cutting their funding and appointing apparatchiks.

Cisco's critical zero-day bug gets even worse – 'thousands' of IOS XE devices pwned

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Every network admins salt ought to have access from the outside world locked down ..

Look at those down-votes you and I got. Lots of Cisco stans here apparently.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Gee what a surprsie

Did we read the same article? Or do you (and those other down-votes) work for cisco?

Thousands of failure point. Breaches already happened. Not even cisos's first few dozen times this has happened. I'm pretty sure I did not imagine those words. Oh wait, there they are right there in black and white.

Oh ho ha, you almost had me going there for about an... attosecond. Yep, right there in black and white.

Take the piss somewhere else. An admin worth their salt would not accept junk hardware not fit for purpose to begin with. Yet here we are.

ecofeco Silver badge

Gee what a surprsie

Not.

I never get tired of saying it, so how's that cloud thing working for ya?

'Influencer' gets 7 months in prison for plot to interfere with 2016 US election

ecofeco Silver badge

It's always projection with conservatives.

Always.

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

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Re: Crimbo

I am going to hell for laughing at this.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Thermodynamics

Uhm, just pop the cover off?

So this one time, at Bandcamp, half the staff were laid off

ecofeco Silver badge

Pretty sure one of them is Lord of the Flies.

ecofeco Silver badge

I find thinly veiled negligee capitalism titillating!

(apologies to Monty Python)

ecofeco Silver badge

Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown.

Nobody in their right mind turns down large sums of money for a legal transaction. This is the world we live in and money makes the world go 'round.

ecofeco Silver badge

Re: Sounds identical to the M&A approach

This is almost EVERY M&A playbook.

What most people don't know is that an M&A is mostly leveraged, i.e money was borrowed to buy the target company. Very Large sums of money. This is done for many reasons that would take an entire school semester to explain. But mostly accounting trickery. All quite legal of course. But Schrodinger and his cat often figure prominently.

So cutting expense to the bone is required after the purchase.

Most M&A are NOT about expanding their market and therefore sales, but more of asset stripping and elimination of competition, thus being able to raise prices in that market, forcing the former customers to either buy at the new rates or find some alternative. And let me tell you, customer inertia is a very real thing. It's comes under "Rate of Retention" is very coldly calculated.

I could on for hours, but you get the idea.

An oh how I LMAO when people talk about supply and demand and somehow benevolent self correcting market forces. Such naivete would be charming if it wasn't so prevalent.