Posts by Ken Hagan

I don't think it needs to be embedded in the document for most of those tasks. Keeping it out of the document makes the document safer for people who just want to read the answer rather than generate it.

It would seem to me, then, that targetting the (relatively small number of) bullet-proof hosts and making them legally liable for their content would be more effective than trying to target the (relatively large number of) law-abiding internet users who just happen to have a valid reason to encrypt their personal finances and private communications.

Funnily enough, this is almost the same as the solution to the problem of "anti-social media". You make the internet companies legally liable for what they publish on their site. If they want to be exempt, they need to say who the original author is and produce credible evidence that they can stop that person from using the service in future under either the same or a different identity.

Right now, so much of the internet is just making cash out of facilitating ... "something, don't know what, don't care, as long as it keeps generating cash for me".

But really, while this /could/ happen, it /would/ only happen if there was some nutter out there who actually had a motive to tank thousands of businesses just for the lols.

We don't know anyone like that, do we?

And certainly not anyone like that with the resources to pull it off, surely?

Re: You want to play hardball?

Ah, thanks. Intelligence and the Army aren't best of friends right now. (Something about not being welcomed with garlands by nubile virgins on day one of the invasion.) My guess is that this guy is toast if Putin isn't around.

Re: Just saw an article yesterday

Looks interesting. Obviously we await confirmation that this works in practice and at scale, but they claim to have a process already so it shouldn't take long to prove it one way or the other.

Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?

Oh no. It would suffice to have it in just one language. The manufacturer would presumably choose their own, for the benefit of all their testers.

Now, where's all that crap made again?

Re: Backups

It's 8% more than I'd have expected and it raises the question of how do they know that the recovered data wasn't tampered with prior to encryption? Obviously if you had a backup lying around you could do a comparison. Equally obviously, you wouldn't need to.

This does seem to be a general problem with ML. We could do with developing algorithms that can be queried after training. The chances that if we knew what they were picking up on, we could do even better by using other data sources or specific tests.

Re: How have they never

Because they aren't big enough in tbe phone market to count as a monopoly, whereas MS were big enough in the PC market.

Re: It's not wasted

Given the number of Russian nukes, no-one else needs to be on their side for it to result in WW3.

Re: It's not the AI that needs fixed

You use "sheep" as an insult but how many sheep are there and how many wolves? It seems to me that the sheep are on to something.

Re: I have a problem

"Fools trust Google."

Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Re: That NAS under the stairs

A raspberry pi with a big SD card would probably suffice, but as Ned Pyle is reported in the fine article, the affected users are probably the least able to set that up.

Re: worried, moi

I don't think the Lenovo link says that at all. The patch is only available in Windows flavour, but the UEFI bios is as much part of a Linux boot as a Windows one, surely. Whether the patch will be offered by Lenovo to Linux devs for packaging is a different question.

Re: The registry !

Imagine a Linux system where /etc was a mount of a filesystem type optimised for lots of small files. In essence, that's the registry.

Would that be so awful? Clearly not. Would people blame every configuration error on the underlying filesystem, rather than the end-user who wrote the wrong values into a file? Clearly.

Re: Mint Newbie

"Re. Wine... inevitably some stuff will be flaky. Windows in a VM might work out better, if feasible, but I guess that may be a bigger learning curve."

I'd say that Windows in a VM is such a shallow learning curve that you might end up with users doing all of their work in that Windows VM, negating most of the benefits of switcing to Linux.

Re: Ah, the joy of being (fr)agile.

"When MS has more patches than all the other patch sources listed in TFA *combined*, what does that say about their ability to write code that *doesn't* suck sweaty monkey nuts?"

Nothing at all, since the article is about Patch Tuesday, which is a Microsoft-specific thing, even if a handful of other vendors have elected to try to hide their own mistakes under its cover.

Re: Western governments have expressed concerns...

Mobiles are probably the only remaining route for facts to penetrate Putin's propoganda machine, so I have no problem with genuinely helping to maintain that network.

Re: Registry, ugh

That's not really a registry problem, though. That's an Explorer bug. With any luck, someone at Microsoft is reading this and can enter it into their bug tracker. (Since I don't have hours to waste crafting a "simplest possible test case" and opening a ticket on an expensive support account that I don't have, I'm unable to do it myself.)

Re: Last untethered version

I already have done, so I think you might be being alarmist.

Re: F2FA.

"I would rather contract an STD."

Hmm. That depends on the means of transmission, surely.

Re: And the other half will follow...

"there were no Greta Thurnberg/Extinction rebellion, etc. etc nutters with huge opinions on things they know nothing about in the boomer populations"

So all those hippies, punks, soviet apologists and anti-nuclear greens were just a figment of my imagination, huh? Tell me, what were *you* smoking back then? Must have been powerful stuff.

Re: Wasn't Win 10 suppossed to be

Isn't Win11 a free update over Win10? That makes it a new "channel" but not, fundamentally, a new OS.

Re: Totally redundant tech.

If "you" are the ad provider, you know no such thing. This is just yet another page thst has been polluted with your shit. Unless you read the URL and parse the page contents, you can't tell whether this is a Mary Whitehouse tribute site or a Whitehouse magazine tribute site.

Re: Crap Credit?

I'm assuming that it does a credit check. If so, I can't see the problem. If not, it needs a better name.

Re: Not a Language?

Yes. Look it up on wikipedia.

No, Leith was surprised because, despite the soft-pedalling around the issue in the fine article, this is an open and shut GDPR violation on a massive scale and quite deliberate, so it is quite astonishing that Google thought they could get away with it.