* Posts by Ken Y-N

164 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jan 2013

Page:

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

Ken Y-N

"Donated" my granny's telly for the Beeb

Previously the school only had a single CPM machine, but the maths department got a Beeb but no monitor, so I decided to help out by persuading my granny to let us borrow her telly, which she never watched, to the school.

Cool, more promises of a Universal Translator from Big Tech. This time, Meta – again

Ken Y-N
FAIL

Impressive, but impressively wrong

For my quick single sentence try, it translated "cabbages" to "butter" in Japanese, and "strawberries" in French

Threads versus Twitter: Shouldn't we be happy the wheels are falling off antisocial social media?

Ken Y-N

Re: Freedom is an illusion

Err, since Elmo took the helm the acceptance rate of government requests to remove tweets has actually increased from around 50% to 80%:

https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-orders/

Twitter has performed little or no push-back on these requests partially because Musk has sacked most of the people who used to handle these issues.

Oh, great. Yet another tech billionaire thinks he can get microblogging right

Ken Y-N
Big Brother

Looks fine to me

A few of my Instagram friends are already there, and it looks quite nice, although other than the text being above the picture instead of the other way round there seems little difference. I never got Twitter (at least now the Muskrat is clear about the Nazi hell-hole he is making it into) so let's see what happens with Threads.

Apologies for posting something positive; Zuck already knows all about me, sadly, so he's not going to be getting much additional info from me liking even more cat pics.

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

Ken Y-N

Wasn't the Muskrat all about spotting bots while trying to get out of buying Twitter? How come now it looks like that he and his team now cannot spot scrapers and has to rely on draconian rate limiting for everyone? Surely he wouldn't be lying?

Last night one of the news magazine programs in Japan covered this latest disaster, and random people on the street were saying they were burning their unverified quota in just 10 minutes. Also, most every local and national government department uses Twitter for emergency notifications, etc, and with the country right in the middle of serious flooding and evacuation notices, with Twitter pining for the fjords word may not be getting out properly.

Microsoft puts profanity filter on %@!#ing Teams transcripts

Ken Y-N
Joke

Re: whose swear words?

Hope you didn't also tell them that there was a fag machine in said pub. I got auto-temp banned from Reddit once for discussing bundles of sticks/Northern delicacies.

Fujitsu admits it fluffed the fix for Japan’s flaky ID card scheme

Ken Y-N
Facepalm

On the Japanese telly a couple of days ago they had an article about the latest issue - places, even within the same town, can have the same name, or the same kanji but different pronunciation, or people have different ways of writing their address - 1-2-3-4 is actually identical to 一丁目二の三番四号, but the database requires an exact match. One could use the post code which would eliminate 99% of these ambiguities, but the My Number system does not include post codes for whatever reason.

Yes, I was facepalming that they only just realised this, and it will take them another two years to hook up to some master database of official addresses, although that doesn't address the other issue of needing fuzzy matches.

Japan's digital ID card gets emergency review amid data leaks

Ken Y-N

It's not as bad as it sounds

Most of the processes involved in setting up the system involve manual input, often by third parties. For instance, my health insurance is though a company scheme, so someone in their office has to go through and link the My Number card belonging to N Kenneth A matches their policy holder called K Y-N (don't ask), so cock-ups have come from mixing up people this the same names, or other problems have been a husband and wife applying for their cards but their photos being swapped on their cards.

Real IT problems were earlier in the year with the system for printing out government documents at convenience stores, as there were probably timing errors with two transactions getting mixed up at the back end.

Stanford Internet Observatory raises alarm over 'serious failings with the child protection systems at Twitter'

Ken Y-N

The subhead says: "Researchers find 100,000 accounts spamming child abuse material"

I don't see that supported in the article or in the links - they only seem to have checked 100,000 tweets and found 40 dodgy image hash matches. Still far too many, of course.

Reddit blackout planned over app-killing API prices

Ken Y-N
Thumb Down

Reddit is Fun on Android user here - can't tell you about traffic, although I do believe it is true that there are a lot of app-using power users and mods.

RIF runs its own ads (which I always thought was a bit cheeky) or a one-off $3 ad-free version. I'd like to say that I'll quit if RIF dies, but I'll probably hang around with the official app, then give up if it's as crap as everyone says. BTW, I use FaceBook, but only though the website on Android, not the app as I don't want Meta as well as Google tracing my every move, as I suspect the official Reddit app might like to do.

Elon Musk finally finds 'someone foolish enough to take the job' of Twitter CEO

Ken Y-N
FAIL

Facts, please

You ----------------->

I'm not going to bother looking up who that MAP is, although wasn't Epstein's pal Trump actually unbanned, and I'd rather do without CP searches in my history, but I'm sure I've previously read that CP have actually gone up - Musk may have banned common hash tags, but that's not tackling the core problem, and he sacked most of the moderation teams.

As for the TLAs, well, your boy Musk is actually bending over even further: https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2023-04/twitter-complying-more-government-demands-under-elon-musk

He also recently insulted someone for asking why he censored Turkish government critics just before their general election: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/twitter-musk-censors-turkey-election-erdogan

Tokyo has millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points that should be shared with blockchain, says NTT

Ken Y-N
Facepalm

Sadly Japan is still excited by blockchain things and the metaverse (I'm sure that Tsukuba forum will be full of that too) and hasn't realised that Elon Musk is a narcistic idiot, etc.

Tesla wins key court battle over Autopilot crash blame

Ken Y-N
Stop

I agree this is a weak case, but having a driving system that can engage in an urban area which is specifically stated as not being suitable for urban driving is a serious mistake too.

Google says it did not train its AI chatbot Bard on your private emails

Ken Y-N

The Vulture Strikes Back - a ChatGPT superhero movie synopsys

The Register’s Vulture is a fearless investigative journalist who exposes the dark secrets of the tech industry. He has a loyal following of readers who appreciate his witty and sarcastic style, but also a horde of enemies who want to silence him. Among them are the corrupt executives of Nominet, the registry that runs the .uk domain, who have been abusing their power and mismanaging funds for years.

When The Vulture publishes a series of articles revealing Nominet’s scandals, he becomes a target of a vicious smear campaign orchestrated by the registry’s board. They hire hackers, trolls and bots to flood The Register’s website with fake news, spam and insults, hoping to discredit The Vulture and drive away his audience. They also try to hack into his personal accounts and devices, threatening his privacy and security.

But The Vulture is not easily intimidated. He decides to fight back with his own weapons: his sharp pen, his loyal colleagues and his faithful commenters. Together, they form a resistance movement against Nominet’s tyranny, using their skills, knowledge and humor to expose their lies, sabotage their plans and rally public support. Along the way, they discover that Nominet is not the only enemy they have to face: there are other sinister forces behind the scenes, pulling the strings and manipulating the tech world for their own nefarious purposes.

Will The Vulture and his allies be able to stop Nominet and its allies from destroying the internet as we know it? Will they be able to protect their freedom of speech and information? And will they be able to survive the onslaught of angry fanboys, trolls and haters who disagree with their opinions?

Find out in The Vulture Strikes Back: a thrilling, hilarious and action-packed superhero movie that will make you laugh, cry and cheer for The Register’s Vulture and his commenters.

China launches yet another crackdown on social media

Ken Y-N
WTF?

A rip-off of NVidia's I Am AI

This is the only thing I could think of watching that:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/i-am-ai/

The voice-over even seemed like it was voiced by a text-to-speech engine.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Ken Y-N
Mushroom

Theoretical house to tent

Versus the reality of your future Moon Lambo turning into Kim Jong Un's stockpile of --->

Larry Ellison mea culpa as traffic cop stops Big Red boss on own island

Ken Y-N
Thumb Down

"the island had become his petri dish of experimentation on health, wellness and sustainability"

So where does a Corvette fit in? Is it running on pineapple bio-diesel?

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Ken Y-N

Re: "whether the car has an in-cabin camera"

An EU directive (yay Brexit???) coming into force soon says that all driver monitoring must be processed locally and deleted as soon as handled, but I'm not sure how it handles that it still has to send out a signal that can be logged such as DRIVER_SLEEPING, DRIVER_INATTENTIVE, DRIVER_WATCHING_PR0NHUB...

Ken Y-N
Boffin

GM, etc, along with an all-cabin camera, have a camera mounted in the dash pointing straight at the driver, and it can handle Near Infra-Red, so it can see through sunglasses and do all that fancy eye-tracking stuff. However, Tesla only has one non-IR camera mounted below the rear-view mirror that covers all the cabin, so at best they can only see one eyeball, I would guess. Even so, it should be more than possible to detect the driver lying back, or whatever, but as we see elsewhere, features seem more important that safety in Tesla.

Neuralink's AI brain chip could be in humans within six months claims Elon Musk

Ken Y-N
WTF?

Self-trepanning?

"The wearer has to drill a hole into their skull"

I think I'll give that bit a hard pass.

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

Ken Y-N
Coat

They had put the screen out front as the lecturer had lost his voice, but they should have known better than to put the CRT before the hoarse.

Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks

Ken Y-N
Happy

His sense of humour on English Twitter is not bad either:

https://twitter.com/konotaromp/status/1557560605690585088?s=20&t=eHPNO2jF8zsB8kNlgF7j2w

Just you wait. We are getting ready to fix the date for preparatory meeting to discuss how we are going to draw a scheme for the Most Advanced Digital Hanko System Development Schedule Planning Committee.

https://twitter.com/konotaromp/status/1557554908575870977?s=20&t=eHPNO2jF8zsB8kNlgF7j2w

C’mon, there is no analogue thing left in our remarkably advanced society.

Oops, my fax machine is jamming!

Taser maker offers electric-shock drones to stop school shootings

Ken Y-N
Coat

Finding one-armed guards

Perhaps we could rehabilitate old one-armed bandits?

Mine's the one with a sleeve sewn up.

Twitter founder Dorsey beats hasty retweet from the board

Ken Y-N
Coat

Beard, not board

Seeing the pic, my brain read the headline wrongly.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Ken Y-N
Go

Don't forget the GPU!

NVIDIA claim about 60W max for their autonomous driving-ready boards, as the GPUs will be constantly running at pretty much full speed.

https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-agx-orin-developer-kit

Google's DeepMind says its AI coding bot is 'competitive' with humans

Ken Y-N
Headmaster

What does "in the top 54%" mean?

Does it mean that it answered enough questions correctly to be rated? If so, how many out of how many attempted questions?

According to the blog post it generates lots of possible solutions and sees which give output that is close to the expected result then further refines them. As I've seen with other impressive AI results, I suspect there's a human at the end of it who throws away the crappy results and highlights the best - GPT-3 for instance had many examples of utter gobbledygook.

Attack on Titan: Four Japanese Manga publishers sue Cloudflare

Ken Y-N
Pirate

Re: Japanese Supreme Court?

It wasn't just a simple review, it was basically the condensed version of the film, with the plot explained from beginning to end.

https://soranews24.com/2021/06/25/three-people-become-first-arrested-in-japan-for-posting-10-minute-movie-recap-on-youtube/

ExoMars parachutes just about good enough to land rover safely on the Red Planet

Ken Y-N
Joke

"A handful of tiny tears 1-2cm in size and some friction searing were noted"

I'd cry too if I has some friction searing.

LINE Pay leaks around 133,000 users' data to GitHub, of all places

Ken Y-N
FAIL

Local governments in Japan are back using it, though. The 10 million inhabitants of Tokyo can get their vaccine passport through LINE, by just uploading a photo of their paper certificate and a photo ID like a driving licence.

As one of the 10 million, even if I used LINE I wouldn't trust them with that info even before this latest leak.

Swift 5.5 unleashed with async keyword to fix 'pyramid of doom', plus other changes in 'massive release'

Ken Y-N
Go

Re: await

Fortunately, there is a simple way, described here:

https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/LanguageGuide/Concurrency.html#ID641

Microsoft does and doesn't want you to know it won't stop you manually installing Windows 11 on older PCs

Ken Y-N
Windows

Re: 2.75TB

Hah! I remember paying 99 quid for a wobbly 16Kb extension pack for my ZX81.

Japan's bullet trains replace smoking rooms with Zooming rooms

Ken Y-N
Go

Re: Lagging

Which train were you on - the most expensive Nozomi (N700) class has had them for ages, although up to now it's been one plug shared between the two or three seats in the row.

Japan to start stamping out rubber stamps and tearing up faxes as new digital agency given Sept. 1 start date

Ken Y-N
FAIL

There's a long way to go

On the news in Japan last night, the vaccines are finally starting to roll out, and the paper form for recording vaccinations comes with a standard 1D barcode and the serial number printed below. There is an iPad-like tablet for reading the code, but 1. the autofocus doesn't work correctly half the time and 2. the app actually ignores the barcode and tries to read the serial number below, which also fails another half of the time because autofocus isn't correct or otherwise dodgy OCR code.

The government fix is to send out aluminium stands so that the tablet can be placed the regulation 7.5 cm away from the form.

Intel throws sand in the face of 'musclebooks' with 10nm Tiger Lake tech

Ken Y-N
Thumb Up

Re: "a new PC will be faster and smaller and lighter"

My under-a-kilo A4-sized Panasonic manages the ethernet, headphones, SD reader, SVGA and HDMI along with 3 USB ports and some other hole with a squiggly logo that I don't recognise.

Sloppy data compliance sees Japanese government cut out its own use of LINE messaging app

Ken Y-N
Black Helicopters

The (over-?)reaction may in part be due to LINE being developed by a Japanese subsidiary of the Korean giant NAVER - I've seen right-wing loonies banging on about Korea stealing all the user data, so nationalist politicians might be wanting a more local solution.

As noted, LINE was already the main COVID telehealth hub, and had plans to be the main online vaccine appointment tool, so that's going to be yet another delay in the already glacial roll-out (hobble-out?) - we've so far had just half a million medical staff injected, and the old folk jabs start in two Tokyo city/wards from the 12th of next month, where they'll get one box each of 1,000 or so shots to inject. I might get mine for Christmas, if I'm lucky.

So it appears some of you really don't want us to use the word 'hacker' when we really mean 'criminal'

Ken Y-N
Headmaster

Quantum Leaps

But, a quantum leap in sub-atomic physics is the smallest jump an (err, should Google this) electron can make moving from one orbit to another or something.

Back in my PFY days, I read a book on the story behind the Sinclair QL (Quantum Leap) and they said that they nicked the term from the Japanese who were using it to describe their efforts to move to 5GL and AI.

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

Ken Y-N
Facepalm

I couldn't help noticing the second-worst project for "whitelist" is called "cockpit", which surely is a phallic-centric view of who is qualified to operate machinery. I demand my right to be offended!

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Ken Y-N
Thumb Down

Trump is more Scottish though

His mother was a chain migrant who might have had an English level as poor as wife number 3 (she was a native Gaelic speaker), but that didn't stop the vast majority of us hating the ginger shitgibbon.

FYI: NASA appears to have scooped dirt from an asteroid 200 million miles away and plans to bring it back home

Ken Y-N
Thumb Up

Nice, but note the Japanese did this last year, and will be home for Christmas.

https://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/

What is your 'intent'? Google Assistant opens door to chatting with third-party apps

Ken Y-N
Go

...And it's gone!

GMail Go has Gone - it seems they must have accidentally removed the device lock, as it's now unavailable on my devices.

FFS FSF, you're 35 already? Hands up if you just sprouted a gray hair or felt a craving for a Werthers Original on reading that. Happy birthday, folks

Ken Y-N

I believe they are a popular beat combo, m'lud.

Now Nvidia's monster GeForce RTX 3090 cards snaffled up by bots, scalpers – if only there had been a warning

Ken Y-N
Terminator

Couldn't AI work out who was a bot?

I hear that NVidia might have some expertise iin that field.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

Ken Y-N
Facepalm

Re: Blockchain

> I didn’t even see where blockchain is used here?

Security through obscurity - there's such an obscure mechanism for using a blockchain that it might as well not be there.

Notepad++ website sent to China's naughty step after 'Stand with Hong Kong' software update

Ken Y-N
Big Brother

Notepad++

Voted "Doubleplusungood" by the CCP.

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Fujitsu tells 80,000 of its Japan employees: From now on, you work remotely

Ken Y-N
Paris Hilton

I predict the Fujistu salaryman divorce rate going up; with hubby at home all the time and him having no chance to go out with the boys after work for networking over a beer or ten, marital stress will go up.

Paris as one of the favourite evening pastimes is visiting hostess bars, and not surprisingly one of the major vectors of new cluster outbreaks is clubs for the gents (and for ladies too).

Ken Y-N

Japanese resident here - I'm with another major Japanese company and waiting for the same announcement for us. My home office is the kitty room sitting on the floor at a low table staring at an A4-sized screen, and I've probably got a larger than average place.

It's not mentioned in the post, but there's an extra 5,000 yen (about 35 quid or so) per month to buy a desk, pay for air conditioning, etc.

Developers renew push to get rid of objectionable code terms to make 'the world a tiny bit more welcoming'

Ken Y-N
Stop

Black/whitelist to block/allowlist?

Why not stick to colours and have Redlist and Greenlist as are already used by governments for things like trading partners? Or will American Indians and vegans get upset?

(I agree changing master/slave, but for git, keys, etc it smells of virtue signalling)

Whoa, whoa... Tesla slams brakes on allegations of 'unintended acceleration' bug: 'Completely false and was brought by a short-seller'

Ken Y-N
Thumb Down

How I hate "clap-back"!

Perhaps I'm not enough of a yank millennial, but what's wrong with good old "retort"?

Also, I find all the "short-seller" retorts that fly around whenever any bad news about Tesla no more that just a smokescreen to distract from the fact that the US authorities are happy with purchasers continuing to be beta (alpha?) testers for Tesla's platform. Germany has decided they must disable it ("Wah, wah, BMW/Benz are just butt-hurt!" I hear the Teslarati cry) but will the US ever start independent investigations?

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

Ken Y-N
FAIL

Re: Is this just an English thing ?

> what if "they" is also on the banned list?

I've just been catching up with this whole story, and yes, "they" is banned as you may hurt his/her/xer/attack helicopter's feeling by not using his/her/etc's preferred pronoun.

Good news Flash lovers! Microsoft won't be disabling it by default (so long as you use IE or old Edge)

Ken Y-N

...from the right-click tab context menu

I nearly choked on my cornflakes at the prospect of create tab and reopen closed tab going away, but they mean from the context menu; I always use CTRL-N and CTRL+SHIFT+T, so it makes no different to me.

Page: