Posts by veti

Re: Reading between the lines ...

Yeah, I find it hard to blame Ray. A SQL query that authenticates itself - what kind of half-assed server configuration even lets you write such a thing? But it sounds like this was common practice at Major Corp^TM.

Re: Imagine that ? No, I don't.

Even on desktop, there are ways to disguise it. Tyop squatting. Non-Latin charsets. A determined attacker can make it pretty hard to tell the difference between microsoft.com and micrοsoft.com.

Re: I'm not planning to visit the United Hell Holes any time soon

I've said it before - the first female POTUS will be a Republican.

When the Dems nominate a woman, half the debate - not the public debate, but the arguments in families and forums and podcasts - becomes about her identity. It just sucks the oxygen away from every more substantive issue. It happened with Clinton, and we saw exactly the same thing happen with Harris.

The only way to draw that poison from the debate is for the GOP to nominate a woman. That would be quite a different dynamic. It'll happen eventually - they won't be able to resist that particular way of owning the libs - and when it does, it will finally break the glass ceiling. I doubt any Dem can do it before then.

Re: Of Course..

If you look for stories about the doings of the US government on this site, it shouldn't take you long to notice plenty of nasty being written about them.

The difference is, that government is relatively open. We know a lot of what it does, and that gets reported on. That sort of detail simply isn't available from the Russian or Chinese governments. For instance, nobody in Russia is leaking information that suggests a specific government agency is lying, and I for one don't think that's because everyone in the Russian government is a paragon of honesty.

When governments choose to be secretive, there are only so many ways the press can cover them.

Re: Aiming, how quaint

Proof: there are still people living in the USA [citation needed]. If "the majority of" gun owners were as you imply, there wouldn't be.

Re: "Deep state individuals"?

"Deep state" isn't a conspiracy. It's more like a cult, although that implies a level of organization that no-one is really claiming. It's a mindset, a way of thinking.

Watch an episode - any episode - of Yes, Minister. Sir Humphrey is the deep state.

When Trump uses the phrase, he means "someone too professional to roll over for whatever I want to do". Or possibly "I promised these other thugs a job, yours will do nicely".

Re: Rap

Rap with a silent "c".

Re: Banning drones

We went through this at Gatwick in 2018. The problem with shooting them down is, it's messy and downright dangerous. You're talking about discharging live ammunition - lots of it - over a heavily populated area.

The world in general, and NATO in particular, urgently needs a way of remotely disabling drones without the high risk of collateral damage.

Re: All that money

"Communist" is an unnecessarily long-winded way to describe him. I prefer to leave out some of those letters, specifically the "omm" and "is", for a much more succinct form.

Re: Pretend I am a Martian.

If Apple tried it, it's only a matter of time before they'd be up to their neck in antitrust suits.

It's not reasonable to build an entire fab dedicated to serving only one manufacturer, so they'd have to sell chips to other customers as well. Some of those other customers would become fixated with the idea that they weren't getting as good a deal as the parent company, and that would open a whole can o' worms.

That's why vertical (supply-chain) integration is usually not a great idea.

Re: Help desk

Possibly because they're the one department in any organization that actually tries to be helpful.

Re: Consumers get any power?

If you genuinely go off grid, you don't need a meter at all. Unplug your house from the grid, you can do what you like and it's nobody's business but yours.

Most people don't want that level of independence, they prefer the safety net of a grid connection, and that means metering.

Calling him "D J Trump" makes him sound way cooler than a truly dire president. Let's not.

Re: But...isn't it all just bollocks?

You just described the development of high level programming languages and environments. And low level ones before, for that matter. What we're seeing is simply another abstraction layer being added to a cake that's already plenty thick.

We know it did "look" at the image, because it went on to produce its own version which is clearly based on it.

I do believe the text prompt "convinced" it that this must be a variation on "the famous illusion", because otherwise that question wouldn't have been posed. But possibly it doesn't "see" the illusion itself, so it doesn't try to check the image for such.

Re: Extra option?

If those "smaller companies" fail to negotiate good terms with the Treasury, they'll simply go out of business, leaving their software unsupported. Realistically, a high-FOSS mix for the public sector would inevitably mean - sooner rather than later - an absolutely huge team of software engineers employed by the taxpayer to do their maintenance. I haven't crunched any numbers on what that would cost, but my guess is - way more than MS licensing.

And human nature being what it is, I find it hard to believe those software engineers would be the brightest and best of their profession, either. Maintenance is boring. And hard. Way harder, and more boring, than, say, developing new software of your own devising. If only the UK were part of some larger association of governments that could collaborate and share the load between them...

It would provide a degree of independence, which is something, certainly. But how much are we willing to pay for it?

At least tobacco consumption was voluntary. If you wanted to avoid it, it was reasonably clear what you had to do.

Re: So many toolkits, frameworks, APIs, versions and confusion

It's not new. Microsoft has been doing this even longer than Google. And it's not random, it's strategy.

Every developer hour you spend playing catchup with Microsoft's newest dev tools, systems, environments, whatever... is an hour you're not spending improving your actual product, thinking about new features your customers might actually appreciate. Joel Spolsky calls it "fire and motion". Microsoft puts up covering fire to keep its potential competitors busy and distracted, while it moves quietly towards whatever actual target it's currently focusing on.

Re: How is an embassy not using a VPN?

How do you connect to the VPN?

Unless you have your own dedicated wires, taking the signal all the way outside the Russian data network and never once using a Russian wire, switch or router, the VPN is just security theatre. You'd need your own trusted satellites to do it, which might be feasible for the Americans but not many others.

Re: The real question

In the first place, what you say of Microsoft chasing profits is equally true of literally every company in the western world. Some are just better at it than others.

In the second place, you seem to be assuming that Windows is Microsoft's only, or at least its strongest, revenue generator. It's not, not even close. Windows is to Microsoft as mud to a carrot, it's necessary that it should be there, but not very tasty in itself. Frankly I doubt if it makes a profit at all.

Re: Supply and demand is a fundamental part

You're mistaking opportunism for strategy.

Re: ...likely limiting the reach of such ads...

The downside is that it does nothing to restrict bot and troll farms run by suitably motivated parties, like the infamous Internet Research Agency.

On the plus side, though, the IRA used small scale paid ads to gather hard diagnostic data on which types of messages were most effective, so even they would still be impaired a little.

Re: Meh.

Except they'd have to be looking for educational pictures of detailed car anatomy. For strictly educational purposes, obvs. Educationally.

Re: America's critical infrastructure

Ah, but what is "critical"? And exactly how much of your mutilated budget are you willing to spend to maintain that airgap?

For instance, surveillance cameras in a car park outside the House of Representatives - critical or not? How about one outside the Pentagon? It's not exactly secret, but you can imagine some pretty sensitive intel being gathered that way over a period.

Re: App search is random

On my desktop right here:

c: shows Calculator, Copilot, Google Chrome, Command Prompt (in that order)

ch: shows Google Chrome, then some web results.

Re: Just do the right thing!

That much is true, and would be commendable if they had any actual affinity for "the truth" as an ideal.

But they're equally willing to hurt people by spouting absolute bollocks, which leads me to suppose that their guiding principle is not "telling truth" but merely "causing pain, by whatever means works". And that's textbook evil.

Re: DDoS promoting world peace?

Consciences are for free people. It's not a concept you can expect a slave to understand.

Re: Move fast ...

TFA is about doing neither of those things.

Re: 'decades-old "ball and chain" legacy contracts'

Welcome to middle age.

Unlike Trump, I don't obsess about where things happen. It's the things themselves that make the world a better place.

Recycling rare earths? Good. Regardless of whether it's done in the US or China or Afghanistan or Mexico... still good. Materials afterwards add to the global supply chain, and will be distributed according to normal capitalist rules, with follow on effects on other industries through the price mechanism... that is to say, everything working as designed to optimize resource use.

If you really want something to cheer the sort of people who seem to pass for "patriotic Americans" these days, consider this: the initiative means less demand for newly extracted rare earths, dilutes Chinese hegemony in that market and weakens their stranglehold on global electronics manufacturing.

Re: Once again ...

Because magic. Don't question it, heretic.

Re: north korea knows you are a coward

And passwords can be hacked, and origins can be spoofed, and even real people can be impersonated... We all know that a well resourced attacker can get through almost any feasible (and many nonfeasible) levels of security.

But it gets harder to do. Each check raises the bar a little bit. And for 99.9% of us, that's good enough. At some point, the attacker will simply say "bugger this, I'm off to infiltrate someone easier", and that's what we want. Not to catch them, not to stop them entirely - that's not our job, that's what we have professional national security TLAs for - but simply to prevent them becoming our problem.

North Korea may have Mission: Impossible level teams of infiltrators who can breeze through all of this shit, but I bet it doesn't have many of them, and those it does will be directed at the most valuable targets. That's not my company, so I don't have to worry about them.