Posts by mark l 2

If Musk wants to be able to post whatever he wants without infringing on the T&Cs of a platform run by a third party, why not just create his own blog where he can post whatever he wants? Even if his blog were getting millions of hits per day its going to cost a significantly lot less than $40B to run.

After all unlike us plebs, who if we made our own blog would unlikely to get too much attention. Musk has enough fan who would follow him elsewhere even if he closed his twitter and posted everything on a private blog. And hes still going to make the news when he posts something controversial. I've just checked and pedoguy.com is available if he wants it. Obviously Pedoguy is a local slang term from where i am from meaning tech entrepreneur, and im sorry if that means something else where Musk is.

Let be honest though Meta will be getting 47% of nothing as 'the metaverse' is just a huge white elephant which is going to crash and burn, and hopefully wipe billions of FB share price.

On the BBC website regarding this story it says "Police from the UK, US, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and Romania were all involved in the dismantling of the online platform." Which shows what he was doing was obviously illegal in all of those jurisdictions.

Since he was arrested in the UK and is a Portuguese citizen I don't see what is the reason he has to be extradited to the US and can't be deported to Portugal to face charges there or tried in the UK?

Also on the BBC "Special agent Jason Kane, from the US Secret Service, said: "This global investigation signifies the remarkable dedication of the US Secret Service and highlights our partnerships with our foreign law enforcement counterparts essential to disrupting sophisticated networks of cyber-criminals."

I thought the secret service job was protecting the US president not going after people selling stolen credit card details?

"The compute requirements for blockchains utilizing proof-of-work consensus mechanisms is growing rapidly, Intel says, and requires an enormous amount of energy, citing this as its motivation for developing Blockscale – delivering new technologies that can provide the requisite power in a more energy-efficient manner."

Or more likely, they want to get on the gravy train and make some quick money selling kit which will become completely useless once the crypto bubble bursts, or more cypto currencies switch away from proof of work.

I suspect that all these cloud providers are going to try and push more ARM VMs going forward because the cost per Watt is lower than x86 and with energy prices sky rocketing that is starting to make a big difference for them.

Oracle Cloud are letting you play around with a VM with 4 Arm Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory on their always free tier. Which is a really decent spec for a free VM if you can put up with it being offered by Oracle.

So Putin has banned any foreign software purchase for critical infrastructure, but I guess that doesn't mean they are going to rip out whats already there to replace it with Russian coded software? I expect that for a lot of stuff there is no home grown alternative. And you can't just knock something up overnight to replace western software that has taken years to develop.

Even something as 'easy' as replacing Windows PCs with the Russian made Astra Linux isn't something that can be easily done if they are using any proprietary Windows software that won't run under WINE.

As for the open source projects that decided to delete files where a Russian IP address is detected, this is a carpet bombing approach to protesting against Russian government aggression. As the developer can't know whether that that IP is a government one or if it belongs to a individual citizen, hospital, charity or anti war organisation.

Without having ever charged an EV i don't know, can you not simply unplug the power cable mid charge to stop it charging up or is it locked into place until the charge is completed?

As if you can simply pull it out mid charging, i suspect there are way more people going to do if they wanted to cause inconvenience to the owner of an unattended EVs on charging than rig up a modem, software and antenna to do wireless hack to interrupt the charging process.

GNOME developers have always done what they see as their own vision of for the Linux desktop, and not everyone agrees with that hence forks like MATE came along which went their own way from GNOME and is my personal choice for a DE. That's the advantage of FOSS is if you don't like the way some project is heading you can always jump ship to another or even create your own fork if you have the skills.

Where as MS decided to dick around with the start menu from Windows 8 onwards constantly changing it with every new release and you have to implement 3rd party hacks to get it as you prefer it to be, which can get patched by MS at any moment with a windows update because they get to dictate how YOUR computers DE should behave.

I thought we had got passed the pure GHz numbers as a measure of CPU performance years ago? If it can't sustain running in 5.5GHz mode for a long period of time I can't see how that is good for gaming, as if it were to suddenly throttle mid game because the CPU starts to melt through the motherboard then the game will start to slow down as well.

Windows file manager is crap compared to the competition on other OS, still not an option for opening multiple tabs? Come on MS this feature has been in most Linux file managers for years.

Stop spending all your time trying to fleece your users out of a few more pennies with ads and actually improve your software.

Its extremely doubtful that the members of REvil Russia arrested will face criminal charges now due the war with Ukraine. I suspect that Russia may even now recruit them to attack businesses and institutions in countries that have sanctioned Russia as a way of generating extra money for their corrupt regime.

Maybe the Ukrainian suspect can get a lenient sentence if he agrees to use his skills against Russia as part of the cyber warfare?

The last time I was with Virgin Media was around 10 years ago, when I switched to another ISP, the day after the switch they disabled access to the email address. So this taught me to never use a ISP provided email again.

Instead bought a domain name and forward emails sent to my domain to a whatever email provider I want.

In regards to the owner of this account who says his 10 character password is cracked within a day. This suggests its either someone at VM who is able to reset the password without the customers knowing, or his device is compromised and no matter how long the password was it was destined to get found out. As there is no way that someone should be able to crack a 10 character password with upper and lowercase letters plus numbers within such a short time even if VM were allowing 1000s of login attempts per second. Which I assume they don't?

"This, the company said, represents progress, because lawful cryptocurrency usage is growing faster than criminal usage"

Buy lawful usage I assume they mean all the suckers who are buying bitcoin as an 'investment', as who is actually spending/accepting cryptocurrency for goods and services? Its no use for low value items do the fees and for anything of high value you run the risk that £10K of Bitcoin today could be worth £8K , £1K or zero tomorrow with the fluctuation in Bitcoins value.

"The former head of ICANN, two EU parliamentarians, and a handful of technical, security, and legal experts on Thursday plan to publish an open letter to the internet governance community arguing that the time has come to develop a targeted internet sanctions system."

Anyone who claims to be a technical expert who backs these measures should never be given a position where they have any authority what so ever. I am just glad that its the ex head of ICANT who is proposing this, and no someone who is currently in charge. As doing that is the fast way to break up the internet for everyone.

In the event ICANN did delete all the Russian domains, couldn't the Russian gov just instruct their ISP to update their DNS to look up the Russian domains on root servers under Russian control anyway? Effectively making the Russian domains just accessible within Russia only so still able to spread the propaganda to the Russian citizens

Thanks to the great work of the people at Armbian and particularly forum member balbes150, I was able to boot a cheap Chinese Android TV box to a full desktop Linux which even had hardware accelerated 3D and video decoding. Considering these boxes go for about £20 new on Ebay or Aliexpress it works out cheaper than even second hand Raspberry Pi at the moment so something to tinker around with until the chip shortage means Raspberry Pi supplies and prices get back to normal.

Lets not pretend that the UK government investing in Oneweb has anything to do with the desire to provide satellite internet in the first place, it was always a military usage they were interested in. What remains to be seen is can Oneweb's balance sheet cope with writing off those satellites that were due to go up on the Russian rockets without needing more government cash?

Since Apple only makes chips to go into their own products unlike everyone else on that list who have signed up to support UCIe whose chips then go into kit manufactured by other companies, I don't see Apple not being part of it as a big deal as to whether UCIe becomes an industry standard or not.

My guess is that its easier for Apple who is almost exclusively selling to end users to stop operations in Russia with no legal fall out.

Where as SAP and Oracle might find the contracts they agreed with Sberbank means they are legally bound to continuing supporting Sberbank unless EU or US sanctions specifically forbid them or risk breaching the contract and potentially getting sued.

Blocking all TLD Russian domains would hurt ordinary Russian citizens and business who have nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine more than anything to do with the government. And could even affect some business based outside of Russia who registered a RU or SU domain purely because they wanted one.

I own a .PE domain name but am not based in Peru, targeting residents of Peru or have even been to the country.

If there are specific domain names the Russian government are using for propaganda purposed in their war then sure these domains should be revoked by ICANN

Well unfortunately all those who voted for the Tories to 'Get brexit done' and 'take back control' and other phrases which mean nothing, are now having to live with these clowns and their badly thought out 'won't someone think of the children' policies.

Ah yes, the same IBM for whom Nazi Germany was their biggest client outside of the US during the second world war, and who leased the Nazis punch card machines to they could do their census and round up all the Jewish people.

Great idea Intel, during a global chip shortage, bring out a new chip whose ONLY use is generating made up fun bucks. More crap which will be in landfill in another 18 months as it won't even be useful on the second hand market.

I really hope Zuckerberg does spaff a load of cash on this Metaverse and makes a massive loss on it.

VR is a gimmick and has been since the early VR headsets were rolled out in the 90s. The problem is it its fun for a bit, but the novelty soon wears off. Since headsets are expensive, you need a huge area to use it in safely, you look like a complete bell end wearing the headsets, and they can't be used on the go.

I played around with Magneto about 10 years ago, but decided to go with Prestashop and then moved to a fork of Prestashop called 30bees.

Glad I didn't go with Magneto now as I wasn't aware it had been bought up by Adobe but that would certainly have made me want to migrate to another platform. As I have experience with the nightmare of security holes that comes with Adobe software and thankfully don't need to deal with it anymore.

What is needed if the US wants to carry on issuing software patents is they need to set up a patent tribunal, so for a nominal fee of say $100 dollars you can challenge the patent for validity, prior art etc.

None of this court room and lawyer BS that only benefits those billion dollar corps and their lawyers and disadvantages the small guy.

The Pro versions of Windows haven't been so in my eyes since Windows 7. Because as soon as the supposedly professional version of Windows 10 came with Candy crush and all the ads plastered over the start menu it no longer was a pro version in other than its name.

I can't comment about 8 pro as never tried it for more than 30 seconds after seeing the stupid whole screen start menu I removed it and went back to 7.

I use a browser user agent switcher add on, which lets me pretend to be whatever browser and OS i want for all those badly written sites which have decided that they should code for Chrome and ignore all other browser engines.

I have found Aliexpress customer service to be pretty good at refunding you if you do receive dodgy stuff. Ive taken to making a video of me opening the package when it arrives just in case as I need that as evidence when I have to opened a dispute.

Ive learned to just open a dispute and not even bother to involve the seller on Aliexpress though, as whenever I have tried to resolve it with the seller first, they try and run down the clock for you to open a dispute or offer partial refunds etc.

The Amazon and VISA spat was an odd one, as Amazon were complaining about paying a 1.5% fee for accepting VISA credit cards, but yet happily accepted Amex cards which were always higher than Mastercard or VISA rates even with the extra charge that VISA wanted.

"He ordered the Highway Patrol to begin a criminal investigation, forcing me to keep silent for four anxious months."

Highway patrol? No wonder it was such as ridiculous court case if you get CHIPS to investigate a cyber crime