Posts by heyrick 6629 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2009
In sane jurisdictions, it isn't. You cannot be held to any terms and conditions that weren't clearly marked before opening the package.
This may also extend to annul that pre-installation crap you must "agree" to because it's not available until the package has been opened, and many places won't accept returns of opened software packages, but I don't think this specific scenario has actually been tested. Most people just click the Continue button without reading all that legalese crap...
"They're not saving lives like nurses"
Who get shit pay, long hours, increasing amounts of abuse for things they have no control over, and damn near zero respect. Back when the pandemic was at its worst, everybody felt good by clapping. How about provisions, supplies, PPE and funding?
They'd probably have less stress and more pay trying to cut it as "influencers", so your point is...?
"Disposable phones with no software updates."
Downvoted, because some manufacturers actually support their products. Maybe they understand that if they flog you a two-years-out-of-date build of Android and never support it, you probably won't be thinking of them when it comes time to get a newer phone...
"and a huge disparity of development targets"
Funny. I had an iPad Mini back in the days of iOS7, and there were a number of apps that appeared to only work in portrait with rather large icons, as if laid out for an iPhone rather than a tablet. And that's a company with basically two form factors (phone and tablet) and a fairly limited number of models.
Some people put in the effort to support different device types and OS versions. Some...don't.
Not a word you'll find in a dictionary - this twat misspelled it, then decided that was better exactly because it won't match any known word.
Anyway, if you're trying to brute force the password of a British bloke in a French bank, are you really going to cycle through all of the word lists of all of the languages? Oh, things like Russian would be fun - at work we've had an Oxana, an Oksana, an Oxhana, and an Ocksanna (who may or may not have had an 'h', I don't remember). All the same in Russian, transliterated multiple ways to Latin alphabet. Apply that to the rest of the language (and others...Japanese - Herburn or Wapuro?) and it starts to get a bit infeasible, don't you think?
"Just because apps on Android do it doesn't make it right, it's highly irritating on there too."
Upvote. Because of recent EU rules on banking, quite often when I buy something from a website I'm asked the switch to the bank app to authorise the purchase. If I do that, I find that upon switching back, the OS unloaded the browser and thus threw away all the order information/basket contents. So I've just authorised a purchase that got "forgotten".
What I have to do is either use my tablet and phone, or wait for the thing to time out and offer to send me a text instead (then wait more until it arrives). It's a pain in the arse, and, I suspect, just a lot of security theatre for no actual benefit (it's the same bank that replaced my longish foreign word password with a five digit PIN because this is "my trusted device" <facepalm emoji>).
"The AI can write a book for you."
By regurgitating bits of other books that it can already scanned and read.
I really wish people would stop thinking of AI as some sort of mystical God. It isn't in any way intelligent as it lacks understanding of what it is dealing with. Hence, it's just clever pattern matching that makes suggestions and additions by recognising what you wrote resembles something it saw someplace else, so maybe you're writing the same thing. If you're lucky, it might be able to predict what will happen next by simply detecting and following the trend, much as a child can work out and correctly guess the next in the Fibonacci sequence given the first few numbers and no explanation of what links them.
This article demonstrates, yet again, that AI is not the holy grail of computing. It is, however, much more like the holy grail of bullshit.
Minute oneth problem. The article states "two Mormon brothers in Utah". It doesn't strike me as a belief system that would even acknowledge such smuttiness exists until it smacks them in the face, upon which time it'll be necessary to freak out and blame everybody else because "training the AI on porn" is surely some sort of cardinal offence that'll get them excommunicated to the gulag...
Actual quote from the article: which it hoped to avoid.
Hoped, past tense, as in all being lost. That's why I didn't quote that part.
Upvote for the other message because, yeah, bargepoles aren't long enough (but a stack of banknotes will do nicely).
You are oh so very close to the truth...
On a Windows 11 laptop, one uses Google to get to Facebook (because it's somehow easier to type Google and then search for Facebook than to remember a 12 letter URL).
A few months of Facebook activity, and one is in danger of qualifying as one of the aforementioned zombies.
The apocalypse happens when more people depend upon the services of a single corporate, than don't (I find it worrying how many people equated Facebook's failure as "the internet isn't working").
Given that it's been years and numerous stories about profiling people, pushing just their right buttons, screwing with democracy, and giving a platform to the terminally stupid to amass followers like sheep caught in a web of confirmation bias, I wonder if the apocalypse is already on its way?
"trying to find out what was going on because they couldn't take any customer orders, etc."
Almost makes me want to learn to play the violin.
I was sent a mailshot by some magazine company. Some of the offerings sounded good, but their contact was on Facebook and their method of contact was Messenger.
Mailshot -> recyclage.
My opinion of a company using Facebook for their services is lower than my opinion of a company with a Wanadoo/Yahoo/GMail email address.
Upvote for ArcWeb and Netsurf.
ArcWeb was my first browser too, and when I'm not using Firefox on my phone, I'm probably using Netsurf on RISC OS.
I mentioned MSIE because websites these days use CSS a lot and look kind of shit on a browser that doesn't understand that, which is why I didn't mention a really old browser like ArcWeb or Arachne. I'm aware of what IE did, I lived through the Browser Wars...
The company I work for has some new fancy HR crap that they expect us to use for preparation for our annual interview.
I swear to god, we're looking at at least forty five seconds to load the intro page (which is actually a pretty simple looking "dashboard", it's not like a big image or anything).
I rather imagine I'm liable to tell my boss I lost the will to live waiting for it to do anything useful for me. If she doesn't buy that, I can always point out how utterly and completely it is broken on mobile devices. It seems to understand mobile because it's slightly better behaved when in desktop mode. As for mobile? Well, let's see, an insane screen width and disallow manual zooming and resizing.
I dunno who made this crap, but if IT procurement was my responsibility, all of this would be flushed to the null device. If the user facing aspect is this bad, I dread to think what it's like under the hood.
And I specificity don't test with Chrome because the Android version of Chrome insists on buggering around with text sizes with no opportunity to turn this behaviour off, so I just ignore it. It does what it does and I don't give a crap. Stuff is still visible, if the relative sizes of different parts of the document are all messed up, that's on Google, not me.
As for breaking changes, maybe this is true if you use all the cutting edge still implemented because "this feature is awesome!" and later withdrawn when the size of its risk is actually understood (battery status API, anybody?). But if you stick with proper standards and not what some browser dev is currently wanking over... Guess what, it'll work from MSIE (remember that) to the latest Firefox, and everything in between.
(as it's my préfecture, I live nearby)
My advice is simple - go to Nantes. Went for the first time by train in August, and the attitude and behaviour was remarkable. I found Nantes open and friendly and vibrant. Rennes, on the other hand, is best described as shades of grey devoid of colour (though, I will grant, the métro is nifty).
Definitely blame the developers. My experience of Android is that advertising is growing. What used to be acceptable little textual adverts is more and more full video adverts with sound (on by default) and a five second timeout. Because money. App shows enough adverts, dev gets some coin.
Sometimes I wonder if it's an app with adverts, or if it's an elaborate advert delivery mechanism. Either way, the adverts show up and the developer makes some money. And nobody gives a stuff about tracking or privacy (if, indeed, the dev even realises, he may just be using a bog standard library that does everything automagically).
"Another theoretical vulnerability makes it into the zeitgeist..."
Ah, but there's money to be made here. So expect iBling thefts to rise, and the bad guys to have "a device" that makes this thieving possible. They don't have to understand how it works, only how to use it. So...
I have a GMail address that I use for places I don't trust. It recently got an email from Google saying that because I have not proven that I'm over eighteen, several settings have been changed.
I signed in, had a look at what they wanted. I could either "pay" a zero amount with a bank card (giving Google my card information in the process) or the slower mode by taking a photo of my identity card/passport and sending it to them (giving Google, essentially, my identity).
Fuck off you fucking rapacious fucks.
I get that they need to know if I'm over eighteen, but that's just way too much information to hand over for an email address. I barely trust the government not to lose/share/get hacked, I sure as hell am not going to send that sort of information to god only knows where, to be kept for god only knows how long, and potentially shared with god only knows who.
I mean, FFS, a special uses-less-water urinal likely does more eventual environmental damage due to being wildly overengineered rather than some simple easy to repair mechanical contraption, like, oh, I dunno, a push knob that doesn't spew water for thirty seconds?
"what red lines they're looking at"
Three simple things.
1, block all content that isn't approved (scripts, images over a certain size, pop-ups)
2, auto-delete all unapproved cookies after 120 seconds
3, completely block all requests to domains known to serve up nothing worthwhile (doubleclick, facebook, fbcdn...).
You wouldn't let a complete stranger into your home, to insert a USB key into your computer, to run the software of their choosing on your machine. So why the hell does everybody seem to think it's okay to do this "in a browser". If the script offers me benefit, then it (and it alone) can run. Otherwise, GTFO.
Title says it all, but really it shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that a global ad flinger revises their browser in such a way that it will no longer be able to offer the same degree of privacy and content blocking that users deserve, as said privacy and blocking invariably blocks the crap that they get paid to fling.
What's sad is how many others are going along with this.
10 MB/sec for raw? Not likely, a good DVD encode will push 6-7 for an MPEG-2 steam.
Raw is going to be a fair bit more. I get 216 Mbps for PAL.
Source: https://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/future-net/digital-video/mpeg2.html
Not just that, but if it's such an important application, why was it possible to shut it down with just a click? It should have popped up dire warnings, asked for a password, or simply refused to shut down until the computer itself was being turned off or rebooted...
Around here (north west France), BK is bigger, tastier, and cheaper than the sad clown. But, holy crap is it greasy. I find as I get ever crustier, my gut is less willing to tolerate some of the weirdness that I throw it's way. And BK, sadly, counts as much weirdness because of the grease content. So now it's like one of these strange sadomasochistic religious events - oh burger, oh cheese, oh yes (but I'm going pay for this later). Yum yum yum yum yum. But not on a day when I need to get up early the next morning. Because, you know, best to be on the safe side.
[I really ought to teach myself to make my own burgers, it would be less grease, real meat, real cheese, and cost a hell of a lot less; but alas, I'm lazy...]
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