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Comment Re:Libre Office (Score 1) 133

It's been a while, but I tried to used LibreOffice for several years on Win10 and eventually had to drop it for a copy of Office (not 365, fortunately), There were just too many subtle and less subtle incompatibilities with the Office that I had to use on my work PCs.

I even tried to get the Libre team to address some of those (e.g. as options), but they said "We're not a copy of Office" (fair enough) and "We do it the right way" (which I honesty did not always agree with). Regardless of right vs wrong, some basic Calc manipulations were so "non-standard" for no other reason than arbitrary choice, that I had to abandon Libre. It cost me far too much frustrating loss of time (with an implied risk of loss of data), and it caused too many problems for the people I had to share my files with and who I could not force to switch to Libre.

Comment If no TPM 2.0 stops WIn11, I'm fine! (Score 1) 152

I don't like Windows. I never did. But I sadly have one machine on which I need it. That one currently is on Win 10 and I most definitely do not want it to be upgraded to the even more privacy-invasive, ad-invasive, user-ignoring Win 11. Fortunately, it doesn't have TPM 2.0, so it currently can't, which suits me just fine.

What's more, that machine is aging and I've started to worry that it will physically break down within 1 year or so - judging by what happened to my earlier ones.So, recently, I went shopping and found a brand new "older" computer that does not satisfy Win11 's requirements, and which is now sitting in storage until I need it to keep Win11 out of my life for another 6 years or so. Hopefully by the time that one also breaks, I will finally be able to escape Windows altogether.

And yes, I do know about the risks of running an unsupported OS. Fact is, nothing truly sensitive is stored on - or connected to - that one machine, and I only use it for certain specific tasks, which allows me to shield it from many risks "by default". And it's sitting behind a double firewall anyway (and for one application even a triple one, as the relevant service provider also applies serious scanning and filtering to the point of annoying me with false positives).

Comment Re: Passkeys are GREAT! (Score 1) 203

My keys are with me at home and I know where they are, but not with me as in "always on my body". If I have to carry them literally everywhere where I might need them to log in (3 computers in 2 fixed and 1 mobile location, spread over 3 floors) and also every time I change between regular clothes, military clothes, and DIY clothes, then that is when I will "loose" them all the time.

Comment Re:Didn't they try this with Microsoft (Score 1) 144

The general Internet-using public didn't give two shits about web standards. What they cared about was that Chrome was fast and responsive and had tabs, while IE was stuck with an overbuilt rendering engine that moved like mud.

Very much this. Early Chrome wasn't without it's flaws, but it WORKED and it was fast. I'm fuzzy on the details and can't be arsed to look up the timeline, but IIRC IE7 was being pushed out and the flaming heap that was IE8 was being forced upon us enterprise Windows users. Both browsers had matured to the Hot Garbage phase of early 2000's software.

Despite the whining of the rest of my IT department, who would only support IE, I switched to Chrome about a week after public release and haven't looked back. It's both better and worse than it used to be, but Chrome is still my daily driver browser. I've tried most of the alternatives, but I keep coming back to Chrome.

Submission + - Ukraine fires UK-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia (aljazeera.com) 1

easyTree writes: Ukraine fires UK-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia

Russia’s foreign intelligence chief says attempts by NATO countries to help Ukraine will not go unpunished.

Ukraine has fired long-range British Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory for the first time, a day after launching United States-made long-range missiles into the country, British media outlets report.

Russian war correspondent accounts on Telegram posted footage on Wednesday they said included the sound of the missiles striking in the Kursk region, which lies on Ukraine’s border. At least 14 huge explosions can be heard, most of them preceded by the sharp whistle of what sounds like an incoming missile. The footage, shot in a residential area, showed black smoke rising in the distance.

People in Kursk also reportedly found fragments from the missiles in the region.

A spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said his office would not be commenting on reports or operational matters.

Britain had previously said Ukraine could use Storm Shadow cruise missiles within Ukrainian territory, but

London has been pressing Washington for permission to allow their use to strike targets inside Russia for several months.

On Tuesday, Ukraine used US-made long-range weapons to strike targets in Russia. US President Joe Biden’s administration has allowed Kyiv to use these missiles in and around the Kursk region only.

Afterwards, Russian President Vladimir Putin lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks. Washington said afterwards it had not seen any reason to adjust its nuclear posture while China called for restraint. See article for more...

Comment Suspicious results (Score 1) 21

I tried a few of my old e-mail addresses that no longer work.
  • One very old one that I know was leaked at least twice around 2000 (but no longer know when and how) was not reported.
  • One was correctly identified as leaked in the 2003 Adobe hack - I knew that already.
  • One that stopped working in 2014 was reported as not leaked. I am, however, about 80% that it was leaked at least once around 2010-2012 (I don't remember the specifics of that, however).
  • One was claimed to be leaked in the 2021 LI scraping, but... by then this address had been obsolete for 2 years and had 99.999999% for sure already been removed from LI.
  • Two more that LI knew about in 2021 were not reported as leaked. Quite weird.

Comment Re: Take it a step further please (Score 1) 284

It can give you hints, but they can be just as meaningless and confusing for non-native speakers. One extreme example: in German (and in Dutch as well) the word for "boy" is masculine, whereas the word for "girl" is not feminine but neutral. To make things even worse, if in German one would try to make "girl" feminine, one would get "die Maedchen", which actually means "girls" (plural).

At least in Dutch the latter would not be the case, since we append an 's' to express the plural of "meisje" and change "het" into "de" at the same time (similar to how German changes "das" into die"). Or how adding some redundancy can help...

Comment All this will do, is stop me from updating (Score 1) 185

I have one Win 10 Pro laptop that runs just fine, but is not illegible to run Win 11. Anyway, even if it were, I would not want to get 11 - to many annoyances. And/But I most certainly don't want ads to sell me Win 11 for/on this machine. So I've been keeping it frozen on specific Win 10 versions for several years and have been blocking all surprise updates for a long time now. In fact, the machine was upgraded only once over all those years and even now is not on the very latest Win 10, because each time Windows get updated to a new release too many things break or too much time has to be spent getting my personal preferences set correctly again.

Last week I was actually starting to look at upgrading to the final Win 10 later this year or early in 2025, prior to EoL, but if that means that I'll be facing forced Win 11 ads, it just will not happen. Blocking Win 11 was my original reason for my policy after all.

I will definitely not update until someone publishes the right registry hack to kill those !@#$%^&* ads.

Comment Re:Will set foil hats to 11 (Score 1) 71

I fully get your point - I am a bit of a privacy nerd - but let's see..

Joe D.(igitaly Illiterate) Random's router is infected. So an employee of a three letter government agency shows up and explains that his router has been used by teh Rusians to attack the DoD and DoJ, and that a software update needs to be installed in order to stop this. What are the chances of our dear Joe allowing this to happen? What are the chances that he'll accuse the government of trying to illegally invade his privacy, or even wanting to install a secret "5G" feature in an attempt to wirelessly control his brain via the microchip they implanted when he got vaccinated against smallpox as a child 40 years ago?

Comment Re: Dont hook it up to the internet (Score 1) 164

This is not the future, but has been the present for 15 years at least.

Disclaimer: Back then I had to work on a product that was to enable that (2G at the time) and the company I worked for wasn't alone.

Fortunately, SmartTVs are unlikely to have this, since they can get a free hike on their owner's (sorry: licensee's - or even more accurately: victim's) WiFi, instead of having to use a paying service that on top of that is less reliable. Getting data from the few people who know how to block a router port and who then also do it, isn't worth the extra hardware and operating cost of a mobile connection.

Comment Re:Arms race? (Score 1) 205

That would be another way to loose me as a "viewer". I often "watch" YT videos in audio-only mode, with the YT window minimized, while doing something else. A site that starts being so fascist that it thinks it should decide and enforce what I physically have to watch even beyond their stupid ads, just looses me completely in an instant.

Comment Re:Let the arms race begin (Score 1) 205

Same here, even though I'm a daily (anonymous) user of YT. There is no way in hell that I'm going to disable my adblockers. Ever. And there is no way in any and all levels of hell that I'm going to get a personal google account for anything. Ever!

Just now I switched over to a YouTube front-end app-killing app because of this stupid little experiment of theirs - much better already anyway. But if YT finds a way to block that or to force ads - especially mid-stream ones - anyway, I'll be saying "sayonara" (in the real meaning of the word, not in the commonly used English understanding of it).

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