Showing 1 - 5 of 5
Microsoft put on the naughty step by Aussie regulator
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/11/2025
» Microsoft has been at it again. The Competition & Consumer Commission in Australia has started a legal process against the Redmond giant for apparently misleading users of the policies for its Microsoft 365 bundle. Microsoft advised users with a Personal and Family plan that "to maintain their subscription they must accept the integration of Copilot and pay higher prices for their plan, or, alternatively, cancel their subscription".
AI is causing concern again
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/12/2023
» There have been two big stories in the IT world over the past couple of weeks. The biggest one concerns OpenAI and its three-day boardroom drama. In a nutshell, the board voted Sam Altman and other members out of the company. The next day, Microsoft picked them up and anyone else who wanted to head over to a new division. That same day, 700-plus employees of OpenAI signed a letter saying they would go if a rogue board member did not quit and bring Sam Altman back. On the third day, Sam was back and three board members were gone.
The new normal of AI fakes
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/10/2023
» Following on from my last article, consider the following scenario. You've grabbed enough clear speech of someone to make a good AI model of them. You write up some text, pass it through the model and verify that the result sounds exactly the same as that individual. This is a little different from the previous example because it's a text to speech model, but essentially the same as using one voice to change to another. You now take a speech or interview from that person, change one word that will essentially change the context, and process this.
Big Brother grows bigger
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/06/2022
» For some time now I have been having problems with USB and my hard drive letters. Over the course of a day or three, with the exception of C:, hard drives letters would vanish. I have C, W, X and Y. C is an SSD on the motherboard with the other three normal hard drives at 10, 10 and 8 TB. The other problem I had was the computer locking up as the system was scanning for a missing USB drive, even if I ejected them using the correct process. The exception was any Samsung phone that I tried to eject without success.
You are being tracked and here's how to avoid it
Life, James Hein, Published on 02/02/2022
» I decided to spend some time this week addressing security and data sharing. This was prompted by me reading Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, watching Dr Robert Epstein on The Joe Rogan Experience, my son enrolling in a cyber security course and my experience over the years.