Showing 1 - 10 of 81
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".
Sabine has the science you're after
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/10/2025
» Sabine Hossenfelder is one of the people I regularly watch on the YouTube platform. She is a physicist but also veers into other areas such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. For her latest video -- In Which I Lose Faith In Quantum Computing -- she makes a number of interesting observations. In short, apart from some very specific applications, quantum computing, even if it is scalable from current technology, has limited application. It also has the potential of bringing down a number of current companies highly focused on this technology, or at least some of their divisions. Artificial intelligence takes up a lot of the space that quantum computing could do well in, but for the present at least, AI does it better. The next 10 years, or less, will be important to see how both of these directions develop, or not. If you are interested at all in physics, maths and occasionally quantum computing, then Sabine Hossenfelder provides some interesting perspectives.
Online Safety Act is a bad joke
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/08/2025
» The UK now has their Online Safety Act (OSA) and Australia is blindly following in their footsteps. In the UK it didn't take very long for the tech aware under-18s to bypass all the rules and regain access to adult content. Think about it, if China can't completely block everything do you think the UK had any chance? There were some creative solutions but the most common was a simple Virtual Private Network (VPN). In related news, some VPN companies reported a 1,400% increase in sign-ups since the OSA came into force.
Beware the AI bots
Life, James Hein, Published on 04/06/2025
» I recently joined a Facebook group that supposedly represented Kat Timpf, a regular presenter on the Gutfeld! show. I posted a couple of comments and a couple of weeks later, I received a tag in social media purportedly from Dana Perino, a regular on the Fox show The Five. Initially this was a surprise. Why would a famous TV star want to chat with me? After a few chats, it became obvious something was off. The tag name in Messenger was just Dana Perino but the conversation had a few structural errors, not something a former press secretary would make.
Popularity of cable news is waning fast
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/11/2024
» The age of the cable news provider is waning. Within 24 hours of the Joe Rogan podcast with former US president Donald Trump, it had over 30 million views on YouTube alone. This is far more than any mainstream news or media outlet gets for any of its shows or presentations.
Turning smart glasses into surveillance tools
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/10/2024
» I'm sure most readers are familiar with the Apple Vision Pro, and may have also been witness to someone wearing one out in the real world, because I have. Since then, there has been a new version of the Meta Ray-Bans that look like a pair of nerd glasses from the 1970s. The latter have turned into something from the TV series Person Of Interest by a couple of Harvard undergrads. The pair, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, are known for their punch-activated flamethrower. This time they built a system that allows the Ray-Bans to scan faces of people in view, pass this to an AI system that scans the internet for identification, and builds a dossier that is passed back to the glasses. It's called I-XRAY and challenges the concept of privacy because, if available, it will even provide details like address and social security number.
Do you really own your devices?
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/09/2024
» Do you own the hardware and software you purchased? Yes, no and possibly, so let's dive into an example. A man buys a second-hand Microsoft Surface from the Internet. It is one of a batch. He uses it for a few years until one day a massage pops up on the screen advising that Mastercard has locked the device and it should be returned to Mastercard. The man does some research and finds out that Microsoft has embedded some software in the firmware and BIOS that has enabled this to occur. It also turns out that this software can be found in other Microsoft and Apple devices, is very difficult to detect and requires a high skill level to remove, or you can just install Linux.
Can you trust search engines?
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/08/2024
» So how do conspiracy theories start and how does the internet and major search engine players contribute to them? As I type this, depending on where you are in the world, if you type "assassination attempt" in your search engine, and in particular one associated with Alphabet, the autofill options will have everything except "Trump" in the result set. You can get Kennedy, Hitler, Putin and George Wallace, but not the most prominent one so far this year that was one of those "where were you when you heard" events that some people saw in real time on their TV. The reason Alphabet offered for not giving the result was something along the lines that their policy is not to show political violence. You can of course find a plethora of political violence videos and examples from their search results, just not for this particular instance. Another example if you type "President Donald", the autofill adds Duck and Reagan but not Trump. Or if you Google Donald Trump you get a bunch of Kamala Harris results.
A new low in online scams
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/07/2024
» According to the Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), scammers are now targeting scam victims with fake offers to help them recover from scams. The con is to use information from those scammed in the past and approach these people with an offer to recover the funds they have lost for, of course, an up-front fee.
Bill has ways of forcing updates
Life, James Hein, Published on 22/05/2024
» If you are a Microsoft user, private or business, there is a site you should keep an eye on. Search "Microsoft end of life dates" and then select the result with the heading "Overview – Product End of Support and Retirements", associated with learn.microsoft.com. On the left-hand side there are years. Click on 2025, for example, and you will see that Office 2016 and 2019 products will no longer be supported after Oct 14 of that year. On that same date, Windows 10 will be retired. For both of these there will be no new security updates. For some, this will not be an issue, but organisations will need to take note as it means their security will be potentially compromised after a while. Even with Windows 10 still outselling Windows 11, Microsoft will be pushing people to upgrade over the next 18 months and for many, this will no longer be free. People and organisations tend to stick with what works and Microsoft doesn't like that, so it stops supporting older products. The site will tell you when you will start to be at risk and after that you can decide what to do.