News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

batiudrami

Re:Australia says OpenAI agent hacked into government website on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @10:02PM (#49825289)
I am certain there would be better guardrails if there were some actual consequences for the people who built these products.
It’s also very expensive! In Australia a BYDAtto 1, which is a 5 seater full featured hatchback capable of normal speeds, is US$17,000.
Similarly the real eyesore in neighbourhoods is all the cars and the assorted infrastructure dedicated to them.

40% of Australian households have rooftop solar. You get used to the look very quickly, and well-installed ones look perfectly fine.

Re:Ads on Apple Maps on Thursday May 07, 2026 @12:22AM (#48045356)
Good for navigation, terrible for up to date business information (opening hours) and reviews.

Google maps’ reviews aren’t great - everything is a 4.3 because they incentivised users to review business interactions they didn’t care about by paying them pennies in Google pay credit - but it will at least tell me reliably if a business is closed today or has shut down.

These muppets won’t win power anyway, they are at least two election cycles away from being competitive again. The last election was a catastrophe.

That said, New Zealand rules, everyone should visit.

Re:Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008 on Saturday March 28, 2026 @02:50PM (#47557244)
Their target is not coders, it is the professional world who do 90% of their work in Office applications, like me. A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.

But I agree, it sucks. It is the only AI we are able to use at work and for tasks that it should be good at (compare comment sheets against a deliverable register and assign to specific packages) and it just can’t do it. It can read the spreadsheet and understand them just fine but outputs are garbled nonsense.

It is interesting to me, as an Australian, that it almost seems like Osama Bin Laden won. The fall of the US commenced when they let the fear in, and that was September 2001.
Re:The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ on Sunday March 15, 2026 @06:01AM (#47385851)
NTS is truly excellent yes.

The streaming app algorithms are bland as hell, built for people who just want noise in the background.

The verge does have lawyers on staff (obviously, as does any media organisation of a certain size). I would be sure they have consulted with them, but there is also a story in this.
Re:Why New Zealand is seeing an exodus of over-30s on Saturday March 07, 2026 @02:00AM (#47285184)
You can work freely and get access to Medicare (and vice-versa) so they’re more-or-less citizens anyway.
A classical virus, from the good old days. None of this botnet/bitcoin mining in the background nonsense.
Re:Apple Introduces iPhone 17e on Monday March 02, 2026 @07:24PM (#47226231)
It definitely is less important / visible to some people. I have a 175Hz screen at home and a 120Hz iPhone, but I use a 60Hz iPad and displays at work and if I am not focusing on it I simply do not notice the difference.
Re:Apple introduces the new iPad Air, powered by M4 on Monday March 02, 2026 @07:18PM (#47226183)
I didn’t understand iPads for years. As a half engineer half email monkey, doing work on them is still next to impossible, especially with nerfed versions of Office applications.

But, they are excellent for media consumption, particularly reading and marking up PDFs. I am able to focus while reading in a way I cannot on a computer. Procreate is amazing (drawing brushes with a pressure sensitive pen and layer/mask support all in one). Great for playing Civ on a flight. And it does all those things in a comfortable form factor while being fundamentally a pleasant device to use.

All that considered, the iPad Air is not that expensive, and it will probably last you a decade before it needs replacing.

Or your dog eating the AirTag with the button battery inside it
Re:The $100B Megadeal Between OpenAI and Nvidia Is on Ice on Friday January 30, 2026 @11:26PM (#46833486)
Important for what? Google and anthropic's models are already better, and google actually makes money, and both are US companies. What strategic relevance is there to Open AI?
Re:BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal on Thursday January 01, 2026 @10:19PM (#46461043)
They are huge in Australia too. And the advice basically everyone gives is "if you're going electric, you'd be crazy not to consider BYD first".

A couple of years ago the only notable EVs you'd see were Teslas, now you'd see at least 2-3x as many BYDs.

Re:The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming? on Saturday December 20, 2025 @07:10PM (#46340966)
Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying. The “optimisation” you talk about was the CPU in the ps4 generation was so weak and tech was moving so fast that any pc bought in 2015 onwards would easily brute force overpower anything that had been built for that generation.
Isolating children? They’re schoolchildren! They see their peers at school every day.
Re:What you can get for the price of a Netflix subscription on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @04:55AM (#46044228)
There is tonnes of private art in the world you are simply not able to see at all.

Many of these TV shows also come to DVD/Blu-Ray eventually.

Hey hey safe injecting rooms have real harm minimisation impacts. Not convinced you can say the same for chatbot boyfriends.
The fare is a flat au 50c, though. It is basically free.
Re:Steam Machine on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @07:48PM (#45909057)
I know you are being rhetorical but for reference, of course not, their margin on hardware is 36%
Liz is a lady, and I am confident she did not AI generate this article. Aside from it clearly having her authorial voice, here is another piece she has written:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24326077/i-asked-chatgpt

By the phrasing this is almost certainly a patch for targeted vulnerabilities to install Pegasus or similar.
Re:Tomorrow's Emoji, Today: Unicode 17.0 on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @07:46PM (#45191112)
This was a much bigger issue 10 years ago than it is now. Emoji are generally fairly consistent across hardware vendors.
Re:Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update on Saturday July 12, 2025 @09:31PM (#44546733)
Firefox now has vertical tabs built in. Not as feature filled of course though tab groups and vertical tabs together replaces all the functionality I needed from Tree Style Tabs.
Re:It's Time to Rethink 6G on Thursday February 13, 2025 @12:08AM (#43032866)
Pretty common physics convention, uncommon when referring to data speeds but common for other things measured over time.
Re:Nobody Cares on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @01:24AM (#42707957)
Also external people don’t generally know or understand all the constrains that led to decisions that are suboptimal (for the person complaining).
Re:How to delete your Facebook account on Friday January 10, 2025 @12:41AM (#42652894)
To be clear, you think the change to specifically allow (verbatim from the new Meta training materials)

““Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians,” and “Trans people are immoral.””

is a net improvement?

Re:28h Days: year 1 update on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @10:37PM (#42641355)
This seems like the biggest disadvantage to me too. I see friends four or five nights a week so I would have to give a lot of that up.

Which is a shame because longer days would probably significantly improve my sleep.

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