Hard Pass

In a long post titled "Our commitment to Windows quality," published on Microsoft's website and sent via email to millions of members of the Windows Insider Program, Windows boss Pavan Davuluri laid out a laundry list of changes Microsoft plans to make in Windows 11, starting this month.

What's most remarkable about this post is what it doesn't contain. Here's how Davuluri kicked things off:

Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows. And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.

That paragraph belongs in the non-apology Hall of Fame, with a cross-reference to "Friday news dump" -- a classic PR technique that aims to minimize media coverage of the awkward news being released.

Mueller, who served as special counsel in the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, was 81.

Robert Mueller, who served as special counsel in the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, died on Friday, according to two people familiar with the matter. He was 81.

The cause of death was not immediately known, but Mueller had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for years, the people said.

Mueller, whose two-year probe concluded in 2019 that Russia had interfered in the election with the intent of benefitting Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, served as FBI director from 2001 to 2013. The Justice Department in 2017 appointed him special counsel to oversee the growing investigation after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.

also this image is so impactful and awesome it's a shame it's not in history books :/

Looking for a simple card/cal/WebDAV server that runs in docker.

Have tried Davis, Radicale and Baikal but have either struggled to get them working or found them a bitch to maintain.

Doesn't have to be a DAV type solution. Syncing/backing up contacts and calendars from an android phone is essential.

This is admittedly somewhat redundant to the earlier post about the taskbar, but there's enough additional information that I find it worth posting.

If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?

That’s the conundrum facing the Windows team at Microsoft right now. Windows VP Pavan Davuluri has gone on the record several times since the start of the year to insist that Microsoft is committed to Windows 11’s quality, most recently in a post today titled “our commitment to Windows quality.” Windows 11 is an operating system that many people use but that few enthusiasts seem to love, either because of recent high-profile bugs or the steadily increasing flow of annoying add-ons, notifications, “helpful” “reminders,” and ads for other Microsoft products and services that coat most of the operating system’s virtual surfaces.

“Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows,” Davuluri wrote. “And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.”

Today’s post at least shows Microsoft attempting to put its money where its mouth is, as it included a short list of specific changes the company will begin rolling out to Windows Insider Program testers between now and the end of April.

Built a small encrypted messenger that runs over any MQTT broker you host. The broker is just a dumb relay — it only sees ciphertext, never plaintext. Setup is dead simple: spin up an MQTT broker (EMQX, Mosquitto, whatever), share a room name and encryption key with someone, done. ChaCha20-Poly1305 + Argon2id, fresh salt and nonce per message. Rust backend (Tauri), React frontend, single portable exe around 5MB. There's also a clipboard encryption mode — type plaintext, it encrypts to clipboard, paste into any app. Useful if you don't want to run a dedicated chat client. Originally designed for people in censored regions, but it works as a minimal self-hosted secure chat for anyone who wants it. Limitations: no forward secrecy, no traffic obfuscation, Windows only for now. Tauri should make cross-compilation straightforward if anyone wants to build for Linux/macOS. Unlicense, public domain. I'm not maintaining it — fork and do what you want.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/technology/p/1903357/should-handymen-use-ai-to-fix-your-electric-outlets-new-mozilla-project-says-yes

In an obscure post, a Mozilla MLE announced a ClawBot ripoff specifically targeted at at tradespeople (electricians, plumbers, roofers, handymen) for help with administrative tasks like scheduling, explaining invoices, etc.

What is their project, ClawBolt? According to their website, it's a compilation of

• A flaky AI agent you run on your computer
• A Telegram chatbot to remotely control it
• A connection to OpenAI to parse all of it

This sounds like a dangerous project to target at tradesmen, doesn't it? AI marketing tells people that AI is smart and safe and powerful when it is anything but. If Facebook's top AI safety genius nearly destroyed her own email inbox, how will a plumber fare?

One of the features of ClawBolt is "memory," something that will store and possibly corrupt questions and answers like "What's Mrs. Johnson's address?" and "My hourly rate is $95".

But it gets worse: ClawBolt documentation says it can scan images to "get help identifying fixtures"

Remember the memes making fun of AI's inability to make wiring diagrams?

I can only imagine how bad this could make things for tradespeople - in addition to violating customer privacy, getting gaslit by a non-deterministic "memory" machine, and potentially breaking their work computers.