Posts by Pascal Monett

Do you trust Xi with your 'private' browsing data? Apple, Google stores still offer China-based VPNs, report says

I don't trust ANYONE with my private browsing data

But there's fuck all I can do about it. Somebody has to answer my request to connect to El Reg, and the first in line is my Internet provider, or my phone company if I'm using my "smart"phone. I have no choice about that, and what they do with that data vs what they say they do is beyond my control.

Google has its sticky fingers everywhere, thanks to its "free" libraries every web developer is using these days, and it's kind of difficult to block that 100% of the time (but I try my best with NoScript and uBlock Origin - obviously my default browser is not Chrome). Facebook is easier to block, but only because I don't have an account, so I don't care and no website will refuse to work if I do. As for Apple, I don't have an iPhone or anything Cupertino-based, so that is also blocked by default (thank God for NoScript).

Xi is not my problem. As mentioned before, he doesn't give a gnat's fart about me and there's nothing he can do to me. If he gets my browsing info from my VPN provider, so be it.

But there is one thing that gets my hackles up every time :

"Chinese law can force any China-based company to assist national intelligence agencies and share customer data with Beijing "

That kind of declaration should automatically be followed by "just like the USA can do to any American-based company with its National Security letters".

Enough of this gratuitious China bashing. NSA letters have existed since 1978, so I think it is safe to say that Beijing is just following Washington's lead on this subject.

Cyber weapons in the Israel-Iran conflict may hit the US

"fully reversible DDoS attacks"

Um, sorry but I don't see the use an attack method that can be "reversed". Does that mean it can be bounced back to the attacker ?

I've tried to search for this, but the best reference I get is this one, and they don't mention that kind of attack.

Could someone enlighten me ?

Re: Macron: "France reaffirms Israel’s right to defend itself"

Every time that idiot opens his mouth, he manages to put his foot in it.

Thank goodness he can't be reelected.

Enterprise AI adoption stalls as inferencing costs confound cloud customers

"it becomes unsustainable from a cost perspective"

But, but . . we've been told for nearly two decades now that The Cloud<supTM</sup> is the best-performing and most cost-effective computing environment there is ! That businesses should all move massively to cloudy platforms because their costs will become negligeable !

Was that all, <gasp>, a lie ?!?

Apple fixes zero-click exploit underpinning Paragon spyware attacks

"keep updating their devices and turning on Lockdown Mode"

What ? You mean I have to actually do something ?

Well I never . . .

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

Well it certainly defied their normal conventions.

Wanted: Junior cybersecurity staff with 10 years' experience and a PhD

Re: Crisis

I have to say that I agree with absolutely everything in your post.

Although I am getting close to pensionable age, so I'd rather it wait a bit longer to become a true relic.

Let's be clear

Recruitment offer that demands you to be young and highly qualified and experienced at the same time ? What a surprise.

This has been going on for decades already. Companies want to put you to work and pay you peanuts for the priviledge. Everybody knows the stupidity of this, but somehow it keeps on happening.

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

The BOFH is back to his true form

It's not a real BOFH episode if there isn't someone missing by its end.

A great read from start to finish !

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Re: I've heard this too many times to believe it.

May I remind you that China has it's own version of Linux (that it uses) ?

That, thanks to Trump and his crass ignorance of the slightest notion of diplomacy, China is now gearing up its own, homegrown semiconductor industry ?

That China has its own automobile industry, its own smartphone industry, and is going to be the first country in the world with a functional Thorium power plant ?

If there is one country on this planet that will have no problem kicking out Microsoft, it's China.

I seriously doubt that Bejing is using OneDrive to store its administrative papers.

Re: Well good luck, seriously ...

Ask Munich. If I recall correctly, it made a lot of noise about going full Open Source twice, and failed miserably.

My understanding, at the time, is that it was just a move to get Redmond to lower license costs.

You are definitely right though, times have indeed changed and the blind trust the world has given to the USA for decades is now pretty much gone.

I will be very interested in seeing what happens with the Danish.

They're not particularly known for making bold statements without following them with acts.

DeepSeek installer or just malware in disguise? Click around and find out

CAPTCHA

Now used to ensure that crminals are not wasting their time.

Will wonders never cease ?

Canva to job candidates: Thou shalt use AI during interviews

"Understanding when and how to leverage AI effectively"

Simple : never.

Canva is apparently in the business of making pretty pictures. I have tried Leonardo. While it is honestly rather impressive, Leonardo apparently doesn't know what an Imperial Star Destroyer looks like and cannot reproduce anything closer than a triangular blob. One would think that, since 1977, the image of an ISD is basically public domain but, apparently, George Lucas' lawyers are much more efficient than the lawyes of all the authors whose books have been scraped as fodder to "teach" LLMs.

DARPA is testing a device soldiers can swallow to make them less stressed

I'd prefer a glass of whisky if you don't mind . . .

Half of businesses rethink ditching humans for customer service bots

Go ahead

And die.

Huawei founder says USA overestimates its semiconductor prowess

"Huawei is not that great yet"

I'm not so sure, what with all the efforts to get it banned, surely it must be rather good . . .

Waymo problems in La La Land as robotaxis set aflame

"business is going on as normal in most areas"

Of course it is.

It's not like a few burning automated vehicles is going to keep Silicon Valley startups from getting more venture capital and setting themselves up for going public, right ?

As AI gallops through the federal workforce, lawmakers once again call for expanded training

"expanded training"

You do not train humans on AI. AI trains itself on humans.

And Terminator is going to become a documentary.

ICANN waves hands in protest at AFRINIC election arrangement

"not a hostile takeover or power grab"

No, of course not. Lu Peng is based in Hong Kong. It's not like this is China attempting to extend its influence in Africa.

Oh, wait . . .

China orders trial of aged care robots that can cook, clean, and provide emotional support

"provide emotional support"

A hunk of metal and plastic is supposed to be able to provide emotional support ?

I'm absolutely not surprised that Elon Musk is going along with this. Actually, I would have thought Zuckerberg would have been first in line.

But the day some mechanical contraption is supposed to be my emotional support is the day I'm asking Dirty Harry to put me out of my misery.

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Re: two men enter

Neither of them are Men.

Two man-childs enter, and I definitely hope they both die of heart attack.

Given that they are both cowards, it will be a lot of posturing and bold words, then silence in the Thunderdome when they both find medical reasons for not attending.

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

Re: The Best Description Of Trump

I liked that so much I searched for a link to save the article.

I found this.

I think I will have that framed.

Thank goodness

Thank goodness that this "small military operation" was only supposed to last a few weeks.

It's astonishing what a few people hell-bent on freedom are capable of doing, even when everyone else is on the verge abandoning them.

I salute the people who have given their lives in the defense of their ideals, and those who continue to risk everything every day in order to defend their homeland.

As far as I'm concerned, being a Ukranian soldier is a medal in itself these days.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Re: Absolutely insane, as usual from the trump white house.

One can only hope.

Unfortunately, Idiocracy is looking more and more like a documentary every day.

Broadcom sends VMware to record revenue, margins, as most big customers sign for private cloud bundles

"87% of VMware’s top 10,000 customers"

. . have rewarded selfishness and greed.

Congratulations on continuing the time-honored tradition of going to Hell in a handbasket.

Japan's latest Moon landing written off as a failure after ispace probe goes dark

"The company says it can't communicate with the spacecraft"

It's kind of difficult to communicate with a pancake . . .

Better luck next time.

Trump’s cyber czar pick grilled over CISA cuts: ‘If we have a cyber 9/11, you’re the guy’

"We feel vulnerable"

You are vulnerable.

And the orange buffoon sitting in the Oval Office thinks that a TIVO is the height of technology.

The Soviet Union fell because of systemic corruption and the inability to accept reality.

It seems to me that the USA is following the same path.

More than a hundred backdoored malware repos traced to single GitHub user

No honor among thieves

Not the image I was looking for, but good enough.

HMRC: Crooks broke into 100k accounts, stole £43M from British taxpayer in late 2024

"This was not a cyberattack"

No, it was just our normal incompetence and lack of oversight, plus some outsiders being more intelligent about our systems than we are.

Everything is fine, move along, citizen. Move along.

China accuses Taiwan of running five feeble APT gangs, with US help

"Beijing complains it’s under relentless attack"

Oh, the poor little things.

Let me try and find a tear to shed . . . nope, none available.

IBM Cloud login breaks for second time this week and Big Blue isn't saying why

Ah, the Cloud

That fluffy, comfortable promise of making everything easy for nothing that is turning out to be the worst and most expensive nightmare possible.

You have a problem ? Contact Cloud Support ^TM.

Except that you have to be logged in to do that, and that's your problem . . .

As usual, the wheel will turn and companies will once again realize the value of being in control of their data on their own hardware.

It'll just take the time Marketing needs to re-adapt the message, and the time for all of those incompetent MBAs who have never produced anything of value in their lives except Powerpoint presentations to die out and leave the space to the experts and engineers who know not only what they're doing, but why and what the constraints are.

So, just a few more decades, I guess ?

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

"a website integrating the Meta Pixel"

These pixel things are more than a decade old. Why is it that browsers don't simply ignore them ?

It's not like nobody knows what they're for, and a single pixel, in today's 4K environment, can't have the excuse of display or decoration.

Block them by default.

I'd suggest hanging the CEO who is responsible, but I know that will never happen.

Microsoft will stop pestering Windows users about Edge in EU

It's not the user experience that counts anymore, it's Microsoft's experience of the user.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Notepad++

It's the only answer.

It works. It works well, and it handles any file size without phoning home to Redmond. It has options that Redmond can't even think of. Try it and you'll never go back.

And no, I do not have shares. Notepad++ is free as in Beer.

US community bank says thieves drained customer data through third party hole

Third parties

When are you going to learn that your security is your business ?

Wanted: IT manager for UK government agency – £60k

Don't worry

UK Gov is going to protect its entire military network against "enemy action" with "the best talent".

Reality check : the best talent it can afford.

Which is apparently less than what a McDonalds senior manager gets paid.

The guy who ensures how hamburger patties are served.

I'm sure that will end well . . .

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

"it is likely We Are Not Alone"

We aren't. The Hubble Deep Field experiment demonstrated without a shred of doubt that there is not a single point in our sky, to whatever point precision you wish to define, that does not have dozens or hundreds of galaxies in the distance.

So there are galaxies everywhere, and water everywhere as well. There is life out there, I have no doubt about that. The only real question is : how far away is it ?

I applaud this poetic effort. It was a nice gesture. Now explain to me how an intelligent civilization with a technical level equal to ours is going to be able to detect that signal from 20 light-years away and get anything meaningful out of it. Then, as an exercise, calculate the intensity of the signal 2000 LY away, then 20,000 LY away.

At what point does it become meaningless noise ?

I'm guessing that Alpha Centauri will already have trouble detecting the signal, not to mention deriving the music from it.

Feds arrest DoD techie, claim he dumped top secret files in park for foreign spies to find

Re: Intelligence != wisdom

And Diploma != Intelligence

Lumma infostealer takedown may have inflicted only a flesh wound as crew keeps pinching and selling data

"China doesn't support or tolerate hackers"

Of course.

Beijing would never do anything that is not pure and legal and totally acceptable, like building a fleet and creating artificial islands in the middle of the sea, to take over a country that has declared its independance.

Nooo.

VMware drops the lowest tier of its partner program – except in Europe

“The vast majority of these [Registered] partners are inactive"

Then it costs you nothing to keep their service active.

I would also mention that it would do your reputation a world of good if you hadn't made that decision, but you don't give a damn about your reputation anyway, so I'll not waste any more words on that subject.

Meta – yep, Facebook Meta – is now a defense contractor

Technomancers

As if you had the tech to make that happen.

Crims defeat human intelligence with fake AI installers they poison with ransomware

You do not use AI

AI uses you.

Data watchdog put cops on naughty step for lost CCTV footage

Cops

The last people you can trust to actually have proper data retention procedures.

Reminds me of that Yes Minister episode where Sir Humphry explains to Minister Hacker that they lost no end of embarrassing files.

The UK wants you to sign up for £1B cyber defense force

"the new Command would protect all military networks from attacks"

"by attracting the best talent"

Uh-huh, sure, and you're going to attract said talent by paying them how much per month ?

Look, I applaud the goal but, given that private security companies themselves are having trouble protecting themselves and their customers from attacks - are they are billing big bucks for that and, I hope, paying their "best talent" appropriately, I've got the sinking feeling that UK Gov is going to find itself in a bind because attracting the best talent is going to mean paying said talent the same as a Minister.

And we all know that that is simply not acceptable.

Palantir's Trump bonanza continues with Fannie Mae contract to fight fraud

"new software to speed up deportations"

Yes, and that went swimmingly well, didn't it ?

We all know the song by now : AI is the solution to everything.

Except correcting its own mistakes.

Security outfit SentinelOne's services back online after lengthy outage

"suggesting this is a problem of its own making"

In other words, someone has just a valuable, if costly, lesson in paying attention to the console before validating a command.

What it suggests to me is that we have made our computing environment so complicated that even security admins don't always know the consequences of what they are attempting.

That doesn't look promising to me.

Europe warns giant e-tailer to stop cheating consumers or face its wrath

Interesting

Funny how I find a lot of the same practices in supermarkets and retailers in the cities nearest to me.

25% off on something that was the exact same price a month ago ? I've already seen that for decades.

Get a custom paint job for earbuds at a nail salon, type on a baguette, then build a fountain for your PC

"the XG Station 3 external graphics dock"

Of course.

Here's another idea, free of charge : the 12TB RAID5 USB3 connectable disk station so your "laptop" can download all those torrents from PirateBay.

It's a laptop, guys. The point is being able to move it.

If I have to use a forklift, I might as well have a proper PC case.

China approves rules for national ‘online number’ ID scheme

Can ? Come on, this is China.

"part of a federated identity scheme that will mean they can will be forced to use one logon across multiple all online services "

There, FTFY.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

What ?

"Tim Cook of Apple "

So it's not Tim Apple anymore ?

Did he (gasp) actually learn something, or did an intern do a quick check to make sure that the orange baboon didn't make a fool of himself (again) ?