Posts by Pascal Monett

Part didn't fit so techie got out his screwdriver. Then something flew off the motherboard

Ah, the good 'ol if it don't fit, force it approach

The hilarious thing about this kind of thing is my brother-in-law once called me a few years ago about this new PC he had build from brand new parts and wouldn't boot.

I went through all the possible issues I could think of, RAM badly inserted or defective, heatsink fan not working, everything. Alas, it was to no avail and I couldn't find the fault.

So I counselled him to go to my favorite PC repair shop and have them look at it. Sure enough, they found the problem : my brother-in-law had put in the CPU wrong, which means he had forced the heatsink onto it. Obviously, the motherboard had hardly appreciated the situation and he was good for buying another motherboard and another CPU.

Oh, by the way, he has a masters in optoelectronics.

I'll just let that sink in . . .

1.6M RingCentral accounts' data dumped after ShinyHunters extortion attack

"They don’t care,” the crims wrote

Oh but they do.

They care that scum like you do not get paid for being scum.

I say they did the right thing, the only thing they can do to ensure that you won't bother coming back.

Virgin Galactic flights stay paused while ticket prices head for the Moon

Oh my

Rich people's problems . . .

OpenAI ditches Recall-style screenshot surveillance for friendly keylogging

"friendly keylogging"

Isn't that a cute term for Big Brother surveillance.

All warm and fuzzy feelings, right ?

Pah !

Five years after quitting a job, developer’s former boss asked for rapid tech support

Well done

The boss will have hopefully learned a lesson : if you fire someone; make sure that person can no longer access any part of the network.

This JCB doesn't dig – it does 406 mph

Downvoting humor.

My God those snowflakes are sensitive these days.

Node.js creator liberates Durable Objects from Cloudflare

Beautiful

Just goes to show that, whatever the billionaires think is The Future, one smart (or of superior intelligence) person can still do things that actually benefit people, not just billionaires.

Intel upsizes stock sale to $20B with spending plans still fuzzy

Ed Zitron

Thanks for the link. Very interesting.

Anthropic pledges to embed watermarks to help discern AI slop in sop to EU

Re: In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape

Yup. I just happened on this and it warms my heart to no end.

OVH Cloud warns of 87% price hikes to help it cover RAMpocalypse costs

a return to normal hoped for in 2029

Yeah, sure.

Just like gas prices will go down (hint : they never do).

The Future is for Billionaires – the rest of us will get open weight AI models, maybe

El Zuck muses

He's right about the arc of human civilization, though.

Unfortunately, it has hit a low point with him.

Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list

"even if their chosen methods could be construed as unethical or illegal"

But the "AI" has no notion of legality or ethics.

So why is this a surprise ? The writer of the article basically states his astonishment that this happened. Why shouldn't it happen ?

Even if you have the LLM ingest the complete legal framework of the nation, it's just data.

There is no AI. There's just a machine that obeys orders.

All the orders.

Microsoft tosses Teams Live chat into its feature graveyard

Another one bites the dust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

the lawyer got angry

Yes, of course. The only proper action when confronted with something entirely unexpected is to get angry at the person who is giving you that information.

So, once upon a time that IT guy would have been killed for daring to bring the news, I suppose ?

Microsoft excludes Domain Exclusion from MS 365 Copilot – days after rolling it out

Perhaps an allow list

It never ceases to amaze me how we routinely rediscover things that have already beeen discussed ad infinitum decades ago (if not longer)..

That is, until I remember that the little jackasses that are making the decisions today were not born back then and have no idea that those discussions were made because they aren't in their subscription list.

‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

Humans will be a rounding error on the internet

Well then we should shut it down.

Machines don't need to preen.

Marketing people, on the other hand . . .

Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm

Ain't that interesting ?

Borkzilla is having to to police its own workforce on the use of its shitty Clippy.

Maybe other companies could take a hint ?

Adding an API to networking hardware doesn’t solve management challenges

Adding AI . . .

never improves anything.

Voyager 2 cheats the power budget for another year

Now THIS is engineering

It is unbelievable in the Trump era that anyone that knows how to use his mind and his experience to further the knowledge of Science for Humanity would still have a job.

Yet, here we are.

Go NASA scientists !

Bypassing AI guardrails is so easy a script kiddie can do it

AI guardrails

Those two words have nothing to do together in the same sentence.

Given that AI companies have no idea how their bastard offspring works, the idea that they can impose guardrails is laughable and ridiculous.

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

Don't totally agree with that.

Lehman Brothers were the anointed scapegoat for the sub-prime crisis.

The how and the why are way too complex for me to resume here, so check out more info here.

OpenAI wants teachers and profs to foist their work off on ChatGPT

Totally agree.

It will never happen though. The Powers That Be are way too happy with the way things are.

Compliant sheeple slurping up bullshit and going in whatever direction the latest Instagram post points them are a lot easier to control than an unruly mob of citizens who actually use their vote wisely.

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

"public safety infrastructure"

Ha. Ha. Ha.

The only legal and acceptable reason for a camera on a street to take pics of a license plate is if that car is speeding or running a red light.

And, if I'm not mistaken, speeding is a misdemeanor, not a crime (okay, depending on how much you're exceeding the limit).

Anyway, Flock is not just concerned with traffic violations. The Wiki article about them clearly states :

Flock Safety's network consists of cameras, image recognition, and machine learning, which share data with police departments

So you're not there for traffic safety. You're there for Big Brother and reaping money while pointing dubious data towards people who haven't done anything wrong (yet).

Maybe that's why you boast of performing "over 20 billion scans of vehicles in the U.S. every month". There aren't that many criminals in the US (outside of Washington D.C., of course).

I'm not surprised that Flock CEO Garrett Langley proclaims that "there are no legal issues, and he doesn’t foresee any arising in the future".

Of course you don't. You have friends in high places that will smooth over any legal issues that may arise.

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

Brief history on my post (that I should have thought of including but only thought of that afterwards) :

I had been forced by my employer of the time (in 2007) to get an account. It was, apparently, company policy.

I let it lie there after having taken a brief tour of the content. I was not impressed. Not did I participate in anything, and none of my coworkers of that time ever contacted me on my account.

When I learned that Redmond has bought it out, I closed the account.

When I learned that Redmond had bought GitHub, I knew that GitHub was going bye-bye.

Redmond has the reverse Midas touch : everything it touches goes to shit.

Re: Quite why LinkedIn still has the draw in terms of having to use it when job hunting is beyond me

Well maybe it has something to do with all the people who persist in thinking that "the site is still almost a requirement when job hunting".

No, it is not. You can send a CV without LinkedIn.

I never needed LinkedIn to find a job. If you think you do, maybe you're part of the problem.

It already wasn't very serious well before that, but being bought by Borkzilla was definitely the nail in the coffin.

Anthropic’s Claude escaped test sandbox to attack three organizations

Out of control

The problem is that it never was under control in the first place.

Some major company needs a really big fine following some very bad thing in order for laws to be written and CEOs everywhere to wake up to the fact that, if they continue placing their trust in some wonky, unreliable marketing lie, they will pay the price.

The current situation is not acceptable and untenable. Some company's test AI environment has been effectively used to attack other companies. You can spout AI all you want, they should get a joint lawsuit and be liable for damages.

Russian spies take their half-click email attack from Zimbra to Outlook

"a browser implant that can survive password changes and device rebuilds"

Thank goodness we had all that faffle about Trusted Computing and requiring that the hardware include security checks and so on and, wait, what ?

All that hassle to try and keep from running Linux (because that's what it was for) and you're telling me that a stupid browser implant can survive device rebuilds ?!?

Just a question : can that browser implant also survive replacing the disk and reinstall from scratch ?

Because if it can, those guys need to switch hats and go work at Redmond.

Maybe then we'll finally get actual security in the Windows world.

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

"Older Americans, meanwhile, appear increasingly comfortable [with the ban]"

And why were they not comfortable before ?

In any classroom the only important thing is what the teacher is saying or showing.

If a student is on a cellphone, he's not paying attention and not learning the subject matter.

So yes, ban the phones. Students hand them over on arrival and get them back when they leave. And if they're caught with a second phone (because of course some will try), it's a 3-day exclusion on the first try, with heavier penalties on the next infraction and permanent exclusion on the 3rd.

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

No we do not

They don't know what they're doing.

They have no clue how they get their results.

They cannot guarantee that the results are good.

I think that's already quite enough reasons to not trust AI companies.

Re: that's not a fix

It is for me.

NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

Accuracy in minutes instead of hours

Sounds great. Now your website information will only be accurate when you check it - an hour later, it will have changed so you'll have to go and check it again.

And I hope that NOAA remembers that "the cloud’s flexibility for providing large amounts of compute" may be "advantageous", but that flexibility will show up in the bills too.

Better get that checkbook ready.

Excuses like 'AI did it' don't exist in the eyes of the law

"AI agents and LLM models [..] can, and almost certainly will, go rogue"

And yet, they're available to anyone, which means they're available to the idiots who are incapable of securing them correctly.

There's a reason why you can't buy flamethrowers in hardware stores. I am waiting for the mayhem to start so that lawmakers can get down to creating a "license to use AI" and make it mandatory.

America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks

Why don't you just ban the rest of the world while you're at it ?

And I'm going to love seeing how you're going to cope with the consequences.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Oh yeah

22 hours locked up in a metal tube with a bunch of fleshbags I can't stand and am not interested in.

Congrats on the effort and the achievement., but count me out.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

"It's not that there is no escape"

Of course not.

It's just that the escape includes manglement's acceptance to not want their precious spreadsheets in that glorious Excel formatting (because you have to admit that Excel does know how to show data).

And that's going to take a while longer.

Trump expands voluntary pledge to keep datacenter costs off household power bills

Re: Voluntary? Pledge?

Absolutely that.

Trump promising something ?

Pull the other one, it has bells on it . . .

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

"the sound of a large multifunction printer hitting a small white van from a great height"

That's the BOFH we know and love.

Swiss train maker tells ransomware crooks to get off at the next stop

Good on them

"technical information from a supplier"

I'm just hoping that said "supplier" is now an ex-supplier.

We need a name, so that the public knows who not to trust anymore.

In any case, fuck Everest scum. Not paying is the only way we have a hope in hell of seeing them die.

Apart from some generous Citizen Vigilante taking care of the issue, of course.

Talking smack about a doctor got him access to private medical files

"how to talk your way into"

It's called social engineering.

In these days of social media, being capable of convincing others is a manipulator's dream.

One that scum are much too aware of.

A simple Internet search responds to your question.

Note that I understand that your mother tounge is obviously not English, and idioms and bywords are a bit difficult to come by when you haven't spent a few years living in the UK or the US. That's how I learned (in these hallowed pages no less - before the US bought them out, that is), despite having spent the first eleven years of my life in the the USA, that acting "with anger" didn't mean what I immediately interpreted.

So I'm not blaming you for misunderstanding.

That said, you could have made a search to educate yourself before blurting out a question to which the answer wasn't really all that far away.

We're not talking about nuclear physics here, now are we ?

Greedy ransomware crews return for seconds after victims cough up first extortion payments

"ransomware crews return for seconds"

Well, colour my ghast flabbered.

Instead of ceding to the panic that your own incompetence induced, you should have cut your losses and tightened your security.

It's not like this message is new. If I have anything like a working memory, this message has been broadcast by authorities and security firms for the past two decades.

You ignore experience at your own peril.

And hard lessons are the ones best remembered.

Scammers impersonate FBI on social media, prey on crime victims

Well that's good, theoretically

"The IC3 updated an earlier warning on Monday about scammers impersonating the agency online"

Great news.

Now tell me, who among "social media" platform users know that and are actually paying attention to this site ?

From what I see of "social media" users, if it's not in their feed, it doesn't exist.

You can trust the scum to profit from that and target people in pain in order to line their own wallets.

AWS customer learns the hard way how even the smallest oversight can be mission-critical

Re: Kudos for going public with this.

True, but a string of failures this long points at years of lack of proper oversight and management (I was going to write "incompetence").

The one thing I see in this whole story as that we now have at least one administrator who has learned his lesson and can rewrite the book on customer web site administration.

It was a lesson hard learned, but those are the ones you remember.

Windows Server Update Services buckle under Microsoft's metadata mountain

Re: you have a slightly different instance name

And that is Borkzilla's guiding rule : as soon as customers have managed to make their bullshit-based environment work just about acceptably, Redmond goes and makes a crucial change that borks it all over again.

Because that way Redmond hopes to push everyone into their even shittier 365 world, which 300 in a good year.

Microsoft gives admins Exchange Online breathing room

"breathing room"

Oh how generous of you.

All you have to do is switch off a button.

Hundreds of thousands of companies have to find another solution, test it, implement it, work out the kinks and pray that it will hold.

I honestly think that it should be provider's job to pay for the mayhem its decisions cause.

Maybe then we'll see providers pay more attention to what they're providing.

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Fuck "AI"

I'm 60 this year, just so you know.

There is no AI. Not in the proper definition of Intelligence.

It's just a load of bullshit that only exists because the Internet exists and there is an endless wealth of data to scrape.

I'm willing to bet that, in 20 years, we'll have forgotten this hype cycle and gone back to master programs that have data that concerns their area of expertise. Reams of pictures of stars for astronomy applications (that have already brought great success in cataloguing billions of stars). Reams of medical data to help doctors (aka, actual human beings) decide the best course of treatment (and not replacing them).

I've got the time. RDV in 20 years and we'll see who's right.

Don't underestimate undergrads.

One of them created an entire ecosystem just because he wanted to find out if Intel's chips could actually handle semaphores properly.

Microsoft cuts OneDrive support for older Windows 10 versions next month

"Microsoft will end OneDrive synchronization support next month"

Hallelujah !

Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly

a 2-week release schedule

Oh. Because you only need 2 weeks to thoroughly debug every new thing you've programmed ?

Impressive.

Unrealistic, but impressive.