Posts by Pascal Monett

Job seekers call BS on the workplace AI revolution

Job seekers ?

If they're looking for a job, they don't have a work life - they're looking for one.

Does not compute.

Put your usernames and passwords in your will, advises Japan's government

"Maintain a list of your subscriptions, user IDs and passwords"

Good luck with that.

Most people can't be bothered with such mundane details. They let the browser remember.

We have tech that does its damndest to keep us from thinking. Social media feeds us automatically what it thinks we want, and we lap it up like thirsty dogs.

I don't see this initiative going anywhere.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

How unfortunate

How unfortunate that Redmond didn't ask Blizzard for a few pointers on how to do major online game launches.

I mean, it's not like they bought them or anything.

Oh, wait . . .

Steam cuts the cord for legacy Windows and macOS

Re: Mac gaming on Steam, even with newer macs, it's casual at best

Mac OS if less than 10% market share.

Nobody is going to bother with all the effort Valve went through (which I salute) to bring gaming to such a feeble revenue stream.

I have a colleague who is entirely Apple-brainwashed. He has an MAC OS ARM laptop, on which he games, because he is subscribed to a gaming service which allows him to basically VPN into a PC and play.

In other words, he doesn't use his MAC to play, he uses it to log into a proper PC and game from there.

And he can't stop telling me how practical it is.

I'm glad he's having fun with his monthly subscription.

Study suggests X turned right just in time for election season

"social media as it should be"

Oh, you mean inexistant ?

Social interactions should be in person. This artificial world we have created is alluring, to be sure, but it is not real. Email is fine for corresponding with family. Internet video is fine for seeing one's loved ones from time to time. SMS works great for near-instant chat with actual, real-life friends. But spending all day long on web sites that "connect" you is debilitating and does not give any real sense of contact, much less human interaction.

It's all a dream, Neo. Take the red pill and come back to reality.

Russian suspected Phobos ransomware admin extradited to US over $16M extortion

Russian cybercriminals

If you want to stay free, you should apparently stay in Russia (for certain values of free, obviously).

So you've seen Russia from the inside ?

China wants mobile devices to limit usage time for minors, ensure they only see nice content

A content filter

I am genuinely curious to see how they're going to make that work.

Every attempt made on this side of the Great Firewall has failed miserably. It's mainly a list of authorized sites, not content filtering.

Is YouTube available in China ? Because if it is, there's going to be one hell of a challenge right there. Oh sure, I know that nothing mentioning Tienanmen is going to be available, but that's just a keyword filter, and only concerns the title of the video.

To me, a content filter is an endless game of whack-a-mole, and once you start, you can never stop playing.

Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous

"We don't know what a 'data Chernobyl' might look like"

I imagine that the tens of millions of people who've already had their identity stolen and their bank accounts abused (not to mention their credit rating) might have a slight notion of what that might look like . . .

Europe glances Russia's way after Baltic Sea data cables severed

It didn't last time, what makes you think it will this time ?

Northern Ireland schools ditch £485M Fujitsu deal after less than a year

Finally

At long last, a multi-million dollar contract falls through even though contractual clauses would have probably ensured that Fujitsu reap a handsome reward.

Is this a signal that the heavyweights need to pay attention to actually bringing value ?

Somehow, I don't think so.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

"the excitement of installing Windows 95 for the first time"

I remember that sense of wonder. It was awesome.

After reinstalling for the 300th+ time, that sense of wonder had largely disappeared . . .

iOS 18 added secret and smart security feature that reboots iThings after three days

"law enforcement is under more time pressure"

I'm all for it.

I've had more than enough of hearing how the police run amok through people's private data whether they have a case or not.

If you can't get a warrant, you shouldn't be looking at my data.

Musk, America PAC sued for allegedly rigging $1M election prize

"allegedly lying about their $1 million election lottery"

Oh my God, you mean to tell me that, after not paying so many of his bills, he's not paying out $1 million ?

That he promised ?

I am shocked.

Shocked, I say.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

"The drive is always to abdicate [..] thinking about it"

And that, in a nutshell, is why we are all going to Hell in a handbasket.

We have brains. Like muscles, if you don't use it, you lose it.

Think !

Before it's too late !

Trump appoints Musk associate Brendan Carr as FCC chair

Business as usual

Trump is obviously surrounding himself with cronies and crooks who will do anything he says and kiss his feet while doing so.

I expect a repeat of the infamous Oval Office meeting where Trump sits and everyone else is standing at attention, waiting for his/her turn to lavish praise on His Trumpiness.

It's going to be a long four years - unless he croaks first.

Now the question is : what's better ? He finishes his mandate and dies in (relative) obscurity, or he dies during his presidency and gets the full Presidential burial ?

NIST trains AI to hear the 'oh crap' moment before batteries explode

"find its way into homes, office buildings, and [EV] parking garages"

Hey, I'm all for it. I know one parking in central Luxembourg that would probably have very much liked to have that alarm in 2019 when it was devastated by a vehicle that caught fire. It was never specified if the vehicle was an EV, though.

It's still closed, and I don't know how many other vehicles were trashed before the fire was put out.

Price tag for renovation ? almost €30 million. And they had a fire alarm.

Yeah, you definitely want all the warning you can get concerning a garage fire.

Or any fire, really.

Letting chatbots run robots ends as badly as you'd expect

Re: Asimov only wrote down some words to sell some books

I respectfully disagree with those words.

Science fiction has long been lauded as a tool for describing societal conditions. Asimov was as much a philosopher as a sci-fi writer. Do not cheapen his work.

That said, I upvoted you because I agree with everything else you said.

Swiss cheesed off as postal service used to spread malware

Interesting

What will be more interesting will be to find out if this method is used again.

If it is, it has to mean that the criminals got their money's worth.

Congress ponders underwater alien civilizations, human hybrids, and other unexplained stuff

Not even going to waste my time watching that video

I'm sure it's just a bunch of accusations, declarations and hookum without any single demonstrable fact.

That this has gotten as high as Congress demonstrates just how low the US has sunk.

No wonder Trump got re-elected.

Lenovo China clones the ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an old, slow, local x86

Re: China wants locals to use more tech designed and built within its borders

Maybe, but that 3rd world is ramping up to 1st world status, and you'd better believe that they will get there.

The dragon is waking up, beware when it starts moving . . .

Microsoft Power Pages misconfigurations exposing sensitive data

"Power Pages – a Microsoft website design service"

Well there's your problem . . .

EU stings Meta for nearly a billion bucks over competition-trampling Facebook Marketplace

"This case entirely distorts" . .

. . our God-given right to make as much money as we can without concern for any consequences. As a Trump-led US company, we demand that our right to milk every cent from anyone and everyone with or without consent be respected.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

"Qantas personnel in Sydney even requested removal of the report"

Typical administrative response. Oh, this ticket is a nuisance, let's get rid of it and the problem will go away.

Google decides Europe's political ad rules are too hard to implement at scale

"it will stop serving political advertising in the EU"

Good.

We don't need to adopt that bullshit here.

We have enough bullshit as it is.

Microsoft 365 Copilot goes monthly for a 5% premium and annual commitment

Copilot annual commitment

I'm sorry, is there anyone who actually gets anything useful out of this monstrosity ?

Because my annual commitment would be no thank you, I have trained personnel, thank you very much.

Asda security chief replaced, retailer sheds jobs during Walmart tech divorce

"a complete list of equipment and applications was not collected at the outset"

Congratulations. Brilliant management there.

An MBA must obviously be in charge.

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

It seems rather stupid to use unlicensed software if you intend to publish an article on a site that specifically states that you need to have all your ducks in a row.

That's kind of like a training course in Excel where none of the computers have an official license and you see the red banner at the top stating that this version is unlicensed.

Not very professional.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

I have a question

How much time is Musk going to be spending away from his cherished personal free speech platform to do some actual governmental work ?

He already doesn't work at Xitter, he doesn't pay his bills and he tries very hard to ignore and/or shut down criticism on the platform he desperately tried to weasel out of buying.

He's going to parade a bit and gather some limelight in his new office, then he'll be back to grumbling, grandstanding and making promises he won't keep on Xitter.

Efficiency ? He has no clue what that word means.

ShrinkLocker ransomware scrambled your files? Free decryption tool to the rescue

"use VBScript and Microsoft Windows' built-in BitLocker encryption feature"

So, if you've disabled BitLocker, you're good, right ?

Besides, how do you know that you've been hit by ShrinkLocker ? Do they put up a nice banner to tell you ?

Data broker amasses 100M+ records on people – then someone snatches, sells it

What a bunch of liars

"we process publicly available business contact information, and do not collect, store, or process consumer data or any type of credential information or sensitive personal information including accounts, passwords, home addresses or other personal, non-business information"

Oh yeah ? Then how do you explain that you had physical addresses of people on a server that decommissioned for two years AND NOT SHUT DOWN ?

There should be a law specifying that, if you deal with data that can identify physical individuals, you must have the proper procedures and protections in place or else you go to jail.

Take 'em behind the chemical shed and shoot them.

EU irate about geo-locked Apple IDs

DVD region blocking is extremely annoying and should be illegal.

I live in France. If I go to the UK and buy a physical DVD, what right do companies have to refuse me the right to play it in France ?

I BOUGHT THE FUCKING DVD.

Let me play it where I want, or I'll just find a pirate copy and play that.

No pilot? No problem! EHang's autonomous air taxis take off in Thailand

Yay ! Progress !

Destruction will now rain down from the skies !

The dystopian future is coming closer every day !

Celebrate while you still can !

FBI issues warning as crooks ramp up emergency data request scams

"adopting critical thinking"

Ah, but that means going to HR to get approval to open the safe in the basement that's behind the door marked Beware of Leopard.

It's so much easier and quicker to just blindly obey.

Gang of monkeys escape South Carolina biomedical research facility

Sounds like a "farm" run with minimal funding

Either that or it's a place where the budget is kept lower than possible because the top brass wants their big cars and swimming pools.

Serving moldy food ? Food doesn't get moldy in a day. Multiple escapes over the years ? Lack of organisational supervision springs to mind.

This place doesn't sound like a good place to work, much less to be a monkey in.

Microsoft 'resolves' and 'mitigates' Windows Server 2025 update whoopsie

"working with 3rd-party providers to streamline best practices and recommended procedures."

Best practice #1 : don't include full upgrades in patch updates.

When Windows Server 2025 is delivered like it's 1999, nobody gets to party

Well said

I approve absolutely everything written in this article.

The fact that Redmond has cut QA teams is well known, the fact that it also has oodles of money is also well-known. Those two facts are contradictory in nature, but their coexistence is the entire basis of the problems millions of people and businesses are facing on a monthly basis.

Maybe a class-action lawsuit across five continents will do some good, because it's quite obvious that Borkzilla will continue on its merry way of not giving a flying fuck about delivering a proper product in the proper manner.

Somebody is missing a good whipping.

Intel: Our finances are in the toilet, we're laying off 15K, but the free coffee is back!

Well, it's either that or company offices are going to smell bad and the cleaning crew is going on strike.

Captain Peacock ? Are you free ?

Beautiful series. A lot of good laughs. British humor at its best.

Just check out Starbucks.

WordPress's Automattic openly tracks websites bailing from rival WP Engine

So, getting petty are we ?

This whole story is visibly being drawn into the depths of the sewer.

I would like to know if publishing data on the customer activity of your competitor is legal. It seems to me that it is not, even if the information is so-called public.

Watchdog finds AI tools can be used unlawfully to filter candidates by race, gender

Re: "he was turned down for every single one of the more than 100 jobs he applied for"

Yeah, stupid fat fingers mistake. Sorry.

"he was turned down for every single one of the more than 100 jobs he applied for"

So ?

I lost my job in 2011 (yeah, right after the two towers). I spent two years and sent dozens of applications every month during that time.

I got two answers, and one interview where I was told that I was highly qualified, but they just weren't hiring at that time. I could have choked the bastard for making me take a 90-minute train ride to hear that.

You were turned down for 100 applications on a web platform ?

Cry me a river.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

It always amazes me how people sometimes just want to take the longest road.

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

"external cameras [..] provide a view for the enclosed operator"

Sounds like an ideal setup for remote, drone-like operation.

I understand this is a test prototype. I wonder what a full-size, 500-person passenger jet could look like.

Winos4.0 abuses gaming apps to infect, control Windows machines

Ah, gaming

Miscreants have long been attacking gamers. Back in the day when CDs were a thing, NoCD tools could often be infected (a very practical little program that would allow you to play that game without inserting the CD). But I don't really understand the point today.

Gamers don't have the money. They're worth nothing as far as ransoming is concerned, so there has to be another reason and the only one I can see is that gamers often have powerful rigs, or at least more powerful than the common PC user.

So it's a question of harnassing that power to do what, DDOS attacks ?

Astroboffins tune into the wild origins of fast radio bursts

Re: I'm beginning to think...

Distance as well.

It's a lot easier to objectively evaluate something curious that is light-years away, but that screaming brat nearby is going to drive you nuts.

And especially in ALL CAPS.

Killer app for AI is still years away, says industry analyst

Indeed.

Trough of disillusionment ? I never even got to the excitement phase.

With all the billions that have been and are being spent, I'm happy for the people who are making a living out of this, but as far as I'm concerned, AI is heading straight into Virtual 3D territory - sounds nice, but remains useless except in very niche cases.

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

It shows indeed

It shows why Linus Torvalds is still the top programmer in existence.

All hail the Torvald !