Posts by Pascal Monett

Twitter preps poison pill to preclude Elon Musk's purchase plan

Amen to that

Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

Ooh, shiny !

There was a special mode.

The mistake is to have used it.

RTFA

Samsung dethrones Intel as chip sector grows 26% in 2021

AMD is 10th ?

Behind Nvidia even !

I can't believe it.

Well, at least it made the Top Ten.

Amazon expands: Datacenter site planned for Santa Clara

Re: Not sure I'd like to work there

I love garlic.

It keeps most everyone away from me.

Except salespeople. I'd need dog poo perfume for those, but that's a step too far for me.

Microsoft-led move takes down ZLoader botnet domains

That's why I do not install any Google products (Chrome, Earth, . .) on my home PC.

Install Google Earth and you'll find yourself with Chrome in short order, because Google has decided that you can't possibly want Google Earth without also wanting Chrome.

Your opinion ? Google doesn't give a flying one.

Remove Chrome ? You'll get it back whether you like it or not.

So, since I have to have GMail for my professional laptop, I use Chrome for accessing GMail (I'm already effed there) and I can install Google Earth as well because it's already too late.

Cisco's Webex app phoned home audio telemetry even when muted

I have an external mike

It has a mute button.

When I press that button, Webex can do its damndest, it won't have anything to phone home with.

My new laptop also does not have a webcam.

I'm not buying one.

Broken password check algorithm lets anyone log into Cisco's Wi-Fi admin software

"improper implementation of the password validation algorithm"

Is there anyone left who tests a product before shoving it out the door ?

Anyone ?

Chip design software giant Synopsys probed for potential forbidden deals with Huawei

Re: Birds coming home to roost?

Yep, that's about right. You can't move jobs oversees during 50 years then complain that nobody home knows how to make anything anymore.

Remember those 50 years of cost-cutting and employee trimming and executive bonuses ?

This is what they have cost you.

Enjoy.

(P.S.: can be applied to all "First World" countries)

Elon Musk's latest launch: An unsolicited Twitter takeover

Sorry Elon, but what's the point ?

Why buy Twitter for vastly inflated price when you have the cash - and the gumption - to build your own MuskSphere and Musk all you want ?

You're targetting Twitter just because it's there, like a whore on the street corner ?

Even a whore can say no.

Chromebook sales train derails as market reaches saturation

"[could] not diversify their customer base beyond the education market."

Yep. Apple is notoriously bad for business networks and integration. Having a Windows network is bad enough, a hybrid Windows-Apple networkd must be exercise in frustration.

Apple shines, however, in creation and the arts in general, which are mostly solo endeavours.

ESA: Fly me to the Moon, just not on a Russian rocket

"Russia was to resume its lunar program"

Oh, they're going to launch a Sputnik III then ?

A lunar program requires an amount of money that Russia does not seem to have at the moment.

Microsoft details how China-linked crew's malware hides scheduled Windows tasks

How about replacing the Registry ?

Text files work fine.

Ah, but DRM wouldn't be possible any more. So we get to keep the Registry, an abomination of an excuse that is more useful to miscreants than to users.

Climate model code is so outdated, MIT starts from scratch

Re: I just have to LAUGH at the level of cluelessness here...

So, you're saying that climate change isn't happening ?

Back in the 1980's, I clearly remember trudging to school in winter through 10-20cm of snow for weeks on end.

This winter, we got barely 1cm of snow and it lasted a day.

I think there's a change, there.

Meta strikes blow against 30% 'App Store tax' by charging 47.5% Metaverse toll

"Meta intends to charge content creators as much as 47.5 percent"

Well good-bye content creators !

Alibaba Cloud's homegrown Arm CPUs emerge in VM trial

"China, where independence from US-sourced tech is a national goal"

As well it should be for many reasons and for many other countries as well.

Eggs in the same basket and such.

Besides, competition is always good in the long run, so I think more companies making and selling CPUs, RAM, network equipment and computer platforms means more choice for everyone and less chance of global shortages generally speaking.

And, of course, there will be the fun of reading a whole new slew of NSA paranoia about how everything made in China phones home without any proof or pics to back it up.

IBM not cooperating with discovery, say attorneys in age-discrimination case

"de-aging the workforce was never part of a grand corporate plan"

Of course it wasn't. The CEO said to de-age in each corporate group individually, so it couldn't be corporate-wide.

See ?

Now, if you swallow that, I have a magnificent bridge to sell you . . .

Infosys quits Russia, ending UK political and tax scandal … maybe

Perfect timing

During all the time nobody noticed, she was living large and paying zero taxes on a billion dollar revenue stream.

Then, when she got caught in the spotlight, presto, her access to taxable revenue disappears, so she won't be paying taxes either.

Poor husband, he's now going to be the sole earner for the household. Does he pay taxes in his position ?

Oh, and can we get a kaching! icon ?

US military wants $29.8m for IT to boost AI intel analysis

As usual, SIGINT rather than HUMINT

Okay, granted, sensors are a better thing when it is question of detecting a hypermissile launch, but this whole program seems to continue the US tradition of believing that everything can be detected by satellite or microphone.

Taiwan, China square off over chip tech espionage laws

Ah, seems that Pooh Bear does not agree.

"denounced as a 'provocative smear' "

Sorry China, but given your proven history of Chinese nationals caught in the act of filching industrial secrets and sending them to the motherland, you don't have a leg to stand on to justify your use of the word "smear".

Google to invest $9.5b in US offices, datacenters

"a greater quality of life for our employees"

Sorry Pichai, but I don't see how trudging to the office of a company that does not create or manipulate physical objects is improving my quality of life.

Now, I will admit that my only daughter is over 25 and working in Paris, so I don't have a gaggle of bawling, roudy offspring to distract me at my home office.

I also admit that I live in a house, not in an appartment surrounded by tenants who all think that the noise they make is quite acceptable.

Finally, I have a wife I love and who completely understands the words "I'm busy now".

Obviously, if one or more of these criteria is not met, I can understand that taking the daily commute to park oneself in an office might be more productive, but that is not my case.

I prefer the view of my front lawn, the bandwidth of my fiber connection and the absence of endless phone calls.

Wiki community votes to stop accepting cryptocurrency donations

"Beggars can't be choosers"

At 0.08% of $162 million, you're far from begging.

Russia cobbles together supercomputing platform to wean off foreign suppliers

"doubts that such processors can meet the needs of highly demanding applications"

Doesn't matter, it's all Putin has now.

Thank you, but no thanks.

I have adopted an automatic amanfromMars filter in my brain, and I have kept my sanity thanks to it.

I will no longer waste neurons trying to process his ramblings.

European officials reportedly targeted by NSO spyware

Agreed.

NSO stating that their software could not be used like that is pure cow manure.

At best, NSO could have said that all of their clients were aware that their software should not be used like that. That might have been acceptable, except that they specifically created software that hijacks mobile phones.

You don't do that when you're honest.

At last, Atlassian sees an end to its outage ... in two weeks

"no authorized access to customer data has occurred"

Yes, we know customers have been cut from their data.

What about unauthorized access ?

Because the CTO is the CEO's cousin and the CFO is his mistress, and they both say it'll be fine.

Beijing approves first new video games in nine months

"the company was ordinary and replaceable"

Well, it seems that a stint in a Chinese jail makes you very humble and compliant.

I very much doubt that any billionnaire has said such a thing to any of their employees in the West.

HCL and HP named in unflattering audit of India’s biometric ID system

I have the solution

Give the contract to Capita.

I'm sure that'll work out fine.

Amazon’s cloudy desktops creep towards cloudy workstations

"temporary local storage"

To be followed by "temporary local processing". Bingo ! AWS has just reinvented the local network.

The wheel just turns around, nothing is invented.

Why is IBM selling post-quantum crypto when it's still a pre-quantum company?

"Have you seen the forms?"

I went to check them out.

The most interesting thing I find is that there isn't a dollar quote anywhere to be seen.

You get a boatload of MSU ranges and corresponding AWLC percentage reductions (could somebody translate that into English ?), but after skimming over the blah blah I couldn't for the life of me tell you how much one would cost.

Of course, I'm sure a call to my nearest friendly IBM salesperson would guarantee a quote and a nice monthly charge in the blink of an eye.

Elon Musk won't join Twitter's board after all

"Musk [..] found nearly $3 billion with which to buy a slab of Twitter"

He has the right to waste his money in any way he sees fit.

Apple iOS privacy clampdown 'did little' to reduce tracking

Re: How is Apple supposed to prevent use of email addresses to identify people?

The problem is not with voluntary data submission. If I choose to activate 2FA then I provide my phone number, that's my choice.

The problem is with all the tracking that done without consent. The fact that ad agencies are basically finding out who you are as soon as you connect, and they're following you all the way whether you like it or not.

I use Firefox with NoScript and uBlock Origin, or Brave. I like to think that I'm rather invisible to ad companies, until I actually make a purchase somewhere. I like to think that, but I'm not sure.

I would like to be sure.

Atlassian outage lingers, sparking data loss fears

"our mission-critical institutional knowledge lives in Confluence at this point"

Well what's the problem ?

You have a backup, don't you ?

DON'T YOU ?

Cryptocurrency-mining AWS Lambda-specific malware spotted

"Lambda is secure by default"

That is a high claim.

The only thing that is secure by default is a safe hidden in a salt mine behind a camouflaged brick wall that nobody knows is there and everyone involved in making it happen has been brought to a pit in another country and shot.

And those that did the shooting were brought to a pit in another country and shot.

Then the person having orchestrated all this took a poison pill and died.

THAT is secure by default.

The rest is just guardrails surfing on hope.

Google makes outdated apps less accessible on Play Store

Is this going to improve the various Telecom provider's incentive to update their customers' equipment ?

Because you're not using Android on your phone, you're using your provider's version of Android on your phone.

So, if this means that your provider is going to improve on getting Android updates out to its customers, I'm all for it.

UiPath says war in Ukraine is affecting business confidence across Europe

Re:The UK is still in Europe

Nope.

It is actually NEXT TO Europe.

Not the same thing.

Intel suspends all operations in Russia weeks after halting chip shipments

No, it's Putin.

Re: not been seen in Europe since Russia started WW2

Sorry, since when has Russia started WWII ?

You need to read a proper history book and stop spouting such nonsense.

Re: if the common Russian citizenry people really wanted Putin out they could have voted him out

Not really.

You're making the mistake of thinking that Democracy is a thing in Russia.

Democracy is a puppet, and Putin is the puppetmaster. Successful political figures running against Putin have a tendancy of disappearing, so voting for them is not really an option.

Putin leaves the cretins that have no chance to justify his rigging of the electoral landscape. You don't need to rig the votes if you've taken care of all serious claims to your power.

And don't forget that Putin has changed the Russian Constitution to basically ensure he can stay in power as long as he wants (aka until he dies).

So, the only real vote against Putin is a bullet to his brain. The rest is just theatre.

Another big Toshiba shareholder calls for major change

So this is actually a power struggle

The investors want to take control (aka go private) and the Japanese government does not agree.

Meanwhile, Toshiba is floundering.

Yay Capitalism.

OpenAI test drives caption-to-image-generating DALL·E 2

Indeed.

Flying bananas in 3 . . 2 . .

Feds take down Kremlin-backed Cyclops Blink botnet

Re: What happened to Gorgon Stare?

Well, in all honesty, a drone is going to have a spot of trouble finding (let alone taking down) a botnet with only its cameras.

China, India face tech brain drain through US universities

"Recent research by a Chinese university that reached similar conclusions was quietly taken down"

That is a mistake. It's not because you are a dictorship that you can afford the luxury of blinding yourself to reality.

That's how revolutions happen.

Canada wants Big Tech to share its riches with news publishers

"Reactions to the bill from the tech companies concerned"

. . have been carefully tailored to make sure the company looks good to the public while planning on pulling the teeth out of this bill right down to the bone.

But surreptiously.

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

"the gun would shoot a projectile every 30 seconds"

They're going to need one hell of a Gatling gun to reliably shoot a projectile every 30 seconds on a 24/7 schedule.

IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims

What ? Little Ginny cooked the books ? Say it ain't so !

Ginni "I fly about in a helicopter while you worry about getting laid off" Rometty made some "strategic financial decisions" that investors didn't like ?

I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.

Re: that will change after these people are dished out justice

Oh, right. So right after we get fusion energy and room-temperature superconductors then ?

Google talks up its 540-billion-parameter text-generating AI system

So the number of billions of parameters is the new megapixel count for AI ?

We recently read about a 176-billion-parameter pseudo-AI, now we have a 540-billion-parameter pseudo-AI. I'm guessing it's supposed to be better. It's also likely to need all of SAP's engineers to set those parameters.

So, who's going to invent the trillion-parameter AI ? And which country is going to devote all of its population to configuring it ?

Shouldn't be long now . . .