Posts by Pascal Monett

US Air Force chief software officer quits after launching Hellfire missile of a LinkedIn post at his former bosses

Okay, I'll accept your comment.

Now, if I tell you that it is that very same IT manager who refused me access to the dev server, what does it become ?

To be fair ?

To be fair ?

Let's make one thing clear : bosses are not techies.

There may be a one-in-a-million people who rise to management after having lived in helldesk, but this is more than an exception ; it's a miracle.

The rest are all manglement material who have flunked Board-level entry and haven't the faintest idea of what an IP address is, much less how to manage a firewall.

Let me give an example. I was once part of a vast administrative entity with an IT department and, at its head, an individual who's grasp of IT was the following : one day, I and my colleague were summoned to the official's office to discuss access to the Dev server and how things were not going to standard.

My colleague had access to the Dev server. I had been refused access to the Dev server.

How is it that the fucking head of IT didn't realize that before I put it on the table ?

And you want me to believe that that fucking idiot would be entitled to not appreciate that I know that he should fucking know who he granted access to what ?

Head of IT. You should definitely know who has access to what. That's not rocket science. That is your responsibility.

Docker’s cash conundrum is becoming a bet on a very different future

Maintenance is by far the biggest problem in software.

When you have created something remarkable, people will remember you.

If you spend 20 years keeping it up to date, that's a lot less likely.

It takes balls of steel to accept that.

I agree with your point.

To be explicit, for me socialism is a society where money is good, but money is not everything. Health care is primordial, education is primordial, transport infrastructure is primordial, and the laws should be tailored in favor of the population's needs, not in favor of multinational conglomerates.

Right, Texas ?

"Progressive pricing may seem dangerously like socialism"

What's so dangerous about socialism ?

It's only rabid, selfish capitalists that rant about socialism.

I live in a country where you can make a living and, when you fall ill, you can go to the hospital and benefit from help that will not force you to sell your house.

In my book, socialism is dandy.

GitHub merges 'useless garbage' says Linus Torvalds as new NTFS support added to Linux kernel 5.15

Well yes, but phreaking gave one person one international call.

It did not bring down thousands of data centers.

The scale is not the same.

"I've never actually required that"

May I humbly submit to the overlord of the One True OS Kernel that it might, just maybe, be an idea to think about doing so, given all the grief that is currently being caused by state-level groups who are actively trying to subvert entire supply chains ?

Not that I would be so bold as to tell The Great One how to manage his pet project that powers the Internet, worldwide communications, space probes and practically everything that is not a desktop PC or a laptop.

But it might be worth considering . . .

Re: From 1982 to 1992 there was no Internet to speak of*

So yeah, things were a lot more stable when the only way to hack a computer was to sit in front of it.

* - yeah, I know, the Internet existed in 1992, but the number of people who actually had access to it was pathetic and the hacking culture was yet to be invented on the scale it has become today

Report details how Airbus pilots saved the day when all three flight computers failed on landing

Re: You don't need a Tesla to crash

But it helps . . .

"Seems the pilots did a good job,"

The pilots did a fucking Grade-A job. Kudos to them.

Now we really need to know how it is that a triple system went haywire like that, because the last thing the aviation industry needs now is for yet another entire airliner model to be grounded.

ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested

I absolutely agree on who is responsible for Tor, but intelligence agencies were absolutely a part of it.

The quote I refer to is this :

"The core principle of Tor, Onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect U.S. intelligence communications online. "

The CIA and the NSA have their hands in this, make no mistake.

As for the bridge, I'm sorry but that it is traditional Internet-speak :).

As for your feathers, are they frozen ?

Well in any case, ProtonMail has now publicly and officially joined the vast coterie of "secure" mail services that are anything but.

Their lies destroy their credibility as far as I'm concerned. If you say you don't record IP addresses and, in fact, you do, you are not worthy of my trust.

Re: Tor

You are aware that Tor was created by the US intelligence community ?

If you think they don't know how to subvert it, I have a bridge to sell you.

Intel's Mobileye unveils first 'production-grade fully electric self-driving vehicle,' partners with Sixt for Munich launch

Re: Old times

It's true that Lego bricks are quite strong.

Especially when you walk on one barefoot . . .

Re: lighthouse?

Ooooh, that's an interesting take.

Compromise reached as Linux kernel community protests about treating compiler warnings as errors

Re: professional coding

Indeed.

A true professional programmer is not just a guy who knows how to code, it is a person who knows what to do in a given environment with respect to data security and operational procedures.

And now GDPR.

One day, professional programmers will be held to the same standards as engineers.

And that will be a Good Thing (TM).

"An unused variable"

Should not exist.

If you write your code properly, you know what variables you use and why. This is not a crapshoot, developers do not generally declare variables without a reason.

If you have an unused variable, you need to check why it is unused because there is a chance that your code might be using some other variable instead, and that's when mayhem happens.

If your variable is truly unused for good reason, then remove the declaration and recompile.

Good code is clean code.

Back in the day when I was learning how to program with IBMs BASICA compiler, I learned that there is not a single compiler message that does not warrant attention. If you have more than one definition of a variable in the Common area, you're in trouble.

These days, I code business applications. An error is when an indispensable resource is not available. A warning is when a document is missing a given parameter. If the code encounters an error, it logs the problem and bails out. If it encounters a warning, it logs the problem and soldiers on to the next item.

But I code for high-level applications, ie not kernel-level code. I cannot imagine a kernel module that has a "warning" like "HDD not available" that should not be looked into.

With a Lidl bit of luck, this Windows installation will make it through the night

Re: Karma Komedian

Now that's a reference that at least 500,000 people should be able to understand.

"a system was placed last winter"

And since last winter they haven't finalized the installation procedure ?

This is not a BSOD, which could signal insufficient disk space or a failed component. This is a "you haven't finished doing the job", and that means that somebody got paid for jack all.

I may be a stickler for efficiency, but this is clearly a case of someone who got paid for something they didn't do.

Nice job if you can get it.

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

“The idea that these chatbots can be dangerous seems laughable,”

Not really.

Human beings have an incredible aptitude at locking themselves into their own thought processes and defining their own reality.

Having a chatbot companion that can encourage such introversion can be unbelievably damaging.

You want to have a conversation with your late companion ? By all means, but do it in your own head. Constructed from memories, it will have vastly more meaning.

But you still need to come to terms with the fact that they're gone. I know it's hard, but you need to realize that.

Chinese prosecutors end investigation into rape claim against Alibaba manager

Let me see if I got this right

So the guy brought a (smashed) colleague to her hotel room, ordered condoms and went to get them, left unused condoms in the room and left with a piece of her clothing, and the investigation stops there.

I infer that the Chinese justice system has decided that it's her fault.

Now I have one question : is Alibaba going to re-hire this swine, or does "sexual misconduct" include "forcible indecency" ?

This is China, things might not be what they seem.

Patch now? Why enterprise exploits are still partying like it's 1999

Patching is essential for a business

Not long ago I read an El Reg forum post from someone saying that, from 1985 to 1992, he only had to patch once.

Sure, in those days, to hack a computer you had to be sitting in front of it.

Since then, this thing called The Internet has grown from a university project to the basic global international communications network that permeates our very lives. There isn't a single electronic device on sale today that doesn't want to connect to it. Hell, they're even making "connected cars", as if a driver needed more distractions from actually driving.

In this kind of environment, patching should be a regular part of a business' procedures. And the sysadmin's job is to determine which patches should apply, not whether or not something should be patched.

Open-source software starts with developers, but there are other important contributors, too. Who exactly? Good question

Re: Teaching collaboration

I like the idea, but schools do not teach basic human politeness, they teach technical expertise.

That may be something to change in the future.

UK splashes out £30m on improving antiquated patent system, Deloitte and NTT Data are the lucky winners

From 5 days to 5 minutes

Dear me, just how much paperwork has been slashed to get to that ratio ?

Doesn't that kind of mean that the paper process was not very efficient ?

I understand that a paper process in three steps could go from a day to an hour (or even 15 minutes), but if it used to take 5 days and now takes only 5 minutes, some kind of corners must have been cut.

In the best-case scenario, of course, it means that they have successfully streamlined the overall process.

In that case, congratulations.

Intel may spend up to €80bn on chip plants in Europe over next ten years

"The auto industry has been hit particularly hard"

Yes. That's what happens when you don't ask for guaranteed shipments and protect your supply chain.

Apple and Android did, and they got their shipments.

The automotive industry needs to review its procurement practices. This is its lesson.

Can WhatsApp moderators really read your encrypted texts? Yes ... if you forward them to the abuse dept

Re: Seems pretty obvious

As far as I can tell, a forwarded message is a new message.

Entirely new, with content copied from a given message, of course, but there is otherwise no link to the original message that has been forwarded.

So receiving an encrypted message that only you can read is one thing. Forwarding that message to someone else creates a new message with a different encryption value to the new recipient.

If the writer of the original message somehow gets a copy of the forwarded message, he should not be able to read it because he is not the recipient.

Unless, obviously, the recipient of the forwarded message forwards it to him.

Am I being clear ?

Talent shortage? Maybe it's your automated hiring system, lack of investment in training

Re: Death by laziness

It's worse than that. The HR department cannot possibly assess what they don't know, and the only thing they do know is how to file CVs and personnel records.

You think an HR drone knows anything about programming ? Or automotive engineering ?

They don't. So they are given bullet points to check off, and it's a damn sight easier to check [Computer Science Degree] than it is to actually ask the years of experience, the successes and failures, and get a general idea of the actual competence of the candidate.

HR is basically the last place you want to go to evaluate a candidate. Get one of the experienced people who actually work in the department and know exactly the profile they need, bring him/her in to evaluate the candidate and you'll have a much better indicator of if or not that person can fill the position.

Samsung offered tax rebates for 30 years to build $17bn chip plant in Texas

I knew it

I've been saying since the first El Reg article that massive tax rebates were part of the deal.

Not that it was so difficult to guess.

I checked Taylor out on Google Earth. Not a river in sight for 200km around (the circle ruler is a great tool).

Great place to build a monster chip-making plant that is going to need millions of gallons of water every day.

I actually hope that they do build that plant. It'll be fun hearing about how it's only working at 25% capacity because of drought.

It'll also be fun hearing about the massive layoffs due to inactivity (well, not for those laid off, obviously).

And the best fun will be to hear about how the local council defends their choice in the middle of the disaster that they are bringing upon themselves.

Because whatever happens and however well that plant does run, one thing is certain : in 30 years, Samsung is shutting it down.

And after 30 years, they'll have a gold-plated excuse : it's obsolete and too expensive to upgrade.

Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft

"You just need to identify which bits of the filesystem and registry they are trying to write to and adjust permissions as required "

Well yeah, sure, everyone knows how to do that, right ? What's the problem ?

</sarc>

The problem is that the vast majority of PC users are people who's job is not sysadmin, and their priorities are elsewhere. To them, the PC is a tool, and they just want to be able to do what it is they want to do.

The Registry ? They might have heard the name, but they're not interested.

So Admin access because otherwise either they go crazy, or the poor helpdesk guy (be it family or professional) is tied up over the phone all the damn day long.

Astronomers detect burps of interstellar cannibal from 480 million light years away

"what happens when a large star accidentally eats a black hole"

Stellar mechanics are the most awesome things that happen in this Universe - or at least, the most energetic.

To think of a supergiant star having a black hole ingest it from the inside. The mechanics of that must be simply insane. The fact that it all ends in a supernova is frankly not surprising. The fact that it expels trillions of times the sun's energy is just a testament to how the Universe can go beyond everything we think we know.

Space is awesome.

Academics tell UK lords that folk aren't keen on predictive policing, facial recognition, heightened surveillance

Re: Distractions

Person of Interest - it's not a fiction, it's a documentary before its time.

Guntrader breach perp: I don't think it's a crime to dump 111k people's details online in Google Earth format

Re: He's never heard...

Well he's going to be getting an earful now, I'd wager.

And rightly so.

It may not be a criminal offense, but he had no authority to publish data concerning the private lives of over 100K people, whether or not he likes whatever activity he thinks they have.

I inherited two rifles from my late father-in-law. I never have wanted a firearm at home, now I have two. Is he going to lump me in with the hunters he very visibly doesn't like ?

I don't see that he's making any effort to make a difference. 5-year-old data doesn't phase him one bit. Collateral damage is obviously not his problem.

In short, he's a terrorist.

Jail the fucker.

'It takes a hell of a mental toll' – techies who lost work due to COVID share their stories

Some people have had a very hard time of it

And I would like you all to take a minute's pause and reflect that there are some people who have been driven to suicide because of the whole situation, and others who have lost everything they were trying to build (let's just say February 2020 was not the right time to start a restaurant).

I am part of the very lucky ones, and I am glad for all of you who managed to make it.

Let us not forget those that did not.

Agreed.

I second that.

Chinese e-commerce tycoon Richard Liu to step away from the spotlight

How am I contradicting myself ?

Do you forget that, in the USA, if a company gets a National Security Letter it must comply ? And without telling anyone.

How is that different from China ?

It's not because we all agree that China is a dictatorship that the private sector is vastly different.

Re: Chocolate-like

I disagree.

Private companies in China are run privately - but if the Chinese government sends them a memo, they had damn well better listen.

Kim Kardashian and Big Tech slapped for spruiking craptocurrency – and holding back useful crypto

Re: They used to be called socialites

And that is still their rightful name. People who look good and are completely useless.

But now, because of social platforms, these people have gained the moniker of "influencers". And Kardashian went and it what she usually does, find something to say in exchange for a boatload of money. The fact that she's encouraging her "followers" to lose their money is not a problem for her.

Kardashian is poison. It's normal that she is promoting funny money.

Dobler effect: Spinnaker Support snaps up rival database consultant

"Open-source databases now make up around 51.1% of the installed base"

Open Source is the future.

Oracle is a dinosaur slowly chocking on its own ashes, and SAP is going to follow the same route.

Besides, in space no one can control your licenses.

Italian stuntman flies aeroplane through two motorway tunnels

Oh no.

He had those before.

What I would like to know, though, is what exactly is his cocaine budget ? It's funny how I have no problem imagining Al Pacino pulling a stunt like that.

Facebook apologises after its AI system branded Black people as primates

Re: Staples insists that these algorithms don't have racial biases baked into them

It's not because you don't know what they are that there are no biases in the code.

UK's NHS hands Accenture another £5m for Test and Trace system for another year

"a commitment to wean itself off consultants"

Yeah but, was there a date on that ?

They'll wean themselves off - once the contract is over.

At which point they'll write a new contract and, lo and behold !, there will be other consultants.

At £1200/day.

Progress !

A practical demonstration of the difference between 'resilient' and 'redundant'

Re: Ohhh Yesss

It's always better to own up to one's mistakes, that way you don't get a reputation of the guy who breaks everything and lets others take the blame.

China's biggest chipmaker to build colossal chip factory

Very true, but don't forget the rash of facial recognition that is currently sweeping the USA.

Only 'natural persons' can be recognized as patent inventors, not AI systems, US judge rules

Well it can always be turned off . . .

"Those are mighty big questions"

And they will be answered when the time comes.

As for AI, we don't have it yet and your neural network is not AI either, so the judge is right.

And if you need to look to Australia for help, you're not doing yourself any good.

Virginia school board learns a hard lesson... and other stories

"DARPA wants an ekranoplan"

Another good video on the ekranoplan and how it was discovered can be found here.

An interesting concept, to be sure, but its use is limited to bodies of water that have no waves.

The Caspian Sea, or the Mediterranean are viable areas for a ground-effect transport, but I doubt the Atlantic or the Pacific are calm enough to see this kind of vehicle survive.

If DARPA wants an ekranoplan for the Great Lakes, fine, but it won't be transporting troops from San Fransisco to Hawaii any time soon.

Then again, if you don't try, you'll never succeed.

Norwegian student tracks Bluetooth headset wearers by wardriving around Oslo on a bicycle

Re: ...and in other news

Sorry, but a mobile phone is not at all a pair of earbuds.

To be able to make or receive a call, your location must be known at the very least by the nearest mast. That is part of the bleeding obvious in life.

To learn that you can be tracked by earbuds is something else entirely. Unexpected, and unwelcome.

Unfortunately, it is not entirely surprising.

Lenovo pops up tips on its tablets. And by tips, Lenovo means: Unacceptable ads

"looking for the best balance between information and experience"

Here is the best balance : information comes before the purchase, experience comes after the purchase.

It's not up to you, Lenovo, to "inform" your customers when they have made the purchase. Your customers know how to use a browser, they can inform themselves.

Apple engineers complain of hostile work environment to US labor watchdog

Apple is not a company I would want to work for

Apple has an internal police that can carry concealed weapons.

Apple has given itself the right to search your house with its stormtroopers if it even only thinks you are a risk of giving away something about its latest curved-cornered smartphone.

Who in their right mind would want to work for a company that gives itself state-level police rights without a warrant ?

Not me.

Can we talk about Kevin McCarthy promising revenge if Big Tech aids probe into January insurrection?

Remind me how they caught Al Capone ?

Capricious tyranny ? Really ?

Republican representatives have been spouting treason for years now. I'll take anything that can take them down.