Posts by Pascal Monett

Cryptocurrency 'rug pulls' cheated investors out of $8bn in 2021 – report

"successful cryptocurrency adoption"

Why the hell do we need that ?

We have money already, thank you, we don't need a new scheme that only benefits criminals.

They already know how to make money, stop making it easy for them.

Confirmed: James Webb Space Telescope team plans launch for this Xmas Eve after data cable fix

I should think that, with all the testing and checking and re-testing that has been done, there will be no problem with the mirror.

And if there is, well we can all write one telescope off the charts because there will be no servicing this bird.

Unlike software companies these days, this one has to go out the gate 100% functional. There will be no patches to the hardware.

Fingers crossed !

(and legs, and toes)

Facebook locks out 1,500 fake accounts used by cyber-spy firms to snoop on people, alerts 50k potential targets

Well done on the naming and shaming

We need to keep these names in mind as well :

Cobweb Technologies

Cognyte

Black Cube

Bluehawk CI

BellTroX

Cytrox

And we also need to be aware that there are more than that. NSO was just the tip of the iceberg. Even if it is shutting down, the people behind it are not going away to become burger-flippers. They will be back under another name.

China lists 100 topics citizens can't include in online vids

"Just like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter"

The main difference being that, if they don't do better, somebody's going to jail.

That is something we can't do in The West.

SMACKDOWN! Reddit hires wrestling's investor relations head to helm IPO

Confidentially filing an S-1 form to go public

How effing bonkers is that ?

You want to go PUBLIC. How are you going to do that in SECRET ?

I wish you luck going public without telling anyone.

Database company Cockroach Labs more than doubles in value to $5bn

CockroachDB

It takes a certain gusto to name one's product after a creature that would cause most people to call an exterminator.

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

Not all corporations are multinationals with tax evasion havens.

Your plumber ? He's got a corporation, and you can bet your willy he pays his taxes to the dime.

You are clearly not a manager.

Anyone good starts at the bottom of the barrel, is lucky to have 20 consecutive years of salary in various companies, and starts making a proper salary between the ages of 35 and 50.

Anyone else is just someone lucky enough to have the right contacts.

Indeed

LinkedIn ? That is your criteria ?

I had a LinkedIn profile for six years. Do you know how many useful contacts I had during that time, outside of all the people I already knew ?

Zero.

LinkedIn has given me nothing interesting, but a tanker full of marketroids and other assorted dredge trying to tack themselves on my success.

I dropped LinkedIn when Borkzilla borged it and I have never regretted that.

This past summer I signed two of the best contracts I've ever had. LinkedIn had nothing to do with that.

If LinkedIn is one of your criteria then we have nothing to talk about.

Everyone expects to "ramp up quickly".

Then reality sets in and they find out that ramping up is contrary to the company's budget plans.

Apple quietly deletes details of derided CSAM scanning tech from its Child Safety page without explanation

Apple is never willing to talk about anything outside of its next product. Under Apple-controlled conditions, of course.

Backdooring has nothing to do with sanity or logic, but everything to do with keeping market penetration and staying out of the eye of sovereign displeasure.

Apple is the whore of the market. It will bend over and take it in the blink of an eye when dealing with a country that just might banish it or take some of its higher-up muppets to jail, but in Western "democratic" countries (that are fewer by the day), it stands tall on the soapbox of "protecting its customers".

Nobody has ever died of hypocrisy, so all is well.

Yeah but El Reg has a longer attention span.

Not to mention its forum users.

Facebook expands bug bounty program to include scraping attacks, two years after it was scraped – hard

Well what do you expect ?

Apple does not make its billions from ads. You cross Apple and you will find yourself in a legal nightmare.

FaceBook ? Its fortune is based on ads. Its users are ad companies and its product is you. Why should it care about what happens to the data it has on you, beyond making token gestures to "respect its users" ?

The Zuck hasn't given a damn about people since he was born. What makes you think that he will change now ?

This is just another FaceBook PR stunt to generate goodwill without actually doing anything.

Honestly, the marketing people at FaceBook are real professionals. Somebody hire them into a real company. Such creativity deserves recognition.

Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter planning move to blockchain. How will it work? Your guess is as good as ours

"The public benefit corporation"

Okay, I went and viewed the link. It's a nice fuzzy way of calling Kickstarter a company.

Only in the USA can you have a company not called a company.

Public Benefit means shareholders and for-profit. There is no "public benefit" to be found over other companies like IBM, Intel or Walgreens.

Honestly, this tip-toeing around the bush in a strongly pro-capitalist country is shameful.

National Cyber Strategy will lead to BritChip for mobile devices by 2025, claims UK.gov

Re: Three decades later

And that would be a bad thing why ?

Construction ?

We are long past 1984. The Panopticon is here, and Google, FaceBook, TikTok, Instagram and others have put it in place. Global surveillance is a thing, but the irony is that it is not any Government that is guilty of it, it's just the carrot that the sheeple are blindly throwing themselves at for their own convenience.

Some time in the future millenia, exoarcheologists will determine that we are the first intelligent civilization to have convenienced ourselves to death.

US lawmakers want to put NSO Group, 3 other spyware makers out of business with fresh severe sanctions

"defaulting on its debts"

Okay, the situation is clear : NSO knows its goose is cooked so it's shutting itself down in order to transition to a new structure, bringing all its intellectual resources with it in order to re-emerge and continue business as usual.

By the time US lawmakers get around to being pissed off again, the new group will have made more hay on the souls of those it damned.

Windows Terminal to be the default for command line applications in Windows 11

Because you'd sell more copies ?

Agreed, but the fact is that Borkzilla still doesn't know what a true kernel is.

Windows started out as a GUI layer over DOS, and Borkzilla still hasn't made the transition to a true kernel. Everything is tied to the UI.

Besides, if you think that Borkzilla is going to make the Windows Experience ^(TM) something you can stick another UI onto like in Linux, well I have a bridge to sell you.

Japan draws a LINE: web giants must reveal where they store user data

"search engines that just cover travel and food get a pass"

I'm guessing that that may be because of a difference in perception. A social media site is basically viewed as pseudo-local. French users of Facebook behave as if Facebook is French. Of course, all Facebook users are well aware that it is a global company, but in their little corner, it's local.

A travel site obviously reaches across the world, otherwise booking flights would be difficult. So, a travel site is percieved as "non-national", and is not expected to be local.

Maybe.

Now that explanation obviously doesn't work so well for food sites, so I won't try to explain that.

Gnu Nano releases version 6.0 of text editor, can now hide UI frippery

"fourteen new color names"

Cue the inevitable unending argument about how much cyan is in the teal and how much more/less there should be, and so on for every new color.

India makes $10B bid to grow local semiconductor industry to serve – and challenge – the world

Fabs are popping up everywhere

With all the new fabs that are being planned or being built, there's going to be a glut of processors of all kinds all over the place.

Prices will drop, and then they'll complain that their immensely expensive fabs aren't making enough money.

Really, how many fabs was there in 2019 ? I don't kow, but it seems to me that there's going to be double that amount by 2025.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

It's a question of company culture.

Before the merger, the culture at Boeing was security first.

Then McDonnel-Douglas took over and it became money first.

And in today's climate, there is little chance that that will be reversed. At best, we might enter an era of PR first, in which decisions will be made on how much PR risk it might cost the company.

In time, we might get back to security first, but the death count along the way will be dreadful.

I basically agree with you, but, until they're no longer needed, protecting them is a Good Idea ^(TM).

And, when they're no longer needed, protecting them is not a problem, so . . .

As long as it's not the wrong kind of snow . . .

Re: clarity

Yeah, well, if Boeing doesn't take care, there will be one.

Azul lays claim to massive efficiency gains with remote compilation for Java

"you're constrained by local machine resources"

Um, if I'm not mistaken, local machines have grown in power to an impressive extent.

The cheapest laptop today can run Office. Okay, not at blinding speeds, but have you tried Word 95 on a Pentium ?

Besides, a server is nothing but someone else's machine.

Some people are really desperately trying to reinvent the mainframe.

CompSci boffins claim they can recreate missing lines in log files

"what the log entry should have been"

That is nothing more than rewriting history.

The absence of information can be just as significant as its presence. If something exists in one source and is absent from another, that means that there is a process that failed and could not write a log entry. For debugging purposes, that is literally more important than the pseudo re-creation of log data.

AI doesn't pretend anything

It's only marketing and overzealous presenters who prance about using the term and, like Tesla's "autopilot", pretend that it is something other than what it is : a statistical analysis machine.

West Sussex County Council faces two-year delay to replace ageing SAP system for Oracle

Another important ERP project going off the rails before even going live

Not that I would defend Oracle in any way, but it is kind of hard to imagine that the Oracle engineers and technicians don't know how to install and configure their own product. I do think they have internal training on that question.

So the issue likely lies more with the civil administration who, despite having an ERP for a while already, have apparently not understood what they were getting themselves into. It's almost like they don't understand their SAP installation and, instead of trying to get to grips with it, they decided to go with another top-of-the-line behemoth only to hit their collective skulls against the same wall.

I might be reaching, but if the product you're thinking of acquiring needs more people to install it then you have people in your own IT department, maybe you should think twice before signing that contract.

UK government has 'no clear plan' for replacing ageing legacy IT estate, MPs report

Re: Are they sure

Well that explains it all. They've spent all the money, so there's none left for the boring stuff like keeping government IT creaking along.

Not a problem, when it finally falls over completely, there will be a great big, wonderful £10 billion contract that will immediately be handed to Crapita.

T-Mobile US figuring out international roaming on 5G

Re: Snooping?

If you don't want your cellular operator knowing where you go, don't connect.

That's pretty much your only option.

If you sit in the taxi, you're going to have to tell the driver where you want to go.

Intel's mystery Linux muckabout is a dangerous ploy at a dangerous time

It's only submitted code

It doesn't have to be accepted.

If the Linux kernel managers don't like it, they can refuse to incorporate it.

Which, apparently, they should.

Because indeed, if they can't test it, they can't trust it, and if they can't trust it, why include it ?

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

Borkzilla has done its best to educate us to wait a while before installing a patch or a service pack.

I have well integrated the lesson.

Re: Cisco patches

Indeed.

If it was a Cisco problem, the only valid patch I would install would have to come from Cisco.

Anything else and you're just asking for trouble.

If pressed, before applying the patch I would have searched for any problems with the patch (aka wait a day or two). In this case, the problem would have been largely reported and I would have gone, printout proof in hand, to explain why I wouldn't install said patch.

But hey, armchair general is easy, isn't it ?

Yeah but it worked, didn't it ?

Nvidia CEO Huang jointly files patent for software tech in the metaverse

If granted ?

It's the USPTO, the greatest rubber stamp of the USA, if not the world.

It's been a long time since it worried about prior art.

Clearview's selfie-scraping AI facial recognition technology set to be patented

"getting closer to being patented by the USPTO"

And who gives a flying fuck ?

The USPTO has long outlived any credibility concerning what it approves and what it doesn't. It is a rubber-stamp for magacorps and has completely abandoned any semblance of pretending that it cared about controlling whether or not a patent was serious or not.

A patent used to be granted on the basis that the submitter could prove and demonstrate how the procedure could be accomplished - in other words, revealing the secret of how the thing worked.

Today, the USPTO rubber-stamps anything it is presented with (rounded corners, anyone ?), and leaves the the judicial system to deal with the fallout.

Useless twats should not have any legal importance whatsoever.

Revealed: Remember the Sony rootkit rumpus? It was almost oh so much worse

Re: You have to wonder

Go ahead and scatter USB sticks anywhere with "FREE" marked on them and watch the mayhem unfold.

Academics horrified that administration of Turing student exchange scheme outsourced to Capita

Then change the rules.

It's the Government, innit ? Government is made to change the rules.

China: Bars app that often hosted dissenting conversations

Re: Sigh

Indeed.

And the Atlantic is just as concerned about them as Xi is about his.

Pentagon wants to drive digital and AI onto the battlefield

Re: as usual

But, but, the Department of Administrative Affairs is absolutely necessary !

Assange extradition case goes to UK Home Secretary as High Court rules he can be sent to US for trial

"[he will be] transferred to Australia to serve his sentence without the US objecting"

I'm pretty sure the Ecuadorian ambassador totally subscribes to that part of the judgement.

Ransomwared payroll provider leaks data on 38,000 Australian government workers

No evidence, eh ?

Methinks your "investigation" demonstrates why you got hacked in the first place : you don't have a clue.

That probably explains why the exfiltrated data was not encrypted - you don't have the expertise to manage that.

In other words, another payroll provider with a bit more savvy in the backend might be a good choice.

Re: Outsource they said, cheaper they said, more secure they said

I have the utmost confidence that the Australian Government could have screwed up just as well.

Playing jigsaw on my roof: They can ID you from your hygiene habits

Jigsaw identification

I can't say I'm too worried about that, for some reason. First of all, I live beyond the suburbs in a quaint little village à la campagne. If someone is rifling through my trash, they already know where I live. And if they absolutely want to know my water bill from last month, I'm nonplussed that they burden their neurons with that information.

I doubt that they'll hijack my water company account to have the privilege of paying the bills instead of me.

On the Web, though, that is another matter entirely. I have an non-negligeable amount of activity in the virtual information highway, and I have no idea how someone could piece together enough information to pinpoint my indentity from my various posts and web habits. That said, I never use the same password twice, so I guess any hijacking will be limited in scope.

I hope so anyway.

Qué sera, sera

NASA's new black hole spotter makes it into orbit

"IXPE's intended to operate for two years"

Rubbish. NASA will have that bird working past it's 20th birthday I'm sure.

International Monetary Fund warns crypto-related risks could soon become systemic

"cryptocurrency easily crosses borders"

What is it with these endless statements about how funny money does everything and goes everywhere ? My Euros can easily cross borders as well, all I need to do is make a transfer.

And I don't have to pay extortionate amounts of fees to do so.

WTF is a 'software-defined community cloud'?

Google gargling at its best

What a waste of time just to push a Google product.

"Projects are effectively private clouds with isolated infrastructure primitives, and their own enclave"

So they're behind a firewall, duh.

"Only personnel with specified qualities such as specific citizenship are allowed access;"

There's an Access Control List, duh.

"Data locality is enforced by software."

The code writes to that location, duh.

Look guys, if you want to do marketing, go ahead, but don't try and make it look like you're writing a technical documentary. There is absolutely no company database in The Cloud ^(TM) that should not have these elements. We haven't been waiting on you to tell us that.