Posts by Pascal Monett

Remember Google Plus? Remember its privacy blunder? Remember applying for a slice of a settlement?

The class action system is broken

Yes, lawyers should definitely get paid for their time.

No, lawyers should not get more money than the people who have been wronged.

Class action or not, lawyers should only get their hourly fee, not a cent more.

Google hits undo on Chrome browser alert change that broke websites, web apps

"Chrome has disabled its deprecation until August 15"

2022 ?

No, seriously, just ten more days ? How generous, Google.

It's obvious you are not the one putting in the overtime your changes have imposed.

Now that you've caused the stink, you could at least give something like 60 days for developers to analyze, define and implement the required changes.

It's not like the Web will break in that time anyway.

Chinese state media describes gaming as 'spiritual opium' that stunts education and destroys families

Re: so all to do with programming

You missed the part where I was programming a D&D magic item generator, and the part where he was programming BASIC games.

Re: It didn't help my studies much either

Back in 1984, my father brought me an IBM PC. It had the venerable 8086 CPU and 128KB of RAM. It also had the finest manuals I have ever read in my life to this day (I still have them).

I learned how to program with that computer. I made my very own D&D random magic item generator.

That didn't help my studies much at the time either, but now I am a professional programmer and have been for more than 25 years.

It's not because something has impacted your studies that it was necessarily bad at the time.

But go ahead and blame gaming. I'm sure that all those teenagers glued to their smartphones will suffer no consequences at all.

AWS taps up Singapore scientists to overcome hurdles facing quantum computing

IBM has 15 quantum computing machines ?

Well, when we finally learn how to program them, IBM looks to finally have a leading position once again.

If it survives until then, that is.

Microsoft suspends free trials for Windows 365 after a day due to 'significant demand'

A free trial removed after a single day

That smacks of very, very poor forecasting and provisioning. Also a bit of skinflintery lurking about.

Come on Borkzilla, you've got enough money to support two days of free trial !

Sueball over breach of more than 5 million payment cards at Dixons Carphone hit for six

Although I understand the judge's judgement . .

. . and I accept that said judgement was made with respect to the law, I still find myself frustrated that a multi-million data breach from a company raking in almost £5B results in punishment that represents barely a pitiful 1 hour of annual revenue.

Come on ! If the fines do not become significant, nobody will make the effort to secure properly !

Get ready to make processes fit the software when shifting to SAP's cloud, users told

"Get ready to make processes fit the software"

No.

Just no.

I don't care if you think that the process is outdated or not, software should not dictate how the company is run. And no single company should be allowed to dictate to their customers how they run their business.

It's incredible to see that we are now in an age where a software maker decides how you should run your business.

Fuck off. If your software doesn't suit my way of doing things, then you are useless to me. I'm not the one who should change.

So I'm to believe that all those industrial plants using SAP need to review their production lines just so that SAP can integrate the data in the right way ?

Are you out of your fucking mind ?

I use Excel to prepare my invoices, because I've set it up so that it prints out everything I need the way I need it.

Hint : if Microsoft changes Excel so that I have to change my invoices to correspond, I'll stop using Excel.

84-year-old fined €250,000 for keeping Nazi war machines – including tank – in basement

Free ?

Where on Earth has ammunition ever been free ?

The give you the weapons, but you pay for the ammo. It's the return business that makes fortunes.

Re: WTF?

He didn't just collect military hardware.

He also had 1500 rounds of ammunition, and largely enough firearms to use them.

Not something I'd like to have in my village, even if held by an 84-year-old.

Actually, especially not if held by an 84-year-old. Ancient grudges can run deep.

UK data watchdog sees its approach to government health tech during COVID-19 outbreak as 'pragmatic'

"pragmatic"

Don't you love it when a performance evaluation is made by the very entity that did the performance ?

Can I make my own performance reviews as well ?

Mine's the one with the triple-A review in the pocket.

Tesla battery fire finally flamed out after four-day conflagration

Re: Red Adair might or might not agree with you

I'm not aware that Red Adair used liquid nitrogen.

High explosives (like C4, I guess) for sure, but not liquid nitrogen.

Re: Liquid nitrogen

Not an expert in any way on the matter, but it seems to me that dropping a super-cooled liquid on a raging fire is an absolute guarantee of explosive results that might not correspond to the definition of "putting out the fire".

Don't rush to adopt QUIC – it's a slog to make it faster than TCP

It's been around just as long, but it has only just started to be tweaked like that.

At least, I think so.

Blizzard president, HR chief exit games giant in wake of sexual harassment uproar

Oh, Blizzard

Such great games.

Such disappointing behaviour.

Straighten that ship up !

US SEC chair calls for crypto regulation

Go Gary !

"a 'Wild West' of speculation and naughtiness "

Sounds like the proverbial nail got hit right on the head.

China tightens distributor cap after local outfits hoard automotive silicon then charge silly prices

Smugglers

It's curious how, as soon as there's a law against doing something, there is always somebody willing to go to any extent in order to do just that.

Is this tendancy for crime hard-wired in our brains, or what ?

Russia tells UN it wants vast expansion of cybercrime offenses, plus network backdoors, online censorship

"providing a backdoor for authorities"

Yay ! The backdoored encryption request is back !

But this time, it's Putin that wants it. Mathematics had better deliver, else it'll get a bullet in the head .

Customers warn Gartner of AWS's high-pressure sales tactics in latest verdict on public cloud providers

The difference is the license fee that they can extract from you.

UK chancellor: Getting back to the altar of corporate dreams (the office) will boost young folks' careers

Son of a billionnaire talks up watercooler networking

Son of a billionnaire seems to not notice that the peons don't get much of a chance to talk to the VP of sales and marketing, even if they are hanging around the watercooler together.

Son of a billionnaire also doesn't seem to realize that he could network in shorts and flip-flops around a swimming pool at one of the kind of parties the peons never, ever, get a chance to go to.

Son of a billionnaire, your "trajectory" has far less to do with who you talked to at the office, and far more to do with who your father is.

'Prophetic' Steve Jobs autograph telling kid to 'go change the world!' among Apple memorabilia at auction

"The kid went on to work for IBM"

Has he been fired yet ?

He should be in the right age range by now, no ?

Leeds City Council swallows the Gartner glossary and orders up 'post-modern' ERP in £44m SAP replacement

"it reserved 'the right to make substantive and relevant changes' "

And that, right there, is the seed of doom for the project.

If you don't know by now what you need from your ERP, then your project is doomed from the start.

You cannot implement any IT project, make "substantive" changes mid-way through, and expect the end result to work.

What you should do is exhaustively list your needs, the results you expect to be able to work, and get an expert to draw up the specifications that answer those needs. When you have a working platform, then you analyze what changes you require and request their implementation.

The best project manager I ever had the privilege of meeting was adamant on one point : when there was a meeting to discuss project progress, it was out of the question to add new points to the requirements list. If there were more requirements, he automatically and authoritatively shunted them to version X+1.

Because he wanted something that worked first. Then you add the bells and whistles.

It helped that he was IT manager and no-one had any authority to complain, but still.

Research finds cyber-snoops working for 'Chinese state interests' lurking in SE Asian telco networks since 2017

Is a SOC even enough when you're up against state-backed actors ?

IBM Cloud took the evening off – 23 services were hard to provision for eight hours

IBM. The home of The Suit, and Business Professionals.

Once upon a time IBM was the reference in business stability and reliability.

Then it fired everyone with a clue because costs, since its own management didn't have a clue.

Now, we get this IBM that can't even manage its own cloud properly, not to mention its own internal mail upgrade.

Frankly, anybody using IBM Cloud deserves everything they get. Yes, Cloud is obviously difficult, but IBM killed every excuse it could possibly have with its endless layoffs of experience.

You reap what you sow.

Amazon sets the date for televised return to Middle Earth: September 2022

Production subsidies ?!?

He's a fucking billionnaire.

He can subsidize his own productions.

What a joke. As if anything concerning Middle Earth would be filmed anywhere else. New Zealand just screwed itself for $100M+.

Chromebooks fighting for mind share at PC makers with higher-margin Windows 11 machines in the lead, says IDC

You're logged on to El Reg, else you couldn't post this.

That is a far cry from being logged on to Slurpus Maximus.

NHS England's £200m ERP replacement misses another deadline as procurement runs 2 years behind schedule

"whether the business case is ready"

Well, the bigwigs at NHS already know which of their buddies are going to get the spoils, so you could say that yes, the business case is ready.

Often ?

My dear chap, you are NHS management material for sure.

PwnedPiper vulns have potential to turn Swisslog's PTS hospital products into Swiss cheese, says Armis

They asked Microsoft to provide QA.

Following Torvalds' nudge, Paragon's NTFS driver for Linux is on track for kernel

Re: What For?

We're absolutely thrilled that you have everything you can possibly need.

We shall forthwith call all developers and have them stop whatever it is they're doing, since you don't need it.

Nuisance call-blocking firm fined £170,000 for making almost 200,000 nuisance calls

In Luxembourg, if you are the general manager of a company that goes insolvent, you are forbidden from ever being a general manager in any Luxembourg-based company again.

Generally there's a limited amount of siblings and cousins an incompetent idiot can call on (and who will agree to take the fall), so I rather like that law.

Redpilled Microsoft does away with flashing icons on taskbar as Windows 11 hits Beta

Re: Finally.

This is not a discovery, this is just the new batch of developers not having older mentors around to slap them behind the head when they try to make their code the center of attention.

Microsoft : you're making an Operating System. Get that dictionary definition and engrave it on all your walls.

Undebug my heart: Using Cisco's IOS to take down capitalism – accidentally

"he had clearly accidentally fired off every possible debug command at once"

So he properly issued an "undebug all" command at the console, and said console decided that no, it was going to do a "debug all".

I don't get how that is possible. There must be some shoddy programming behind that thing.

Huawei to America: You're not taking cyber-security seriously until you let China vouch for us

"once the USA [..] knew the rules"

The US only has one rule : USA first and everyone else is fair game.

Share information more openly ? The US will readily agree - to recieve shared information. Giving it out ? No so much.

Trust China to vouch for Huawei ? Okay, not even I would trust that one, but hey, why should the US do so ? It knows very well what the NSA can do and there's no reason China shouldn't be doing the same.

Contrary to the US Government - which can't seem to get a grip on its super spy agency, China's government will have no trouble keeping its spy agency on a tight leash - which will tighten even more if there is something China's rulers don't like.

Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings

AI can be an inventor

Well I certainly agree - the day we have actual AI, that is.

Right now all we have are statistical analysis machines. And we can't even say how they come to their decisions.

That is black box computing, not AI.

Euro watchdog will try to extract $900m from Amazon for breaking data privacy laws

Thank you for these responses, you've cleared the fog for me.

"complaint by [..] a French privacy group"

One thing I don't get : how is it that a French privacy group made a complaint to a non-european-institution in Luxembourg ?

The CNPD is a purely Luxembourgish institution, it has no teeth at the European level as far as I can tell. It's home page makes no mention of Europe at all (neither does its Missions page), and the European flag is conspicuously absent from it, contrary to every other European Institution web site.

I'm giddy at the idea that somebody is finally levelling a fine that represents a meaningful amount against an Internet goliath, but how does this work ?

Tech spec experts seek allies to tear down ISO standards paywall

If it's supposed to be standard, it has to be public

A standard that is not freely available is not a standard.

Period.

Russia says software malfunction caused Nauka module to unexpectedly fire thrusters, tilt space station

One thing is for sure

When the Nauka's thrusters started firing, it must have been one hell of a brown alert moment for everyone on board.

Thankfully, astronauts are people with tremendous self-control and intelligence. I'm glad that they're all alive and well.

Re: Several possibilities

e) a cosmic ray flipped the wrong bit

Sysadmins: Why not simply verify there's no backdoor in every program you install, and thus avoid any cyber-drama?

How about using proper change control ?

Once an update is committed to the upload server of the supplier, there could be a mechanism to ensure that that file is properly identified (MD5 and signature, or something similar). As soon as the file changes, if there is not the proper declaration in the records, shutdown the Internet connection for the server, send an alert mail and wait for the admins to come and check.

I'm pretty sure implenting this kind of procedure wouldn't break the bank, and it seems to me that it could be rather efficient in keeping customers safe.

On this most auspicious of days, we ask: How many sysadmins does it take to change a lightbulb?

"It has a cord attached so it's YOUR problem."

I think the response was very adequate. I would have loved to do that myself.

Then again, if it were the BOFH, I can readily imagine him attaching a cord to said assistant and making it his problem to solve.

With Marmite.

London class-action sueball against Google is a lot like Epic's case except fandroids might win enough for a pint

"Advocates of these cases"

are lawyers looking at the $$$ signs that they stand to reap.

I'm getting sick of all these hypocrites pretending to work for the benefit of the public.

It's for the benefit of the public ? Then you get your hourly rate and not a cent more.

Liars.

What to do with our leftover Saturn V Lego? Why, build another rocket, of course

A typewriter ? Really ?

There is probably not a single piece of that thing that you can use to make anything else but a typewriter.

I despise this bespoke transformation of my childhood imagination.

You want to build a typewiter ? Use Meccano, that's what it's for.

International Space Station stabilizes after just-docked Russian module suddenly fires thrusters

"attitude control has been regained," NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said . .

. . holding a large cattleprod in hand

We can't believe people use browsers to manage their passwords, says maker of password management tools

"using things like multi-factor authentication"

Yeah, which means I have to give up my phone number to any number of websites run by any kind of sysadmin with a budget I am not aware of and qualifications that I know even less.

Sorry, I'll keep my password management in-house, thank you very much.

AWS growing so fast its revenue makes it bigger than Cisco or HP

Especially when it comes to leaving critical data available to all and sundry in an unsecured bucket.

Malware and Trojans, but there's only one horse the boss man wants to hear about

Haven't we already had an On Call with just that ?

The guy who wiped the production server with a command line mistake and then mopped up while telling everyone it was "unscheduled maitnenance".

BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

So he was "visiting" during working hours

I think Jim is not the only one who should discover the wonders of marmite. Looks to me as the head of accounting should also get a taste for allowing personal visits during work hours, and for allowing a perfect stranger to use unsecured media on company property.

Then, of course, there's the boss who actively made the situation worse by granting a security risk access to the Holy Sanctum. And, obviously, the sheer blasphemy of his grubby hands on the PHY's and BOFH's computers.

Oh yes, they're going to need a lot of marmite.

Ex-health secretary said 'vast majority' were 'onside' with GP data grab. Consumer champion Which? reckons 20 million don't even know what it is

Let's be honest, okay ?

"Four in 10 (42 per cent) said hearing about the scheme in the survey had made them trust the NHS less "

Given the UK Government's history of IT project management in general, I would suggest that 10 out of 10 should opt out. NOW.