Posts by Pascal Monett

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

"What I've learned was that simply being a non-profit is not a magic pill for honesty and integrity"

Ain't that right, Nominet ?

IT manager who swindled Essex hospital trust out of £800k gets 5 years in prison

Barry Stannard

Soon to be your new friendly face at the nearest McD's.

With a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, he might even rise to flipping the burgers.

A well-deserved fate.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

They don't have granite in Japan ?

Openreach to UK businesses: Switch is about to hit the fan. Prepare for withdrawal of the copper-based phone network now or risk disruption

"Openreach owner BT will pay minimal tax in the coming years"

So, after having spent years dilly-dallying and not putting any money into infrastructure, BT is now handsomely rewarded with a guaranteed low-to-nothing tax bill to make it do its job.

Isn't it great to be at the top ?

Former NASA astronaut and Shuttle boss weigh in on fixing Hubble Space Telescope

Re: So you're telling me there's a chance

And I choose to hang on to that chance with all my might.

Gotta learn how to cross my toes . . .

Who in America is standing up to privacy-bothering facial-recognition tech? Maine is right now leading the pack

"facial recognition is dangerous no matter who is using it"

Bless you Caitlin. Go on fighting the good fight.

I wish you the best of luck.

Robinhood hit with record $70m bill by financial watchdog for outages, misleading investors

"will not admit nor deny any wrongdoing"

I despise companies that are caught red-handed and yet still think they can save face by not admitting what everybody knows is true.

Data collected to promote public health must never be surrendered to police

Singapore's decision was disastrous

At the time, I remember very well the number of comments wondering whether or not these COVID tracking apps would be perverted like that, and then Singapore went and did exactly that.

Suprisingly, nobody else did, until now, that is, with Australia opening the way again.

There is clearly a problem in our so-called Western society. On the one hand, everyone is all about Freedom (and, increasingly, Privacy), on the other hand we are sliding slowly but surely into police states at a level Orwell would be amazed of.

Democracy is hard enough to keep going as it is. Let's keep the jackboots at bay.

You, robo-car maker, any serious accidents, I want to know about them, stat – US watchdog

Re: Circumvention by obfuscation

It will be significantly more difficult to obfuscate the fact that car needed to be towed, or that someone ended up in the hospital, but I'm sure they'll do their bloody best.

IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say

"laid the blame on IBM CFO James Kavanaugh"

Okay, I am well aware that large companies do have the despicable habit of being run by the beancounters, but in this case shouldn't it be the CTO getting the flack ?

IBM does have a CTO, right ? If he can't stand up for what is needed, isn't it his fault in the first place ?

No, it's just a major disaster.

Microsoft wasn't joking about the Dev Channel not enforcing hardware checks: Windows 11 pops up on Pi, mobile phone

You're nuts

Windows 11 on a Raspberry Pi ? That's crazy. Kudos to the mad engineers who tried that.

That said, Windows hardware requirements have always been a joke. For starters, Borkzilla has systematically tried to make people believe that whatever version of Windows it was pushing, it could run fine on a quarter of the actual memory requirements.

For Windows 95, the official minimum RAM was 4MB. If you actually wanted to do anything other than boot the system, you needed 16MB.

For Windows XP, the official minimum RAM was 64MB. Again, having at least 256MB made the system actually useful and responsive.

For Windows 7, Borkzilla had the gall to state that 2GB was all that was needed (for the 64-bit version). What you actually needed was 8GB at the bare minimum, 16GB was much, much better.

And for Windows 1 0, Borkzilla is still trying to convince people that 2GB for the 64-bit version is enough. If you want to look at the logon screen, maybe, but if you want to work, I'm pretty sure that 16GB is the bare minimum.

International law enforcement op nukes Russian-language DoubleVPN service allegedly favoured by cybercriminals

I have nothing to hide and I demand that you justify what right you have to ask.

Leaked print spooler exploit lets Windows users remotely execute code as system on your domain controller

What the ever-loving frak ?

"people need to prioritize disabling the print spooler service on domain controllers and mission critical servers "

What the hell is the print spooler doing enabled on a domain controller ? Since when do you print from a domain controller ?

I wager this situation would never happen on a Linux server, because Linux admins only enable what is needed on the server. Windows admins, on the other hand, just install Windows and let it run.

I never print from my main PC, because the printer is on the other side of the office and the USB cord is not long enough. Do you really think I have the print spooler service enabled on my main PC ? Of course not.

New Yorkers react to strikingly indifferent statue of Elon Musk with cheerful hostility

Not sure that that argument applies : money is being made off of it.

America tops ITU's Global Cyber Security Index, UK in tie for second with Saudi Arabia

You're not answering the question.

Is Saudi Arabia ahead of the UK or not and why ?

They decided to give countries with the same score the same rank, so no, Estonia ranks 3rd because both the UK and Saudi Arabia rank 2nd.

Then you have Korea, Singapore and Spain that all rank 4th.

Once you understand the process, it becomes logical.

How would you rank the difference between the UK and Saudi Arabia given that they have the same score of 99.54 ?

I wondered about that myself

Is there some sort of anathema around the words Middle East ?

Is it because the news has been referring to conflicts in the Middle East for the past fourty years (if not more) ?

Like it or not, it's the Middle East. Isreal is not part of Europe. It's not even guaranteed that the movements of tectonic plates will ever make that happen.

Revealed: Why Windows Task Manager took a cuddlier approach to (process) death and destruction

Re: "shutdown" doesn't really shut down the computer fully anymore

You're talking about a laptop.

I can assure you that when my tower case shuts down, it's shut down. The PSU is off, no LEDs are shining and even the USB ports are shut off.

Financial watchdog says Google's clampdown on scam ads might not be enough to prevent stricter laws in Britain

"we think a permanent and consistent solution requires legislation"

Yes it does, otherwise you're counting on a private company to Do What's Right.

And that has never backfired, now has it ?

Cross-discipline boffin dream team issues social media warning: FIX IT NOW!

Academics

They are top notch for defining what happened in the past. If we have to wait on them to define how we need to manage social media now, we'll be dead before we get the report.

Social media has been here for a decade already. It's perfectly in academic timing to start worrying about it now.

Re: Gutenberg's printing press did immense harm - short term

The Maleficarum clearly did it for mainland Europe, but it was James Ist' book Daemonologie that kicked off the worst period of witch hunting in the UK.

The fact that it had been authored by a king, and not an obscure monk, had a lot to do with its influence.

This always-on culture we're in is awful. How do we stop it? Oh, sorry, hold on – just had another notification

"measure what they deliver"

I will never forget that time I accompanied a friend of mine to a presentation concerning an accounting package. He wanted me to come with him because, in the early 90s, I was an accountant.

At the presentation, there was the two of us, and two guys from an accounting company. Two young, cocky guys.

They spent the entire presentation asking about the the functionalities allowing them to trace employees down to the keystroke.

Remember, this was the early 90s, when the 486DX2 was the pinnacle of technology. And here I was, discovering that an accounting package was spending more CPU resources on spying on its users for the pleasure of management than actually doing its job of managing accounts.

That was one hell of an eye-opener for me.

My friend chose to not take that package.

You wait ages for a neutron star and black hole to collide, then two pairs come along at once

Don't forget, people

Whatever the event, the black hole always wins.

UK artists seek 'luvvie levy' on new gadgets to make up for all the media that consumers access online

I have a hunch that people who sell drugs or stolen property have a tendancy to not declare that revenue on their income tax.

What ?

"redress the balance caused by people accessing music, films, and other creative material online without paying for it directly "

Hey, I'm all for supporting the Arts, but why choose to tax the equipment ? If people are consuming creative material online, they're going somewhere for that, so tax that place.

Are we going to start hearing a variation on VHS killed the film industry ?

Stop this nonsense.

Five words everyone wants to hear: Microsoft has 'visually refreshed' Office

Windows Search

That has to be the least efficient Search module that has ever been invented.

I cannot help but imagine that Windows Search has been expressely tweaked by Borkzilla engineers to ensure that, despite every improvement in hardware performance, Windows Search remains just as sluggish as it was in Windows 3.1.

I disable that monstrosity, and use Everything Search instead. Everything Search is free, it installs in less than half a minute and, once it is done looking through your hard drives, it takes less than 10 milliseconds to find any file name you might be looking for.

You know, like a proper search function should do in the 3rd Millennium, with computers that are a million times more performant than they were when the 286 came out.

AMD opens wallet to lure scientific computing boffins away from Nvidia's CUDA onto its Instinct accelerators

Competition

There's nothing like it.

Panasonic's Toughbook G2 comes Windows 11-ready even as TPM 2.0 supplies dwindle

That keyboard dock looks like a beast

And good on backlit keys. That is so useful.

I don't have the need for ruggedized, but I think Panasonic did a great job on this one.

Bezos v Branson: Battle of the wannabe Space Barons as Virgin Galactic cleared by FAA to start flying customers

Do you, by any chance, live at Boca Chica ?

Fujitsu wins £9m contract hike for Oracle HR system running nearly 3 years late at Northern Ireland Education Authority

So many project failures are being rewarded

And it feels like it's always the same names that come back to the trough.

How is it possible ?

Bitcoin doomed as a payment system and its novelty will fade, says Federal Reserve Board of Governors member

Re: It's the usefulness

In France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany and, I'm guessing, all of the EU, banks allow you to transfer money to any IBAN account number.

You just log on to your online account portal and type in the order, confirm it and it's done.

It baffles me that there are so many people in the world who need ad-hoc services for something that should be offered by the banks themselves.

Microsoft approved a Windows driver booby-trapped with rootkit malware

Ah, Microsoft

Now giving its blessing to malware authors through sheer lack of giving a fuck.

Water conditions in Jupiter's clouds could support 'life', say astroboffins

Water activity

Such is Science, ever adjusting its rules following new insights and new data.

It will be interesting to see how this definition pans out if we actually get a valid survey of Venusian atmosphere.

London Greenwich station: A reminder of former glories. Like Windows XP

How much longer will we have to endure this ?

I wonder how much longer it is going to take for companies to remove Borkzilla bloatware from platforms that don't need it and go with a rock-solid Linux implementation that Just Works.

India's IT minister angry that Twitter broke local law by following US law

Interesting dichotomy here

Time it took Twitter to ban Trump's lies : 4 years.

Time it took Twitter to ban another world leader who was just complaining about Twitter's non-compliance to local law : less than 4 days.

Hmm. Seems that Twitter has a rather unbalanced set of rules when it comes to managing world leader accounts.

Good news: Google no longer requires publishers to use the AMP format. Bad news: What replaces it might be worse

AMP is not a problem, nor is its replacement

As I read this article, the author is complaining that AMP redirects my click to a Google-cached page, and its successor does the same thing.

Except that I use ClearURLs. That is a Firefox addon that removes all extraneous, useless stuff from the link I want to click on.

So I have never been impacted by AMP. When I click on a link, ClearURLs ensures that I get to the page that was intended : the one on the website I wanted to visit, not Google's cached version of it.

The Internet remains the Internet. If you do a little bit of research, you can have the experience you want, not the experience other entities want for you.

The world has a plastics shortage, and PC makers may be responding with a little greenwashing

Re: the USA and most western nations do NOT dump plastic into the oceans

Sorry Bob, but have you seen the sides of the roads and highways these last few decades ?

Plastic bags full of trash are lying there. Sometimes it's just a plastic bag, or an empty plastic bottle.

The truth is, people are pigs. They do not hesitate to throw away anything they decide they don't need any more, and many don't give a damn about where they are when they throw something away.

My favorite example ? Smokers. When they're done with their cigarette, that butt will go flying, be it on the sidewalk or through a car window. Look for a trash can ? Are you kidding me ?

So plastic has got into the oceans not through any government program, obviously, but through the sheer don't-give-a-damn of a large part of the population that goes to the beach and doesn't care what they leave behind when they decide to leave. Some might attempt to look for a trash can, but if it's more than 20 meters away, or if it's already overflowing, fuck it, they'll just leave their trash right there.

Now, obviously, I'm not saying everyone does that, nor am I saying that that is happening on every single road or beach of the world. It has happened enough, though, so that there are several areas in our oceans that are choking with plastic residue.

That would not have happened if everyone was mindful of putting their trash where it belongs : in the bin.

Hmmmmm, how to cool that overheating CPU, if only there was a solution...

8 inches of water barely gets to cover half the height of the wheels. I don't see how a car of any kind can be totalled by that.

You might need to replace the wheels, depending on the corrosiveness of the liquid, but worse than that I can't think of.

And those sensible people will sensibly ask a plumber how to go about doing something concerning plumbing, otherwise they're not so sensible.

So I fail to see how Jake's comment falls down.

Hubble’s cosmic science is mind-blowing, but its soul celebrates something surprising about us

Beautiful piece which unfortunately almost reads like an obituary

Thank you for this take on the technical history of Hubble.

Now let us all cross our fingers that the boffins and engineers will once again wrest victory from the jaws of defeat.

Here's hoping, against all odds, that Hubble will once again grace us with Science, and more beautiful pictures.

AWS launches BugBust contest: Help fix a $100m problem for a $12 tshirt

Indeed

Amazon rakes in $90 million a day, and they're graciously promising $234,000 in bounties.

Wow, that really makes my heart race.

Jailed for seven years: Cyber-crook who broke into Big Biz to steal bank card info for FIN7 super-gang

Credit card security is improving.

Here in Europe, I have a OTP token assigned to my credit card. When I make online purchases, I must authenticate and provide the password given by the token at that time.

Works pretty well and it seems to me that that will very much thwart any miscreant's attempt to fleece me if he ever does manage to snaffle my credit card number somehow.

Plus, there's the fact that, if I ever do detect suspicious activity on my credit card ledger, I can report it and my bank will block it and send me a replacement credit card at no extra cost.

SolarWinds backdoor gang pwns Microsoft support agent to turn sights on customers

The perils of piracy

Malware has long been a staple of CD cracks and pirated games.

I buy my games, always have. But I freely admit that shoving the disc in the reader just to play quickly got on my nerves. I used to have a fairly reliable No-CD site, so I could avoid that hassle. Slowly but surely, even that site got taken over by the scum of the Earth and its cracks were no longer trustworthy.

These days, the problem is solved because I use Steam. GOG is also an option.

But you buy your games. Cracking them is just asking for trouble.

Green MSP calls on Scottish government to stop spending £4.7m a year with AWS after Amazon 'dumping' allegations

"we do not send items to landfill in the UK"

We send them to landfills in China.

It boggles the mind to imagine that millions of brand new items are destroyed. Why ? Can't they just stay on the shelves until they get sold ?

This is clearly the worst aspect of our wasteful society. We make things, use resources, and destroy them before they can ever become useful.

If Amazon has so much stuff it can't sell, it should seriously review its decision process on what items it acquires in the first place. And, if an item really does not sell well, then bite the bullet and put it in the dollar bin at 99 cents. I'm pretty sure that you'll ship a lot more and won't need to landfill them.

Wish you could play tabletop Dungeons & Dragons but have no friends? Solasta: Crown of the Magister offers a solution

Re: Friends ≥ null program

Same here. My old AD&D crew now all have lives, wives and children, plus no vacation time to spend three or four full afternoons sitting around a table with (badly) painted figurines, wierdly-shaped dice and a piece of paper with stats written on it.

Fond memories of those times, though. It was good while it lasted.

Nowadays, I have a different group of friends and we convene Mondays and Friday evenings for two hours of multiplayer gaming via Internet. We use a Teamspeak private server for voice, and our current gamelist is 7 Days to Die, Diablo III and Minecraft.

It's another sort of fun.

Google: About that whole getting rid of third-party cookies thing – we're gonna need another year or so

I use Chrome for one thing only

To log on to my professional Gmail account.

It's already borgified, why should I use anything else ?

For everything else, it's Firefox with Noscript and UBlock origin.

These six proposed bipartisan antitrust laws put Big Tech in the cross-hairs – and a House committee just OK'd them

Re: All very laudable but...

Better late than never.

And honestly, it is a bit harsh to blame lawmakers for not having the foresight to guess what Google, Facebook and Twitter would become a decade before they did.

Laws are made with hindsight, not with foresight. Unfortunately.

BOFH: Oh for Pete’s sake. Don’t make a spectacle of yourself

Ah, Threat-Detecting Boots

If only.

Google creates 'optimized' Android for one smartphone — that will only be sold in India

"an affordable price"

In other words, the marketing department is still trying to find out just how hard they can gouge their new customers and still make bank.