Posts by Pascal Monett

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

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.

More than half of UK workers would consider jumping ship if a hybrid work option were withdrawn by their company

Re: Company loyalty?

Indeed.

Company loyalty disappeared right around when HR demonstrated that humans were just resources - to be used and disposed of.

Shocking: UK electricity tariffs are among world's most expensive

Personally I'm rather surprised about the use of windmills. If there's not enough wind, brakes are applied, if there's too much wind, brakes are applied.

Why do they not go for a pyramid shape around a vertical axis ? Winds could be hurricane-level and it could still turn (well, I think).

Boffins demonstrate a different kind of floppy disk: A legless robot that hops along a surface

"the soft robotics field"

So they can jump. Put up a wall they can jump over, and a field of spikes for them to fall on.

Problem solved.

Facebook slapped with an eyepopping $150B lawsuit for spreading hate speech against Rohingya refugees

And where exactly is "here" ?

NASA installs a new and improved algorithm to better track near-Earth asteroids

Re: "With Sentry-II, we don’t have to do that anymore"

Technically I agree with you, however this is NASA we're talking about, not Borkzilla.

I'm sure that, if they put the software in production, they did the checking beforehand and are confident that it works as intended.

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

"this gorgeous new theme"

Gorgeous ? It's white on black. No frills, a one-pixel border (that is black) and nothing else to look at.

If that's your definition of gorgeous I suggest you set your expectations a bit higher.

South Korea sets site reliability engineering standards for Big Tech

"contribute fairly to network costs"

I still don't understand that argument.

To connect to the Internet, I pay my provider a monthly due. That is supposed to cover my bandwidth usage.

El Reg has a connection, and it pays its provider as well (probably more than I do). That covers its bandwidth usage.

Where is the unfair part of all of this ?

If it's because there's a carrier between me and El Reg, well it's up to my provider and El Reg's provider to manage the situation. El Reg is not supposed to pay every provider along the way.

This is nonsense.

Foreign Office IT chaos: Shocking testimony reveals poor tech support hindered Afghan evac attempts

"fewer than 5 per cent of these people have received any assistance"

Okay, one question : why the blazes was it so important to email them documents before evacuating the people you knew were going to be murdered ?

Wouldn't it have been better to just load them on the planes, get them to security and then let administration catch up with the situation ?

Or is that too much to ask from a "civilized" country ?

The nub of the issue: Has your ThinkPad's TrackPoint gone TITSUP*? You aren't alone

Re: The tell-tale signs of a Lenovo Pointer regular user...

Agreed. My personal preference is a wireless mouse, but in a pinch I will prefer the trackpoint over any touchpad.

And keep your filthy, greasy fingers away from my screen !

Microsoft wins court approval to take over sites run by Chinese crime gang

Re: This is normal

Technically I agree with you, but one must admit that the Internet is a very peculiar environment as far as software is concerned.

Before the Internet, the only way to attack a machine was to physically sit in front of it. In those days, a programmer was only concerned with making sure the product functioned as intended. Security was baked in because of the limitations of physical access.

Networks showed up, and suddenly computers had to be secured from unwarranted access, but that happened at the OS level, not at the program level.

Today, practically all computers are connected to the greatest network that has ever been implemented. The drawback is that now, programmers must not only ensure their product works, but also that it is protected from attacks that can happen any time, in any way. The minds that can concieve the attacks are intelligent, and more numerous than the minds that concieve the defenses. There is a basic inequality there.

Yes, buggy software is a nuisance that really should not exist, but that concerns functionality. Security is an ongoing concern because the miscreants have time to try things no programmer could protect against before the fact.

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

Re: [OPINION] is the perfect tag

But that's the whole point of the article : Bitcoin is not a tool. No one has done anything useful with it.

Lasers started out as something useless as well, today worldwide communication depends on them.

Bitcoin will never become that useful.

Kill it.

With fire.

Re: Something will come of it one day

Bitcoin has been a fad for the past 15 years.

It's well into its teens and nothing good has come from it.

I agree with the author of the article : it's time to put it back into the bottle until the day someone finds an actual use for it.

btc is not a store of value

It is a store of gullibility.

This piece is incredibly relevant at a time when governments are toying with the idea of having a government-backed funny money scheme.

Thankfully, in the latest versions, no "mining" is included, it's just you pay 1 (whatever currency) and you get 1 funny money coin.

I can live with that.

Battlefield 2042: Please don't be the death knell of the franchise, please don't be the death knell of the franchise

I bailed after 2142

My group of friends and I had a blast with Battlefield 2. It's simple : I played that game so much that the DVD broke and I had to buy another one.

Of course, we played on my local server, hacked by a now-defunct team of dedicated Internet gaming experts which allowed me to run a 128-slot server populated by the largest maps and tons of bots for whatever slots were not taken up by players. We also had custom airplanes, and I particularly liked the Warthog.

We had tons of fun, and our own ranking board.

The only issue was that, of course, EA Games did not like that people had servers that they did not pay EA Games for, so every update broke the ranking and, sometimes, even broke the server. When that happened we had to find workarounds, like putting specific addresses in the hosts file to ensure that the server stayed local. It was an increasingly frustrating headache, but that did not make us stop.

What made me stop was BF 2142. It was not uninteresting, but you couldn't play solo and you couldn't have a personal server. EA Games had obviously learned the lessons of BF2 and was determined not to let players have fun on their own.

The issue I had with 2142 was that every single patch basically required that I reinstall 2142 from scratch. I did not have a fiber connection at the time, I was on a 10Mbps ADSL line. It took basically all day to update. It was a terrible update system and I hated every moment of it. The final straw came when the online install package asked me for my DVD key. DVD key ?!? What the blazes does an online store ask me for a DVD key ?

So I fired off a rather angry mail to support telling them what I thought of this insane situation. The response : my profile got banned.

You banned me because your shit-for-brains system didn't work and I had the gall to complain ? Fine, EA Games, we're done. You stole my money and you don't know how to make fun games anymore anyway.

EA Games is now banned from my life. I don't regret it.

A smarter alternative to password recognition could be right in front of us: Unique, invisible, maybe even deadly

Ah, frustratingly short

The article was gathering steam and going strong and bam! The end.

I would have gladly read more.