Posts by Pascal Monett

China says it applied to join digital free trade deal days after proposing law against cross-border data flow

Re: China won't play by the rules.

China wants the money, because money is what makes the world go 'round. All the bollocks about the party line falls flat when the need to spend is felt. And China needs to spend. On its military, its infrastructure and its economy.

China has been keeping to itself for a long time and now it sees just how far back it has fallen. It wants to catch up, and its people want to live a good life. Communist politics have been battered down to allow the "capitalist" economy to flourish, and China is seeing the positive effect on its economy.

That positive effect is what is going to ensure that China does indeed play by the rules. Oh, it will resist as much as possible, to be sure, but in the end, if you want in on a market, you accept the rules of the market.

Until you can change them.

Latest Loongson chip is another step in China's long road to semiconductor freedom

"CPU architectures as a means of control"

Where did that come from ?

Loognson's declarations are obviously written with a government and party representative. Every declaration must contain some form of jab at The West, even if it is totally groundless.

And as for the "independant analysis" of the architecture, I'm sure it was made by a party member as well.

It would seem that China's version of Pravda is working up a sweat.

New World: Grindy? Check. Repetitive? Check. Fun? We hate to say it... but check

Re: "get better loot so you are strong enough to get even better loot"

So, you're talking about Diablo III I take it ?

Re: Avoid this game like the plague

Ouch.

I'll wait for that to be patched before I take a gander then.

Data-breached Guntrader website calls in liquidators, is reborn as Guntrader 2 Ltd

Owning more than one company is not the issue.

Starting a new one when there's a liquidation of one of your existing ones underway is.

So he pre-empted the investigation.

I'm sure the law can find a way to suspend that - if it wanted to.

Re: How does this work?

Good question.

From my point of view, it's the fault of the law. There is no justification to let a person under liquidation procedure open another company, whatever that company may be.

One thing at a time.

First you handle the liquidation issue, then you start over.

Here, it is apparently allowed to open multiple companies although one of your existing ones is being scrutinized.

I think it would be good to put a stop to that, by mandating that anyone owning a company that is in liquidation cannot open new companies until the procedure is over.

Juno what? Jupiter's Great Red Spot is much deeper than originally thought

"how Jupiter's beautiful and violent atmosphere works – in 3D"

Can't wait to see the videos they're going to make of that !

Windows Subsystem for Android: What's the point?

When it became barely enough to run Windows.

Sharing is caring, except when it's your internet connection

"What the neighbours made of their sudden disconnection is . ."

. . their problem.

You log onto an open wifi, you accept that that connection is not under your control. If it disappears, well tough cookies.

I'm not blaming them for using an open access point, but they have nowhere to complain. Back in the day, though, this kind of thing usually meant people with PCs but no internet connection, and those kind of people could likely be quick to jump on an open access point rather than pay for their own connection.

We've all heard the tale of the guy who gets a knock on the door and opens it to find another tenant asking him for his wifi password.

Yet again, Cream Finance skimmed by crooks: $130m in crypto assets stolen

"We apologize to our users and community for this unfortunate incident"

$130 million is not an "incident".

What is unfortunate is your belief that not using an industry that has over 1000 years of experience is a good idea. Banking rules were not made up, they are the product of everything that has already gone wrong and they are the guarantee that errors will be few and far between.

Discarding that to reproduce the same mistakes and make new ones is not a good choice.

Once is hacking, twice is sloppyness, three is gross incompetence.

They're lucky the Mafia didn't have any money there, 'cause if it had, they'd all be dead.

Get ready for full holograms and 6G while living in the metaverse, says Samsung

FBI 2150

It's late in the evening and it's raining. The police lieutenant is still clutching his cold, unfinished stimfee, waiting for the coroner's decision. The blue lights wash over the wet facades of city buildings, and the once-human form lying on the ground. The body is dessicated and charred, the fifth one this week and it's only Wednesday.

The coroner gets up, tired as hell, and turns to the officer. "Yeah, he got a phone call. Bad luck when you're in line of sight of three relays."

The lieutenant nods. Well, at least the forms for this are standardized. That'll make the paperwork easier. "You know, " he says, " they're talking about making 23G use high-energy x-rays."

"Well that'll make my job easier for sure," answers the coroner. "There won't be any body to analyze"

"Right" chuckles the officer. "Okay, you can take him away. Let's get out of this rain."

India's Supreme Court starts probe into use of Pegasus spyware

"government legal reps obfuscated when asked to supply information about the use of Pegasus"

Funny how governments around the world fall into the same trap of fouling things up then trying to cover up the mistakes.

Interesting (and reassuring) that the various justice systems appear to behave somewhat similarly when it comes to trusting government to investigate itself (well, in democracies at least).

When AI and automation come to work you stress less – but hate your job more

Automation

I don't much like it myself, but you have to admit that, 200 years ago, 99% of the population were farmers. We automated that and now I'm guessing that 95% of the population are doing other things.

So automation is not a bad thing in itself, it's just the transition period for the people who have to find another set of skills that is difficult.

HIV Scotland fined £10,000 for BCC email blunder identifying names of virus-carriers' patient-advocates

Apparently you missed the paragraph where I stated :

"It seems that HIV Scotland is going to learn to revamp its mailing section and ensure that only properly-trained people who know what they are doing are in charge of mailings . ."

It's a charity

Charities are full of people with good intentions and not much know-how, especially when it comes to technical matters.

A few years ago my daughter had the intention of joining the International Red Cross for the summer and go help build housings in tsunami-devastated areas.

She came back with a sobering answer : no, because the IRC had already seen the effect of groups of well-intentioned idiots fouling everything up and ruining the projects, so now they only take experienced people on such drives.

It seems that HIV Scotland is going to learn to revamp its mailing section and ensure that only properly-trained people who know what they are doing are in charge of mailings, and that is contrary to the basics of a charity where people expect their good will should be enough.

Well sometimes it isn't.

Microsoft's UWP = Unwanted Windows Platform?

Oh come on, XP wasn't that bad.

Just look at Vista.

"Once again you abandon a framework"

Hey buddy, you trusted Microsoft. It's your fault, really.

How many more times is it going to take for people to understand ? Borkzilla launches a new tool ? Fine. Wait 'till version 3 to check it out. Wait 'till version 5 to start developing on it. Check the initial promises, compare to realization. If at V5 it's at less than 75% of initial promises, you should know that it will never get there.

Then decide what to do with it, knowing that there's a better than 50% that it will be discontinued in the next ten years.

Either that, or it will be "replaced" with something else you can no longer avoid using.

Honestly, these days you're better off with Open Source.

Good Grief! Ransomware gang has only gone and pwned the NRA – or so it claims

"the cybergang at arms is under US financial sanctions"

So, caught between a rock and a hard place, are we ?

The NRA being one of, if not the most harmful "associations" that has ever been created, I am amused.

You take extraordinary measures ? And you're "very vigilant" ?

Pro tip : having armed guards next to your servers is not going to help.

NPM packages disguised as Roblox API code caught carrying ransomware

So the issues are down to a lack of control

I can therefor create a package called noblox.js.jackpotnow and nobody is going to bat an eyelid until somebody actually wonders why that exists.

Somehow that does not strike me as "anyone can contribute", so much as "anyone can fuck it up".

I've got a feeling that the ease-of-contribution culture is going to get a healthy dose of reality check in the coming years. It's not because it's open source that it has to be a free-for-all. I'm sure developers are going to welcome a bit of verification if it means that their code can be kept from the dregs of the Intarwubs.

After all, what's the real cost of having to sign in to a project before being able to contribute ? It's just a few emails and an identifier for your contributions.

Identifier that can be banned if you screw up, of course.

50 years have gone by since the UK's one – and only – homegrown foray into orbit

"The easiest thing you can do is pour concrete"

Yeah, well it might not be that simple.

Chinese server builder Inspur trains monster text-generating neural network

Re: Someone, somewhere will make this happen

Yeah, well, I'll wait and see . . .

First, stunning whistleblower leaks. Now a shareholder lawsuit lands on Zuckerberg's desk

Okay, fine.

But they've only lost if they sell their shares now.

As long as they keep their shares, they haven't lost anything.

"what's been revealed about Facebook's operations [..] has harmed investors"

When I read those words, I was thinking "Finally, investors are starting to take a step back from this cesspit".

Then I read the complaint : their only problem is that the stock value has dropped. Not a peep about anything Facebook is on the hook for.

Right, time to pick up my cynicism again . . . I know I left it around here. Can't be far off.

Citation, please ?

European Commission sticks 'in-depth' antitrust probe into Nvidia-Arm merger plan

"boost competition and innovation"

Sure Nvidia, that's your deepest desire.

Now, are you going to tell your investors that ? What about managing the company in the investors' best interests ?

Renewal chasing as-a-service is now a thing – and vendors love it

Not going to happen. Renewtrak is legit. It is a company legally established, serving as intermediary between two entites, one of which Renewtrak has a legal contract with, and the other that has a legal contract with the first.

The FBI couldn't take that down if it wanted to.

Big Blue scoffs a Happy Meal: McDonald's sells automated order-taking tech to IBM

That depends on when the next quarterly report is due.

Pack your bags – we may have found the first planet outside of our galaxy

Colonization

I love science-fiction, as I'm sure many people do. The idea that we can span the distances between stars inside of a human lifetime is tantalizing, to be sure, as is the idea that we can find other habitable planets that can support our specific life form.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty convinced that, even if we could do so, we'd just bring the same amount of lazyness and apathy to preserving the new planet as we have shown with the old.

So being stuck here right now is probably the best lesson we can get on the consequences of mismanaging planetary resources.

'We will not rest until the periodic table is exhausted' says Intel CEO on quest to keep Moore's Law alive

"two advanced chip factories in Arizona"

Again, Arizona. The driest state of the Union is where everyone is building in an industry that needs millions of gallons of water every day.

Is there some special virus in Arizona that systematically infects only semiconductor CEOs and bends their mind to choose Arizona, instead of, gosh, just about anywhere else that actually has water ?

Intel claims first Alder Lake chip is the fastest desktop gaming silicon in the world

Re: personally I hate water cooling as at some point it will leak

I've been using watercooling for years. If done right, it does not leak.

I would also point out that there is a high likelyhood that your motherboard has its SATA IO chips watercooled.

As for me, I have abandoned the idea of air cooling completely. Watercooling is more efficient, and quieter, even with top-of-the-range CPUs and GPUs.

Sovereignty? We've heard of it. UK government gives contract to store MI5, MI6 and GCHQ's data to AWS

"store their secret files in the AWS cloud"

Have they sent their logon credentials to Moscow yet ?

No matter, Moscow will have that when it needs it.

31-year-old piece of hardware not working very well: Hubble telescope back in safe mode over 'synchronization issues'

It's not meant to be serviceable.

Astroboffins aren't stupid enough to miss the importance of where they're parking their kit.

Re: JWST is not a new HST

Voudriez-vous un morceau de fromage avec ça ?

Re: "servicing the HST is no longer viable"...

As iconic as the Shuttle was, and with all the services to Science it did render, the Shuttle was not economically viable.

Add to that a layer of management that pays more attention to the schedule and PR than to temperatures and engineering issues, and it is a very good thing that the Shuttle was shut down, because I am convinced that those bungling beancounters at the head of NASA would have caused another shocking failure in the following years.

And we don't need that memory.

Facebook's greatest misses: The five nastiest bits from recent leaks

"must surely display both brilliant foresight and a true understanding of human behavior"

Either that, or it displays his sociopathy to an extreme degree.

Re: Facebook’s profits are enormous, but its operating margins are tiny

I don't give a damn about how tiny its margins are if its profits are enormous.

If it has enormous profits, it has money to improve its moderation abilities.

And I don't care why Zuck is not taking action. The Law can make him take action.

Of course, for that we would need politicians that don't already have their heads halfway up his ass.

Re: Figures.

And then you have at least 10% of accounts that are cats or dogs, or maybe even goldfish.

South Korean telco goes down, blames DDoS attack, later admits its BGP broke

"not a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack"

Am I the only one who feels that making up an excuse is a pretty unprofessional thing to do ?

Especially in a company of that importance.

Jeff Bezos wants to build a business park in space

"an office address in space for businesses"

Stupid. Utterly stupid.

An office address is useful for being close to where you produce something. Even if it isn't tangible goods, space is an environment where there's nothing.

And it costs millions to get there. And it dangerous to human health to stay there too long. Plus, the walls of the station are paper-thin, they can be breached by a pebble of sand. And to take a shit you have to shove a tube up your ass. Not to mention the food is pre-chewed.

I very much doubt any CEO of any company is going to enjoy being in space for business purposes. Sure, fucking the secretary in zero-G won't get old soon (or will it ?), but the sheer fact is that, while he's up there, actual business is happening down here.

And let's not forget that blasting off from Earth is not 100% certain to get you into space. You can also be blasted to bits.

It is way too early for this kind of project.

Now, when we have a functional space elevator, or some other way of getting people into orbit with 99.999% reliability, then we can start looking into mining asteroids and yes, that will be a time to have an orbital business space.

But until then, get access to space secure first.

If you're using this hijacked NPM library anywhere in your software stack, read this

Recipe that apparently everyone is happily walking straight into, because then it's someone else's fault.

What should be done is have a build server, make sure your code works there, then port all the used code to the production server and LOCK IT DOWN. No more calls to outside libraries, everything is on-site and under control.

When the build server gets an update, CHECK THE UPDATE. Yes, AND ALL DEPENDANCIES.

It's called security. Nobody said it was easy.

Non-profit's IT manager accused of embezzling $400k by buying gear, services from his own fake companies

Embezzling a non-profit organization

The lowest pickings, the easiest targets.

Non-profits with a strong financial structure, strong internal controls and a meticulous verification of invoices are few and far between.

On top of that, as IT manager he was in an ideal position to know just what to do and how to present it to slip through the cracks.

Although he still got caught, so easy as the job was, he was still too stupid for it.

Many crooks succeed at first. It's the ones that don't get caught that are good.

Tesla slams into reverse, pulls latest beta of Full Self-Driving software from participating car owners

"Please note, this is to be expected with beta software"

Please note : beta software has no business in production products.

SolarWinds attacker on the move: Russia's Nobelium crew has trebled attacks targeting MSPs, cloud resellers, says Microsoft

"Hostile countries' threat actors"

This is sabotage and nothing less than an act of war.

I'm thinking Tom Clancy could have whipped up a scenario where such actors were terminated with extreme prejudice à la Rainbow Six.

Windows XP@20: From the killer of ME to banging out patches for yet another vulnerability

"a huge leap forward from Windows 9x"

That is very true.

Windows 98 SE, as fun as it was, couldn't run more than 24 hours without borking itself. Windows XP, especially in its 3rd edition, was better on that point, even though it took Windows 7 to convince me that Borkzilla could actually write an OS that didn't continually trip over its own feet.

That said, even with XP I had to reinstall from scratch every now and then, just to have a system that appeared to run smoothly. Between my computers and my friends' computers, I reinstalled XP over 300 times (yes, I counted).

Windows 7 was a true breath of fresh air on that point.

UK watchdog launches full probe of Motorola Solutions' cop-comms deals on Emergency Services Network

"market investigation is not warranted"

I'm sorry, at three years late and no less than 50% over budget on a project that was already in the billions, I do believe an investigation is indeed warranted.

NASA sets a date to begin lunar tuning

All you need is a 256GB USB stick that is USB3-compatible.

Oh, and a tablet, of course.

Jokes aside, they're astronauts, not civil servants. They have a daily program that is regulated to the minute. They obviously do have some downtime available, but they're not going to be spending six months watching films or series.

They don't have time for that.

Asia's 'superapps' bundle ride-share, food delivery, even financial services – and they're beating big tech

"tools users perceive as an extension of the OS"

Oh great. China is going all Borkzilla on us now.

So, when will WeChat be a required part of Edge ?

I'm not all that certain that superapps are not going to happen in the West. The new generation is weaned on smartphones. Very few of them do anything on PCs these days. For Pete's sake, Fortnight is being played on smartphones !

And let's not forget that WeChat is actually the mobile operator Tencent. It had the chops to integrate other apps, it had the position to do so, and it ended up with the government mandate to establish it. It's all of Firefox's (useful) add-ons, but integrated together by law.

Okay, that won't happen in the West, but as new generations start with smartphones in their little hands instead of keyboards, mice and proper widescreens, well perception is going to evolve, and apps with them.

I think Borkzilla would kill to have 1.23 billion daily users on smartphones.

Japanese bloke collared after using AI software to uncensor smut and flogging it

"the wrong way to look at how we fight hate speech"

But of course. Any way to look at it is bad if it makes you look bad, especially when looking at actual facts.

It's much better to just trust that you are doing your best, right ?

Sure.