The Register Home Page

* Posts by Pascal Monett

19394 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Google to build cut of its cloud operated by France’s Thales, for French government clients

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Still, they are a major.

Only because of the piles of cash that back them.

That said, Google does have a rather large experience of networking and managing massive demand, so I trust that Google won't have much trouble getting itself up to AWS's level.

Bonus : Google will do it differently, so there will be healthy competition, and that's always a Good Thing (TM)

Facebook far too consumed by greed to make itself less harmful to society, whistleblower tells Congress

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Facebook’s algorithms [..] put immense profit before safety and society"

Wow, what a surprise.

Not to diminish the testimony in any way but, honestly, US senators are the only ones who are going to feel a revelation here.

D-Wave claims it can build a gate-model quantum computer

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"D-Wave claims"

Not a problem. We'll just wait and see what D-Wave delivers.

And, as far as quantum computing is concerned, even if D-Wave is a year late, it will still be an accomplishment.

Telegraph newspaper bares 10TB of subscriber data and server logs to world+dog

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Unsecured Elasticsearch clusters are relatively common"

Is it time to declare ElasticSearch a security threat yet ?

If not, when ?

Windows 11 in detail: Incremental upgrade spoilt by onerous system requirements and usability mis-steps

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

"design paradigms from those devices could successfully carry over into a new Start"

Okay, now I get it. Borkzilla developers are young whippersnappers continually glued to their mobile phones, so obviously they think it's a good thing that their PC UI act in the same way. That way, they don't have to get used to a different environment. On top of that, they must all be using Surface or whatever other monstrosity with a touchscreen, so obviously, that's the way to go. Because everyone is using a touchscreen on their desktops, right ?

Never mind that more than a billion Windows users are using "normal" screens, never mind that, as of now, no less than TWO entire generations of Windows users have been used to the ol' Windows 3.11, XP, or 7 interface (or all of them), no, the new generation of developers wants its smartphone interface on a desktop and, by God, they're going to have it.

Well they can keep it to themselves. Absolutely everything in this article is rubbing me the wrong way. A Start Menu section I can't get rid of ? Fuck off.

Windows 11 ? Not in my house.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

Re: occasionally want edit a couple of pics

You, sir, are not the average Windows user. Of course you need a PC.

I hate touchscreens as well, especially my phone.

Nobody puts their grubby mitts on my screens - not if they want to keep their fingers intact.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

Ah, the joy of Microsoft's auto-evaluation

Your PC will need a minimum of

- 1 Ghz CPU yes, if you want to do your computing at the speed of an anemic snail

- 4 GB of RAM yes, but that's just for loading Windows, if you want to actually use it, you'll need at least 4 more

- 64 GB storage yes, for loading Windows - you'll need another 500GB for the updates, then you'll need another disk for the files you actually work with

And besides, who today sells a 64GB disk ? If you buy an HDD, the minimum on sale is 300GB. For an SSD, it's 120GB.

I am aware that there are a lot of people who just read email and surf YouTube. They can do that on a tablet. If you're buying a PC or a laptop, it's because you have stuff to do on it and, in that case, 4GB of RAM is just asking for the pain.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Mint

Agreed. Mint is a distro that helps make the transition to Linux with some ease.

As a long-time Windows user (since Windows 286, yikes!), I find the interface intuitive and it is not overly difficult to get where I want to go.

I still need some training, but my retirement is a decade from now, so it'll have to wait.

Hong Kong's central bank sees seven big issues to solve before a central bank digital currency can fly

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Do CBDCs improve existing business?"

In a word : no.

Businesses today have no technical issues paying their invoices or getting their customer's money. A so-called digital currency is not to help with that, so the entire exercise seems quite useless to me.

On top of that, if you want to make me download a terabyte of blockchain data on my smartphone just so that I can bonk it on a payment terminal in order to get my croissant, you can fuck right off.

That 'anti-NSO Pegasus spyware' download is actually a Trojan – so don't touch it

Pascal Monett Silver badge

And the NSA/CIA are waiting down there to show them a few tricks.

Waymo, Cruise get green light from California's DMV for self-driving taxi services

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

"when the rain and fog aren’t too heavy"

Well they're not going to be opening offices in London any time soon then.

Mine's the one with the umbrella in the inner shotgun pocket.

Beijing explains what China's new data protection law really means – a month after it took effect

Pascal Monett Silver badge

The Great Wall is being extended

And that is fine.

If Beijing wants to wall its companies and money-makers inside its borders, it is free to do so and that will trouble no one.

If China wants to make life more difficult for multinational behemoths, that's fine as well. The multinationals have largely enough money to cope, and largely enough analysts to define when too much is too much and it's time to pull out.

Keep raising the wall, China, and you'll find yourself alone behind it.

2FA? More like 2F-in-the-way: It seems no one wants me to pay for their services after all

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

A brilliant demonstration of how phones can become useless annoyances

Damn smartphones and the apps that go with them.

Damn the companies that pre-install useless shit I don't need and don't want but can't get rid of.

I hate smartphones.

Got enterprise workstations and hope to run Windows 11? Survey says: You lose. Over half the gear's not fit for it

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"an upgrade will have to happen in the coming months or years"

Why ? Because Borkzilla says so ?

Windows 1 0 was supposed to be the last Windows. Frankly, I see no reason why there should be a Windows 11 - there's nothing in there that can't be handled by a patch.

Borkzilla is going to have to come to terms with the fact that companies are not there to endlessly stop working just so the latest, "greatest" Borkzilla software can be installed.

You know what people like with computers, Borkzilla ? Stability. There's no reason an OS should last less long than the hardware it runs on.

Virgin Galactic cleared to fly again after a spell on Federal Aviation Administration's naughty step

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Neither is currently capable of achieving orbit"

And as long as they can't, they're just toys for (billoinnaire) boys.

Billionnaire will billionnaire, but their toys are going to have to become useful if they want to make anything out of it.

People are not going to pay $100K to spend two minutes at the edge of space.

Anonymous: We've leaked disk images stolen from far-right-friendly web host Epik

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Epik happily hosts services and individuals who hold those views"

On the one hand, I'd like that platform to be shut down.

On the other hand, it's a treasure trove for the FBI.

So go free speech. Let those assholes hang themselves.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Of course not. Aliens means everyone who is not white.

Racists don't care if you were born there, they just see your skin color and react according to their (very) limited intelligence.

UK MoD data strategy calls for social media surveillance on behalf of 'local authorities'

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

"efficient and effective planning of supply chain and people"

Has got what to do with FaceBook ?

And why is the military preoccupied by that ?

It's a government issue. If the government can't be arsed to keep the peace, then it calls the military. That's when the military needs to intervene.

And, since the UK is, nominally, a democracy, the military should have nothing to do with social unrest because the solution is a change of government.

It's called elections. They're still a thing.

If a government goes so wrong as to spark a revolution, the military will be informed.

It does not need to follow Beijing's lead.

Attacks against Remote Desktop Protocol endpoints have exploded this year, warns ESET's latest Threat Report

Pascal Monett Silver badge

the Nobelium gang

Putting more pressure on OS makers, industry and IoT-shite makers to secure their platforms.

As bad as it may seem, in some cases this pressure might not be a bad thing. It is going to push industry to better safety practices, maybe cleaning up their act and doing a better job overall. That will benefit everyone.

Oh, and maybe, just maybe, all those unsecured cloud databases will become a thing of the past. I can dream, can't I ?

But attacking hospitals for money should mean a bullet in the head. No pity there.

China demands internet companies create governance system for algorithms

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

"preventing the propagation of content deemed dubious"

And here we go.

Content deemed dubious in China ? Tienanmen Square.

Content deemed dubious elsewhere ? Good people on both sides, I won Arizona, the election was rigged, etc . . .

Let me give you my definition of dubious content : when it's a bald-faced lie, it's dubious. Otherwise, it's freedom of speech.

You have the right to call me an idiot, that's your opinion and you are entitled to it. You do not have the right to deny historical facts. The Holocaust happened. We landed on the Moon. Tienanmen Square happened. The Twin Towers were not a controlled demolition. The election was not rigged.

Period.

Email billing blunder meant MVNO iD Mobile told 24,000 customers to pay up or have their service suspended

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"some customers have been sent an outstanding balance notification in error"

I know that, where email is concerned, it is really easy to fuck up even when you're trying to do things right.

However, it must be said that it would make things simpler if you could compare the recipients actually generated to the list you're expecting before sending out the mailing.

I do not know of any tool that allows you to do that. Of course, you could use Word and generate the mails before sending them off to Outlook, but that is you doing the job. I'm thinking of something integrated in your mailing tool that does the job and flags any discrepancies before proposing to send it all.

Infosec outfit Group-IB's website was defaced in weeks before CEO's arrest over high treason claims

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Justice and Russia

Those two words just don't go together.

The Law is just a tool for the State to wield in order to crush whoever it is that is getting in the way. Putin will lift his phone, say "I want that guy to go down", and all the judges and police will do their best to find anything they can pretend to make stick.

State treason ? In Russia it is state treason to not like Putin.

Through the Looking Glass – holographic display hardware is great, but it's not enough

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Progress, of sorts

We have achieved videoconferencing for the masses. We can even use our smartphones for that now, something that the phone industry promised decades ago but failed to deliver.

The result ? Everybody hates it.

Now, we are witnessing a new gimmick : pics which have some depth to them. To make it work, you have to have bespoke hardware. That is very much going to limit the market. Yet another thing with batteries to follow.

It's an interesting idea, but I want it on my 26" widescreen.

Microsoft warns: Active Directory FoggyWeb malware being actively used by Nobelium gang

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

Microsoft Active Directory

It was only a matter of time before it became an active threat.

Even the Borkzilla specialist wants you to migrate to something else.

Telling.

AWS US East region endures eight-hour wobble thanks to 'Stuck IO' in Elastic Block Store

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: might I suggest rotating your case about 180 degrees?

Oh sure, I'm sure that won't be a problem what with the screens, PSU, keyboard, sound and network cables, among other things, that are attached in the back.

And yes, I obviously want to squat under the desk every time I have to interact physically with the tower.

Brilliant idea !

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

"Sometimes it's hard to find the silver lining"

Well said.

That is not the problem of the manager who championed it, then left to go champion it again somewhere else.

I'm starting to hate cloud. Did you know that tower cases now come without any place to use an optical drive, or any ability to plug in a USB key on the front panel ?

I recently upgraded my PC which had been chugging along since 2010 and thought hey, while I'm at it, why not change tower ? Well today's towers expect you to throw all your data to the cloud.

I wonder how they expect people to reinstall Windows ?

Because that does happen, you know.

Oh, silly me, you bring it to a repair shop to pay a PFY to hook up an external USB optical drive and do the install you can't do anymore.

Obviously.

Story of the creds-leaking Exchange Autodiscover flaw – the one Microsoft wouldn't fix even after 5 years

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Not a vulnerability

As long as you play nice and only talk to servers you trust.

Hey, Borkzilla, did you know there is this thing called hackers ?

They tend to not play by the rules you dictate.

But okay, I understand that that is not your problem.

Ethereum dev admits helping North Korea mine crypto-bucks, faces 20 years jail

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

I'm sorry, you're expecting a polititian to have balls these days ?

Emails, chat logs, more leaked online from far-right militia linked to US Capitol riot

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"but we had already begun a complete restoration of our clients’ systems"

Which is what you're supposed to do in the first place, instead of paying miscreants and thus encouraging them to continue.

I don't know what's worse : the idiots who click the bloody link that gets them infected, or the fucking morons who pay good money to get hacked again.

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Is the database really that big

The database is less than 500kb.

Five. Hundred. Kilobytes. We can leave it as it is for the next hundred millenia before we start getting into a size issue.

This really is a storm in a teacup.

If your head's not in the cloud, you're not in the right place

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Absolutely spot-on

"That's a combination of the notion that if you're away learning you're not doing the job you were hired for, and the fear that you'll take the training and immediately demand extra pay or bugger off to a better job. Which you wouldn't do if you really liked where you worked, but this idea might as well be written in hieroglyphics in many workplaces. "

That is so true it hurts.

Airbus to help build Mexican Moon-mining automata

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Dereum

Sounds like the name of a crypto-funny-money scheme.

Unfortunate.

HPE campaigns against 'cloud first' push in UK public sector

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"central government [..] must consider [..] a public cloud [solution] – before any other option"

Simple answer :

This option has been considered and, after much research (and an exploratory team sent to the Bahamas to witness cloud deployment on-site), the conclusion that imposes itself is that Cloud is not secure, not fit to host citizen's private data, not reliable enough, prone to lock-in and more expensive than it seems.

Therefor, for this contract, an on-prem solution will be preferred.

And there you go, problem solved.

Tech contractors fume over payday outage at Giant Pay after it sniffs 'suspicious activity'

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Sounds like a crack team for dealing with an IT outage

Yeah, the lawyers thing. What the hell are they supposed to be doing at this point in time ? GDPR control to ensure that the IT guys aren't sneaking peeks at payroll data ?

You solve the technical problem, then you bring in the lawyers to sue somebody's pants off.

This is putting the cart before the horse. That rarely works well.

Unless . . . unless the lawyers are already drafting a defense against the sueballs that will be coming their way.

That might be it.

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I'm sure Sir Humphry wouldn't be surprised.

Check your bits: What to do when Unix decides to make a hash of your bill printouts

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I quietly disagree

"You just do not get the same level of job satisfaction or client adulation when supporting clients remotely, do you? "

I feel fine working from my home office. I have a new customer that wants me on site now, and the highway and parking experience are every bit as horrible as I remember FBC (From Before COVID). Thankfully, that customer only signed for 3 days a week, and it would appear that, some days, I might be able to work remotely again.

I must have been a cave troll in a previous life.

GNOME 41: Slick with heaps of new features for users and devs – but annoyances remain

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"imaginatively called Software"

oooh, burn !

Yeah, I think the guy who thought that up is going to have a brilliant career in whalesong ahead of him.

</sarc>

One-size-fits-all chargers? What a great idea! Of course Apple would hate it

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So it "stifles innovation"

I understand two things in this plan :

1) there is finally a chance that I no longer have to store 50 different chargers "just in case"

2) Apple is no longer to make a mint by purposefully designing chargers that are just slightly different for every one of its models so that it can extract a maximum of additional moolah from the idiots that buy from it

I think I would be quite happy with point #1 if I bought Apple gear, and I am very, very happy with with point #2 in any case.

Stop the waste. Be more customer-friendly.

Besides, your phones hardly differ from one year to the next. Stop churning out clones every 12 months.

Facebook overpaid FTC fine by up to $4.9bn to protect Zuckerberg, lawsuits allege

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

"transparency is essential for social media platforms"

Of course.

And you noticed that as soon as the lawsuit landed on your desk.

Congratulations on your foresight.

Facebook : when it comes to El Zuck's reputation, nothing is too expensive, but when it comes to behaving properly and policing its content correctly, that's too much.

Could somebody please shut this sewer rat down ?

UK Ministry of Defence apologises – again – after another major email blunder in Afghanistan

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"the Afghan Relocation and Assistance Policy (Arap) team"

Good thing they didn't name it the Afghan Relocation and Assistance Bureau.

That would have been a bit messy.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Email works fine as it is.

For the people who use their brain, that is.

You can't implement safeguards against everything. The only safeguard against everything is shutting down the computer.

DORA explorers see pandemic boost in numbers of 'elite' DevOps performers

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Ah, the wonders of self-assessment

"26 per cent of surveyed technology workers consider themselves 'elite performers' "

I am not an "elite" performer, I am a friggin' god of performance. If my salary was based on my personal assessment of my performance, I'd be paid €60,000 per month.

Unfortunately, I'm not really the one determining my salary, my clients are. So, as long as they keep calling me (and paying me), I am still the god of performance.

Senior IBMer hit with £290k demand from Big Blue in separate case as unfair dismissal claim rolls on

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

"IBM has claimed he is 'liable' "

I have to say that, as far as employment claims from IBM are concerned, by default IBM does not have much credibility in its claims.

It really should stop trying to cheat its salespeople, for starters.

If you're Intel, self-driving cars look an awful lot like PCs

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

"cheaper self-driving cars getting the bare minimum"

As long as it is clear that the bare minimum is being able to arrive at one's destination without plowing through a tree, another vehicle, a cyclist or a pedestrian, then I'm fine with that.

If, however, your "bare minimum" includes a monthly subscription to avoid baby strollers, you can fuck right off.

There is no bare minimum in autonomous vehicles. Either it does the job perfectly, or it is useless.

Strippers are a bonus. Millionnairs can pay for that. The rest of us just need it to work.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nah, it's just Windows suffering from a bit of vertigo

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Rebooting endlessly

It seems rather obvious to me that all these info screens that bork because Borkzilla's system is inherently faulty are completely useless.

Not one of them have ever stopped a bus, train or cable car from functioning as intended.

Do away with the cruft already. If you want to display information, use Linux and configure it properly.

Researchers finger new APT group, FamousSparrow, for hotel attacks

Pascal Monett Silver badge

FamousSparrow

A bit much like Red Sparrow. Frankly, those Russkies should extend their lexicon a bit.

"The kill-switch is intended to be used by the operators only "

I think there is a very good kill switch available : the 9mm Parabellum.

You only need to know where to apply it.

Infosys admits it still hasn't fully fixed Indian tax portal

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"said article or opinions expressed in it should not be linked with the RSS"

Sorry, if you publish it, you cannot then pretend that you did not approve it.

You're not FaceBook, YouTube or a blog platform. You do not have the excuse that you don't know what your users publish. You're a journal and you are responsible for what you publish.

If you do not want to be their mouthpiece, then don't publish their bullshit.

Imagine a fiber optic cable that can sense it's about to be dug up and send a warning

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"Each sensor can be configured as a hydrophone, microphone, or whatever [..] customers require."

So, Mr Fox, are you still in disagreement about that phone hacking thing ?

Here's an idea: Verification for computer networks as well as chips and code

Pascal Monett Silver badge

That video is edifying

"The ability to master complexity is not the ability to extract simplicity "

Honestly, every single Microsoft employee manager should watch this video, for educational purposes.

SEC takes legal action after crowdfunded marijuana investment scheme appears to go up in smoke

Pascal Monett Silver badge

That's not a joke.

That's a fact.