Posts by Pascal Monett

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

The zombie rises again

Somebody nuke this from orbit, please.

It's obviously the only way to be sure.

'Imagine' if Virgin Galactic actually did sub-orbital tourism: Firm unveils new chrome job on SpaceShip III

"400 flights per year per spaceport"

Wow. I woder how much pollution that will add to our atmosphere.

And that's yet another UK education body under attack from ransomware: Servers, email, phones yanked offline

"highly sophisticated."

Well of course it was - for them.

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

"there's not much precedent for seeking permission in the technology industry"

Well it is high time to set a precedent then.

Tools down: Singapore’s training bots and drones to digitize construction work

More surveillance technology

Of course, in Signapore, it is indispensable to have more tech to ensure workers are traced, tagged and watched, with the Multiple Eyes of Sauron snitching on them to a local enforcer (an Uruk-Hai ?).

None of this is going to solve the materials or manpower crisis, a drone is not going to make materials come faster. But this is the right time to implement these measures, obviously.

Cryptic US Strategic Command tweet reveals dangers of working from home with kids in the way

"a password to the systems used to control and fire America’s nukes"

Nonsense. Everybody knows that that password is 0000.

Payment app MobiKwik denies customer data was stolen from it, has no idea how the info ended up on the dark web: Maybe it was your fault?

Re: the times they aren't a-changin

I'm just waiting for the likely groveling apologies when it is incontrovertedly proven that yes, it is MobiKwik's data that is out there.

Now, where's my popcorn again ?

Pair accused of turning photos into vids to crack tax dept facial recognition system in China

"China was an early adopter"

And lo! So were the miscreants.

Turning a picture into a video, nice lateral thinking there.

I re-checked the article and you're right, there is nothing that specifically states the miscreants are in jail.

So, good question. What is the answer ?

South Korean regulator recommends Apple be prosecuted for hampering fair trade probe

Such blatant disobedience deserves a harsher punishment

It seems that the Apple mentality is despicable across the globe.

Beijing's new privacy rules ban apps collecting unnecessary data, require free service without data slurps

Malware cannot harvest any data ?

I'm sure malware makers will do their best to respect those rules.

Re: Hint

The amount of data hoovered by the NSA daily says the contrary.

Apple expands third-party repairer program, mostly in Asia

A growing “right to repair” movement

This would not be needed if sanity prevailed.

I can buy a $20,000 car and do whatever I want with it, but a $450 phone I cannot have repaired outside of specific cartel of shops ?

Madness.

UK's Home Office dangles £32m for application support on comms-snooping network

has "supported saving many lives,"

But we'll never tell you how many. Nor will we tell you how many terrorist actions were stopped because of surveillance.

Don't worry your pretty little minds with such things, Citizen, just be good and cower in a corner while we "protect" you.

Oh, and John ? Sarah doesn't like the way you look at her. Just an FYI.

UK terror law reviewer calls for expanded police powers to imprison people who refuse to hand over passwords

Yes, when you live in a police state.

The problem is, the UK is supposed to be a civilized country, emphasis on "supposed".

The bitter fact is that Bin Laden has won. We are doing far more damage to our own way of life than Bin Laden could ever have dreamed.

Rogue elements: Hades and Loop Hero manage to draw on the same legacy while having very little in common

By the Berlin definition, Minecraft is a roguelike

Going by the numbers :

High factors

Random environment generation - check

Permadeath - there is a Hardcore mode, so check

Turn-based - uh, nope

Grid-based (tiles) - well, somewhat, so check

Non-modal (all actions take place in same mode) - check

Complexity (more than one solution to a given goal) - check

Resource management - check

Hack 'n' slash - check

Exploration and discovery - most definitely check

Low factors

Single player character - check

Monsters are similar to players (they have inventories, use items etc.) - check, even if it's a bit limited

Tactical challenge - check (especially the first time you encounter a Creeper)

ASCII display - nope, but some people would say not far from :)

Dungeons - check (Strongholds in the Overworld, Fortresses in the Nether)

Numbers (hit points, character attributes etc.) - check

So yeah, Minecraft checks almost all the boxes.

MoJ cancels £100m ERP procurement to get in line with UK government shared service strategy

“The pandemic has proved . . "

Shame that it took a pandemic to make you realize you needed something that worked.

On the other hand, that explains a lot.

Blockchain may be the machinery of mischief, but it can't help telling the truth

This article is just another variation of the whole "look, we've created a digital thingamajig that some of us shall refer to in real life - all our problems are solved !".

The limits of NFT are simple : when you have no power, you can't check it. It isn't tied to whatever object it represents, so the object can move about without it, meaning that the NFT cannot prevent moving the object.

NFT is nothing but a dork tower. It is absolutely predictable that it would be used in the arts area, where people make "art" made out of feces and idiots pay tens of thousands to buy it.

Am I a bit pissed ? Yeah.

Vegas, baby! A Register reader gambles his software will beat the manual system

"all the time spent sabotaging the test results to ensure it would fail"

And they sabotaged themselves out of a job.

Oh, the irony.

Taiwan to create new mega tech Ministry spanning industry policy, security, comms, and more

In all fairness, not all security updates have to deal with buffer overflows, unchecked input variables and illegal SQL commands.

At least some of them deal with with actual problems that could not possibly have been envisioned by any developer.

Of course, once the problem is identified, the developers should be able to avoid making the mistake again, but since we're still dealing with buffer overflow flaws, that is a pipe dream.

OVH reveals it's scrubbing servers – to get smoke residue off before rebooting

OVH's experience might be useful

It seems to me that this whole ordeal would be a good time to write the manual on fire recovery procedures in data centers. I'm sure there is one, but now OVH has first-hand experience.

It would be really nice if OVH decided to share that experience other than by tweet.

Red Hat pulls Free Software Foundation funding over Richard Stallman's return

Re: his free speech

He definitely has the right to uphold child pornography, peadophilia and incest.

I have the right to be disgusted by it and not want anything to do with such a person.

What links ML, lasers, and tiny gold-plated micro-bots? Answer: Smart medicines

That's all well and nice

It must be fun zapping golden balls to play water polo, but I do not know of any electromagnetic radiation that can go through human skin that is not dangerous in some way. You probably can't use x-rays at any dose, that's for sure.

Besides, playing in a tank of water is one thing, those little balls won't be going against the flow of blood simply because their backside is warmer.

I have no idea what will come of this, but zapping minuscule golden balls inside blood vessels to make them move around seems very unlikely to me.

SUSE says tschüss to Ceph-based enterprise storage product – it's Rancher's Longhorn from here on out

Yay ! More Cloud !

What can possibly go wrong ?

Oh, right. OVH.

Never mind.

BP Chargemaster's Pulse rebrand let crims send IcedID banking trojan from formerly legit mailboxes

"Please look at the file attached. It must be interesting."

No.

This mail is supposed to be from a provider I am working with. That provider has a website. No provider sends unsolicited emails with attachments, they send emails telling you where on their website you can check the document. Okay, yes, some of them will send you a link as well. Their marketing team should be flogged for that.

Email security is easy : your buddies send you unsolicited attachments, companies do not.

And Microsoft will never email you.

US state AGs: How can Facebook, Google, Twitter say they tackle misinformation when *gestures wildly at COVID-19 BS everywhere*

Re: Don't trust them

You put trust in Twitter ?

We've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A halo of light polarized by a gigantic black hole's magnetic field...

Please point me towards your Nobel Prize-winning PhD thesis that outlines your theory in detail.

Oh, you're still writing it ?

I can wait.

So, where does Silicon Valley stand on S.230? Zuck wants 'industry best practices', Pichai demurs, Dorsey urges more Bluesky thinking

"that would be impractical for platforms with billions of posts per day"

I fail to see how it would be impractical for platforms that make billions of dollars per day.

Costly ? Probably. Impractical ? Certainly not.

Cockup or conspiracy? Popular privacy extension ClearURLs removed from Chrome web store

Yes, Google is genuinely very concerned about privacy.

Because actual privacy will shred its money printing business.

Tired: Linux fans using the Edge browser. Wired: Linux fans using a Microsoft account to sign into the Edge browser

Indeed. A Linux user installing a Microsoft product ?

Madness.

Can you imagine Slack letting people DM strangers in another org? Think of the abuse. Oh wait, it did do that

Bye bye Slack

You have just done a Microsoft on your foot. A simple message can get anyone into anywhere ? And it takes 4 hours to shut that down ?

Thanks for the heads-up. Slack is now on my blacklist.

Hyundai and Singapore's top telco charge towards electric vehicle battery subscription service, 5G smart factories

"real-time telemetry of electric vehicles to track battery performance"

Battery performance, sure. That's the only thing they want to track. Given how the COVID app has been subverted over there, with this news Hyundai is now on my blacklist of companies I never want to buy from.

Oracle's 'self-driving cloud data warehouse' hides SQL behind a GUI... if needed

"which are designed for business users"

Um, you're Oracle, right ?

What other kinds of users do you have ?

Scammers tried slurping folks' login details through 70,000 coronavirus-themed phishing URLs during 2020

"asking users to log in with Office 365 credentials in order to register for vaccination"

Wow. That's actually a good move. I'm sure many, many sheeple did so without even blinking. Of course your Office 365 credentials are a valid indicator of your real-life identity. Isn't your name in it ? And your email ? And password ?

Obviously these are things a doctor will need before he jabs the needle in.

My God we can't colonize other stellar bodies too soon. I want a place on Ganymede.

Pat Gelsinger’s Intel will evolve from lone wolf to touting modular systems-on-packages with third-party foundry collaboration

I guess he needs more time

So, Intel is going to make packages-on-chips, create foundries in Arizona (Arizona has water ?), wants Apple and Qualcomm as customers, and will finally start making chips on 7nm five years after everyone else.

I'm a bit underwhelmed. I was hoping for something actually new. Foundries in Arizona ? A chip foundry uses millions of litres of water a day. Why Arizona ? Montana would be better. Or around the Great Lakes. But in the desert ? Tax breaks are nice, but you need water. Arizona doesn't have water. That's crazy.

I guess it's going to take some time to overcome Intel's current inertia and allow Gelsinger to really shine. Wait and see.

Free Software Foundation urged to free itself of Richard Stallman by hundreds of developers and techies

Did you check out those warped opinions ?

Citation :

From Stallman's blog in 2003: "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of... narrowmindedness.

So, you're telling me you find no issue here ?

Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities

Re: Destabilizing

Nominet has just been shaken up, and I'm not sure the shaking has stopped.

I'm glad that the pitchforks have won, but it is not a total victory until the right people have been appointed and the entire Board is renewed.

If the current Board members had a shred of decency, they would have stepped down after the ousting of the person they so publicly supported got kicked out. As they did not, they demonstrate their will to do everything to oppose the new wave and should be kicked out as well.

Whatever 'normal' is, global CEOs don't expect to see it return before 2022 and are ploughing funds into security

I think that that will indeed be the one good thing that this pandemic will have taught CEOs : your staff doesn't have to be in the office to get work done.

Until 2019, working at home was a privilege rarely given, and sparingly at that. Then COVID trampled all over that notion.

I'm looking forward to a world where I can work from home when possible, go to client sites when necessary, and take my wife to the restaurant again on week-ends every now and then.

OVH flames scorched cloud customers with pledge to build data centre fire simulation lab

Re: Racist remark

Not racist. Jealous. ;)

And if you can't take a gentle ribbing every now and then, chill.

Total Eclipse team's new start: New Adoptium working group will promote free open source Java runtimes

Eclipse

The bane of Lotus Notes developers. I can't work more than half an hour in the Notes Designer without having phantom Notes processes skew the debugging.

Eclipse may have allowed X-pages technology and improved Lotus Notes' ability to be rendered in a browser, but its cost is untold hours of productivity lost while developers struggle to open database designs or understand why their updates do not change anything.

Database design. Before Eclipse it took 0.15 seconds to access the design of the database you were working on. After all, how long can it take to access less than 500 technical entries ? Since Eclispe was integrated, it can take up to three minutes to open the design of a mailbox. Three bloody minutes. Then, after half an hour, if you ever have to change a view definition, you are practically guaranteed to have to shut down your Notes client and kill all associated processes before relaunching it if you want to have a proper rendering of the results of your change. More often than not, you'll find that Notes has spawned as many phantom processes as the ones you're actually supposed to be using.

Eclipse. Burn it with fire. Nuke it from orbit. I can't wait for HCL to get rid of that shit.

Prince Harry, the Count of Montecito, turns Silicon Valley startup exec with first job based in 21st Century

He has escaped.

"founded in 2013"

It's 2021 and they're still not making a profit ?

Burn it down and salt the ashes. There is no reason, apart from Californian stupidity, to uphold a company that hasn't had a single year of profit in almost a decade.

If it was a donut shop it would have been dead in 2015, tops.

Google patches WebView component to end unexpected Android crash fest

"For about seven hours on Monday"

Sorry, I was working on Monday. Didn't have time to check my mobile phone to see if it was working as well.

Report: Microsoft is thinking about splashing $10bn on Discord to slot it next to Skype, Mixer...

Can't wait

I can't wait to find out how quickly Borkzilla will emasculate Discord's usefullness and destroy its user base before going sulking back into its corner, having still understood nothing about the Internet works.

Oh well, the beancounters are just going to have to prepare to write off another ten billion. They're used to it.

Outsourced techie gets 2-year sentence after trashing system of former client: 1,200 Office 365 accounts zapped

"he deleted 1,200 Microsoft user accounts belonging to a client"

Okay, you can blame the company for not having deleted his access properly, by all means, but the fact remains that this asshole deleted 1200 user accounts of people that nothing to do with his problem.

Hang him.

Proof that Surface devices are not a niche product obsessed over by Microsoft fans: A patent lawsuit from Caltech

"also wants the cost of its attorneys' fees covered"

Why is that not automatic ?

If you win your court case, I would find it more than logical that the loser pays for everything.

Google's boss for the next billion users bails after beating that target handily

Sure

Being VP of one of the richest multinational behemoths of the world is "training".

When can I start my training ? I won't be greedy, $1M/year will do fine.

America's Supremes give Facebook nothing but heartaches: Top court won't stop '$15bn wiretap' lawsuit

Re: Dear Zuck...

Of course not. Facebook's moral compass is firmly set on "profit", and it makes its profits from its targetted advertising.

So nothing will stop it from doing its damndest to target you as finely as it can.

Re: so Facebook shouldn't be tracking me

Yeah, but between shouldn't and doesn't, there's a bit of wiggle room.

And Facebook as all over that wiggle room.

Remember Apple's disastrous butterfly keyboards? These lawsuits against the iGiant just formed a super class action

Re: Peanuts

My thoughts exactly. The only ones who can rejoice here are the lawyers. What are the users going to get out of this ?

Can you shove a standard, functional, keyboard into a space designed for a flat butterfly keyboard ?

Or is Apple going to have to replace all those laptops entirely ?

That would be a solution for the users, and Apple can afford it.