Posts by Pascal Monett

Canadian province's supreme court orders Dell to pay nearly $500,000 to sales rep fired in his twilight years

64 years old, $390K retirement package

Doesn't sound like he needs to find work to me.

Good for him and, as usual, shame on corporate behemoths who, apparently universally, cheat on the very people bringing in the contracts.

Mensa data spillage was due to 'unauthorised internal download'

It's Mensa

They'll figure it out.

Re: You have to look at the individual

I can't, there's a gigantic ego in the way.

Intel adds a new device – the ‘IPU’ – to its must-have modern data centre stack

I can't help but wonder

What kind of mischief are the miscreants going to wreak, and how are they looking at this ?

More "intelligence" on the network means more holes to slip through.

Samsung mulls delaying next 'fan edition' phone in light of semiconductor shortage

They're delaying the next model ?

Good.

Don't need a new model every year anyway.

'Welcome to Perth' mirth being milked for all it's worth

Thanks for the link

That is an awesome channel. I am going to be checking it out in detail.

Just in time too, I've spent my usual time-wasting channels' content :).

Fancy the ultimate no-Air-outside-bnb? NASA willing to rent out ISS for two weeks

I'll be ROFLing thinking about billionnaires drinking their own pee

Not to mention the toilets.

Or the absence of solid foods.

Do go have two weeks of fun being locked up with everyone else's farts, and remember, you're paying almost $1m per day for the experience !

When security gets physical: Mossad boss hints at less-than-subtle Stuxnet followup

"Stuxnet wasn't the only spanner in the works"

Spying 101 : keep your enemy looking for threats, whether they exist or not.

Of course he's going to say that. Mossad is full of actually competent people. They know that you keep your enemy under pressure, so that the enemy makes mistakes that can compound whatever it is you have in waiting, or make it easier or better to unleash at the right time.

Of course, if I were Iran and Mossad declared that they were done and didn't have anything ready, I wouldn't trust them either . . .

US Supreme Court gives LinkedIn another shot at stymieing web scraping

Re: Better Law

I agree completely, but they are judges, not soccer players. They cannot pass the buck, they must render a judgement based on the law that is.

I'm guessing that being a judge is not all bread and honey.

Indian government reverts to manual tax filings as new e-tax portal remains badly borked a week after launch

Because the release date was decided on following political requirements, not design requirements.

Basically, the devs got the specs in their hands and just had to get something running by a given day.

I'm not going to comment on Indian developer skills, but I'm sure that any group of developers is going to have a tough time on such a project if they need three more months than they have.

Thailand bans joke cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens

Can we do the same here ?

Please ?

NATO summit communiqué compares repeat cyberattacks to armed attacks – and stops short of saying 'one-in, all-in' rule will always apply

This is starting to look like playground scuffles

"Stop that you two !"

"But he started it !"

"No, you started it !" <cue more scuffling>.

I was going to say that we need to approach this matter as adults, but then I remembered that we just got out of OHSG's presidency, and we still have The Boris on our side.

So playground scuffles it is.

Inventor of the graphite anode – key Li-ion battery tech – says he can now charge an electric car in 10 minutes

This is impressive

And, contrary to carbon nanotubes, it looks like it will be available on the market sooner rather than later.

With all the Li-ion batteries out there, there is undoubtedly an immense drive to have a charger that can not only guarantee your battery recharged in minutes, but your battery life doubled as well.

I would soo like to get my hands on a charger like that !

The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

So, a backdoored encrypted chat, eh ?

"law enforcement authorities around the world are well and truly committed to finding ways through and around encryption, wherever it is used by criminals "

And I have no problem with that.

What I have a problem with is those same authorities arguing that my Sync encryption should be backdoored, or that my PGP mail should be backdoored, or that my communications over Internet with my bank should be backdoored.

No, they should not. It is what keeps criminals out of my affairs. If it so happens that it also keeps authorities out of my affairs, there is one big difference : criminals do not have warrants at their disposal.

Amazon exec's husband jailed for two years for insider trading. Yes, with Amazon stock

Being a high-roller is a lot of fun

But it's a lot better when the money is legit.

The guy's an idiot. In barely two years he reaps almost $1.5 million and he thinks nobody is going to notice ?

And now he's ruined his wife's career.

I wonder if he'll still have a wife in 2 years and 9 months. If so, it'll be a cold reunion.

FTC approves $61.7m settlement with Amazon for pocketing driver tips

So, let me see if I get this correctly

Step One : public announcement : drivers will get 100% of their tips.

First off, if you have to announce that, there's already something wrong.

Then, second step : switch to variable base pay rate without telling anyone.

Ok, for that to happen, there had to have been a meeting. Someone chaired a meeting with a group of other people and the question was, specifically : how do we not pay 100% of the tips, like we promised ?

And all the good little soldiers brainstormed that little switcheroo.

The next question was : how do we keep the drivers from learning about it ?

Well, at that point, anybody could think of lumping all the tips together without any possibility of checking which tip for which job. The less you communicate, the easier it is to hide things.

What this whole story tells me is that Bezos is far from being the only evil one in Amazon. He's got an army of evil minions who have absolutely no morals at all, and they're all in upper management.

Excuse me, what just happened? Resilience is tough when your failure is due to a 'sequence of events that was almost impossible to foresee'

Great article

Pure wisdom as well.

I will keep the link as a reference in all my discussions about testing components with my customers.

UK tells UN that nation-states should retaliate against cyber badness with no warning

"zero-notice digital punishment"

Because the Internet needs to become even more like the Wild, Wild West.

Oh, silly me, so that's what WWW stands for !

Blue passports, French service provider: Atos bags £21m UK Passport Office deal

So, this contract is for doing what the previous one didn't ?

The thing from 2017 that was supposed to revolutionize data treatment, remove paper, and be delivered in 2020, is where ?

Ah, silly me, nowhere, of course.

UK Gov IT at its best : promising the Moon, barely delivering a lorry.

Whatever you've been doing during lockdown, you better stop it right now

Thanks, Dabbsy

Exactly what I needed to end this week.

BOFH: Despite the extremely hazardous staircase, our IT insurance agreement is at an all-time low. Can't think why

Good one !

A properly cheerful BOFH just hinting at the terrifyingly evil one lurking just out of sight. Loved it !

I think this whole series could become the foundation of a new style of Tales from the Crypt. It could be called Tales from the Server Room, but someone would need to find something more catchy.

Someone call Hollywood . . .

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

So, basically you're calling yourself a dickhead ?

Well, you know best.

Make no mistake, COVID is here. It's not going away. Countries are celebrating their vaccination schemes, and hell, I'm raring to get back to going to restaurants and being in public without that godawful mask, but you can be sure that, from now on, every year we'll have an updated COVID vaccine, just there's a flu vaccine.

COVID is here to stay.

How about wanting everyone to know the truth ?

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

Re: Dummy thermostats

The number of variations on this kind of story is bewildering.

It's almost as if someone in Manglement is reading El Reg !

Mounties messed up by using Clearview AI, says Canadian Privacy Commissioner

"Clearview AI claims Canadian privacy law shouldn’t apply to US-based companies"

It does not apply to US-based companies. As far as Canada is concerned, Clearview AI is free to leech anything they want.

It applies to Canadian companies and organizations.

Idiots.

China arrests over 1000 for using cryptocurrency to help launder proceeds of phone scams

But, but

They said I would be anonymous !

Apple, it's OK. Seriously. You don't need to blind your iOS 15 engineers to prevent leaks

"a thick shroud of secrecy"

More like a thick shroud of paranoia.

Apple operates in its own world, and thank $Deity that there are employment tribunals to set it straight every now and then, because otherwise it would forget that there is actually a Real World (TM) out there.

Except for Marketing. They know.

AWS Frankfurt experiences major breakdown that staff couldn’t fix for hours due to ‘environmental conditions’ on data centre floor

Once again, Single Point of Failure failed

It's interesting that, in an industry that can have just about redundant everything (switches, servers, firewalls, you name it), it would appear that nobody bothered to plan redundant aircon (at least, not that I can tell from the article).

I know aircon is expensive, but now the question is : how much more expensive is a day of 100% downtime ?

You might want to design a second aircon system as backup, just to be sure.

Perseverance Mars rover sets off on its first mission, to boldly drill and return samples as no rover has drilled before

Go Persy !

Science is going to go forward again. Great news !

Let's hope that Zhurong will find interesting things as well.

Exciting times.

Risk and reward: Nefilim ransomware gang mainly targets fewer, richer companies and that strategy is paying off, warns Trend Micro

"tools such as PowerShell"

Ah, Powershell. One more of the many "what could possibly go wrong ?" moments from Borkzilla.

NTT slashes top execs’ pay as punishment for paying more than their share of $500-a-head meals with government officials

That seems a bit exaggerated. Did the local official pay out of his own pocket, or did he invoice the department for it ?

In the latter case, it's still a bit exaggerated, but in the former, it becomes outrageous.

Ransomware-skewered meat producer JBS confesses to paying $11m for its freedom

Whoa there

You have encrypted backup servers and you still paid the miscreants ?

What kind of bullshit is that ?

Either you can restore from backups, and your ideal IT team should be well-trained on doing so, or you can't, and you pay.

It's no use singing the praises of your IT infrastructure if you can't use it to recover from ransomware.

South Korea’s data watchdog barks warnings at Microsoft and five local firms

A $14K fine ?

What is that for Microsoft, 0.5 milliseconds of revenue ?

Wow, I'm sure the Board is impressed with the duty of never doing it again.

Google says its artificial intelligence is faster and better than humans at laying out chips for artificial intelligence

The next step

"humans and their usual software tools were needed for the fiddly business of checking clock signal propagation, and so on "

Sounds to me that that is something another AI/ML could take care of as well.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The best time to build a semiconductor foundry is 5 years ago

The central failure

We're going to see another central failure in a short time : building all of your new fabs in the driest State of the Union.

Arizona. Who the blazes thought it would be a good idea to build there ? Well, apart from the high-level suits who undoubtedly extracted a monstrously insignificant tax agreement and didn't give a flying one about the additional drain this is going to put on what's left of the Colorado river.

Additionally, cooling costs are going to be through the roof.

Way to go for ecology all around.

In this round of 'Real life or Black Mirror episode', drones that hunt down humans by listening to their screams

the HK-Aerial Terminator

With the noise that thing made in the film, my first thought was that it couldn't possibly hear anything. It likely tracked its victimes via radar or infrared. The fandom wiki says nothing on how it tracks, it just gives gushing praise on armaments and troop-carrying capacity.

From what I recall from the movie, soldiers on the ground were pretty much able to move around freely as long as they stayed out of line-of-sight. They could even talk, but of course, military talk, not table-side chit-chat.

Of course, having read about how we already have companies with "vast experience in filtering unwanted noise", there could well be a new timeline where the buggers can filter out their own engine noise and hear a human running. From there, we're one step away from an area-of-effect missile showering an area 50sq meters around the supposed location of the sound, and that goose is pretty much cooked.

'Vast majority of people' are onside with a data grab they know next to nothing about, reckons UK health secretary

Re: while the US has thankfully corrected its mistake

Not entirely.

Republican states are currently doubling down on the madness and doing their level best to ensure that, come next Election Day, only genuine, white-skinned Republicans will be able to vote.

Oh, and apperently Trump is announcing that he will be "reinstated" next August.

The level of delusion of these people is impressive, I must admit. How they remember to breath through the day is a miracle in itself.

"only a few posts on NHS Digital's website and associated tweets by way of notification"

Okay, so I am to understand that Twitter is now an official government information platform ?

I mean, I know every twat in office spends much more time on Twitter than he apparently spends working (hmm, there might be something there), but I was not aware that I should now be obliged to have a Twitter account and follow all governmental departments to get official news.

Official news should be broadcast on the telly or radio at official news times, presented by a professional news anchor and possibly commented on by a guest invited for that purpose - hopefully, someone from NHS, or at least the medical profession.

I'm not much interested in the opinion of a celebrity or an "influencer" (gah) on this matter.

That thing you were utterly sure would never happen? Yeah, well, guess what …

Re: With the months of planning and the what-if scenarios

And that's the key point : months of planning.

Most customers that call me in want me to solve a given problem NOW. They don't have a test server, because that is a cost center.

So I end up doing the job as cautiously as I can, asking all the questions I can think of before committing code to a production server.

Even then, sometimes things go wrong. Generally it's when someone comes in and says "this thing is broken now", and I most of the time I can answer "you never told me about that".

The rest of the time it's an edge case nobody was aware of.

But I basically have to code a test script that modifies nothing, test the hell out of it and, when I'm satisfied it does the job, then I port the code to the actual production script.

I've had my share of stomach butterflies, but so far so good.

And the lesson learned is ?

Never give anyone outside the dev team anything else but a guest login.

Carefully crafted to allow exactly what is supposed to be done, and nothing else.

It's completely unsupportable. Yes, we mean your brand new system

We in IT know the golden rule : if it works, don't fix it.

Security researcher says attacks on Russian government have Chinese fingerprints – and typos, too

"too crude to have been the work of a Western nation"

But good enough to have infiltrated Russian government IT.

I like that they say that Western malware is of better quality. It's like these guys are playing a game.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Because you can tell the Board that this will save money and Fastly is very reliable and the SLAs are quite reasonable and, even when things go wrong, it's not your fault.

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

Notepad++ is genius

I really appreciate how it does not balk at file size, does not waste any time in opening a file of any size, and is just generally working.

So it's not the prettiest editor. I don't care, it works. That's what counts.

Chinese app binned by Beijing after asking what day it is on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre

Isn't it ironic ?

I imagine this from the point of view of the marketing department. They are likely young men and women, full of enthusiasm in a company that has a lot of impact.

They brainstorm something for June 4th and set it in motion, and all of a sudden Beijing come crashing around them, bringing all their efforts to naught.

I'm betting they are all thinking "but why ?".

And now they're going to find out, one way or the other.

So Beijing is basically educating it's people on the exact thing it wants to suppress.

Remember Anonymous? It/they might be back, and it/they are angry with Elon Musk

But it is a ponzi scheme. The first ones to mine got the most Bitcoin, then hyped it up so many, many others would drive the price up, making the initial miners a mint (in real money, of course).

We're right behind Computer Misuse Act reforms for busting ransomware gangs, says UK infosec industry

"wary of criminalising the payment of ransoms by victims"

Didn't the FBI go through all those kinds of arguments already when they they pushed for criminalizing kidnapping ransoms ?

I seem to recall that that had a pretty good effect.

Custom HMCTS video platform bought as part of £280m digitisation project used less than Zoom, say judges

"no central record was kept of [,,] who had heard cases remotely between 19 03 2020 and 31 07 2020"

I would say that that is unbelievable, but this is UK Gov IT, so yeah, par for the course.

Facebook faces competition enquiry on two fronts as EU and UK officials scrutinise its ad data

"data should not be used in ways that distort competition"

I applaud that declaration without reserve.

I look forward to the legal definition of data distorting competition. I don't think we have one yet.