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* Posts by Pascal Monett

19429 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Cyber exec with lavish lifestyle charged with selling secrets to Russia

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"an unidentified Russian buyer"

What is the point in identiying said Russian buyer ?

It's not like you're going to be able to drag that company to a non-Russian court, now is it ?

Extraordinary rendition was a great idea until somebody realized that it works both ways . . .

Microsoft suggests temporary registry hack for stricken smart card users

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Incompetence.

It's incompetence.

Something that Borkzilla's Scroogesque pile of money has disguised as competence for decades now (remember Ballmer ?) and, thanks to the endless amount of incompetent managers and CEOs buying into the scheme, Redmond continues to be able to pretend it knows what it is doing when any technical person of actual experience and competence (the two do go together, you know) will be able to demonstrate just how much that is completely wrong.

SAP says some customers are dragging their feet on contract sign-offs

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"customers are dragging their feet on contract sign-offs"

Hello ? Houston to the Board : customers do not owe you their money.

You are supposed to convince them to hand it over.

If your only excuse is extortion and predatory licensing, guess what ? Your "customers" will tell you to fuck off, because you are not the Mafia and you can't say "what a nice procurement system you have, would be a shame if something happened to it" without getting a furious lawsuit you would lose, and rightly so.

The only way to convince your customers that your new license is in their interest is to prove it them, not to your Board.

In that, you are failing.

Deal with it.

Microsoft threatens to ram Copilot into Exchange Server on-prem

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Summarising emails

You know what an "executive summary" is, right ?

It's the gold-plated excuse for manglement to complain that they were never told about such-and-such issue before imposing authorizing deployment.

Copilot is the automated version on excuse creation.

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Pascal Monett Silver badge

75,000 working days a year

Apparently, in the UK there are 254 working days per year (on average).

Given that UK gov is publicly stating that of pseudo-AI will save the peons money, it means that 295 government employees will be facing the chop.

Also, where is the basis for this figure ? Why not 7.5 million working days ? Then you could pretend to justify over 250 thousand redundancies.

What ? Too soon ?

Apple’s AirDrop makes weird latency spikes for Wi-Fi wonks, researcher finds

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"do the Apple way of networking"

It's the Apple way, or the highway.

Not using Apple is recommended, but not spoken of.

On the other hand, this is one case of very good naming on Apple's side.

TI CEO says some customers still wary of Trump's import tax roulette

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"clarity on what exactly are the final rules"

You might get more clarity in 2029.

Then again, you might not.

Do you play russian roulette ? You're going to have to learn.

Ex-Uber CSO is gellin' like a felon with teen cyber crims, explains why they do it

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"He started his own consulting firm, Joe Sullivan Security"

That is going on my blacklist right now.

You can go on pretending that you've seen the light, I don't care.

On the other hand, you probably have a brilliant career ahead of you with Trump. You should ask for a meeting. Don't expect to get paid, though. Trump keeps whatever money he has for himself.

OpenAI's Atlas shrugs off inevitability of prompt injection, releases AI browser anyway

Pascal Monett Silver badge

" 'Trust no AI' says one researcher"

Could every browser maker please include that in every tab it shows, please ?

IBM is just not into the 'spend megabucks on cloudy GPUs' thing, rents them instead

Pascal Monett Silver badge

The orange shitgibbon doesn't care what happens to the peons. If anything, he would have invited Ginny to the White House for a nice Big Mac dinner (and posted the required photos saying that he paid for it himself).

Meanwhile, he has harped on green cards and managed to make sure he could make some money off of that, instead of plowing some much-needed funds into the US education system.

But nobody does that because educated people have a big risk of seeing through the bullshit and not voting for a serial loser like Trump.

With impeccable timing, AWS debuts automated cloud incident report generator

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Impeccable timing

"We could really have used this a couple of days ago, guys "

Once again, The Vulture bites the heels of IT. Keep it up !

China blames US for cyber break-in, claims America is world's biggest bit burglar

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

China complains about US industrial interference

Okay, let's play that game. How many Chinese nationals have been dragged into court for corporate espionage vs how many Americans have been caught in China doing the same ?

Numbers, please. Then we'll talk.

AI eats leisure time, makes employees work more, study finds

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: This is a research paper?

Yes. They just assumed, and you know what they say about "assumed".

But, if I understand correctly, these "researchers" are based in China - so maybe they don't have access to those pesky studies that are revealing to the rest of the world that "AI" is not all it's cracked up to be.

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: It's not just tossers who use smart stuff

You are completely right, some of these products can indeed represent a boon for the physically disabled. No one is criticizing that aspect.

It's the physically abled idiots that have more money than sense that garner our ire.

That and the fact that the companies hawking the tat are all using it as a means to monetize our private life under flimsy excuses.

SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

Musk and his big mouth

Always over-promising and under-delivering. And insults do not an argument make.

He should be sweeping the streets of New York with a used broom, muttering to himself all the time.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well it got applied on the outside in the end.

The real insight behind measuring Copilot usage is Microsoft's desperation

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

"randomized mathematical models"

Like I trust Redmond's notion of mathematics . . .

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"breaks half the internet"

Not my half.

Then again, I'm only reading El Reg today . . .

A simple AI prompt saved a developer from this job interview scam

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"the faker posed as the chief blockchain officer"

Anything blockchain causes an instantaneous reaction : RUN !

I would not need to ask a hullacinating bullshit generator to check some code that I will NOT download, much less execute.

Brain cells work quicker than ChatGPT. If you have them.

Tribunal wonders if Microsoft has found a legal hero after pivot to copyright gambit

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Is Office an artistic work"

No, it is not.

An artist is an individual who takes care of his artistic vision and strives to improve himself from one work to the next.

Borkzilla doesn't care about improving itself, and claiming that icons have colors does not make Redmond a painter.

I would really like to be a judge just to throw out this case with extreme prejudice.

UK calls up Armed Forces veterans for digital ID soft launch

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"the government's push [..] to embrace digital ID cards"

Maybe if the government had a better track record with all things digital it wouldn't be so much of a push ?

Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover' "

Nope. Sorry, but not sorry.

If you had any respect for the Open Source community, you would have done things differently.

As it is, you have just demonstrated that you will bend over and take in the ass for anyone with enough money to impress you.

You're history.

The Internet does not forget,.

Hyperscalers try to beat the heat with larger racks, more air flow

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Oh come now

And here I was thinking that we'd all be happy about bigger racks . . .

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

Yeah, but you did move to Win 11.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

"Microsoft's quality control department"

They haven't been caught napping.

They were fired a decade ago.

This is the result.

Chamber of Commerce sues over Trump's $100K H-1B paywall

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I wish you were right.

From where I sit, it really looks like His Orangeness does whatever the fuck he feels like until someone wakes up and says "no".

Then that someone is fired.

The USA. How to fail Democracy.

Turns out the end of Windows 10 is good for something: The PC refresh cycle

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

Re: More bubbles are going to burst.....

Agreed.

The hardware for the past ten years at least is more than capable enough to ensure Internet browsing, email and video.

One of these days, Redmond et al will have to recognize that the latest and greatest is just a pipe dream. 90% of users already have what they need.

Gamers and video makers will always be an exception, but you don't make revenue out of them - they're a percentile of the market.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Interesting.

So, how lethal is DOS 1.0 these days ?

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

LibreOffice is free and good enough.

SAP users still wrestling with business case for S/4HANA

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

95% of legacy users

I don't care what your excuse is, if after a decade you still have more than nine out of ten of your users that refuse to upgrade, you're doing it wrong.

Vulnerability scores, huh, what are they good for? Almost nothing

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"We need to start with a shared understanding of risk"

So, basically, a software threat is not a hurricane with an easy-to-define impact index. A category 5 hurricane is something you get out of the way of, a CVE of 9.8 is something you might want to look in to.

Gosh, now somebody is going to tell me that you need to be intelligent . . .

Nork scammers work the blockchain to steal crypto from job hunters

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"blockchain smart contracts"

Two of those words make what's left of my hair stand up straight.

One would hope that developers, of all people, would be wary of anything blockchain, but let's be realistic : it's not because you know what's behind the curtain that you pay more attention.

Decomposed dinosaurs make Texas a top destination for AI bit barns

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Devil

"Poolside execs hope to cut costs"

Using hand-waving and chanting well-known corporate words.

Given that they are not going to dirty their hands by actually doing the job, I doubt that their intentions will match their expectations.

Then again, I don't really care. They are setting thermselves up for failure since they are only paying attention to the cost of energy, not to the cost of cooling.

And, as we all know, the Colorado river is drying up at a frightful pace.

So yeah, go build more gigawatt planet heaters. We really need those now.

End of support for older Office and Windows Server versions pile on the pain for admins

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Office 2013

Companies always splurge for the latest and greatest, but Office 2010 still does 99% of what you actually need, and 2010/2013 don't bug you if you don't register. You'll get a reminder, but you can work.

Given that companies have already paid the license, they can go for Office 2013 and save themselves from the upgrade treadmill.

Which they won't do, of course.

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: This will be a multi-year effort

Somehow I doubt that the chip dealing with radio signals is changed in every new iteration.

So I'm thinking that, given that we're on 5G at this point, phones will remain compatible with 5G for a while (they're still compatible with 3G - and 4G of course).

So there may be some revisiting for the new generation, but I don't think it's going to be a "bin what we've done and start over" situation.

Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Yay for Schleswig-Holstein !

Good on them to finally boldly go into the Futur, the one with stability and without endless critical updates that never actually address the underlying pile of crap.

I hope they're not going to pull a Munich and stay the course, domanstrating to an aghast CxO public that, yes, you CAN do without Redmond - even if you have to say goodbye to your favorite Excel charts and PowerPoint presentations.

Life can go on, and it will do so in much better shape when we've all gotten rid of that lodestone stamped with a a Windows icon.

Capita fined £14M after 58-hour delay exposed 6.6M records

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

Is that a joke ?

"ICO makes example of outsourcing giant "

Capita. 2024 revenue : £2.4 billion.

Fine ? 0.58% of annual revenu.

You call that an example ? I call that pocket change. The CEO probably has that lying in his sofa cushions.

You want to make an example ? 10% of 2.4 billion is 240 million.

Fine them that and watch them scramble for it to never happen again.

Make 'em sweat, instead of going to a restaurant to celebrate after your piddling little "fine".

AI is the flying car of the mind: An irresistible idea nobody knows how to land or manage

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

"heading for a hard landing"

So, to properly use "AI", you have to be trained.

Well, given how well <cough> companies are focussed on training their employees, I'm sure they'll have no trouble punting the issue to schools and universities to ensure that the next generation of starry-eyed meat fresh from the diploma mills will handle those pesky AI issues just like today's batch handles Excel formulas : badly.

And I say it's a Good ThingTM. I hope that the whole current generation of AI trash gets dismantled so that we can make a new generation that will no longer be in everyone's hands (save for pretty picture generators) but in the hands of actual, competent people.

And yes, I would like a winning lottery ticket with that, thank you.

Some like it bot! ChatGPT promises AI-rotica is coming for verified adults

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

If you want it to work, get the sex industry into it

Nobody would be selling anything online if it weren't for the porn industry that flattened those barriers.

So yeah, getting into sex has the potential of engorging benefits to towring heights . . .

Mine's the one with, euh, never mind.

Microsoft seeding Washington schools with free AI to get kids and teachers hooked

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Standard Operating Procedure

Redmond has form in invading young minds to get them hooked early.

What matters is that, when they get around to having a paycheck, they pony up the money to keep using their "account".

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Congratulations

Thank you, Bose, for applying another layer of knowledge paint on the idiots who persist in buying into The CloudTM.

I agree that, if by now they haven't yet got the message, it is high time to apply the good ol' two-by-four to the wallet so they might finally be enlightened.

Kudos to you for bearing the heavy weight of this education.

End of Windows 10 support is the perfect time for the Windows 11 installer to fail

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"might not work as expected"

Sorry. it definitely works just as expected - by Redmond.

Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

"Europe's largest local authority"

Could you please stop calling it that ? It gives it an air of importance that its continuous administrative failures demonstrate it does not deserve.

How about calling it Europe's largest administrative failure ?

That should about do it.

Inside the belly of the beast: A technical walk through Intel's 18A production facility at Fab52

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Awesome

I second that. Okay, AMD took the lead, and not entirely witthout reason. But that certainly does not mean that Intel should just lie down and die.

This can be proof that Intel still has a bite, and there is largely enough room for two chip companies to make an honest living without trying to shoot each other in the legs.

I wish the best for this foundry and for Intel's futur in the business. I just hope they won't go back to the childish antics of skewed marketing presentations and charts that are presented to make Intel look much better than it is.

I won't hold my breath, though.

Chinese phishing kit helps scammers who send fake texts impersonate TikTok, Coinbase, others

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Ah, scammers. Well placed in the Scum Of The Earth' top ten.

It's Sunday, right ?

Get a bit of revenge schadenfreud : here.

Kyndryl sued for firing non-white workers, disabled vet

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Unhappy

[terminations] based on race, national origin, age, disability, and whistleblowing activities

Well, as soon as you wrote "IBM spinoff" I thought, duh.

In a just world, everyone in that company should have walked out, leaving those manglegers and CxOs with the liberty to hire all-white inexperienced youngsters and revel in the lack of profits that that would generate.

But this world is not just, especially in the US at this time, and nobody who has a job is going to resign over petty detail like Mohammed got canned.

Hundreds of millions of business PCs are still on Windows 10 as D-Day nears

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

"100s of millions of computers that have yet to upgrade to Windows 11"

Sorry Redmond, you yourself defined that a vast majority of them didn't have the hardware to do so.

Fuck you.

McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Angel

"navigate the minefield of hype that surrounds AI"

Be honest.

Don't sell AI.

Of course, I am fully aware that snake-oil vendors can't keep their slimy hands off of a new get-rich-quick scam, and it is quite a shame that such companies can't be forced to pay for the benefits they promised that never appeared, but really : intelligent CEOs (I'm supposing there are a few of them left) will not be taken in by the siren song, and will tell companies like McKinsey to fuck the hell off.

Yes, I am an idealist. Sometimes even, a poet. In other words, I believe people generally actually want to make things better, not worse.

I do realize that, as far as the Dow Jones is concerned, that is rarely true.

Please don't burst my bubble . . .

Hobble your AI agents to prevent them from hurting you too badly

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Nah, don't hobble them

Let them run wild and discover which wonderful lands you can discover.

After all, it's AI, ain't it ? How can you know what you will discover if you don't let it loose ?

Don't pay attention to your stock price, this is more important.

Right ?

RIGHT ?

Mars’ powerful whirlwinds blow dust everywhere, could affect future missions

Pascal Monett Silver badge

This is a wierd read

I seem to remember that there was a rover that was actually saved by said winds which scoured its solar panels and allowed it to go farther and longer than ever thought possible.

Now this is painted as a threat. Why ?