Posts by Pascal Monett

Thailand calls on telcos and ISPs to censor information about pro-democracy protests

"made it an offence to take a selfie at protest events"

Wow, a government that feels threatened by selfies.

Not a very good indicator of stability or justice.

Gamers are replacing Bing Maps objects in Microsoft Flight Simulator with rips from Google Earth

Re: I think the key point is that you CAN import from elsewhere

If I were an avid Flight Simulator player, I might move along with you.

As it stands, I'll let you move to ambivalence while I continue gloating about how Bing is once again only used to find Google.

Samsung aims boot at Apple's decision not to bundle a charger in with the iPhone 12, foot ends up in mouth

It is definitely a step in the right direction since it means that mobile phones will have to be compliant with a single model of charger, and that is a Good Thing (TM).

I have a drawer full of chargers with connectors of every kind imaginable (and probably some unimaginable ones). The day I can throw that into the recycling bin and replace it all with one or two truly universal chargers is a day I am looking forward to.

Software billionaire accused of hiding $2bn in income from IRS – potentially the largest tax scam in US history

he "created and used a proprietary, encrypted email system"

His employees shredded incriminating evidence, destroyed electronic media, and yet, with all these precautions, the IRS still knows what's in the emails, the codenames of the accomplices and probably much, much more.

Next time the FBI wants to crack an iPhone, instead of once again whining publicly for Apple to put in a backdoor, I think it should call the IRS for help.

That said, given that every time the FBI has whined about Apple, in the end it still proclaims that it got results without the backdoor, so maybe they already do.

If you can see this headline, you're certainly not reading it on Twitter: All tweets, notifications vanish

"All tweets, notifications vanish"

And nothing of importance was lost

"Nothing to see here,"

Well, it's Twitter. There never was anything to see.

Your web browser running remotely in Cloudflare's cloud. That's it. That's the story

"send you only safe content"

Thanks, but I have NoScript for that.

Don't need no effing cloud.

We bought a knockoff Lego launchpad kit from China for our Saturn V rocket so you don't have to

I have been a LEGO fan since I was born

The greatest set I was ever gifted with was the yellow medieval castle. I have practically an entire trunk load of bricks of every kind, plus the moon set that some parent graciously gifted me before my 10th birthday.

It is impossible to count the hours that I have spent building and tearing things down with all those bricks. Everything could be repurposed, set to another use, and it was always fun.

Now, of course, I'm an old fart and don't really like kneeling for hours any more. But whe, three XMASes ago, I saw my nephew get the Saturn V, I was initially impressed. Of course, on XMas morning, he started about building it. I watched, bemused, as he spent about three hours putting it together. And all the while he did so, I was asking myself : and what else can you make with those specific parts ?

LEGO has changed to a point that I can no longer wish to follow. It used to be that you could use everything in a myriad of ways. Now, parts are so specialized that you can only use them in the set they were intended for.

That's a shame.

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

"We were caught quite off guard"

Yes, you obviously were. You are also apparently caught off guard by the notion of (gasp) actually updating your software.

I use LibreOffice, because for what I need to do, it fits the bill and, at a cost of zero, that bill works fine for me. I also view the frequent updates as a Good Thing (TM).

That said, I also view LibreOffice as a pale copy of what Office 95 would give me if I could still get it working today. Don't get me wrong, I respect the work that has been and still is being put in LibreOffice, but a contender to Microsoft Office it is not.

To read that OpenOffice hasn't had an update in 6 years makes me shudder to think of the state of things. Multiplan, anyone ? Word 4 ?

LibreOffice is obviously the future. Go LibreOffice.

Remember when Zoom was rumbled for lousy crypto? Six months later it says end-to-end is ready

Good on the method, but bad implementation

The encryption should be automatic and transparent. There is no reason to require user opt-in in this case, nor is there any reason not to activate it all the time automatically.

But at least this is progress.

Good news: Boffins have finally built room-temperature superconductors. Bad news: You'll need a laser, a diamond anvil, and a lot of pressure

What a great discovery

We have now replaced the temperature problem with a pressure problem. Instead of cooling a mile of cable with liquid hydrogen (or whatever it is they use), we'll have to maintain that mile of cable under millions of atmospheres of pressure while zapping it with lasers.

I really don't see how this improves the situation.

Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts

Oracle ? Generous ?

Reminds me of another generous man who said "I am changing the terms of the deal. Pray I don't change them again."

Obvious icon is obvious.

Elizabeth Holmes' plan to avoid her Theranos fraud trial worked out about as well as her useless blood-testing machines

Re: This Case is Only Remarkable because

Oh really ? Because the name Martin Shkreli means nothing to you ?

Comcast’s president of tech falls offline while boasting about how great cable is for connectivity

"There is [..] no way to independently verify"

There doesn't need to be. It doesn't matter what he was using, what matters is that he very publicly shot himself in the foot by not having a reliable connection.

That is on par with Bill Gates' first presentation of Windows 95 that introduced the world to the wonders of the GUI of the future as well as the Blue Screen Of Death in one single presentation.

Years after we detected two neutron stars crashing into each other, we're still picking up X-rays. We don't know why

"the emissions are 100 billion times brighter than those from the Sun"

So they're getting x-rays from a merger that are stupendously bright. Did they point an optical telescope there to see if anything was visible ?

How about infra-red ? If the two neutron stars don't have nuclear fusion, they should certainly be radiating heat like crazy.

Of course, if they've become a black hole, then the source has to come from the jet, but couldn't the jet be visible if it 10,000 billion kilometers long ?

EDIT : after a short search, I found this article that details nicely all the important things about this merger, and there are many. But nothing on the jet.

UK's Cheshire Police tenders for whole new ERP system after Oracle Fusion went live with 'significant deficiency'

"after a troubled launch of Oracle Fusion"

What is it with all these major vendors that botch project after project ? It's at least the third time this year.

I cannot believe that there are so many incompetent project managers getting these high-profile projects. When you have a multi-million dollar (or pound/euro/whatever) project you put someone of experience in charge. The programmers don't necessarily need to be the best, but the project manager does.

Yes, there are clients that don't know what they want, or have internal politics that are murkier than a toilet after beer and tacos night, but that does not explain all these high-level failures coming from companies that have the experience to do better.

UK govt advert encouraging re-skilling for cyber jobs implodes spectacularly

A gerbil can replace Donald Trump.

And the world would be a better place.

UK taxman waves through £168.8m Fujitsu contract because no one else can hold up 30-year-old infrastructure

"awarded Fujitsu a £168.8m contract without competition"

Thank God there are procedures and such to ensure that the Government gets the best deals possible, right ?

Oh, I'm sorry, the Government has decided to bypass the procedures ? How lovely. Just you try bypassing paying your taxes. You'll find the procedures are firmly in place and well respected, I'm sure.

As usual, one rule for them, one rule for us.

German-speaking SAP user survey sees S4/HANA upgrade projects either sink or swim as coronavirus cuts into revenue

Well, a bright future for SAP then

It would seem that all of the historical failures are unimportant. Massive ERP's are the future, and SAP is the most massive, so buying SAP never got anybody fired, right ?

Pakistan bans TikTok because of its users not its owners

"the service’s slew of salaciousness"

Where ?

I just spent ten minutes looking at TikTok video and the only thing I saw was a bunch of idiots doing stupid, uninteresting things.

The kind of things you should keep for the privacy of your friends in your room, or backyard.

Either that, or a high-virtue signalling somebody who thinks TikTok is the right platform to preach about something (I don't know what the bejeesus they were talking about, I had cut the speakers).

As far as salaciousness was concerned, a complete waste of time.

As China trials its Digital Yuan with a giveaway, seven big central banks outline response

"a viable digital fiat currency"

We already have that. It's called a credit card.

I fail to see the interest in having a national funny coin. The single good side that it might have is denting the prolific activity of criminals and incompetents in so-called "exchanges", where the only thing that is really going on is the ticking of the time bomb that is counting away the seconds until data is stolen, coins are lost or somebody makes a getaway with the money.

If that sort of activity can be curbed, then so be it, but don't tell me that my fiat currency I use almost every day is not almost completely virtual.

Hell, there are enough people complaining that the entire banking and financial world is based on a sham. All those who want to reintroduce gold-based monetary values, for starters.

Microsoft tells staff work-from-home is now ‘standard’ – with caveats galore

That's funny, I always thought that my salary was what I get for doing my job, not for driving to work.

My salary is for 8 hours a day regardless of where I'm working or how I get there.

You want to pay me following my cost of living ? Fine. I'll be dining at the restaurant noon and evening then, with Champaign and caviar at every meal.

Adjust my salary on that.

Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access

"Ever been faced with an over enthusiastic manager with [..] not quite enough, IT skill?"

All the damn time.

If you don't know how to write the code, don't tell me what I'm supposed to put in it. I don't care about your little pet, I just want to get the job done right.

From the Department of WCGW: An app-controlled polycarbonate lock with no manual override/physical key

Cellmate

I thought the whole thing was a joke - then I followed the link.

Dear. God.

They actually made a todger tackle. And made it to be unlockable by an app. Meaning connected to the Internet, no less. There might be a bit of fun to be had there, for a bored blackhat tired of blackmailing companies and hospitals with ransomware.

Funny, I guess nobody is going to go all high and virtuous about the use of the word 'slave' on that page.

Facebook's anti-trademark bot torpedoes .org website that just so happened to criticize Zuck's sucky ethics board

The solution to this issue is simple

Instead of using a host that is susceptible to blocking, parking or outright shutting down their site, they should just host it themselves.

That way, they might receive a takedown notice, but they can ignore it until some human comes and starts shrieking at them that they've gotten dozens of takedown notices and they'll be sued if they don't take it down, at which point they can answer : "See you in court". At that point, somebody with a brain is going to have to start analyzing the actual website to build his case for the judge, at which point he's going to have to realize that they don't have a case.

And that's when they go away quietly, while the site stays up.

Of course, to host a site oneself, one must pay a bit of money and do a bit more work than just designing some web pages, but hey, if you're intent on getting the word out, then it should be worth it.

EFF off: Privacy Badger disables by default anti-tracking safeguard that can be abused to track you online

Privacy Badger, local learning

A nice try, I guess, but NoScript stops trackers dead.

Britain should have binned Huawei 5G kit years ago to cuddle up with Trump, says Parliamentary committee

Well done, Cotton

Way to openly declare that UK Government is ready and willing to bend over and take it every time Washington gets the urge.

Oh, and if you're worried about "overseas technology", well guess what ? The USA is overseas from you too.

You cannot hype an unproven, undocumented issue from country A when you are promoting dealing with country B instead, which has been proven and widely documented to do the exact same thing you are shrieking country A might do.

This whole thing is bullshit and is starting to seriously annoy me.

Tableau continues to pursue monogamish marriage a year after Salesforce nuptials

What ?

"We'll go deeper with Salesforce because we're all now one team, and we have no access to Salesforce technologies that we didn't have before."

That sentence doesn't make sense. If you have the same access to Salesforce tech than before, you could have gone deeper before.

You're basically saying on the one hand you're now on the same team and on the other, it doesn't make a difference.

That makes no sense.

ICANN begs Europe: Please fill in the blanks on this half-assed GDPR-compliant Whois we came up with

ICANN can sort it out quite quickly

Just ask the German registrar that sent it packing what it is doing and copy that.

I'm sure the registrar would be happy to help - for a small fee. Say, $9 million ?

Mine's the one with a copy of the GDPR in the pocket.

Chef leaves a bad taste: Staff cut in 'horrid, bleak' week after Progress swallows DevOps darling for $220m

"watch our actions"

We are. We see that you boast about how Chef's business is going to continue to grow, and yet you're getting rid of the very people that made Chef interesting to you in the first place.

We'll be very interested in seeing your results, even if we can already guess how things are going to go.

DigitalOcean decides to head rivals off at the PaaS, floats App Platform to deploy, run code without juggling servers

"try its hand at a PaaS offering"

Okay. We have seen Azure fall over, we have suffered AWS fall down, and Google Cloud occasionally skips a work day as well. Given that these three are the behemoths of the industry, backed by companies that have tens of billions on their account, what makes you think that DigitalOcean has a snowball's chance in Hell of giving you a platform that is in any reliable ?

If you really want to go Cloud, given how much trouble the top tier has, I think it would be suicide to go with a runner-up.

Wisepay 'outage' is actually the school meal payments biz trying to stop an intruder from stealing customer card details

"a URL manipulation attempt"

. . . is only a danger if you coded your URLs stupidly enough that they can be manipulated.

Alternate payment methods ? After reading of your incompetence I will surely look for that.

A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong

I've actually lived through something like that. I was called in to develop a data export from a production database to a system on another platform. I was all ready to go via CSV, but I was specifically told that the export should be in an Excel file.

This was when Office 2010 was already out, so I didn't have much chance of hitting the million row limit.

So I did the job as per spec, created the code that grabbed the data, opened a new Excel sheet and plonked it in, row by row, then saved and closed Excel, grabbed the file and FTP'd it to wherever it had to go.

A few years later I got a call from that same customer. They remembered that I had done the job and now it wasn't working anymore, could I come in and fix the problem ? Sure.

So I went and checked the code. Nothing had changed in my code, so I asked to be able to run a test. With permission I ran the code in debug mode and, lo and behold, when Excel was asked to open a spreadsheet the code halted, there was no spreadsheet to be had.

After explaining the problem, a server admin used his access to check the server in question and reported that Office was no longer installed on the server. Long story short, it turns out that the beancounters were checking lists of Office licenses against users and, since that license didn't have a person associated to it, they cut the license. Apparently it would be useless trying to explain that that license was a business requirement. It was internal procedure that every Office license had to correspond to an actual, breathing human being.

Solution ? Could you please modify the code to use the CSV format ? Sure. That way the recipient will just have to bung it into Excel on his license. Problem solved.

Another day at the coalface.

President Trump to slap fresh restrictions on H-1B work visas, refuses to hear public comment on changes

"economic security is homeland security"

So, um, does that mean that economic insecurity is . . war ? How does that work ?

I am absolutely not surprised that Homeland Security is spreading its wings once more ; the USA is well on its way to becoming a dictatorship, especially if it continues on its current path. Trump has his cronies in all the right positions, so obviously people are doing his bidding without even blinking, much less thinking.

But declaring that the economy is under Homeland Security purview ? What tools do you have when it goes wrong ? You can't magically make a law that sets the economy right.

This is just another excuse to expand the Big Brother state that the USA has become.

Big Tech to face its Ma Bell moment? US House Dems demand break-up of 'monopolists' Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google

“the decline of trustworthy sources of news"

That's rich coming from a country that allows Fox News to broadcast.

UK, French, Belgian blanket spying systems ruled illegal by Europe’s top court

Can I say it now ?

The EU is now the beacon of freedom and justice for all. The USA has lost the crown and is descending into madness. It will probably recover, in time.

Meanwhile, it's in the EU that freedom is guaranteed the best. Justice a bit less maybe, but we're getting there.

Massive news, literally: Three super-boffins awarded Nobel Prize in physics for their black-hole breakthroughs

Congratulations to all !

I am thrilled to see that Professor Gehz is getting recognition for her work. I have been following (from afar) her lectures and her study of our own supermassive black hole and as soon as I started reading the first paragraph of this article I started wondering if her name would show up.

It did, and I am very happy for her.

And for the two others of course, but a bit more for her.

Nominet refuses to consider complaint about its own behaviour, claims CEO didn’t mean what he said on camera

Re: At what point do you pull the plug?

If you compare with ICANN, you don't pull the plug and you don't arrest anyone.

Very disheartening.

Yorkshire authority seeks £3m 'modern, cloud-based, future-proof ERP solution' in as few products as possible

A mere 3 million ?

Sorry mate, you're going to need to add a few zeros to that if you want an all-in-one solution.

And you're going to have to wait a few years before you get the full package.

Then you're going to have to ask for fixes and updates for a decade or so, which will inevitably up the costs by at least 80%.

Good luck on your cloud project, though. You'll need it.

Cisco ordered to cough up $2bn – yes, two billion dollars – plus royalties after ripping off biz's cybersecurity patents

“mitigated by the professional performance of its trial counsel.”

No. It's not because the lawyers smile nicely that you should scale back on the damages.

They're paid to be the best they can, and in this case, paid by thieves. The judge should have hit them with all barrels.

Insurance firm Ardonagh Group disabled 200 admin accounts as ransomware infection took hold

My thought exactly. There are at least 195 accounts too many that have that level of access.

They should start by pruning that.

Unless, of course, that level of access is not controlled by web firewalls and therefor upper management can continue surfing - uh - specific productivity websites, yeah, that's it.

Pack your bags! Astroboffins spot 24 'superhabitable' exoplanets better than Earth at supporting complex life

A larger planet means more gravity

Which, in turn, will have an impact on the maximum height of any multicellular organism out there.

I'm no boffin myself, but I have read many articles on how King Kong could not possibly exist because the mass ratio to bone thickness would mean his skeleton couldn't possibly keep him standing, and other articles to that effect.

So, I'm all for superhabitable and I get that it means there may be life there, not that we can live there, but a larger planet means smaller creatures. At 1.25 times the mass of Earth, any dinosaur out there would not be as tall as the Brontosaurus, I'd guess.

Windows 10 to let you know that your SSD is dying rather than throwing out a BSOD when it's already too late

"Raise your hand if you're still using Skype"

It's still installed because I have customers that still use it.

I haven't been required to launch it for over a year though, because the COVID confinement made them acquire and install other tools for VPN access and so forth, so I don't know how long it will stay in my application list.

What is it about McDonald's, cultural black holes, and not being able to make tech work?

Re: expand the pool of unemployed but above-average workers

So, I take it you're ready and willing to go work at Micky D ?

You might want to check out a better bar.

Institute of Directors survey says most bosses expect no mass return to the office if COVID-19 crisis ever ends

"directors must make sure they are going out of their way to support employees' mental wellbeing"

Tell that to IBM.

Fujitsu gets ready to eat its own dogfood as company-wide digital transformation project kicks off

Look at the bright side

At least Capita is not in charge, so Fujitsu just might have a chance.

Microsoft says bug, sorry, 'a latent defect' in Safe Deployment Process system downed Azure Active Directory

Microsoft and its rings

Everything has rings at Borkzilla. They have been well thought-out and cleverly implemented, with iron-clad protocols and processes to respect, and yet they regularly blow up and spew stuff over every ring at the same time.

Windows Update had the same problem no too long ago, remember ? It was the Fast Ring update that spewed over every other ring and borked a whole slew of PCs.

It's a very good idea, really. Except it's Borkzilla, so Murphy's Law stands proud.

Icon for the ring, obviously.

First analysts, now YouTubers put you on blast. Do you A) take it on the chin or B) up fire up the DMCA-o-tron?

Sounds so fair, doesn't it ?

"Users must fill out a copyright removal request form, and when doing so we remind them to consider exceptions to copyright law. Anyone who believes their reuse of a video or segment is protected by fair use can file a counter-notice.”

Oh, you remind them to consider exceptions to copyright law, but then you go and file a strike against the YouTuber anyway. So, in practice, you do bugger all to keep things fair because even if the YouTuber disputes the strike, that won't keep you from piling them on and, after three, he's down for the count.

Stop trying to make it look like you're being fair, YouTube, because you are clearly not.

Fair would be a DCMA claim is made, the target is notified, the target then chooses to file a counter claim or not. If not, then the strike is counted. If a counter-claim is filed, then YouTube (not a judge) analyzes the video and determines whether the copyright holder is justified in his claim. YouTube then notifies both parties of its decision, and if there still remains a dispute, everybody goes to court.

THAT would be fair.

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

Not a true Who Me

He just reported the problem. He's not the one who bungled the fix.