Posts by Pascal Monett

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.

Biden expands Chinese tech and military blocklist to 59 companies

But of course

"the use of Chinese surveillance technology outside the PRC and the development or use of Chinese surveillance technology to facilitate repression or serious human rights abuse constitute unusual and extraordinary threats "

Whereas the use of NSA surveillance technology is perfectly fine, because we're the Good Guys.

Pull the other one.

Either surveillance tech is a good thing, or it isn't. It doesn't matter where it's from.

Apple: We didn't take commission on 90% of App Store sales and billings

Revenue $15bn, cost $100m

100 / 15000 is a ratio of 0.0066%.

As I have repeatedly said, 5% is largely enough.

Tiananmen Square Tank Man vanishes from Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, other search engines – even in America

Not sure about that.

Human stupidity is a very powerful force. Almost unstoppable.

Report commissioned by Google says Google isn't to blame for the death of print news

Report commissioned by Google

. . is in favor of Google.

Wow, that's astonishing. Must be totally unbiased and truthful.

Honestly, I would like to be a fly on the wall in the kind of meeting where a multinational behemoth comes with a suitcase full money and states what report it wants and what results it wants.

I'd really like to see the face of those so-called "journalists" eyeing the money and saying "sure, we can do that".

Just to see hypocrisy in the flesh.

Once, just once, I would like to see a report commissioned by somebody that did not conclude in favor of that someone. As it is, these days, every time you hear of a report with favorable conclusions for something, all you need to do is ask "which entity commissioned that report ?" to know why.

The whole system is despicable.

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Ah, the bliss of remotes

At least, the bliss of not having too many of them.

I have two sets. Set 1 is TV and DVD player. Set 2 is Orange Box and VHS.

My CD player and amplifier are too old for remotes. You get off your ass and go press those buttons or turn that knob. Works every time.

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

"misbehaving cores"

Is the solution of replacing the CPU with another identical not a good idea, or will the new one start misbehaving in the same way ?

The article states that Google and FaceBook report a few cores in a thousand. That means that most CPUs are functioning just fine, so rip out the mercurial CPUs and replace them. That should give a chance of solving the immediate issue.

Of course, then you take the misbehaving CPU and give it a good spanking, euh, put it in a test rig to find out just how it fails.

Brit retailer Furniture Village confirms 'cyber-attack' as systems outage rolls into Day 7

A cyber-attack and no data had been leaked

That sounds a lot like they got hit by encryption malware, locked it down and are in the process of restoring their servers and possibly some of their PCs as well.

Good on them for not paying. Too bad somebody clicked the wrong link.

How to use Google's new dependency mapping tool to find security flaws buried in your projects

Library bloat ?

It's not because you have no need for some of the functions of a library that nobody else does. The library was not written for you, it was written to answer a specific set of requirements and contains the code necessary to do so.

Asking the compiler to remove functions that are never called is an interesting idea though. I would guess it is technically possible.

Conservative Party fined one-third of a luxury food hamper by ICO for nuisance email campaign

Re: Can't provide proof?

Absolutely.

Since when has the absence of records allowed anyone to escape a fine ?

I'm sorry Judge, I have no records of having broken into that house.

Oh ? Fine then, you'll just pay £100.

As usual, one rule for the plebs, another for the people with influence.

NASA doubles down on Venus missions, asking what made the planet uninhabitable

Earth's far distant future

If I'm not mistaken, Earth's far distant future is to have its atmosphere stripped away by the Sun in its Red Giant phase, with all the oceans boiled away.

The only question is weather the expansion of our star's diameter will mean that Earth will orbit from farther away or not, which would mean that our charcoaled planet will not be engulfed by our star's outer atmosphere and melt away.

Earth's far distant future is not to become Venus. That may, however, be a rather close future, geologically speaking.

China reveals plan to pump out positive news about itself. Let's see what happens when that lands with social media fact-checkers

Re: we fear alternative economic systems, especially ones that work

I think you might need to revise your economic cookbook.

The only reason China is on the rise now is because the Communist Party of China has realized that it would do best to let its companies function following the Capitalist regime, with a bit of good ol' Communist control to maintain everything in proper Politburo order.

The Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward in productivity, and it took decades of hardship and starvation for the Glorious Party to realize that and accept it.

The ideal of communism, that everyone has a share of everything and nothing belongs to one man, has been systematically ruined in all so-called communist states by a ruling party that set themselves above all their "comrades" and own expensive datchas, high-powered cars and lots of security personnel, which in turn allows them to dictate absurd and counter-productive orders without fear of reprisal.

Capitalism, for all its faults, is a vastly more egalitarian economic regime.

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

Go for it

Call it Thorium, call it Natrium, I don't care. Get it up and running and stop those coal-based generators ASAP.

Hybrid working? Buckle in, there's no turning back as survey takers insist: You can't make us go back

It seems that the worst is to come for companies that rent office space

The tendancy is getting clearer every day : beancounter's preference for diminishing costs is going to prevail over manager's ego trip in being able to count heads.

Suits me.

This AI could save a firefighter's life

The eternal problem with thermodynamics

I'm not by any stretch a physicist, but I've often read that if you think you understand thermodynamics, you're wrong.

Anything that can help those brave firefighters is a good thing in my book. I hope this will pan out and become reliable.

People who put their lives in harm's way to go save other people deserve every bit of help they can get.

Stack Overflow acquired for $1.8bn by Prosus (no, me neither)

I'm missing the point

So Prosus is active in fostering communities. Great. Never heard of them.

Why does this need to be an acquisition ? Can't they just open a channel and throw So some money for maintenance ?

I get that current SO owners are really happy to become millionnaires (btw, way to go guys to confirm that your selling out is going to make you rich), but I fail to see why Prosus needed to acquire SO in order to "reach 1000s more companies".

No company throws a billion dollars around without a firm grasp of how it wants to monetize that. The penny will drop one day, and we'll all go "so that's why".

Meanwhile, Chandrasekar, go on pretending that SO is going to stay independant. Yeah, sure. If you don't know it yet, you'll find out soon enough that your independence is subject to your new master's will, and he spent big money on you. He'll want something out of it.

Feds seize two domains used by SolarWinds intruders for malware spear-phishing op

"responsible states do not harbor ransomware criminals"

Yeah, good luck with that.

South Korea's first fully indigenous rocket now on launch pad, ready for tests

From next to nothing to lunar orbiter in 2 years

That's shorter than the Apollo program.

Good luck.

Bribery charges against Apple's global security boss dismissed in iPads-for-gun-permits case

"he is carrying a concealed weapon"

Sorry, but I see absolutely no justification for anyone not working in the police or a military base to walk around with a concealed weapon.

Apple is not National Security.

This is US crazyness at its highest.

South Korea rounds up chipmakers and hyperscalers to build AI and server processors

More competition ?

It's the UK contractor tax factor: IR35 outsiders gaining leverage in skills market, survey finds

Seems that the market functions like the Internet

It routes around obstructions.

VC's paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let's have a look at that

About damn time

"buying compute resources by the hour from a third-party inherently costs more than purchasing your own infrastructure "

Thank $Deity for that study.

I am going to be linking this article for years to come.

Surviving eclipse season and resurrecting 25-year-old software with Windows for Workgroups 3.11: One year with Mars Express

The Mars Express is a testament to the intelligence of our species

There are things we can do right, and the history of the Mars Express is brilliant proof of that. Intelligent minds getting together to solve problems will overcome everything but the heat death of the Universe.

You guys are awesome. Keep up the good work !

Re: ET and all that......

I admit to occasionally wonder about how far our radio signals can be determined to be anything other than background noise.

Compared to a star (and lets not start on pulsars), the Earth emits a puny amount of radio waves. I wonder if, should we have an outpost on Ganymede, would it be possible to view a TV broadcast, or even listen to a radio broadcast ?

Then you ask the same question, but one light-year away. I'm absolutely no expert in radio waves, but the strength of our signals when they reach Proxima Centaur must be vanishingly small.

Check the TUPE: Facebook's hire of Bloomsbury AI founders wasn't 'traditional' acquisition - so sacked bod can't claim law was broken

"each cofounder had been hired individually – and therefore TUPE didn’t apply"

Leave it to The Zuck to find a loophole in a legal employment protection scheme.

That being said, we're talking about a co-founder here. That's not exactly the bottom rung in the employment ladder, if I'm not mistaken.

Where you're at the top, you take your chances and look out for yourself. Running to the employment benefit larder when you feel you didn't get your fair share is rather pathetic.

Why did automakers stall while the PC supply chain coped with a surge? Because Big Tech got priority access

Re: "a lot of power merely amplifies mistakes"

I think there should be a law that, for the first five years, a driver should not be allowed to drive anything with more than 80 horsepower - even if your dad is a billionnaire.

If you need assisted driving tools you shouldn't be behind the wheel.

ABS and airbags are necessary, the rest is just an excuse for the driver to not pay attention to what he is doing.

And when you push that concept to the limit, you get a Tesla moron riding in the back seat.

Will the real IRC please stand up? Freenode’s forest fire leaves ashes – and fresh growth

"everything of worth was saved"

And that is good news.

Then again, this is the very spirit of the Internet : route around obstruction. The Internet was built on openness and trust, and that is why a moron with money will never be able to nail down any particular part that is not in the IP folders of some company.

IRC is Open Source at its finest. Lee just took over one organization, apparently thinking that he could bend it to his will.

Kudos to all those people who did not accept some petulant man child's idea of management and left him in his playpen to rot.

A smashing article. I enjoyed every line.

Space junk damages International Space Station's robot arm

Re: How

Well I think it is safe to assume that, given the amount of junk we are responsible for having put up there, there's a good chance that the impactor was our fault.

Tiny rocks do travel in space, obviously, but they tend to come in swarms and are generally accompanied by bigger rocks that astronomers can find and track.

But, in the absolute, statistically speaking, yes, it could have been a very small meteorite on its way to Earth's atmosphere.

There's also the issue that, even if all countries would agree to sign up for mandatory de-orbiting of end-of-use satellites, there's still the chance that a satellite gets damaged by an impactor and can no longer be de-orbited.

Back to square one on that.

Congestion or a Christmas cock-up? A Register reader throws himself under the bus

Happy that it worked out for him

Honestly though, it's a coin toss as to whether you will get roasted or not.

In this case it was about money, so there may well have been someone up the chain blowing his lid and getting all vocal about it. The fact that the hierarchy chose to look at the positive side, aka network performance, is just a stroke of luck.

Days Gone PC: Melting pot of open-world influences makes for one of the more immersive zombie slayers out there

"Not one of these is a bad game so when you add them all together..."

Terribly sorry, but stringing together the good elements from other games does not always end up in a good game. Just sayin'.

As far as zombie games are concerned, I have to say that 7 Days to Die is my preferred sauce at the moment. They're in Alpha on Steam, but honestly they could go full 1.0 and start talking about patching, because 7DTD is the best Alpha I have ever played on Steam.