Posts by Pascal Monett

Texan's alleged Amazon bombing effort fizzles: Militia man wanted to take out 'about 70 per cent of the internet'

Re: Proof!

I think that some intelligence is leaking into space.

Apart from that, yeah.

Maybe so, but that does not diminish the fact that the Internet is resilient.

If I have a titanium wrench, I don't care that it was made out of titanium because that's all that was left, it's still a titanium wrench.

Wormhole encrypted file transfer app reboots Firefox Send after Mozilla fled

So, the service is free, and a Pro plan is being thought of

And you don't have ads, or tracking.

VC money is not going to carry you to success, guys. You need to monetize this or you will die. 10GB free is too much, 1GB free is enough and will incite the people who need this to splurge on a paid plan.

India uses controversial Aadhaar facial biometrics to identify COVID vaccination recipients

"A [..] facial recognition system therefore makes sense"

Well, at least they won't have any white bias in the data. Maybe they'll even have found a way to make the system accurate, contrary to the failures in the US and UK.

If that is the case, then India could be the first country to export an actual facial recognition system worth the name.

Gitpod ditches Eclipse Theia for Visual Studio Code under redesign, sponsors new dev experience event

"all things which just happen to be in tune with Gitpod's approach"

And just happen to justify its subscription model.

How convenient.

I've been a developer for 25 years now. I don't need no git's pod to do my work in.

Now get off my lawn.

W3C Technical Architecture Group slaps down Google's proposal to treat multiple domains as same origin

"No, we are not proposing to change the scope for permissions"

All we want is that everything Alphabet be recognized as a single entity, so we can scrape, pilfer and track everything with even more ease.

Google, go fuck yourself.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

"the company ignored that question"

Not acceptable.

You do not program for how your own country interprets values. You program for how your client country interprets values.

Mistakes like that lead to losing a satellite because you transmitted data in metric values while the program treated them in imperial values.

Beloved pixel pusher Paint prepares to join Notepad for updates from Microsoft Store

Re: MS Paint has never been so bad

Well, I'm glad you're content with the basic shovel of the pixel realm. I guess you don't need to create/retouch images all that much.

As for me, I've been using Paint.net for over a decade, and before that I was using Paint Shop Pro.

Microsoft Paint is the kindergerden tool, as far as I'm concerned.

And let's not talk about Notepad. Notepad++ is the only text editor you'll ever need, and Microsoft's offering doesn't hold a candle to it.

Website maker Wix embarks on weird WordPress-trashing campaign, sends 'influencer' users headphones from 'WP'

So, Wix are just a bunch of assholes

A company that is far behind the competition, closed source in an environment that is apparently mostly open-source and competing fairly, and the cherry on top is that they send "promotional" material looking to be from their major competitor.

That combination speaks of a despicable mindset, and I don't even take into account the impossibility of exporting data.

Keep it up, Wix, and you'll stay at the bottom of the market barrel.

Indian defense chief admits China’s cyber-weapons would ‘disrupt large number of systems’ whenever Beijing presses the button

I'm not sure we can compare with MAD. Once your communications infrastructure is overwhelmed, you don't have any strike capability left.

UK government rings £1.5bn dinner bell for software design and implementation, 54 vendors come running

It doesn't really matter, it's going to be a vast waste of money anyway.

Greenland's elections just bolstered China's tech world domination plan

I definitely took that as sarcasm. I agree that it was slightly unexpected given the tone of the rest of the article, but it is standard Vulture writing and a reminder of the basic style : biting.

British gambling giant Betfred told to pay stiffed winner £1.7m jackpot after claiming 'software problem'

"not transparent or fair"

Ouch. There are a million websites out there that need to review their Ts&Cs in that case.

First time I've ever heard of a judge knocking down those carefully constructed piles of legal Get Out Of Jail Free (for the company) mumbo-jumbo. If this becomes a precedent, a lot of companies are going to feel the pain.

Sometimes British judges are just the best.

Privacy activist Max Schrems claims Google Advertising ID on Android is unlawful, files complaint in France

Re: However...

While I agree with basically everything you say, I can't see that happening any time soon.

Re: The BBC itself is just as damned bad

Well hey, you've taken back control. Deal with it.

No need. Just file a complaint under GDPR. I think you'll find that things will change quickly (for an administrative definition of "quickly").

'Our hosted pools are under attack by abusers': Azure DevOps enjoys a midweek TITSUP*

"convenient alternatives to self-hosting"

Am I glad that I don't work in the kind of environment that thinks that self-hosting is anathema.

It may work for some, but I have been self-hosting my data for over two decades and I have had no problem. That does not incite me to indulge in handing over my data to some faceless virtual hosting facility.

All the stories I hear about burning datacenters, entire swaths of hosted servers wiped by some "event", and the many, many stories about pilfered user data really do not make me think "hey, I just might try out that cloud stuff everyone is talking about".

US national parks to be smothered under blanket of liquid-hot Magma. Yes, the open-source 5G software

"vendor agnostic and free from lock-in"

The advantage of the free software movement is that, once the basic list of requirements are set up, things can be added under public scrutiny and the software can evolve according to the needs of the users, not the budgets of the providers.

Free Software is the death knell of closed voting machines, whose controller nobody knows. It is the end of Windows (yeah, okay, not anytime soon, but still), an OS that is decided by a company that thinks it knows better than you what you need. At some point in time, it will even make IoT reliable and secure (not holding my breath either).

Closed, proprietary software is dead, it just doesn't know it yet.

Software in space race heats up: Microsoft eyes satellite image processing with Thales Alenia Space's digital image analyst

"applying [ML] and [AI] (and their predecessors) to the field of satellite imagery"

Then it is perfectly logical that Borkzilla enters the field now, a decade after everyone else.

It's SOP, you see.

Astronomers have not waited on Borkzilla to wake up to their needs. This is just another soon-to-be-abandoned project.

Post Office awards Fujitsu a £42.5m contract extension for the IT system behind wrongful subpostmaster prosecutions

So, let me summarize

For "economic and technical reasons," the service could not be provided by any organisation other than the original contractor before the expiry of the Horizon Agreement

Okay, sure, that part I can accept. It would be highly unreasonable to throw everything away and have operation grind to a halt while you commission Crapita (because who else ?) to develop an entirely new set of bugs.

So fine, ensure the maintenance of your buggy, mololithic, outdated system. Got it.

Meanwhile, now that you have ensured its continuance, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO REPLACE IT ? Now's the time. Throw another £100 million to somebody and get your non-monolithic, up-to-date, designed for multi-channel digital operations (do you really even know what that means ?), highly Agile system on its feet so that you can replace the dinosaur when the next end date expires.

Because 2024 is going to be here before you finish drawing up your next set of outdated specifications, I'll wager.

The JavaScript ecosystem is 'hopelessly fragmented'... so here is another runtime: Deno is now a company

Re: Mozilla clueless

Sorry, but where you get it from does not make it any less privacy-respecting.

Unless you have a recent Huawei phone, you've got the Google Play Store and there's no other option to get stuff without rooting the phone, so it's hardly a dent in Mozilla's efforts to get you a privacy-respecting browser.

Taiwan’s PC-fest COMPUTEX cancels real-world edition – three months after promising in-person gathering

"COMPUTEX will now revert to a virtual format"

As was inevitable even in December. But don't owrry, governments are forcing people to get untested vaccines so, by next December, everyone will either be vaccinated or dead and everything will be business as usual.

Well, for the businesses and business owners that survived the confinements, that is.

Can we get a Reaper icon ?

Jeff Bezos supports US tax rise after not paying it for two years – and paying tiny amount in 2019

Ah, tax laws

Instead of changing the rate at which corporations are taxed, it might be simpler to change the rules that allow them deductions on their tax bill.

I'm guessing that would bring in a few billion.

We finally get to spot a burnt-out comet and what is it covered in? Talcum powder

It was 3.5 million kilometers away

And an Earth-based telescope allowed boffins to determine that it has talcum powder on the surface. The image quality, power and precision to establish that is simply staggering. Well done.

No so well done for the wiki page though, it doesn't mention the Subaru telescope at all.

DARPA adds RISC-V to its Toolbox: Defense researchers can get special access to SiFive chip designs

SiFive

Here's hoping that none of SiFive's accesses has a "SiFive123" password.

Mine's the one with the 16-char password in the pocket.

Imagine your data center backup generator kicks in during power outage ... and catches fire. Well, it happened

Seems that generators are a bit of danger

Might be time to house them in their own, seperate building.

CERN boffins zap antimatter with ultraviolet lasers in the hope of revealing the secret symmetry of the universe

Re: then the Big Bang theory is false

Where do you draw that conclusion ?

I believe that there are quite a few highly-qualified physics experts that might not agree with you.

Of course, as always, please point me to your Nobel prize-winning PhD that demonstrates that everyone is wrong.

Oh, you're not done writing it ?

No Problem, we'll wait.

Wait a minute

Excited antimatter particles emit normal photons ?

Shouldn't they emit anti-photons ?

I'm bewildered.

Subaru parks plans to make 58,000 cars due to brakes on silicon supply chain

Re: Creating SPOF isn't such a great idea

And yet industry keeps on doing it, eh Boeing ?

Honesty though, you can saddle a car with a lot of electronics before it starts getting weighed down. Do you really think the camera on your smartphone is the heaviest part ? Of course not.

And since cars these days have the processing capacity, well, would be a shame not to use it, I guess.

But not for phoning home. That is never acceptable.

Facebook says dump of 533m accounts is old news. But my date of birth, name, etc haven't changed in years, Zuck

Re: Interesting

Signal, that's the encrypted chat app.

So El Zuck wants privacy for himself, and invasion of privacy for everyone else.

Not surprised.

Re: Oxymoron alert!

You need to upgrade your satire detector.

Australian ponders requiring multiple IDs to sign up for social media, plus more crypto-busting backdoors

Re: Help! Old F*art Needs An Explanation

Well, not an expert on encryption by a long shot, but before being able to send any kind of message, the proposal would have you provide proof of ID to the platform, so you can kiss anonymity good-bye.

Then there's the fact that setting up private encryption is a hassle not many people will wish to put up with, if we start by supposing that people will even be bothered to give it a thought.

Twitter nukes AI-generated twits who backed Amazon and pushed anti-union rhetoric

Re: Amazon and US Unions ?

The problem is power to the people - the bigwigs don't like that.

A union is something that is going to argue for better working conditions, less stress, longer bathroom breaks and so and so forth forever. That will make a dent in profitability, you see, so Bezos is doing his damndest to avoid that.

Absolutely fab: As TSMC invests $100bn to address chip shortage, where does that leave the rest of the industry?

Re: Turn off Las Vegas

Like that is ever going to happen.

The Hoover Dam is the end of the chain. There is so much water being siphoned off the Colorado River it's pure insanity to build a semiconductor plant in one of the driest places on Earth.

For Heaven's sake, can't you go and build in Montana ? Or Washington State ? They've got water up there.

State subsidies won't help you maintain production when the draught comes along.

Sledgehammers do wonders on high-precision machinery.

QNAP caught napping as disclosure delay expires, critical NAS bugs revealed

Re: thus all users have identical authorization

Sorry, but on my Synology DS414j I have five user profiles and none of them can do all the same things as any others.

Each profile has its level of access to the 8 partitions my NAS has, from no access to read access to write access. Not every profile can write on the same partitions.

It's very granular. I don't understand where Stoneshop is coming from. Of course, if two users have write access to a partition, they both have the same write access, but hey, what do you expect ?

Micron chief warns 'severe shortage' of DRAM expected to continue this year

So they _can_ re-use the water

If used water can be treated and returned to a drinkable state, then fab plants seriously need to think about a near-closed-circuit for their water needs.

If TSMC and Micron had planned ahead for draughts (which are not exactly unknown), they would have useable system that would allow them to function at full or near full capacity right now and draw less water from Earth's reserves every day.

I understand that it is economically costly, but to not do that is ecologically costly.

And then there's the problem of what they do with the resulting waste from the recycling center.

It's a mess any way you look at it.

In a devastating blow to all eight of you, Microsoft pulls the plug on Cortana's Android, iOS apps

Re: It's a fairly decent service

Don't worry, you can be sure that Borkzilla will have that taken care of by this time next year.

If you can't log into Azure, Teams or Xbox Live right now: Microsoft cloud services in worldwide outage

Re: I found this useful guide

Heh, good one.

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

An enlightened explanation of how we got ourselves into this mess

A remuneration scheme where, if you don't choose "bucket", you don't get paid.

And people think that "AI" is actually worth something.

Wi-Fi slinger Ubiquiti hints at source code leak after claim of ‘catastrophic’ cloud intrusion emerges

"unauthorized access to certain of our [IT] systems hosted by a third-party cloud provider"

And why are you hosting part of your company-critical IP on a 3rd-party server ?

You are obviously completely out of your minds. Ubiquity is off my authorized list from now on.

I've got the power! Or have I? Uninterruptible Phone-disposal Stuffup

"doing an OVH"

Ouhhh burn ! (pun intended)

I have the distinct feeling that that is an expression that is going to become part of the El Reg vernacular, if not part of the Urban Dictionary.

Well played !

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

“as open and candid as we can,”

You've already shown how open and candid you can be : not at all. You are all a bunch of lying, thieving parasites and the only way things will go right is when you gotten rid of.

Crack ou a can of RAID, there's an infestation to be taken care of.

Android, iOS beam telemetry to Google, Apple even when you tell them not to – study

Oh, so slurping less is acceptable to you ? You accept nosey, but too nosey is too far ?

I'm sorry, for me just plain nosey is already too far.

Sharing data so that the phone company can connect your call is more than okay, it's required. None of that data needs to get to the phone maker.

Re: Never mind the width feel the quality

They said the estimate was "off by an order of magnitude" - but they didn't say in which direction.

What I want to know is whether all this slurpage still takes place if mobile data is switched off.

What really irks me is that mobile data is expensive - all this slurpage is being done without my consent and on my dime.

X.Org says it's saving a packet with Packet after migrating freedesktop.org off Google Kubernetes Engine

I think this is a very good cautionary tale, which I will point some of my over-enthusiastic customers to.

They will likely brush it under the rug, but in a year or two, I'll be able to remind them that they had been warned.

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.