Posts by Pascal Monett

Accenture, Capita, IBM jump on £800m framework to make the NHS more agile as UK.gov announces further reforms

"with whom NHS Digital can develop strategic relationships"

I'm sorry, given how long UK Government has been shoveling money their way, you'd think that the strategic relationship was already developed.

President Biden to issue executive order on chip shortages as under-pressure silicon world begs for help

"urges the Democrat to fund efforts"

I thought this was the USA, the country that frowns on government intervention.

Oh, right. Money. Nobody frowns on getting that.

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

Pics or it didn't happen

Bloomberg's credibility is zero as far as I'm concerned. So they're doubling down ? Still no pictures ? It's hookum. Hogwash.

I will believe this very dubious story if you show me pictures of the modified mainboard, with a bright red arrow pointing to the part that has been added, and specify where you found it.

It's classified ? How can it be classified and widespread at the same time ?

I'm tired of this bullshit story.

Mine's the one with a phone that can take pictures.

Myanmar Junta delivers harsh cyber law and more IP blocking orders

Solve ?

Internet access is not going to bring back Democracy in Myanmar. At least, not if there's only a handful of people who have access that is not under surveillance.

Remember, they still have their local Internet. They're just going to need to find a way to coordinate without raising suspicion if they want to do something and, given that they would be going up against armed men who, contrary to US Capitol guards, likely have orders to shoot and will probably do so, if the people try anything there will be blood. Lots of it.

Better buckle up: Volkswagen puts Microsoft in driver's seat to deliver 'automated' platform

"Buyers are advised to check the privacy policy"

My privacy policy is simple : it's my car, you can fuck off.

I will not buy any car that is tied to any other person's server. I don't care what your excuses are, or what service you pretend to offer, as long as I am the one who is legally liable for how the car behaves, you can go drown in a gutter if you think I am going to give you the slightest amount of input in how I drive my car.

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

Re: knowing more about your personal life than Microsoft has ever cared to

Um, it's more like more than Borkzilla has ever been able to.

You might want to revise your computing history. Microsoft has been late to every Internet party. First it ignored it, then it scrambled to rejoin it, then it faught to dominate it, which happened with IE 4, then it forgot about it letting Google take over.

Since then, it has stayed in the background, because it had no choice. Google has taken over, JavaScript is everywhere and none of that has anything to do with Borkzilla.

Borkzilla is now in the back seat, as far as driving the Internet is concerned.

That's why you're not CEO.

Nor am I.

Criminal charges against Autonomy's Lynch will never be dropped, even if extradition bid fails, says lawyer

"Criminal charges against Autonomy's Lynch will never be dropped"

Of course not. We all know how the USA can hold a grudge.

We also know how the USA can withhold its citizens accused from abroad of war crimes and keep them from facing trial.

Justice and freedom for all ? As long as you're white and USAian.

Due diligence was not lacking, there were quite a few HP bigwigs who were against this acquisition, but Apotheker pushed it through.

Why is he not facing a trial ?

British owners of .eu domains given an extra three months to find a European address

Re: we know better these days

Do you really ?

The fishing industry is driving itself into the wall.

Nobody is paying any attention to ensuring that fish populations can regenerate, all of the fishing industry is about building better boats, bigger freezer units and better catching procedures.

The fishing industry is killing itself and the fish. If it can't learn restraint, it deserves everything that is coming to it.

Euro privacy watchdog calls for end of targeted advertising plus a squeeze on the processing of personal info

Yeah, that location argument is a damp squib. It's not even advertising, it's just showing me what restaurants are near me. That's a service, pure and simple.

End targetted advertising. Normal advertising is bad enough.

UK.gov awards seats on £2bn 'digital outcomes' framework to suppliers – one of which doesn't even have a website

"director Shila Odedra, seemingly a former lead user researcher at tax collector HMRC"

I am confident that that persone knows exactly how to milk that particular cow.

Apple, Microsoft, PayPal among 35 organizations compromised by evil twin dependencies attack

"there's been a 430 per cent increase in upstream software supply chain attacks"

Of course there has been - it works.

And, on top of that, you can reap extensive rewards by getting automatically inserted into all of that company's customer's networks as well.

It's a blackhat dream come true.

All that because, for the past twenty years, developers have taken the habit of not bothering to check what they're putting on their production servers.

I don't care how much you trust that Github repo, you do not put code on production servers that has not been vetted.

Once again, lessons are going to be learned the hard way.

Samsung floats autonomous ships as ready to sail in 2022

Autonomous ships ? Dear God.

As much as I love the idea, and applaud Samsung for having the balls to actually set this up and try it, I can only think of one thing : what do you do when it goes wrong ?

If it works, fine, congrats, job well done. But if it doesn't, what are the possible consequences ?

Best case scenario you've got a beached ship. Expensive, but no harm done.

Worst case scenario you've got a collision with loss of life. Not only expensive, but a massive lawsuit in the making.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to be the lead developer answering questions in front of that jury.

Nominet vows to freeze wages and prices, boost donations, and be more open. For many members, it’s too little, too late

It is time to GROUT !

Get Rid Of Useless Twats.

And slap a lawsuit for criminal mismanagement of a non-profit with a public remit. There has to be something to stick on those bastards to get them to jail.

Drag Autonomy founder's 'fraudulent guns' and 'grasping claws' to the US for a criminal trial, thunders barrister

"potential buyers of the company, such as HP."

HP is a big company. It had its own review of Autonomy finances. It's own internal high-ups were against the pruchase, but the nitwit at the top made the deal anyway.

So, who is going to drag Apotheker in court to accuse him of 'grasping claws' ?

Not to mention blatant incompetence ?

All grown up: Raspberry Pis running Ubuntu added to IoT patching service KernelCare

Wow

"The system works by allocating kernel memory for the new code, pauses all processes, modifies the original functions, jumps to the new code, then resumes processing. No reboot is required. "

Elegant, simple and efficient.

In other words, nothing to do with Borkzilla.

What the heck is FinOps? It's controlling cloud spend – and new report says it ain't easy

Re: on-demand pricing is bullshit

A decade ago The Cloud (TM) was the bee's knees. Everyone was looking to go to The Cloud (TM). Suggesting and promoting cloudy stuff made you a driver, a forward-looker, a visionary.

Now we're getting reports like yours, telling us that The Cloud (TM) is not for everyone nor for everything.

Par for the course, I guess. It's new and shiny, then the grime starts piling on and maybe a bit of rust here and there, and all of a sudden, The Cloud (TM) is not going to seem so shiny any more.

But, of course, not before all of UK Government and the NHS has wasted billions on it.

Facebook and Google’s Australian pay-for-news nightmare finds a European admirer

Re: i genuinely believe Google are trying to make the world a better place

For Google investors ? Definitely.

For me ? I don't think so.

Being spied upon, tracked like a wild animal and having stupid ads shoved into my face does not make me feel better about the world.

That is why I protect myself by using Firefox with NoScript and uBlock Origin.

You see ? This "better world" of yours means I have to actively protect my privacy.

You're wrong.

P.S. : I'm guessing you're actually being sarcastic, but I opted to take that at face value.

First UAE interplanetary probe now in orbit around Mars – two craft from China, US near Red Planet, too

Success on first try ?

Way to go, guys. I hope that that is a portent of many future successes.

Survey: Techies reckon open sourcery has better prospects than familiarity with a single vendor's cloud wares

Re: IBM is doomed to die, eventually

Agreed, but its intellectual property will be recovered by someone else, or maybe many someone elses.

So there may be hope for support in the long run.

"94 per cent reckoned FOSS code was as good if not better than the proprietary option"

Seems obvious. FOSS code is public, therefor if you code like shit, you're going to have it up for the world to see and the world will tell you you code like shit.

Proprietary, on the hand, allows a bad coder to do his worst, secure in the knowledge that nobody will see his code so it doesn't matter.

Of course, there are very good coders that write proprietary software, but hiding the code means you can hide mistakes and bad practices - and with the amount of bugs due to buffer overflows that still happen, well let's just admit that there are more bad coders on the proprietary side.

No phish for the likes of you, thank you very much! Google finds email villains are picky about demographics, country

Re: I don't find Google blocks too well

So you're saying that you get emails with no subject and no content outside of an image. It seems that that would be a pretty clear indicator of spam in itself, why would you not want that filtered ?

Openreach engineers vote to strike amid changes to job grading structure

Two sides shouting

Openreach says conditions do not deteriorate, syndicate says they do.

Somebody is not listening.

Obviously I largely suspect that Openreach is optimistic in its declarations. If it truly had been working with the syndicate for the last year and a half, there wouldn't be a strike, now would there ? It's all well to say you've been meeting, but if every meeting is just you saying "this is how it is" then you haven't been dialoguing much.

On the other hand, I don't know CWU at all, but syndicates in general are kind of prone to siezing any chance they can to strike under the pretense of improving labour conditions. That said, if 80% of its members agree, then something has gone wrong in the discussions for sure.

I can't tell who is telling the truth. Is Openreach really trying, or is CWU just trying its best to defend the workers honestly ?

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Pretty much had to happen some day

It is unfortunate that the numbskull decided to try a "prank" robbery against a guy with a gun, but given the amount of weapons that exist in the US, the only thing that surprises me is that it took this long.

That said, there are two things that bother me (aside from the whole death thing, obviously). One, this happened in what is supposed to be recreation park. The guy brought a gun to a recreation park ? WTF ? What is wrong with him ?

And two, and this is worse IMO, he just pulled out his gun and fired ? Couldn't he have drawn his gun and say something like "I suggest you GTFO" ? You know, give the guy a chance to reconsider ? But no, he just rambo'd it and got trigger-happy.

Somebody commented that he would have to live with that for the rest of his life. I'm not convinced that that will be a problem for him.

Faced with the sack, Nominet CEO half-apologizes for taking the 'wrong tone,' asks angry members to hear him out

“I’ve had some time to reflect"

Yeah, just like the guy who got caught red-handed running a red light. You've had the time it took for the police officer to get out of his car and approach you.

Now you're going to get the ticket. Half-hearted pleas will not save you.

You'd have told them they should have used Apple/Google app model, right? NHSX seeks willing humans to fill health tech and data roles

Re: a large sum of money by anyone's measure

I think Dido Harding would consider that as pocket change.

And she has failed much harder than that.

Humble Apple Pie: Cupertino sweetens pot to get its DTK prototype machines returned after developer backlash

Globally, Apple didn't do bad on this

Ok, mistakes were made, not denying that. But the machines were meant to be returned - can't fault Apple for trying to enforce that.

Yeah, Apple screwed up completely on the recall procedure, but it also corrected the issue and, in the end, played fair.

I don't like Apple, and I always relish a good El Reg bite of any hand El Reg can get its beak on, but overall, Apple did good on this one.

Windows' cloudy future: That Chrome OS advantage is Google's to lose

Snail mail and Google ?

Do keep us posted on how that went.

Re: get you from A to B with minimum fuss

That's not the software, yet, it's the wetware.

There is yet no such thing as self-driving vehicles.

That said, your point about software being more important than hardware is absolutely true. A laptop without an OS is just a hunk of metal and plastic and toxic materials. It's only the magic of software that makes it useful.

And that software has to be written by people who have the means to eat.

Re: Users don't really care if their phone is running the same OS as ..

Indeed. Users absolutely tend to buy the devices that correspond to their needs, and only after worry about how to get their data from one device to the next.

The vendor that will make that possible is going to be the proud owner of its own money-printing machine.

Yes, let's ask Sir Humphry.

Agreed.

If the first thing you do when you buy some hardware is wipe and install Linux, you are not qualified to discuss the functionality of that hardware in its original function.

Don't scrape the faces of our citizens for recognition, Canada tells Clearview AI – delete those images

Checked out that article, it was mostly a fun read.

Basically, I learned that almost every term outlined in US English has a sexual connotation in GB English.

But the one thing that really made me LOL was the reference to an article intitled "This Is the Age When Men Are Most Likely to Cheat".

Really ?

Name me one age where men were not likely to cheat.

I think the only one that qualifies was the period of the Black Plague - because men were locked at home to escape death instead of on the prowl for another chance to dip their wick.

Intel sues former staffer for allegedly stealing Xeon cloud secrets in USB drives and exploiting info at Microsoft

Indeed

"Gupta moved 3,900 internal documents from his company laptop to two external USB-based drives "

And how exactly was that possible ?

As a consultant, I have access to the servers of a number of customers. Not one of them allows USB ports to work without administrative approval. I might be able to charge my mobile with a cable, but the computer is not going to allow the PC to access the phone.

How is it that someone who is leaving has access to a computer that lets him connect whatever he wants to a USB port and transfer files to it ?

Serious security fail.

DBA heroes don't always wear capes. Sometimes they just have a bunch of forgotten permissions

Re: "you cannot do that!"

Seems to me that I just did.

Big tech helpfully offers Pakistan new social-media-friendly content-blocking framework

"members’ own transparency reports are the best benchmark for such failures"

Remind me when FaceBook has ever been transparent on its procedures ?

And I'm sorry if I think that fixed delays for takedown times are not entirely a bad thing. Do you really want calls for genocide or insurrection to lie around until a moderator decides to take the time to deal with the issue ?

Yes, I know, we're talking about Pakistan - not exactly a shining example of Democracy. But still, relying on FaceBook to "do its best" generally means another round of congressional hearings where The Zuck is just going to mouth lame excuses and not do anything.

So mandatory takedown times, and FaceBook et al can just put in the manpower to deal with it.

It's not like they don't have the money.

Microsoft suspends donations to politicians who backed attempt to overturn US presidential election

Re: Democrats need to do a full voter rights act

I disagree.

The only solution to the shambles that has become Democracy in the USA is direct universal suffrage, which means everyone has a vote, and every vote counts towards a given candidate.

I don't care if the vote is expressed by ballot, mail-in, email or electronic voting machines. Everyone has one vote, every vote is counted and nothing else matters.

The Electoral College is what put the USA into this mess. Get rid of it.

No one should stand between a citizen's opinion and the winner of a vote.

Hacked by SolarWinds backdoor masterminds, Mimecast now lays off staff after profit surge

"Mimecast not only fell victim to the SolarWinds hackers ..."

And the dominos continue to fall.

it will be interesting to see the backlash on this.

When will the first lawsuit against SolarWinds123 happen ?

SitePoint hacked: Hashed, salted passwords pinched from web dev learning site via GitHub tool pwnage

"criminals bent on accessing these are instead targeting other systems"

Methinks this is not the last we're going to hear about this kind of pwnage.

The fallout on this is going to be impressive.

War on Section 230 begins in earnest as Dem senators look to limit legal immunity for social networks, websites etc

Re: after a while foreign agencies started creating fake accounts

It's always them damn furriners.

Build the wall !

"the law works at least as well, if not better, than the alternatives"

The law did not work well enough to stop a large group of people from coordinating an attack on your own Democracy.

If you think that's acceptable, well I have a bridge to sell you.

Samsung seeks to have almost $1bn shaved off property taxes for planned Texas semiconductor fab

Company-mandated tax breaks

It's always the same thing : let us install for free and we'll bring you jobs.

And as soon as you start thinking about enforcing taxes, we'll bugger off to some other idiot who believes the malarky.

It should be a federally-mandated rule that companies pay taxes and pay for their installation costs. No tax breaks.

But it's no use complaining. The whole system is broken anyway.

Chrome zero-day bug that is actively being abused by bad folks affects Edge, Vivaldi, and other Chromium-tinged browsers

"the flaw exists in [..] Chromium's Javascript engine"

Javascript, again.

And again, and again.

Just block JS by default and the Internet will be a safer place.

NoScript FTW.

My bad! So you're saying that redacting an on-screen PDF with Tipp-Ex won't work?

"it's only simple when you know how to do it"

How true.

Big data: Study suggests even a moderate gambling habit is linked to increased mortality and other bad stuff

"the study is silent on these factors"

Well, if the data has been properly anonymized I do not fin dit surprising that socio-economic class is not in the analysis.

Gambling is certainly an activity tainted with reproach, but, just like tobacco, that doesn't keep every government from benefitting from it by allowing it and taxing it.

Of course, you cannot forbid gambling because, if you do, you'll just get criminal gambling centers run by thugs. So it makes sense that the government has a hand in ensuring that, at least, the gambling is done fairly.

You also have casinos, where gambling is authorized and, hopefully, the casinos are regularly audited.

But, just like prostitution, gambling is not going away.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

I got a wierd call one evening

It was the very evening of my last day on a contract in a large Luxembourg company. The contract had been slightly difficult because, on my first day, six months before, I quickly assessed that the IT manager's right-hand man had something against me and was not shy of being clear on that point.

Well, I didn't need to work with him, so it didn't bother me much. I learned the hard way that you don't need to work with someone to be bothered by them - especially when they work above your glass cieling.

Suffice it to say that I was not sorry to see the end of that contract. Then I got the call, which went something like this :

Caller : "Hi, it's me. Um, we've had a problem with the database you were working on, would you happen to have a backup of the code ?" <cue antennas starting to quiver>

Me : " Hi. What happened ?"

Caller : "Well the server crashed and, when it came back up, that db was corrupted. We need your backup."

Me : "I'm sure I have a local copy on the desktop of my account."

Caller : "Yeah, but Security was quick to erase that before we could assess the problem."

Me : "Well, there's the backup of my account. Surely you can restore that."

Caller : "Well, no, there is an unplanned maintenance on the backup server - we can't use it. We really need your copy." <ok, this stinks now>

Me : "I'm terribly sorry, but I would remind you that the NDA I signed specifically forbids me from taking any code from your premises. I have no backup copy. You're going to have to wait for the backup server's unplanned maintenance to end."

Then I hung up. The caller had been a guy I worked with, who had generally been nice to me - or so I thought.

This had obviously been an attempt to frame me for doing something that I definitely should not (and didn't). Had I been stupid enough to take the code, and even more stupid enough to admit to it, I would have undoubtedly found myself in very hot legal water, and possibly the end of my budding career.

This event taught me two things early on : 1) never trust anyone when someone high up doesn't like you, and 2) always stick to the rules.

Useful lessons.

That was very stupid from the security company, and it could have landed them in court.

An ex-employee has no authority to be on company premises after hours - certainly not when an alarm had been tripped.

They could have unwittingly been setting you up - or wittingly.

In any case, refusal was the only appropriate answer.

Japan’s COVID-19 contact-tracing app hasn't warned users of encounters with carriers since September

Re: Info request

Can't remember reading anything positive about them anywhere.

Except maybe Taiwan, where it was made mandatory and will now become a tool for their local Big Brother. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

“We are proud of our 2020 election coverage ..."

I have no doubt that you are very proud of having relentlessly lied about everything in your blind obedience to the GOP and it's values that date from the days of slavery.

The amount of lies and false information made up to prop up those lies is completely staggering. You did a very good job, really. 60 lawsuits filed and all of them lost, what a record.

Unfortunately for you, all of that pile of trash is public information, you will have no chance refuting it, nor will you be able to brush it away by saying that it was satire.

You're going to be in front of a judge this time, and judges are not well known for appreciating being taken for fools.

I hope Fox News will find the bill very heavy, and I hope that those three pundits will get what's coming to them as well.

It is high time Fox News begins to understand that they are not immune, and are accountable for what they say.