Posts by Pascal Monett

31.5M invoices, contracts, patient consent forms, and more exposed to the internet

"exposed to the public internet in a non-password protected database"

In this day and age, I call that criminal negligence.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Re: "usual black-and-white Gateway boxes"

Ah, power supplies.

Even today, when upgrading a PC I systematically search for a PSU that is at least 50% more powerful than the load I expect to have.

I have long since learned that, if a PSU is rated for 600W, it will give you 500W without too much trouble, in a pinch, for a while, but if you load it more, you will end up with a dead PSU sooner or later.

Yeah but no. There is a London, Texas, and you can bet that there is a number of US readers that just might be confused . . .

Lego's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

I'm happy you got through that trying episode.

And a Concorde is not a bad thing to remember it by . . .

Ex-Microsoft engineer resurrects PDP-11 from junkyard parts

You might consider his ego a bit less inflated if you realized that he is just a person who has had an insane and insanely successful career.

And he's far from being an idiot.

Maybe that's what's grating you ? He's just good.

CockroachDB scurries off to proprietary software land

CockroachDB

Yeah, it has cockroach in the name.

Should've guessed . . .

First of ESA's Cluster satellites prepares for fiery finale over South Pacific

"after an extraordinarily long mission"

I beg to differ.

Space missions have one of two outcomes : either they fail spectacularly before getting into orbit (or reaching their destination), or they successfully get to where they were supposed to go and then they outperform all expectations until they a) run out of fuel, or b) run out of energy.

It's only on good ol' Earth that projects fail all the time and get endlessly rescued (eh, UK Government IT ?).

Why ?

Because on Earth, you can send a peon you pay peanuts to do a minor (or even a major) repair, and it costs less than a Learjet trip over the Atlantic. Or maybe a Learjet, who's counting ?

But, to repair things in space, it costs at least a 737 Max.

And that is why we'll never have space-rated technology on Earth.

It costs too damn much.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Simon is the personnification of the Single Electron Administrator theory.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

And that is why Borkzilla definitely does not want anything to talk to Office300 if it can help it.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Electronics have certainly come a long way as far as durability under stress is concerned, but electromagnetism can still throw a monkey wrench into the workings from time to time. I wonder how a modern PC would resist in such conditions.

India delays planned space station and moon base by five years

Delayed by five years, eh ?

What's to bet we'll be hearing that song again ?

Open Compute Project seeks standard for concrete, with help from AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft

"a thoroughly worthy exercise"

Agreed. Anything we can do to lower our carbon emissions is a worthy goal, in my view.

As far as concrete is concerned, until we use it, we won't be able to be sure how it behaves. So every additional test is a Good Thing^TM.

China's rideshare champ Didi gives users the option to report stinky cars

Stinky cars ? In China ?

Count my gast flabbered.

Now I have one question : women being able to chose cars driven by women, is that not going to kind of end up making sure that women only drive cars of other women, and men are left with cars only driven by men ?

Yes, I know that men don't have the choice, but this is China. There will be so many women prioritizing their choice that men won't have much of a choice left.

Snowflake claims Iceberg wins table format wars, and Databricks has just proved it

“There's not really been any noticeable effect"

That is not entirely true.

SolarWinds left critical hardcoded credentials in its Web Help Desk product

SolarWinds ? Again ?

They just can't stay out of the limelight, now can they ?

Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it'll be back

That's why you need to add NoScript and UBlock Origin.

Then the web is fine.

Microsoft resurrects Windows Recall for upcoming preview

Re: Police, TLAs and border security must be salivating at the opportunity

Are you kidding ? Facebook is drowning them in its drool.

"something the company has striven to address"

Really ?

Adding Ai is not re-hiring a QC department, so I don't think so.

That said, the day Windows will be handled by AI is the day it might stop being so unreliable (as far as updates are concerned).

This uni thought it would be a good idea to do a phishing test with a fake Ebola scare

Brain ?

BRRAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNN !!

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

Re: the changes are almost entirely cosmetic

Of course.

Actually creating functionality requires capable programmers.

Changing the position of the latest gizmo can be handed to the intern . . and we often see the results !

3 years of updates ?

No !

You update that thing until there aren't any more on the market.

It's not a car, it's software. And even for cars, automakers are supposed to supply spare parts for more than a decade if I'm not mistaken.

So you can bloody well update your software for at least a decade.

This sell-and-forget civilization we're living in is really grating my nerves these days. Gotta refill my dried frog pills, I guess.

Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365

INPUT "DO YOU HAVE MONEY? " A$

Seems to be the basic interest of any multinational behemoth these days.

You don't ?

Get lost.

Microsoft to stop telling investors about peformance of server products

"eloquent statements of its performance"

Indeed.

With numbers like that, it's no wonder Redmond doesn't give a shit about a few pitty little bugs and zero-days, or downtime for that matter.

China's top Office clone copies Microsoft again – with an inconvenient outage

"Kingsoft has offered users 15 days of free service by way of apology"

Hey Redmond : you hear that ?

15 days free for a day's outage. That seems to be very different from your usual response of fuck all of us.

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday borks dual-boot Linux-Windows PCs

"the Secure Boot feature"

Seems more and more like a vulnerability to me.

I'm getting tired of official products being more devastating than Russian hackers.

It's not your machine anymore.

Russia tells citizens to switch off home surveillance because the Ukrainians are coming

Interesting

So, Putin, how does it feel to get a taste of your own medicine ?

Juice probe scores epic fuel save after snapping selfies with Earth and Moon

Re: Excellent

The payload isn't going to change, the satellite is already in space. What this really means is that there is 150kg more fuel for future adjustments, so better lifetime returns, or longer lifespan.

Elon Musk's X Corp faces $61M lawsuit over unpaid tech tabs

Keep it up, Musk

At this rate, lawers will end up with all your billions . . .

Rocket Factory Augsburg engine test ends in explosion at SaxaVord spaceport

"test campaigns are designed to identify issues"

Cracking succes, then !

ESA's Juice probe dances with Earth and Moon before shooting off to Jupiter

"On August 20, the spacecraft will do it all again, this time around Earth"

Wait, Juice is rolling around the moon tonight, and be rolling around Earth tomorrow night ?

IIRC, the Apollo missions took three weeks to get to the Moon.

Now that's one heck of a boost !

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

"car crashes are rarely the fault of the car"

That's evolving !

Yeah, but nobody used Terraserver.

Core Python developer suspended for three months

Re: confusing racist with ethnicityist

Oh for fuck's sake, can we stop inventing new subdivisions of the same problem ?

It's INTOLERANCE.

Is that not good enough ?

New Zealand minister OKs Kim Dotcom extradition to US

Re: Paying Trump for a release

Are you sure Musk actually paid the money ?

Because his mouth is full of promises, and his acts are full of deception . . .

If a cheesy '80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong

Oh, right

After all, "The Quickening" is hardly a moniker that could be applied to much of what comes out of Redmond these days

Indeed, a pile of festering shite that nobody ever wants to see again is definitely not what Redmond wants to see out of the gates . . oh, wait . . .

Equinix pilots use of fuel cell in 'shipping container' outside datacenter

"hydrogen fuel cell technology"

That will only be green if the hydrogen is produced by nuclear reactors (Thorium being my preference), and delivered by battery-powered trucks (no, not CyberTruck).

But, in the absolute, good idea. We need power-production alternatives that don't use coal or fossil fuels.

UK farm ministry offers £27M to support legacy systems for another three years

"another three years"

Not to worry. With UK Gov's history of IT projects, the "replacement" won't be ready before 2030.

And vastly overbudget, obviously . . .

From windfarms to Amazon Prime, UK plans to long range test six drone services

Really ?

"The company told The Reg in May it has already made thousands of deliveries via drones "

So, where are the horror stories ? Does anyone have first-hand knowledge of these drone deliveries ? What was delivered and did it work ?

China-linked cyber-spies infect Russian govt, IT sector

Methinks there might be a chance of a phone call

Xi might be getting a call soon, reminding him that Beijing and Moscow are basically on the (ahem) same side.

You're not supposed to overtly undermine your ally, now are you ?

Then again, the rules are always changing in international politics . . .

Microsoft tweaks fine print to warn everyone not to take its AI seriously

You beat me to the punch :)

Microsoft squashes bug that sent Windows devices to BitLocker recovery

Bitlocker

When I looked at what it was supposed to do, I thought to myself "well, isn't this a handy tool for miscreants to make my life miserable ?", and I disabled it.

I know how to backup, thank you. I don't need Borkzilla's fuck-ups to handle my data any more than I have to accept.

Is Lenovo a blind spot in US anti-China security measures?

So, Lenovo will go the Huawei way

Let's make no mistake : Hong Kong is now most definintly Chinese, so being registered in Hong King is no different than being registered in China.

Given all the hoopla that was made (unjustifiably up to now) around Huawei, I see no reason for the so-called "national security minded" to not go for banning Lenovo as well.

It's just a matter of time before someone apparently discovers some suspect transistor soldered to a Lenovo motherboard (with zero pictures to prove the claim) and uses that excuse to proclaim that Lenovo is not trustworthy any more.

Microsoft pushing, pushing, pushing Edge in Defender slammed as a 'dark pattern'

Edge for Business

What's the point ?

Businesses already have it, personal users won't take it.

This is really marketing trying to justify its existence.

Indian telcos to cut off scammy, spammy, telemarketers for two whole years

Re: Wow!

I certainly hope so.

And I hope that India expands that to a 20 year block.

And I hope that the idea spreads to other nations.

I'm an optimist like that . . .

Intel, already adrift, now Armless too

Selling their ARM shares for ~150 million ? What's the point ?

It's a drop in Intel's deep red bucket. It won't help, and Intel has now deprived itself of an important bargaining chip in another competitive technology.

I see absolutely no good reason to do this.

India shuffles away draft law treating influencers like real broadcasters

"require online content creators to register and be subject to the same laws as broadcasters"

And that is a bad thing, why ?

I mean, I understand that the "content creators" on Youtube will find that inconvenient, but, to repurpose a famous phrase, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

NIST finalizes trio of post-quantum encryption standards

"implant compromised firmware on hardware"

I don't see that that should be an issue since Huawei has been banned and Russia is incapable of selling computer hardware since it doesn't make any.

And if it does start making some, it won't sell it outside of its captive market.

So, what's the problem ?

Oh, right. Cisco will probably fuck something up . . .

Biden tries to cut through fog of confusion caused by deliberately deceptive customer service tricks

Re: Dropbox

Dropbox has veered into scam territory. They've updated their taskbar icon to have a red block on it. Red means urgent (or even dangerous) in many cultures. The first time I saw that icon I thought there was an issue and I opened the application, but no, it's just attention-whoring.

I don't appreciate that. If they think I'm going to go for a paid subscription with that kind of attitude, I've got news for them : I'm voting with my wallet. No.

Re: pay for subscriptions with a gift card

That is a good idea.

It's just a shame that one has to resort to such subterfuge simply to avoid being bilked.