Posts by Pascal Monett

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

'Do you need anyone in your QA department?'

No, thank you. We've fired all of them.

What's going on with AMD funding a CUDA translation layer, then nuking it?

"the legality of emails is unimportant"

That is an unfortunate stance, IMO.

A man's word is apparently worth nothing anymore, especially if that man is a company. It seems that the US wants it both ways : companies are people except when it doesn't suit them.

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Re: only Tesla has been able to bring it all together

Um, you may want to take a look at BYD.

HP Inc loves China – but wants to reduce the risks it presents

"we continue to grow in China and with China"

As long as Beijing accepts our presence and can continue pilfering our IP with impunity.

You have engineering done in China ? Consider yourself lucky that there is not a Chinese company producing near-exact replicas of your stuff for the local market.

China is actively stealing every secret it can, and you are actually counting on Chinese engineers in China to create your stuff ? Talk about having the chicken pen guarded by the fox . . .

Report slams Boeing and NASA over shoddy quality that's delayed SLS blastoff

Re: Historically Boeing has a way of buying lenient trreatment

That sweetheart deal is going to be a lot less interesting if Boeing tanks, like it should.

Of course, if that is the case, there will be a "too big to fail" bailout, but the public effect of that would be disastrous - which doesn't mean it wouldn't work. After all, the White House can hardly imagine buying an Airbus 320 for its next Air Force One, now can it ?

Hello? Are you talking on a Cisco SPA300 or SPA500 IP phone? Now's the time to junk 'em

Cisco, again

My $Diety, aren't we all happy that we have banned Huawei.

When you have friends like Cisco, you don't need enemies.

Ransomware groups are better at web app security than you, says researcher

Sounds pretty normal to me

When your day job is hacking other people's websites, you'd have to be abysmally stupid to not take into account your experience when creating your own website. You know what to look for, so you know how to guard against it.

Delta: CrowdStrike's offer to help in Falcon meltdown was too little, too late

"CrowdStrike's earlier letter to Delta blamed the airline's 'IT decisions' "

They are right on that point : Delta decided to use CrowdStrike.

That mistake can be corrected.

Intel's legal troubles mount after plunging stock sparks yet another court battle

"These shareholders want something done about it"

Sell your shares and go invest somewhere else.

Honestly, these shareholder lawsuits are insane. Stop trying to go cry to mommy. You're supposed to be adults.

Intel finally has a new GPU – for cars

Oh come now, imagine your heads-up display being the Pipe Screensaver.

Wouldn't that be . . . very distracting ?

Honestly, the more I read about all the bullshit they're trying to stuff into cars these days, the more I intend to keep my good ol' diesel running for as long as possible.

At least my car does what I want it to do.

And it doesn't talk back.

If you give Copilot the reins, don't be surprised when it spills your secrets

"It's kind of funny in a way"

Oh yeah, it's downright hilarious, innit ?

Redmond is going to have to work hard to keep it from getting sued. Fortune 500 companies are not going to take its normal "use at your own risk" excuse on this.

China’s preferred desktop Linux, openKylin, chases the AI PC in version 2.0

China has access to Intel's Meteor Lake silicon ?

I thought the White House had banned China from getting the best goodies. So that must mean that Meteor Lake silicon is not considered high-tech enough to ban China from getting it.

Interesting. One would think that anything AI would be considered too sensitive to be given to China these days.

US elections have never been more secure, says CISA chief

"convincing people not to buy into the propaganda"

That might be easier if US politicians didn't treat elections like their own personal propaganda platform . . .

You set yourselves up for this. You deal with the consequences.

UK Royal Mint mining PCBs for precious metals in e-waste recovery effort

Welcome to the Living Language, where your language is defined by the vast majority of people who don't know how to speak it properly . . .

Entrust faces years of groveling to regain browsers' trust, say rival chiefs

Um, what ?

"we are actively and vigorously implementing an improvement plan to return to full browser acceptance"

Well all you need to do is follow the CA guidelines. If that has been so difficult for you in the past, then you need to actively and vigorously get your finger out and start working properly.

Why is it that compliance with recognized international stardards are so difficult for some companies ? Are they in league with criminal elements that prevent them from doing the job properly ?

Because, apart from sheer incompetence, what other excuse is there ?

Rickety Raptor Lake CPUs won't lose Turbo-boosted speeds after microcode medicine, Intel claims

What about security ?

I seem to remember hearing about how predictive branching was a security issue.

What's happened to that ?

Devices with insecure SSH services are everywhere, say infosec duo

"You don't find what you don't look for,"

I take it that King has no children's room and has never decided to go vaccum it when they were in their teens . . .

ICANN reserves .internal for private use at the DNS level

"it is not certain setting aside .internal will improve anything"

Maybe it won't, but given that it is, apparently, already widely used, might as well recognize it.

That said, apparently companies can create internal domains as they wish, so ICANN doesn't really have any say over that.

Would you rather buy space broadband from a billionaire, or Communist China?

15,000 satellites into low Earth orbit

I'm starting to think that sales of amateur telescopes are going to dwindle in the next decade . . .

Small CSS tweaks can help nasty emails slip through Outlook's anti-phishing net

So, anti-phishing measures are a simple HTML thing

I realize that this is way easier than coding an analysis into the Outlook client that measures what already exists and pops up a non-hackable alert when a new email address is discovered.

Now tell me why Redmond decided not to do that.

I mean, I'm an average developer and I'm pretty sure I could do that, so ?

CrowdStrike hires outside security outfits to review troubled Falcon code

Re: since they have full control of the input anyway

They have full control until some hacker finds a way to make a malformed file input and inject it in the system.

And since CrowdStrike has demontrated that that is a valid entry point to madness, . . .

Police take just 2 days to recover $40M stolen in business email scam

As usual, improper accounting procedures are to blame

"asked that the next payment made to it was sent to a new account"

In a word, no. Not until we have a written letter signed by the CEO defining the new account, and then only when we have made a test transfer and validated that it worked.

What is it with these new account scams ? I will transfer the money to the account I know. You can transfer it to another account if you so wish.

Honestly, by now accountants should know that, if the transfer is urgent and the account is unknown, it's a scam. Period.

Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features

I would love to see a bridge built following Agile methodology.

I wouldn't use it, but I would love to see it fail, then listen to the "move fast and break things" excuse.

Intel: Our balance sheet is a smoking ruin, but we think our new chips work

"rivers of profit on which shareholders will sail into early retirement"

Shareholders can easily also have shares in AMD, thus playing the two big (only?) horses.

Not to mention that, said shareholders are that cash flush, they should have shares in TSMC as well, giving them revenue across the board.

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

"more than 100 votes"

That's all ?

And they expect Redmond to act on that pitifully small amount of user pressure ?

Gosh, with the millions upon millions of people who use Outlook, not to mention the tens of millions in a business environment, you'd think that, if there were a problem all those users were all uppity about, there'd be a smidgen more than 100 votes to make a change.

No wonder nothing changes . . .

Nvidia's subscription software empire is taking shape

Re: Financial dick waving

Shareholders.

EVs continue to grow but private buyers are steering clear, say motor trade figures

"cost and lack of charging infrastructure"

Not to mention that no country has the power generation required to replace all ICE cars with EVs.

But hey, not to worry, we'll all do like Germany and build new coal-powered energy stations to power all those wonderful climate-respecting EVs, right ?

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

WordStar

An absolute pleasure to use when you memorized the keyboard shortcuts.

I honestly regret it. MS Word has become (of course) an absolute abomination next to it.

I think I will be taking this version for a spin.

Chrome Web Store warns end is nigh for uBlock Origin

Re: Firefox anyone?

Anyone ?

Anyone who minds their privacy, you mean.

Firefox + NoScript + uBlock Origin is absolutely my trifecta when it comes to surfing the web on my home PC.

I would accept nothing less.

Chrome ?

I use that only to access my professional GMail, Google Maps or Google Translate. Anything else means Google can go forth and multiply.

Billion-dollar bust as international op shutters Cryptonator wallet

"Users of Cryptonator [..] received an unpleasant surprise"

No. They received a wake-up call to reality.

It is high time that funny money got the comeuppance it deserves : world-wide banishment.

There are no crypto exchanges that are reliable. None of them respect anything near banking charters, and all of them are staffed with incompetent idiots who are either waiting for a chance to skip with the money or are waiting for some hacker (or even a normal user) to empty their so-called "vaults" and leave them high and dry.

Funny money is an immense waste of resources and time, and everyone taking part in it is just a potential luser.

Illinois relaxes biometric privacy law so snafus won't cost businesses billions

Congrats, money wins again

But people still can't replace their faces or their fingertips when those biometrics go wrong.

I am now at the stage of seriously hoping that one of those biometric databases gets hacked and sold on the dark web so that politicians can no longer avoid dealing with the consequences of individual privacy.

Michigan probes Musk-backed PAC website that weirdly tried and failed to help register people to vote

"It was brought to our attention"

Because we couldn't be arsed to actually test our website before putting it online.

Hey, don't blame us - Microsoft doesn't do any testing either so why should we ?

Infineon announces layoffs as Q3 results disappoint

"weaker-than-expected economic performance"

Oh, so, because you were incapable of properly forecasting your own business, the peons must suffer ?

It would be a smidgen easier to accept that bullshit if the Board had to shave off a member for every 1000 people it laid off.

Sneaky SnakeKeylogger slithers into Windows inboxes to steal sensitive secrets

Re: Malware.NET?

Yeah, but we're talking about malware writers, not Windows coders. Malware writers are still intent on minimal footprint.

That's something Redmond has forgotten about ages ago.

Punkt MC02: As private, and pricey, as a Swiss bank account

Oooh, sounds like something I might accept having when I retire

Given that, when I retire in around a decade, I won't be needing my Gmail connection, maybe this kind of thing could fit my personal bill.

Not to mention : a week on a single battery charge ? That sounds like music to my ears.

By then, I suppose the kinks will have been ironed out . . .

The cybersecurity QA trifecta of fail that may burn down the world

Great article

It is essential to be able to summarize a situation and point out the inconvenient truth of it. This article does exactly that concerning AI/ML and the timing couldn't be better.

Thank you for this piece of reference. I hope the message will be heard far and wide.

Atlassian softens its cloud-first approach for remaining on-prem customers

Almost $4 billion a year selling software and they're still losing money ?

Okay, I know Jira is crapware, but it's crapware that's selling.

How is it that Atlassian is losing money selling software ? How bad do you have to manage things to lose money when you're selling the same code over and over again ?

Fortune 50 biz coughed up record-breaking $75M ransom to halt leak of stolen data

"they may feel it's cheaper in the long run to pay up"

No, you blithering idiots, if you pay, they'll keep coming back and it definitely won't be cheaper in the long run.

But you morons are not capable of thinking in the long run, so . . .

Tesla that killed motorcyclist was in Full Self-Driving mode

The manual ?

Who ever reads the manual these days ?

Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

BSOD has been rare since Windows 7

It's time a new generation got introduced to it.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

Um, I think that, these days, there are less and less offices who have anyone who even knows what CLI means.

And I suspect that, the further in time we advance, the more that will be true, even in IT offices.

Japan mandates app to ensure national ID cards aren't forged

Re: the sign of hubris

I would disagree. ID cards are useful and are not necessarily a sign that your government is veering Big Brother (it is, but not for that reason).

The problem in Japan, as I see it, is that the team drawing up the specifications apparently didn't bother to check with countries that already had ID cards to find out what problems those countries had found and think about how their scheme might be impacted. On top of the other problem that is this is the first time anyone has tried to implement a digital ID scheme based on numbers.

No, wait, Social Security has been based on numbers since forever. Maybe they should have looked into that.

Oh well, I'm sure the Agile team is on it. After all, move fast and break things, right ?

Oh, right. It's already broken.

India contemplates compulsory dynamic 2FA for digital payments

So OTP is fine, but biometrics is better ?

This is clearly a push to get to using biometrics. The issue remaining the same : I can't change my face if the database gets hacked, and we all know that it will.

Leave my face alone.

Too late now for canary test updates, says pension fund suing CrowdStrike

"We believe this case lacks merit"

Boilerplate response. Of course you do. Unfortunately for you, just about everybody else probably thinks is has merit, and I'm guessing the judge will too.

That said, I think there should be a law stopping shareholders from sueing their own company. You're not happy with the company's performance ? Then sell your shares, take the loss and go invest in a better company.

Firefox's Mozilla follows Google in losing trust in Entrust's TLS certificates

"not meaningfully different from the previous commitments [..] given in 2020"

Wow. So mindlessly repeating the same promises after having failed to uphold said promises doesn't work anymore ?

Someone warn Trump . . . oh wait, in politics it's still fine.

Carry on !

NASA pops repair kit in the mail so astronauts can fix leaky ISS telescope

"keep doing groundbreaking science"

And THAT is the mission goal for all of NASA, ESA, JAXA et al.

And God damn politics that get in the way.

UK court rules in Intel's favor in R2 Semi power patent case

So, the patents are invalid in the UK

But are, apparently, valid in Germany.

So basically, patents are a nightmare everywhere. Until there is one, international patent court, that is. But then, given the farce that is the United Nations, it's pretty clear that we humans are totally incapable of managing anything on a large scale that cannot be corrupted or influenced outside the established rules.

In other words, as a species, we need a benevolent dictator to ruthlessly enforce the rules we have ourselves chosen, because we can't be arsed to do that in the long run.

More than 83K certs from nearly 7K DigiCert customers must be swapped out now

"We will not be able to delay revocation beyond that date and time."

Um, why ? You're the certificate authority, are you not ? It seems to me that you have the ability to do whatever with your certs, including having a bit of patience while thousands of admins and thousands more IT staff have their schedule thrown into the blender to satisfy you.

Infosys denies it owes $4B in taxes to India

"a fine worth around one year's profit"

You can bet that Infosys is going to fight this one tooth and nail.

I wonder who it was that Infosys was offshoring to, tu the tune of $4 billion in taxes alone. That's one hell of an offshore service contract.

Ransomware infection cuts off blood supply to 250+ hospitals

Re: When in Rome...

Gladiators is too much of an honor for those scum.

Chuck them in the arena with a keyboard and release the lions on them.