Posts by Pascal Monett

In a desperate bid to stay relevant in 2020's geopolitical upheaval, N. Korea upgrades its Apple Jeus macOS malware

"The malware uses GitHub"

And why hasn't GitHub shut that down already ?

Or is Microsoft not aware of the issue ?

Cogent cut off from ARIN Whois after scraping net engineers' contact details and sliding them to sales staff

Good on ARIN, shame it took so long

Now all those engineers need to do is change their ARIN contact details and keep Cogent from regaining access.

Because we all know that Cogent is just going to do it again once it regains access.

Google and IBM square off in Schrodinger’s catfight over quantum supremacy

So we're up to 56 now

I read not long ago that the largest amount of functional qbits was 16. Well that's been blown out of the water.

Progress in this field seems to be going strong. One day they might actually be able to do something useful with it.

Now the question is : are 56 qbits enough for everyone ?

We’ve had enough of your beach-blocking shenanigans, California tells stubborn Sun co-founder: Kiss our lawsuit

I am rather surprised

It would seem to me that, once the gate blocking the public path had been found, the Mayor of the town concerned should have just sent 'round a demolition crew to remove it, and sent the bill for removal to that utter dick.

I wouldn't have waited 10 years to do that.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 end of support: What will change on 14 January?

"Although it is not unreasonable for Microsoft to stop updating a decade-old iteration of Windows"

Why ? Is there something wrong with 7 ? Is its code beginning to leak ?

I can understand dropping XP since 7 is much, much better. 7 runs fine and I can do everything I need with it. It has no telemetry and can be properly locked down without too much hassle. The code is not going stale, will not fade or rust, so as long as my hardware runs fine I don't see why Microsoft should not be updating the OS.

Sure, it is a cost for Microsoft, but that is not a reason to stop updating 7.

As internet pioneers fight to preserve .org’s non-profit status, those in charge are hiding behind dollar signs

The basic problem

The basic problem is that ICANN is supposed to manage the Internet as a whole and it is not managed itself by an international group, only by corrupt American oligarchs. We all use this Internet, we all need it, and 99% of the world can do nothing about it.

The USA is no longer a place where important organizations should be located. Get ICANN out of there, bring it to Europe and have an international team take care of managing our Internet.

At this point, I'd prefer the endless discussions of Eurocrats instead of this dark room management that stinks of money and selfishness.

5G signals won't make men infertile, sighs UK ad watchdog as it bans bonkers scary poster

"discounted [ES-UK's] majority mainstream viewpoint"

Their majority mainstream viewpoint ? What numbers do they have that substantiates that declaration ?

Oh, silly me, the guy who wrote that believes it, so it must be so. If this were Trump country, it would be perfectly normal.

GSMA report: Sorry, handset makers, 5G is not going to save the smartphone market

"It just so happens that there's something better."

That remains to be demonstrated. Yes, there is a new protocol, but until it is everywhere and always available, it will not be reliable. Plus there's the fact that 5G needs a lot more access points to be useful - those points need to be created and, until they are, people will be happy with 4G.

It's time that companies realize that good enough is good enough and people won't bend over backwards to throw cash at them just because something "better" has been announced.

Seems like 5G is going to be the Betamax of the mobile phone industry.

We won't CU later: New Ofcom broadband proposals mull killing off old copper network

Re: one major problem that Ofcom is deliberately ignoring

The laws of physics prevent power from being sent through fiber optic cables. So what you're really complaining about is the fact that mobile phone coverage is not 100%. One way to improve coverage is to bring fiber to places that don't already have it, I would think.

Ministry of Justice bod jailed for stealing £1.7m with fake IT consulting contract

Good on the whistleblower

Nice to know that there are some honest workers in government functions that actually have the balls to raise issues when it is necessary.

That being said, I'm sure the vast majority of civil servants are not going to do such a thing, but this one was in the right place with the right knowledge and acted with the power of his position. In other words, rotten to the core.

I'm guessing his civil service career is at an end. Welcome to Mc Donalds, sir ! Here's the fryer.

If at first you don't succeed, pry, pry again: Feds once again demand Apple unlock encrypted iPhones in yet another terrorism case

Yeah, sure

"The Attorney General has made it plain he believes there should be a legal mechanism to allow law enforcement to access the contents of phones"

Please go ahead and do that. Then watch as the USA becomes a third-world country while everyone else enjoys proper encryption.

If you don't want to listen to reason, if you refuse to acknowledge how the world actually works, then you deserve what you get when you try to force your fantasies on Real Life (TM).

Microsoft engineer caught up in sudden spate of entirely coincidental grilling of Iranian-Americans at US borders

Great link

"we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument"

Funny, I can't begin to count how many different domains I've witnessed that kind of attitude.

No, not naive. Paranoid.

The Six Million Dollar Scam: London cops probe Travelex cyber-ransacking amid reports of £m ransomware demand, wide-open VPN server holes

Re: ICO hints that GDPR appears to be optional

At this point, it would seem that the CEO is probably praying that there will be a turnover to put a fine on.

Good. That will educate him about the importance of making sure security is part of his conception of IT.

A sprinkling of Star Wars and a dash of Jedi equals a slightly underbaked Rise Of Skywalker

Completely agreed. The Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn was a masterpiece. I do regret that nothing was done to integrate that.

Maybe in 50 years we'll have a completely CGI version redressing that injustice.

The prequels kinda dampened my enthusiasm for Star Wars, not to mention the damage Lucas did himself (Han shot first, you bastard). I have to admit though that Rogue One was, to me, once again a Star Wars film worthy of the original trilogy.

So, by my count, Star Wars is 4 films and a smattering of blah. I would like to see a film giving us a Darth Vader that is actually frightening, as he was (so briefly) shown in Rogue One. I think showing him tracking down and exterminating the Jedi that escaped Order 66 would have a lot of potential entertainment-wise, and could maybe be tied in to the original trilogy by explaining how Yoda exiled himself on Dagobah. Something like barely escaping Vader to throw himself against another Sith and then making the decision to lie low in the Sith's power shroud to remain alive and elude Vader's hunt.

Something like that.

But I'm not counting on it.

Yeah, says Google Project Zero, when you think about it, going public with exploit deets immediately after a patch is emitted isn't such a great idea

Always a good thing

It's a good thing that a bit of allowance is made for those who actively try to keep their products secure. Humanity cannot live at the speed of the machine, the machine has to allow for inferior human traits such as needing sleep and not being at 100% all day long.

No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers

I watched the video

Apparently, the software detects finger movements, not so much positions on the table. It is also apparently quite performant, unless this is another Magic Leap moment - but I doubt that.

The team that wrote that definitely deserve a cold one.

ICANN extracts $20m signing fee for $1bn dot-com price increases – and guess who's going to pay for it?

"justified by comparing the company to top-ranking law firms"

If ICANN is continually comparing itself to for-profit companies, it is high time that ICANN's statute be revised by a judge.

There should be a law somewhere that limits non-profits to raking in just what they need to survive and continue to function. These high-rollers who deal themselves Golden Boy salaries in Mother Teresa companies are starting to get on my nerves.

Finally, a good use for AI: Machine-learning tool guesstimates how well your code will run on a CPU core

"dropping the mean absolute percent error by more than 50 per cent across all benchmarks"

Okay, they halve the error margin and still produce a result "quickly". Nice to know. It would be even nicer if we had a ballpark number of the analytical error margin to get a better idea of how important this is.

As it is, this 50% improvement in guesstimate precision could be half of 80 or half of 10, we just don't know.

Tragedy: CES squeeze forces frequent flier hotshots into economy hell

Ah, first world issues

They paid for an economy seat, they got the economy seat and they got to their destination as planned. Yeah, it sucks that nobody could actually be upgraded, but this is a storm in a teacup.

I'm going to have to check if I have any position in this upgrade scheme. I've crossed the Atlantic about two dozen times in my life, but I'm guessing that it wouldn't be enough anyway.

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

Re: He'd lost several months of work

No, he gained valuable knowledge of the importance of backups and the limited use of text editors.

EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V, Penguinistas respond by demanding crippling boycott

EA hardly needs Linux as an excuse to ban people

I used to have Battlefield 2042. Every time EA updated the game, I ended up needing to reinstall it completely. Back then, my Internet connection was 10Mbps at best, so you can imagine the hassle.

Then, one fine update and a full reinstall later, I was greeted with a popup demanding my CD key. For the game that I purchased through their online portal. That had never before required a CD key. That didn't have a CD key.

I was incensed, and said as much in a mail to support. The answer ? Banned.

Well EA is now banned from my life. EA doesn't care ? Neither do I.

Brit banking sector hasn't gone a single day of 2020 without something breaking

Ah, the King James bible.

That explains everything.

Re: Which third commandment?

I don't know what Bible you have, but mine says Thou Shalt Not Kill is part of them.

So yes, there is a prohibition on murder. And on theft, and on lying.

It's always DNS, especially when you're on holiday with nothing but a phone on GPRS

Re: It was released to the GreatUnwashed in '86

86 ? That's practically prehistory in Computer Time.

That's no way to manage after-hours support. The manager should have a list of names with on-call dates beside it, and woes be to the guy who gets called and doesn't answer because he slid the pager to someone else.

Samsung leads 5G early birds after shipping 6.7m phones to snatch over half of the market

Re: Since I am not a gamer

I am a gamer. I play on a proper PC with a 28" widescreen, a keyboard+mouse and a Microsoft Strategic Commander. On a 1Gbps fiber line.

4G covers all the needs I have for my phone usage, but my gaming I do on a proper platform.

I do not see that 5G is going to benefit me in any way in the foreseeable future. I also do not plan on changing my Samsung Galaxy A3 unless it dies on me. A phone is a phone, as far as I'm concerned, and the only other use I have for it is occasionally checking Google Maps for my position vs my destination. 4G works fine for that.

NASA's monster rocket inches towards testing while India plots return to the Moon

Re: a threat of buying 6 more

I'll have to remember to threaten my butcher with coming back next time I go buy some meat.

Y2K? How about Y2.02K as Lloyds suffers its second TITSUP* of the year

Re: Lloyds

If TSB still does, they still can.

TikTok boom: US Army bans squaddies from using trendy app on govt-issued phones

They do have time off from being shot at, you know. They need some distractions, lest they go absolutely barking mad all the time.

Stack Overflow makes peace with ousted moderator, wants to start New Year with 2020 vision on codes of conduct

"she can apply to regain her moderator status"

I wouldn't do that if I were her. She was not being paid, she was volunteering her time and effort and they shat on her.

They can go fudge themselves.

And we now go live to Apple v Corellium, where the iTitan is still lobbing copyright fireballs at the virtual iPhone upstart

"Apple is trying to extinguish the iOS bug-hunting and jailbreaking communities"

Well duh. Apple has been locking down every new jailbreak technique with every new release of its iOS since forever.

And it won't stop, because when you buy Apple you go the Apple Way or the highway.

To be fair, Apple is far from the only company that doesn't want anyone to tinker with their code.

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

"Travelex had public-facing Windows remote-desktop servers with no NLA enabled"

Not acceptable. This is a professional company dealing in international currencies and with direct links to banks, there is no excuse for not having a properly secured environment.

The CEO should be dumped without a parachute. The next one can go about firing the head of IT. Being hacked is one thing, but not doing one's due diligence on security when dealing in this kind of market means that heads should roll.

SanDisk's iXpand Wireless Charger is the unholy lovechild of a Qi mat and a flash drive

The problem with wireless charging

In a word, it is inefficient.

We are already burning way too much coal to power all our gizmos, gizmos which we are buying more of every year. Why have a regular toaster when you can have a "smart" one ? Why have a regular anything when you can have it use compute cycles all day long just so that you can, once a day or less, command it from you bloody smartphone ?

So yeah, use even more energy, and recharge your gizmos with the most inefficient technology that some brilliant idiot thought up.

We're going to burn our way back to Stone Age.

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

Twinning toilets

At first, upon reading that sentence, I thought "what the hell is that ?". When finished with the article (nice rant btw, great start to the New Year there), I searched for it, and found that it is yet another way to get valuable aid to poor countries. No way you can complain about it in this era of enforced political correctness.

However, there are already several high-profile aid organisms working in poor countries and funneling masses of money and effort to help out, so why is there a need of yet another organism which is much more obscure and whose reliability is not well established ? I am always wary of non-profits I've never heard about ; you have no idea what they're actually doing with the money nor how efficient they are in bringing the aid they say they bring. I'd want to see other photos of twinned toilets to control that they're not sending the same picture to every company that forks over the money.

2 more degrees and it's lights out: Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix's toasty mobile bit barn

Yeah, but they still have cooling.

Re: I'll never really understand...

I have a hard time understanding that as well, but I no nothing about either the conditions he was living in, who is he like and what made him make that decision.

Unless he was just lazy, I'm guessing it was a difficult decision to make. He knew what he was turning down after all.

Greetings from the future where it's all pole-dancing robots and Pokemon passports

Smashing start of the year !

Thanks for that, Dabbsy, and Best Wishes to you and every commentard on El Reg.

Keep biting !

Beware the three-finger-salute, or 'How I Got The Keys To The Kingdom'

Um, nope, back then it didn't. It didn't even use the mouse.

Back when I worked as an accountant I got intimately acquainted with the numeric keypad. When you have to enter an average of 6 financial numbers a minute during the day, you get used to it pretty quick.

You tell me that Golden Boys had issues with the numpad ? Maybe they should cut their white powder usage a bit.

"The Boss handed over his key to the server room"

As well it should be. You're the Boss, you send peons to the server room. Because it doesn't matter how knowledgeable you think you are, you have no idea how things are set up, how to check what state they are in ad how to ensure that you are acting on the proper server when you fiddle around on keyboards.

Because if you did know all that, you wouldn't be the Boss, you'd be a peon.

So rely on the people you pay to do the job.

I caught Disco Elysium fever. No, not the Saturday Night kind. I was really quite poorly

I'm sorry

You're telling me that there are hours and hours of dialogue, and what I say makes almost no difference ? What's the point then ?

Thanks for the heads-up. This is one game I'll be avoiding.

That reminds me that I have Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition I and II on Steam. Might be time to go and relive those proper RPGs.

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

Re: users would learn

Nope. No guarantee. It's like backups. You can explain their importance to a user, you can regularly send a reminder, you can go around and make a point of asking them eye-to-eye, it's only the day that the hard disk crashes and all those precious files are gone that the wailing will start, the gnashing of teeth and the beseeching of all gods old and new, all to no avail.

At that point, and that point only, the user has a chance of learning the lesson. And even then, there's no guarantee that he will actually start doing regular backups.

But at least there's a chance.

How do you ascertain user acceptability if you keep killing off the users?

Totally agree. Brussel sprouts are an abomination and should be consigned to feeding pigs.

Londoner who tried to blackmail Apple with 300m+ iCloud account resets was reusing stale old creds

How does this work ?

Okay, I get that he didn't kill anyone, but he attempted blackmail on a grand scale. He threatened (baselessly as it turns out) tens of thousands of possible victims to extort money.

Again, he didn't kill anyone, but that level of threat, to me, means he should have gone to prison for six months, not just have an electronic curfew.

The sentence seems a bit light, in other words. I guess the judge found him to not be that much of a threat after all. Either that or he's setting the guy up for a major sentence next time around.

European Space Agency launches planet-hunting Cheops while Rocket Lab starts on a third launchpad

"using green hydrogen peroxide oxidiser and kerosene"

Um, since when has kerosene became green ? Okay, it's probably just the way the sentence was written, but "using kerosene and [a] green hydrogen peroxide oxidiser" would probably have been a better choice.

In other news, I note that, for the first time in Internet history, we're actually going to have to pay attention to what a Troll says. That's a first !

LibreOffice 6.4 nearly done as open-source office software project prepares for 10th anniversary

Re: I'm not so sure that options are the answer to why Office is so popular

Of course not. Office is popular because Microsoft gave it away to schools to wean entire generations on its software. That is why businesses are using it today, because everyone is supposed to know how to use Word and Excel.

But if you just look at the differences between the two products, Office is years ahead of LibreOffice in graphics and that's why LibreOffice is not gaining any traction in the business environment.

Oh, and there's the fact that, for some reason, people think it's a great idea to put their sensitive data on someone else's server, and Microsoft is all over that in Office.

"Has LibreOffice succeeded?"

Well, it's still alive, so I guess that is a positive. But as a comparison to MS Office, sorry. It's no wonder MS Office has the upper hand in the business world, the options for charts are ten times what LibreOffice has. As far as charts in particular and graphics in general are concerned, LibreOffice is at the Office 95 level. In Excel, you can adjust almost everything in a chart. In LibreOffice, you can change chart type and hide or show the legend and that's just about it.

Given how management is so attached to their pretty graphics, Office is the winner hands down.

At home, on the other hand, I use LibreOffice because it does everything I need to do and works well. I just don't need to make charts.

BOFH: 'Twas the night before Christmas, and the ransomware struck

The Director didn't have a chance

As it should be with a grade-A certified BOFH of Simon's level.

Well done ! And not even for personal gain ! What an altruist !