Posts by Pascal Monett

Vote rigging, election fixing, ballot stuffing: Just another day in the life of a Register reader

Smart, but not intelligent

"the other contestant revealed that she had paid someone to win the contest for her, and was suing the station both for the tickets and to recover costs for her cheating"

So we have a woman who wanted the tickets, but didn't have anything much to get her to win. Except her body, which she apparently had no trouble flaunting. So she - correctly - estimated that she would get attention with a lewd pic, but that was not enough, she wanted to guarantee a win. So payment to some guy for help.

She had the gumption to go through with this plan, but when it failed she didn't have the intelligence to think it through and went into a lawsuit guns blazing, but neurons not firing.

I wonder if her pic was part of the evidence ? I'm sure the judge would have considered it carefully.

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

So, booting in three seconds is not fast enough ?

If I may, 3 seconds is largely enough since the time between you press the button , take your seat, grab your coffee and get your mouse ready is going to be at least 3 seconds. And that does not take into account putting your glasses on.

Come on, anything less than 5 seconds is perfectly functional. Of course, I have a Windows history of needing to wait for more than a minute with Windows 95, to several minutes in a Vista corporate environment, so I've probably been beaten into submission on that point, I'll give you that.

Just remember one thing : better is the enemy of good. Don't go ruining something just because you want to shave another second off your boot time. Most people boot their computers once a day, if that, so saving one second is not really a heavy priority.

Then again, saving 33% can be viewed as a priority I guess, but that's just how percentages can screw you.

Re: Get over your Filesystem operating systems

So, what OS have you written that doesn't need files ? I'm really curious to take a look.

Before going to back to something that actually works, that is.

Stand back, we're going in: The Register rips a 7th-gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon apart. Literally

I have to admit that 0.0068 linguine isn't better.

6% it is !

You can forget about that Black Friday deal: Brit banks crap out just in time for pay day

But they have made a provision for that : they trusted The Cloud (TM) which told them it was always available.

Re: TSB

I just got a mail from Beelzebub; he was complaining about how cold his hooves were and that he wasn't use to that.

Re: IT? Not so much.

Here's a little story : in a bank in Luxembourg, a peon was brought in from a staffing company to oversee secure transmission of financial data in PDF format. His job was basically to drag PDFs from on folder to a different folder in a different folder in a different environment. Fascinating job, I know, but hey, apparently they pay (peanuts) for it.

Of course, he was surrounded by high-level personnel and management who were, as I was told, telling him to go faster and faster as the minutes went by. What had to happen happened, and the poor guy mis-clicked and opened a PDF instead of dragging it over. He closed the file immediately, but that did not prevent him from being fired on the spot.

So sorry, but you can get fired in IT just as fast as anywhere else, if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

BBC tells Conservative Party to remove edited Facebook ad featuring its reporters

I'll be damned if I'm going to go to FaceBook to get information on anything.

Sage to have its CakeHR and eat it: Scoffs cloudy automated personnel-botherer

"it will be essential that further acquisitions are made to build critical mass"

Of course, put that baby on the treadmill to IPO to ensure more opportunities for the MBAs and PHBs of the world.

Why does every company have to absolutely become a bloated behemoth like IBM or HP, or be considered a failure ?

Can't people see that it doesn't actually help ?

Explain yourself, mister: Fresh efforts at Google to understand why an AI system says yes or no

"AI Explainability"

Using AI to explain AI. What could possibly go wrong ?

Start by making AI debuggable. I don't care if you need an expert to interpret the trace, so long as there is expert around who can.

Then make it easier.

Stop trying to leap to user-friendly at all costs. There can be intermediate steps.

Cloudy biz Datrix locks down phishing attack in 15 mins after fat thumb triggers email badness

I did a double-take on that as well, and had to look twice to spot the subterfuge.

Taught me a lesson today : pay double attention when URLs contain "i" or "l".

Internet Society CEO: Most people don't care about the .org sell-off – and nothing short of a court order will stop it

What a load of bull

If you had gone public with the offer you would have been doing your job as a steward.

You are making the mistake of believing that .org was yours to manage as you see fit. That is patently wrong. You are the overseer, your job is to manage things to the best interests of the community, not of your fucking business pals.

Also, if there are only a paltry ten million subscribers, you mind telling us why the package is evaluated at a billion dollars ?

And, cherry on the cake : "Most people looking for a domain name get it through a company that is overwhelmingly commercial". Well duh, what non-commercial outfit is there that proposes domain names ? What kind of effin' justification is that ? Most food I get is through commercial outlets, that doesn't mean I'm okay with slave wages.

Asshole.

That's Microsoft price: Now you can enjoy a BSOD from the comfort of your driving seat

Because there is an order of magnitude more Windows developers than there are Linux developers, and manglement can't understand the concept of a stable platform.

RuneScape bloke was wrongly sacked after reading veep's salary details on office printer

Brilliant idea. I trust that these thousands of printers all come with a mailing clerk who will absolutely not read the content of the printout and slip it into an envelope automagically labelled with my address ?

No ?

Then what's the point ? I don't print for the pleasure of using paper and ink.

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

An RPi as a desktop computer ?

I'm sure that the latest generation can be used as a desktop computer, but I am also quite sure that it is not a desktop computer.

At least, not compared to mine.

And, when I check the specifications, I can see the difference.

The CPU is a quad core 1.5GHz thing. Respectable, but an i7 6700 trounces that without breaking a sweat.

The RAM can go to 4GB, and it is DDR4 - congrats. I have 32GB.

The Pi has Gigabit Ethernet, just like mine.

As for video, I have a MSI GeForce GTX 980 TI LIGHTNING with 6GB of DDR5 RAM. I doubt the Pi holds a candle to that.

That said, the Pi 4 has one great advantage over my rig : it can apparently operate on a 2.5A power supply.

That's not enough to turn on my CPU.

So, the Pi is undoubtedly a respectable little thing, and if Apollo 13 had that, they would have had less energy problems and largely enough computation power.

But it is definitely not a desktop.

Move over, Alien vs. Predator: Signing into AWS with an Office 365 login is a real crossover

"This opens up AWS SSO to many small businesses"

Step by step, creep by creep, business is slowly being tied into The Cloud (TM) whether they want to or not. In the end, they will be completely borged by it, and when (not if) it goes down, the entire world will be blocked for an undefined amount of time.

Yay the future.

Brian Eno's latest composition: A giant Christmas card with Julian Assange on it

He has been accused of, even when it is Assange which I despise, does not equal he is guilty of.

Sounds like one hell of a family

Obvious troll is being obvious

ESA toasts 10% budget boost by stretching ISS support out to 2030

Moderately ?

I see nothing moderate in either of those billionaires, or in any billionaire actually. You've got quite some cheek to suggest that they are "moderately" wealthy. Either that or you should get back in touch with reality.

The only thing I see in favor of these two is that they are doing what NASA cannot do any more : getting Humanity back into space. I'm willing to forgive them their excesses for that reason.

We've found it... the last shred of human decency in an IT director – all for a poxy Unix engineer

Indeed

Too often these days a boss takes the paycheck and skirts off when the fallout arrives.

This one had the balls to stand up and take responsibility for his team.

I would have been proud to work for a guy like that, and made every effort to ensure that he didn't need to stand up for me.

Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?

Security passcodes

Okay, maybe there is a point in requiring a passcode to call the lift, but what's the point of a passcode to actually use it ? That is not security, that is pure CIA-level paranoia. The building manager needs to remind himself that he is not managing the Pentagon. And that poor fellow (assuming he survived the ordeal) probably had a long, deep think about just how "secure" he is if he can die of a heart attack because next time the medics might not be able to get to him in time to save him.

I'm sure he was suitably impressed when he got the building tour at the start of his life there, but if I were told that, in order to get to and from my flat, I'd have to know more codes than what I need to move around in the banks I consult for, I'd smile, say thank you for the tour and never call back.

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

"the US Department of Labor has no right to enforce labor laws"

The slapdown on that is going to be epic, I hope.

This week, we give thanks to Fortinet for reminding us what awful crypto with hardcoded keys looks like

"Departments will have 270 days to get systems in place"

Why delegate that to individual departments ? Bug reporting could very well be centralized, there's no need to duplicate that a dozen times or more, with a dozen times the bugs and mishaps to go with it.

The cybersecurity department should handle that, and could oversee that the departments get on with correcting the bugs at the same time.

Waste of money, time and resources.

Astroboffins peeved as SpaceX's Starlink sats block meteor spotting – and could make us miss a killer asteroid

"Accurate [..] predictions are essential for understanding the hazard they pose to spacecraft"

Well it looks like, once 12000 of those birds are in place, the prediction will depend on how many get hit on a given day.

Which is not going to increase the orbital garbage problem, no sir.

Christmas in tatters for Nottinghamshire tots after mayor tells them Santa's too busy

My wife is an elementary school teacher

Every year in December, she has to deal with the kids who absolutely want to tell the "truth" to the littler ones.

Once the tears have dried, she tells them : "They don't believe any more, so of course Mum and Dad place the presents. Santa does not come for the kids who don't believe."

Works every time.

Internet Society's Vint 'father of the 'net' Cerf dodges dot-org sell-off during public Q&A

"ICANN has a series of accountability mechanisms"

Pfft. Hrmmph. HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HA ! HAAAAAA !

That was a good one. I needed that.

ICANN has accountability like I have syphilis - none has been detected.

You're drinking morning coffee in 2019. These eggheads are in 2119 landing drones on their arms like robo-falconers

Indeed.

"a strong impact on the human-swarm interaction" is something I am looking forward to see in a horror movie.

Open-source Windows Terminal does the splits: There ain't no party like a multi-pane party

As usual

The completely useless bling is configurable, but the whole thing is prone to crashing and whatever is important cannot be configured.

In other words, just another day at Redmond HQ.

No wonder Bezos wants to move industry into orbit: In space, no one can hear you* scream

Today that is perfectly true, and even reusable rockets will be a great burden on Earth ecology and economy.

With some future technology available, Earth would likely benefit from having all heavy industry removed from its surface. Mining operations would take place in the asteroid belt anyway, processed minerals would be shipped to the Moon and used there, and needed items could then be deposited back on Earth.

That is how it is going to have to be for Earth's climate to stop suffering. Well, that and shutting down most of the electricity generators based on coal and replacing them with generators based on thorium.

Amazon straightens up its IoT house, complete with virtual Alexa, ahead of Las Vegas shindig

Re: Ready to step up and keep the enemy at bay?

That is my firm position. I don't need no stinking IoT, I can get to a wall switch to turn on the lights.

Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update

"The company kept very quiet"

And got 180 forum pages of complaints for its trouble.

It's 2019 and there are still companies that can't handle customer issues other than by using Soviet-style behavior.

Shame on Bose. Borking a driver is a mistake I can get, the only people who never make mistakes are the ones who never do anything. But putting a lid on a problem is not a viable solution, especially in an age where the Internet makes it so easy to vent and bring attention to the problem to the wider world.

Covering the issue is only ever going to make more pressure, not less. Get your PR department in order, Bose.

Well it is now.

Yeah but, no, but... 'Overpaid' Boeing snaps back at NASA's watchdog

"did not elaborate on what caused the borked second phase"

Oh come on, what's the National Security issue there ? Do you think you can possibly be more ridiculous than when NASA borked a landing because descent velocity was described in feet instead of meters ? Did someone leave a scarf on the altitude detector ?

Man up and tell the world what actually went wrong. You're just making things worse for when we do find out - and we will, in the end.

Although I generally agree with your post, I must say that I do not believe NASA has thrown away any blueprint or plan for whatever it may have had.

You might be referring to the fact that we don't know how to make the Saturn V's engines any more, but it has been amply demonstrated now that that is not a case of having thrown anything away, it is a case of losing what you correctly referred to as institutional knowledge.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Why ? My network card is fully compatible with IPv6, so why do you assume that endpoints wouldn't know how to send a packet to an IPv6 address ?

I'm not the network guy, I'm talking from an organizational point of view. And pie-in-sky wishful thinking.

With unicorns.

What should have happened with IPv6

IPv6 should have been an ISP thing. ISPs would transition to IPv6, and each ISP would have a full IPv4 environment for connecting their customers. Packets moving from one ISP to another would be bridged with an IPv6 packet (or tunneled, whatever).

If they had done that, IPv6 would have been adopted long ago, in the backend, and us users wouldn't even be talking about it.

Instead, we have the mess we're trudging through today, with some saying IPv6 is not very different from IPv4. Yeah, except that most everyone is still using IPv4, so IPv6 is neither easy nor convenient enough to adapt to at this point in time. And, since IPv4 addresses are not going anywhere any time soon, I've got the feeling that this kind of conversation will still be taking place in thirty years.

"We have now run out of IPv4 addresses"

And ? Do the existing IPv4 addresses risk rusting out, or fading away ?

No, they don't. Whatever IPv4 addresses we have now are perfectly fine, thank you, and will continue to be so for millennia to come. They just might outlive the Human race, actually.

If IPv6 hadn't been artificially complicated in an engineer's fevered dream, there would have been no problem to go to IPv6. Just tack on four more bytes, and consider that the existing IPv4 space was simply 127.0.0.0.x.x.x.x and that would have worked fine and everyone would have understood.

But no, that was too simple. So they made IPv6 a monster of a thing that only network engineers can understand, and now it's languishing in adoption hell. Cry me a river.

Besides, what is RIPE crying about ? Now that IPv4 addresses no longer exist (again), new addresses will have to be IPv6, so where's the problem ? It's upgrade by restriction. RIPE should be happy.

After five losses, Apple finally wins a round in $600m VirnetX FaceTime patent mega-battle

The only thing that is funny in this whole affair is that Apple is apparently in danger of running out of courts. It has already plowed so much effort into this (*) that courts will actually no longer hear an appeal on one part of the case.

That has to be a first.

* - okay, I admit, avoiding a half-billion dollar payout is worth some effort.

Stop us if you've heard this one: Facebook and Twitter profiles silently slurped by shady code

"MobiBurn only facilitates the process"

Yes, we get it. You're not the criminal, you're just the guy who picked the lock and let the criminals in.

Sorry, that does not wash. You admit yourself that you facilitated - a judge would call that complicity.

In any case, once again the problem is malware coming in via ads. Ads are a scourge to security and privacy. Block them, ban them and boycott them until the ad industry gets it shit in order.

As pressure builds over .org sell-off, internet governance bodies fall back into familiar pattern: Silence

Indeed

In any case, it is now official : "revered internet figure Vint Cerf" has sold out and will be revered no more.

Planets may lurk in harshest environments. Not that Novell NetWare server you can't unplug – black holes

Okay, planets. Why not ?

But Life ? Even planets are likely going to have a hard time not smashing into each other. I really don't see that kind of environment as being anywhere near a place where Life could take hold.

On the other hand, with all the stuff that's in the area, water is likely to be there as well, so those planets could very well have water. If they are massive rocky planets, there could be water deep down, shielded by dozens of meters of rock, where some form of bacterial life could subsist.

Since the idea is that planets form in the accretion disk, they will orbit the black hole and not get sucked in. That means that they'll be around for the next wave of matter that falls in. Except that, if that next wave is in the form of an incoming star, then all bets are off as to the stability of the planets' orbits. They'll either get ejected from the system (at high velocity), or they'll be dragged into the singularity, ripping apart along the way.

Either outcome means the death of any life that may have taken hold.

Not a nice place to be born, to say the least.

Copy that? We'll never join you on the Xerox side if you don't answer simple questions – HP

Re: I think we need a new financial term:

I would suggest another : board scum.

The waste that sits around and only speaks to try and ingest yet more company value while producing only layoffs and accruing debt.

Microsoft stocking fillers: Powershell 7, maybe even next year's Windows 10. But forget about Surface Earbuds

"the ability to nuke a PC from orbit by installing directly from the cloud"

Typical. Just like game developers who seemingly always have the latest and greatest hardware to develop their games on, here comes Microsoft who imagines that everyone had a gigabit connection and nothing to fear from hackers.

I'm just waiting for the patch that will "ensure that the cloud service called is a proper Microsoft-certified server" and not an unregistered 3rd-party server in Hacker Homeland.

European smartphone market rallies but Apple didn't get the memo

Re: Apple is going to have the problem of how to reverse it

Um, I don't see that Apple considers being expensive as a problem. Apple has always been "reassuringly expensive", and it has become a giant on that very notion.

I don't see Apple changing any time soon.

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

32,768

That is exactly the limit of a signed integer variable in practically every programming language under the Sun. What a coincidence.

A programmer with any sort of experience is going to have hit that limit some way or another during his various projects and knows that, for any sort of operation outside of basic For/Next, or very basic mathematical calculations, integers should generally be replaced by long ints, which go a bit beyond 2 billion or into the 9 billion billion depending on language definitions.

It is quite obvious that the summer intern who was given the driver project did not have the required experience, nor the foresight to imagine that 4 bytes would not be enough to count uptime. It is also obvious that the senior reviewer didn't do his job properly.

UK taxman updates its employment-checking calculator for IR35: Still crap, say contractors

Nothing to see here

Just another normal day for UK Government IT projects.

Move along, citizen, move along.

Why can't you be a nice little computer maker and just GET IN THE TRUNK, Xerox tells HP in hostile takeover alert

I concur. As a freelance consultant, I see many different office types (accounting, finance, insurance, technical, industrial, etc..), but I have never seen even one without paper everywhere - even in IT departments.

The printer business may be declining in the home, but in the business it is flourishing.

Samsung taking its sweet time delivering Galaxy watches from phone bundle bungle

"some customers"

From a single customer to 99.9% of customers is "some customers", so kudos on the precision there.

Truth is, if you're getting that mail, you're likely part of those "some" customers.

T-Mobile US hacked, Monero wallet app infected, public info records on 1.2bn people leak from database...

"All three strains of the spyware slipped into the [..] store before being spotted and removed"

Meaning they got in. It's fine that they were removed, but it would have been better that they not get in.