Posts by Pascal Monett

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.

Tesla that killed motorcyclist was in Full Self-Driving mode

Re: Throw the book at him!

Unfortunately, the him who's going to get it is not the him we're all thinking about. The driver confessed he was looking at his phone, ergo he's going to take the fall and His Muskiness will blithely continue to spew his bullshit without consequence.

Five months after takedown, LockBit is a shadow of its former self

"its best earners have fled for crews with better opportunities"

In other words, the disease has spread.

Like dandilions.

Shutting down the servers is all well and good, but until you jail the miscreants, you've only disrupted them, you haven't stopped them.

Two senior board execs leave SAP as restructuring hits the fan

Two top-level execs

Okay, so one of two things : either top-level execs are not important, or their departure is embarassing.

Given how much they are paid, I'm inclined to believe the first.

Because if they are so useless, then stop paying them so much.

Amazon, you will do a total recall of bad stuff sold through your site, watchdog barks

"it is not obligated under American law to protect shoppers from hazardous products"

And that is the perfect demonstration of the so-called auto-regulation of capitalism. It doesn't.

You shouldn't need a law to remove hazardous products from your listings, Amazon. Defending your right to not do so just demonstrates (as if that was needed) how little you care about the consumer and how much you care about your profits.

We knew that anyway, so go for the law. It's the only thing that will curb your capitalist enthusiasm.

Can't get Minecraft, MongoDB Cloud, others to work today? Blame that Azure outage

Ain't that fun ?

You paid for a game, but because some bigwig decided it, you can't play your game if said bigwig's network is down.

Well I don't like that.

Not that that is going to make Redmond change its mind on anything . . .

Rising costs biggest issue for datacenter operators as demand grows

"the unrelenting quest for power"

Don't worry. There's just a massive governmental push to replace all ICE vehicles with electric ones.

Can't have anything to do with your own power supply, now can it ?

I mean, it's not because we already don't have the necessary power generation (forget sustainable) to support that change that you should worry at all, now should you ?

Microsoft's Azure networking takes a worldwide tumble

"access issues and degraded performance"

What, again ?

So, where are we at, Office 300 ?

Because it has never been Office 365.

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

Hardly difficult. I have Plummer's Youtube channel bookmarked on my Firefox bar.

Obviously, he doesn't.

Re: Called out by a commentard

That is a bold claim.

So, back up your words and explain to us what you would have done to ensure that the time clock on the taskbar not take up too much resources, since you're so much more knowledgeable.

And then, when you've done that, why don't you give us your insights as to how UEFI should have been implemented.

With code examples, please.

"it appears the setup/design team made the change after the code was written"

And that was the precise moment when the rot started.

Proofpoint phishing palaver plagues millions with 'perfectly spoofed' emails from IBM, Nike, Disney, others

"The root cause is [..] Microsoft 365"

The root cause is a company who wants everyone to get on board with its services without bothering to secure its services.

What could possibly go wrong ?

Re: Insecure by default

Yeah, but that would require that the customer do a bit of work, which would mean support questions and annoying phone time.

Much better to just open to everything and remain blissfully ignorant of any issues until they actually crop up.

Latest update for 'extremely fast' compression algorithm LZ4 sprints past old versions

"only very smart humans can do that"

"writing efficient code to exploit the parallelism of multiple processor cores is very hard"

Fuck yeah.

And there is no amount of pseudo-AI bullshit that is going to change that any time soon.

That said, if and when it does, that will be one hell of an accomplishment.

Car makers sold people's driving habits, location data for pennies, say US senators

"attempted break-ins and vehicle component health"

In other words, things you would be logically interested in knowing are things that car manufacturers and insurance companies load up with personal data exfiltration.

Let's not pussy-foot around the obvious here : some asshole thought this was acceptable. He thought that it was perfectly normal to saddle legitimate requests with data exfiltration.

That asshole is a sociopath, and every manager above him who signed off on this as well.

They should all be fired and sent to McDonalds for remedial education.

Meta's AI safety system defeated by the space bar

"the social media biz is working on a fix"

As in, desperately trying to modify it plain text parsers to nail down improper space bar usage while admitting proper space bar usage.

Ha ha.

God am I glad I don't work in a shithole like that.

Microsoft finds a new way to irritate Windows 11 users – a backup pop-up

Re: Dear Register: Just stop!

Congratulations. You're waking up.

Don't worry, you can still take the blue pill.

Re: But what are the options?

An optical drive with a DVD-RW.

Of course, that means you need to work a bit.

It also means that, once that DVD is closed, you have upwards of 20 years of data security. All you need to do is remember where that DVD is.

NASA gives Falcon 9 thumbs-up to launch Crew-9

Yeah.

Boeing has forgotten the value of that.

Tesla asks customers to stop being wet blankets about chargers

Wet blankets

Because mixing humidity with electricity has never posed any problem whatsoever . . .

Google apologizes for breaking password manager for millions of Windows users with iffy Chrome update

And once again, why trust a code you don't know ?

My little password database is secure, if only because nobody knows its format, where it is or what's in it.

It could be a plaintext file in a specific (non Windows-managed) location. It could be an Excel spreadsheet on my NAS. It could be in my StickyNotes.

What it is not is depending on the vagaries of some remote entity I have no control over.

It used to be called a Personal Computer.

Emphasis on the word Personal.

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

I honestly believe that 90% of end users would be fine with an out-of-the-box Mint install instead of Windows or Mac OSs.

I totally subscribe to that opinion.

We'll get there, with help from CrowdStrike et al. One fine day, we will get there.

But I'll be dead before that fine day happens.

Inquiry hears UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal

"UK government misled MPs"

I'm shocked.

Shocked, I say.

US claims TikTok shipped personal data to China – very personal data

I dispute that. El Reg has nothing in common with Facebook or any other "social" media. I have no way of finding out who is new on El Reg if they don't post something somewhere I read. You don't have a wall I can check. I am not alerted to your presence in the forums, nor can I "follow" you in any way. The only personal info I have access to is what you put into your public profile. If you decided to include your gender, religion, family details and/or sexual preferences, that's your decision. It is neither a requirement nor, I believe, encouraged by El Reg.

And I can't send you a private message. I can only publicly respond to your posts, as can you.

It's a forum, it's not social media.

Secure Boot useless on hundreds of PCs from major vendors after key leak

Re: Yes, UEFI is mostly Security Theater.

Everything you say is, I'm sure, absolutely true, but you cannot compare user failures to product or systems failures.

Users are stupid, unaware or uncaring. You can try to convince them to do things right, but most won't get the message until it's too late.

UEFI was supposed to have been created by engineers. That is not the same level of importance.

Post-CrowdStrike, Microsoft to discourage use of kernel drivers by security tools

Malware authors must be salivating

Hey guys ! Here's an entire new vector for crashing a Windows PC. Then you can sell the "solution" and take over the computer.

Those scum are intelligent scum. We've not heard the last of this.

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

"a sobering wake-up call"

There is no longer any such thing.

I do not think that CrowdStrike will fold. Too big to fail comes to mind. Too many megabuck multinationals do not want to upheave their flawed systems. They will prefer that Kurtz makes his mea culpa, makes a ton of promises, shows transparency and a ton of bullshit, and they will stick with what they know.

If CEOs were capable of venturing into the unknown, every business PC would be running Linux.

Kamala Harris's $7M support from LinkedIn founder comes with a request: Fire Lina Khan

"Antitrust is fine…Waging war is not."

Apparently you're the one waging war.

If the boss of the FTC is bothering you, I say she's doing her job.

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Dropping the phone while gardening

I can understand you placing your phone on a table and it falling off. I can understand you taking your phone out of your pocket, fumbling, and dropping it.

I cannot understand you mowing the lawn with your phone. You're mowing the fucking lawn. You can live without your slab of toxic materials during that time.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: For once

An instant response is not a quiet "excuse me" while standing behind the would-be perpetrator. The alarm still had to be sounded before the police showed up. The fact that they were on the other side of the road is irrelevant. They weren't there.

For once

For once the police were actually there when they needed.

That's probably why that has never happened since.

Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space

So, a new Apollo XIII in the making ?

All these technical details could well make another gripping spaceflight story, even when you know the ending.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: same as it ever was...

Not quite : it's another beta version of software used in production.

It was ever thus.

Omnissa, VMware's old end-user biz, emerges with promise of 'AI-infused autonomous workspace'

"self-healing, self-configuring and self-securing"

Self-configuring is already a red flag. The software doesn't know where it is, so some amount of manual configuration is necessary.

Self-healing means nothing for software. Software doesn't stub its toes. Either it has resiliency programmed in it, or it will fall over like Windows 95 after 24 hours.

As for self-securing, I look forward to reading reports of PCs running Omnissa where Omnissa has decided to refuse network connections . . .

Sam Altman wants a US-led freedom coalition to fight authoritarian AI

Re: Régulation Yes Altmann no

Indeed, but they have money, and in America, that talks louder than democracy.

Beware of fake CrowdStrike domains pumping out Lumma infostealing malware

Yeah but, if the malware auto-shuts-down if it detects AV software running, shouldn't that mean that every business PC and every Windows 1 0 + should be protected, even if it's just by Windows Defender ?

FYI: Data from deleted GitHub repos may not actually be deleted

"this is expected and documented behavior inherent to how fork networks work"

Wrong.

Delete means delete, just as no means no.

It doesn't matter if the data has already been accessed or not. A deletion order should mean that it should no longer be accessible, period.

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

"we have to earn those dollars"

If you're aware of that, then openly gouging your customers isn't the way to go.

You have the right to change your prices, but customers require justification in order to subscribe to the change.

Multiplying by 2 or more is not justifiable.

Adobe exec likened hidden cloud subscription exit fees to 'heroin', says FTC

Adobe "strives to have a positive customer experience" ?

Yeah, right up until you sign the contract and hand over the money.

Then you're nothing but chicken feed, and Adobe is the one eating.

Kaspersky says Uncle Sam snubbed proposal to open up its code for third-party review

Umm, why does he need US Government approval ?

If he wants to open his code to 3rd-party review, it seems to me that he can just do it.

If he want to post source code on GitHub, he can.

This sounds like waffling to me. Either that, or he is trying to rattle Washington.