Posts by Pascal Monett

The knives are out for cloud gaming as Nvidia flashes blade-based box packing 40 RTX GPUs

And, in the meantime, the rig we have is fine and working and does the job. Even in a year when the games finally become compatible, there isn't going to be a mad rush to get a hold of them.

Oh sure, the enthusiasts will jump at the chance to splurge yet another grand to show off their new power, but the rest of us ? The last purchase I made on my I7-6700 was in 2015 and it still chews through the games I play without any trouble. Why should I go and throw good money at something that is only going to improve performance by what, 5% at best ?

I'm off the upgrade treadmill now (after having gleefully participated for the past two decades), and unless there's a game out there that I simply cannot avoid playing that really requires this new tech, I'm staying off of it.

In a humiliating climbdown, Facebook agrees to follow US laws

"prevent landlords, employers and money-lenders from bypassing anti-discrimination laws"

And how is it that these types were permitted to bypass these laws in the first place ?

Oh, silly me : because Facebook.

So now we have another promise. I'll put that on the dung pile with all the others.

Want to cruise your auto auto around but don't fancy killing people? Nvidia has an answer

All this hoopla for nothing

Unless you're going to try and make me believe that these virtual training worlds contain perfect replicas of sun glare, intense rain, snow and potholes in inconvenient areas ?

The only thing these virtual worlds are, at best, going to do is guarantee that the vehicles will run okay in perfect conditions - which is already something, I guess, but not enough.

Silence of the WANs: FBI DDoS-for-hire greaseball takedowns slash web flood attacks 'by 11%'

I'd like to know

Exactly how many pathetic little morons are there to make this DDoS-for-hire stuff viable, and who exactly are they pointing their pathetic attention at ?

Does the FBI have the customer records as well ? I'd just love to see the face of one of those basement-dwellers when the FBI comes knocking at their door with a pair of handcuffs.

Formulus Black – the artist formerly known as Symbolic IO – trumpets its new breed of dedupe

Yay, let's add yet another layer of complexity

What could possibly go wrong ? And when it does, how can anyone possibly be sure where the problem actually originated ?

Not to mention, I'd like to know just how security and private data are impacted by this. Sounds to me like some hacker is going to find it more interesting to just encrypt the FbM packets behind the markers and job done, pay up.

Ransomware drops the Lillehammer on Norsk Hydro: Aluminium giant forced into manual mode after systems scrambled

Looks like they will finally decide to allocate some budget to IT security now

And, with a truckload of luck, some other heavy-industry companies will take this as a heads-up and start moving their ass on the subject as well.

Yeah, it's gonna cost money. The only question is, are you going to pay that money before the enforced shutdown and cleanup, or after ?

So about that Atari reboot console... you might want to sit down. It's going to be late, OK?

I concur

They could slap a Pentium in there and have more than enough oomph.

This is shaping up to be Yet Another Fiasco. All the ingredients are there : nostalgia, vague assurances and a lot of affection, but no hard data, no actual promises, no plan or schedule and, most important, no explanation on how the catalog is going to be ported to the new hardware. It's just "hey, we're redoing the Atari ! Yay !! And you're going to pay for it ! Yay !!".

They could also add "You're going to pay for executive bonuses before any product is even built ! Yay !!"

Another dud in the making.

Boeing big cheese repeats pledge of 737 Max software updates following fatal crashes

Forget ROTM

I more and more have the feeling that if we collectively kick the bucket, it will simply be by our own stupidity.

We are obviously interfacing the human and the machine with more and more software, however we are singularly failing to properly think about the consequences, or properly test all the scenarios before we put it into production.

Do that in a bank or an administration and you only get headaches trying to set the situation straight again (and some loss of money). As we have seen, do that in flight automation software - which we need - and you lose lives.

Sorry Boeing, someone was not thinking right when they drew up and improperly tested this functionality. And more than 350 people have paid that negligence with their lives.

Sign of the times: Mirai botnet strain fine-tunes itself to infect digital signage, projectors

"businesses are, usually, a lot quicker to spot malware attacks and lock down their systems"

A spot of wishful thinking there, I think. Of sure, medium and large businesses may have the clout to do so, but there are a number of small but rather wealthy businesses (think lawyers and doctors and vets) that haven't a clue, yet might have a need for that shiny screen in waiting room. I don't think they have the faintest idea what Mirai even is and why they should bother about it.

They might not have the need for a "business" screen either and just prop up a bland, non-connected screen like any sane person would, but when you couple ignorance with money, crazier things have happened.

Why, just last month I had a very interesting conversation with my ophthalmologist who talked about his laptop (yes, he knows I'm an IT guy) and that his work application needed an update and told me that he had another "expert" who promised him he could get it for him for free. I had to then explain that first, there isn't a big chance that a company making ophthalmology software would leave their updates on BitTorrent, and if so, there was an even smaller chance that the update wouldn't have an "update" of its own. I then proceeded to explain that the golden age of people hosting cracks for various software and games out of the goodness of their hearts was long gone and today, said cracks are to be assumed to be accompanied by malware.

In the end, he agreed that it was probably a better idea to just pay for the damn upgrade. Whew ! One bullet dodged. This time.

This being my use case, you must understand that this professional is not only an intelligent man and a good professional, he's also far from poor. Yet, he was entirely ready to rely on some schmuck offering a free upgrade for an obscure application. You really think that he'd be able to spot some Mirai infection on the screen he has in his waiting room ? I can assure you, he wouldn't even notice the impact on his bandwidth, because I'm sure he's got a 100Mbit line and he uses one percent of that.

Wondering why 'Devin Nunes herp-face' was trending online? Here's the 411: House rep sues Twitter for all the rude stuff tweeted about him

You have now planted in my mind the image of 12 jurors with buckets of popcorn and gallon jugs of fizzy drinks loudly laughing and clapping at the various arguments bandied about in the courtroom, having great fun, and sometimes throwing some popcorn at the various participants.

I'd pay to see that film !

Agreed

He's got Freedom of Speech standing on the other side. Plus the fact that he's a public figure, so people have the right to lampoon him.

He's just proven that his hide is too thin to be a proper politician. That's a serious fail in his line of work.

Bandersnatch to gander snatched: Black Mirror choices can be snooped on, thanks to privacy-leaking Netflix streams

Re: Oh for god's sake...

Seconded. I would really like to see how, in a unique scenario where choices are predetermined, somebody could guess that I like zapping zombies and I don't like brussels sprouts. It's not like the film director integrated that significance in the choices, now did he ?

Okay, they can detect what choice was made. From there to deducing "significant" things about anyone, I think they're pushing it a bit too far.

Nonprofit OpenAI looks at the bill to craft a Holy Grail AGI, gulps, spawns commercial arm to bag investors' mega-bucks

"the for-profit company is ultimately controlled by the nonprofit's board"

Yeah, sure. For the moment. Until the for-profit company's stock soars so high that eagles gasp for breath. Then there will be a decision that, regretfully, the duty of the board is to the well-being of its shareholders, so, off you go, little boffins, back to your science desks and let the big things be handled by the Men In Suits.

There is a reason Armani does not make lab coats.

Boeing... Boeing... Gone: Canada, America finally ground 737 Max jets as they await anti-death-crash software patches

More than 300 dead is largely worth an abundance of caution

This decision is entirely normal. One crash is a subject of commiseration, two of the same kind with the same airframe and on new planes and it is time to realize that something is likely very wrong.

I'm not pouring fire and brimstone on Boeing though, they have one of the most complicated jobs on the planet. I'm sure they'll find out what is wrong, if only because now that the planes are grounded, the pressure on them is skyrocketing.

So yeah, they'll solve the problem. They have to.

What today links Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram – apart from being run by monopolistic personal data harvesters?

The "hiccup" lasted well into 2 P.M. for me

At some point this morning between 8:30 and 9 I lost access to my GMail account, and it did not come back until after 2 P.M.

I did find all my morning messages at that point, so nothing was lost.

We can do this the easy way or the Huawei, US tells Germany with threat to snip intel over 5G fears

Re: Wot?

And this from a country whose president has forced Security clearance for people who are a liability.

Astroboffins spot hefty pair swinging together. What? Um, we're talking about record-breaking massive binary stars...

It would have been nice if the article had mentioned that. I had to go find another source to find that number.

Iranian-backed hackers ransacked Citrix, swiped 6TB+ of emails, docs, secrets, claims cyber-biz

In any case, this amply demonstrates that Huawei is not the major threat. Weak passwords and insufficient network security is.

And this with a company that specifically does networking. That doesn't look good for their reputation.

Buffer overflow flaw in British Airways in-flight entertainment systems will affect other airlines, but why try it in the air?

"I was not probing [..] because I didn't know the existence of any vulnerability at that time."

No, you weren't probing, you were just dicking around.

In a plane full of passengers.

Not knowing what you might trigger.

You might have missed a Darwin award there, bud.

Is this the way the cookie wall crumbles? Dutch data watchdog says nee to take-it-or-leave-it consent

God bless the Dutch

And blessed be the GDPR, which is really starting to look like the thing that is going to give us back our Internet experience.

While this CEO may be stiff, his customers are rather stuffed: Quadriga wallets finally cracked open – nothing inside

Thank goodness Bitcoin is there to stick it to The Man, right ?

So happy that all those financial rebels have such a secure and reliable solution, well away from the prying eyes and overbearing regulation of pesky government.

Funny, but I'm not all that bothered about government oversight when it comes to ensuring that my money remains in my possession.

Put down the cat, coffee, beer pint, martini, whatever you're holding, and make sure you've updated Chrome (unless you enjoy being hacked)

So, viewing an ad can be bad ?

Isn't ads that thing that Google is doing it's best to ensure we see, ahem, for our "protection" ?

Well gee, it looks like ad blockers are not so useless after all, eh Tim ?

Unless you want your wine bar to look like a brothel, purple curtains are a no-no apparently

Good on him for standing up

Congratulations on how the guy is dealing with the issue : openly, honestly and calmly.

It is high time the rabid prudes step down a notch and let other people live their lives. Purple is not the colour of prostitution either - it seems to me that it is seen every Easter in Christian churches and catholic cardinals have been seen wearing that color - so zip it, prudes, you're just revealing your shameful desires as usual.

TalkTalk kept my email account active for 8 years after I left – now it's spamming my mates

This would normally be a rant about sheer incompetence

But TalkTalk, so it would be entirely redundant.

I am looking forward to a lawsuit.

Uber won't face criminal charges after its robo-car killed woman crossing street

DISGUSTING

That's really all there is to say. I don't care what the excuse is : it was Uber's test vehicle running on automatic. Uber is liable.

I hope somebody is going to appeal this appaling decision.

From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic

Sign firmware ? Not worth the bother.

If my PC gets hijacked I think that the data on it is very much more interesting to the miscreant then trying to find out what I'm saying, which is frankly of no interest to most people.

If we're talking about espionage, a good directional microphone or a bug are time-honored procedures with a very good success rate.

And you can even hear whispers with those.

You won't get Huawei with this, America! Chinese giant sues US government over 'unconstitutional' ban

So it's actually because Beijing can force Huawei to cooperate ?

In that case Europe urgently needs to ban US equipment because the NSA can do and _has_ done exactly that.

Goes to show that you need to be careful when you say something, there could be unintended consequences.

UK Ministry of Justice: Surprise! We tested out biometric tech in prisons and 'visitors' with drugs up their bums ran away

Is it just me ?

Biometric trials that fail, facial recog that fails miserably, government IT projects that don't stop failing and, for some unfathomable reason, are never stopped - does anyone else have the impression that, in general and broadly speaking, Benny Hill is in charge and has been for the past decade ?

Two in five 'AI startups' essentially have no AI, mega-survey of nearly 3,000 upstarts finds

2 in 5 have no AI, 3 in 5 have Bullshit AI

It's statistical analysis, people, nothing more.

If it was AI, you'd need a lot more than a few pixels to make it take an elephant for a banana.

Civil servants 'Sir Humphrey' their way through grilling on UK.gov's digital transformation

Let's make one thing clear

Yes Minister was a documentary. A case-by-case educational show in mastering civil servant procedures.

So why the surprise when they apply the procedures ?

Mine's the one with the plausible denial examples.

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

I don't think it is that difficult to write that kind of policy, but there is not enough popcorn in the world when it comes to enforcing it.

Re: why it was separated deity only knows!

Accountants know as well. Hardware gets amortized, software doesn't. That is why it is very important to have both lines on the invoice.

Sniff the love: Subaru's SUVs overwhelmed by scent of hair shampoo, recalls 2.2 million cars

Holy cow, it's everywhere

So now I learn that we emit potentially noxious gases simply by wanting to stay clean and smell nice. Terrific. What other doomsday mechanism will our consumer society dump on our ignorant hides ?

It might be time to slow things down a bit and not rush to production with every half-baked idea simply because we can.

If at first you don't succeed, you may be trying to install that Slow Ring Windows 10 build

"the gang at Redmond appear to have lost patience with the company responsible"

Well, in defense of the company responsible, the board is still on life support after having been told that their most precious asset needs to be changed. Oh, not the game, of course, that's just the money-maker. No, it's the anti-cheat, that has been lovingly crafted by Northern Trolls in specially-made dank caverns with WiFi access and an endless supply of chocolate frogs. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to gather all those chocolate frogs ?

And they're going to have to - gasp - do it again ? Pity the stock price, for Pete's sake.

Okay, seriously now, it's a game company. Most of them don't have a stellar track record for keeping talent. Most of them do have a reputation for crunch time that lasts months, if not the whole development time. Then you have to find a team smart enough to not only understand the existing anti-cheat model, but also grep the required changes and implement them correctly - a rather demanding task, eh, Microsoft ?

All of this hoopla and most games I play have no anti-cheating issues. Minecraft ? You can whitelist the participants and, if you don't, there's a plethora of add-ons specifically tailored for tracking cheaters. None of that has anything to do with the OS. 7 Days To Die ? There's an entire anti-cheating system included in Steam apparently, and I haven't heard a peep about issues on Windows 1 0.

So I'm thinking that this is likely an issue for some other kinds of entities, the likes of EA Games or Origin, who are pretty crappy at how they handle players in the first place. I have banned their stores from my PCs due to the shoddy experience they have imposed on me. If that is indeed the case, then I can only rejoice that Microsoft is leaving those PCs in the dust.

Three posts and BAM! Linuxed.

That didn't take long at all.

YouTube's pedo problem is so bad, it just switched off comments on millions of vids of small kids to stem the tide of vileness

Re: Is this accurately reported El Reg?

Um, the fact that YT is blocking comments now doesn't give you a clue ?

The BBC might be right about the future, but comment blocking is happening now.

I myself never look at comments elsewhere than on El Reg - this is the only place it is worth it. But I do find curious that YT hasn't made comments an option in the hands of the channel owner. With parental guidance options.

I would say that children have no business posting on YT, but education is outrated these days.

Vodafone exec dons tartan tam-o'-shanter, clutches bottle of Irn-Bru, in snap shared with firm... just before Glasgow staff told of redundo dates

Oh come now - cut him some slack

After all, he's in charge of customer care, not employee care.

And it's a good thing too, because he obviously doesn't care about the employees.

The biggest uptick in demand for software devs by bosses is for... *rubs eyes* blockchain engineers?!?

I need to find me one of those companies

I need to find one of those companies that has money to burn on useless tech and convince them that my new securchain technology will put them two steps ahead of the competition.

Then I should be able to milk those idiots until I retire.

Don't mean to alarm you, but Boeing has built an unmanned fighter jet called 'Loyal Wingman'

Stealth indeed.

We already have the film, we know how this is going to end.

Slow Ring Windows 10 fragged by anti-cheat software in the games you're playing at work, says Insiders supremo

And that argument falls flat when your disc breaks because they do not send you a new disc.

If I had a license, then the disc is irrelevant and breaking one should ensure you get another free. But no, you have to pay for a new disc, meaning you pay a second license.

So that means that that disc is mine, and licensing terms can stuff it where the sun don't shine.

Of course, that only mattered when games were actually sold on discs. With rampant multiplayer everywhere, all they need to do now is control your access to the server. They don't care about discs any more.

China's tech giants are a security threat to the UK, says Brit spy bigwig

Re: peek into them and see

You do not want to ask Huawei to send you items for inspection - that will obviously turn up nothing since, if Huawei was indeed guilty of the accusations, it would hardly be stupid enough to send actual evidence.

You need to stop a container at the border and confiscate some stuff for inspection. That is the only way you have a chance to find evidence - if there is any actual evidence to be found.

Indeed, gentlemen don't.

Unfortunately, there are no gentlemen in government.

'God, Send Mobiles,' the industry prayed back in the '90s. This time, 5G actually has it covered

I'm not concerned by all the hubbub

I've got fiber to the house now, and 4G is more than enough for my needs when I'm not at home, so I'll be watching this craze from the sidelines. I'm in no hurry to replace my phone anyway.

In a galaxy far, far away, aliens may have eight-letter DNA – like the kind NASA-backed boffins just crafted

Or they could just wait for the jaws to the face and find out that, yes, an 8-base can not only be alive, but lethal as well.

I'm getting out before it's too late. Mine's the one with a flamethrower in the pocket.

Blue Monday: Efforts to inspire teamwork with swears back-fires for n00b team manager

On the fence here

I do not agree about "when to not". It was his idea, so he should have taken responsibility for it. On the other hand, he should also have been told about the data-skimming, so taking responsilibility and pointing that out could have saved him.

Not that there was much fallout on the whole affair anyway, it seems.

Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe has got the horn for space rock Ryugu – a sampling horn, that is

Little step by little step, we weave our doom.

Decoding the President, because someone has to: Did Trump just blow up concerted US effort to ban Chinese 5G kit?

"the issue has reached the highest levels of government"

The issue is that the highest levels of government are held by people with the morals of drug cartels - but in more stupid. They say incredibly stupid things that are regularly proven wrong, but they think that, because of their position, their words have a special weight. They don't understand that respect is something that is earned, it is not a given. And it must be accompanied by acts that are on par.

When you declare a National Emergency, you do not go and play golf the very next day. The act is not on par with the words.

Google: Hmm, this government regulation stuff looks important. Let's stick some more lobbyists on that

"government affairs and public policy"

Right. Google is just being nice, soon it will be "Bureau of Law and Decision Making" - at least if Google has it the way it wants.

Not so smart after all: A techie's tale of toilet noise horror

Computer sound is on in an open space ?

As far as I'm concerned, that will last exactly one update before either it gets muted or it's keyboard-to-the-face time.

Computers have no business making noise in a business environment.

Northern UK smart meter rollout is too slow, snarls MPs' committee

Now, now, everything is fine

Have no fear, Mrs Reeves, tthis will turn out to be the second greatest clusterkluck since the update of the NHS

Just you wait and see.