* Posts by Pascal Monett

18221 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

CrowdStrike CEO summoned to explain epic fail to US Homeland Security committee

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Oh, a summons from Congress

So, Crowdstrike gonna pull a Zuckerberg, or is the CEO actually going to submit to a public flogging ? 'Cause that's what's waiting for him.

Not everyone can be a total asshole. I'm guessing Kurtz is going to bend over backwards to try and keep the share price from falling further.

Time will tell.

Arch-based CachyOS promises speed but trips over its laces

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Another conclusion

If you want to launch a new Linux distro, you need to be at least as good as the best distros that already exist.

ESA's meteorite bricks hit Lego stores, but don't get your wallet out just yet

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Moon base made of moon LEGO

Why not ?

I just hope that they'll make 'em a bit more rectangular, to ensure that no air gets out. That brick doesn't seem all that airtight to me.

FrostyGoop malware shut off heat to 600 Ukraine apartment buildings

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Facepalm

Connected infrastructure requires secure connections

Who knew ?

Global cops power down world's 'most prolific' DDoS dealership

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So, the whack-a-mole continues

Congratulations. Good job.

What is the guarantee that these miscreants won't start over on another domain ?

Not diminishing the result in any way, but impeding miscreants is not the same as jailing them.

Cybercrooks crafting solo careers in wake of ransomware takedowns

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Terminator

"increased quality of AI tools that lack prompt filtering"

So, jail the CEOs of AI tools until they implement proper prompt filtering.

Engineers fix ESA's Gaia observatory from 1.5M kilometers away

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Pint

"We, therefore, raise a glass"

Hear, hear ! I most definitely second that motion ->

Websites clamp down as creepy AI crawlers sneak around for snippets

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"an honor code for crawlers"

Ah, honor.

The kind of thing the Founding Fathers were sure people had when making important decisions.

Ah, how times have changed.

Oracle coughs up $115M to make privacy case go away

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Ah, privacy

What a nuisance when you want to make money, eh ?

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

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"CrowdStrike marked their driver as a boot driver"

So it is down to the shitty Windows environment once again. No surprise there.

The issue might be more in the fact that it seems to be very difficult to isolate the kernel in an OS while granting security access to protective measures, all the while keeping the hoi polloi at bay and the system secure.

Too late to think about a redesign of the OS architecture. We'll just have to make do with what we have.

Cellebrite got into Trump shooter's Samsung device in just 40 minutes

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Stop

"Cracking of devices in this way isn't welcomed by manufacturers"

Why ?

It's the golden excuse for saying "We will not weaken our device's encryption. We don't have to, since you have the means to break in anyway".

Curiosity rover is crushing it: Ran over a rock and found pure sulfur

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Thumb Up

Another "that's wierd" moment

Eureka is rarely heard these days, but real science advances on those little steps.

I can't wait to read about the conclusions.

HCL's back-to-office plan: Come in three days a week, or forget about holidays

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COVID really threw a wrench in things

During COVID, we were all locked down, nobody was in the office, and yet companies not only survived, but many thrived.

Now, management is desperately trying to get back to before, but there is no going back. We proved that we could do the job with suffering the commute. Stop with the threatening, we know this works.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

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In our office it was Quake

We were doing "network stress tests" during the lunchbreak. It became such a success that our little room, fir for three, was often occupied by six howling monsters during lunch hour.

One day, we were really getting on with the destruction and the howling glee. Unfortunately, that day, one of our colleagues in the next room had scheduled that time for a business call.

Needless to say, we were soon relocated to the basement, and that was the end of our network stress tests.

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

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I never click a shortened URL.

I don't trust what I can't see the result of.

But, then again, I know how to read.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

Re: Good riddance

Totally agree.

Management, marketing and Javascript have long conspired to ensure that the URL got perverted into the absolute filth of length that exists today.

And news sites are the first to blame, with their stupid insistance that they needed their articles to display in three columns, just like paper.

It's the web, stupid. You don't display like paper. But, instead of dealing with it, we had to wait for smartphones and adaptive HTML to get something akin to what the newsies could have understood thirty years ago.

Stop management from interfering in the Internet. That would be a good start to getting things working smoothly again.

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

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Re: WTF?

People might.

Companies don't.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Impact...

Unfortunately, I am inclined to agree with you.

After all, there are those pesky contract clauses, etc etc, and finding another AV supplier is going to be a major pain and probably require humongous amounts of work from IT personnel everywhere, so why not just listen to the siren call of "lessons have been learned" and stay the course ?

After all, it works so well for Capita in the UK (and Fujitsu, and God knows how many more) . . .

Cybercriminals quickly exploit CrowdStrike chaos

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"Criminals didn't waste any time"

If only they used such energy for honest work, our civilization would stride forward instead of staying mired in muck.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

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I'm guessing CrowdStrike's share price is not the only thing that is going to be tanking in the coming weeks.

The fallout from this is starting to look like it will draw blood. CloudStrike's client list is going to shrink worse than a banana in the desert sun.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

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Trollface

What ?

But, but . . that means work . . . and responsibility if things go wrong. It'll be my fault.

This is not my fault. It's the vendor who screwed up.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

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"a very sheepish football fan"

I'll bet he got even more sheepish when he showed up to recover his sandwiches, only to find a large group of very pissed-off men in full bomb squad gear with guns looking at him with rage in their eyes.

I hope Brian got overtime for that.

North Korea likely behind takedown of Indian crypto exchange WazirX

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

Force majeure

It's funny how there are absolutely no banks who invoke that excuse.

No real banks. Banks with a banking charter, and proper procedures and personnel dealing with actual currency and legal obligations, not fairy money and feel-good wishes.

Invoking Force Majeure when you don't have the compentence, the ability or the experience to implement secure money-managing procedures is like a teenager flipping his car in a curb and blaming the rain on the road.

Bunch of muppets, all of them.

EU's renewable hydrogen plan needs a 'reality check'

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Mushroom

Don't you just love administrative caution ?

"A lack of robust analyses before setting production and import targets, which were not realistic and therefore likely won't be achieved"

Likely won't be achieved.

Likely.

The initial analysis is flawed and unrealistic, but achieving unrealistic targets just might still be possible, maybe, in an alternate universe.

I understand that you need to not ruffle any feathers too much, but if initial analysis is wrong, the chance that results will not be achieved is a bit stronger than likely.

As in won't happen.

Beijing's attack gang Volt Typhoon was a false flag inside job conspiracy: China

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Facepalm

Great

More ammunition for the people who think 9/11 was an inside job.

And nobody will be going to prison for this.

Google slashes maps API prices in India – weeks after a competitor emerged

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So, $1.50 instead of $5, and 5 million instead of 100K

At $5 for 100,000, that's 200 requests per cent, or 0.005 cent per request.

At $1.50 for 5 million, that's 33,333 per cent, or 0.00003 cent per request.

Now, I'm supposing Google is still making money on this, since I'm supposing that India also frowns on price dumping. If that is true, it should mean that Google is artificially inflating its prices by a factor of 166.

Just FYI, you know. Google's prices are way too high.

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

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So, Office 345 is down again

And what are customers going to get in return ? A voucher for some free time on Teams ?

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Apparently, you mean some other muppet . . .

OpenAI’s GPT-4o Mini is indeed small – like its lead over rivals in certain tests

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"the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment"

There is nothing unpredictable about the GDPR. So, the only thing unpredictable for Meta is : when will it get sued ?

Meta isn't scraping European data to feed its monster ? Good. GDPR has succeeded. Again.

Judge mostly drags SEC's lawsuit against SolarWinds into the recycling bin

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FAIL

"present our own evidence"

Your honor, I submit this piece of evidence to the Court : Solarwinds1234.

It's all well and nice to declare the SEC incompetent for cybersecurity, but you need to demonstrate competence for that argument to be valid.

Kaspersky challenges US government to put up or shut up about Kremlin ties

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Stop

Re: Above board and not backdoored software

Why ? Who said so ?

Kaspersky is proposing an independant verification of his software, not of all AV software.

Personally, I'm all for it.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Maybe not, but he's certainly capable of starting one at home.

Russia’s FIN7 is peddling its EDR-nerfing malware to ransomware gangs

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AvNeutralizer

No prize for guessing which AV they started to fully dismantel first.

I'm betting Windows gets pwned 100% of the time, whatever the version.

Europe's largest council could face £12M manual audit bill after Oracle project disaster

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Trollface

"a customer win [..] Larry Ellison once flaunted to investors"

So, Larry, what are you flaunting now ? Projects costs multiplied by six and a half, or project delayed for four years ?

NASA swings budget axe, kills $400M+ VIPER lunar trundlebot

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"an uncertain budget environment"

Curious. I thought your budget environment was pretty certain : shrinking.

Maximum-severity Cisco vulnerability allows attackers to change admin passwords

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Windows

"we know that an unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit this to change passwords"

Thank God they got rid of the real threat that was Huawei . . .

Firms skip security reviews of major app updates about half the time

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Trollface

"it is imperative that organizations strengthen their application security posture"

It sure is. I'm sure another couple hundred catastrophic breaches will help solve the problem.

Semiconductor shares slump – possibly thanks to Biden and Trump

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"Taiwan doesn't give us anything"

Of course not, but that is not why there are US carrier fleets nearby. Those fleets are nearby to ensure that Taiwan is not absorbed in to China, which could then cut off supply to The West globally, which would be a major catastrophe for IT in general and all those fancy gadgets DARPA likes to get its hands on like, oh, hypermissiles at a guess. Or all those fancy self-piloted "assistants" that are supposed to be delivered with every new F-35 at some point in the future.

Trump appears hell-bent on not spending a dime on anything. He's missing the fact that, if the USA has the economic and international situation it enjoys today, it is because it is present on the seven seas and the five continents and ready to be aggressive if need be, with the best tools there are. Bring all that military back home and your influence is going to shatter to pieces, leaving someone else to pick up the slack (that someone being Beijing at this point in time).

You really have to be a moron to not see that.

Samsung buys UK AI startup to give its products the personal touch

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"the world's fastest knowledge graph"

I note that nowhere is it mentioned anything about accuracy of results. No, the important thing is that it is the fastest because, of course, if you're not the fastest, you're lagging behind.

Light-weight solar-powered flying robots are coming

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Ultra-light solar cells

I'm impressed. The drone might be (very) flimsy, but those solar cells are paper-thin and ultra light, yet they do deliver current.

I wonder how long they last.

Tech upgrade broke the casino – took slots offline for days

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Trollface

"system performance issues"

As in, people were winning.

Merged Exabeam and LogRhythm cut jobs, face lawsuit

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Yes. The golden parachute is proof of that great Capitalism at work. This whole deal was made so that one guy could exit with margharitas at the beach forever more.

The rest are peons. It is their destiny to be used and discarded when no longer useful to The Board, and they should be thankful for having been paid up to then.

Right, Gellar ?

Here we go again. And again. Musk threatens to pull Twitter, SpaceX out of California

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"but she doesn't want to spend time with me"

And of course it is someone else's fault, eh Musk ?

What exactly did Microsoft promise CISPE in its settlement?

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Windows

"At the end of the day, the settlement is nothing"

So, complete success for Redmond, then. Someone's getting a bonus this month.

Stop giving Redmond money, people. Just stop.

Mega-city's Oracle system won't have effective cash management until 2025

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Europe's largest local authority

It might do well to divide itself into four or more parts and allow for more localized, less byzantine management.

But I'm sure that would not suit the people sitting at the top . . .

GNOME head honcho Holly Million steps down

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So she didn't leave to "spend time with her family" ?

After barely a year ?

That feels to me like there were "creative differences" between her and the Foundation.µ

I wonder what those differences were.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

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Thumb Down

He lied to the Court.

Jail him.

Cold comfort to teachers who got paid late, but ERP software rollout had 'unrealistic' timeline

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I humbly admit that I never had the chance/curse of tackling an ERP project. From what I read on these hallowed pages, they are frought with failure, so I guess I'm lucky.

If you think AI labs wouldn't stoop to using scraped YouTube subtitles for training, think again

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"the internet giant puts a lot of effort into thwarting unauthorized scraping"

Oh sure it does. That's why there's already a 5+ GB dataset of scraped data.

Honestly guys, can't you see that are fooling no one ? Your words are worthless because your acts have already spoken for you.

YouTube is your site. You have no excuse not to be able to lock it down, especially when you are continually messing with YouTube downloader addons. Apparently, those things bother you a lot more than subtitle scraping, because those addons are constantly updating to cope with your messing around.

But I get it : a downloader addon cuts out your ads and thus impacts your bottom line, and we can't have that, now can we ?

ESA starts work on planetary defence mission, because Bruce Willis is retired

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So, after Apophis, a 5000 year wait for the next one

Seems to me that, in the next five millennia, we will have colonized our solar system and we'll have been mining those asteroids for quite some time. Given that we'll likely start with the larger ones, there's a chance that that next chunk of space rock supposed to hit us will, by then, have been reduced to ores and completely processed.

But, in case we get a bad surprise before then, it's always good to get more data on asteroids, so go RAMSES !