Posts by Pascal Monett

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

Technically ?

Yes.

Re: Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to X that “other” box

Oh I'm sure it would, except that, the next day, you find a Death Squad kicking in your door and taking you (and maybe your entire family) for a one-way trip behind the chemical shed to get shot.

Democracy was a nice idea, but it was based on the quaint notion that the people in charge would respect the rules, ideals and goals of Democracy.

That is no longer the case, and The People have no way to legally and democratically solve the problem. I'm reminded of a cartoon (can't find it) where the Founding Fathers are drafting the Consitution and one asks something like "Shouldn't we put in an article about how the Presidential Candidate should be a person of irreproachable conduct ?" and Jefferson responds "Who would vote for anyone that wasn't ?". Well, enough people, apparently.

My own President Macron blatantly didn't care about debating during the 1st tour of elections in 2022. Why should he waste his time ? He knew ful well that he'd be facing That blond beskirted idiot Marine who is very comfortable being in the opposition, thank you very much.

Bring back the benevolent dictator. We won't be worse off, and things just might actually get done.

Mars was once a desert with intermittent oases, Curiosity data suggests

Re: Thousands of nukes have been detonated on Earth

Yes, but most of them have been detonated underground.

Apparently, the official total is just over 2000. So, thousands being technically correct, it's not like Humanity has been blasting ten nukes per day for fifty years.

Still, over 500 atmospheric tests seems quite enough for me.

We're number 1! Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10

Congratulations

No, really, well done on threatening, coercing and browbeating your customer base.

You've finally made it. Win 11 is top of the shit pile. Have yourselves a pint.

I would ask you to think about the difference when Win 3.11 blew away Win 3.0, or when Win 95 took the world by storm and you didn't need to lift a finger, but a clearly way beyond that point of caring.

So, keep wielding that whip. You obviously attain your goal, one day or another . . .

Wikidata: Attempting to bridge FOSS ideals and direct democracy

Human interaction is complex

The Internet itself is certainly a Good Thing^TM. Social media can also be a good thing, but the bitter truth is that humans are, as always, the weakest link.

Technology, as impressive as it may be, will never be the solution. Between arrogant billionnaires who believe that their opinion is more important because their bank account is larger, and the assholes who have the technical means to impose their will on others and do not hesitate to do so (yes, the overlap is rather large here), there is only one solution :

Education. Teaching people to think for themselves. To pit their ideas against historical fact, and deduce on their own whether or not their opinion is right.

The exact thing our governments are currently dead-set against, because that would mean that manipulating opinion is harder, which would be an impediment to their goals - goals which rarely align with the goals of the basic human population, which is mainly to live in peace, live a full life with a loving family and die knowing that you have loved and been loved, and have avoided starvation, death and strife for your family and your loved ones.

Some people just love to watch the world burn.

I don't see how technology, much less pseudo-AI, is going to help here.

Kawasaki and Foxconn build robot nursing assistant to tackle hospital scutwork

Re: there are multiple ways to summon a human

Yeah, there are.

One of them is to continuously shout "NUUUUUUUUURRRSSSE" at the top of your damn lungs for twenty minutes straight.

Then a harried nurse comes along and tries to make sense of your bullshit because the only thing you actually want is attention.

You clearly haven't visited hospitals long enough.

Good for you.

I don't see that working

If you've ever been to busy hospital, one thing you don't see is nurses just standing around or strolling along the corridors.

If they're not on the move, it's because they're taking care of a patient or doing admin stuff or preparing doses for patients. They don't have time to loiter.

I don't see those two enormous, bulky things going quickly down the hallways because you don't want them bumping into staff and you certainly don't want them rolling over patients. So they're going to be slow, ponderous, and in the way.

Nurses don't have time to put up with that shit.

Microsoft leaves Pakistan but promises customers won't notice the change

"other closely located Microsoft offices"

You mean, offices that are outside the blast radius of India's nuclear arsenal, right ?

Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

So, one step closer

We're getting one step closer to the nanosuits in Crysis.

<cue Evil Genius cackling>

AI models just don't understand what they're talking about

So, "experts" have finally got the notion that the I in AI is not "intelligence"

Congratulations. It only took you ten years more than everyone else with a brain.

Now, if you could just get the message through to Marketing, you'd do us all a great favor.

Well, except for the shareholders of those LLM joints but hey, you win some, you lose some, right ? And you've already won enough. Time to move over and let the people who actually work do their job.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

Re: he need to rethink his understanding of policies and politics

He doesn't have one.

Neither does he have the gene that gives a normal human brain the possibility to think : "wait, maybe I shouldn't do that".

He got lucky by being at the right place at the right time and he's been coasting on that ever since.

Well now he's luck is running out, and he is entirely responsible for that.

He weeps for no one but himself, and I'm not weeping for him.

Gone in 40 days: US drops ban on export of chip design tools to China

The "stable genius" has done it again

Showing his power by magnanimously waving away something that never actually happened.

Ransomware crew Hunters International shuts down, hands out keys to victims

NoEscape, eh ?

That's exactly what I'm hoping you'll get.

UK charity bank CAF branded a 'disaster' after platform migration goes wrong

Hey, it's a charity bank

They were undoubtedly counting on the "goodwill" of their customers, and a bunch of IT "volunteers" to get things done.

It would seem that goodwill is in short supply when people can't get to their money and pay their bills.

Charities work for a lot of things. Feeding people, clothing them, even finding appartments to live in. Banking is not an area where charity applies. Goodwill doesn't pay your mortgages or your rent, you need cold, hard cash to do that.

Plus, you may be a charity, but if you include the word "bank", I believe you should have signed up to the banking charter of your country.

Banking is serious business (except, of course, if you're talking billionnaire banking, which is a crapshoot but hey, $BigMoney).

Let's Encrypt rolls out free security certs for IP addresses

"which has the potential to negatively impact [..] search engine optimization"

Oh my, Google is going to have trouble finding its little money makers ?

Well, we can't have that, now can we ?

'Quad' nations launch plan to stop China making critical minerals into Unobtanium

Re: Zero Sympathy

Indeed.

The West (as it is politically called) is simply reaping the rewards of the century-old mentality that places shareholder return above all else.

Shareholders are going to have to learn that looking at what costs the least is shortsighted and short-term thinking. Instead of shareholder first, we are going to have to find a way to transition to a "survival of the company first", and that transition is going to be very, very hard to accomplish.

CISA warns the Signal clone used by natsec staffers is being attacked, so patch now

Sci-Fi already has the solution

None of this should have happened had the government idiots in charge and their drones used proper, secure, government channels of communication.

But those are slow and cumbersome, and today's "elite" (using that term with a truckload of reservations, annotations and addendums) just can't bring themselves to repect proper procedures (ok, they'd have to get to know the procedures in the first place - but who has time for that ?) so they hitch on to whatever app they can download (uh, why can they download things on their government-issued phone ? And why aren't they already in jail if they discuss National Security issues on their personal phones ?) and "make things go faster".

It seems to me that, if the police aren't allowed to arrest traitors anymore, then a Bureau of Sabotage is highly needed.

Call center staffers explain to researchers how their AI assistants aren't very helpful

"A hybrid approach, where AI and human agents work in tandem"

Yeah. The human does the job, and the "assistant" stays in the bottom right corner like Clippy, until the human wants to know the weather outside when he/she's deciding where to go for lunch.

Trump's budget bill bankrolls $85M Space Shuttle shuffle

I'm sure Trump will answer that in . . two weeks.

Arista acquires VMware’s VeloCloud SD-WAN outfit from Broadcom

Oh boy, blackhats must be drooling in anticipation

"These days, WANs likely connect to many sources of data "

Translation : you have one ginormous single point of failure where any one element can introduce a miscreant to your entire network.

"AI agents will bring more change to WANs as they roam around networks looking for data in many locations "

Oh that they will, especially when a state-sponsored miscreant finds a way to subvert the agents and make tyhem cause havoc.

It'll be blast to read the forensics on an AIagent-caused wipeout of a company's entire network.

"Apparently, for some reason the AI agents decided to reconfigure all the working addresses of every electronics equipment on the network to 127.0.0.1

We now have about 36,000 PCs, laptops, servers, phones and edge servers to manually analyze in order to find out where the change came from and revert it.

Best case scenario is we rebuild a proper network within two years, at the condition of hiring at 400 security experts working 8h shifts 24/7."

Microsoft's on-prem Exchange and Skype for Business Server go subscription-only

"To support ongoing maintenance and updates for Microsoft's on-premises server products"

I'm sorry, if it's on-prem then your customers are the ones paying for the maintenance of their servers.

You're just making new shitty updates that regularly cause chaos and now you expect to get monthly tequilas out of other people's hard work?

Are you trying to push people to Linux ?

Cloudflare creates AI crawler tollbooth to pay publishers

Agreed, but something has to be done to reign in Google and set things straight.

I'm less bothered with Apple. You can choose to avoid Apple, but even Apple users cannot avoid Google.

Senate decides free rein for AI companies isn't such a good thing

Oh dear

Seems that the AI lobby is going to have to prepare a lot more brown envelopes - and quickly.

Poor things. They might actually be prevented from scraping private data with impunity any where they want.

Sorry, but with the heat, my tears evaporate immediately.

EU rattles its purse and AI datacenter builders come running

Congratulations

Well done on jumping aboard the hype train. Don't you worry your pretty little head about what will be done with all that power-guzzling equipment, I'm sure you'll draft requirements and laws to ensure that they are powered only by clean electrons, without bothering to hand any money out for that. Nooo. You take care of ensuring that whatever power we have is used 300%. We'll worry about how to keep our lights on.

Terrible tales of opsec oversights: How cybercrooks get themselves caught

It's a shame

It's a shame that France doesn't have the prison colony of Guyane anymore.

I'd send all of those assholes there without a second thought.

China successfully tests hypersonic aircraft, maybe at Mach 12

Re: Hilarious

True, but there is only one problem : incredible claims come regularly from China, and most of them are debunked within a year.

So excuse me if I'm also going to need a bit more than a picture and a post in a Chinese newspaper.

Norwegian lotto mistakenly told thousands they were filthy rich after math error

"To them I can only say: Sorry!"

No buddy, you're going to be a lot sorrier when a class-action lawsuit (or whatever the Norwegian equivalent is) lands in front of a judge who will undoubtedly decide that you are to pay for the costs of annulation of contracts that these "winners" contracted in good faith.

British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network

"it seems there are some who haven't got the message yet"

Not entirely a bad thing, since their condemnation sends a clear message to everyone else as to who you should definitely not hire.

Microsoft's next Windows 11 update is more 'enablement' than upgrade

It only took them 40 years

"Microsoft is adding tools to allow antivirus and endpoint protection vendors to run their wares in user mode, outside the Windows kernel "

And gosh, the BSOD is getting a Dark Mode. Now THAT is worthy of an update !

Cloud lobby warns EU: Clamp down on water rules and we'll evaporate

"burdensome regulatory demands"

Oh, as in do proper treatment of your water reserves to be able to reuse them ?

I understand that that will incur more costs for you, but guess how much I care ?

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

"due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls"

So that's what being shit is when talking business speak.

In this case, Pirate Bay and BitTorrent are your friends.

DoJ clears HPE to buy Juniper if it sells Instant On Wi-Fi and licenses some code

"the next steps usually include [..] a round of layoffs"

Its HPE. A round of layoffs happens every time the CEO gets his morning coffee without the exact dose of cream and sugar that he was expecting.

The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive

Re: microsoft screwed themselves

Redmond has been doing that to itself for decades, but that did not convince anyone to move away from Windows. It was just the cost of business, and the IT drones had to be paid for something, right ?

Having a big baby sitting in the Oval Office, making threats, arbitrary decisions and generally demonstrating total unreliability and the unwavering will to punish by every possible means anyone/entity/country that doesn't kiss his ass was a very big wake-up signal.

I think this is serious, and it is going to become a serious issue for Microsoft/Apple/Oracle etc, and a game-changer for everyone else.

So, thank you Trump ?

Gaming is not a government- or business-level issue

That being said, it really pissed me off that Redmond is now the owner of Minecraft and of Blizzard.

Since the last interface update of Minecraft (curious how often those things happen these days, without any substantial visual difference from my point of view), when I launch Minecraft on my gaming rig I now get a popup that tries to get me to go to the Microsoft store. I ignore it and get on with connecting to my server, but the message is clear : the enshittification has started.

I dread to find out how they're going to kill Diablo III (no worries about Diablo IV though - Blizzard killed that one itself with stupid design decisions).

Canada orders Chinese CCTV biz Hikvision to quit the country ASAP

"Canada’s government will stop using any Hikvision products it finds"

Why did Canada's government purchase a Chinese CCTV product in the first place ? Aren't there any Canadian ones available ? Oh, I know : budget concerns.

Well that's a winner now, isn't it ?

On top of which, it's CCTV. It's not supposed to communicate with anything but the computer of the security guard that is supposed to check it between coffee and donuts.

How can that be a national security risk ?

Ex-NATO hacker: 'In the cyber world, there's no such thing as a ceasefire'

Who is reinventing history now ? You are full of strawman arguments.

NATO never "expanded". Every single NATO country in Eastern Euope signed up because they didn't trust Moscow. That's because the Soviet Union died in name only. Remind yourself that Putin is an ex-KGB officer.

The spirit of the Soviet Union is still very much alive.

Moscow invades Ukraine and what happens ? Finland comes out of its neutrality and requests NATO appartenance. Because Finland knows first hand that that bear next door is RIGHT THERE. You have probably forgotten that Stalin used WWII as a pretext to invade Finland, or you are deliberately ignoring that fact because you are obviously not interested in any fact that does not support your point of view.

How's the weather on Red Square these days, komrade ?

Fox doesn't need genAI to spout their nonsense.

Their pundits are genetically engineered for it.

Oh the irony

"Iran, along with Russia and China, are getting really good at using generative AI for fake news and social media posts that aim to manipulate public opinion. "

And who is providing said generative AI ?

And to think that some orange baboon is pretending that Tik Tok is a national security menace (without doing anything to stop it).

More trouble for authors as Meta wins Llama drama AI scraping case

Well duh

"We appreciate the decision from the Court. Open source AI models are powering transformative innovations our bottom line, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies bonuses for our managers, and fair use of copyright material our ability to hoover up other people's work with impunity is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology to allow us to continue raking in the dough."

TFTFY.

Kaseya CEO: Why AI adoption is below industry expectations

"It took two decades for the cloud to mature"

Oh, because you call that thing that regularly falls on its face "mature" ?

HPE customers on agentic AI: No, you go first

"a lack of explanation of data privacy rules"

Why is it so difficult to understand ?

Data Privacy. My data is mine, not yours. I might be willing to give you the right to store it for my purposes, but just like my wife, you don't touch it.

There. Is that so difficult to get ?

Starlink helps eight more nations pass 50 percent IPv6 adoption

"Tuvalu’s rise [..] coincided with the arrival of Elon Musk’s Starlink"

Well it had better align its views with His Muskiness' political beliefs, otherwise it might find its access has been "mysteriously" cut off.

FBI used bitcoin wallet records to peg notorious IntelBroker as UK national

What ? Bitcoin ?

But, but . . haven't we been repeatedly told that Bitcoin is completely anonymous ?

With a public ledger ?

If you cannot understand the contradiction, please drive your car at full speed against a wall. It'll do wonders for your brain, because you're obviously not using it.

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

"they're all either former beancounters or guided by beancounters"

Beancounters are the bane of the corporate world.

Their job is to count the beans, not to say how they should be used.

Just go ask Challenger how well that worked out.

Back in black: Microsoft Blue Screen of Death is going dark

"ways to make Windows less fragile"

Simple : use a Linux kernel.

Oh, and teach your developers to work in an environment that demands they actually pay attention to security.

Then you can go on make Excel charts and Powerpoint presentations that manglement can't get enough of in an actual computing environment.

I'm sure your bottom line will manage . . .

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

"In an era of radical uncertainty"

The first of which is will the USA continue honoring its obligations towards its allies, or will Trumpism win the day and it decides to "stop paying for other countries" ?

Frankly, at this point in time I think it is dangerous to rely on anything the White House can influence.

That WhatsApp from an Israeli infosec expert could be a Iranian phish

Charming Kitten, Educated Manticore

Sounds like the title of a certain film.

This intellectual masturbation for or from people who are basically criminals is getting tiring.

Stop honoring them with sexy names. Internet Crime Group #NNN is all they deserve.

Frozen foods supermarket chain deploys facial recognition tech

Iceland has violent crime ?

Now that's news.

It's not like criminals there can cross state borders, now is it ?

I would think an "unfortunate" detour by a volcano would solve the problem . . .

AFRINIC election annulled after ICANN writes angry letter to African regional internet registry

Coulda, shoulda, woulda . . .

Apparently, it's extremely difficult to use intelligence as soon as more than one country is involved.

Maybe I should rethink my opinion of diplomats.