Posts by Pascal Monett

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

Ownership

After a quarter century of experience in IT project consulting, I find that that is easily the most elusive quality, especially in administrations.

In a private company, it is easier to find someone who actually wants the project to succeed - because it will benefit his (or her) department directly. That doesn't mean that it is automatically so however, I have found exceptions and private companies have internal politics that are just as obscure as the real thing.

But in public service, it is far more common to have a project leader that is absolutely not interested in actually leading the project. After all, he has no skin involved and his (or her) position will endure whatever the result.

That kind of mentality hinders the success of any project by default. In the private sector, it is less prevalent because you can, ultimately, always get fired, or removed from your position. But in public administration ? Never going to happen, even with people who have a history of failure.

That irks me to no end.

Qualcomm sues Chinese handset-maker in India to defend African market

It's called protectionism

"cases against Chinese entities often move very, very, slowly if they're brought in China"

Yep, well that's just another demonstration of how strongly China wants to play by the rules of international law - aka it doesn't give a shit.

Big Music reprises classic hit 'ISPs need to stop their customers torrenting or we'll sue'

"is therefore equally liable for IP theft"

And why are you restricting yourself to Verizon ? There are other providers in the USA, if I am not mistaken.

Oh, and don't forget to sue the US Government as well, because those roads allow Internet providers to maintain their networks of thievery.

FBI gains access to Trump rally shooter's phone

So he was a registered Republican

Hmm. That might make it a tad difficult for the obvious "it's the Democrates that want Trump dead" argument.

Then again, Republicans these days are not exactly big on taking facts into account . . .

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

It is surprising how a supposedly intelligent person can be so incapable of managing such things.

My own brother-in-law, who is an engineer btw, tried last year to self-upgrade his PC. He bought all the right components, motherboard, CPU, RAM, cooler, SSDs, etc, and put everything together.

When it didn't work, he called me, because he knew that I have extensive experience in upgrading my hardware. I tried to diagnose by phone what appeared to be a RAM problem. We tried removing all but one stick, putting the sticks in different slots, all to no avail.

Bereft of ideas, I asked him to remove all the DIMMS and try to boot. We got the same error, ergo it was not the RAM. At that point, I pointed him to a very good PC Repair shop because, if it was the motherboard, I didn't have any other solution.

It turns out that my brother-in-law had put the CPU in wrong. Which means he forced it in, because slotting in CPUs these days is as easy as just gently dropping it in place. All you need to do is align the marked tab on the CPU with the tab on the motherboard and drop it in. But no, he put it in wrong, forced it down and screwed the cooler over it. Obviously, the CPU was dead and the motherboard as well.

When I learned what had happened, I was speechless. But, that is how it is. He's far from stupid, but boy was he stupid there.

China's internet cleanup campaigns are going so well it needs a new one to protect kids

"shocking online behaviors in the context of children"

Well that's one point that I cannot hold against China's regime.

Yes; there are mounds of filth and violence targeting children directly, and something should be done about that everywhere.

It seems, though, that even when you try in an authoritarian regime that doesn't blink when it comes to killing its own citizens, it's difficult. So, what chance do we have ?

New Outlook set for GA despite missing some key features

"some pretty large chunks of functionality are still missing"

Incredible. A company is pushing a product that isn't even finished.

Because it can.

I would make a statement about shooting squads and sheds, but it might seem a tad extreme. Except that, when I get a customer contract, I don't have the liberty of spending the time dilly-dallying and, when delivery comes around, saying "oh, I'll do that later".

If I tried to pull a stunt like that, it would be the end of my reputation and career.

But Redmond does it all the time, and it's still in business.

Go figure . . .

SpaceX hit by inflight Falcon 9 failure

It's rocket science

It stays hard.

Every time.

Smartphone is already many folks' only computer – say hi to optional desktop mode in Android 15 beta

The Samson Meteor Mic is an astoundingly good USB microphone for a very reasonable price. No installation required, just plug it in and it works.

I'm sure you can find a proper USB webcam for not much either.

Google can totally explain why Chromium browsers quietly tell only its websites about your CPU, GPU usage

"Luca Casonato highlighted the extension's existence this week on social media"

That link points to twitter.com.

I thought that had been renamed to X, following the lunatic's preference.

So, I'm guessing it was too much of a bother to actually rename everything. Apparently, he just contented himelf by redoing the logo and stuff the rest.

Of course, given that he had already fired all the competent people, it's pretty obvious that His Muskiness doesn't have the nous to change the domain name.

Re: Why is it in Chromium?

Borkzilla doesn't review its own code, you can hardly expect it to review code from anyone else.

Singapore's banks to ditch texted one-time passwords

Easy solution : a physical OTP token

LuxTrust uses that. To connect to my bank account, I need to know my user name, my password and have the fob available to get the OTP at the right time.

Sure, there's a smartphone app, and there are other solutions as well, but the fob works fine. There is no reason to force people to have a smartphone.

Boeing's Starliner set for extended stay at the ISS as engineers on Earth try to recreate thruster issues

"Starliner could be used in the event of an emergency"

Well sure, if you know you're already screwed, might as well take the chance.

Firefox 128 bumps system requirements for old boxes

Re: superior stability

Oh, so that's why my sticky notes don't load at start one out of every five boots ?

Ah, now I'm reassured. It's because of superior stability. Yeah.

Privacy expert put away for 9 years after 'grotesque' cyberstalking campaign

He's got nothing to do in civilized society.

Send him to a desert island somewhere.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

So, now it's speed limiters

And the next step to the nanny car will be what ? No shirt, no ignition ?

If I can't drive the way I want to, just give me private taxi that will do the job while I read a book.

Butm if I'm at the wheel, I decide what the car does and I'm responsible for it, not some effin' nanny back-seat driver.

Japanese space agency spotted zero-day attacks while cleaning up raid on M365

The tendancy to hush up is general for all companies. It used to be taken as a sign that your network was not secure. Today, your network can be very secure and yet, you can still suffer being attacked.

But the tradition is to hush it up. That's why there are laws mandating that public companies fess up when they get hacked. Private companies might be a different matter, depending on the jurisdiction.

Apple, Google ease cross-cloud data transfers, perhaps with costly catch

“We are nowhere near the end of" . .

. . being able to nickel and dime our customers who will never stop adding more data to their storage because cloud has become synonymous with backup for everyone who couldn't be arsed to do a backup in the first place.

How low can you go: Tesla's US market share dips below 50% for the first time

That article had me in stiches.

"I hope I’m never loud and lonely enough to want to buy one" - oh boy.

Anonymous 'ask me anything' chat app NGL ordered to knock it off targeting kids

"While we believe"

I don't care what you believe. You have quite obviously constructed something that you intended to monetize, and you purposefully targeted teens who do not have the necessary experience to understand that you are nothing but snake oil scum.

I checked the PDF of the complaint. Sending messages to children saying "I know what you did" or "Are you single" ? Really ?

You should be strapped to a pole and whipped for forty lashes.

Disgusting.

Snowflake lets admins make MFA mandatory across all user accounts

Great idea

I didn't catch the part where they were promoting OTP for MFA.

Is that an omission, or are they asking for user's phone numbers to send unsecure SMSs to ?

Or, <shudder>, biometrics ?

Microsoft exits OpenAI's boardroom to sidestep regulatory scrutiny

So, Redmond is "confident in the company's direction"

Of course it is. When Ballmer was driving it into the wall it was also quite confident. It took the total disaster that was Vista to finally get rid of that clown.

I wonder what kind of disaster is going to make Redmond think about what it is doing.

It'll take one hell of a disaster when all the Board has to do is check its gold vaults to reassure itself.

Windows 11 is closing the gap on Windows 10

Re: at least taught the public at large

The past two decades of Borkzilla history contradicts that statement.

The public at large has learned nothing, and people who are vastly more informed have apparently not learned much.

Windows whatever continues to infiltrate the business world like the virus it is. Can't kill it, can't get rid of it. Like the common cold, it will always be around to grace your network with latest 0-day, curtesy of Borkzilla's absence of quality control.

"use of Windows 11 continues to rise as Windows 10 falls"

Of course it will. Especially since Redmond has done everything it can to kill Windows 1 0. There's only one route left.

Ever since Vista; that has been Borkzilla's history. Gone are the days where users flocked to Windows XP because it was viewed as the Next Best Thing.

Now, the next version of Windows is just That Unavoidable Upgrade To Be Done As Late As Possible.

Might there be a message there, Redmond ?

Glass rain, supersonic winds, and Eau de Rotten Egg – just another day on HD 189733 b

Oh great, another ginormous gaseous planet about to be destroyed by its star

13 times closer to its star than Mercury ? Less than 4 million kilometers then.

So, when is it going to be absorbed, or torn apart ? Does the Roche limit function in this scenario ?

Big Tech's eventual response to my LLM-crasher bug report was dire

Well free the prompt, then

Last time I asked for the prompt, it was very much tongue-in-cheek (and with the troll icon, no less). Of course I was not expecting you to do that.

I'm not expecting you to do that now either, but if Redmond is not concerned, then maybe it would do good for it to see just how concerned it should have been.

America's new Sentinel nukes mushroom 81% in cost. Pentagon says it's all good

Yeah, two years after its planned 3-week offensive.

RADIUS networking protocol blasted into submission through MD5-based flaw

So this has to be an insider attack

Seems a bit much to ask an insider to set up cloud computing for improving a MITM attack. Besides, if he needs to hack, he doesn't have admin access. In that case, he would need to have admin rights over his local PC in order to install all the stuff he needs - and that is becoming increasingly scarce these days. Except in small companies, of course, but you don't need to MITM in a small company. You just chat up the right person and, with a bit of social skills, you'll be in in no time.

So, the attack exists, already has patches, and can't be used by an outsider. What is the real scope for danger, here ?

Europe blasts back into the heavy launch biz with first Ariane 6 flight

Congratulations

It's nice to see Arianespace back in the race. And, contrary to some, no multiple delays and rescheduling, just engineers doing their job in the background then, flight.

Makes you dream, eh Boeing ?

Tesla parental controls keep teenage lead feet in check

Tesla parental controls

Are useless when it's the kid that buys the car.

Once upon a time, in order to have a car that could go from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds, you had to have a successful career behind you, or a rich father. Nowadays, all you need is good job.

Personally, I would be for a law that states that young conductors with less than 5 years experience should be legally limited to 80hp.

I have two friends whose sons have a Tesla. The kids have lead feet, but there is no parental controls since the parents haven't bought 'em.

I'm just hoping they'll be lucky enough to not have a bad accident before they actually get enough experience to manage that kind of power. Same thing for all the others.

Parental controls ? Nice idea. Seems a bit useless in the current world.

Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams

"Office 365 connectors within Teams will be cut"

So, Fortune 1000, when are you going to understand that Borkzilla is not a reliable business company ?

How many more rugs do you need pulled under you to stop giving those leeches money ?

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Because the PM's nephew likes to have lunch in that specific pub and no other.

So the datacenter is in London. QED.

Microsoft China staff can't log on with an Android, so Redmond buys them iThings

It seems obvious that no one at Redmond is thinking of anything.

They can't even renew their certs in time, so something as complicated as ensuring proper authentication . . forget about it.

Eldorado ransomware-as-a-service gang targets Linux, Windows systems

"encrypts files on both Linux and Windows machines"

Wait a minute. I accept that the scumware can encrypt files on Linux, but won't that be limited to the files of the user ?

Unless </headsmack> they've found a privilege escalation hack, of course. But will said privilege escalation hack function on all distros ? I'm guessing not.

Could some Linux aficionados enlighten me on this ? Linux has actual security. How is this possible ?

Coders' Copilot code-copying copyright claims crumble against GitHub, Microsoft

"The judge disagreed [..] on the grounds that the code [..] was not identical enough"

I'm hoping that his analysis was a bit better than just looking at the names of the variables and finding that they weren't the same.

If you submit a given problem to two developers who can't talk to each other and have to use the same programming language and the same algorithm, I submit that there's a fair chance that their code will be similar. In LotusScript, for example, there's not very many ways to get a document from a view and there's only one quick way, so it's pretty obvious that that part of the code will be near-identical between developers. There is, however, one possibility of difference whatever the algorithm : if there are arrays to be used, one developer could program and use said array, the other one could instead use NotesItem. In that case, the code would obviously be markedly different and yet produce the same result.

But such cases are, I would think, few and far between. If you're writing to a file, there's an extremely limited number of ways to do it differently.

Microsoft forgets about SwiftKey's support site

Re: Looks like the intern

Yeah.

One such blunder was bad enough. Two is simply proof that Redmond really doesn't give a damn.

Fraud guilty plea flies from Boeing to swerve courtroom over 737 Max crashes

"a meeting with Boeing's board of directors"

The only way I would be going to a meeting like that is with an Uzi and three extra clips.

To be confronted to sunch a bunch of snakes and know I couldn't do anything about it would be too much, for me.

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Yeah. That sounds very safe to me.

Indeed.

I'm not an electrician, but wiring things into a live installation definitely sounds like something I would not like to do.

Electricity is dangerous enough when you have time to manage it properly. Plugging things in to live voltage is just asking for trouble.

A decade after collapsing, crypto exchange Mt Gox repays some investors

Oh but it is.

It's just that economists don't understand it yet.

Selfie-based authentication raises eyebrows among infosec experts

"typically takes under 20 seconds to complete"

If it says "under 20 seconds", that means more than 10. So, in order to purchase takeaway (I'm guessing), you have to not only consent for your facial biometrics to be captured by some two-bit outfit that will be hacked in under 20 minutes, but you also have to submit to a dystopian-future-style interrogation for a quarter of a minute to prove that you are just an innocent citizen.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Oh, and those small companies have not implemented this as a stopgap. If I know anything about small companies, they are not looking for a better solution. This is the solution.

FCC: T-Mobile US unit gave blind customer the runaround in massive tech support fail

Yes and no.

The company is recieving federal funds for helping disabled people.

Help them. Stop with the procedural phone call scripts and get a human with a brain who knows the system and makes it work.

And you should do that for everyone, actually. And yes, I know : that costs money.

Texas court blocks FTC noncompete ban, and you can blame SCOTUS

The USA is heading for the wall

Trump's manipulation of the Supreme Court is going to guarantee that the USA will spend the next few decades in turmoil and maybe end in a revolution.

It should be illegal to put biased people into such an institution, but the rules only work when people are ready to respect them.

Trump respects no one and, given the number of criminals he has surrounded himself with, it should be a clear sign that this man needs to be removed from politics.

Oh well, he'll be dead of old age soon. But not soon enough.

Cancer patient forced to make terrible decision after Qilin attack on London hospitals

I wish her the best

She's young, she still has her life in front of her. I hope that her cancer is over and that she will be able to live a full and fulfilling life with her spouse and children.

It is horrible to have been put through such an ordeal. Cancer is already bad enough as it is without being forced to make life-changing decisions literally right before going under the knife.

But, having lost my mother to ovarian cancer when she was only 63, I can't help but approve her decision. I'm sure her husband prefers her with one boob rather than not having her at all. Maybe, just maybe, it is a good thing for her and she will be able to have reconstructive surgery at a later date when all is well and the whole problem is over. I just wish her the best.

But it is still criminal to have put her through all that.

Re: just in case one day someone cracks the encryption

I doubt that. Someone would have to be working on the encryption to hack it, and if the disks are stored, nobody is working on it.

But I might well be wrong, and somehow I hope I am.

Paessler pulls subscription licensing switcheroo on PRTG Network Monitor

"3,000 of the 10,000 largest VMware customers"

So, you don't care about the little ones, and you haven't managed to retain 50% of the largest ones.

And you call that a success ?

Latest Ghostscript vulnerability haunts experts as the next big breach enabler

It's either open a file or click a link

There's the remote edge case where you visit a compromised website, but it seems to me that 99% of all malware is still waiting for the user to do something stupid.

Fix that and the miscreants will lose billions overnight.

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

I don't know.

I am personally rather familiar with Sir Humphrey. I absolutely love Yes Minister and its sequel, and I personally consider that it should be mandatory watching for every political student.

Then they can go on to House of Cards, which I abandoned after season 1 because wayyy too plausible and not funny at all.

Oracle releases experimental next-gen kernel build

Btrfs

Excuse me if I am a bit confused, but how many file systems do we actually need ?

I understand why FAT fell by the wayside, and I get that NTFS might not be the best of breed, but it's been since the 1960s that we've been studying the problem.

Why don't we have a good, reliable, standard file system yet ? Why does every vendor still have their own ?

Europol says mobile roaming tech is making its job too hard

"while not impeding secure communications disproportionately"

But it's okay to impede secure comms a little bit - just enough to avoid either putting boots on the ground or, worse, more paperwork like, oh I don't know, a warrant ?

You want to hear what some suspect is saying ? Here's an idea : directional microphone. I hear they work very well.

Of course, that's less easy to put in place than clicking on a keyboard from a thousand kilometers away.