Posts by Pascal Monett

Alaska Airlines grounded itself due to mysterious IT problem

So they were hacked

C'mon, guys, just admit it and we can throw you a "Welcome to the Club !" party.

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

"which did not seem like a good omen"

I have to admit, if I were responsible for something like that in such a company, my butthole would be so clenched I wouldn't even be able to fart until I was told that no, I wasn't fired.

I'm glad that he escaped that episode unscathed (well, almost).

Japan discovers object out beyond Pluto that rewrites the Planet 9 theory

It's impractical. Isn't that a beautiful excuse to not obey the law ?

I'm sorry, Your Honor.

It was impractical for me to not hack that bank account and transfer the $60 million to my account.

I needed the money.

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Coding

It requires a coder. Someone with experience who will understand what you are asking, what the caveats are, and how to implement it on your choice of platform.

In any case, you went from "Wow, this is great ! I'm a coder !" to "Jesus, this thing is shit and I don't trust it" in record time.

And you paid for the privilege.

Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack

Don't worry, Microsoft

Nobody has ever dropped your shitty products because of bugs or security issues.

Carry on !

Re: Guy I know

In France it is forbidden to record images from your property to the sidewalk or street.

You can install a camera that watches your front door on your own property, but if it proven that you can also record people walking their dog on the sidewalk, you're in trouble.

Meta declines to abide by voluntary EU AI safety guidelines

"legal uncertainties"

Translation : we don't know how to milk that cash cow now.

Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state

"we're perfectly able and willing to surveil ourselves"

Yup.

1984, Brazil, and other works (of perfectly valid content and justifiable intentions) were all based on the idea that it is Goverment that is the watchful eye responsible for a dystopian future.

Then along came Facebook and it's been a downhill ride ever since.

I'm rather happy that George Orwell is already dead, because he would certainly have a heart attack if he saw what our "modern" civilization has become.

As companies race to add AI, terms of service changes are going to freak a lot of people out

If they were that clueful about privacy and security, they would be using Sync.

"We regret that our terms caused unnecessary confusion"

No. You regret getting caught.

There was no confusion. There was you slipping in a bit of text written by a highly-paid besuited Porsche-driving lawyer to ensure that, in the future, all of your options were open and available.

Unfortunately, it would appear that there are people who actually bother to take the time to read those coma-inducing piles of legalese (no, it's not English, it's its own language) and who have enough knowledge themselves to decrypt and unravel the truth behind the waffling.

And it would appear that, this time, they are not your friends.

Who knew ?

Watch out, another max-severity, make-me-root Cisco bug on the loose

Bleak, but I can't fault you.

Yeah, but that's called work.

Something you avoid generally for as long as you can.

Re: What is the tally now for Cisco?

On this you are perfectly right.

Huawei got crucified because it was Chinese. No proof, no demonstration of vulnerability, just chanting over and over again "Huawei must obey Beijing. It's a threat to our security !"

Well, Cisco must obey Washington, but I don't hear anybody complaining. And Cisco is apparently a very real threat to our security.

Time for Britain's CMA to strike hard – or risk losing the cloud competition fight

Not a lot of enthusiasm here

Then again, there's not much to be had.

But saying that you're broke ? I think that's going a bit too far.

You are generating wealth. You're just not the ones that are benefitting from it.

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

"told the software guy the machine ran fully validated production code"

Then why was the software guy there in the first place ?

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

Re: Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out

You do not ally with Windows.

You submit, or you don't. You'll get the shaft anyway.

Laid-off AWS employee describes cuts as 'cold and soulless'

How interesting

The CEO predicts layoffs and, lo and behold, they happen.

Gosh. What power of vision. What insight. What courage.

I'm breathless.

Ukrainian hackers claim to have destroyed major Russian drone maker's entire network

Re: Lesson

Unfortunately, business and infrastructure do not learn until something blows up in their face.

Infrastructure has been warned repeatedly and continuously for the past 25 years. It hasn't changed anything, apparently.

As for business, what to say ? I guess it costs less to get hacked than it does to have competent people doing their job. That's a Board-level decision and, if they're happy with the consequences, I don't care more than they do.

Re: Well

Your reply sparked a thought and I tried doing some research.

I found this, and I thought I should share.

People can, and sometimes do, kill. No question there. The circumstances matter, though.

If I find someone raping my daughter or my wife, he had better pray that the police are not far because I will slaughter him with the nearest sharp or blunt object I can get my hands on.

If you attack me with the clear intent of ending my life (for whatever reason), and I have a gun at hand, I will defend myself and shoot you. If I don't have a gun, I will fight for my life and if you die, well, you started it.

If you tell me that thousands of invaders are coming, give me an assault rifle and a handful of mags, and ask me to defend my fellow citizens, I do believe I will try to make every bullet count.

But if you hand me that gun and mags, ship me off to a place I've never been before and might not even have ever heard of, and then order me to go kill some people I don't know and never will for some reason that has nothing to do with me, I'm not convinced that I will become Rambo and go kill everything that moves.

Well

Whether or not this claim is valid, it does indicate that future warfare is not going to content itself with only what is happening on the front lines.

If Napoleon failed to conquer Russia with his Great Army, if Hitler failed to even get to Moscow, if the Japanese failed to hold their conquests in the Pacific during WWII, it all boils down to supply.

I don't remember the exact figures, but I seem to remember that, in WWII, for every US soldier sent into battle, there were 100 people working 24/7 to get him his ammo, food, gear and whatever else he needed.

Napoleon said an army marches with its stomach. That may have been enough back in the day, but today's modern armies need way more than just food.

And successfully hindering any part of that supply line could make quite a difference in the final outcome.

Google sues 25 alleged BadBox 2.0 botnet operators, all of whom are in China

Loved that

"and crime, too"

Oh yeah, there's that. Might as well tack it on.

Superbly done, El Reg.

OpenAI deputizes ChatGPT to serve as an agent that uses your computer

"told to behave and observe safeguards"

And be a good little boy and play nice. For fuck's sake, I can understand that Marketing believes this bullshit but how in the world can anyone with functioning neurons swallow this and actually believe it ?

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

Stop pretending. Wake the fuck up.

Or do I have to drop in the Board meetings with a cluebat ? Because I'm starting to think I do, and I'm starting to kinda want to do it.

Intel swings the axe again as it looks to lose 5,000 staff

"After coasting on its x86 dominance for decades"

Indeed. And the AMD Thunderbird was the first sign that Intel was on its way to the old people's home.

AMD fought tooth and nail to climb and gain recognition, while Intel puttered about. Sure, in the 90s Intel was the king, no question there. But when AMD was first to have a Ghz CPU, Intel should have seen the writing on the wall.

It didn't.

As usual, it's the employees that will pay the big price, while the Board and management will retain their high salaries and bonuses and get hired elsewhere with similar paychecks.

Yet, it is not the employees who failed.

JWST peers through dusty curtain to catch young star making baby planets

I love Science.

UK tech minister negotiated nothing with Google. He may get even less than that

And I note that you post anonymously, so you're so proud, are you ?

Uber to roll out thousands of robo-cabs built by China’s Baidu

Uber

Now part of Xi Ping's information network.

Apparently, those shits are clawing their way up in the world.

Britain's billion-pound F-35s not quite ready for, well, anything

Re: we'd make our own aircraft

But . . that's expensive . . .

Nvidia to resume sales to China – with Trump administration approval

"attending a million-bucks-a-plate meal at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home"

That is one fucking expensive McDonalds kid meal.

Scientists spot massive black hole collision that defies current theories

"Black holes this massive are forbidden"

Black holes this massive don't care about your puny theories.

Oooo, I see what you did there.

Nvidia CEO says China wouldn't risk building military supers with American AI chips

"they'll build on their own"

Now, all together <hand raised> : thank you Trump !.

You reap what you sow, and Trump is sowing shit better than a herd of pigs ever could.

That said, with the amount of Big Macs he's eating . . .

A software-defined radio can derail a US train by slamming the brakes on remotely

Excuse me

It's the railroad industry in the US.

They already don't give a fuck.

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

Typical Musk

Claim yet another Great Advancement For Humanity, and see it blow up in his face.

He could be the Buster Keaton of our time - if you remove intelligence, humor and class from the equation.

EU-sponsored report says GenAI's 'fair use' defense does not compute

Re: So Europe loses out on an AI future

That doesn't sound like so much of a bad thing to me.

It's not even the LLM's developers, it's the billionnaire asshats who own the whole thing and they're not doing any reading, for sure.

They're counting (money, of course).

Stopping the rot when good software goes bad means new rules from the start

"Short of running a full verification process on each update"

And, pray tell, why is that not happening ?

Does Google not have enough computing power to make its portal secure ? Does it not have enough money for that ?

It doesn't give a flying fuck is the problem.

<old man ranting mode ON>Once upon a time, we didn't have the luxury of downloading updates. We had to wait for the next month's magazine CD to deliver an update to us (if we were lucky). Magazine that we had to pedal uphill to get, and we had to pedal uphill to go back home and install it. That's why our programs worked, because they had to.<old man ranting mode forgotten being ON>.

Mumble, mumble, kids these days . . .

UK's NCA disputes claim it's nearly three times less efficient than the FBI

Um, just a minute, there

"The FBI covers more ground than the NCA. Unlike its UK cousins, the feds are tasked with investigating crimes such as murders and armed robberies, and it also leads on counter-terrorism, none of which fall under the NCA's remit. "

So, the argument the NCA is advancing is that the FBI has to cover more territory, more types of crime and also follow leads on counter-terrorism, so their numbers are better.

Let's turn that around, shall we ? The NCA has one thing to look at in a comparatively puny part of the world and it is still three times less efficient than the FBI.

I don't see that argument making you look good, NCA.

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

the Atari 2600

Teaching "modern" AI that it is not to be fucked with.

Google Indonesia tangled up in $600 million Chromebook corruption probe

"Europe and Japan both plan satellite communications constellations"

Astronomers are going to be giddy with excitement.

You have a fake North Korean IT worker problem – here's how to stop it

So, Fortune 500 companies are wasting money and time

They're actively trying to spend the least to get the "most qualified" and so will not spend one cent on checking who said "most qualified" says he is.

And I'm supposed to shed a tear over this ?

Could we get a Fuck You icon ?

AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster, study finds

"AI didn't understand the context"

Of course not. What is repeatedly called AI these days doesn't "understand". It does not have the capacity to do so.

Period.

Keep chipping away at the monolith though. When it is reduced to rubble, the landscape will be clearer.

ICANN fumes as AFRINIC offers no explanation for annulled election

Power of Attorney

Ah, don't you just love it when cheaters and criminals drape themselves in the trappings of law while absolutely not respecting the barest of its rules ?

Africa, the Cradle of Humanity, still hasn't got with the program. It's the 3rd Millenium BCE. You don't pretend to use Power of Attorney and have records mysteriously altered.

You Trump it, scream "Fake News !" and then wander the lawn aimlessly in front of the cameras while not answering any questions. Preferably with a helicopter revving up in the background.

Now, ICANN, I'm still waiting to find out what you do about mess, apart from fuming.

More license upheaval to come after SAP kills RISE with SAP products, users warn

SAP

The king of redefining contractual obligations and licenses from which Oracle and every other useless cloud-based bullshit company has written their lines of conduct.

BOFH: The auditor is asking too many questions. We have just the laptop for that

"We're having more problems with auditors"

Oh, come now. It's nothing a nice roll of carpet can't solve, now is it ?

Chinese censorship-busters claim Tencent is trying to kill its WeChat archive

Keep up the fight

And find a hosting company that has some balls and doesn't run screaming like a scaredy-cat as soon as a sternly-worded bullshit letter arrives in their Inbox.

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

"Boris took matters into his own hands and got a new job"

Yes, I do believe that that was the best thing he could do.

Betweeen the idiot hiring an ex-convict as company lawyer and the bitch getting her buddy (lover ?) to be paid for a Wordpress website hosting private data, that company was obviously a complete write-off and nothing good could have come from trying to actually make things work correctly.

French cops cuff Russian pro basketball player on ransomware charges

"He's useless with computers and can't even install an application"

Funny how many managers I know who would fit that description.

He's a basketball player. That's hardly your typical description of a hacker. I hope things will get cleared out for him, and quickly.

Ex-ASML engineer who stole chip tech for Russia gets three years in Dutch prison

"I didn't ask"

Well you're in the clear, then, right ?

I mean, you can't possibly be guilty if you didn't know you were doing anything wrong, eh ?

I have one question : is stupidity a virus ? Because there seems to be a fucking trainload of people who have caught it, these days.

Thousands of NASA senior staffers expected to quit after budget slashed

"as we work within a more prioritized budget"

Yes, the priority being : to kill you.

One thing you have to give Trump is his uncanny efficiency at destroying any company he touches.

He is Midas, but his touch is shit, not gold.