Posts by Pascal Monett

Don't fear the reap... er, automation: Puppet hopes to make IT boring, says that's a good thing

"There's a lot of drama around deployments because they aren't fully tested."

Not to mention that they might not even have been fully thought-through.

I have the feeling these days that sysadmins do not have the time to project and plan, they have to put out fires all the time because management pushes things through that always have to be done yesterday.

The IT department that has a comprehensive list of all applications, servers and functionalities, up to date and with dependencies, probably doesn't exist.

As such, when it is time to deploy something, the approach is very much "do it and see what breaks". Oh sure, they'll have had meetings and they'll have defined what the end result needs to be, but nobody will have listed everything that can break and what needs to be done beforehand to avoid the issue.

Just recently I was at a site that had just deployed a new domain for a company that had been acquired. I was called in to help re-stitch the relevant links in their applications. It was a process of check, control, correct. Meaning that I had to go through all the apps I knew of in their existing domain, and check that the configurations and code were properly modified to include the new domain and function with it.

I was not given a checklist, nor was I aware that they knew what needed to be fixed. Thankfully, I knew what apps I was in charge of there, and I also knew a bit about a few others, so things were under control rather quickly.

I can't say that things were very well planned, though.

Apple's iPhone X won't experience the joy of 6...

Re: Numbers

"Will Apple's share price really be affected by only selling 245 million iPhone-Xs?"

Of course it will be. You're talking about the Stock Market, where you only increase share value if you exceed expectations. Merely matching expectations means only a slight dip in share value.

This stems from the same mentality that wants marketing guys to increase their revenue by 20% each year - never mind if the market has reached saturation.

Our society does not know how to handle just surviving. Every one of those multi-billion dollar multinational companies that rake in revenue by the boatload cannot just continue to manage their portfolio, that is stagnation and thus death. No, they are all judged by how much more revenue they generate, even if there is no room left to increase market share. It's the nature of an economy that pushes everything towards monopoly status. If you're not on top, you're not worth it.

Concerns raised about privacy, GDPR as Lords peer over Data Protection Bill

"The intelligence services already comply with robust data-handling obligations"

Yeah, as in "send everything to the NSA".

As for the rest, I can't help of thinking about this particular episode of Yes Minister.

IT admins hate this one trick: 'Having something look like it’s on storage, when it is not'

"any time you rely on humans/users to do something it never works"

On that point, I have to agree.

I cannot count the number of companies I worked in or consulted to who struggle to get users to archive mail. The mailbox is the number one critical application in many companies, and network disk sizes are always on the verge of overflowing.

In order to get things under control, often the only solution is to arbitrarily impose a cutoff date and archive anything older than that. Then you get grumbling in the ranks, although curiously most of the time the impact on actual work is minimal.

European Patent Office staff rep blames prez for 'slipping quality'

Re: why don't you fight to acquire some new rights ?

I am self-employed, so I am fighting for my rights every damn day, thank you very much.

@druck

Wrong argument. Home leave is not for people who have yet to relocate, it is for people who already have relocated.

For people who have yet to relocate, there is the Installation Allowance, ie one month salary bonus. Then there is the Expatriate Allowance, from 16% to 20% of the basic monthly allowance.

Then there is the possibility of Rent Allowance, meaning that you get your pay plus bonuses and don't have to pay your rent either.

And there's all the rest, which you obviously have not read.

Nice job if you can it, any way you look at it. Well, it'll be nice as soon as Batistelli moves out.

Home leave ?

I despise Batestelli and want his pension revoked, but 10 days extra leave every two years because you've moved far from mommy ?

I have to admit, if the EPO has money for all those advantages, it might be time to review the amount of money the EPO has.

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

"encryption isn't protected by the American Constitution"

It doesn't have to be.

Encryption is protected by encryption. And that's the best protection there is.

For the rest, if all law enforcement agencies have is an encrypted message, then I demand they show what proof they have that that message is so important. If they have done their job, then they have suspect location and time, witnesses and DNA evidence (flawed as that may be) and a host of other clues that point to guilt. In that case, the message is supplementary evidence and they should be able to do without it to obtain a conviction.

Re: "if the fate of the world depends on breaking an unbreakable message"

Um, theoretically the issue is about crime and terrorism, not James Bond-level evil geniuses.

For that level, you have James Bond and his unbreakable-encrypted-message cracker : the spanner on the kneecap.

Indeed. There's no constitutional right to sell bread either. What kind of effing argument is that ?

Equifax: About those 400,000 UK records we lost? It's now 15.2M. Yes, M for MEELLLION

My mother's maiden name is Spongebob.

I've just checked that link and I'm incensed and somewhat frightened at the same time. Just by opening an account in the UK, you are automatically included in one or more credit reference agency's files. Is there any mention of that in your Ts & Cs when you open the account ? I'm guessing maybe, but maybe not. Can you opt out if there is ? Hah !

That takes me to wondering how things are managed in France. Banks lend money (sometimes), so they have a customer history. Do they share it and how ? I know that there is a national register of people that are forbidden from having a checkbook or credit/debit card, but that is not managed by a private company.

Questions, questions.

'Israel hacked Kaspersky and caught Russian spies using AV tool to harvest NSA exploits'

Re: "Duqu is Israeli"

Citation please ?

Because the wiki page makes no mention of country of origin.

Google: This may shock you, but we also banked thousands of dollars to run Russian propaganda

"a formal and strict policy of only accepting political ads from organizations within the country"

Yeah, because it is so difficult to register a non-profit organization in any given country. Or set up an account that fakes an organization.

Wow, what a barrier. Democracy is safe with that. Not.

Apple's iOS password prompts prime punters for phishing: Too easy now for apps to swipe secrets, dev warns

You don't need to fake flawlessly - 90% of users will just go through and input a password, the same way PC users have been trained to click OK on any popup that keeps them from what they intended to do.

Alerts, checks and information mean nothing when the user doesn't care anyway.

Et tu Accenture? Then fall S3er: Consultancy giant leaks private keys, emails and more online

"We have a multi-layered security model"

Yeah. Shame that apparently none of those layers include not publishing passwords in unsecured repositories (cloud or not).

I don't give a damn about your security model. What just happened is a clear breach of security and if I were a customer I would be raising holy hell right now.

Cortana, please finish my sentences in Skype texts for me

Another good excuse

to get your location details. Apparently it's for restaurant suggestions. Yeah, sure, 90% of Skype interaction is obviously just people wondering where to go to eat.

Here's a suggestion, Cortana : it's the 3rd Millennium - how's about you make location data an option and let people add it when they feel like getting restaurant suggestions ? It's not like that kind of data is not already available on Google Maps anyway.

Video games used to be an escape. Now not even they are safe from ads

Re: Battlefield 2142

I remember when that game came out all the BF2 fans were up in arms about it (aka torches and pitchforks). The amount of discussion was really impressive in the forums.

I didn't like the idea at all, but BF2142 was just too interesting to pass on. Then the interesting thing happened : I cannot for the life of me remember any of the billboards. When you're in that game, you don't have time to check them out, you're looking for targets or trying to avoid being one.

So, all in all, if they do adgaming like in BF2142, I say bring it on, I can easily ignore them.

However, the day they make an ad mandatory viewing for whatever reason is the day I stop playing that game. In-game awards ala TF2* ? Please. I'm past 50, I know what grinding is. If you have skewed your game so that awards are the only way to progress, I'm out anyway.

* that said, the awards in TF2 are cosmetic only, so I quickly ignored all that because the game is fun.

Calm down, Elon. Deep learning won't make AI generally intelligent

"AI is more artificial idiot than artificial intelligence"

AI is Artificial Intelligence.

Just because journalists insist on continuing to abuse the term does not mean that AI has lost its meaning.

Journalists need to learn to not spaff headlines with "AI" as soon as some new computer tech shows the end of its nose. Of course, "New Tech Might Help Sub-Process Which Could Result In Getting Closer To AI" does not sell as well as "New Tech Set To Bring Us AI Next Year".

And that is the whole problem with AI.

Stealthy storage startup wants to fly read-write heads closer to disks

I'd heard that HDD heads are about as close to the disk as a Boeing 747 flying a few inches above the runway. And I second the gliding on turbulence bit.

I wish these guys all the luck, but I'm a wee bit skeptical on their chances of success.

That said, whatever they try can just as well bring benefits down the line, so go for it !

Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it

Microsoft is suffering from a desperate mind-set of locking people in

As stated in the article, we already have two lock-in vendors who remain steadfastly incompatible with each other. The difference with Microsoft is that Apple and Android are actually useful and, generally speaking, perform adequately.

If a new ecosystem is to rise, it will have to be open. Not necessarily open-source, but open. That is the strength of Linux, and the reason why it endures. If another closed-source OS maker tried to enter the market today, it would be a doomed effort from the start.

Microsoft, with its many, many billions in the bank, could have been the sugar daddy for this kind of phone, but it couldn't imagine not locking people in and Windows-ing the whole thing. Microsoft has the money, but not the intelligence. On this, Nadella was right to scrap the whole thing.

Moon trumps Mars in new US space policy

Re: Law of averages...

That is not actually a joke ;)

Seriously though : whaddya know ? Trump can finally honestly say that he has accomplished something !

Re: "neither the moon, nor Mars are of any LONG TERM space-political value"

I beg to differ. Either one allows us to have members of the human species elsewhere than on a single planet, which has the long term interest of keeping our species alive in case Earth gets wiped out by a major asteroid strike.

As for the Lagrange points, they only cover Earth access. When we finally become a space-faring species, that will have zero effect on colonies situated in the Outer Planet area. Assuming we get some people over there, of course.

It's 4PM on Friday, almost time to log off and, oh look, Disqus says it's been hacked

Maybe, but El Reg has yet to have its user list hacked.

Let's go live now to Magic Leap and... Ah, still making millions from made-up tech

"The startup I'm waiting to see is the specialist Law Firm dedicated to locating, debunking and financially eviscerating these farcical scams and the credulous VCs who fuel them."

Never going to happen because this is private capital and you have the right to piss off your money any way you feel like it. It's up to the VCs to not get taken in by bogus claims or overbearing personalities.

No, because when you launder money you want to get it back.

In this case, the VCs are losing money and the one spending it won't have anything to give back.

npm adds two-factor auth, security tokens in wake of JS typo attack

OTP integration is a Good Thing (TM)

Looks like the various ways to manage/integrate one time passwords is going to become another notch on the indispensable security section of any developer's CV.

And the sooner developers master those tools and brag about it, the better for everyone.

Russian spies used Kaspersky AV to hack NSA staffer, swipe exploit code – new claim

Re: "no self respecting spook would be caught using Microsoft Windows to do their spying"

Given that almost 90% of all desktops these days are still under Redmond's rule, I don't see how you can realistically avoid using Windows all the time.

Now, a spook should know better than to use a Windows machine for work, I'd think, but the real problem here stems from the very probable fact that, spook or no, management will be using Windows and management wants their time sheets, planning, expense reports etc done on time. I haven't heard of a lot of Linux versions of the products that handle that, so you'll be most likely using Windows for all that stuff.

Compound that with the natural human tendency to be lazy - especially in the geek arena - and you have a contractor bringing work from a secure environment to an environment where security is an afterthought because who wants National Security-level hassle on one's private network ? To go on Youtube ? Nah, no need.

Add a zest of overconfidence (I got a super strong password on my wifi router) and willful ignorance (hey, it's me, nobody's interested in what I'm doing anyway) and here we are today, learning that Russia can read stuff on your PC via an anti-virus program.

The basic mistake here is a contractor leaving the NSA building with confidential documents and no oversight. I work regularly at various client sites (banks, insurance companies, ...) as a contractor ; do you have any idea how many places I can slip a USB key in the slot and copy files onto it ? Zero. I have complete access to server files, sometimes I even have admin access to the server itself, but USB ? Forget it.

Why is this even possible at a site that is practically the brain of National Security ?

I don't get it.

Here's a gentle guide to building JavaScript AI in web browsers. Totally not a scary thing

Well, it's Deep Learning, so it sends everything back to them.

The image recognition processing is not done on the PC, I'll wager.

DeepMind now has an ethics unit – which may have helped when it ate 1.6m NHS patient details

Re: "why is this not being developed [..] for the benefit of the people"

Because there's not enough money to develop anything for the benefit of people who won't be paying for the service.

The real question is why does NHS not have the expertise to do this in-house, to which the answer is obvious : not enough budget to retain staff that are competent enough.

The day NHS has the budget to advertise for a Big Data technician with top qualifications that pays more than private industry is the day you are loudly complaining to your MP that healthcare is costing you way too much on your monthly salary.

There's really no way out of this.

Amazon told to repay €250m in 'unfair state aid' from Luxembourg

Amazon said: "We believe..."

Well duh. What an indispensable statement. Really, I was on the verge of thinking that Amazon thought it didn't pay enough tax and was forced by Luxembourg to reduce the amount. Thank you for the clarification, Amazon.

This PR bullshit is really starting to get on my nerves. The fact that the state of Luxembourg says they believe Amazon did not benefit is actually news. The fact that Amazon thinks so is just obvious because they'd say so even if they knew it was not the case.

Li-quid hot mag-ma: There's a Martian meteorite in your backyard. How'd it get there?

"an asteroid hit the volcano, leaving a crater and sending the materials rocketing to Earth"

Given that an atmosphere would likely have slowed down the ejecta by a significant margin, would that mean that, at that time, Mars already had no atmosphere ?

We know that it lost its magnetic field billions of years ago, could that not help determine when ?

What is the probability of being drunk at work and also being tested? Let's find out! Correctly

Not a beer drinker, so ..

Wasn't aware that beer could have that kind of effect.

So I have to amend my position on alcohol in the morning, since it could simply mean that you had "too much" the night before. I'm okay with that, although I will be encouraging you to drink lots of water during the day.

A certain bias, there

"It assumes [..] that an employee is coming in with alcohol in their system (drunk) 12 times in a working year."

If you have one glass of wine with your noon meal, you do have alcohol in your system. You are not necessarily drunk, though.

What this means is that it is apparently considered that 0% is the only acceptable percentage of alcohol in the blood in a working environment. Seems a tad draconian to me, but I'm French, so . .

On the other hand, any level of alcohol when coming in to work in the morning is obviously unacceptable because it means that the person has been drinking on the way to work, which is a clear sign that they need professional help and cannot function normally.

Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049

"Never got Bladerunner either"

No one is obliged to like any film.

For Bladerunner, take it as visual and audio poetry. That might help with the mindset.

Just a suggestion.

I saw the film before reading the book.

I fell in love with the film, but the book left me disappointed.

Must have been the absence of Vangelis background music in the book at the time.

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

Re: If (When?) they get their way...

I'm almost of an opinion that we should do something about creating a backdoored encryption scheme and, of course, make it mandatory to use with all government officials and communications.

That to see just how fast they backpedal when the inevitable cracked account spills horrendous details on their personal lives that they would have preferred kept secret.

Either that or to see how they squirm to avoid having such a scheme applied to them because they full well know that they could get hacked in the first place. Cue endless arguments about how it is "not needed" at high levels and somesuch, which would just demonstrate their hypocrisy to the world.

But it can't happen and that's a good thing. I'll just have to fantasize about them getting ridiculed that way. Or I could just wait for them to ridicule themselves. Won't be long.

Never is.

Russian bot-herder and election-fiddling suspect closer to US trial

"I will die within a year"

He's a Tom Clancy fan, then ?

Seriously though, although I am ready to believe that CIA agents are perfectly capable of killing a high-profile, wanted individual of any nationality if there is a need, if he was in such danger from US spymasters he might have wanted to avoid going to a US-extradition-friendly country in the first place ?

When you play the game, you play it all the way. If you are aware that you have information that is so badly wanted by a given country, you plan your life around avoiding getting caught by that country.

The fact that he did not do so signifies that his claims are rather on the bogus side, or at least that he is not the professional spy he thinks he is.

Dropbox thinks outside the … we can't go there, not when a box becomes a 'collection of surfaces'

"juxtaposes colours in bold, unexpected ways"

Sorry, looks all blue to me. And I don't know their logo well enough to remember any difference with the previous version.

As for bold, unexpected ways, I would expect piss-yellow next to turd-brown, with some lime green on top. That would certainly be unexpected and quite bold. Maybe not very successful, though.

Oracle VP: 'We want the next decade to be Java first, Java always'

"Java [..] is the number-one programming language"

His argument, apparently, is because of the number of thingys that run it, essentially. Number which is respectable indeed, except that I will never forgive whoever thought it was a good idea to put Java in a Blu-Ray player.

But if he can use his metrics to justify his position, then I can propose another number one programming language as well : COBOL. Because without COBOL, VISA, MasterCard and American Express, not to mention PayPal, all grind to a sudden halt and the world's economy collapses in the hour.

Java, with all its faults, doesn't hold a candle to that.

ISIS and Jack Daniel's: One of these things is not like the other

I wonder

How drunk do you have to be to confuse the two ?

And how much more drunk do you have to be to forget that you live in Switzerland, next to a bar ?

Azure fell over for 7 hours in Europe because someone accidentally set off the fire extinguishers

From the looks of it, cogs were falling off all over the place

So, let's countdown the failures :

-VMs were axed

- Backup vaults were not available

- Azure Site Recovery lost failover ability

- Azure Scheduler and Functions dropped jobs

- Azure Monitor and Data Factory experienced pipeline errors

- Azure Stream Analytics went on the fritz

- Azure Stream Analytics had a stroke

Apart from that, the Cloud is marvelous, never fails you and you can always access your data.

Except when it FUBARs and no backup is working any more, but the salespeople will never tell you that.

Nailing a cloud project without killing Bob boils down to not being a tool

All valid points, with one caveat

If the management cannot stick to the plan, all your points are moot.

So basically the success of any complex project is based on whether not management can cope with not interfering all the time. The rest is par for the course, but you can have the most brilliant team in the world and the project can still fail if manglement can't stay away long enough for stuff to get done.

HPE coughed up source code for Pentagon's IT defenses to ... Russia

"the code was revealed at one of its offices outside Russia"

Let me get this straight : a private company responsible for National-Security-level software actually let a foreign power (who is actually irrelevant) view the source code for that software and nobody is in jail for treason ?!?

So the rules only apply for lone sysadmins, then ?

Sheesh.

Open World? More like closed world: Women sue Oracle for 'paying them less' than blokes

"doing away entirely with the need to decide who to pay"

So, updates and backups are being automated, now it's employee pay.

Hey, Larry, why don't you just automate the CEO ? Then you can go off and play in your jet or your yacht.

Because automating employee pay is in no way ever going to come back and bite your ass. Sure.

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

"To model just a few hundred electrons needs a computer bigger than the universe"

Okay, I know I'm the village idiot next to these guys and I'm sure they know what they're talking about, but that sentence really bugs me. It is probably due to the sentence further down that says that adding another particle doubles the size of the model, so they just did an exponential of 2 to the 100th power and yeah, for sure that's big, but is that really how the simulator would work ?

What if it was a quantum simulator and each particle was thus analyzed by a quantum dot that considered all of its possible positions simultaneously ? Isn't that how it should work ?

I don't know. It's way too early for this anyway. I'm quitting this before the headaches start.

Life began after meteorites splashed into warm ponds of water, say astronomers

Re: Why highlight meteorites?

You might say that it is science, and science needs to quantify everything. As such, they are basically highlighting the fact that meteorites are, in their scenario, an almost insignificant factor in the accumulation of carbon compounds on Earth. They just don't say so explicitly.

Nobel Prize for boffins who figured out why you feel like crap after long-haul flights

Even Fozzie got his revenge.

Java security plagued by crappy docs, complex APIs, bad advice

@David 55

Yes, IBM Notes developer. Domino is still supported until 2022+.

But I do agree that my list of clients is on a very straight downward incline.

Oracle promises ‘highly automated’ security in self-driving database

Re: "Ellison said it would automatically provision, patch,..."

and "automatically backup".

That in itself sounds like a bold claim to make. Backups need to be managed, if only to ensure that someone can find out when the backup crapped itself and failed.

Humans are not just there to make mistakes, they also serve as monitoring equipment and pick-up-the-pieces equipment. Automating everyone away is not going to do much good when you need to restore from yesterday's backup only to find out that the backup has failed for the past week and no one knew anything about it.

You never hear of automated restores, now do you ?