Posts by Pascal Monett

Encryption backdoor debate 'done and dusted,' former White House tech advisor says

Madness

So, on the one hand, I'm supposed to support backdooring encryption and now, I'm supposed to be convinved that E2EE is a Good Thing^TM.

Would you care to get your fucking message straight ?

US logic in question, but perhaps American memory can still prevail

"They stole our chip business"

Wrong.

They took what you didn't want to bother yourself with.

Don't blame low-income countries for taking the jobs you didn't want to pay for in order to maximize your margins.

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

FORTRAN.

Yeah. That language that was specifically created for printing accounting results.

I'm sure that would do wonders for enhancing Linux.

Call me when they've ported Doom to FORTRAN.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

GOTO

Yeah, dump on GOTO.

Let's completely ignore that Assembly language doesn't have any other means of pointing a program to another part of code . . .

Assembly.It's the language the computer understands.

Everything else is made for your convenience.

Accenture wins £35M more UK tax work without competition despite promise to 'disaggregate'

"which was not envisaged and catered for"

So, basically you admit that you don't have a fucking clue what you're doing.

One would think that the past five decades of administration would enlighten you to your own requirements, but apparently that is a bit too much to expect.

Stumbling ERP project racks up sales losses greater than budget

"The SAP dashboard lacked the clarity of the previous system"

Okay, one question : how the fuck is SAP still not capable of producing a clear system ?

It's not like SAP was created a year ago, right ?

So, don't you have procedures by now ?

Especially given the cost you demand ?

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

Indeed.

It is high time top IT companies stop presuming that they have the right to decide for their customers.

They have the power, not the right.

Screwed by the cloud: Hardware vendors looking for that raison d'refresh

So, HPE has found another excuse for a raft of upgrades

Anything is good to make customers spend their money, eh McDonald ?

Who paid you for this report ? Do you really think I believe that you're being objective ?

Edgio bankruptcy results in endpoint change for Microsoft

"this option wasn't being made available"

And who exactly is the jackass that made that decision ?

Boffins ponder paltry brain data rate of 10 bits per second

10 frames per second ? I seem to recall that films are projected at 25 frames per second, and I haven't heard anyone complain about that.

US Army soldier who allegedly stole Trump's AT&T call logs arrested

#FREEWAIFU

Yeah.

Looks like you're going to need a #FREEME now.

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

Re: all airports will need to rethink their design

Yeah, that's obviously a really simple thing to do.

Report claims FAA ignores most whistleblower complaints

Well, that's it then

The reputation of the FAA is now officially ruined.

Not only did it allow private interests to game the system, but it also ignores possible safety issues without due analysis.

The FAA was once, like so many official bodies, a bastion of integrity and reliability.

As with all the rest these days, that has gone to Hell in a handbasket.

What a shining future we have, protected by all those corporate interests.

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone, while you're still alive . . .

More telcos confirm China Salt Typhoon security breaches as White House weighs in

"allowed Beijing to 'geolocate millions of individuals' "

Oh my $Deity, now Beijing knows that hundreds of thousands of people live in Detroit !

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Re: "if I couldn't write a mouse driver, I didn't deserve a mouse."

Yeah but, if that's how we handled the computing revolution, we wouldn't be posting stuff here.

And I wonder what that guy was doing about his car. Did he overhaul the engine every year ? If not, did he deserve a car ?

Microsoft adds another problem to the Windows 11 24H2 naughty list

The fact that testing for everything is objectively impossible does not absolve Borkzilla from the duty of testing what it can before deploying.

It is not up to the customer to inform Redmond of the results of the update.

Yeah, but that implies that you know what you're doing.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Good point.

It would still be awesome though.

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Thank you El Reg

Thank you all for your tireless dedication to entertain and inform us - or is it inform and entertain us ? - about all things IT and loosely related.

I hope you've all had a good festive season and I look forward to reading you for years to come.

Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain

Re: Small thinking

Aristotle's work is public domain. When he was alive, he was far from poor and spent his time in seminars and teaching.

He was quite successful in his own time. No need to transport our "modern" values to him.

Microsoft investigating 365 Office activation gremlin

It's updated regulary, so yes, there is a new one several times a year.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Fresh eyes

I had a case where a script I had written on client site just refused to work.

I know how to write code. I've been writing code for practically all my working life. This code should have worked. But it didn't.

Try as I might, I banged my head against a brick wall for more than an hour. The I called for help. The project manager (who knew code) came to take a look. He didn't find any fault. That was fine and dandy, but it didn't solve the problem.

He called a colleague. After a full half an hour of code review and discussion, someone (not me, but can't remember who) mentioned : "hey, shouldn't those be points in the mail address ?".

Problem solved, with three sets of eyeballs after an hour of debugging.

Sometimes there are things that you just can't see for yourself.

Re: Bluffing

Yup, happened to me too.

Client was ranting about a script that wasn't doing its job anymore. Instead of asking the coder (who had apparently left), I was the one it fell on to try and find a solution.

Thankfully, my 30 years of coding experience in another language (and ample what-the-frak-is-this experience) allowed me to pinpoint the solution, and leave the client happy.

I have never done coding so by the seat of my pants as that.

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Re: MICROSOFT FAIL!

Well, to be honest, it's pretty good at that.

And yet, it's still there.

Infosec experts divided on AI's potential to assist red teams

"We're going to have to use more and more of it"

Well great.

Here we have this utterly useless tool and now we find that we're just going to have to use it, instead of ignoring it entirely.

Since when has Humanity abandoned the idea that a tool should be efficient and its use justifiable ?

We are all just running downhill without a care in the world for what is waiting at the bottom.

Take a step back, breath, and start thinking about where you're going and what you're doing.

Supreme Court to hear TikTok's appeal against law that would force it to shut, or sell

"their right to free speech"

As usual, confusing a right with a commercial platform that has nothing to do with Free Speech.

You have Free Speech. You can go to the street and yell and rant against the President, the Government and whatever other political figure you want, you will not get arrested for it.

Tik Tok (or any other "social media" platform) has nothing to do with your right to Free Speech.

In a just world, that appeal would be trown out on that basis alone.

Intel sued again over struggling foundry business

"sued yet again by shareholders"

Shareholders should not have the right to sue the company.

You don't like what the comapny is doing ?

Sell your shares.

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Re: Banking Software Quality

Yeah, but that takes TIME and it costs MONEY and, most importantly, it makes those at the top RESPONSIBLE.

We can't have that, now can we ?

Just how deep is Nvidia's CUDA moat really?

"people want to write at higher levels of abstraction"

Well duh, ya think ?

Who wants to write code like

ASR A

BCC ASC

LDA A ACIA+1

AND A #$7F

Not me. I prefer writing

Function getASC(data as String) as Integer

Dim Char as String

Char = left(data,1)

getASC = ASC(Char)

End Function

When I look at Assembly code, I have no effin' clue what it is supposed to be doing, whereas even a non-developer can take a guess at what my preferred code is doing.

Phishers cast wide net with spoofed Google Calendar invites

Think before you click

There is an astounding amount of adults who just blindly trust anything they see on their smartphones (because that is where the action is now).

Just last week one of my wife's friends complained about her phone having been hacked. Turns out my wife had sent her a URL to a shop store following one of their (lengthy) discussions, and instead of using the link my wife sent her, she went to FaceBook instead, and obviously she clicked on some scammer link and now her phone is in tatters.

She's a retired schoolteacher. You'd think that she'd have enough brains to use the link her friend sent her.

I guess not.

Taiwan in talks to tap Amazon's Project Kuiper space broadband

"Kuiper is the most mature service of its sort"

Well, there's a chance that Bezos won't be going cutting off countries at a whim, and Bezos is entirely more mature than Musk, so I'll have to agree with that assessment.

That said, Starlink is operational, even if Musk blows a gasket now and then, so it might have made sense to go there first and negotiate with Kuiper when it actually gets off the ground.

When your technological ghosts come back to haunt you, expect humbug

Interesting take on Scrooge

I liked it.

The ending is, of course, pure fantasy. There will be no liberation. We will end up borged into the Web with mind-links, information being scrolled right on our retinas.

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

Well, at least there's a silver lining

70%+, across all platforms, don't trust pseudo-AI.

That goes a way to restore some of my faith in Humanity.

Suggested Actions fails to suggest its own survival as Windows 11 feature killed

Suggested action for copying a phone number ?

Typical Borkzilla.

Copying a piece of text is a select text-CTRL-C affair. You want to replace that with a bloody "assistant" that is going to take me through three popups and five mouse clicks to end up not getting me where I want to go ?

Fuck off and die.

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

"There is an effort to do that total rewrite"

Obviously.

From the outside, it seems that 90% of coding efforts in Linux-land is to rewrite something someone else didn't like (or thought he could do better).

Lights out for 18 more DDoS booters in pre-Christmas Operation PowerOFF push

Probably not, it'll just favor the competition.

I'm sure there is some of that.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Re: turrets, autoloaders etc are electric anyway

Only inasmuch as the power comes from the diesel engine powering the tank.

Air-conditioning is electric as well, but AFAIK if the tank's engine is dead, it won't work either.

Interesting link. I learned something, there.

I still don't see how that can apply to tanks, which work best on level terrain.

There will be no regenerative braking to help much, and they're not supposed to take on 65 tons of ore at any point.

But it's nice to know somebody got this working.

I wonder what it will cost to replace the batteries when the time comes . . .

EV tanks ?

In what world do you live where you think that an Abrams is going to have any battlefield mobility whatsoever with batteries ?

As far as planes are concerned, yes, we have experimental, one-person pseudo-gliders with long wings covered in solar cells, but if you think that will in any way be efficient on the battlefield, you have read too much science-fiction.

I'll believe your words the day I see a Caterpillar 930G survive a day's work on batteries.

Hey, don't get me wrong. I'd love to see that. I'd love to know that we have fusion that works.

But I'm aware that we're not there yet.

China preps another rocket that Beijing hopes will become its workhorse

5-ton cargo

And to think that the Saturn V could lift 141 metric tons to LEO.

Firefox ditches Do Not Track because nobody was listening anyway

It was a foregone conclusion from the start

I don't want you to follow me.

Stop following me, I said I don't want you to follow me.

I said don't follow me !

Stop following me !

Where's the police when you need them ?

. . .

Okay, fanstasy aside, this DNT "feature" was thought up in the last days of an Internet that was thought to still abide by moral behavior.

Unfortunately, everyone saw the writing on the wall from the start, and here we are now. You cannot ask corporations to behave nicely. You go in with the law as a reason and a vicious cluebat (aka penalties) as "encouragement".

But of course, then you have lobbyists crying that you are stifling "innovation".

And Capitalism rolls on . . .

Australia lays fiendish tax trap for Meta – with an expensive escape hatch

Re: How about making parents responsible

What ?

And be forced to actually educate them ?

Stop talking nonsense.

Oracle gets Big Red reality check after financials fail to impress

Re: See what happens...

Absolutely agree. This is insanity at work.

Oh my God, Oracle underperformed by 0.008% ? They're now worthless !

And to think that the idiots working at the NYSE are called Golden Boys . . .

SAP says GenAI will help solve legacy migration skills shortage

So now Gen AI is the solution

That is a dangerous line to toe.

After all, if Gen Ai can solve SAP migration problems, maybe Gen AI can solve SAP and get rid of it.

With Gelsinger gone, to fab or not to fab is the $7B question

Well that explains it

"TSMC has all this expertise in place, but it took them 20 years to get there "

Those 20 years are the years the USA spent having stuff built elsewhere and not retaining expertise at home.

You've had your fat margins, now you're going to have to learn to work again.

WhatsApp finally fixes View Once flaw that allowed theft of supposedly vanishing pics

"We're constantly building in layers of privacy protection"

That's rich, coming from Meta, a company who is constantly trying to find new ways to invade user privacy.

And, given that since Windows 1 0 there is Ctrl-Win-Shift to grab anything on screen, all of this argument is only valid for people who use Facebook on their smartphone.

I've heard that the youngsters have abandoned Facebook, so it's only the older generation that is using it - and they generally don't like smartphones, right ?

My layer of protection is Firefox + NoScript + Ublock Origin. You go ahead and try to beat that, Meta.

TikTok appeals to have Trump – or Supreme Court – decide its fate later

"an enemy of the people"

That said by a troll who doesn't give a damn about "the people".

Alibaba exec trashes his own staff and customers, quickly apologizes

"I am carefree"

Yeah sure, right up until you see some underling being carefree as well.

Then you step on him like you squash a bug.

Your attitude really is "I'm at the top, so I do what I want and you do as I say".

Not a very novel attitude. A despicable one, but not novel.

Mr Intel leaving Intel is not a great sign... for Intel

"it was a very bad fit for investors"

Investors ?

I resent that term.

An investor is someone who believes in the company, who sticks with it because he believes that the company has a vision, an idea that is useful and worthy.

Today's "investors" are nothing but but money-grubbing Scrooges who bitch as soon as they don't get the returns they think they deserve.

Investor my ass. Go make your own company and show the world just how incapable you are.

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

"Ever had a moment when [..] reading the manual didn't help"

Oh yeah. It was way back when Lotus Notes was Release 4. LotusScript had just appeared and I had been tasked for creating a Content Management System for an international customer.

Now, you need to understand two things : the first is that, in those days, a Notes database was limited to 2GB in size. The second thing is a little quirk in the system when you're cycling through all the documents (or records, for you RDBMS people) in a particular view.

The manual says (still to this day) that using view.getnextdocument(olddocument) will give you the next document in the view, which it pretty much does. What the manual does not say is that the old document is not deleted from memory when you do that.

So, in those days, it wasn't much of an issue because Notes databases did not contain hundreds of thousands of documents.

But then R5 came out, and the 2GB cap was lifted. And oh boy, did those databases start filling up. That is when I learned, the hard way, that cycling through 85K+ documents, with attachments, in a view could crash the script (thankfully, not the server). The bug report came in from the customer, and I spent days trying to understand why because the script never crashed on the same document (thank God computers are supposed to work on zeros and ones - God only knows what would happen if fuzzy logic were to be used).

In any case, after much head-scratching, I finally clicked that the script always failed after more than 80K documents had been processed. It took me another few minutes and then I wrote this :

Set olddoc = doc

Set doc = view.getNextDocument(olddoc)

Delete olddoc

With that, magically the script always completed successfully from then on (Delete removes from RAM, not from database).

That is one lesson I have never forgotten.