Posts by Pascal Monett

Financial institutions told to get their house in order before the next CrowdStrike strikes

"better prepare for IT meltdowns"

Simple : stop downloading unverified code to your production servers !

LottieFiles supply chain attack exposes users to malicious crypto wallet drainer

"supply chain attack"

That path would not exist if Agile developers would stop downloading unverified code to production servers.

As usual, business is going to learn the hard way.

Microsoft turning away AI training workloads – inferencing makes better money

"we are literally going to the real demand"

Who are you to decide what the real demand is ?

You have customers, and apparently a lot of them, willing to pay for your services. You take the money and do the job.

Meta spruiks benefits of open sourcing Llama models – to its own bottom line

"made $270 million in the quarter but lost $4.4 billion"

That's about $16 lost for every dollar spent.

And they're still spending.

Chinese attackers accessed Canadian government networks – for five years

"can disrupt critical infrastructure"

That's only because critical infrastructure is about as protected as a newborn baby.

Get your finger out and start protecting critical infrastructure before somebody actually brings it down.

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

Because he's a billionnaire. And an asshole, but that is politely ignored.

Don't forget that the media is controlled by billionnaires and those people like to help each other.

Sketchy financials send Supermicro auditors running for the hills

Re: $17.5 million .... without admitting wrongdoing.

I completely agree. This "not admitting wrongdoing" thing galls me beyond measure. You paid a $17.5 million fine and you did nothing wrong ? Then why did you pay ?

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

Ah, an electric car

I'm sure Torvalds had no trouble buying it.

I'm waiting for his comments in 8 years when he'll have to replace the battery.

Also, does anyone know the volume of the second-hand market for 4-year old EVs ? Because I don't think there is one.

Musk, Bezos need just 90 minutes to match your lifetime carbon footprint, says Oxfam

"Rich countries have failed to keep their $100 billion climate finance promise"

Well, let's not forget that Trump bowed out of the Paris accords, shall we ?

Brit Apple semi supplier IQE's CEO departs amid reshuffle

"effective immediately"

That smacks of serious leadership issues. This is either a clash at top level, or a gigantic sex scandal that is being quashed.

I'd vote for the former.

OpenAI reportedly asks Broadcom for help with custom inferencing silicon

What ? On-prem is cheaper now ?

But . . but . . all those expensive suits with their beautiful presentations that said that The Cloud^TM was the best thing since sliced bread ?

Were they lying ?

Ok, seriously, if even cloudy companies are starting to look as on-prem as advantageous, it won't be long before the vast migration from The Cloud^TM back to in-house will be starting.

And then, The Cloud^TM will be viewed as the thing it is : a vast, money- and energy-gobbling distraction.

A bit like cryptocurrency, actually, come to think of it . . .

Beijing claims it's found 'underwater lighthouses' that its foes use for espionage

"secret sentinels"

Because Chinese fishing boats have only ever been used for fishing, right ?

Uncle Sam outs a Russian accused of developing Redline infostealing malware

Re: Russian safety net

Agreed.

I'm thrilled that US law enforcement has identified yet another Russian criminal.

Call me when it has the means to put him on trial.

Softbank CEO says 'super AI' will arrive in 2035 and cost $9T

"$9 trillion is not too big"

Oh ? Then put up the money yourself and shut up about it.

Chinese chips, quantum and AI now on US investment blacklist

We've always been at war with EastAsia

Those words are starting to become prophetic.

Merde! Macron's bodyguards reveal his location by sharing Strava data

Who cares ?

It's Macron.

His entire presidency is a joke (albeit a costly one).

It's no surprise that the French equivalent of the Secret Service is stupid enough to continue to reveal their location after the previous reports in the news : they can't speak English.

And let's not forget the brilliant perfomance of the French "elite" commandos in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.

The halcyon days of the French Resistance are, apparently, long gone.

NASA narrows Artemis III landing target list to nine

Re: Artemis IV

Hello ? Do you know what a subject is ?

Come back when they post an article on Artemis IV.

Chinese engineers wire Raspberry Pi into 600-meter railway tunnel to find any holes

Awesome

It is absolutely amazing how those little things can be applied to the most astonishingly different domains. If I had invented that kit, I would be proud as peach.

Those who invented it and brought it to market certainly can be.

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

Re: Apple should be honest enough to say that

There is no multinational multibillion-dollar conglomerate that has any honesty whatsoever. It's all lies, all the way down.

The only honest thing is the sales price of the smartphone when you purchase it and, even then, you get surprises with the "additional charges" on your monthly bill.

Delta officially launches lawyers at $500M CrowdStrike problem

So, briefcases at dawn it is

The popcorn futures are looking more and more interesting.

ClownStrike may well respond "aggressively" (I wouldn't expect anything less), but their failure has been rather well documented and I think any lawyer worth his salt will counter the feeble "their infra wasn't up to scratch" argument with ease.

Your job is not to count on your customer's infra and disaster recovery to ensure your business continuity.

Boeing launches funding round to stave off credit downgrade

Funding round ? For Boeing ?

HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA !

You'd have to be daft to throw money into that company. Might as well use it to light your barbecue.

Dutch cops pwn the Redline and Meta infostealers, leak 'VIP' aliases

The game of whack-a-mole continues

I seem to observe that law enforcement is getting quicker to do the job.

So replacements be aware : your time to shine is shrinking.

Is Microsoft's AI Copilot? CoPilot? Co-pilot? MVP creates site to help get it right

Microsoft MVP Loryan Strant

So, he is frustrated that users can't follow the revolving merry-go-round of shell game bullshit that Redmond is spewing. Boo hoo.

They're users. They're not being paid a fortune to follow that shit, they're being paid to work.

If you guys spent more time being consistent in your naming procedures, we wouldn't be where we are now.

And your solution is to add yet another reference site to all the stuff we have to check to find out what it is we're supposed to be doing to get it right.

Well done. As if we had the time for that.

WordPress forces user conf organizers to share social media credentials, arousing suspicions

That's the whole point of WordPress

It's for the vast majority of people who do not have the ability to code their own website.

The click-and-drag components are easy to get a grip on, you don't need to learn everything to get a website up and running in an hour, and the people this is geared toward are the kind who don't want to waste an entire day on this.

And then you have social media, which is largely sufficient for many, many people as well. I'm talking FaceBook, obviously, but YouTube channels, Instagram, even TikTok are places where people can express what they want to say without thinking about the technical side of things.

But yes, if you want a website you control and isn't subject to vulnerabilities you never thought of including, then hand-coding is certainly the most powerful manner of getting there. You just have to be able to do that, and not everyone can.

Your computer's not working? Sure, I can fix that problem – which I caused

Computer wiped every month ?

I believe there seems to be a little law about computer fraud and abuse that could have put a stop to those shenanigans pretty quickly.

I understand what he did, but he was skating on very thin ice.

Not that I blame him.

Google Cloud burst by 12-hour power outage in German region

12 hours and 39 minutes

Okay, and that impacted how many companies and how many clients of those companies ?

It is high time that we get over this cloud malarky and get back to on-site IT where, if one company has an outage, it only impacts that company and its customers.

Until you can build an infrastructure that can resist little things like power outages, it's not worth it.

OpenAI loses another senior figure, disperses safety research team he led

"remove the obligation to work for a living"

Objectively, we're going in that direction. We have machines to do the hardest parts of manual labor (aka mining, tunneling, farming, etc). These machines need human supervision, but humans do not need to do the hard work. We have robots for many aspects of manufacturing. Cars are made mostly by robots, with humans just checking things out.

As a species, we are working towards having robots do everything. We'll have a robot car, no need to drive. We'll have a robot butler, no need to clean the house. We'll have robot road makers, house builders, farmers, etc. We're going there.

When we get there, what will we do ? We'll sit back and watch all that stuff work for us. Meanwhile, we'll be watching cat videos on Youtube. That means we'll need the means to have a computer, a connection, and the snacks we eat in front of said screen. All of that will need to be provided for, because we won't be working anymore.

This will be a sea change in human society. The sci-fi novel The Expanse touched on that subject, with Earth population being able to decide between Basic, where they would be fed/cared for for nothing, and /Not Basic/ (don't quite remember), where you had a career (mainly in politics, apparently) and a salary that could allow you some benefits beyond just having food, clothing, shelter and health care.

In the long run, we're going to have to come to grips with a society where humans no longer need to work to provide for themselves.

But it's in the long run.

Scientists demand FCC test environmental impacts of satellites

"Presently, there are 10,855 objects orbiting the Earth"

Um, no, there are many, many more objects than that - but that's when you count all the debris.

As usual, we are going full speed ahead without any consideration of the consequences. That'll come later, when we see what destruction we've wrought in the search for money.

Then, like after the sinking of the Titanic, we will set up standards and international measures. But first, something has to die, otherwise no one cares.

Congress to Commerce: Sanction more Chinese chip firms to stop Huawei's evasion

"will respond through the appropriate channels"

I do hope those channels do not include X/Twitter.

Waiting to see . . .

Billionaire SaaS CEO loses title after week of sleaze allegations

"just how badly founders must behave"

There is no more sanction for people in the upper spheres. Unless they kill someone, in a country where they can't buy the police, they're basically free to do and say anything they want.

Just look at the fucking lying pussy-grabbing convicted asshole that is pretending to get another turn as king of the hill in the White House.

If this were a just world, he wouldn't dare show himself in public, let alone speak.

Musk claims Cybertruck has become profitable at last

"Musk claims"

I have to admit, I kinda lost interest after reading those words . . .

Boeing's new captain promises U-turn after Q3 nosedive

"It will take time to return Boeing to its former legacy"

Ooh boy, ain't that the truth.

Don't worry, the heat death of the Universe is still a while away - you've got the time.

Woman stuck upside down under rock for hours after trying to retrieve dropped phone

And she was barefoot ?

What the blazes was she doing barefoot in the hills ?

Is this a missed Darwin award ?

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

NAT should be enough for everything

The entire IPv4 address space could be available to every country.

Each country would NAT their international comms to their specific address. That would give us the possibility of multiple millions of countries (not that we need that).

When we have colonies, we could NAT comms between Earth and said colonies (Moon, Mars, Ganymede, whatever else). Each colony would have practially the entire IPv4 address space available.

IPv6 is useless.

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

"amid growing adoption of competing architectures"

Now that's capitalism.

Oh, we have a competing architecture that is successful. Let's join together to try and ensure that our failing architecture stays relevant.

Never mind that the computing landscape is changing, we have shareholders to satisfy.

Gosh. Talk about dinosaurs.

The future is ARM. Shut up and get with the program.

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

Re: What, no love for Multiplan?

Yes. Love here.

I had a copy of Lotus 1-2-3, and I used it extensively. So extensively that I, at the time, found out that filling a 360x240 pixel screen (CRT for you whippersanappers out there) of cells would max out My 8086 x 128KB (yes, kilobytes - megabytes weren't even thought of yet) PC and I couldn't fill a cell more.

Then I got a copy of Multiplan and, all of a sudden, I could fill four times more cells with calculations and data.

I never looked back.

Then I got my filthy pirate hands on a copy of Boeing Calc.

Oh my God, that was something.

Excel today ? It's only interesting for the pretty charts that manglement needs to keep thinking it's doing a good job.

The billionaire behind Trump's 'unhackable' phone is on a mission to fight Tesla's FSD

Oh I remember 40 years ago.

There was no Internet back then.

Not for the general public.

US leans on Japan to curb sales of chipmaking equipment to China

"take further action against Huawei"

I'm sorry, you've already banned it from your country and pushed quite a few others to ban it as well.

What "further action" are you expecting to take ? Bomb its HQ ? That might not go so well.

Intern allegedly messed with ByteDance's LLM training cluster

Re: Losses

Well the article did cite "serious violations of discipline", so it's possible that the intern had access to someone else's PC that had access to the AI's configuration.

If you can fool around with that, there's no telling how bad the damage can be, or just how far it can go.

What I'm wondering is : was it really malicious, or was the guy just experimenting without thinking that the consequences would be far greater than what he thought ?

"the incident was reported to their university"

Well that's one guy who can say goodbye to his PhD, apparently, as well as his prospects of ever working for a major Chinese company.

I'm guessing he's going to learn English and come wreak havoc over here in the near future.

Pixel perfect Ghostpulse malware loader hides inside PNG image files

"defenders must adapt by"

. . using their brain.

I'm supposed to click on some link and enter keyboard shortcuts instead of a normal CAPTCHA ?

First of all, I'm going to check out that link. If you say you're from Microsoft and you sent me the mail from a gmail account, you're out. If you manage to spoof the microsoft account, the I want to see the link going to website that has the word microsoft in it. If it doesn't, you're out. Finally, I'm not going to do CTRL-C on a CAPTCHA. You're out.

Use your brain, people.

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

the whole place was largely closed within a couple of years

Yup. That's what happens when you have morons at the top who think their title is more important than your expertise.

They know nothing about what you do or why, but damn can they order you around.

WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

Re: Oddly perhaps ...

I'm sorry, but I have abandoned WinAmp a long time ago. I remember using it, I remember perusing the skins and choosing my favorite, but all that is water under the bridge.

Now I use VLC. It does everything I need, does it well, and I'm not aware that it reports back to the mothership - or that there is a mothership.

California cops cuff suspect in deadly drone-assisted drug deal

The war on drugs continues

It is especially ironic when you know that the CIA is responsible for importing drugs into the US.

They created the need, and created the crime. How convenient.

Tesla FSD faces yet another probe after fatal low-visibility crash

Re: Lidar costs money

Oh come now, it can't cost all that much if everyone else is doing it.

You can get a laser pointer for €6 on Amazon. That is not going to ruin Tesla.

Tech giants set to pay through the nose for nuclear power that's still years away

Re: Submarines and ships

Yeah but, it's likely that those subs are under National Security rules and you're not going to be able to just copy/paste their reactors to the civilian world because The Man still doesn't want anyone to know their abilities.

The Cold War may be dead, the paranoia isn't.

Alleged Bitcoin crook faces 5 years after SEC's X account pwned

Okay, one question

What the ever-loving fuck is the SEC doing on X ?

Doesn't it have a spokesweb thingy ?

Is there anyone who pays attention to official channels anymore ?

Does "official channel" still have meaning ?

Someone's finally taking on £10M Hull City Council ERP deal to replace Oracle

"the Council is expecting to accrue [..] £1 million [..] digital efficiency saving each year"

Yeah.

We'll see how that works out.

Oh well, at least it's not the usual suspects with their snouts in the trough this time. Maybe some good will actually come of this.

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

"I'm passionate about adventure"

Yeah, as long as you've never done it before.

You financed your little space shuttle until you got up there, then you let it drop.

If I were a woman, I would without hesitation class you as a one-night stand. Passionate until you got what you wanted.

HashiCorp unveils 'Terraform 2.0' while tiptoeing around Big Blue elephant in the room

Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

Goodbye, HashiCorp. It was nice knowing you.