Posts by Pascal Monett

ESA spending €17M on spacecraft just to watch it go up in flames

"so engineers can see what happens"

If that's what needs to be done, so be it.

We're not talking Redmond programmers. We're talking space science.

Go for it.

Apple ropes off at least 4 GB of iPhone storage to house AI

"about the size of an HD movie, for now"

Nope.

I have more than a thousand HD movies in MP4 format and the vast majority of them are less than 2.5GB in size.

It depends on the efficiency of your compression algorythm.

Hyperscalers are carving up the ocean floor into private internet highways

No kidding

"large tech companies 'enjoy a remarkable degree of freedom from regulation and accountability for their activities and the content they carry' "

Yup. And, in my opinion, it's because the Internet has never been considered as something important by governments across the world.

But that is changing. All you need to do is look at how many governments have officials with their personal social media page when they should be talking through official government channels. Or look at how many governments actively control, at sometimes forbid, Internet activity. Oh sure, the ones that do that now cannot be counted as democracies, but the day is coming when Internet regulations will be decided upon and enforced.

Fujitsu wins spot on £600M framework after vowing to sit out public sector

Words are nothing but words

Acts count.

And $600 million is obviously not something a company is going to ignore.

So good on Fujitsu for having once again put its snout into the trough. Bad on UK government officials for allowing that.

Oh well, it's just pissing another $600 million into the wind. It's not like that has any consequence, right ?

NASA, IBM just open sourced an AI climate model so you can fine-tune your own

"a relatively small cluster of 64 Nvidia A100s"

So now you can have your own weather forcast for, what, only 6 A100s ? At $8,000+ a piece ?

Or you might choose to rent them on a cloud platform for only $2 per hour.

A bargain, I say !

India funds Moon lander, space station module, and Venus orbiter

I wish them luck

India is to build a new space station ? Wow.

If they manage to get that done and in orbit, that will be a major achievement.

Go India !

Cloudflare tightens screws on site-gobbling AI bots

Indeed. Here's the deal : fuck off.

Admins using Windows Server Update Services up in arms as Microsoft deprecates feature

Yay

Once again, Borkzilla is the best advocate of moving to Linux that there is.

AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that

"move Windows beyond its version-based desktop obsession"

Borkzilla is heading for a wall of its own making.

It promised that Windows 1 0 would be the last ever version, and now it has proven that you can't trust its words.

Nobody cares about upgrading a PC that is still working satisfactorily. 5 year old equipment is good for the trash ? I don't think so. Come back in six years and we'll talk about that again.

Face it : the least capable, lowest-cost laptop is fine for surfing the Web and doing mail. Companies have equipment that is much more powerful and will last a decade or more.

The renewal treadmill is over, Borkzilla. Deal with it.

Intel has officially entered the grin and bear it phase of its recovery

As usual, long-term thinking is not in the MBA mindset

Yes, building a foundry is costly. Yes, it will take years, maybe a decade before said foundry actually makes a return on investment.

Guess what ?

Some things take time to be realized and, if you can't wait, you won't reap the benefits.

Too bad for you.

Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal

"the Sun is expected to swallow our planet"

The discussion is still open on that point. Maybe when the Sun goes into its red giant phase it will indeed swallow our planet, or maybe the Earth's orbit will have changed because the Sun's gravitational pull will have weakened.

Either way, Humanity will have to have evacuated long before, or it will already be extinct and the fate of Planet Earth will no longer be a problem.

Re: Sending one out into space.

The enemy hardly needs biological weapons. A space-faring civilization capable of spanning the mind-boggling distances between stars will just chuck a 20km-wide asteroid at our planet and wait two (twenty ?) years for the fallout to wipe eveything out.

Then they can colonize and mine our planet for whatever it is they think they're looking for, or just use the planet as another host for their ever-growing population.

Microsoft cash to help reignite Three Mile Island atomic plant

Re: Clippy

That was funny :)

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

Remote Desktop

The one thing that should definitely be disabled by default. Those who know what they're doing doing can enable it if needed.

Europe's largest city council: Oracle ERP allocated £2B in transactions to wrong year

Oh look

An update on a complete failure of management.

Just what I needed to make me feel good on a Friday evening.

Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after

"Shifting to Teams"

Seems like that is the start of a mountain of problems . . .

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: not an inappropriate insult

No, it's just abysmally stupid when you're not the one deciding who gets fired tomorrow.

But hey, if you don't have the Darwinian credentials to understand that, then get fired at your convenience.

What the ever-loving **** ?

"he loudly asked the boss if he was still having an affair with a colleague – in front of the entire office and the boss's wife"

Okay, how is it that this guy wasn't fired the next day ?

A huge week for satnav as both China and Europe make generational launches

At least that won't hog LEO

This stuff is going GEO, and it will be useful for a long time, not just five years.

Citrix adds remote Mac support, but some customers are grumpy

"a general lack of client empathy during negotiations"

Empathy ?

That's for runner-up losers that don't have a market monopoly. We do, so you accept our product and you're happy to kiss our feet.

Because, seriously, where else are you going to go ?

Alibaba Cloud claims its modular datacenter architecture shrinks build times by 50 percent

Alibaba Cloud

In this day and age, what Western company would be insane enough to go and deliberately put its information into the hands of Mordor Beijing ?

CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains

I must agree with you. The answer to the question "Why does software require so many urgent patches?" is that the security landscape is continually changing.

Okay, that does not give a free pass to not sanitizing inputs - that should be punishable by a dozen lashings - but you can build a product with care and attention, making sure to protect against all known vulnerabilities, and then bam! A month later, a new type of vulnerability appears and you have to correct for it by patching.

That is the truth, but it should not hide the lazy programming many products are guilty of.

No way? Big Tech's 'lucrative surveillance' of everyone is terrible for privacy, freedom

"X has made tremendous strides in protecting users’ safety"

Oh, so it has started talking about it in internal meetings, then ?

Twitter had better security - at least Twitter tried to week out the toxic.

The only "trmendous strides" X has taken was to bring the toxic back in spades.

Starlink's new satellites emit 30x more radio interference than before, drowning cosmic signals

Yup. It's called free enterprise. Anything that is not specifically forbidden is allowed by default.

Thousands of orgs at risk of knowledge base data leaks via ServiceNow misconfigurations

Overlapping issues at play here

After reading this article, I have the feeling that there are several issues that are at the root of this problem.

First, there's the fact that ServiceNow has had to amend its platform to bolster security. That tells me that their handling of security wasn't properly thought through in the first place.

Then there's the fact that, despite having amended the platform, customers are still getting it wrong, which points to a possible lack of clarification in the documentation. It's difficul to write good security documentation when you're tacking on a new process that changes everything.

Finally, there's the fact that customers don't have time for security, they just want things to work. Maybe some customers gave it a try and found that their new configuration broke their processes and, instead of correcting the processes, they reverted to the old, insecure configuration. Maybe some customers just didn't understand the problem and left everything as is because they had enough trouble getting it working in the first place.

In any case, this whole affair demonstrates just how important it is to establish proper security from the start. Making such corrections after the fact is always a problem in itself.

With billions in UK govt IT contracts about to expire, get the next vendors to act right

Wishful thinking

I wish as well, but enough billions have spent for no result that I seriously doubt that this sudden uprising of virtuous indignation amounts to any meaningful difference with the past.

You'd have to eliminate all current pigs-in-the-trough for this to have any meaning. That means getting rid of Fujitsu, Capita and any other "consulting" firm that has given les than mediocre results.

But of course, that would mean needing to find new companies to arrange brown envelopes and endless budget overruns and delays.

One day, one fine day, you might finally ask yourselves where the real issue lies. Maybe it's not the consulting firms ?

Maybe you need to get rid of the useless cruft that thinks it can make decisions. You can't do that ? Fine, here's another solution : name a responsible for every new government project. If it does not succeed, he is retired and stripped of all his medals and UK whatnot.

Sometimes, the knout is the only answer.

Tor insists its network is safe after German cops convict CSAM dark-web admin

"The Tor project has insisted its privacy-preserving powers remain potent"

I would hope that is true, but given that the entire project is based on the work of a US Government agency and that there is no reason to not believe that the CIA (or other agencies) is actively involved in it, I somehow doubt that that is entirely true.

California governor goes on AI law signing spree, but demurs on the big one

"eliminating perjury provisions for lying about AI models"

I'm sorry, doesn't that mean that AI companies are defending their ability to lie ?

And that has been accepted in a country that continues to endlessly chant God Bless America ?

You guys do know that the Ten Commandments include "Thou Shalt Not Lie" ?

Hypocrites.

Intel frees its Foundry biz – and that's just one of many major shake-ups today

Well of course. Get with the MBA program : people with experience cost money. Trim the workforce to save money (but keep the expensive managers who have nothing useful to do).

Chinese spies spent months inside aerospace engineering firm's network via legacy IT

Re: Too early to say it is not, at least partially, an inside job

You missed this part of the article :

"Binary Defense is due to publish a report on Thursday about the cyber-break-in and lessons learned. "

If they're already writing up a report about lessons learned, it seems to me that the details are known.

Maybe not by you, but they are known.

LinkedIn started harvesting people's posts for training AI without asking for opt-in

"advising users how to turn off the scraping"

Sure it's simple : shut down your account and leave the sleazebags.

Google dodges €1.5B EU ads antitrust fine after appeal win

So, Google has weaseled itself out of another fine

I'm glad to see that Google's ad money is being put to good use.

I don't who got paid, but it was obviously money well spent.

FBI boss says China 'burned down' 260,000-device botnet when confronted by Feds

Re: Make paying ransom a crime.

Just like kidnapping.

It was made a crime to pay a kidnappers ransom, result : no more kidnappings for ransom in the US.

Do the same with ransomware. When there is no more money to be made, the only attacks left will be those of state actors who have other interests in mind (my how that sounds better <shudder>).

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

I am James Bond !

And so is my wife !

IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says

"they were required to sign an NDA"

Excuse me ? If you're laying me off I will not sign that and I will talk about it. Now what are you going to do ?

How is it that this kind of thing is legal ? At the very least, I would have thought that someone being "forced" to sign that NDA would go directly to court over the matter.

Cops across the world arrest 51 in orchestrated takedown of Ghost crime platform

200kg ? Is that all ?

Look, I'm very glad that you dismantled a violent criminal network, don't get me wrong, but I can put 200kg of anything in the back of my Skoda Fabia.

That is not an impressive amount to me. Can't you find anything better ? In the boatload range, for example ? I don't know, a ton or more ?

200kg sounds like a Saturday at Cosco. If these guys were such criminal masterminds, you should be able to find that under the sofa.

Microsoft unveils Office LTSC 2024 for users that remain stubbornly offline

So, long term is five years in Redmondland

Just one question, Nadella : have you planned on shutting down Borkzilla in five years ? No ? Then why is your Long Term limited to five years ? Are you planning on leaving before that and you won't care any more ?

Your customers, the ones who pay for your product, definitely plan to be there in five years and long after. It is exhausting to continually read that software companies are the ones who decide how long their software is supposed to be used. It's not like that. You're a multi-billion dollar company. You put out a critical piece of business software, and YOU FUCKING SUPPORT IT UNTIL BUSINESS DOESN'T NEED IT ANYMORE.

That should be enshrined in law.

Cloud giants point the finger at each other during regulator hearings

Regulate them

If they all disagree with the measures, then that means the measures are good for the consumer.

Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray

If that's where we have to go . .

I'm glad that industry people are starting to fear that the projects they make money out of and pay nothing for just might end up not being supported any more.

When that happens, maybe industry will think of a remuneration package for new maintainers. Oh, of course, it will be new young maintainers with a vast lack of experience and all the problems that may ensue but hey, you only have yourselves to blame for that.

Despite Russia warnings, Western critical infrastructure remains unprepared

An unfortunate necessity

I absolutely do not approve this internet warfare, but one thing that is apparently even more certain is that critical infrastructure needs to be secured and never has been because nobody ever decided it was needed. So it's been available for attack since forever because who cared ?

Well now, it is needed and everyone cares, so put up the money, get the training, and get those critical infrastructures secured. You've been coasting on ignorance and complacency long enough.

The case for handcrafted software in a mass-produced world

"an LLM bot can write new code"

Maybe it can, but if it hands out the same abominable mess that MS Word dishes out when you wish to save in HTML, then I will do fine without it.

That said, I have seen the results when asking ChatGPT for a LotusScript function that checks all the documents in a Notes view and I have to admit, while I wouldn't have written it exactly like that, the code provided does work, so maybe, just maybe, there might be a possible future where you could ask WhateverGPT for a functional Windows kernel without the cruft and get something that actually works and respects your computer (and allows you to play your games).

Here's hoping.

Python in Excel goes live – but only for certain Windows users

run Python scripts inside workbooks

Yay ! A whole new playground for mischief-makers is now available !

I can't wait to find out how miscreants will be able to subvert this.

New RFC explains how protocol developers can avoid building human rights abuses into the internet

"New IP 'would enable mass surveillance' "

Well it's backed by China, so duh.

It is so duh that experts reviewed it detail because obviously they would.

So I applaud this initiative, but I wonder exactly what good it will do. It's kind of like the wishlist of nice things we'd all like to have but have no way of getting yet.

I hope the ensuing comments will create an outline that could finally become an actual standard. Adding that to my wishlist.

The end is in sight for Windows 10, but Microsoft keeps pushing out fixes

"It's almost as if Windows 10 and 11 were the same thing"

Gosh, it's almost as if Redmond never actually rewrote the Windows Core since XP and just kept piling on the cruft and arbitrarily deciding, via UI "upgrades", which was the next version.

This nonsense with hardware requirements is just the latest in the glaring pieces of proof that Borkzilla is phoning it in rather than actually working on its product.

Of course it wants everyone on Win 11 : that's where The Cloud^TM is, which means more monthly revenue because nickel and diming functionalty instead of providing it out-of-the-box.

Sorry ?

"Can you consider yourself a tech publication"

Why are you blaming El Reg for this nonsense ?

HPE CEO: 'Best interest of shareholders' to pursue $4B damages from Lynch estate

Re: coincidences do happen

Especially when you help them along . . .

Nobody is surprised. HPE (the Board) is a bunch of vultures. Not taking into account their own due diligence is not something that will keep them from looking into the mirror and finding that everything is fine.

And you can be sure that, at the end of this year, they'll find a good reason to give themselves more humongous bonuses after having tearfully announced yet another round of layoffs.

The future of software? Imagine a bot, stamping on a human face – forever

"not concerned whether there'll be anyone to hire in a decade"

Yeah.

We'll see how they re-evaluate that in a decade when there's no one to hire.

Management. Pfft. Couldn't think their way out a paper bag if their life depended on it.

And as for planning, don't get me started . . .

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

"Extensive use of IPv4 NAT"

It works.

And the more IPv6 was foisted upon us, the more we realized how simple (and therefor robust) IPv4 really was.

The academics can bang their IPv6 drum all they want, the rest of us just want to get doing what we need (or want) to do. And, if the IPv4 boot still fits, why change ?

I am adamant about one thing : I do not want to become a full-fledged administrator just to have my home PC, a few laptops and several mobile phones connected to my Orange box and, therefor, to the Internet. With IPv4, it's a breeze. With all I read about IPv6, it would be a nuisance. And I will do well without having to explain to my wife that her normal web sites don't all work today because somebody did something to the IPv6 connection. No thank you.

So I don't want IPv6. Not before you pry my IPv4 NAT out of my cold, dead hands . . .

Thank you, Reg Readers: On Call has turned 500!

Dear me, 10 years already ?

I've been following On Call for ten years ?

Wow.

I don't think there's any other website I have visited so regularly for such a long time.

Congratulations and long live El Reg !