Posts by Pascal Monett

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

In our office it was Quake

We were doing "network stress tests" during the lunchbreak. It became such a success that our little room, fir for three, was often occupied by six howling monsters during lunch hour.

One day, we were really getting on with the destruction and the howling glee. Unfortunately, that day, one of our colleagues in the next room had scheduled that time for a business call.

Needless to say, we were soon relocated to the basement, and that was the end of our network stress tests.

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

I never click a shortened URL.

I don't trust what I can't see the result of.

But, then again, I know how to read.

Re: Good riddance

Totally agree.

Management, marketing and Javascript have long conspired to ensure that the URL got perverted into the absolute filth of length that exists today.

And news sites are the first to blame, with their stupid insistance that they needed their articles to display in three columns, just like paper.

It's the web, stupid. You don't display like paper. But, instead of dealing with it, we had to wait for smartphones and adaptive HTML to get something akin to what the newsies could have understood thirty years ago.

Stop management from interfering in the Internet. That would be a good start to getting things working smoothly again.

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

Re: WTF?

People might.

Companies don't.

Re: Impact...

Unfortunately, I am inclined to agree with you.

After all, there are those pesky contract clauses, etc etc, and finding another AV supplier is going to be a major pain and probably require humongous amounts of work from IT personnel everywhere, so why not just listen to the siren call of "lessons have been learned" and stay the course ?

After all, it works so well for Capita in the UK (and Fujitsu, and God knows how many more) . . .

Cybercriminals quickly exploit CrowdStrike chaos

"Criminals didn't waste any time"

If only they used such energy for honest work, our civilization would stride forward instead of staying mired in muck.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

I'm guessing CrowdStrike's share price is not the only thing that is going to be tanking in the coming weeks.

The fallout from this is starting to look like it will draw blood. CloudStrike's client list is going to shrink worse than a banana in the desert sun.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

What ?

But, but . . that means work . . . and responsibility if things go wrong. It'll be my fault.

This is not my fault. It's the vendor who screwed up.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

"a very sheepish football fan"

I'll bet he got even more sheepish when he showed up to recover his sandwiches, only to find a large group of very pissed-off men in full bomb squad gear with guns looking at him with rage in their eyes.

I hope Brian got overtime for that.

North Korea likely behind takedown of Indian crypto exchange WazirX

Force majeure

It's funny how there are absolutely no banks who invoke that excuse.

No real banks. Banks with a banking charter, and proper procedures and personnel dealing with actual currency and legal obligations, not fairy money and feel-good wishes.

Invoking Force Majeure when you don't have the compentence, the ability or the experience to implement secure money-managing procedures is like a teenager flipping his car in a curb and blaming the rain on the road.

Bunch of muppets, all of them.

EU's renewable hydrogen plan needs a 'reality check'

Don't you just love administrative caution ?

"A lack of robust analyses before setting production and import targets, which were not realistic and therefore likely won't be achieved"

Likely won't be achieved.

Likely.

The initial analysis is flawed and unrealistic, but achieving unrealistic targets just might still be possible, maybe, in an alternate universe.

I understand that you need to not ruffle any feathers too much, but if initial analysis is wrong, the chance that results will not be achieved is a bit stronger than likely.

As in won't happen.

Beijing's attack gang Volt Typhoon was a false flag inside job conspiracy: China

Great

More ammunition for the people who think 9/11 was an inside job.

And nobody will be going to prison for this.

Google slashes maps API prices in India – weeks after a competitor emerged

So, $1.50 instead of $5, and 5 million instead of 100K

At $5 for 100,000, that's 200 requests per cent, or 0.005 cent per request.

At $1.50 for 5 million, that's 33,333 per cent, or 0.00003 cent per request.

Now, I'm supposing Google is still making money on this, since I'm supposing that India also frowns on price dumping. If that is true, it should mean that Google is artificially inflating its prices by a factor of 166.

Just FYI, you know. Google's prices are way too high.

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

So, Office 345 is down again

And what are customers going to get in return ? A voucher for some free time on Teams ?

Apparently, you mean some other muppet . . .

OpenAI’s GPT-4o Mini is indeed small – like its lead over rivals in certain tests

"the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment"

There is nothing unpredictable about the GDPR. So, the only thing unpredictable for Meta is : when will it get sued ?

Meta isn't scraping European data to feed its monster ? Good. GDPR has succeeded. Again.

Judge mostly drags SEC's lawsuit against SolarWinds into the recycling bin

"present our own evidence"

Your honor, I submit this piece of evidence to the Court : Solarwinds1234.

It's all well and nice to declare the SEC incompetent for cybersecurity, but you need to demonstrate competence for that argument to be valid.

Kaspersky challenges US government to put up or shut up about Kremlin ties

Re: Above board and not backdoored software

Why ? Who said so ?

Kaspersky is proposing an independant verification of his software, not of all AV software.

Personally, I'm all for it.

Maybe not, but he's certainly capable of starting one at home.

Russia’s FIN7 is peddling its EDR-nerfing malware to ransomware gangs

AvNeutralizer

No prize for guessing which AV they started to fully dismantel first.

I'm betting Windows gets pwned 100% of the time, whatever the version.

Europe's largest council could face £12M manual audit bill after Oracle project disaster

"a customer win [..] Larry Ellison once flaunted to investors"

So, Larry, what are you flaunting now ? Projects costs multiplied by six and a half, or project delayed for four years ?

NASA swings budget axe, kills $400M+ VIPER lunar trundlebot

"an uncertain budget environment"

Curious. I thought your budget environment was pretty certain : shrinking.

Maximum-severity Cisco vulnerability allows attackers to change admin passwords

"we know that an unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit this to change passwords"

Thank God they got rid of the real threat that was Huawei . . .

Firms skip security reviews of major app updates about half the time

"it is imperative that organizations strengthen their application security posture"

It sure is. I'm sure another couple hundred catastrophic breaches will help solve the problem.

Semiconductor shares slump – possibly thanks to Biden and Trump

"Taiwan doesn't give us anything"

Of course not, but that is not why there are US carrier fleets nearby. Those fleets are nearby to ensure that Taiwan is not absorbed in to China, which could then cut off supply to The West globally, which would be a major catastrophe for IT in general and all those fancy gadgets DARPA likes to get its hands on like, oh, hypermissiles at a guess. Or all those fancy self-piloted "assistants" that are supposed to be delivered with every new F-35 at some point in the future.

Trump appears hell-bent on not spending a dime on anything. He's missing the fact that, if the USA has the economic and international situation it enjoys today, it is because it is present on the seven seas and the five continents and ready to be aggressive if need be, with the best tools there are. Bring all that military back home and your influence is going to shatter to pieces, leaving someone else to pick up the slack (that someone being Beijing at this point in time).

You really have to be a moron to not see that.

Samsung buys UK AI startup to give its products the personal touch

"the world's fastest knowledge graph"

I note that nowhere is it mentioned anything about accuracy of results. No, the important thing is that it is the fastest because, of course, if you're not the fastest, you're lagging behind.

Light-weight solar-powered flying robots are coming

Ultra-light solar cells

I'm impressed. The drone might be (very) flimsy, but those solar cells are paper-thin and ultra light, yet they do deliver current.

I wonder how long they last.

Tech upgrade broke the casino – took slots offline for days

"system performance issues"

As in, people were winning.

Merged Exabeam and LogRhythm cut jobs, face lawsuit

Yes. The golden parachute is proof of that great Capitalism at work. This whole deal was made so that one guy could exit with margharitas at the beach forever more.

The rest are peons. It is their destiny to be used and discarded when no longer useful to The Board, and they should be thankful for having been paid up to then.

Right, Gellar ?

Here we go again. And again. Musk threatens to pull Twitter, SpaceX out of California

"but she doesn't want to spend time with me"

And of course it is someone else's fault, eh Musk ?

What exactly did Microsoft promise CISPE in its settlement?

"At the end of the day, the settlement is nothing"

So, complete success for Redmond, then. Someone's getting a bonus this month.

Stop giving Redmond money, people. Just stop.

Mega-city's Oracle system won't have effective cash management until 2025

Europe's largest local authority

It might do well to divide itself into four or more parts and allow for more localized, less byzantine management.

But I'm sure that would not suit the people sitting at the top . . .

GNOME head honcho Holly Million steps down

So she didn't leave to "spend time with her family" ?

After barely a year ?

That feels to me like there were "creative differences" between her and the Foundation.µ

I wonder what those differences were.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

He lied to the Court.

Jail him.

Cold comfort to teachers who got paid late, but ERP software rollout had 'unrealistic' timeline

I humbly admit that I never had the chance/curse of tackling an ERP project. From what I read on these hallowed pages, they are frought with failure, so I guess I'm lucky.

Ownership

After a quarter century of experience in IT project consulting, I find that that is easily the most elusive quality, especially in administrations.

In a private company, it is easier to find someone who actually wants the project to succeed - because it will benefit his (or her) department directly. That doesn't mean that it is automatically so however, I have found exceptions and private companies have internal politics that are just as obscure as the real thing.

But in public service, it is far more common to have a project leader that is absolutely not interested in actually leading the project. After all, he has no skin involved and his (or her) position will endure whatever the result.

That kind of mentality hinders the success of any project by default. In the private sector, it is less prevalent because you can, ultimately, always get fired, or removed from your position. But in public administration ? Never going to happen, even with people who have a history of failure.

That irks me to no end.

If you think AI labs wouldn't stoop to using scraped YouTube subtitles for training, think again

"the internet giant puts a lot of effort into thwarting unauthorized scraping"

Oh sure it does. That's why there's already a 5+ GB dataset of scraped data.

Honestly guys, can't you see that are fooling no one ? Your words are worthless because your acts have already spoken for you.

YouTube is your site. You have no excuse not to be able to lock it down, especially when you are continually messing with YouTube downloader addons. Apparently, those things bother you a lot more than subtitle scraping, because those addons are constantly updating to cope with your messing around.

But I get it : a downloader addon cuts out your ads and thus impacts your bottom line, and we can't have that, now can we ?

ESA starts work on planetary defence mission, because Bruce Willis is retired

So, after Apophis, a 5000 year wait for the next one

Seems to me that, in the next five millennia, we will have colonized our solar system and we'll have been mining those asteroids for quite some time. Given that we'll likely start with the larger ones, there's a chance that that next chunk of space rock supposed to hit us will, by then, have been reduced to ores and completely processed.

But, in case we get a bad surprise before then, it's always good to get more data on asteroids, so go RAMSES !

Qualcomm sues Chinese handset-maker in India to defend African market

It's called protectionism

"cases against Chinese entities often move very, very, slowly if they're brought in China"

Yep, well that's just another demonstration of how strongly China wants to play by the rules of international law - aka it doesn't give a shit.

Big Music reprises classic hit 'ISPs need to stop their customers torrenting or we'll sue'

"is therefore equally liable for IP theft"

And why are you restricting yourself to Verizon ? There are other providers in the USA, if I am not mistaken.

Oh, and don't forget to sue the US Government as well, because those roads allow Internet providers to maintain their networks of thievery.

FBI gains access to Trump rally shooter's phone

So he was a registered Republican

Hmm. That might make it a tad difficult for the obvious "it's the Democrates that want Trump dead" argument.

Then again, Republicans these days are not exactly big on taking facts into account . . .

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

It is surprising how a supposedly intelligent person can be so incapable of managing such things.

My own brother-in-law, who is an engineer btw, tried last year to self-upgrade his PC. He bought all the right components, motherboard, CPU, RAM, cooler, SSDs, etc, and put everything together.

When it didn't work, he called me, because he knew that I have extensive experience in upgrading my hardware. I tried to diagnose by phone what appeared to be a RAM problem. We tried removing all but one stick, putting the sticks in different slots, all to no avail.

Bereft of ideas, I asked him to remove all the DIMMS and try to boot. We got the same error, ergo it was not the RAM. At that point, I pointed him to a very good PC Repair shop because, if it was the motherboard, I didn't have any other solution.

It turns out that my brother-in-law had put the CPU in wrong. Which means he forced it in, because slotting in CPUs these days is as easy as just gently dropping it in place. All you need to do is align the marked tab on the CPU with the tab on the motherboard and drop it in. But no, he put it in wrong, forced it down and screwed the cooler over it. Obviously, the CPU was dead and the motherboard as well.

When I learned what had happened, I was speechless. But, that is how it is. He's far from stupid, but boy was he stupid there.

China's internet cleanup campaigns are going so well it needs a new one to protect kids

"shocking online behaviors in the context of children"

Well that's one point that I cannot hold against China's regime.

Yes; there are mounds of filth and violence targeting children directly, and something should be done about that everywhere.

It seems, though, that even when you try in an authoritarian regime that doesn't blink when it comes to killing its own citizens, it's difficult. So, what chance do we have ?

New Outlook set for GA despite missing some key features

"some pretty large chunks of functionality are still missing"

Incredible. A company is pushing a product that isn't even finished.

Because it can.

I would make a statement about shooting squads and sheds, but it might seem a tad extreme. Except that, when I get a customer contract, I don't have the liberty of spending the time dilly-dallying and, when delivery comes around, saying "oh, I'll do that later".

If I tried to pull a stunt like that, it would be the end of my reputation and career.

But Redmond does it all the time, and it's still in business.

Go figure . . .

SpaceX hit by inflight Falcon 9 failure

It's rocket science

It stays hard.

Every time.

Smartphone is already many folks' only computer – say hi to optional desktop mode in Android 15 beta

The Samson Meteor Mic is an astoundingly good USB microphone for a very reasonable price. No installation required, just plug it in and it works.

I'm sure you can find a proper USB webcam for not much either.

Google can totally explain why Chromium browsers quietly tell only its websites about your CPU, GPU usage

"Luca Casonato highlighted the extension's existence this week on social media"

That link points to twitter.com.

I thought that had been renamed to X, following the lunatic's preference.

So, I'm guessing it was too much of a bother to actually rename everything. Apparently, he just contented himelf by redoing the logo and stuff the rest.

Of course, given that he had already fired all the competent people, it's pretty obvious that His Muskiness doesn't have the nous to change the domain name.

Re: Why is it in Chromium?

Borkzilla doesn't review its own code, you can hardly expect it to review code from anyone else.

Singapore's banks to ditch texted one-time passwords

Easy solution : a physical OTP token

LuxTrust uses that. To connect to my bank account, I need to know my user name, my password and have the fob available to get the OTP at the right time.

Sure, there's a smartphone app, and there are other solutions as well, but the fob works fine. There is no reason to force people to have a smartphone.

Boeing's Starliner set for extended stay at the ISS as engineers on Earth try to recreate thruster issues

"Starliner could be used in the event of an emergency"

Well sure, if you know you're already screwed, might as well take the chance.