Posts by Pascal Monett

Inquiry hears UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal

"UK government misled MPs"

I'm shocked.

Shocked, I say.

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

"it appears the setup/design team made the change after the code was written"

And that was the precise moment when the rot started.

US claims TikTok shipped personal data to China – very personal data

I dispute that. El Reg has nothing in common with Facebook or any other "social" media. I have no way of finding out who is new on El Reg if they don't post something somewhere I read. You don't have a wall I can check. I am not alerted to your presence in the forums, nor can I "follow" you in any way. The only personal info I have access to is what you put into your public profile. If you decided to include your gender, religion, family details and/or sexual preferences, that's your decision. It is neither a requirement nor, I believe, encouraged by El Reg.

And I can't send you a private message. I can only publicly respond to your posts, as can you.

It's a forum, it's not social media.

Secure Boot useless on hundreds of PCs from major vendors after key leak

Re: Yes, UEFI is mostly Security Theater.

Everything you say is, I'm sure, absolutely true, but you cannot compare user failures to product or systems failures.

Users are stupid, unaware or uncaring. You can try to convince them to do things right, but most won't get the message until it's too late.

UEFI was supposed to have been created by engineers. That is not the same level of importance.

Post-CrowdStrike, Microsoft to discourage use of kernel drivers by security tools

Malware authors must be salivating

Hey guys ! Here's an entire new vector for crashing a Windows PC. Then you can sell the "solution" and take over the computer.

Those scum are intelligent scum. We've not heard the last of this.

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

"a sobering wake-up call"

There is no longer any such thing.

I do not think that CrowdStrike will fold. Too big to fail comes to mind. Too many megabuck multinationals do not want to upheave their flawed systems. They will prefer that Kurtz makes his mea culpa, makes a ton of promises, shows transparency and a ton of bullshit, and they will stick with what they know.

If CEOs were capable of venturing into the unknown, every business PC would be running Linux.

Kamala Harris's $7M support from LinkedIn founder comes with a request: Fire Lina Khan

"Antitrust is fine…Waging war is not."

Apparently you're the one waging war.

If the boss of the FTC is bothering you, I say she's doing her job.

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Dropping the phone while gardening

I can understand you placing your phone on a table and it falling off. I can understand you taking your phone out of your pocket, fumbling, and dropping it.

I cannot understand you mowing the lawn with your phone. You're mowing the fucking lawn. You can live without your slab of toxic materials during that time.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: For once

An instant response is not a quiet "excuse me" while standing behind the would-be perpetrator. The alarm still had to be sounded before the police showed up. The fact that they were on the other side of the road is irrelevant. They weren't there.

For once

For once the police were actually there when they needed.

That's probably why that has never happened since.

Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space

So, a new Apollo XIII in the making ?

All these technical details could well make another gripping spaceflight story, even when you know the ending.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: same as it ever was...

Not quite : it's another beta version of software used in production.

It was ever thus.

Omnissa, VMware's old end-user biz, emerges with promise of 'AI-infused autonomous workspace'

"self-healing, self-configuring and self-securing"

Self-configuring is already a red flag. The software doesn't know where it is, so some amount of manual configuration is necessary.

Self-healing means nothing for software. Software doesn't stub its toes. Either it has resiliency programmed in it, or it will fall over like Windows 95 after 24 hours.

As for self-securing, I look forward to reading reports of PCs running Omnissa where Omnissa has decided to refuse network connections . . .

Sam Altman wants a US-led freedom coalition to fight authoritarian AI

Re: Régulation Yes Altmann no

Indeed, but they have money, and in America, that talks louder than democracy.

Beware of fake CrowdStrike domains pumping out Lumma infostealing malware

Yeah but, if the malware auto-shuts-down if it detects AV software running, shouldn't that mean that every business PC and every Windows 1 0 + should be protected, even if it's just by Windows Defender ?

FYI: Data from deleted GitHub repos may not actually be deleted

"this is expected and documented behavior inherent to how fork networks work"

Wrong.

Delete means delete, just as no means no.

It doesn't matter if the data has already been accessed or not. A deletion order should mean that it should no longer be accessible, period.

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

"we have to earn those dollars"

If you're aware of that, then openly gouging your customers isn't the way to go.

You have the right to change your prices, but customers require justification in order to subscribe to the change.

Multiplying by 2 or more is not justifiable.

Adobe exec likened hidden cloud subscription exit fees to 'heroin', says FTC

Adobe "strives to have a positive customer experience" ?

Yeah, right up until you sign the contract and hand over the money.

Then you're nothing but chicken feed, and Adobe is the one eating.

Kaspersky says Uncle Sam snubbed proposal to open up its code for third-party review

Umm, why does he need US Government approval ?

If he wants to open his code to 3rd-party review, it seems to me that he can just do it.

If he want to post source code on GitHub, he can.

This sounds like waffling to me. Either that, or he is trying to rattle Washington.

You're not hallucinating: Generative AI is helping IBM's mainframes grow

Wait, what was that ?

"That may shrink cloud bills, or with Red Hat and on-prem tech shrink bills further still."

IIRC, the initial hype around The Cloud^TM was that it would make your on-prem IT less expensive. Highly paid consultants in suits were hyping CEOs everwhere (well, essentialy at Fortune 1000 companies where the business meal is still a notion), chanting about how The Cloud^TM would bring vast economies compared to all those expensive admins.

So, it looks like we're back on track to talk once again about how on-prem is lowering bills.

And the wheel ever turns . . .

The months and days before and after CrowdStrike's fatal Friday

So, Kurtz was at McAffee when they bugged ?

And he is now at CrowdStrike and they fuck up.

This is starting to look like Kurtz should exit the IT security field and go into something less critical, like Pokemon.

ServiceNow president leaves after policy breach related to public sector boss hire

Wow, actual consequences at the top

So, ServiceNow is doing better than the EU, who reconducted someone who is under legal inquiry despite there being a policy against that.

There appear to still be places in this world where rules are not just for the hoi polloi. That's refreshing.

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

I didn't know that. That is insane. Awesome, and insane.

Once again, it's not a question of what the thing was made for, it's a question of what can it do. A PC can use a barcode scanner on boot. And somebody knew that little tidbit, and thought to apply it.

Awesome.

Things are going Z-shaped at Huawei: Chinese giant preps three-screen folding smartphone

So, trifold now

Is this going to become a Gilette razor thing ? Five folds ? Six ?

It's a phone. There's never enough screen space. Not until we get holographic displays a la Star Wars.

Musk deflects sluggish Tesla car sales with Optimus optimism

"my predictions on this have been overly optimistic in the past"

So, Musk, remind me : how many deaths has it took for you to acknowledge that ?

Windows Patch Tuesday update might send a user to the BitLocker recovery screen

I'm sorry to rain on your parade, but the EULA has been extremely efficient up to now at preserving Redmond from any fallout of its shoddy programming and lack of testing procedures.

I see no reason why this should change, and MSFT's stock price practically only ever goes up, so, that has to mean Redmond is right, right ?

School gets an F for using facial recognition on kids in canteen

"FRT can result in high data protection risks"

Somebody tell that to the police. They're trying to get it everywhere.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

You're supposing the local driver would be able to detect issues better than the testing suite that was written by the same company.

I don't see that happening.

Administrators have update lessons to learn from the CrowdStrike outage

Maybe some consideration should be given to not applying an update before testing it in a secure environment.

But yeah, I know, that costs money.

Now as many as 10,000 SAP jobs to be hit by restructure

focus on costs

That is the go-to excuse for companies who are not making enough money to satisfy the shareholders.

It doesn't matter that they're making money hand-over-fist and can largely afford the salary charge. No, what matters is that shareholders, who do nothing at all but sit with their mouths open like chick in a nest waiting for food distribution, what matters is that those freeloaders get their share.

Capitalisme needs a rethink.

CrowdStrike CEO summoned to explain epic fail to US Homeland Security committee

Oh, a summons from Congress

So, Crowdstrike gonna pull a Zuckerberg, or is the CEO actually going to submit to a public flogging ? 'Cause that's what's waiting for him.

Not everyone can be a total asshole. I'm guessing Kurtz is going to bend over backwards to try and keep the share price from falling further.

Time will tell.

Arch-based CachyOS promises speed but trips over its laces

Another conclusion

If you want to launch a new Linux distro, you need to be at least as good as the best distros that already exist.

ESA's meteorite bricks hit Lego stores, but don't get your wallet out just yet

Moon base made of moon LEGO

Why not ?

I just hope that they'll make 'em a bit more rectangular, to ensure that no air gets out. That brick doesn't seem all that airtight to me.

FrostyGoop malware shut off heat to 600 Ukraine apartment buildings

Connected infrastructure requires secure connections

Who knew ?

Global cops power down world's 'most prolific' DDoS dealership

So, the whack-a-mole continues

Congratulations. Good job.

What is the guarantee that these miscreants won't start over on another domain ?

Not diminishing the result in any way, but impeding miscreants is not the same as jailing them.

Cybercrooks crafting solo careers in wake of ransomware takedowns

"increased quality of AI tools that lack prompt filtering"

So, jail the CEOs of AI tools until they implement proper prompt filtering.

Engineers fix ESA's Gaia observatory from 1.5M kilometers away

"We, therefore, raise a glass"

Hear, hear ! I most definitely second that motion ->

Websites clamp down as creepy AI crawlers sneak around for snippets

"an honor code for crawlers"

Ah, honor.

The kind of thing the Founding Fathers were sure people had when making important decisions.

Ah, how times have changed.

Oracle coughs up $115M to make privacy case go away

Ah, privacy

What a nuisance when you want to make money, eh ?

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

"CrowdStrike marked their driver as a boot driver"

So it is down to the shitty Windows environment once again. No surprise there.

The issue might be more in the fact that it seems to be very difficult to isolate the kernel in an OS while granting security access to protective measures, all the while keeping the hoi polloi at bay and the system secure.

Too late to think about a redesign of the OS architecture. We'll just have to make do with what we have.

Cellebrite got into Trump shooter's Samsung device in just 40 minutes

"Cracking of devices in this way isn't welcomed by manufacturers"

Why ?

It's the golden excuse for saying "We will not weaken our device's encryption. We don't have to, since you have the means to break in anyway".

Curiosity rover is crushing it: Ran over a rock and found pure sulfur

Another "that's wierd" moment

Eureka is rarely heard these days, but real science advances on those little steps.

I can't wait to read about the conclusions.

HCL's back-to-office plan: Come in three days a week, or forget about holidays

COVID really threw a wrench in things

During COVID, we were all locked down, nobody was in the office, and yet companies not only survived, but many thrived.

Now, management is desperately trying to get back to before, but there is no going back. We proved that we could do the job with suffering the commute. Stop with the threatening, we know this works.

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.