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* Posts by Pascal Monett

19426 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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 CloudTM 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 CloudTM 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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

Connected infrastructure requires secure connections

Who knew ?

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Terminator

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Pint

"We, therefore, raise a glass"

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

Websites clamp down as creepy AI crawlers sneak around for snippets

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Ah, privacy

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

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: WTF?

People might.

Companies don't.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

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'

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So, Office 345 is down again

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Apparently, you mean some other muppet . . .

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

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.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"an uncertain budget environment"

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

Maximum-severity Cisco vulnerability allows attackers to change admin passwords

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"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

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"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.