Posts by Pascal Monett

Snowflake lets admins make MFA mandatory across all user accounts

Great idea

I didn't catch the part where they were promoting OTP for MFA.

Is that an omission, or are they asking for user's phone numbers to send unsecure SMSs to ?

Or, <shudder>, biometrics ?

Microsoft exits OpenAI's boardroom to sidestep regulatory scrutiny

So, Redmond is "confident in the company's direction"

Of course it is. When Ballmer was driving it into the wall it was also quite confident. It took the total disaster that was Vista to finally get rid of that clown.

I wonder what kind of disaster is going to make Redmond think about what it is doing.

It'll take one hell of a disaster when all the Board has to do is check its gold vaults to reassure itself.

Windows 11 is closing the gap on Windows 10

Re: at least taught the public at large

The past two decades of Borkzilla history contradicts that statement.

The public at large has learned nothing, and people who are vastly more informed have apparently not learned much.

Windows whatever continues to infiltrate the business world like the virus it is. Can't kill it, can't get rid of it. Like the common cold, it will always be around to grace your network with latest 0-day, curtesy of Borkzilla's absence of quality control.

"use of Windows 11 continues to rise as Windows 10 falls"

Of course it will. Especially since Redmond has done everything it can to kill Windows 1 0. There's only one route left.

Ever since Vista; that has been Borkzilla's history. Gone are the days where users flocked to Windows XP because it was viewed as the Next Best Thing.

Now, the next version of Windows is just That Unavoidable Upgrade To Be Done As Late As Possible.

Might there be a message there, Redmond ?

Glass rain, supersonic winds, and Eau de Rotten Egg – just another day on HD 189733 b

Oh great, another ginormous gaseous planet about to be destroyed by its star

13 times closer to its star than Mercury ? Less than 4 million kilometers then.

So, when is it going to be absorbed, or torn apart ? Does the Roche limit function in this scenario ?

Big Tech's eventual response to my LLM-crasher bug report was dire

Well free the prompt, then

Last time I asked for the prompt, it was very much tongue-in-cheek (and with the troll icon, no less). Of course I was not expecting you to do that.

I'm not expecting you to do that now either, but if Redmond is not concerned, then maybe it would do good for it to see just how concerned it should have been.

America's new Sentinel nukes mushroom 81% in cost. Pentagon says it's all good

Yeah, two years after its planned 3-week offensive.

RADIUS networking protocol blasted into submission through MD5-based flaw

So this has to be an insider attack

Seems a bit much to ask an insider to set up cloud computing for improving a MITM attack. Besides, if he needs to hack, he doesn't have admin access. In that case, he would need to have admin rights over his local PC in order to install all the stuff he needs - and that is becoming increasingly scarce these days. Except in small companies, of course, but you don't need to MITM in a small company. You just chat up the right person and, with a bit of social skills, you'll be in in no time.

So, the attack exists, already has patches, and can't be used by an outsider. What is the real scope for danger, here ?

Europe blasts back into the heavy launch biz with first Ariane 6 flight

Congratulations

It's nice to see Arianespace back in the race. And, contrary to some, no multiple delays and rescheduling, just engineers doing their job in the background then, flight.

Makes you dream, eh Boeing ?

Tesla parental controls keep teenage lead feet in check

Tesla parental controls

Are useless when it's the kid that buys the car.

Once upon a time, in order to have a car that could go from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds, you had to have a successful career behind you, or a rich father. Nowadays, all you need is good job.

Personally, I would be for a law that states that young conductors with less than 5 years experience should be legally limited to 80hp.

I have two friends whose sons have a Tesla. The kids have lead feet, but there is no parental controls since the parents haven't bought 'em.

I'm just hoping they'll be lucky enough to not have a bad accident before they actually get enough experience to manage that kind of power. Same thing for all the others.

Parental controls ? Nice idea. Seems a bit useless in the current world.

Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams

"Office 365 connectors within Teams will be cut"

So, Fortune 1000, when are you going to understand that Borkzilla is not a reliable business company ?

How many more rugs do you need pulled under you to stop giving those leeches money ?

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Because the PM's nephew likes to have lunch in that specific pub and no other.

So the datacenter is in London. QED.

Microsoft China staff can't log on with an Android, so Redmond buys them iThings

It seems obvious that no one at Redmond is thinking of anything.

They can't even renew their certs in time, so something as complicated as ensuring proper authentication . . forget about it.

Eldorado ransomware-as-a-service gang targets Linux, Windows systems

"encrypts files on both Linux and Windows machines"

Wait a minute. I accept that the scumware can encrypt files on Linux, but won't that be limited to the files of the user ?

Unless </headsmack> they've found a privilege escalation hack, of course. But will said privilege escalation hack function on all distros ? I'm guessing not.

Could some Linux aficionados enlighten me on this ? Linux has actual security. How is this possible ?

Coders' Copilot code-copying copyright claims crumble against GitHub, Microsoft

"The judge disagreed [..] on the grounds that the code [..] was not identical enough"

I'm hoping that his analysis was a bit better than just looking at the names of the variables and finding that they weren't the same.

If you submit a given problem to two developers who can't talk to each other and have to use the same programming language and the same algorithm, I submit that there's a fair chance that their code will be similar. In LotusScript, for example, there's not very many ways to get a document from a view and there's only one quick way, so it's pretty obvious that that part of the code will be near-identical between developers. There is, however, one possibility of difference whatever the algorithm : if there are arrays to be used, one developer could program and use said array, the other one could instead use NotesItem. In that case, the code would obviously be markedly different and yet produce the same result.

But such cases are, I would think, few and far between. If you're writing to a file, there's an extremely limited number of ways to do it differently.

Microsoft forgets about SwiftKey's support site

Re: Looks like the intern

Yeah.

One such blunder was bad enough. Two is simply proof that Redmond really doesn't give a damn.

Fraud guilty plea flies from Boeing to swerve courtroom over 737 Max crashes

"a meeting with Boeing's board of directors"

The only way I would be going to a meeting like that is with an Uzi and three extra clips.

To be confronted to sunch a bunch of snakes and know I couldn't do anything about it would be too much, for me.

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Yeah. That sounds very safe to me.

Indeed.

I'm not an electrician, but wiring things into a live installation definitely sounds like something I would not like to do.

Electricity is dangerous enough when you have time to manage it properly. Plugging things in to live voltage is just asking for trouble.

A decade after collapsing, crypto exchange Mt Gox repays some investors

Oh but it is.

It's just that economists don't understand it yet.

Selfie-based authentication raises eyebrows among infosec experts

"typically takes under 20 seconds to complete"

If it says "under 20 seconds", that means more than 10. So, in order to purchase takeaway (I'm guessing), you have to not only consent for your facial biometrics to be captured by some two-bit outfit that will be hacked in under 20 minutes, but you also have to submit to a dystopian-future-style interrogation for a quarter of a minute to prove that you are just an innocent citizen.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Oh, and those small companies have not implemented this as a stopgap. If I know anything about small companies, they are not looking for a better solution. This is the solution.

FCC: T-Mobile US unit gave blind customer the runaround in massive tech support fail

Yes and no.

The company is recieving federal funds for helping disabled people.

Help them. Stop with the procedural phone call scripts and get a human with a brain who knows the system and makes it work.

And you should do that for everyone, actually. And yes, I know : that costs money.

Texas court blocks FTC noncompete ban, and you can blame SCOTUS

The USA is heading for the wall

Trump's manipulation of the Supreme Court is going to guarantee that the USA will spend the next few decades in turmoil and maybe end in a revolution.

It should be illegal to put biased people into such an institution, but the rules only work when people are ready to respect them.

Trump respects no one and, given the number of criminals he has surrounded himself with, it should be a clear sign that this man needs to be removed from politics.

Oh well, he'll be dead of old age soon. But not soon enough.

Cancer patient forced to make terrible decision after Qilin attack on London hospitals

I wish her the best

She's young, she still has her life in front of her. I hope that her cancer is over and that she will be able to live a full and fulfilling life with her spouse and children.

It is horrible to have been put through such an ordeal. Cancer is already bad enough as it is without being forced to make life-changing decisions literally right before going under the knife.

But, having lost my mother to ovarian cancer when she was only 63, I can't help but approve her decision. I'm sure her husband prefers her with one boob rather than not having her at all. Maybe, just maybe, it is a good thing for her and she will be able to have reconstructive surgery at a later date when all is well and the whole problem is over. I just wish her the best.

But it is still criminal to have put her through all that.

Re: just in case one day someone cracks the encryption

I doubt that. Someone would have to be working on the encryption to hack it, and if the disks are stored, nobody is working on it.

But I might well be wrong, and somehow I hope I am.

Paessler pulls subscription licensing switcheroo on PRTG Network Monitor

"3,000 of the 10,000 largest VMware customers"

So, you don't care about the little ones, and you haven't managed to retain 50% of the largest ones.

And you call that a success ?

Latest Ghostscript vulnerability haunts experts as the next big breach enabler

It's either open a file or click a link

There's the remote edge case where you visit a compromised website, but it seems to me that 99% of all malware is still waiting for the user to do something stupid.

Fix that and the miscreants will lose billions overnight.

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

I don't know.

I am personally rather familiar with Sir Humphrey. I absolutely love Yes Minister and its sequel, and I personally consider that it should be mandatory watching for every political student.

Then they can go on to House of Cards, which I abandoned after season 1 because wayyy too plausible and not funny at all.

Oracle releases experimental next-gen kernel build

Btrfs

Excuse me if I am a bit confused, but how many file systems do we actually need ?

I understand why FAT fell by the wayside, and I get that NTFS might not be the best of breed, but it's been since the 1960s that we've been studying the problem.

Why don't we have a good, reliable, standard file system yet ? Why does every vendor still have their own ?

Europol says mobile roaming tech is making its job too hard

"while not impeding secure communications disproportionately"

But it's okay to impede secure comms a little bit - just enough to avoid either putting boots on the ground or, worse, more paperwork like, oh I don't know, a warrant ?

You want to hear what some suspect is saying ? Here's an idea : directional microphone. I hear they work very well.

Of course, that's less easy to put in place than clicking on a keyboard from a thousand kilometers away.

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

"he had worked more hours than were allowed"

Than allowed by whom ? The police handbook ?

And is that officer going to go around jailing firefighters because they took 11 hours to secure a building in flames ?

Ridiculous.

Time Lords decree: No leap second needed in 2024

The negative leap second

A new Y2K in preparation ?

I can understand some points, actually. Adding seconds just means that logs write the next operation x seconds after the last. Removing a second would mean that a log (especially transaction logs) would have multiple entries for the same second, and then some more. That could be quite the headache for many servers and RDBMSs, not to mention the admins that keep them ticking.

And I have zero idea how to solve the issue.

Db2 is a story worth telling, even if IBM won't

Worse than that, IBM seems actively engaged in burying the product and any mention of it until it is completely forgotten.

Then, when the balance sheet comes up, they're all wailing and astonished that they're not making enough money.

We've banned Chinese telco kit and drones. Next: Mountain bikes?

"its fleet of DJI drones"

How is it that the US Government, which has been increasingly hysterical over China for the past decade, has purchased these drones in the first place ?

I mean sure, buy one to study it, but a fleet ?

Row erupts over data sharing function in UK doctor software

"better understand the implications of this software"

Seems like there was a step missing in the project before the software was written. Thos creating the software should have been more aware of its implications.

As usual, people talking to people who aren't on the ground, making decisions about what should be done and then getting all surprised when the people supposed to use the software get all riled up and worried about responsibility.

It seems that the root problem is that it's never the people actually responsible who get asked what they need, it's only the upper-class manglement who don't have a clue but need something to look good on their CV.

So much for green Google ... Emissions up 48% since 2019

"who spun it as a net positive"

In other words : this is what we're doing now and we ain't changing anything.

So, Google, how 'bout them FPGAs ?

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

Bummer

I was hoping to see fusion in my lifetime.

I guess I'll just have to hope that my daughter sees it.

Ransomware scum who hit Indonesian government apologizes, hands over encryption key

"not all victims would get the same treatment"

And there goes any goodwill you might have garnered. Penetration testers my ass. You're nothing but a bunch of greedy scumbags. I would hope you rot in Hell, but God is infinitely better than me.

Australia to build Top Secret cloud in AWS for military and spooky users

"to securely host our country's most sensitive information"

In the cloud. On someone else's server. Server that is managed by a group of barely-paid administrators fresh out of college.

I'm sure nation-state-backed hackers everywhere are looking forward to finding out what is in that cloud.

And they'll find out.

Microsoft Stores all close their doors in China

Re: the average user often opts for a MacBook

Sorry to burst your reality distortion field, but given that the MacBook has trouble breaching the 20% market share, it would seem that the average user buys a Windows laptop.

Oak Ridge boffins twist exotic metal into eco-friendly, solid-state cooler

I remember that

It was all the rage back when watercooling came out. Watercooling won because the Peltier coolers had a tendancy to freeze not on ly the CPU, but the air around it, meaning ice crystals forming on the motherboard.

Not good.

Cue a slew of tutorials explaining how to spread vaseline around the CPU to avoid shorting the motherboard.

Yeah, watercooling was easier.

Salesforce investors reject plan to add extra $20M to Benioff's total pay

Benioff is already a majority shareholder

So, if the company is doing well, he's doing well. He doesn't need more and, since he's already a billionnaire, he hardly needs a few paltry million more.

He should have asked for 20 billion. Apparently, among billionnaires these days, it's all the rage.

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

Re: To translate or [fail] to translate

Dialects are always a nightmare for linguists, so forget about computers.

MIT's bionic leg upgrade leaves amputees walking like the wind

It is breathtaking to see what future we are preparing on the medical front

I am gobsmacked to see that we are finding ways to overcome handicap so efficiently.

Well done. This is what happens when you have intelligent people dedicated to actually solving problems and technology that provides novel means to new solutions.

Don't tell me that landing on the Moon was a waste of money. This is proof that it wasn't.

France poised to bring 'charges against Nvidia'

What about FPGAs ?

I thought that there is now renewed interest in FPGA tech for all that juicy AI and ML stuff.

Nvidia can therefor argue that it hardly has a monopoly since it's going to get kicked out of the market, right ?

Boeing to reacquire spun-off supplier Spirit AeroSpace to shore up safety

"reacquire spun-off supplier Spirit AeroSpace"

Yeah well, at this point you can only say : incest is what it is, right ?

CISA director: US is 'not afraid' to shout about Big Tech's security failings

"not afraid to say when something is amiss"

I congratulate you.

Now, when are you actually going to do something about it ?

Because you remind me of the wife who is continually pestering her husband to get a job. For years.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

You're right. Hadn't thought of that.

Verizon hit with whopping $847M verdict for infringing 5G and hotspot patents

"The judicial process is ongoing"

Sounds like an appeal if I ever heard of one.

Obviously.

Make 'em squirm, I say.

What do CTOs hate most about GenAI? Tool changes that break stuff

Tool changes that break stuff

Um, sorry, but aren't we in the Scrum epoch of move fast and break things ?

Aren't you supposed to be happy about that ? Oh, you're not ?

Well, it might be time to calm down and go back to waterfall, then. You know, when things were actually being planned ?