Posts by Pascal Monett

After injecting pop-up ads for Bing into Windows, Microsoft now bends to Europe on links

"reduce task switching across windows and tabs to help stay focused"

Bollocks.

Face it, Borkzilla : you're not the #1 choice. Oh sure, you have desktop monopoly, one that you ruthlessly enforced when other choices were starting to emerge, but you simply will not be #1 where it counts now or tomorrow, the Internet.

The default browser is the user's choice, whether you like it or not. And if anyone needed proof you do not cater to those using your products, forcing Edge means task switching, because users are in their default browser and you are throwing up Edge.

That does not help to stay in focus. Words against acts, once again, and your acts betray you. Not to mention that this forcing Edge anyway you can is very much like the whiny ex that can't stop phoning you. Pathetic.

In any case, I note with interest all those Edge Deflector tools. I will be exploring their utility on my work laptop. Thanks for that tip !

We're about to hit peak device count, says HTC veep, as AR takes over

Not going to happen

The only reason computing has had so much of an impact on our lives is because, for the past fifty years, there has been every reason to improve on it.

From the room-sized behemoths that could barely calculate a square root per second, to the desktop computers that revolutionized how we work, to the Internet that revolutionized how we could learn and be informed (not always for the better), to today's computing devices that can do it all and be carried in a pocket (for certain values of pocket), computing has been on a necessary improvement curve, and with shining results.

But, with all this tech, what hasn't changed ? Videophone. Oh, technically it has, tremendously. But nobody likes it. They didn't like it when it came out, they don't like it today, and I see no reason to think they will change their mind tomorrow.

Why are teens (and now tweens) always typing on the screens grafted into their hands ? Because texting can be done at your rythm. You impose your little circle of privacy, respond when you feel like it. Zoom, or videophone, or even phoning, deprives you of that choice. You're talking to someone directly, you have to respond at the right moment. That is why all those texters are not actually phoning people all day.

Having an implant in your brain, going on the theory that that will actually be one day possible and 100% reliable, means good-bye to the simple ability to ignore something for a while. You don't want to answer your phone ? Leave it on the couch, go to another room for a minute, just ignore it, the ringtone will die at some point. You don't want to answer that blinking light in your peripheral vision ? Good luck ignoring that.

And what about sleep ? Will you be able to go airline mode and not be bothered in the night, or will you not have a choice and wake up groggy at 3 in the morning with that bloody blinking light in your peripheral vision ?

Whatever the level of tech of this brain implant technology, I'm sure there will be people who try, and I'm sure the majority won't.

A phone, for all its faults, is something you can turn off. Sometimes it feels good to be able to turn off.

Samsung realizes behaving ethically is good for business, says compliance boss

"rejoining the group comes with a caveat"

Samsung will self-exit if the CEO goes to jail again.

(yeah, I know, won't happen - the self-exit, of course - the going to jail, who knows ?)

Japan complains Fukushima water release created terrifying Chinese Spam monster

"China has labelled [this] a selfish and highly irresponsible action,"

Yeah, and China knows all about those actions.

Brain-computer interface and AI helps stroke victim speak through avatar

"The [NYT] updated its terms of service"

It would do better to update its bot.txt file, because despite all the hype around pseudo-AI at the moment, I don't think those statistical analysis machines actually read terms of service.

Or are even beginning to be capable of understanding them.

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

Stringing cables on a pole is easier

Sure it is. It also puts the cable at the mercy of the weather, of drunken motorists, of kids with stupid ideas and of thieves with an agenda.

Yes, putting cables in the ground is much more expensive. It requires proper planning and documentation. It also removes a lot of possible dangers, and could maybe even help in case of Carrington events.

There are cases when it pays in the long run to do things the expensive way.

Eh, Boeing ?

Foxconn founder Terry Gou to run for Taiwan's presidency

I think it is time to post this again.

Whiffy malware stinks after tracking location via Wi-FI

Not acceptable

"T-Mobile, without any authority from or contact with Kroll or its employee, transferred that employee's phone number to the threat actor's phone at their request"

No. Just no.

I don't care what the sob story was, the fact that T-Mobile accepted to do so means that it is T-Mobile that is guilty of handing out that data to the wrong person.

I just can't imagine why, in 2023, a communications company would still be able to do so. This is not a new kind of attack. There should be procedures in place preventing this from happening. And, if an employee ignores those procedures, he should be fired, because this is exactly what the procedures are meant to prevent.

T-Mobile, you are responsible for the proper management of your customers' data, and that includes their SIM data.

You utterly failed to uphold your responsibility.

If I were a T-Mobile customer, I'd be reviewing my options for leaving.

Here’s how VMware hopes to spend $1B Broadcom R&D budget boost

Thank you for your comments. I'll report them back to him.

ProxMox, he says.

VMware apparently has a few issues to solve

As a freelance consultant in Luxembourg I get to talk to quite a few people in the upper echelons. Just yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a business owner who told that he had dropped VMware entirely. Among the things he gave as reasons were :

1) as a business partner, he has to recertify every year (money for VMware), he has to give a certain amount of referrals every year (money for VMware), and yet he still has to pay for his application license - no freebies for business partners

2) the latest version of VMware must be installed on (very) recent hardware - if your server is five years old, VMware won't install

As a result, he is now using an open source (free) product that works just as well, is less complicated to configure and use and doesn't pout in the corner if the CPU isn't the latest and greatest.

I'm thinking that VMware may have some issues in its future if it can be so easily replaced by a free product.

Tor turns to proof-of-work puzzles to defend onion network from DDoS attacks

I think this is brilliant

If I were a Tor user, I would wholeheartedly agree.

Something that keeps dishonest troublemakers out of my way and let's me surf in peace ? I'm all for it.

And I really like that they are taking pains to clarify that it is not YAFMS (yet another funny money scheme). Funny money has nothing to do with plain old integrity, and that integrity is what the Tor developers are trying to keep.

I salute them ->

Profits just keep rolling in at T-Mobile US. So only thing to do is axe 5,000 workers

"We have zero intention of being a faceless – or heartless – company"

Yeah ? Well you blew those intentions right out the door.

Words vs acts means that your words are meaningless.

You are a liar.

Getting meshy: BAE scores £89m deal with MoD to build new battlefield network

"BAE and its partners [..] have yet to design the new system"

And the MoD thinks it is going to have its new toy in 2026 ?

Without overcharges ?

What optimism.

I think I'll be reading about this project's delivery date before, and after, 2026.

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

"Happily, we never heard a word about it from anyone,"

I wonder how well that demonstrates the usefulness of those screens.

UN cybercrime treaty risks becoming a 'global surveillance pact'

I think you meant to say NSA.

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

Re: the company saw more of this abusive behavior

Completely agree with your point. As already said above, this is in exactly the same ballpark as Internet providers pretending to offer unlimited access, but complaining when you actually use it.

So <1% of users are using >35TB of storage. And ? You said "unlimited". If your business plan is not capable of handling that, it's your failure.

Especially since you are "offering" that plan to professionals. Guess what, there are professional video makers, and video takes up a lot of space. And even if they are not professional video makers, you said the plan was unlimited. Your terms.

Dropbox is decidedly a useless company. They don't know what they're doing, and they don't know how to do it.

Doesn't matter, they'll be gone soon enough.

Rocky Linux backer CIQ rejects lawsuit's claims it was founded on stolen IP

How is this possible ?

Company signs agreement with employee to let him go and start another company in the same business, then sues.

If they did sign that agreement, why did they sue ? And if they did not, why is a lawyer saying they did ?

Is this another case of "well, we did agree to that, but this is different" ? - aka : another bloody waste of time in court ?

Honestly, if I were the judge I would throw the whole thing out on principle. You waived your right to complain, so what are you doing here ?

UK health service has £1.5B to put toward Digital Workplace Solutions 2: Electric Boogaloo

"together with limits to its budget"

Limits to its budget ?

For an organization that has been pissing money away for nothing since at least ten years, it's budget is obviously not limited enough.

If they had less money to fool around with, they'd have to do something actually productive with what they had.

Then they could build on it bit by bit, instead of having all these massive ideas that end up going nowhere and costing everything.

Why these cloud-connected 3D printers started making junk all by themselves

Sounds like this cloud thing was programmed as if it was a local server

We all know that cloud = someone else's server.

In this case, it would seem that someone else's server had an issue with restoring a proper job list after a connection had dropped (sounds like something that should have been tested properly).

That looks like there isn't sufficient job identification when printing. If the printer knew which job it was printing and if each new instruction was accompanied by the proper jobID, then if a new jobID was suddenly sending instructions, the printer would be able to refuse and set itself in error status.

Sounds like that is a precaution that was not taken because why think of making sure the printer knows what it is printing ? The Cloud^TM never goes wrong, right ?

Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds

computer intrusion, blackmail, and fraud

So, if I get this right, if you're under 18 in the UK you can wreak havoc and blackmail people and you're free until the trial ?

No computer lockdown ? You can just carry on blackmailing people ?

Is there something that is keeping that soon-to-be criminal from continuing to make other people's lives miserable ?

India lands Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on Moon, is the first to lunar south pole

Well, I'm guessing Roscosmos is keeping veeeery quiet now

Too bad for Science, really, more of that is always welcome.

China's top EV battery maker announced a breakthrough, but top boffin isn't convinced

Another week, another astonishing claim from some other Chinese institute

At this rythm, by the end of the year they'll be declaring the flying car.

Neighbors angry as another North Korean 'satellite' launch attempt fails

So it blew up ?

The article is not very clear on the end result. I'm guessing rapid unscheduled disassembly.

And where did the remains fall down ? The Yellow Sea ?

And are we sure that there was no flying laser in the vicinity ? That unexpected 3rd-stage snafu could very well have been the result of a bit of coherent light interference with the 3rd stage envelope, no ?

Good thing Nvidia makes number-crunching GPUs – it'll need them to count its cash

Nothing to worry about indeed

Even if the Biden administration tightens the rules even more and nVidia loses the chinese market, it's rolling in dough anyway. It'll just make less and it has an official excuse for why. Not it's fault, had nothing to do with it, etc.

It's financials will continue to look good and, hopefully, that means its employees will remain employed (although nVidia is not IBM on that point).

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

So, another cloud company that screws it up for all of its customers

Hey, CloudNordic, if I was one of your customers I wouldn't be worrying about getting my site back online with your help.

I'd be getting it back online with the help of a different provider.

You screw up in that magnitude, I vote with my wallet.

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

No reason to panick

It's the UN. Nobody listens to them anyway, and when they should say something important, they keep quiet.

Let them spout on about ruling the Internet. The existing bodies can just politely take the paper and sit on it. After all, the UN has no enforcement capability.

The UN has never changed anything, it certainly won't start here.

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

"We may fail"

No, man. You WILL fail.

This is on you.

You have a CEO, why are you making more decisions ?

Are you really that stupid that you don't see how bad you are at decision making ?

To think that this waste of air is the one who got lucky with PayPal and swims in money.

Sometimes Lady Luck would need some sort of consequence alert.

And it's all going down the drain.

Marvellous to watch.

From afar.

You can now fine-tune OpenAI's GPT-3.5 for specific tasks – it may even beat GPT-4

Yeah, but wait until GPT-5, -6, -7 !

Endless marketing cycles FTW !

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

Space trash

Humanity, as a whole, has a tendancy of not caring if it doesn't seem to matter. The only problem with that attitude, is that we often cannot see how it matters before it is too late, or at least much more expensive to correct.

That is why we are choking the sea with plastics coming from bags that have been carelessly thrown out a car window, or left on the beach because the trash can was five meters too far away.

In space, it has been the same thing. The entire space industry has, since the beginning, operated on a it-doesn't-matter attitude. Leftover rocket booster lounging around at 600+ kilometers ? Doesn't matter, it'll end up coming down.

Except that, since the decades we have been throwing stuff up there (and given the cost, with pretty good reason, generally speaking), all those remaining objects are now starting to clutter up Earth's orbital space and becoming, if not yet a danger, a clear nuisance.

All of that because of our human reflex. Like the smoker who just chucks his cigarette butt instead of putting it in the trash bin.

We will end up paying for that as well, in time.

Apple's defense against apps vandalizing other apps still broken, developer claims

Re: Not sure I get it

Good question. There are plenty of Windows applications that can make major changes to system-wide settings. Is that supposed to be considered a bug ?

When I double-click on a PDF and the system asks me if I want to define a given program as default for opening PDF files, I do not consider that a bug. I've been asked, therefor I give or refuse my authorization and I find that that works.

But if I have a application that automatically overrides my existing settings because their developers know best, that is the kind of thing that will make me nuke their application and never go back to it.

Now, the real question is : Skype for Business, that still exists ? Hasn't that been folded into Teams ?

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

"the Artemis V crew"

We're at Artemis I, right ?

So that's like the mobile phone industry talking about 8G when 5G has just been registered as a commercial failure, and 6G is still under design.

The only difference is that this is NASA planning. I'm fairly sure that they can plan a space station better than the mobile phone industry can plan yet another useless xG version. The space station will be absolutely critical to anything we get to doing in space in the future.

It's a good thing everyone is not like the mobile phone industry, otherwise we'd have IPv7 in the starting blocks and everyone telling us we need to migrate to accomodate a googleplex ip addresses we don't need.

Hey Joe, those US CHIPS funds still coming? We kinda need them, says Micron

Subsidies are "necessary" ?

So you're basically saying that your company does not have the funding required to do it alone ?

Why should you get subsidies then ? You're already a multi-billion dollar business.

Subsidies are made for small companies that need some help surviving bad times, or agriculture which simply cannot sell at cost because supermarkets are always pushing prices to the bare minimum to maximize their margins.

Subsidies should literally be forbidden for companies that are over a billion dollars in capital.

It's called capitalism. If you can't make it on your own, you don't make it.

Well, that's the theory, anyway. In practice, it depends a lot on who you know, and who you can put pressure on . . .

In any case, funnily enough, I never hear complaints about government intervention when it's question of handouts.

California DMV hits brakes on Cruise's SF driverless fleet after series of fender benders

Well forget the second accident

There is no programming in the world that can prevent a vehicle from being broadsided by a moron who runs a red light. I'm glad there were no injuries and I hope the careless driver will get what he deserves.

But a vehicle that can't handle an oncoming vehicle in the same lane ? I understand that avoidance maneuvers is a whole other set of abilities, but braking is still supposed to be on the cards, is it not ? The vehicle "initiated a braking maneuver". Nice to know. Why did it not stop entirely ? Or did it stop entirely and it's the ambulance that drove into it ? Not clear from the article.

Whatever the case, if driverless vehicles can't handle the antics of emergency vehicles - who are doing their duty as best they can - and become no better than roadblocks, then it's not 50% less that should be on the road, it's 100%, day and night, until the issue is solved.

Now I agree that, given the trouble it has been up to now to get anything near driverless actually working, this is probably a whole new load of trouble for the engineers concerned.

Still, if there is one type vehicle that should always get top priority on the road, it's emergency response vehicles.

And driverless cars should be the first to give way and clear the road for them.

OpenAI snaps up role-playing game dev as first acquisition

Stop misusing that term

"Maybe it's possible they can become more intelligent if they can embody and experience a digital one"

No. Stop encouraging people to think that statistical analysis machines have any intelligence at all.

It's not because we have no idea how they get to their conclusions that there is a iota of intelligence inside the box. There isn't.

It's just mathematical rules coming together in some way that confuses people. Besides, mention statistics and 90% of the room is already asleep, drooling.

You wouldn't say that a movement detector is intelligent because it detects someone entering and turns on the light ?

What you're calling AI is no different from the movement detector. The movement detector just has less circuitry.

High severity vuln in WinRAR could allow code to run when files are opened

Yep. I'll be honest, I used to use WinRar before 7zip came out.

But, ever since 7zip has been available, I had been steadfast in using it and talking about it around me.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

"Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"

Well that's already a clear sign that this mission was placed squarely under the sign of Brilliant Communist Success Story instead of being careful, taking things easy and just getting there.

They could have spent 40+ days getting there, slower arrival speed, easier to slow down. But no, Communism slows down for nothing. So they arrived much faster, something went wrong (did the political commissar attached to the project take advantage of the situation to sell off a few minor parts, gasket, switch, modulator ? Nobody will notice, right ?), and the burn destined to slow the craft down ended up sending it directly into the Moon.

It must be exhausting to live in a country where everything you do must not only be a success, but also something the higher-ups always need to be able to brag about.

Doing Science in that kind of environment is crazy.

Well it certainly was a short fall !

Need a decent dining spot in Ottawa? Microsoft suggested a food bank

CNET, Gizmondo, others to be found out

So, we're now in the age of "publications" paying AI to create stuff to bring in readership.

Well, now that I know that, I'm not using those site ever again.

If you think I'm going to be interested in the brain farts of something that has no brain, have I got news for you.

The Board thinks it's going to create the perfect AI to "create" it's content, fire all the meatbags and profit ?

Not gonna happen.

Re: This is nothing new.

That's not the point.

Yes, humans have been shitty at their jobs since Oglug failed to keep the campfire burning. So what ?

We're not supposed to be making pseudo-AI to make the same (or worse) mistakes we do. We should be making it to do better.

It's not better because it's not AI. It's just statistics, and a human has to program the damn things. Not to mention train them.

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

Re: NASA is responsible for it's budgets

Of course, every agency is responsible for its budget.

But that doesn't mean that it decides the amount of budget it receives.

It's budget requires X billions to function properly. That is a known quantity. Congress allocates Y = X - too much.

You're saying that's NASA's fault ?

A license to trust: Can you rely on 'open source' companies?

I love this article

Especially since I said just about the same thing 7 days ago, concerning HashiCorp.

Nice to see that I'm not the only one with this opinion.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

There are solar-powed USB chargers

Found that kind of stuff on Amazon. You'd need a nice bit of extra trunk space to store one (or two), but apparently, if you've got the sunlight, they can do a fair job of keeping your laptop charged.

What they would do with this, I have no idea, but it's better than just leaving it to an external battery.

What DARPA wants, DARPA gets: A non-hacky way to fix bugs in legacy binaries

Re: How did they allow themselves to get into this position anyway?

That is the marvel of the software industry.

You need to realize that source code used to be treated like gold. You had the rights to the final product, but if you wanted the source code, you paid extra (and I mean HEAVY extra).

And that's not too long ago either. About ten years ago I was working for a European Institution that had a business-critical Notes application for which it had paid a ungodly amount of money to have the rights to the source code (and that was accompanied by an iron-clad contract in which, if ever said source code was published anywhere, a number of first-borns would have to be sacrificed on a night of a new moon).

Even today, having the source code is not a given. Go ask some web designer to do you a website and get the quote for having the website and the source code for all of it. I'm thinking you'll be looking at a different figure compared to just the website and support.

Personally, I've always programmed in Lotus Notes. For me, it was a given that the applications I was writing for the client would not be code-locked.

I know of quite a few software houses in Luxembourg that don't do that today.

Well, first of all, it's Da Gubbermint. You are doing your patriotic duty in letting it reverse-engineer and modify binaries for which there is no code.

Second, those EULAs, apparently, all belong to defunct companies whose programmers are likely retired today (if they are still alive), and whose IP has not been bought by some company still in activity today.

Third, even if that IP had been bought, there's a fair chance that the accounting department (or internal library) has no clue that they have the rights to that code. Also, there is a non-zero chance that, even if they know, they have no desire to tell anyone because they don't want to put a finger into the update process of a software for which they might have the source code (having the IP rights doesn't mean you have the code) but don't have anyone capable of modifying it.

Because if they show up and make a fuss about IP, then they run the very real risk of being liable for the changes.

I know I wouldn't want that.

Our AI habit is already changing the way we build datacenters

"first of its kind datacenters"

Is this another Musk-level brain fart ?

It's a datacenter. It uses ungodly amounts of power, generates equally ungodly amounts of heat, and that heat needs evacuating. Oh, and on the side, it may be somewhat useful.

It's not because you're building it with the latest in-house doo-dad that the situation changes.

Call me when you've invented a datacenter that doesn't need cooling. THAT will be first-of-its-kind.

Re: Smoking hairy golfball

Thanks for that. I'm going to keep that reference.

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

Failover backup redlining

The issue is not the failover, it's the idiot who designed a failover system with less resources than the production system.

If you design a failover, that server needs the exact same configuration than the one it is replacing.

Not doing that is stupid, and this was the result.

I would have thought that you wouldn't need a degree in computer science to understand that. Apparently, you do.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

a politically neutral 'truth'

Unless we're talking about science (and even then), I do not think there is any chance that the "truth" cannot be biased by politics.

I mean, water flows downhill whether you are republican, democrat or whatever else, right ?

Pi, for example, is famously known as 3.14159 (and an infinity more). That did not stop some US legislator from attempting to pass a law to "simplify" Pi to, IIRC, 3.

God knows why, but one thing is certain : if politics cannot stay away from basic mathematical truth, then there is no truth that can remain politically neutral forever.