Posts by Pascal Monett

Global Slack messaging outage cuts world off from colleagues

Test team ?

I have news for you, my friend. Come over here, it's going to take some time . . .

"bought [..] in 2020 for $27 billion, hauled in $1.5 billion [..] for its fiscal 2022"

At that rythm, it'll take until 2038 to recoup the investment.

Well, who said planning was a lost art ?

Oh wait, it wasn't planning, now was it ?

Thames Water to datacenters: Cut water use or we will

"250 Olympic-sized swimming pools"

If a water company is leaking that much of its only excuse for existing, then it should concentrate on stopping the leaks before blaming customers that they're using its product.

£214m effort to modernize SAP ERP in UK govt systems marked Code Red

It's a laudable idea, handled by a bunch of bumbling gasbags

Keeping spending to a tight leash is definitely something that should be achieved in government, no question on that, but might it have been an idea to go one department at a time and consolidate afterwards ?

Going for entire swaths of departments at a time seems overly bold to me, especially when these projects are handled by decision-makers who have no experience in these kinds of decisions.

But no matter, costs will overrun and delivery will be delayed, as with practically every other government project. What is important is not to achieve, but to be active.

Like that hospital in Yes Minister which had no patients, but 500 administrative personnel.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Technically, that has been achieved just a few weeks ago, and it made a lot of noise in scientific circles.

We're not talking about commercial production yet, though.

As for superconductivity, I certainly do hope that that will arrive. Just think, with that single innovation all power generators will instantly become up to 20% more efficient !

AI mentioned 175 times during Microsoft's Q4 earnings call

"Microsoft's More Personal Computing division"

Well, at least they're slightly more honest about that.

It's true that it used to be Personal Computing, but with all the phoning home to the mothership that Borkzilla has crammed down everyone's throat, they at least have the honesty to not say just Personal Computing any more.

Not that I think they did so on purpose . . .

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments

What is truly sad is that you focus on a single point of his post and leave out all the very good and appropriate stuff before.

Financially smart ?

Because buying Twitter was a smart move ?

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

Re: Watching Musk run this into the ground...

Better not make a drinking game out of it, though. No liver could survive.

Twisting the arm has a prior condition : you have to have a hold on it.

Xwitter has no hold on anyone. It hardly has a hold on itself.

Russia throws founder of infosec biz Group-IB in the clink for treason

"even by Russian standards"

It's Russia (okay, the Soviet Union) that has set the standards on unreasonably rushed trials.

If even they are saying that the trial was unreasonably rushed, then that has to be a new world record.

Crooks pwned your servers? You've got four days to tell us, SEC tells public companies

Hang on a minute

"a company can delay filing this report with the SEC if the US Attorney General determines that openly disclosing the intrusion immediately would pose a major risk to national security or public safety"

How is the Attorny General able to make a decision if the company is delaying its filing ?

Does it mean that a company should contact the Attorny General immediately and get a decision before deciding to delay the SEC filing ?

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

"it needs to have oversight"

What makes hié think there isn't oversight ?

So this bullshit has now reached Congress. The army has alien corpses recovered from crashed UFOs, yet, in this age of smartphones, there isn't a single picture of proof floating around.

I wonder how many other governments are hiding UFO stuff, and why nobody else in the world is talking about it.

Oh, by the way, apart from their good word, I don't suppose they've actually produced anything in the way of proof ?

NASA awards $150 million to prototype tech for humans on the Moon, and above it

So it's going to be the Moon after all

Good. As far as building stuff and ensuring protection and long-term habitability, the Moon is no harder than Mars and much closer in case of emergency.

Okay, we're talking a three-week delay for emergencies (maybe that can be improved on), but still, better three weeks than at least six months.

GlobalFoundries claims German chip subsidies will 'distort competition'

Re: Distort competition?

It's always the same story. When US companies get subsidies, it's to support the economy. When foreign companies get subsidies, it distorts competition.

That dead horse has been flogged for so long it's surprising there's anything left to that threadbare argument.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

Ah, the good ol' days, when you had to walk uphill to start your PC, and walk uphill to shut it down . . .

James Webb spots water vapor in rocky planet-forming disk

This discovery might advantageously explain why there is water in Earth's mantle, which is something the cometary theory is not really capable of explaining.

Tokkers can Tok like Tweeters can Tweet – for now

"specific bans for some, such as government employees"

Government employes have nothing to do on Tik Tok or any other non-governmental service with their government-issued hardware and software.

Why is that such an issue ?

The only problem is that government agencies aren't capable of locking down their software properly.

Go work for a bank and see if you can access Tik Tok on your company profile.

Go ahead, I dare you.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Re: Committed to end twitter

That's the only thing I'm not bothered about.

Let him kill it, and his investment as well.

Serves him right.

The people ?

There's only one moron running the website and since he's fired everyone who knew anything, he spouts and spouts then has to run empty corridors to find someone who will implement his spoutyness.

Takes time.

He can go back to his diapers if he wants.

At least that would be a lot less shit for the rest of the world to deal with.

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

"who knows how insecure it actually is?"

We'll find out when there is a stupendous malware breach that takes control of the non-airgapped PCs and spreads to the so-called air-gapped ones still connected to the same network and the mayhem and forensic report that follows demonstrates that the whole thing was worse than useless because false sense of security.

Any day now, just waiting for it . . .

Stolen Microsoft key may have opened up a lot more than US govt email inboxes

"It's still unclear how the spies obtained the private encryption key in the first place"

And that is the crux of this whole affair.

Of course keys can be compromised, that is not the question. But if the compromise is waltzing in through the door, scooping up the key without triggering any alarm and waltzing back out again without trouble, then there's somebody who should spend a few very uncomfortable hours in an interrogation cell.

Borkzilla has made a major blunder here. I expect full forensics on a very complete investigation, otherwise it seems clear to me that Borkzilla's reliability will be called into question.

Which is kind of like putting yet another red mark on a blood-soaked sheet.

NASA's DART kicked up swarm of 37 boulders after Dimorphos asteroid crash

"If we follow the boulders in future Hubble observations"

Because Hubble is not dead yet.

And who knows ? Maybe, just maybe, if SpaceX or others can manage, we just might be able to get a repair mission going.

Yeah, I know, pie-in-the-sky thinking.

But hey, who doesn't like pie ?

Tesla's Dojo supercomputer is a billion-dollar bet to make AI better at driving than humans

"But then, you get to, like, 10 million training examples, it becomes incredible"

Great news.

Call me when it becomes reliable.

Oh, and useful.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Agree but...

Something has to thin the herd to keep the mouthbreathers from procreating.

Re: Real Sanitizers

That stuff is vicious.

Judge lets art trio take another crack at suing AI devs over copyright

Re: I use Stable Diffision on a regular basis...

Looks like that is what judges are going to have to decide.

Proposed ban on data brokers selling warrantless personal info to Feds revived

"rules [..] that already are in place for phone and tech companies"

Once again, the required law already exists and it is not necessary to write an entirely new law.

What needed to be done was simply to modify the existing law to not restrict warrants to phone and tech companies, but consider that it targets any company that has data to sell.

In these modern times, lawmakers need to write laws for today while keeping an eye open for what might exist tomorrow.

RIP Kevin Mitnick: Former most-wanted hacker dies at 59

Re: But why tho...

The wiki article on that states that "Pancreatic cancer is the fifth-most-common cause of death from cancer in the United Kingdom,[17] and the third most-common in the United States", so I think it's more of a coincidence than anything else.

Weird radio pulses could be coming from new type of stellar object

Data analysis is king

Another "hmm, that's strange" moment in scientific history that will likely produce a major discovery and, possibly, new mechanics in astrophysics.

I'm rather excited about this, can't wait to hear about it from scientific sources.

That said, the data has been stored for the past three decades, and they only find it now because nobody was looking for it before ?

Somebody get an AI on that data, pronto. For once we have something a statistical analysis machine can actually be good for, it would be shame not to.

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

"plans to license its as-yet Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers"

Dear $Deity, who would want it ?

TSMC says Arizona fab behind schedule, blames chip geek shortage

I'm just waiting for the plant shutdowns due to "unforeseen" water shortages.

Guys, you're building very thirsty plants in the desert at the tail end of a dying Colorado River.

This will not end well.

Re: Kindnap TSMC CEO and workers.

The wiki article on Kagoshima says nothing about kidnapped Korean potters, it states that nineteen young men "broke the Tokugawa ban on foreign travel, traveling to various industrial locations in The UK before returning to share the benefits of the best of Western science and technology".

Besides, it's hardly because nation-state kidnapping was a thing in the past that it is a good idea to go ahead and do it today. Slavery was also a thing, so why bother with autonomy while you're at it ?

Under CISA pressure collab, Microsoft makes cloud security logs available for free

"a step in the right direction"

A small step for Borkzilla, a giant leap for cloud network administrators.

And it took a breach to make that available. The fact that retaining cloud log ability had been considered acceptable by a provider is not really surprising. The fact that potential customers found that acceptable is just the demonstration that it is not technical people that wanted The Cloud^TM to happen, it was the CEO's nephews and the bragging rights that it erroneously conferred.

Any admin worth the name would have seen the paltry amount of tools at his disposition, compared to what he had available with his on-prem servers, and scoffed at the idea that he should hand over his data to a server he barely had any control over.

Except nobody asked the admin's opinion in the mad dash to be the coolest cloud kid on the block.

Well, at least now some semblance of sanity is emerging from the morass.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

"went into beta in 2021 and was released early last year"

Oh my God ! Hey ! Borkzilla ! Are you listening ?

Maybe if you did your shit right, you wouldn't be so worried about making your shit shine.

After all, you're no longer in competition with Apple, now are you ?

Always on the Horizon, UK must wait for megabucks EU science deal

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

Well, once they're all gone, the budget problem will be solved, right ?

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

So, from Twitter to Mastodon

In other words, you still haven't learned your lesson.

My wife has. She had an account on Facebook. That account is now frozen and she doesn't go there any more.

Russia's tiny quantum computer is (probably) nothing to worry about

"sift through a mountain of junk to find a gem"

Oh, so like using the Internet, then ?

Google toys with internet air-gap for some staff PCs

"the effectiveness of Google's small-scale test may be hard to ascertain"

Well I think it was pretty effective. Let's see what the experiment has brought in so far :

1) Ordering a vast swath of peons (2000+ is not a small number when it concerns people) to have their internet cut off without warning leads to vast, immediate and (possibly) angry response from said peons

2) Understanding that the default choice should always be opt-in, and making the announcement general, soothes the flock and keeps the peons happy

That in itself was quite effective, at least to bring Google management out of the Soviet era of management. One can only hope that the evolution will be permanent, but I'm not holding my breath. The speed with which manglement can forget past lessons is truly awe-inspiring (in the bad sense).

And have to type in code ? Manually ? Like in the Stone Age ?

Have you no pity ?

Energy efficiency, staffing keep datacenter operators awake at night

AI in datacenters

This is going to be fun to watch.

A server in a datacenter is dependant on a lot of things outside of its hardware specifications. There's the contract type and level, there's the possible load and there's undoubtedly a lot more things I'm not aware of.

If those datacenter CEOs think they're going to be able to use a statical analysis machine to try and minimize power usage, I'm looking forward to a lot of griping among customers when they launch a full load of processes outside of their regular habits only to find that the server power they're paying for is not available on demand.

Either that, or I fail to see what use the AI will have, because if the boxen are already configured to idle when not on demand (which they defnitely should be), then what use can AI be ?

Even for solving the fat-fingered configuration problem, it's not the AI that will invent the order. So, instead of a fat-fingered configuration problem, AI will only upscale the issue to fat-fingered ordering problem.

So, progress ?

Tech support scammers go analog, ask victims to mail bundles of cash

"Scammers, who the FBI says in this case are mostly targeting older adults"

As I'm well on my way to becoming an older adult, I have a question : could these scammers please start sending their missives by snail mail ?

I mean, that gives an entire other level of authenticity and importance, doesn't it ?

That way, I could laugh all the way to the trash bin at the thought of all that money they're wasting on me . . .

Oh well, one can dream.

Computer scientist calls for new layers in the tech stack to make generative AI accurate

"a data and oversight layer where the model is assessed, verified and checked"

Hmm, it's not mentioned specifically, but might there be a chance for an execution log in that new "oversight" layer ?

You know, a log that states what was asked, what was checked and what was approved ? Seems to me that "oversight" should require that, otherwise you're just asking a black box to ruminate over another black box and you've got no better guarantee than when you started.

But of course, as CEO of an investment firm, he needs to make noise to make his company more visible, so yeah, let's wax lyrical about how black boxes can control other black boxes without any means of checking what the hell is going on. It makes for good PR, right ?

Rocket Lab wants to dry off and reuse Electron booster recovered from the ocean

Re: Probably just as well

I remember being skeptical back when El Reg first described these aerobatics, and getting the downvotes as well.

It would seem that the downvoters refuse to admit that it's a hair-brained idea best left to the drawing board.

Yes, I know they used to recover film from spy satellites like that, but a roll of film dangling from a parachute is a far cry from a first stage rocket booster.

And now, Rocket Lab has officially ended the practice. They tried and they stopped trying after seven failures. That should be enough to take a step back and reevaluate the situation, no ?

With limited space for tourist attractions, Singapore bets on augmented reality

Okay, not going to knock it

Maybe, just maybe, this is the kind of thing that can, in the long run, make VR an interesting thing for Joe User.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Besides, if it's available in VR, why should I need to take a plane ?

Norway bans Meta's behavioral advertising with threats of wrist-slap fines

"0.16 percent of Meta's Q1 2023 profit"

So, Meta makes over $5.5 billion per quarter for nothing good or wholesome.

No wonder ad services are considered the holy grail. Anybody who wants to make money wants ads to fling left, right and center.

Actually providing a service worthy of subscription is so last milennia . . .

Microsoft 'fesses to code blunder in Azure Container Apps

So, fat-fingered configuration, again

Seems to me that these cloud thingies work fine when humans don't interfere.

Hmm, reminds me of BOFH somehow . . .

Typo watch: 'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses in error

What ?

"It is not possible to implement technical controls preventing the use of personal email accounts for government business"

Yes, it is. All you need is a bespoke mail client that has the proper restrictions in place.

Of course, that means not using Outlook, which is something you should avoid anyway.

Either that, or you put National Security to good use for once and you force Microsoft to make a special, military-grade Outlook.

But don't just say it's not possible.

Microsoft promises to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for next decade. Sony believes it

"it probably wouldn't want the bad reviews, press, or lawsuits"

No, but it wants that juicy market share.

The reviews, press and lawsuits are just a cost of business.