Posts by Pascal Monett

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

I would think we are past questioning his judgement at this point in time.

We know his judgement is bad.

The Weather Channel settles another case claiming mobile app privacy violations

"With the class certification denied" . .

. . lawyers will not be able to get their mitts on 20+ percent of the payout.

Do I feel sorry for them ? Nope.

Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment

Nah, it's much better this way.

She's desperately trying to not go to prison, but she knows she'll end up there like the turd circling the drain.

I very much prefer her to be in panick mode now so that, when she is finally sent to jail, she feels the full weight of her guilt.

UK watchdog blocks Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition

"the decision appears to reflect a flawed understanding of this market"

AKA : they don't get it the way we do.

Yeah, well I'm not disappointed in the least. The only cloud service I trust in gaming is Steam, and nobody else, neither Borkzilla nor Activision, is up to Steam's level in the matter.

Apache Superset: A story of insecure default keys, thousands of vulnerable systems, few paying attention

"this episode illustrates that users do not read documentation and don't read logs"

Which is a basic truth anyone who ever had to write a user manual has known for ages.

What this "episode" really illustrates is that, when making a product that uses an encryption key, make sure that right at the beginning the product does not start when using the default key and make an error message that makes it clear that it won't start until said default key has been changed.

You can cross 'Quantum computers to smash crypto' off your list of existential fears for 30 years

Thank goodness for sanity

Kudos to Shamir for getting things back to Earth where quantum computing is concerned.

Indeed, most of us have nothing to fear from having our lunch meetings decrypted - which is also why all the hoopla around child abuse is a very poor excuse for backdooring encryption.

That said, I don't think quantum computers decrypting messages will be useless, it's just that those who have one will be using it on messages coming from very specific sources.

Moscow will try to capture and decrypt everything it can from the US embassy, the NSA will do the same to Russia and China, and China will be throwing massive numbers of quantum computers to get a hold on as much embassy traffic as it can.

Qauntum computing is still very much a threat to encrypted messages, it's just that the sphere where it will apply has now been publicly restricted to very high levels only.

If you don't get open source's trademark culture, expect bad language

I respectfully disagree.

In my own house I can do whatever I want, including calling my dishwasher a Hoover if I so wish.

As a commercial outfit, however, I'm pretty sure that I would most definitely get in trouble if I sold dishwashers with Hoover as a model name.

Just like I have always and always will tell you to go google something. Google^TM doesn't like it ? I'm waiting for their lawsuit, me and a billion other people.

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

A harmless jape

These days they make those like they used to make sturdy PCs (aka not any more).

That 3CX supply chain attack keeps getting worse: Other vendors hit

"Tapio was fired by the board [..] shortly after the breach"

That was a very good start, and an example to follow in the rest of the world.

Will it catch on ? Hmm . . .

Chinese scientists calculate the Milky Way's mass as 805 billion times that of our Sun

"the paper's reviewers hailed the research as the most accurate to date"

To date, maybe, but that is just an estimate.

And I still can't find the definitive amount of stars in our Milky Way. Even on scientific channels on YouTube, quotes are in the 100 to 400 billion range, which is quite a range IMO.

On top of that, they only pulled an estimate after sampling less than 300,000 stars. I know you only need to poll 2000 people to get a statistically significant result, but still, 300,000 out of 100 to 400,000,000,000 seems a bit light to take that as an accurate figure.

But okay, it's the best we have for now. I can accept that.

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

"meaning fewer devices need to be summoned into existence"

Sorry ?

This scheme is supposed to get "personal" PCs into the business place and Borkzilla thinks that that means fewer PCs ?

Hey Nadella, you do realize that, since COVID, everybody who's actually going to use a personal computer has one now ? And you want people to buy your handwaving argument that cloud PCs are less expensive ?

Do you really think nobody else is writing or reading about the green cost of datacenters and Internet usage in general ?

Pull the other one, it has bells on it.

International cops urge Meta not to implement secure encryption for all

This whole excercise is not what it looks like

Look, we know what's going on now. You're not thinking of the children. Child abuse is a terrible thing and should rightly be stamped down as soon as it appears, but you do not need the power to invade everyone's privacy to safeguard the children, and that's not what you're fighting for.

You're fighting for the power to invade anyone's privacy on whatever pretext suits the meal of the day. In itself, if only the government institutions could do that, it might eventually be acceptable, but the NSA has amply demonstrated that it will abuse whatever the hell it wants with or without permission, so by "eventually acceptable" we need to read "absolutely not acceptable".

And then there's the whole problem of if the encryption can be intercepted, it will end up being intercepted by the "wrong" people (and any value of wrong can suffice here).

Finally, I'll accept this possible invasion of my private life and correspondance if and only if all government officials use the same technology for their top-secret communications.

Hey, if it's good enough, then it's good enough for everyone.

Microsoft not a Teams player as admin center, 365 service suffer partial outage

"repeated the same disable component, save, re-enabled component, save process"

Looks like, when there's an Azure outage, the best thing to do is just reinstall Windows and everything else from scratch.

By the time you're done, Azure is back !

Hyundai to develop a Moon rover (to launch, not because the roads are so bad down here)

"we are moving beyond land, sea and air mobility"

Um, I just checked Hyundai's website and I can't find any boats or planes in the All Vehicles list. There aren't even any drones.

So, is Hyundai just skipping sea and air, or does it make boats and planes that I don't know of ?

What does an ex-Pharma Bro do next? If it's Shkreli, it's an AI Dr bot

That artist is far from being alone.

Hold the bastard in contempt ? I've got the FTC beat by years.

And no, DO NOT reduce the fines.

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

Re: What else could they do?

Gee, I don't know. You'll have to ask the Russians for guidance on that.

Re: Starship hasn't had the most successful history?

Sure. The only question is : how many more tests before getting something reliable ?

Not knocking it, SpaceX has largely been the most open and honest companies there is. It admits failure when failure happens, and I'm sure there are many valuable minds working the problem.

Musk not having a say in it more than likely has a lot to do with its existing success.

But hey, a bit of gentle ribbing can't hurt, now can it ?

So, carry on !

How DARPA wants to rethink the fundamentals of AI to include trust

"The current state of AI is impressive"

You are easily impressed.

What is currently abusively called "AI" is nothing but a statistical inference machine. It is only as good as the guy who programmed it understands statistics.

It has nothing to do with AI, can be easily confused with brightly colored clothes, and couldn't tell you what a mammal is if its electricity depended on it.

And the statistics expert can't even prove why it produced its conclusions.

So it's the closest thing we have to vastly overrated 8 ball.

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

I believe it

I totally believe it.

I'm expecting to see this revolutionary communist top-of-the-line, bleeding edge tech any time now. Because surely, if they've announced it, it has to be true, right ? I mean, nobody has ever taken the risk of publicly announcing something that was factually incorrect, right ? Naahh.

Totally believe it.

And it's opposite day today.

An earlier supply chain attack led to the 3CX supply chain attack, Mandiant says

The "supply-chain attack"

It wouldn't be so effectve if programmers stopped downloading code to production servers without any good reason.

Saving bandwidth is less important than ensuring security. And if you think that getting the latest updates is worth compromising security, I'm sure nork hackers have you on their Employee of the Month portraits.

Europe wants more cities to use datacenter waste heating. How's that going?

"There's a cost, and operators are worried it will fall on them"

Why ? They'll be selling the heat, won't they ? So, there's profit to be made and, if you want to make money, you have to start by paying money. They've already done the hard part anyway : the heating process is up and running already.

This reflex of not wanting to pay in order to get something has to stop. It's not because you're a corporation that you have the right to government handouts and tax breaks.

Facebook puts a price on privacy for US users and it's not enough to buy a cup of coffee

"minus attorneys' fees of no more than 25 per cent"

25% of 725 million is 181 million.

$181 million is way too much for someone who has not been impacted by the issue that they are now involved in.

It is wrong. Just wrong.

An attorney is paid by the hour. If he's a good attorney, he gets to bill an outrageous sum, but he shouldn't get his fingers in a pie he doesn't deserve.

And if he was impacted by the issue, then he gets to submit a claim, just like everyone else.

It is time to put a stop to this nonsense.

4chan and other web sewers scraped up into Google's mega-library for training ML

"Problematic, racist, and pornographic web content"

I understand that racist web content should not be used in training data. I'm a bit less sure about pornographic web content, but I'll give that one a pass.

Now, if web content is neither racist nor pornographic, how exactly is it "problematic". What is the definition of "problematic" in that context ?

Could someone enlighten me ?

Musk tells Twitter advertisers: You're welcome back, but don't make demands

"freedom of speech at Twitter was paramount"

Correction : freedom of speech is paramount, except if you're dissing the Great Twitler.

What Musk still doesn't understand (and probably never will) is that your actions still have to correspond to your words in order to be credible.

Making exceptions to your own general rules and your credibility goes down. Make those exceptions to favor yourself and your close friends, and your credibility disappears.

His credibility has disappeared.

Medusa ransomware crew brags about spreading Bing, Cortana source code

"Software should be and can be made secure whether its source is private or open"

That is especially tru of encryption, which is why RSA encryption is so successful.

However, when a private company that has never published production code is hacked and its code is stolen, that is a rather serious blow against the security of its code because now the miscreants can find out how the whole thing was put together, which makes it easier to find loopholes and create code that simply hacks the result.

If I knew the code to Bing, I could write a patch that could finally redirect any call to Bing to whatever browser I preferred.

Damn, now I'm getting my hopes up . . .

Meta virtual reality interrupted by financial reality as thousands lose their jobs

"Meta expected to disemploy"

Ah, progress. We are no longer fired, we are disemployed.

The quest to find a soothing way of telling someone to fuck off that their immediate financial prospects are in the shitter continues . . .

When you're ASML, not even a semiconductor downturn can dent your outlook

Stock is down ?

There are tens of billions of dollars and euros that are begging for fabs to be made. Those fabs are going to buy ASML kit.

It's time to buy ASML stock, not sell it.

Europe finalizes €43B Chips Act it hopes will help free it from foreign fabs

"our vulnerability into sovereignty"

Let's not forget that that vulnerability was of our own doing, with every "industry captain" hell-bent on having everything made in poor countries instead of building industry in Europe.

Between COVID and China, it looks like some sense has been knocked into a few decision-making heads.

Oh, of course there's the fact that, in order to sell product, you have to have it available - which is a tad more difficult when your production line is a continent away, out of your control, and has suddenly developed a severe case of notavailabilitis.

It would seem that, just like The Cloud^TM, it appears that local control is once again in favor. And the wheel turns . . .

Deplatforming hate forums doesn't work, British boffins warn

"may justify action despite the right to free speech"

The right to fee speech does not include the right to threaten others and never has.

Swatting should be illegal if isn't already, and the consequence should be hard time for the scum responsible. I fail to see what new law is needed to make that happen, I'm sure there are enough existing laws for that.

Online threats should bring legal action, with subpoena to the provider to reveal the origin. And death threats should be acted upon by the FBI or corresponding law enforcement without fail and without mercy.

Free speech is not an excuse. You can hate anyone you want, you have no right to threaten them.

Curiosity gets interplanetary software patch for better driving and more on Mars

Proof ?

And just about every article on Windows in the past 20 years is not proof enough ?

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

Re: Point of order.

That is not how being employed works. It is your employer that is supposed to pay for the material that you use.

Or do you pay your salary to your employer ?

Red Hat at 30: Biggest Linux company of them all still pushing to become cloud power

They'll keep moving forward with the hybrid cloud

Well good luck to them. I think Red Hat, of all companies, will recognize the customer's right to decide for himself, and not foist a cloud environment on people who have no use for it.

We're talking Linux here. I hope that that means that customers are intelligent enough to not go for cloud simply because everyone else is.

Then again, we're also talking human beings - worse, managers - so I'll accept that I might be disappointed.

Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid

"execute his target script 16384 times"

Sounds like a beginner who couldn't be arsed to find out exactly how many loops were necessary so go for 16K, it'll surely be enough.

Not to mention that auto-appending to the cron job sounds like it should be anathema to me. Not a Linux admin (or an admin of any other OS), but I'm convinced that a job is supposed to be put in the cron list by an actual human who knows what he's doing, not as an auto-insert by some coder who looks like he's half-assing his way to the next paycheck.

Germany and Intel both want more from planned Magdeburg mega-fab

€43 billion in subsidies

Yes, I know that semiconductor fabs are immensely expensive and that we now have to ensure that when China invades Taiwan it will not cut us off from our silicon perfusion.

With that in mind, it still seems to me that money attracts money. None of those billions are going to go to a chip fab startup. It'll all be Intel, TSMC etc, in other words, it'll all go to companies who are already valued in the hundreds of billions.

You want to take advantage of this opportunity to start in the semiconductor business ? We like your gusto, kid. Why don't you start with a hot dog stand in New York ? Call us back in 20 years, we'll see what we can do.

Energy efficiency starts to rock telcos' 5G infrastructure choices

"coming ahead of concerns even such as security"

Where public communications are concerned, it is my position that nothing should come before security.

The fact that security is not the number one concern when implementing a new layer of communication that is supposed to be open by design is a promise that, when things will go wrong (and they will, we all know that), it will be much more expensive and time-consuming to correct.

And frankly, telling me that an open infrastructure does not need to be hardened against Russian/Chinese/Nork hackers is just begging for trouble.

Pentagon super-leak suspect cuffed: 21-year-old Air National Guardsman

Um, no. The guy can find any religion he wants, posting classified documents on a Minecraft-associated server is not whistleblowing.

If you want to be a whistleblower, you send the documents to Wikileaks, or a reputable journal, along with a text stating your intentions and why those documents prove your act.

Leaking classified military documents to impress your buddies is not that in any way, shape or form.

This guy is going down.

Don't worry, folks, here comes Chuck Schumer with some ideas about regulating AI

Apparently you have it in for BPS (no, I've checked your comment history, don't even try to deny it). Would you mind providing a citation that might justify your online war against them ?

Not that I particularly care for either of them, but when I mount an argument against someone, I source my argument.

Please show us your source(s), otherwise you are just ranting gratuitiously.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

As long as NoScript remains available, the war is not lost.

You work for Alphabet, don't you ?

YouTube’s recommendation algorithm

I have another solution : don't use it.

Instead, there is the old-school method. It's called bookmarks. In my browser bar, I have a Youtube folder. All the channels I follow are in that folder. At the bottom of the bookmark bar folder, there is an option "Open All in Tabs" (at least, there is in any proper browser). So, when I feel like exploring my channels, all I have to do is go to my bookmark folder, open everything I have chosen, and wait for the refresh (on a 1Gbps fiber line, it's okay).

YouTube recommendations ? I don't need stinkin' YouTube recommendations. If one of the hosts on a channel I follow recommend that I go look at another channel, then I go check it out.

Bah, humbug.

Google Pay mistakenly rains free cash on netizens

"We have resolved an error"

No kidding. And you didn't need a bug submission for that, now did you ?

Astonishing how, as soon as real money is involved, bugs get resolved reaaaally quickly (not).

Next time, you might want to test first instead of moving fast and breaking things, eh Google ?

OVH punts hybrid water and immersion cooling for high performance systems

Liquid cooling

I'm thrilled that server farms are cooling their equipment more efficiently. That is obviously a Good Thing^TM.

However, I do have one question : the amount of heat that needs evacuating does not depend on the manner in which the cooling is done. So, how is it that I am reading about economies ?

Granted, air cooling requires noisy fans and proper airflow, which is not always obvious to ensure. Liquid cooling is easier since the heat is leaving through a pipe, not just through the rules of thermodynamics, so it's a sight easier to know what you're doing, but in the end, there is still a fan pushing (or pulling) air through a grill, and that's where the cooling is happening.

Far be it from me to knock liquid cooling. I have been an active proponent of it for almost two decades (aka, before it became common), but the amount of heat to evacuate does not change, even the operating comfort does.

When I adopted liquid cooling for my first AMD Thunderbird, it made a world of difference. My home office was silent. The only noise left was the soft whirr of a pair of hard disks. It was astonishing, and I never went back to pure aircooling.

Nowadays, my home rig has watercooling on the motherboard, on the graphics card and, of course, I bought a CPU cooling kit with a ginormous radiator. So I have a 3-fan radiator for my GPU (which, in all honesty, never makes a sound) and a two-fan radiator for the CPU (which makes more noise, annoyingly), in addition to the chassis and PSU radiators. Still, I will never go back to pure aircooling.

But the heat is still there. It still needs to be taken away. The only advantage of watercooling (apart from reduced noise levels) is that you don't have to rely on iffy air thermodynamics. I do not see any other gains.

Elon Musk actually sits down and talks to 'government-funded media' the BBC

I disagree. The amount of research needed does not depend on how much time you have to show it.

"he would have walked away from the takeover deal if he could"

Hey, genius, if you had read the terms you could have avoided signing a contract that locked you in.

Instead, you just signed it and then tried to use your name as an excuse when it all went pear-shaped. At the rarified level of your circle, that is simply not excusable.

No pity here. Pay attention next time.

If there is a next time.

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

One day, one happy day, business is going to return to prioritizing stability over convenience.

I suppose that won't happen until all current CxOs have kicked the bucket and their noxious influence die with them.

But one day, we will return to a world where uptime is king, and change for the sake of change is anathema.

The golden rule is : if it works, don't fix it.

Very little is gained by adding a dark theme. Just my two cents . . .

How insecure is America's FirstNet emergency response system? Seriously, anyone know?

"CISA does not comment on congressional correspondence"

As much as that may be justified, it still feels like a cop-out for legitimate journalistic inquiry.

With that kind of excuse, actualy journalists might as well just follow Twitter for the news (and I don't think that that is a good thing).

FBI: How fake Xi cops prey on Chinese nationals in the US

"people claiming to be law enforcement from China"

Let's imagine for a second that they actually are.

That still doesn't give them the right to enforce Chinese law outside of China. Not without a treaty between the USA and China and, these days, I really don't think that kind of treaty has any chance of becoming reality.

Someone can very well show up at my doorstep in France and claim to be from the FBI. He can even show me his card. He is not the law in France and any menace will be met with a curt "Out !" and that will be the end of the story for me.

It will be followed by a call to actual French police to warn them that there is a guy impersonating US FBI agents and going around threatening people, so that might not be the end of the story for him, but that's no longer my problem.

Of course, I have no more family in the USA to be threatened with, so there's that.

Even if China is actually sending proper law enforcement officers to try and get Chinese criminals to go back, that's not the way you do things. You negociate and extradition treaty and, once signed, you then submit extradition requests via the proper channels. But of course, that would mean China plays by international law, which is something it has a very hard time doing as soon as said law is not in its percieved immediate interest. That is how we get a nation acting like a schoolyard bully. And that including toward its own people.

Tiny Brit tech firms win spots on £1.84B public sector contract. Kidding, it's the usual suspects

Re: at least our solutions are functional

But, my good sir, that is not part of the criteria.

You must be :

- expensive

- buzzword-savvy

- with plenty of (beginner) consultants

- and a legal contract that requires a legal department full of permanent lawyers to draft

- oh, and have an employee who is vaguely related to someone in government helps (a lot)

Having something that works is neither here nor there.

Azure admins warned to disable shared key access as backdoor attack detailed

"these permissions could be abused" . . .

. . . but it's no big deal actually.

Sure, Borkzilla, it's not your data that is at risk, so "no big deal".

But your created a security environment which "could be abused".

Tell me, did you ever think of pitting your security against an official Red Team ? No ?

Of course not, silly me. That's what customers are for.

Just because on-prem is cheaper doesn’t make the cloud a money pit

"It's an attractive prospect"

Oh really ?

So now on-prem is attractive again ?

Does that mean that all those C-suits are no longer basing their bonuses on moving everything and its dog to The Cloud^TM ?

Because I seem to recall a not-so-distant time when The Cloud^TM was the cheapest, most reliable way to go.

Looks like the beancounters have brought a cluebat to the board's meeting room.

About time too.