Posts by Pascal Monett

Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again

"header bidding via prebid.js"

So all this tracking is done via JavaScript ?

Well then, once again NoScript to the rescue.

Why am I not surprised ?

China leads the world in tech research, could win the future, says think tank

"China leads the world in tech research"

Given that China also leads the world in stealing tech research, yeah, they're going to have a good long leg up on most everyone else.

At Citrix, 'perpetual licenses' means 'we'd rather move you to a subscription'

"the vendor will stop maintaining products sold [..] under that scheme"

I propose a law that obliges the following :

1) If a company sells any product with a perpetual license, the company is obliged to support said product in perpetuity - and if said company folds and its remains are bought by another company, that new company will have to respect that legacy. Consequence : Companies will stop the nonsense of trying to make customers believe that the company will support anything for any longer than it feels like.

2) If a company sells any product that includes the words "Unlimited","No Limit" or any variation of or other wording intending to make customers believe that they are not limited, then said company is forbidden in perpetuity on that product from introducing any scheme that would limit or throttle the use of the product in any way, shape or form beyond the natural limits of technology.

Stop with the malarky. Don't sell anything in perpetuity, you won't last that long. Don't market anything as unlimited - almost nobody has been able to put up with the costs in the long term.

Honesty in marketing, it's a good thing. Would make for a kick-ass comedy platform as well.

My God, it's full of tabs: Vivaldi's coolest new features shine on phones and cars

It's called a challenge.

For the same reason you need a barbecue, or a sauna - because you can.

This is the insane mentality of people who just can't leave well alone. A car is a tool to get you from one place to another, not an office or entertainment system replacement. No, I do not want a high-end audio system with a 96" flatscreen to watch films in my car. It's nonsense because the sound of the tires on the road are going to spoil any other experience you care to try. Besides, you're supposed to be driving in a car. You have a bloody smartphone to surf the web with.

Stop putting stuff everwhere you can jack it in just because. A hammer does not need to be "smart".

NASA finds crashing spacecraft into asteroids is a viable defence strategy

"we can prevent an asteroid impact with sufficient time, warning and resources"

So stated the venerable Theodore Rexaminus in his well-known encyclic "On Asteroids And Saurien Capacity To Save The Species".

Unfortunately, the printing press would have to wait almost 67 million years . . .

Re: Crashed. Will the insurance pay?

I think it is plausible that, given the costs involved, the ESA and NASA would coordinate a bit more than "oh, so you launched something on that as well".

APNIC elections: Reform activists rejected, org welcomes stronger election protections

Congratulations

"the APNIC community detected a threat to its operations and successfully rallied to defend against it"

It's always nice to see that bottom-feeding scum get defeated in their never-ending goal to drag the world down to their level.

I wish APNIC the best of luck in its future work, it seems it has gotten off to a good start.

Politeness prevents me from stating what I wish for the bastards who used unfounded innuendo to try to gain a foothold.

No really, put those hot irons away . . . for the moment . . .

Microsoft adds features to Windows 11 monthly – managing it is your problem

"Continuous innovation coming to Windows 11 in March"

So, Borkzilla has officially adapted the "move fast and break things" approach to OS design.

I'm so glad for Windows 11 after all. At least all that shit won't be contaminating my work laptop.

Oh, and users can avoid things by setting the proper policies ? Don't make me laugh. Most users have trouble setting a network share, I don't see them setting policies any time soon.

And apparently neither does Borkzilla, which is why it has decided to do this.

Bosses failing to offer hybrid work lose out in recruitment

"knowledge workers – those outside retail"

What ? There are people who know something in retail ?

Forget ChatGPT, the most overhyped security tool is technology itself, Wiz warns

"in the end, it's not really about the tools you buy"

Um, Mr. Herzberg ? The boss just called, he wants to see you in his his office right away. Something to do with a long vacation, I think . . .

FBI boss says COVID-19 'most likely' escaped from lab

So the FBI thinks it's a lab leak in Wuhan

The FBI. The US organization that is specifically prohibited from operating outside US borders.

Excuse me if I don't think that the opinion of the FBI on international matters is something I should pay attention to - especially when it is expressed on Fox Spews.

I note that the CIA has not expressed any opinion on the matter, and is specifically cited as remaining "on the fence" on the matter.

Personally, if I were American, I'd be asking as to why a domestic security organization that has no possibility of even investigating outside US borders is using resources to investigate this question when there are actual intelligence organizations that are already on the job and have access to international operations.

But hey, that's just my opinion.

Re: The FBI is way out on a limb here

Well, they're expressing an opinion on Fox News, so it's not like it's anything newsworthy . . .

Re: the communists [..] tried to cease power

Did they toggle the power button to OFF ?

It's official: BlackLotus malware can bypass Secure Boot on Windows machines

"exploit it because the affected signed binaries have not been added to the UEFI revocation list"

So the solution is already known, but nobody's working on it ?

I would have thought that adding a new entry to a list is something that wouldn't take days, let alone weeks, to get done.

I'm going to have to seriously rethink my project time estimates. Modify the input form ? That'll be six months, sir.

Salesforce banks savings by sweating tech infrastructure for an extra year

"five year old servers and four year old PCs"

So that's supposed to be a problem ?

This is just what has been waiting to happen for a decade. Four-year-old PCs ? Gosh, what an infamy ! Employees should benefit from a 2% performance increase every 3 years, not 4 !

Come on, a PC in a business environment can work 6 years just fine. Managers will just have to put up with not getting the latest and greatest to surf porn with on the job.

Honestly, I'm surprised that they're working the servers longer than the PCs. I don't care how important you think you are, but the server you work on is doing more than your PC is.

China's efforts to influence standards are mostly fake – and flopping

"a single company or country is not able to [..] force through harmful standards"

And yet Borkzilla tried.

My how it tried.

Google: You get crypto, you get crypto, almost everyone gets email crypto!

Workspace Enterprise Plus ?

Call me when GMail finally integrates the Return Receipt.

I've checked, and the only thing GMail Pro gives me compared to regular loser GMail is the wonderful world of putting all my data in Google's cloud. And GMail Pro makes no mention of Return Receipts.

When I check my loser GMail settings, I see no mention of RR, nor any way to set it on a mail.

I work freelance, so collaboration is useless for me given that I have no colleagues to collaborate with.

I do, however, have customers, and correspond regularly with them by email. It would be nice to have the ability to know that they have read my mail even if they haven't yet responded to it. You know, with that functionality that has been incorporated into SMTP since its beginning.

But somehow, Google didn't include that in GMail.

If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone

Wait a second

"the space community has a chance to disagree on interoperability before navigation and networking satellite systems are deployed"

FTFY

Apple's outsourced Lightning cable plant in India goes up in flames

"as Foxlink is insured [..] the blaze won't impact its bottom line"

That's interesting, I wonder why companies have better insurance than people do.

Because I'm pretty sure that, although my house is insured, if it burns down I'm not going to get all the money I put in it to buy a new house.

And I will certainly not get enough to build a replacement house.

Do I have to sign up for twice the insurance premiums ?

Power behind throne to depart as SAP enters a new era

"He will hand over to Airbus's Dominik Asam"

Which demonstrates to me that hiring a CEO has nothing to do with your business and what your company does, it's just hiring a manager.

Preferably one that looks good and can handle himself in front of a camera.

You spent years managing a company that makes planes ? Nobody cares. The only thing that counts is that you spent years managing in a high-profile company.

Speaks volumes about just how disconnected management is from the actual job (yes, I know I'm preaching to the choir ; it's my PMS : Post-Monday Stress).

Boffins concoct interference-busting radios

Re: Disappointed...

To sat nothing of the HoloNet.

HMD offers Nokia phone with novel concept: Designed to be repaired by its owner

I heartily agree, but i don't think we'll see that happen any time soon.

Megacorps are not interested in "the spirit" of money.

CEO Elon Musk wants out of Tesla tweet jail. Lol, no, says SEC

"he voluntarily agreed to it – twice"

Yeah but, in Musk's mind, that doesn't matter because he has changed his mind. In his world, that is all that matters.

Thank goodness we live in a world that still has a smidgen of sense left to the higher instances which are not (yet) completely overrun by pea-brained, nonsense-spouting scum who are willing to claim loud and clear that the weather's fine even if it's raining cats and dogs outside. The list is long, but for me, it started with the antics of the board at ICANN. Pai is the first to have demonstrated just how untouchable an asshole can be when he's at the top. The rest of the scum watched and learned, and we ended up with the OHSG, the crowning achievement in bullshit-spewing.

These people are not complete idiots. I'm sure they know what they're doing, the question is : why are they doing it ?

Uncle Sam to block Adobe absorption of Figma over monopoly fears

"Figma co-founder Dylan Field said this wouldn't happen"

Of course he would say that.

Now tell me just who is supposed to believe that the guy in charge of being bought out is going to say anything that will go contrary to him being bought out.

If it has been the Adobe CEO who said that it might have had a bit more clout . . . if anyone believes what that clown says about price hikes any more.

Microsoft strokes UK's ego by pooh-poohing EU approach to AI regulation

"a Conservative Brexiteer MP who seemed to enjoy sticking it to the EU"

Looking forward to hearing about how the EU is responsible for UK's economic situation ten years from now.

Also, "a Conservative Brexiteer MP". Is there any other kind ?

Microsoft grows automated assault disruption to cover BEC, ransomware campaigns

A nod ?

How about a nod to the fact that the pervasiveness of Borkzilla's network management is a free ride for most hackers, who only have to understand one platform in order to potentially get their claws into 90+% of businesses the world over ?

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

There's always a reason why it's cheaper. Find out said reason to see if it's important to you before thinking you got a good deal.

European Commission bans TikTok from staff gadgets

"TikTok was singled out"

Indeed, all social media should be banned on corporate tools. Actually, anything not used for corporate business should be banned on corporate tools.

Banning it personal hardware is a bit overboard though, especially since the tools to allow personal hardware to be used on the corporate network are also supposed to set up a barrier between business and private data.

That barrier should be ban enough, but apparently it isn't.

Mozilla says 80 percent of Google Play's app safety labels are inaccurate

I call bullshit

"This report conflates company-wide privacy policies that are meant to cover a variety of products and services with individual Data Safety labels, which inform users about the data that a specific app collects"

You put a Data Safe label on the Facebook app, ergo you are wrong.

Europe to consult on making Big Tech pay for the networks it floods

"strangely aimed only at American-born firms"

American-born firms who, strangely, pay almost no taxes anywhere. And they may have been born in the USA but, strangely, when the taxman cometh, the are very much foreigners.

Microsoft has apparently legally set its tax base in offshore havens. Apple is also hot on that market. Amazon does wonders to ensure that it can, perfectly legally, avoid the majority of taxes it should pay. I'm sure that Oracle and all the others are in line as well. After all, it's their "duty to their shareholders", isn't it ?

I'm obviously not saying that these companies should hand over 50% of their revenue, but they definitely should not whine about having to pay for what they use.

Oh, and it should be a worldwide rule that, if your company rakes in over a billion dollars a year, you are forbidden from getting subsidies anywhere. You've got the money, you don't need to deprive citizens of the benefits of their tax money.

US to impose caps on Korean chip shops working in China

"biotech for superhuman soldiers"

So, if we're talking biotechm we're not talking about exoskeletons. We are thus still limited by what the human can do. There will be no biotech that will allow a human being to jump over a 2 meter wall.

If you start mentioning nanobots, we're off to sci-fi land and you are irrelevant. And no, we're not going to be modifying eyeballs to have Terminator-style Augmented Reality screens inside our heads. So what's left ? What are the domains were biotech would actually bring something to the battlefield ?

I'm guessing that one area that would bring certain benefit is if soldiers could recuperate faster. Sprint over 50 meters, recover in three seconds, dash again, repeat five times. That would allow for much faster covering of territory, quicker repositioning on the battlefield and thus more effective use of firepower to take the day. At least, I think it would.

Another area is enhanced awareness, ie sleepless soldiers. That is an area that has already been studied for decades and we're no closer to any real solution. A soldier that is awake for over 48 hours at a stretch is a soldier that starts losing his grip on reality, no drug has been able to correct that. So I don't know that there is any biotech that can correct that issue, but that would be one hell of an improvement on the battlefield. Combined with fast recovery and you have an assault force that could fight for two days straight and litterally wear the enemy out before reinforcements could arrive, thus vastly improving battlefield results.

But I don't see that biotech will enable soldiers to shoot better, or see at night, or run faster or carry heavier loads. Equipment and training help for those things, not biology.

So what biotech is being cooked up in the secret labs ?

Ukraine invasion blew up Russian cybercrime alliances

"[..] has not produced the disruptive results that the Russian state has expected"

So, Putin's keyboard warriors are no better than Putin's actual army. Go ahead and forgive them all, your sad little regime is not going to hold out much longer anyway.

Unless things change, first zettaflop systems will need nuclear power, AMD's Su says

Drastic steps ?

I'm sorry, since the first 8086 graced our desktops, computing power has been (de)multiplied by more than you can count.

The 8086 had 29,000 transistors in a single core. Today's CPUs have so many billions of transistors they're not even counted any more (okay, 6+ billion), and cores by the dozen.

How much more drastic can you get ?

We've gone from an architecture that did one thing at a time in the single available core, to an architecture that delegates computing to the best platform, stores terabytes of data faster than I can drink my whisky, does real-time raytracing on a 3840 x 2160 pixel screen and all that managed by a chef d'orchestre who can juggle 24 threads at the same time and calculate the millionth digit of Pi before I've finished my morning coffee.

The only drastic step left is R2-D2.

Call me when he rolls off the production line.

Google staff asked to share desk space in latest cost purge

Share a desk ?

No problem, I'll gladly work from home.

For the same pay, of course, I'm not responsible for your mismanagement.

What's that ? You hired 12,000 people during the pandemic and couldn't guess that, when it was over, things would at least go back to pre-pandemic ?

Aren't you supposed to be smart ?

Kremlin claims Ukraine hackers behind fake missile strike alerts

"the country's Ministry of Emergency Situations"

I would have thought that the Ministry of Interior would be tasked with handling emergency situations of this kind, or the Ministry of Defense at the very least.

Does Russia also have a Ministry of Silly Walks ?

Twitter algorithm to be open sourced 'next week,' says Musk

Re: Musk says...

Indeed, the whisky bottle empties way too quickly . . .

Disagreement is not hatred.

I can disagree with you, it doesn't mean I hate you.

It does, however, imply that I respect your person and position, and bring proper arguments concerning my own opinion on the matter.

I have no problem with disagreement in a civilized society. Disagreement can foster new ideas that are a benefit for all. What I have a big problem with is blind stupidity and the refusal of considering that one's own opinion just might not be the Lord's Gospel.

Supreme Court not interested in hearing about NSA's super-snoop schemes

"effectively exempting the agency's data collection from review"

I hear that the NSA has a life-size gold-covered statue of Trump in the Director's office.

This won't hurt a bit: Amazon now a US healthcare provider

Amazon 2100 :

Search for Heart Attack.

Popup for Ambulance : Special Deal, only $6500 if you purchase in the next 5 minutes !

Yay capitalism ?

Lawyers join forces to fight common enemy: The SEC and its probes into cyber-victims

"Either outcome imposes a significant and unfair burden on attorneys"

So, if I understand correctly, because Covington is a den of lawyers, they are required to have special priviledge when it comes to dealing with the SEC.

SEC asks the same thing in every case, it's not new.

If it is such an issue for lawyers then, given that even they state that being hacked is inevitable, they should find a way to ensure that client data is not available to hackers - aka don't put it on the network.

It's not like lawyers will ever have a paperless office anyway.

Ancient art of banning rideshare companies revived in India, this time on motorbikes

How's that for disruption, Uber ?

"the practice and services violated existing laws, since the vehicles are not registered for commercial use"

Well, they never were, so why did it take so long to notice ?

Did the Indian Minister of Transport recently have a bad experience on a moto-taxi ?

Titanic mass grave site to be pillaged for NFTs

Now that's a blockchain I could get behind.

APNIC calls in lawyers to handle election code of conduct breach allegations

False allegations, disparagement of opponents [..] and creative approaches to the truth

A Monday in US politics then . . .

or Fox News.

Humans strike back at Go-playing AI systems

Re: that's still not generalised AI

It's not AI, period.

Hong Kong to crypto exchanges: get a securities broker's licence, or go home

What's the point ?

Why bother about funny money brokers in Hong Kong ?

Xi Pooh has already forbidden that in China, and that's where you're going.

Chinese boffins call for research on ‘countermeasures’ to US chip bans

Re: I see a potential for China to corner the market in the 1nm class

I don't think it'll be that simple.

FTX is back in Japan, where users can withdraw fiat and crypto

"comprehensively regulated cryptocurrency sector"

Ah. So it's not a free-for-all sticking it to The Man being largely taken advantage of by completely unscrupulous individuals.

Geez, maybe having regulations is not such a bad thing after all . . .

GoDaddy joins the dots and realizes it's been under attack for three years

Green hats, really ?

What about blue hats ? Or grey hats ?

Or hey, it's the latest fashion apparently, rainbow hats ?

Can't be woke if you leave them out, can you ?

This is getting ridiculous.

Nations agree to curb enthusiasm for military AI before it destroys the world

You seem to have not at all followed the raft of diplomatic activity that took over 20 years to bring Russia to this point.

Yes, Russia invaded Ukraine all alone. But we (aka The West) made a lot of promises to Russia, specific promises, not general notions mouthed in platitudes, and we did nothing to hold ourselves to those promises.

You try promising things to someone and never making good on your promise, and then tell me how long that person is still going to believe you.