Posts by Pascal Monett

You can run Windows 11 on just 200MB of RAM – but should you?

16GB of RAM is the minimum

Sure, you can run on less, but if you want to run Windows comfortably, you need at least 16GB.

And RAM isn't that expensive any more, so there's really no excuse.

US warns aging air-traffic control code won't be fixed until 2030

Re: who signed-off on the risk assessment that allows it

I don't see that witchhunting is very useful here. Getting the corrections in and reviewing the procedures is.

Warning: Microsoft Teams Free (classic) will be gone in 2 months

Flawless ?

You do realize who we're talking about here ?

Take the morning off because Outlook has already

Wires and duct tape everywhere. To be expected when you build a world-aailable service based on the absence of a QA department.

Looks like Defender was right.

Microsoft is changing how it handles device diagnostic data to keep EU sweet

I trust the code I write. The customer agrees it works in the acceptance phase.

It's the inevitable changes that happen afterwards that I don't trust.

"I've seen application spending more time logging what they do instead of doing something useful"

You haven't seen my code.

Re: good grief

Diagnostics are not telemetry (at least, I hope Borkzilla still maintains a distinction between the two).

As far as diagnostics are concerned, I have an explanation of the why because I am a developer and have been since 1996 (TLDR : I like diagnostics).

Whenever I write a script that must execute automatically without human intervention (ie at set time intervals), or executes in the background without pestering the user with error messages (because they're just ignored anyway), I want a log of that code's activity. I want to know the start environment, the data in input, the path that the code took and why and, if relevant, what the code sent back as response.

I want that information stored in a repository so I can consult it when (not if) there's a problem in production, because invariably, weeks, months, or even years after I wrote that code, I'm going to get a call to tell me that my code doesn't work anymore and could I fix that. Invariably, I ask what changed and, almost invariably, the answer is "nothing changed, your script is broken".

Yeah, sure, because I wrote chameleon code that overwrites itself. Pull the other one, etc. But you don't say that to the customer, do you ? Not when you're a freelance developer in any case.

So I know I have my logs. I ask permission to go on site and have access to the application. In customer environment, I access said logs and trace the activity back to where it was working properly, then I take the next log and find out, normally rather quickly, where the issue is.

Correcting the issue may be easy, or it may be hard, but I can print out that log and point to it as to why the code isn't working anymore (because you changed the date format of the server, doofus).

That, to me, is diagnostic data. Since I do not go and post that in The Cloud^TM, it is only accessible on-site and, therefor, as well protected as the client's server is (aka security is not my problem).

What happens after varies and is irrelevant to my point, which is : with logs, I spend at most 15 minutes finding out what went wrong. Without logs, it would take hours, if not days, just to find out what the issue is - especially when the customer doesn't want me accessing production data.

So I like diagnostics. They've saved my bacon (and my time) more times than I care to count, and they make me more efficient.

I'm just hoping that the term means the same thing for Borkzilla.

US stalkerware developer fined $410,000 and ordered to modify apps so they reveal spying

I largely agree with that opinion.

He should be in jail.

Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet

"Global spending [is] a quarter of the US defense budget"

Following the data available here, a quarter of the US defense budget for 2023 is $236 billion, not $190 billion.

Choosing to compare that to the US defense budget is curious. Yes, the US of A is certainly the country in the world that spends the most on its military (even though it is the least likely to be invaded), but that fact is irrelevant to the discussion.

If you're going by a quarter of the US defense budget, $236 billion is the GDP of Egypt in 2017 (#44 in the list). $190 billion would be Iraq's GDP for the same year (#52).

It's much less sexy to compare global spending to a country's GDP, but I feel it's much more relevant than comparing to the world's single richest country's military spending.

But hey, American aircraft carriers are sexy, I admit.

And they work a lot better than that Russian one, eh Putin ?

Wikimedia Foundation confirms, and bemoans, Pakistan ban

Re: The ban-hammer

And if your government is preoccupied with "sacriligious" web pages, you live in a country I would avoid.

Things that are sacriligious should literally not be hidden, that way the People can educate themselves and form their own opinion.

But of course, a backwards dictatorship is not interested in an educated population - they just want obedient citizens.

Not like our enlightened Western cultures, who just want obedient consumers.

Ransomware scum launch wave of attacks on critical, but old, VMWare ESXi vuln

Re: Attack Surface

Yes, we all naturally assume that competent people are in charge.

Until we find out that the beancounters had their say.

Well, I'm sure the beancounters are going to have a chance to revise their opinion (not that I'm saying they'll change it, it's too early for April Fool's day).

Re: The virus entered via email on a Windows system

You can say it : Outlook.

We know.

School laptop auction devolves into extortion allegation

Investigating RDA ?

From this article, it seems to me that RDA is doing its job. Found unwiped sensitive data on auctioned machines that had also been sold to public buyers. It is largely too late to bring in an NDA and, if the goal is to sweep the whole affair under the rug, well a certain Mrs Streisand who certainly like to have a word with that school.

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

Procedure update

I'm guessing that the New Year came with an updated procedure concerning the printing and manipulation of the end-of-year share certificates.

I'm also guessing that reprinting was not an option for some asinine accounting reason. I can reprint my invoices as often as I like, they don't change number, they don't change total and printing does not impact my customers' accounts.

But hey, this is the 21st century, so . . .

Have we learned anything from SolarWinds supply chain attacks?

"it's easy to create some knee-jerk legislation which has unintended bad consequences"

As true as that is, it might be time to put an end to the free lunch buffet that companies have been enjoying since the dawn of the Internet. Borkzilla is first in line for never accepting any liability yet is there any count of the man-years that its successive OSes have cost in time and resources ? Of course not.

I am obviously not advocating that the major OS companies be held liable for every Tom, Dick & Harry's multiple issues - they would shut shop immediately and with good reason.

But if we can't have a guarantee that the software works 100% of the time, we should at least have a guarantee that the OS vendor has every verification and control in place to ensure that, at least as far as security is concerned, every possible contingency that has been thought of has been addressed.

Then, of course, it will be the flying circus of clown acts to list all possible contingencies that should bring liability. I'm sure there's quite a list, but not salting and hashing passwords is something that should definitely entail jail time - and for the Board, not for the developers.

Activision-Blizzard pays $35m to send SEC away, Microsoft merger still in doubt

"the paying of the fine doesn't mean the company is admitting or denying"

It doesn't have to.

It paid, therefor it is guilty.

Innocent people don't pay fines.

LockBit brags it pumped ION full of ransomware

"The issue is currently isolated to a small number of smaller and mid-size firms"

So it's not a problem until "the issue" starts targetting Big Money, at which point the battlecruisers will be sent out to deal with it.

But, until then, the small fry can get stiffed.

Meta, which pays for web scraping, sues to stop web scraping

"Meta paid Bright Data to scrape data from other websites"

Yes. From other websites. Not from Facebook/Instagram.

You don't need to scrape from Facebook, Meta is already doing that.

US government calls foul on Apple and Google over walled gardens for apps

The NTIE forgot something

". . Apple and Google stifled competition by forcing apps to be distributed through their stores despite secure, safe alternatives being possible, gave preference to their own apps over third-party alternatives and forced developers to deal with a 'slow and opaque' review process"

Not to mention targetting apps that were not only useful but also better than the "official" app (or provided a user-approved service concerning the OS), banning it and then providing an "official" app that did the same thing.

But no matter, the ball is rolling. The wall around the garden is weakening and nothing can stop that.

I wouldn't be surprised, however, if either one of the phone giants is caught poisoning the alternative "secure" stores with malware-infested apps in order to point and say "See ? They're not as secure as we are. Please give us back our monopoly - it's for the good of the suckers consumers".

Former Ubiquiti dev pleads guilty in data theft and extortion case

Re: Not that Sharp...

Indeed. When the Feds are in your flat taking your toys away, it's a bit late to "go out in a blaze of glory".

When the FBI has a warrant on you, you're goose is a good as cooked. Telling porkies like "someone else bought that VPN subscription" is only believable if that someone else was also buying other stuff and you took action to try to stop it. A "someone" who got access to your PayPal account is not going to stop at buying a VPN sub.

As usual, some dumb fuck thought he was on top of the world and, being the pathetic little slimeball that he appears to be, tried to rake in the cash and get an early retirement.

Well he'll get the retirement, but it'll be without the margharitas or the swimming pool blondes.

And he doesn't deserve them.

Latest Windows 11 build shares desktop real estate with, er, Spotify

"Occasionally they disappear from the widgets board"

Business as usual. Three-fingered salute solves almost everything.

Carry on, Borkzilla ! You don't need a testing department any more, you've got all your users to debug things for you.

China unveils massive blockchain cluster running homebrew tech

Now we're talking

Finally a service based on Blockchain tech that is a) serious and b) not a scam.

Looking forward to hearing about how said service handles itself in a country of 1+ billion possible users.

That said, it appears to need a thousand servers to handle 240 million ops per second. I have no idea, but I'm guessing that a traditional database platform could handle that amount of activity with considerably less servers - or blockchain.

I wonder what the server environment of the New York Stock Exchange is like ? I'm willing to bet they've got more than 240 million ops per second going on, and, from what I gather, it's pretty well traced as well.

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

Why not shoot it down ?

The USA has a lot of empty space within its borders. Or mountains. Shoot it down when it gets over the Rockies, it'll hit a mountain peak nobody is on.

Obviously, if it lands in a city that would be bad, but surely it is possible to know how long it'll take to drop, what speed it's going at and estimate how heavy it is (they've already shot one down, so they have an idea), and calculate the right place to shred the balloon.

Then ban sales of helium to China. It's not like one more item on the list is going to spark WWIII.

Hi, Pakistan? You do know anyone can edit Wikipedia, right? You don't have to ask

"Which reads a lot like the PTA isn't aware that anyone can edit"

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Come now, you're not expecting a backwards, authoritarian government to actually handle things itself, now are you ?

We're talking about some midieval adminitrative busybody. Of course it's up to someone else to deal with the problem and, until it is, said adminitrative busybody from the millennia before last will wield the only thing he (because of course it's a he) knows : the banhammer.

Nice, heavy and comforting in the mind, he will teach a lesson to all those "modern" barbarians : don't fuck with Pakistan.

Well we have no intention of fucking with Pakistan. It can stay in 1491 if it wants.

FTC prescribes GoodRx a $1.5m pill after 'sharing health info' with web giants

And here we go again

"We do not agree with the FTC's allegations and we admit no wrongdoing," the company added. "Entering into the settlement allows us to avoid the time and expense of protracted litigation."

Point #1 : You don't need to agree. I'm convinced that every criminal ever arrested by the police disagreed with being arrested. It doesn't matter.

Point #2 : So you admit no wrongdoing ? Doesn't matter either, since you're essentially paying the fine. We know you're guilty.

Point #3 : You're settling because you're guilty and you just want to cut to the chase in order to minimize the impact on the shareholders.

Bottom line : you're guilty as fuck.

What happens when you host code and git clone turns into a DDoS? Let's ask SourceHut

"Russ Cox from the Go team had got in touch"

Oh, I see. Two years of raising an issue without any response, but declare that you plan to ban the mighty adslinger and suddenly things get moving.

That's bad form, Google, because next time, it might just pay to start by banning.

OpenAI offers error-prone AI detector amid fears of a machine-stuffed future

Rated unclear

Now, now, those Vultures should be commended for having helped the vast domain of statistical computing get off its feet.

Watchdog: There just may be something in these claims Apple broke labor laws

"Finding merit isn't a determination of guilt"

Of course not. This is the USA. Guilt is only determined by the court of Justice.

So you can pay millions of dollars to be able to stand up in front the press and state that you "admit no wrongdoing".

But you've still paid millions of dollars.

Landlord favorite Twitter sued for allegedly not paying rent on Market Square HQ

So, now it's the super app

Musk is abandoning Hyperloop as a front for his "genius" ?

I'm sure a superapp will cost less, but you need developers and ideas for that - and Musk has neither. It's easy to say that Twitter needs to become everything to everyone, but that's not a game plan, that's just an objective.

Musk is probably berating this objective every day, telling it to "give 150%" and "not leave the building until you're done".

Good luck with that.

As Twitter is currently brilliantly demonstrating.

Boffins deploy machine learning in search for intelligent ET

"a viable analysis tool, out-scaling the world’s largest super-computers"

And that was back in the naughties, when the CPU was the only thing doing calculations.

To think of what could be achieved in analysis with today's GPUs and their massively parallel threads . . .

The SETI screensaver would just be a blur of colors.

I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it.

WAN router IP address change blamed for global Microsoft 365 outage

Re: If it was working before then the first thing you must always ask

And the answer almost always will be : "Nothing ! We didn't change anything !"

Followed by an extensive waste of time re-auditing the entire network until, hey, what's this ? And then you get a "Oh yeah, we had to modify a setting on the B portion of the network because bla bla, but that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the outage, right ?".

Grrrr.

China stops recognizing online study, orders kids back to foreign unis

"stage local protests in nations that take issue with the Middle Kingdom's policies"

I'm sorry, but that should earn them an immediate return ticket to their beloved country.

You don't like our way of thinking ? That is your right but then, what are you doing here ?

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

Re: Fortunately the UK used their democracy and got out

Oh yeah, I remember that period.

All those reasoned arguments and intelligent debates. So refreshing.

Can you feel the sarcasm ?

"That breaks so many funding models for FOSS it's not even funny"

Cybersecurity is not funny.

It is time to get it out of the hands of clowns.

Mon Dieu! Suspected French ShinyHunters gang member in the dock

21 years old

Undoubtedly considered himself invulnerable, superior and super smart, looking down on his victims and laughing when the money rolled in.

He can do the time, he's got plenty of it.

AI cannot be credited as authors in papers, top academic journals rule

"all paper submissions must be the original work of authors"

Lets stop tiptoeing around the subject, shall we ?

All paper submissions must be the original work of Humans.

When monkeys are capable of submitting a scientific paper we can amend that but, until AI actually means what the letters are supposed to stand for in the real world, machines must remain where they are : useful tools and indispensable support for the actual scientific brain.

California toys with digital vehicle titles on private DMV blockchain

"blockchain will increase efficiency and transparency"

Ooh, so they've finally found a solution to make blockchain scale (it doesn't) ?

I am thrilled that there are some institutions that are trying to adopt blockchain and finally make this thing useful.

I only find it curious that there are hardly any private companies that are doing this, ie risking actual capital on the idea.

Apart, of course, from all the funny money schemes which almost invariably end up on the bonfire of mismanagement and incompetent IT decisions and staff - not to mention intentional scamming from the get-go.

No, lets let government use our tax money to pursue this bullshit bingo boondoggle. At least, when it won't work, it can just be quietly swept under the rug without much fuss because hey, it's only your tax money at work, right ?

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

"the [EAS] can take over practically any television or radio channel in the States"

And that will be extremely useful for all the young'uns who have their smartphones grafted to their hands.

Might be an idea to actually get that alert sound out into films that the youngsters watch, because they don't stand much of a chance of recognizing it otherwise.

Musk: Tesla's doing great. I mean, have you seen my Twitter follower count?

Now you've got me interested.

Disaster recovery blunder broke New York Stock Exchange this week

"an NYSE employee" != junior tech

Poor Meta. Technical debt and user training made its exabyte-scale data migration tricky

Re: Meta found data migration difficult?

Nobody deletes data anymore. You never know when you might find some use for that obscure content in the Comments3 field.

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

"damaged registry keys"

Ah, the Registry. Created to appease rights holders and integrate DRM into Windows (I'm sure the user base was really clamoring for that). An abomination of an excuse that goes up to and includes allowing miscreants to camouflage their malware.

Too bad Borkzilla didn't stick with config files, ain't it ?

It's been since Windows 95 that we've been lugging this so-called database around, and Borkzilla still hasn't found a way to ensure that its contents don't get screwed up. And when they do, you're good for reinstalling from scratch - even today.

Why don't we have an official verification tool ? How can a key possibly get "damaged" ? Why doesn't Windows automatically detect that and correct the issue by isolating the key ?

Almost three decades now, and Borkzilla still can't answer those questions. And we still have to cope with the fallout.

Pathetic.

Tesla eyes Nevada for Semi electric truck plant, battery factory

"Center placement of the driver's seat"

What genius decided that that was a good idea ?

Is that a pitiful stab at trying to avoid the cost and hassle of switching the steering to the right side for UK routes ? It's an electric vehicle, don't tell me that you have to redesign the drive shaft.

You're making an EV, not redesiging how people drive.

Defra 'confident' it has 'handle' on risk for 30% of apps out of support

"It's possibly slightly worse than described"

No my dear, it's much, much worse than described.

We'll be hearing about this again, I wager, and the picture will not be so rosy.

Go to security school, GoTo – theft of encryption keys shows you need it

Re: Persistent keys are the problem.....

Because cryptography is hard ?

They coded and salted the hases, which is more than many do today. Not trying to find excuses, but they did better than most already.

You can always do more, especially where security is concerned. Maybe this "no persistent key" approach would break something else, or make everything more difficult ?

Intel chairman exits just ahead of next financial report

"stepping down just days before the chipmaker is due to report its Q4 earnings"

Um, no, that's not how you do it.

He was there for the making of those earnings report, so he steps up to the plate and takes responsibility for them.

Then he can step down.

Stepping down before is just demonstrating a lack of professionalism.

No cookie.

Well that escalated quickly: India demos homebrew mobile OS

"is apparently incapable of running malware"

Careful, some miscreant is inevitably going to say : "Challenge accepted !".

WFH can get you 40% salary boost in UK and US tech jobs

"Nadia Vatalidis, Remote VP of people"

Now that is a Grade A work title.

Not a clue what she does or who she does it for, but you can't deny she must be useful for something.

Damned if I knew what it was, though.

Seattle: Home of grunge, Starbucks… and now, a quantum computer manufacturing plant

US senator Patty Murray : "These are the kinds of investments . . "

. . that ensure that I will remain Senator until the day I die.

Pass that envelope here, I'll take of it.

P.S. : we need a Mr Moneybags icon