Posts by Pascal Monett

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.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

It was a useful option, therefor I'm pretty sure it has been removed.

I need my Trash

It would be funny if I hadn't met at least one person who treated the Trash bin as her personal temporary storage space.

How she never screwed that up is beyond me.

Network died, hard, during company Christmas party, leaving lone techie to fix it

"for VTP to work, the command had to be sent to each of the switches"

So he was operating on faulty assumptions. I don't want to be harsh, but it seems that an admin should always check that what he's doing is the right thing, otherwise mayhem might ensue.

He didn't make sure, and he paid the price (one lost XMas evening).

I'm not necessarily saying that an admin should consult the manual every time, but I would have thought that, just before sending a command that should reconfigure the entire network (not something you do every day, I guess), it might be a good thing to double-check and be sure.

Oh well, he's learned his lesson.

India takes second punt at soft lunar landing with launch of Chandrayaan-3 mission

Re: Good luck

Yes and no. The majority of failures are about getting to LEO in the first place. Either the rocket blows up, or its engines fail to provide the necessary thrust for the required amount of time, or something goes haywire with the guidance system . . . The possibilities of failure are almost endless.

If the rocket manages to get to LEO, you've arguably done the hard part. The rest all depends on how rigourous the programming was, how complete the tests were and how prepared the whole project was. Sending the probe depends on Newtonian physics. There are no surprises there.

Getting to LEO is a roll of the dice. After that, it's mostly your fault if something fails.

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Only created by AI ?

I don't know, check this out : https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en.

Yes, a lot of faces can be spotted as fake, but some are very convincing.

And you'll never see the same face twice.

"address concerns of being replaced by AI"

Seems those concerns are damned real right now.

I propose an AI to replace Hollywood moguls. Scan them once, give them $200 and see how they like the idea.

Let there be light ... based wireless networks: LiFi spec OK'd as Wi-Fi complement

"thin cable thickets"

So, thinnets then ?

Right, I'm out.

'There has never been a realistic plan' for UK's £11B Emergency Services Network

"current hardware will be obsolete in 2028"

So, the project is eight years overdue and current hardware will be obsolete in five.

They forecasted a major emergency comms project to only work for less than fifteen years before requiring everything to be replaced ?

Golly, with planning like that, who needs catastrophes ?

Tell you what, guys, I'll do you a favor : give me £15 billion now and I'll have something working by next year, promise. I don't know what yet, but for £15 billion I'll wrack my brain and get it to work.

Broadcom asserts VMware's strategy isn't working and it basically needs rescuing

"VMware alone can't get that job done"

Yes, apparently VMware is a lame duck. Utterly incapable of ensuring healthy competition. Lacking vision. Etc.

With all those compliments, it's lucky Broadcom is being nice. I shudder to think of what they would be writing if they decided to get nasty.

And apparently the blame is being laid at marketing's doorstep. That should be a strong hint for the salesdrones at VMWare to polish their CV and start finding employement elsewhere.

Then again, they're salesdrones. They always have their CV ready to go elsewhere.

Feds want to see what ChatGPT's content is made of

"Of course we will work with the FTC"

Yes, of course you will. Why do you have to state the obvious ? You don't actually have the choice.

Duh.

PR is great (or so I've heard), but there is a thing as saying too much. That last sentence was too much.

Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

"But at $450, outright, its flaws are easy to overlook"

Um no. If I pay $450 for a bloomin' phone, it had damn well better perform flawlessly. Not costing $1K is not an excuse.

I will overlook flaws if I buy a $150 second-hand phone, not if I buy a >$200 brand new squawker from a store.

Celsius feels the heat: Ex-CEO arrested, watchdogs line up to sue bankrupt crypto biz

Roni Cohen Pavon on the run

You mean this guy ?

This "Celsius Network Roni" ? Pro tip : if the name you use at work is not the name on your birth certificate, you're either an actor, a porn star or a criminal. You most certainly are not a professional businessman, even if you do wear a suit and a tie.

So he "assists in the development of sales strategies and the identification of a variety of difficulties and obstacles" at Celcius ? Seems like he mainly worked to find ways to cheat the law, maximize sucker income and sing the siren tune of unbelievable interest rates (because they were not real).

And now, like the cockroach sent scurrying from the light, he is running from Justice. I'm guessing he may be smart enough to go to a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the USA (not guaranteed, but still possible) - which are, for the most part, poor, 3rd-world countries. I'm also guessing the FBI have his accounts frozen, so I hope he had the foresight to stash some funny money into an account that he can still access from whatever straw-thatched hut he's living in now.

In any case, I'm sure he'll be living la vida loca for $2/day for the foreseeable future, unless he's stupid enough to get himself caught for something (not impossible either). Fugitive from justice sure gives you time to reflect on how not smart you actually were when you decided that scamming people with false claims and newfangled non-tech was a good idea. Of course, it gives you time, but the intelligence to recognize that doesn't come giftwrapped with it.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Stop giving them ideas !

Re: piracy warning

And it has forever been so. The only thing is, back in the glorious days of VHS, you could take one look at that FBI warning, snicker and press Fast Forward to get of it and all the useless previews that followed. These days ? Put the disk in and go prepare your snack/dinner/whatever, because you've got at least five minute of unskippable shit occupying your screen before you can actually watch the movie you intended to.

Pirates ? They've got the same movie on a USB key or NAS and, when they want to watch it, they prepare their snacks beforehand because when they press PLAY, the movie starts.

I'm starting to think the pirates may not be entirely wrong . . .

Ex-Twitter employees owed half a billion in severance, says lawsuit

"subject to Twitter's decision making governance procedures"

Well isn't that a Get Out Of Jail Free card right there.

Musk's "governance procedure" is locking up the cash register and throwing (almost) everyone out.