Posts by Pascal Monett

Rising labor and component costs lead to UK product and service price hike at IBM

IBM's support contract costs

It's certainly quite cheeky for IBM to up the cost of support when they've fired all the expensive know-how in order to replace it with pimply-faced youths paid minimum wage or barely better.

ISP's ads 'misleadingly implied' existence of 6G, says watchdog

Let them be misleading

Let them try to rake in customers thinking that they're getting 6G wifi. It's public knowledge that 6G doesn't exist yet, so the customers will become irate and demand refunds and it will be a terrible mess for that company.

They might make money out of it, but they'll sweat every cent they make.

Vietnam admits it has just ten percent of the infosec pros it needs

Ride-sharing on scooters

In Benin, over twenty years ago, they were already doing that.

They were called zems, I think. They were all over the place in Cotonou. You could flag one down, give your destination, then hang on for dear life until you got there. The ride was about 25c in today's money.

Google reportedly designing chatbots to do all sorts of jobs – including life coach

Why turn to an AI life coach ?

Well, one point is that you're sure it isn't judging you.

Second point : with all the bull around wellness in general (soothing quartz bracelet, anyone ?), AI could indeed not be worse.

Final point : people listen to Gwyneth Paltrow, so I would actually prefer they listen to an AI in that case . . .

Check that, maybe they are.

Japan's digital minister surrenders salary to say sorry for data leaks

"such offers from execs and politicians are common in Japan as a type of mea culpa"

Yeah, well there won't be any French ministers doing that any time soon.

Oh, that must be because they're never wrong . . .

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

Indeed. I'm thinking that a good little CleanURL addon would do wonders to avoid that kind of issue as well.

Re: always on about absolute free speech

Which he has no qualms on quashing himself.

As usual, one rule for the peons, on rule for the ruler.

I really would like Musk to fuck off to Mars, although I can't bear thinking of the plight of all the other people forced to put up with that asshole.

Cruise self-driving taxi gets wheels stuck in wet cement

That seems to be exactly what President Macron thinks.

That's not what I understand when I read "wireless bandwidth constraints that delayed connectivity".

To me, that means that, if the vehicle cannot connect to the mothership in a timely fashion, it's ability to continue is heavily impacted.

That, in my mind, eliminates any possibility of using that kind of vehicle outside of a well-covered city.

No trips to the countryside are possible.

It's not just spin – boffins give quantum computing a room-temp makeover

"difficult to implement on today's error-prone machines"

Ho hoo, burn ! Is that why Azure is always falling over ? I thought it was good old fat-fingered misconfiguration.

I wonder what Intel thinks of that description, especially when selling its Xeon Platinum 8280L beasts at almost $37,000.

Or AMD, with its massive €8,700 Threadripper.

Or nVidia, with its $30K A100 supercomputing monster.

There are a lot of people making a ton of money on those error-prone machines. And I don't see that they are all that error-prone. Yes, there's the occasional unexplainable crash every now and then, and yes, Borkzilla has trained us well in the three-fingered salute to recover from Windows bluescreens, but Excel tables are generally quite reliable (when humans have written the right formulas), and CPUs don't generally fish data from the wrong memory cell.

So I think error-prone is a bit of an exaggeration.

Just a bit.

DARPA wants interoperability standard for Moon living

So, it's the start of competing standards

I'm sure we all remember that specific XKCD.

Kudos, I guess, to DARPA for wanting to clarify how to do what on the Moon, but it's a given that, five years after the first moonbase is up and running, the standards will have changed.

Because even on the Moon, the faucets will be obsolete after five years, and the replacements won't have the same connectors.

Because progress, right ?

Humans stressed out by content moderation? Just use AI, says OpenAI

AI auto-moderation

What a wonderful concept - for the company web site. You can tinker with your parameters to your hearts' content and implement your rules with gay abandon.

For the users, that means that any site using this auto-moderation will be completely incapable of understanding humor, satire or double-entendres, in other words, everything that makes speech fun.

Nope, we will all be transformed into good little posters who obey the rules and have no fun at all.

Such a tool would be a disaster here. I, for one, would likely stop posting immediately.

Using pseudo-AI for auto-moderation on the website of a car maker, or other industrial application, would probably ruffle nobody's feathers. You don't go looking for support on one of your belongings with the intention of using humor, although that could still be a loss for the helpdesk who will have no other source of laughs to look forward to.

But on any site that requires human interaction to thrive, this auto-moderation would stifle humor and conversation. We'd end up chatting in emojis. Beurk.

Discord.io pulls the cord after crooks steal 760K users' info

Good and bad here

Bad points for the break-in. Shoddy code ? That's a shame.

But A+ for handling the fallout. Full admission of the break-in, without pussy-footing about the issue. Passwords salted and hashed, miscreants aren't going to be able to do much with that. Premium subscriptions reimbursed, can't fault them there.

Promise to do better ? You betcha.

There are a lot of companies who could take notes here.

US task force to look into how military could use generative AI

"solve tasks like generating strategic plans"

Ooh, I'm sure the generals are thrilled about that. And I'm sure the generative statistics bullshit generator is going to have no problem in taking into account prior encounters, experience it doesn't have in dealing with that target population, and a whole other set of information that nobody is going to input into the system because nobody working on the system has the data and, even if they did, they wouldn't have a clue as to how to input it.

Let's go ahead and set that up, then generate a strategic plan for beating Imperial Japan at the end of WWII. I'd like to see that generative "AI" pitted against the strategic thinking of the time, and then that of today.

As a beta run, if you will.

If it fails, back to the drawing board.

But who am I kidding ? It's a military, pie-in-the-sky plan. First they pay for it, then they implement it, then the soldiers pay for it, then they scrap it.

Beijing's silent treatment topples Tower Semiconductor merger with Intel

Again, why a merger ?

Couldn't they have just signed commercial agreements with binding partnership clauses ?

Everything has to be a merger these days, nobody knows how to play nice any more.

Why securing East-West network traffic is so important – and how it can be done

Interesting article

I've learned a few things. Now I know what East-West network traffic is, and I understand how important it is to lock that down.

Yes, apparently end-to-end encryption is extremely important, if only to ensure that a destination that a given source is not supposed to connect to is ignored.

It is obvious that East-West traffic is going to be hard to secure. This article demonstrates that it is, nonetheless, necessary.

There's a good chance your VPN is vulnerable to privacy-menacing TunnelCrack attack

So this is basically an iOS issue ?

I use NordVPN.

I use it because some of my clients, in this post-COVID world, want me to connect remotely, but only from a list of approved locations. It's easier for me to use NordVPN and connect to where I need, than rent a flat and move countries just to do a job that requires less time to do than to transit to the approved location.

I note that NordVPN does not seem to be at risk on a Windows platform. So I'm good.

I also note that NordVPN does acknowledge some risk on iOS.

Seems that iOS needs to get its ducks in a row.

It Just Works is not supposed to apply to malware, whatever the origin.

Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

"Zoom reserves the right to change the terms at any point"

Of course it does. And to think there are still people who say that Ts&Cs are a contract.

They bloody well are not, there's not my signature on it and the provider can change anything at any given time.

Not a contract.

South Korea 'puts the brakes' on Google's app store dominance

Re: I'm confused

No, it is not. This is a case of a local Play Store being created, and Google saying "if you put your apps there, we will delist them here", in other words, Google is using its muscle to choke local options.

You may not care about local options, but Google is not a South Korean company, which means, in my mind, there are things it does not understand. A local option should be a good thing to have, and I do not see that Google has the moral right to throw the toys out of the pram on this.

This is about Google wanting every single cent that can be made, when Google already has its own money printing machine.

It's about greed, and how to curtail it.

I say bravo to South Korea.

Singapore opens to stablecoins – once they jump through some hoops

Re: Worst of both worlds

"any cryptocurrency where the user can appeal to a central authority to rectify errors doesn't offer that user total control over their tokens"

I don't see where users had total control over their tokens in the various funny money "exchange" crashes we've seen recently.

But hey, if you want to play with fire, go right ahead. Just don't come crying when you get burned.

Lost voices, ignored words: Apple's speech recognition needs urgent reform

Interesting column

I'm happy that Dragon still has a life somewhere, and that people who really need it can still use it. I've always heard good things about Dragon. Nice to see the fire is still alive.

That said, there are some issues which, I think, could be easily solved. The proper noun issue would go away if, when recording a new one, you had the option to Always Capitalize. That should be rather simple to implement.

The issue with Will, or The Sun, is simple to comprehend : the product is not aware of the contect in which it is working. It "hears" something, and code happily goes to the nearest match and, bingo, you've got Will, a person, when you're talking about your will to do something. Maybe, before using the match, the product could detect that more than one possibility exists, and popup its proposal to which you could just say no ? I have no idea how practical that would be, and it would certainly complicate things in all the other cases that work fine.

But before proposing The Sun, the product could have a basic notion of how many times the user has already wrote about newspapers. If it's never, then maybe don't do that automatically ?

Or better : allow the user to invalidate a match. No, I never talk about The Sun, stop using that match.

That shouldn't be too difficult to implement, should it ?

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

"radically alter the workflow of medical professionals, without their input"

And there is the problem. You do not design an interface without spending some time with the people who are supposed to use it and learning about how they work.

Designing a product without ever talking to its users is a high sign of arrogance, these days. That only works when you are creating something that never existed before.

The word processor is a perfect example. When the first word processors came out, nobody had ever even dreamt of it. There was no one to talk to, because it was an entirely new product.

Today, if you embark on making a new word processor, you hardly need to talk to anybody because if it doesn't work like Word, you're up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

So you're designing a product to "help" doctors ? Go talk to a doctor. Find out what they need and how they work, and then go back to the office and wrack your brain to find out how you can replicate that in your UI.

Not doing that just makes your product useless, and at the mercy of anybody who understands the issue and gives two hoots about it.

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

Re: It's a bank, of course it's not free money

They don't need to say it.

It's obvious that any money withdrawn will be money debited from the account and, if you don't actuallw have that money, you'll have to give it back when your account sees the extra money removed.

It's disheartening to realize that people can still believe that, just because there's a bank error, it's party time.

No people. There was a bank error. It WILL be corrected.

If I do ever see some unexpected sum on my bank account, I will wait a few days to be contacted by whomever it was that sent the money. If days, then weeks go by without any contact, then I will cautiously start believing that maybe, just maybe, I can actually keep it.

But I'm not going to rush the same day or the next to an ATM to extract some of that. It's not mine until I'm sure. And even then, the possibility that someone will come a-knocking to get it back will always loom over that money.

Boffins reckon Mars colony could survive with fewer than two dozen people

"neurotic, reactive, social, or agreeable"

I note that they did not include psychopath or sociopath in the selection list.

We may have screening tools available that can weed out sociopaths, but I doubt that a truly determined psychopath can be detected before its too late.

I'm sure a true psychopath would learn what it is a screening process looks for and adapt his behavior to avoid detection. Then, when on Mars, it would be game time and he could set up dozens of different "experiments" to drive everyone crazy before starting to kill.

And beware sending any psychiatrist over there. It's the golden ticket for a psychopath.

Red Hat's Mexican standoff: Job cuts? Yes, but we still need someone to boot Linux

I don't get that

"for some of them, enabling UEFI boot is either still in beta or remains an extra-cost option"

Okay, to have an option that is in beta is perfectly normal, no issues there (although you might want to get something done to push it into full relase one day).

But to have something that works and is apparently sorely needed (those UEFI motherboards are already out there) and you don't bake it into your release ?

This is Linux, not Windows or Apple. Get that into your codebase and tout it loud and clear. Isn't that supposed to be a technical advantage over your rivals ?

Can you raise $100M+ from AI investors with no product? SEC says yes

97 bucks ? Really ?

I guess it wasn't a bad idea (since it worked), but if you come to me asking for an investment, I expect to be putting a lot more money than that.

When the guy I knew asked me to become his business partner, the entry ticket was €5000.

You sing the praises of your business plan and then ask me for not even a hundred bucks and I'm going to laugh all the way to the door.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

I've got one : bullshitter.

Re: Gore took that all the way to the Supreme Court

Yes, but he did not arrange and incite an insurrection when he shown the door.

He did things the legal way, and it was handled legally. He might not have liked the decision, but he abided by it.

Trump abides by nothing as long as he can get away with it.

It is high time he is stopped from getting away with it.

Apparently, Republicans are strong champions of whatever they think is favorable to them at the time you ask them the question.

Fifteen minutes later, it can change.

Well they didn't do that, now did they ?

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

Pathetic

Musk is killing his reputation faster than he is ruining himself.

Re: Fifteen-year-old

So, Musk is 15 years old.

That's what you're saying ?

Hmm. Yep. It fits.

FTX crypto-clown Sam Bankman-Fried couldn't even do house arrest. Now he's in jail

He really can't just shut the fuck up, can he ?

It is clear that this guy will do anything to get his way. He wanted easy money, he did whatever he could to get it. Now he's caught and he knows he's going to jail, so once again he'll do whatever he can to get out of this pickle.

Personally, I'm surprised he hasn't murdered anyone yet. Maybe because of house arrest.

In any case, I absolutely doubt that paying his debt to society will be lesson enough. I expect to hear about him again soon after his release, whenever that is.

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

"an HP support agent told a user"

Well that's one guy who's almost certainly not working at HP any more.

I have abandoned ink a long time ago. I have a Samsung SCX-4600 laser printer, bought in 2017. I don't need to print in color, and I hardly need to print, so when I do need to print, toner doesn't dry up and block me. And when I need to scan, it works, whatever the amount of toner.

I suggest people rethink their printing needs. There are very few actual cases where you need a color copy fo anything, and in our digital age today, a color scan will likely be more useful.

And every scanner scans in color.

Maker of Chrome extension with 300,000+ users tells of constant pressure to sell out

"Our focus is on user privacy"

That coming from an ad company.

There are times when I regret that a response cannot be accompanied by a mandatory .44 Magnum, cocked and ready to fire when the response is read.

HashiCorp's new license is still open source-ish, just with less free lunch

Ah, Open Source

I still don't really understand these arguments. You started Open Source, free for all. Now that you have business people telling you that you can make mint out of that code, you're switching allegiance.

That feels more than a bit like a bait-and-switch to me. I'm pretty sure that, if their code had not garnered interest outside of the ham radio community (just an example), they wouldn't have bothered.

But no, they started Open Source so everyone could benefit and marvel at all they could do with the code, and now that they're successful, oh, hey, you should pay now.

I think there needs to be some honesty in the Open Source realm, as in new projects should clearly state if their intention is to monetize and change licenses down the line.

And, in any case, I don't think it is fair to put a blanket change on the code. You want to change license ? Fine. State that, as of YYYY/MM/DD, the last version under Open Source is the current NN.XXX.ZZZZ-WWWW (version numbers are such a hassle these days), and as of version BB.FFFF, the license changes to pay as you go (or whatever).

That would be more honest for everyone, and much less hypocritical for the company.

The other solution, of course, is to always be wary of a company offering code as Open Source. You just know that, if they become successful, they're going to change. For the worst (as far Open Source is concerned).

Want to pwn a satellite? Turns out it's surprisingly easy

I sense the plot of the next James Bond film in the making . . .

Electoral Commission had internet-facing server with unpatched vuln

"highly privileged Active Directory accounts by default"

For am email server. How typical of Borkzilla.

We don't know how to do security efficiently, so let's just give email all the privileges and it will work. What's the worst that could happen ?

Hey Nadella, here's a challenge : get Exchange working on Linux.

That'll teach you a thing or two about actual security.

Magento shopping cart attack targets critical vulnerability revealed in early 2022

GoogleShoppingAds

They'd be out of luck with me. I'd block that based on the name alone.

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

I think it is the perfect time to start a new company : Gloom

Gloom will be all about meeting and conference rooms. Not virtual, real.

Perfectly equipped, comfortable chairs, companies will be able to book rooms for 2 to 200 people, who will present themselves at reception with the online voucher. Once authenticated in person, they will be led to the reserved room and will be able to have their meeting/conference during the allotted time.

Meetings that drag on beyond allotted time will be subject to a penalty every 15 minutes after end of allotted time. The amount will depend on the room size and number of occupants.

Gloom is necessary to offset the fatigue that comes with online meetings. Your employees will be more alert, more involved, and get more work done.

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

"You deserve this more than me"

That must be the first time I have ever even just read about a boss saying those words.

It's incredible, so much so that I firmly believe that, no sooner had he said those words, a wormhole to a different universe opened to return him to whence he came, because that guy didn't belong in this one.

US Cyber Command boss says China's spooky cyber skills still behind

Re: What the actual #***?

Well, to be fair, he's only been in command of the NSA since May 2018, so he's only been "jolted awake" after 5 years, not 74.

I do notice, however, that he mentioned a meat packing plant (JBS), but no mention of hospitals.

One would think that hospitals would be a bigger priority for National Security than meat packing plants.

Think International Space Station dust is obviously free of bad chemicals? Wrong

Another good point for having built the ISS

Yes, it cost a fortune, but we are learning new things all the time, and not just concerning space.

New Zealand supermarket's recipe-generating AI takes toxic output to a new level

Woah there !

"People would actually have to follow through with the instructions – and ingest the cursed meals or beverages it recommended – for the technology to be really dangerous"

Never underestimate Joe User's ability to follow instructions. It's on the Internet ! It has to be true ! And the site wouldn't post it if it was really harmful, right ? There is nothing harmful on the Internet, right ?

So let's start mixing this cyano-bleach-polonium tea. It says that the taste is unique !

Chinese web giants go on $5B Nvidia shopping spree to fuel AI ambitions

No, we can't all get along

What is this obsession with increasing the amount of land under a country's control ?

There is no more land to grab that is useful and not already inhabited, so grabbing more means going to war. And that means sacrificing thousands of lives, on both sides, lives which would have served much better growing the economy. However the war in Ukraine ends, tens of thousands are dead. Useless deaths that will be sorely missed when the time comes to rebuild and make everything whole again.

Shameful waste of everything.

Stop oogling your neighbor's stuff. Until your own citizens are swimming in milk and honey, you've got better things to do at home.

And when they are swimming in milk and honey, they won't need to go get more next door.

Infosec imposter syndrome is real. Here's something that can help

Somehow, I doubt that someone truly incompetent worries too much about being incompetent.

He's incompetent, so he doesn't know how incompetent he is.

To actually worry about being incompetent, I think you have to have a pretty good idea of what you should be competent at.

CISA boss says US alliance with Ukraine over past year is closer than Five Eyes

"The answer is planning ahead"

And therein lies the problem.

Politicians today do not plan ahead. They react, mostly badly (and that goes for practically every country, not just US/UK).

If China does invade Taiwan, the US is likely going to get a heaping helping of trouble. Then politicians will cry that nothing has been done.

Yeah, well start doing it now.

Don't shoot! DARPA wants to capture future spy balloons in one piece

Re: Prototype High Altitude Recovery Vehicles (HARVEE) exist already.

The article states that the altitude of concern is over 60,000 feet.

I did a quick search and found that helicopters have a cieling of 25,000 feet, so completely useless for this task.

A cargo airplane can fly higher (the article states 40,000), but that does not mean they all can and that certainly does not mean that a slow cargo plane is designed for operating at 60,000 feet. It's useless to fly cargo that high.

The article clearly states that the only jet plane that can operate at that altitude is a fighter jet (the F-22 being one of the few), and they are not made to intercept balloons floating at mere feet per second.

I think a laser is indeed the best weapon. Put a prick in the envelope, let it sink gradually and then catch it with a skyhook. Won't cost billions, will work every time.

Microsoft OneDrive a willing and eager 'ransomware double agent'

"Since there's no actual malware installed on the target machine"

Wait, there's Windows, isn't there ?

Of course malware vendors aren't going to detect OneDrive shenanigans. It's Borkzilla software, it can't go wrong !

NASA to test potential 400Mbps laser link for Mars

And that is the beginning of the Galactic Internet

Until the HoloNet is finally activated, that is.

Here's to millions of cat videos being transmitted all over the Solar System !