Posts by Pascal Monett

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

And here we go again

Another push to replace passwords with <anything else>.

Do you realize the difference between passwords and <anything else> ? You can change a password.

Biometrics ? I can't change my fingerprints any more than I can change my face (hey, I'm not a multi-millionnaire).

Pass keys ? Managed by who ? Do they guarantee that they can't be hacked ? Ha !

Do you know the definition of Democracy ? It's the least worst system of government.

That's what passwords are. The least worst system of security.

I know how to manage my passwords. I never use the same password twice.

Leave my passwords alone. Especially from pseudo-AI.

NASA repurposes Mars Helicopter’s ancient Snapdragon SoC to help Perseverance rover navigate

Wonderful

This is what happens when Science is not bogged down by Politics.

I applaud the people at NASA who have endlessly proven over the decades that they can always make the best out of the most difficult situations.

Attacker gets into France's database listing all bank accounts, makes off with 1.2 million records

"mobilized the agencies that fight this sort of incident"

Sorry, which "agencies" are we talking about ?

I'm asking because, in France, there is apparently only one agency : the moron who thinks he's a playboy.

This, from a government who wants to "protect" the children by requiring every adult to register in order to be able to continue to access Instagram.

Even teenagers can see through this bullshit.

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘more competent who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens’ will take over Linux one day

Someone more competent

I hope you will find that someone. One day. Because the World needs Linux.

Personally, I doubt it. Finding someone just about as competent would already be acceptable.

Because, let's be clear : if the Internet was run on Windows server, the Internet would be a mess of updates, impossible connections and undocumented errors.

Congratulations, Linus, you have just given us a window into a future of really, really, undesirable consequences.

Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers

"crack down on the scourge of fly tippers and unauthorized dumpers"

Congratulations. What is the next step ? Cracking down on smokers throwing away their cigarette butts ?

That is definitely disgusting, but I don't think anyone needs a government division to control it.

What's the next step ? Drones patrolling the sidewalks to control that people don't insult each other ?

The laws in place should already be sufficient to solve the problem. Enforce them properly, then you can dream about increasing surveillance.

The idea of using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense

"the agentic AI hand grenade"

Brilliant.

SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists

Hey, no problem, right ?

"This finding supports growing concerns that space traffic may pollute the upper atmosphere in ways not yet fully understood "

The Human species has been doing things it hasn't fully understood since Day 1 (your choice, I'm not picky on that score).

So, this is another thing we don't fully understand. That is not going to keep China and India from going full-ahead with their own space programs, because honestly, you are not a World Power if you don't have "eyes in the sky", right ?

And if a few hundred million peons need to suffer forthat, who cares ? We're too many on Earth already, right? So, gien that Natural Selection has failed to curb the ever-increasing dominance of Man over Earth, Artificial Selection will have to replace it.

And, given how little practically every country's government is allocating budget to the education sector (vs, for example, the military sector), it's fairly obvious that "the elite" (aka : those who have "connections") are not interested in educating the masses beyond what they need to have a compliant base who will blindingly obey whatever edict "the elite" decide to publish.

As in, COVID. Enough said.

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Cheer up, kids.

Source, please ?

Where you there ?

Canada Goose ruffles feathers over 600K record dump, says leak is old news

Exactly

Where is the reference to the publication of said raid and the notification to the authorities ?

Or is it that Canada Goose deems 600K records insufficient to be worthy of a notification ?

Shouldn't the authorities be taking a look into this ?

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Re: If you were serious about security

Interesting point. What would replace passwords with ? Biometrics ? Because you really think I want to have my face stored on all those servers that I don't control and that, history tells me, will be hacked at one point or another ?

I can change a password. I can't change my face.

Re: Know your threat model

Joe User doesn't even understand what those words mean.

You are clearly a professional. Your solutions, efficient as they are, are not available to the guy who just wants access from every bit of electronics he has at his disposal and has no idea of the consequences.

And I'll bet that, if you start trying to "educate" him on those consequences, he'll shut you out in order to continue to easily consult his FaceBook page, and whatever else he usually does.

Sounds impressive.

Do you really think Joe User is going to bother with all that, let alone be capable of implementing and managing it ?

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

Re: Dumb and Dumber

Um, if you're sent a link by the police, I believe you're supposed to trust it.

This is all from Dutch translation, so I'm pretty sure we don't have all the details, but it would seem that the issue is not that he clicked the link, the issue is how he handled the aftermath.

You don't go telling the Police that you'll only give back if you "get something in return".

I have no way of knowing the particulars, but we're talking about the Dutch. DEutch Police are vastly more trustworthy than ICE thugs, so if they arrested him, I would tend to believe that he was a bit stupid in his response.

GPT-5 bests human judges in legal smack down

So, AI is now slated to replace judges

If you want a good idea of how that will go, watch Big Bug.

Re: the current US Supreme Court

is hardly an example of Justice.

It is now a Trumpian tool of dystopia and should be entirely replaced. The only problem is : with what ?

The USA is failing. It has a convicted criminal at its head and a political machine that is 100% geared towards continuing the march into oblivion.

I'm sure they will succeed.

Penguin-powered platform board keels over at Alpine station

So, it would be a Linux install gone wrong

Why on Earth would you need to reinstall Linux when you have a working environment ?

At the condition, obviously, that your display server is air-gapped from the Internet, If It Works, Don't Fix It applies.

On top of that, the "fixer" obviously didn't do his job properly. Ever since we discovered that Swiss air-traffic controllers were too few and overworked (can't find the source, sorry), it would seem that the vaunted Swiss efficiency has taken some buckshot to the wings.

Anthropic wants comp-sci students to vibe code their way through college

I disagree. This is not "more of the same". This is divorcing a mind from the fundamentals of programming.

Those students will be worse than useless, they will be a danger to business procedures.

On the other hand, that's a brilliant step forward to becoming a manager . . .

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Americans

They really are the last people that have should have guns readily available.

AI to make call center agents 'superheroes,' not unemployed, says industry CEO

"Gartner says"

I am generally extremely sceptical about what Gartner says.

In this case, however, I will welcome their support in defending actual human employment.

Microsoft warns that poisoned AI buttons and links may betray your trust

"Microsoft warns"

Hello Microsoft. Anyone having actually worked with your pathetic excuse for an OS doesn't need your warnings.

Just starting Windows is a warning in itself.

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

"All of this [..] can be toggled off"

Nope, not the way to do it.

It should be "toggled on".

Not that I care anyway, Notepad++ is vastly superior and does exactly what I want it to do.

Dijkstra’s algorithm won’t be replaced in production routers any time soon

KISS

Amen to that.

I shudder to think what Redmond damage Redmond could do if it decided to generalize this new-fangled algorythm.

I know I'm getting old (hell, this year I'm 60), but honestly I've spent enough of my life in IT to know that If It Works, Don't Fix It.

Microsoft boffins figured out how to break LLM safety guardrails with one simple prompt

"What makes this surprising"

The only people who are surprised are the idiots who are employed by companies pushing LLMs with billions in the bank.

As someone said recently : "the i in LLM is for intelligence".

Someone's attacking SolarWinds WHD to steal high‑privilege credentials - but we don't know who or how

Hackers : here's an idea

Try SolarW1nds+1234

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

In the days of CRTs, I don't think they had coloured plastic ones. I may be wrong though.

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

Re: desperately hoping that "junior + LLM" can achieve the same thing

And they will be bitterly disappointed.

Or, and this is quite possible, they will readjust their expectations to find it quite acceptable. Which, in turn, will end up proving that Idiocracy was, in fact, a documentary.

I think I can guess which path we'll end up with . . .

Yeah, just ask a politician . . .

I have been called upon to write documentation for internal software for a few years now.

It's not easy. You need to write the docs for the people who have never worked with the software, not for the people who've been working with it for years (or more) and who just need a reminder. I was specifically told that my documentation would be read by new hires. That practically added double the number of pages to the purely technical side because I had to make sure that the new hire understood the interface (and its quirks) that he was working with.

As a result, I have the greatest respect for people who do that job for a living, without ever actually working with the product.

It's not easy, especially when you can't help but ask yourself : is anybody really reading this ?

Re: which seems to be self evident

Except that neither manglement nor MBAs seem to have grasped that concept . . .

Well said.

I'll be remembering that :)

Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP

$630+ billion

Could somebody please remind me how much they pay in taxes ?

Oh, right. Zero.

DDoS deluge: Brit biz battered as botnet blitzes break records

malware-infected Android TVs

Thank goodness we have all this "smart" shit lying around, eh ?

31.4 Tbps is nothing to sneeze at. Seems like a lot of compromised TVs.

Maybe the TV should redescend to what it always was : a dumb video terminal. That might help, no ?

Summer in Australia means beers, beaches, and bork

That last picture is absolutely lovely

How unfortunate that just about every living creature in Australia (and around it) wants to kill you - and most have the means to do it.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Re: Quite a rare sight

Yeah but, reading logs. It's like reading the instructions.

Who does that these days ?

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Re: Kessler syndrome won't happen

That's not exactly reassuring . . .

Re: Utterly impractical

Thank you for that link. A very interesting read.

I doubt that SpaceX has the money to launch a million rockets (assuming that each rocket will carry a datacenter, which is apparently a subject under discussion).

This is just another after-a-blunt Muskian brainfart. Nothing will come of it.

Ask Hyperloop.

Re: On site maintenance ?

JWST is at L2 and there are zero plans for its maintenance.

L2 is 1.5 million kilometers away. I'm guessing that L1 is just as far. It took a whole month for JWST to get to its current position. You can't do maintenance on that scale and, btw, what happens to maintenance ship afterwards ? Is it supposed to come back ? With what fuel ?

Etc. Etc:

Ah, those cheeky bastards never disappoint, do they ?

Most SAP migrations bust budgets and project timelines, research finds

Well done

Finally, an official study that tells everyone what they already know : SAP is a bloodsucker that will drain you in any and every way it can find until you are nothing but a line on SAP's income list.

Being useful for you ? That's your problem.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Heh, nothing technical like news that Google has screwed itself to make me smile

Well done, Google. All those changes and angst and grumbling for, in the end, being even more blocked than before.

I'd make some suggestions on what you could do, but Heaven forbid that I help you improve your ad-slinging.

And I really like the fact that you are trying to keep ad-slingers from stealing other ad-slingers revenue. Reminds me of the old adage "There is no honor among thieves".

And you are the Thief In Chief, so you should know.

Amazon can't build AI capacity fast enough, throws another $200B at the problem

So, another $200 billion

Plus Alphabet's $180 billion.

Does anyone really think that they're really going to be able to avoid this deluge of pseudo-AI (at least, on Windows) ?

Thank $Deity for Firefox and NoScript+uBlock Origin . . .

Re: *Pop* Go The Weasels

Oh stop talking sense. We're way past that.

Pakistan to test students for real-world skills before they graduate from IT degrees

Interesting approach

I have one question : who is going to test that the professors know what they're testing for ?

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

So, QA is finally coming back

To get to that point, the egg basket must really smell rotten.

I do hope that this new appointee knows that he's being set up as the fall guy.

It's bubble or nothing for Google as search giant looks to plow ~$180B into datacenters this year

$180B for "generative AI"

The signal is clear : they're gonna shove that AI shit down our throats with a funnel and a hose and our hands tied behind our backs.

Thank goodness there will always be good people capable and willing to code blocks and workarounds and make them available to all who care to need.

God bless them.

GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop

"figure out how to manage the mess"

Simple : don't allow automated downloading of anything.

Get those coders back to their actual jobs : making sure their stuff works.

Oh sure, allow anyone to manually download a package. Then expect him/her/it to install said package on a test server, verify the code and that it does the job, then push it into production.

That would go a loooooong way to ensuring that malware-embedded fake packages would have no hope.

But obviously that will never happen, because it would mean that an actual human, paid by the hour, would have to actually work to ensure the proper functioning of his company's environment.

What an idea, eh ?

Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights

Palantir

It is not surprising that this company is soaring financially. This is a time when governments everywhere are becoming more and more attuned to the idea of surveillance, due process be damned. Cue V for Vendetta. Honestly, I am starting to believe that that film, as well as Idiocracy, are actual documentaries, not fiction.

Europe shrugs off tariffs, plots to end tech reliance on US

I can't wait

I am hoping that I will see the day when Borkzilla, Oracle & Co are shut out from European borders and White House interference.

6.something% ? Are you kidding me ? You're going to need a lot more investment than that. You're going to need datacenters, you're going to need network administrators, technicians and even (shudder) actual desk jockeys that all know their job.

The good ones don't come cheap and you're going to need them if you really want this to work.

Time to put your money where your mouth is.

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Re: electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing

Whatever makes you think His Muskiness has time to read ?

He's got bullshit to post on Twitter (yes, I know, but I refuse to change the name).