Posts by Pascal Monett

UK spy boss warns China hopes Russia will help it take over tech standards

The war in Ukraine is a devastating blow to the image of a mighty Russia

Russia's failure in Afghanistan was understandable. It was a mistake for everyone who ever set foot there.

Russia's failure in Ukraine is not understandable. It should have been a win. Maybe not an easy one, but a win, nonetheless.

To have the Russian army bogged down, or even retreating, is a damning indictment of a serious lack of preparation and foresight.

The bear has lost its claws. Russia's credibility as a military threat is in the toilet, and Putin's reputation has been hit for six.

I wonder what mayhem will come from that.

DoJ to Congress: Thumbs up for big tech antitrust bill

"Amazon, Apple, Google [..] have expressed their dissatisfaction"

Good.

That means that the bill has some teeth, so it's a Good Thing^TM.

Avast, me hearties ! We'll bring those scurvy dogs in line yet !

Arrr !

Nvidia releases $1,999, 8K-capable GeForce RTX 3090 Ti GPU

I guess it's no use

to ask if it can run Crysis ?

Okay, okay, stop pushing . . .

The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google

"You have no privacy, get over it"

Sorry, we're not getting over it.

It's not because you have the means, that you have the right.

And if you can't understand that, let me come over with a cluebat and I will make you understand.

Dems propose privacy-respecting digital dollar

"it's critical for the US not to be left behind"

And take no notice of the countries that are actively banning it, or why.

You wouldn't want to actually have to think of any consequences, now would you ?

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

I don't see how a reference to the opera is a bad thing.

We all know that it ain't over 'til the fat lady has sung. It's tradition.

It should have read : "Retry 10000 times and let us not irritate the poor little Mid-West yokels by saying why"

I outgrew potty humor as well.

Given the amount of downvotes you already have, yeah, we're outliers.

‘Precursor malware’ infection may be sign you're about to get ransomware, says startup

Re: Almost mind numbing...

Sounds like you're running a PC in Fort Knox.

I just have MS Defender for the PC. I use Firefox with NoScript and uBlock Origin.

And I don't open attachments from people I don't know.

Nvidia outlines subscription-fueled journey to $1tr revenue

"more cash through subscriptions [than] through one-time hardware shipments"

Best of luck, Nvidia.

I don't rent my hardware (or my software, for that matter).

Hackers remotely start, unlock Honda Civics with $300 tech

Well, not Honda in any case.

EU, US agree on Privacy Shield enhancements

"data flows between the EU and US"

What ? Say again ? There is a flow from the US to the EU ?

That's news.

Oh, I see the mistake, it's "data flows from the EU to the US".

That secretary was not on the ball, there.

Big Tech revenues under threat from EU law proposals

"we're worried that some of these rules could reduce innovation"

Yeah, sure. Innovation.

Nothing to do with your ability to sling ads, oh no. Innovation it is.

Because a more level marketplace has always historically stifled innovation.

Pull the other one, it has bells on it.

BOFH: Putting the gross in gross insubordination

There can be only one BOFH

The PFY will have to leave the coop and fly on his own elsewhere.

Or he can decide to be assistant for the rest of his life. His position is rather comfy, after all.

As long as he doesn't cross the BOFH, that is.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

As they say, it's $50 for the hammer, and $400 for knowing where to use it.

British cops arrest seven in Lapsus$ crime gang probe

"We're going to try to stop him from going on computers"

Buddy, you can do better than try.

Take his kit and sell it. Be done with it.

Not blaming the parents for not knowing what was cooking. I spent a whole lot of time on my PC way back when I was in school, and my mother wouldn't have had a clue what I was doing. It was in the days before the Internet, so no hacking involved, I was learning how to program.

But now that you know, you should act. No pussy-footing around.

Supercomputer to train 176-billion-parameter open-source AI language model

A 176-billion-parameter NLP

I'm sure SAP could make a mint selling armies of consultants to configure that beast.

Language is complicated, for sure, but how long does it take to configure 176 billion parameters ?

It seems to me it takes way too long to be useful. Tell me there is some form of automation here.

HP finance manager went on $5m personal spending spree with company card

Executive bonuses don't land you in jail.

The shareholders never say much about them either.

Well, first on the list is selling all the stuff she bought with stolen money and giving the proceeds back to HP.

Which will obviously not suffice because the stuff is no longer new, so it'll be sold at a markdown which might be quite important.

Second is her spending the rest of her life remembering that time she had it all only to squander it and find herself cleaning toilets.

Because she will never be given a company card again, that's for sure.

Prepare for weaponized AI that adapts in real-time to your defenses, says prof

"the rarest users are the C-suite"

And you do not cut them off, even if they are surfing dodgy porn sites during work hours, because if you do, you'll be the one getting the chop.

Microsoft Azure developers targeted by 200-plus data-stealing npm packages

There are that many AV companies ?

We blocked North Korea's Chrome exploit, says Google

iFrames

Is it time to remove that from the browser toolbox, or do iframes have a legitimate use that we can't do without ?

Because there's a lot of miscreants using iframes for their nefarious purposes.

US DoJ reveals Russian supply chain attack targeting energy sector

"Of course the US itself has form"

Yeah, and the NSA being abysmally stupid enough to get itself hacked means that said Russian hackers are probably gloating that they're using US tools against US targets.

Well done, NSA, you have single-handedly upped the ante worldwide with your stupidity.

10x prices, year-long delays... Life as an electronics engineer in global chip shortage

Counterfeit chips

It beggars belief that someone would actually try this. I mean, sure, a counterfeit luxury purse is still a purse, but a counterfeit processor ? How do you justify that ?

You can't just go sell an 8086 and brand it a Pentium. A counterfeit luxury purse can look as good as the original, but a counterfeit chip is going to be found out real quick.

These guys must be happy to sell just once to each customer, because I'd never buy from them twice.

Distributor dumps Kaspersky to show solidarity with Ukraine

What this really means

It means that, from now on, it's going to be a lot harder to find excuses to work with China and not seem lika a hypocrite.

Oh, silly me, I forgot the main excuse : China makes 90% of what we buy.

Google opens Play Store to third party payment systems – starting with Spotify

"Google has revealed a shift of policy" . .

that means that it has finally understood that if it didn't allow 3rd-party payment systems it was in for global blizzard of lawsuits.

Good.

Too bad that it probably won't be bringing its sale share down to the 5% where it belongs. Yet.

IT outage at Scotland's Heriot-Watt University enters second week

We'll have this conversation again in 12 years - after my retirement.

Also, I observe that apparently you only worked in one university.

Oh I absolutely agree.

For a given value of "immediate", that is.

Nor did I say that the ticket wouldn't be read immediately.

In other words, we are in perfect agreement.

Now, let me tell you how things would go in some other customers I have worked with (ie banks and insurance companies) . . .

To put it simply : do you know what an SLA is ? It's what a university generally doesn't have.

"hinting at some severe trouble within the university's on-premises infrastructure"

Obviously. It's a university. They don't have the money or the intellectual resources to do things properly.

I know I'm not going to make any friends by saying this, but I've never seen a university network without some major, jaw-dropping choices (and I've seen a few), all because the IT people they have were never top-tier in the first place.

In the second place, an "urgent" ticket is generally considered as something that must be fixed this semester. University IT does not live in the same timeframe as its computers. A cyber attack ? That must have reset their clocks in a very hard fashion.

Maybe some good can come of this. And, if indeed there was no data leaked, well their IT guys do deserve a few brownie points.

Now all they have to do is properly segment their data domains and, the next time, they might be able to not lose everything.

I hope their backups are good.

EU law threatening 'commercially painful changes' for tech out tonight

So, painful changes, limited scope to reduce their impact, global standards ?

What's there not to like ?

As a consumer, obviously.

As a multinational behemoth rolling in dough, there's plenty not to like, but I don't give a flying fig about that.

UK Ministry of Defence takes recruitment system offline, confirms data leak

"sources finger Capita-run system"

Honestly, with so many failures on its CV, how the Hell is it that Capita continues to get contracts ?

Who's is whose cousin in the upper spheres ? Or is it somebody's wife's son ?

Because there is absolutely no financial, professional or reputational reason to choose Capita. With its history of delays, overcost and underdelivering, it simply boggles the mind that it keeps getting new contracts - that it regularly fails at.

Thailand bans use of crypto for payments

"due to the cryptocurrency's current price fluctuations"

Current ?

I don't know if you're aware, but BitCoin's price has never stopped fluctuating (wildly).

It's only because it is the funny money granddaddy that it has attained such heights. As usual, the first into the pyramid scheme reapes the most rewards.

Adopting BitCoin as legal tender. I don't think that will last all that long. Then again, it's El Salvador, so they can go ruin what's left of their economy, it won't be a big problem on the world scale.

It will be a problem for the poor in El Salvador, though.

RIP: Creators of the GIF and TRS-80

Even though I disagree on his pronounciation

I will gladly salute his achievement.

Let us not let his mistaken opinion be a reason to not acknowledge that he did indeed bring a lot of good things into this world.

ServiceNow jumps into RPA with imminent 'San Diego' release

"you can still have that overarching governance and control"

Of course you can have proper project management, just like you can design an Access database correctly.

The only problem is that, when you put design tools in the hands of Joe Anybody, you get a project coded by anybody. From my experience, that mostly means a collection of Excel spreadsheets with buttons calling VBA code that nobody knows what it does because the guy who coded it left the company, there is no documentation, cryptic information popups and basically everyone is praying every day that the whole hairball keeps working.

So you go ahead and put process design tools in the hands of people who don't know how to code. I will be chortling quietly when reading about how your customers are frustrated because they can't make anything work properly.

Cybercriminals made $7bn in pure profit in 2021, says FBI

Yeah, well when you'll stop paying them ransom money, they'll stop attacking you for money.

Of course, that doesn't mean that they'll stop attacking you.

China's tech hub relaxes COVID restrictions to restart industrial production

"Beijing simply will not tolerate substantial COVID-19 outbreaks"

And what is Beijing's policy on the flu ?

Enough of this madness already. Omicron is very contagious, but not dangerous. Let everybody get it and get over it.

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

"It is eminently fungible"

Careful there, we're veering into NFT territory.

But brilliant, in any case. A lovely, succint overview of reality.

US biz to blow $120bn on AI by 2025, says IDC

Hang on a minute

"Online services like fraud analysis or threat intelligence are some of the areas that are expected to become increasingly powered by AI, and these capabilities were already previously handled by software"

And they will continue to be. Just slapping AI on the process doesn't make it AI. Fraud analysis is not entirely easy, but if you think that a statistical analysis machine is going to erase fraud I have a bridge to sell you.

I have had a training course in detecting fraudulent activity, mandated by one of the clients I work for. It is . . . complicated. I'm not convinced that an "AI" is going to do any better than what is in place at the moment.

But hey, banks have money. If they want to waste it on this, good for anyone who gets the deal.

False advertising to call software open source when it's not, says court

That was pretty bold

Spouting Open Source claims all over your website when your license has nothing to do with Open Source.

I'm glad somebody stood up to this nonsense.

JavaScript library updated to wipe files from Russian computers

Re: Stupid is as stupid does

Yeah, but when you don't care about collateral damage, or you're too stupid to imagine that your actions just might be detrimental to some people who are not like the ones you lump in one giant category, it doesn't matter.

So, this Miller is an asshole.

Oh well, maybe it will help people understand that YOU DO NOT DOWNLOAD LIBRARIES TO YOUR PRODUCTION SERVER.

Meta sued for 'aiding and abetting' crypto scammers

"the celebs depicted without permission have suffered reputational harm"

Well, unless they are or are associated with the Kardashians.

The Kardashian is already rock bottom when it comes to reputation.

Google uses deep learning to design faster, smaller AI chips

Nothing new here

It's been a while that CPUs have been designed by programs.

The only difference is that now, said program is being called "AI", so it's newsworthy.

Samsung updates its most popular smartphone range

Re: Phone prices are crazy....

They are indeed.

It seems to stem from the fact that the makers are desperately trying to make them everything but phones - the phone part is just a coincidence these days.

I would prefer a site that can compare the characteristics of any year's smartphone to any other year's smartphone.

I have a Galaxy A3 I got in 2017. I'd really like to have a side-side comparison with an A3 from 2021 (as I suppose the 2022 version isn't out yet) to see if there is any really must-have feature that I might feel I could actually use.

Probably a moot point anyway. My A3 is starting to behave somewhat erratically at times, so I guess I'll be replacing it this year whatever else might happen.

China declares a new era of digitization has begun

"no modernization without informatization"

And no informatization without Xi watching over all of it.

No thank you.

Hear us out: Smartphone lidar can test blood, milk

We now have smartphones with lasers

That is an interesting development. It is also genuinely a technical achievement.

I suppose it doesn't help battery life, though.

FCC gives Pacific Networks 60 days to leave the US

But of course

"The FCC also expressed concerns about Beijing gaining access to communications and associated data and using it for nefarious ends – including espionage."

Obviously.

The NSA is the only authority that has the right to gain access to communications and associated data and use it for nefarious ends - especially espionage.

Duh.

Brit data regulator fines five cold-calling fiends £405k

750,000 unsolicited marketing calls

And that makes for only a £405,000 fine ?

It should be a £750,000 fine at the very least, with bankruptcy guaranteeing you'll never be a manager of a company in the UK again.

Come on, guys, it's high time you started fixing that shit.

Union demands better deal for app drivers as Uber license renewal looms

"Drivers should be compensated [..] from the moment they log on and off the app"

As much as I sympathize with Uber drivers, being paid simply because you're logged on is an open invitation to being paid for nothing.

I hate Uber and its managers with a passion, but no, this is not acceptable. You get paid for your work, not for being logged on.

How experimental was Microsoft's 'experimental banner' in File Explorer?

"that should be the default rather than a setting to hunt down"

There should be no setting to hunt down.

Any optional software should be on the Store. People know about Stores. Let them search for their own upgrades.

The OS is only there to make the computer function. Stop confusing it with a sales pitch.