Posts by Pascal Monett

VideoLAN to India: If you love FOSS so much, why have you blocked our downloads?

I use VLC

I have been for about a decade already.

I didn't even know VLC was based in my country.

Irony ?

DoJ ‘very disappointed’ with probation sentence for Capital One hacker Paige Thompson

"the sentence he imposed was based, in part, on his belief Thompson will not commit further crimes"

So, a judge with a touch of naiveté.

How touching.

India's IT services sector wants workers back in offices – but not all the new hires

"detailed how Infosys pushed back her employment by five months"

I had an offer in 2010 from a Swiss bank. They wanted to see me, but they said I had to live in Switzerland to be eligible for hire.

I live in France. At the time, my wife was a school teacher. I was supposed to uproot everything, get a house in the most expensive country in Europe, and then go through a hiring process without any guarantee of actually getting the job ?

You sign me a contract saying I will be hired when I am a Swiss resident, and I'm coming.

You leave me in doubt, you can go frack yourself. I'm not ruining my family's life on a hope.

Physics Nobel Prize in a superposition between three quantum physicists

79, 75, 77

It's called work, whippersnappers. A lifetime of it.

Kardashians they are not.

UK hits Russia with British IT services ban

"British IT services ban"

UK IT is banning services to Putin ?

Let me join the bandwagon : I am hereby banning all Russian companies from my services.

The fact that I have never provided my services to a Russian company is beside the fact.

I have banned Russia !

Yeehaw !

Don't mind Facebook, just putting its own browser in its Android app

"Meta's spokesperson observed that this is more than some rival apps allow"

Oh, so other people doing bad things is a good excuse for you to not do the right thing.

Riiiight.

UK.gov's decision on Newport Wafer Fab ownership delayed for third time

Re: The decision is obvious. Block the sale.

Yeah well, maybe vote for people who can make the obvious decision.

I'm not blaming you personally, in the last thirty years politicians have become specialized in doing whatever they fancy and voters be damned.

I'm just tired of it.

You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie

Re: Thank you Liam

That article should become standard reading in all technical courses.

India's Mars Orbiter Mission loses contact, burns all fuel, deemed 'non-recoverable'

"a subject of great national pride"

And with good reason.

Total success on first try.

Lasted 16 times longer than planned.

Brought back priceless science data.

Kudos to everyone involved.

PostgreSQL 15 promises to ease Oracle and SQL Server migrations

Re: Age doesn't matter, stability does

Well, given the amount of large companies that are transferring their business-critical data to The Cloud^TM, I think the answer is yes.

EU semiconductor investment not nearly enough, warns chip boss

"I don't think people realize how much investment chip fabrication requires"

And I don't think people realize how much pure water the industry uses.

Not saying that we shouldn't do it, but water management should definitely be part of the equation.

Samsung’s Smart Monitor tries too hard to be clever

a low-end "smart" TV

Why on Earth would you want a "smart" TV ?

They're no better than a normal TV, and they report everything you watch to the mothership.

Fuck smart, I want dumb but efficient.

And I want my privacy.

Text-to-image models are so last month, text-to-video is here

"type a text description of a scene as input"

Oh dear God, that is so going to turn into flying penises.

And when that gets hacked, what do you do ?

Gone in a day: Ethical hackers say it would take mere hours to empty your network

"I do not blame the person who clicks in an email"

I do.

We've seen enough of this. People should know by now.

BlackCat malware lashes out at US defense IT contractor

Secrets Managers

That transmit passwords in cleartext.

Okay, it's been corrected, but why did it start that way in the first place ?

Fake vibrating teeth could make great hearing aids

It's a Monty Python-style thing.

Not indispensible.

Atos rejects bid from rival for digital, big data, security units

"The Board of Directors has therefore decocted not to proceed"

Decocted ?

That doesn't sound like a Board of Directors. That sounds like a Board of Alchemists.

Sage denies misleading customers over perpetual licensing, users not happy

"vendor says it's been 'clear' "

I'm sure it's been clear for the vendor, but given the amount of complaints, calls to salepeople and sheer to-and-fro, it's not that clear for customers.

Besides, if you state publicly that customers with a support contract have a free upgrade, then where's the problem ?

Something is not right here, and that something is simply that fact that Sage wants its customers to pay for a security upgrade that should be provided free of charge.

Bad doggie. No biscuit.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Exchange Server zero-days actively exploited

"adopting zero-trust principles for connections to the product"

That's a very good idea, because I have zero trust in Exchange.

Astroboffins present fresh evidence of moving liquid water on Mars

"The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

Mars is tectonically dead. It has no magnetic field, which means its core is not moving any more.

Granted, the sheer volume of material is going to take an undetermined amount of time to cool off, but if the core was that hot, the ice would have melted.

There may well be a point below the surface where the core can agreeably heat an underground dwelling, but I fail to see how that can impact subsurface ice.

Of course, I'm not a geologist, much less an exo-geologist, so maybe I'm just ranting for nothing.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

Re: a major company which ran the entire factory production on Win3.1

If they were smart enough to airgap the factory floor from the Internet, I don't see that there's a problem.

A lot of industrial equipment was designed way back when, and nobody's there to port the code to Windows whatever so, as said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Arm founder says the UK has no chance of tech sovereignty

Re: Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Indeed.

The Ministry of Tik Tok in charge of technology.

That'll go well . . .

UN's ITU election may spell the end of our open internet

That's already being done.

Indian authorities probe Singapore gaming payments outfit Coda

"These allegations, while without merit, provide an opportunity to clarify this misunderstanding"

Oops. We got caught.

Time to implement Plan B : look nice to the inspectors.

This rope-laying, ever-growing robot may one day explore your blood vessels

"this tube can reach as much as 1.5 m in length"

I'm not very comfortable with the idea of a 1.5m tube loged in my veins.

Cockroach Labs CTO: Google became too comfortable, I wasn't being challenged

"They just have too much money flowing around their system"

One of the very rare times when too much money is a problem.

UK, US slip down World Digital Competitiveness Ranking

Re: instilling understanding

That is a dangerous thing. It makes people have objectivity and makes them capable of critical thinking, both things which are anathema to the Boris Johnsons of this world.

That is why the education systems in our so-called 1st-world countries are being actively steered away from accomplishing any such thing.

Panem et circenses. That is the rule now.

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

"in our copious free time"

That's a good one :)

India reportedly asks smartphone makers to add local satnav silicon

"reduce dependence on foreign systems while improving accuracy"

GPS is accurate.

I doubt any other system will be that much more accurate.

Granted, GPS is US-controlled and I accept that India would prefer to have its own system, but don't bring accuracy in question.

Here's how crooks will use deepfakes to scam your biz

"use fake identities to trick unsuspecting customers or coworkers into sharing payment info"

How stupid are people ?

Do people really give payment details to a new hire ?

Dear Lord, maybe we do deserve an asteroid.

China's central bank declares victory over online lenders, Bitcoin speculators

P2P loans is not necessarily cryptocurrency

I have a problem with confusing person-to-person loans with funny money.

If the loan is made in the national currency, what does the government have to say about it (other than the fact that China is a dictatorship and wants to control everything) ?

If I meet a friend and loan him in person €1000, the government has nothing to say about it. If my friend never gives the money back, that's my problem to deal with. P2P loans are the same thing.

Just mandate that P2P loans cannot be made in funny money.

Life will find a way.

IBM updates desktop mainframe emulator

Perpetual licence

Well, if it costs $11K but the yearly license costs $5K, I'd say that's still a deal.

Microsoft China turns 30, gives nation the gift of jobs and export promotion

"Microsoft sees plenty of growth in China"

There has been plenty of growth in China.

Especially with all those pirated CD copies sold for mere pennnies.

European carriers again call for Big Tech to fund network builds

"But the CEOs believe they're being asked to do all the heavy lifting"

I'm sorry, but the streamers are already paying for their bandwidth, if I'm not mistaken.

They have a contract, and if your tariffs are not adequate, the onus is on you.

Additionally, the users also have a contract, and they are paying for their access as well.

Stop trying to find excuses to get more money. Do your job and configure your prices accordingly.

El Reg is not supposed to pay more just because I'm reading one of its pages.

This is nonsense.

Salesforce set to hire thousands in India after hitting brakes on US recruitment

"weeks after it slowed hiring in the US"

That's pure capitalism at work.

Aren't you happy to live in a world where other people will get your job because they'll be paid less ?

China's infosec researchers obeyed Beijing and stopped reporting vulns ... or did they?

"a strangely commensurate increase in bug reports from unknown sources"

So there are some people who are still capable of working for the greater good.

Good on them.

Darth Vader voice actor James Earl Jones allows AI to take over the role

Awesome

Until someone does a fake video with him doing/saying something horrible.

And we all know that, given time, it will happen.

Another technological price we are foisting upon ourselves.

BT's emergency call handlers will join pay strikes

"BT said the pay award offered was the highest in decades"

So what ?

You've decided to offer a few more pennies than usual.

That doesn't make your offer anything special.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Since when does management bother about checking the existing situation before making its edicts ?

Privacy watchdog steps up fight against Europol's hoarding of personal data

So, the EU version of the NSA, then ?

It seems that the need to hoover all the data is a virus that every police agency catches without fail.

Federal agencies buying Americans' internet data challenged by US senators

"Americans have opted-in to surveillance"

No, actually they haven't.

They've just been stupid enough to not pay attention and got conned into giving that data up.

But, given that there is no computer user license, it's hardly surprising. Anyone can buy a phone, but how many people actually know what is happening when they use it ?

The secret to Sparrow, DeepMind's latest Q&A chatbot: Human feedback

"Chinchilla has 70 billion parameters"

And I'm sure that no human has controlled more than a thousand of them.

Honestly, parameter count for pseudo-AI is the exact same thing as pixel count for screens. The hyperbole is unending.

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

So, you're actually admitting you have a Tesla ?

Meta accused of breaking the law by secretly tracking iPhone users

"We have carefully designed our in-app browser"

Of course you have. And you have carefully ensured that the user's choice of browser is completely ignored.

There's a lot of care going on there. For your ad requirements.

For respecting user privacy, much less.

Amazon accused of singling out, harassing union organizers

"These allegations are completely without merit"

Of course they are.

Until the Court says they're not.

My money is on the Court.

Another UK tech company bought out: Schneider Electric grabs rest of Aveva

a "holistic approach to digitization"

So, if I understand correctly, 60% of shares was not enough to allow Schneider Electric to implement a "holistic approach".

If that is the case, then what was the bloody point.

If you've got 60% of the shares of a company, then the company is practically yours and you can pretty much do what you damn well please.

This is just PR blabbering for nothing.

Microsoft debuts Windows 11 2022 Update – now with features added monthly

“43 trillion security signals”

Dear God, the amount of bullshit is reaching towering levels.

Meta, Google learn the art of the quiet layoff

"lose the dead weight"

So, Meta is going to fire half the management staff ?

Of course not.

San Francisco cops can use private cameras to live-monitor 'significant events'

Well whaddya know

Person Of Interest is becoming a documentary.