Posts by Pascal Monett

Crypto exchanges freeze accounts tied to North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group

Re: Growing Up?

The problem isn't really in decentralization per se, but rather with the fact that any Joe Schmo can declare himself part of the infrastructure without having to prove that he knows what he's doing (he doesn't).

Twitter starts auction to flip the bird, furniture, pizza ovens, gadgets galore

"Musk has [..] articulated a plan"

Well he can still articulate.

Delivering will be exponentially more difficult given that he has fired or driven away most of the developers.

I wonder how his "search" for a new CEO is going ? I especially wonder what difference it would make to Twitter's image, given that everyone knows that said CEO will not be able to manage any differently than what His Muskiness accepts, so booting out the racists again is clearly off the table.

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

"perhaps best not to use a program called SETI@Home somewhere other than, you know, home"

I disagree, somewhat.

The mistake was in implementing the plan on his own. What he should have done would be to present the idea to his manager and get approval.

Of course, that meant his idea could also have been shot down, but hey, them's the breaks.

Disclaimer : I was a long-time contributor to SETI@Home myself, and ran it on every computer I had at home, plus my work laptop if I could.

China aims to grow local infosec industry by 30 percent a year, to $22 billion by 2025

"an ambitious program to scale the industry at 30 percent compound annual growth rate"

Yes, because in security nothing says success like an arbitrary financial goal.

Oh, and blockchain ?

Guys, if you actually manage to implement blockchain successfully where security is concerned, that will indeed be an achievement.

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

"Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute"

No it didn't.

$760K out of $3+ million is definitely not most of that spend.

Now, 8 petabytes of data is nothing to sneeze at, that's for sure. But, if you have a budget of over $260K/month, you have enough money for servers, a local SAS implementation running over 100Gbps fiber and money to spare for the aircon bill and fire suppressing installation.

Apparently, The Cloud^TM does not give you any savings on the IT personnel budget, since there is still need of a bunch of skilled admins to oversee it properly, so you have the people required to manage all that locally.

I'm curious to see next year's local bill and find out just how damning it is for The Cloud^TM.

NSA asks Congress to let it get on with that warrantless data harvesting, again

"he provided several stories"

Oh good. Violating the privacy of 300+ million individuals on a daily basis gave you less than a dozen useful cases.

That declaration in itself would be enough for me to tell them to take a hike. Then I'd go and create an even more restrictive law.

Plus : this is about spying on Americans, and the NSA is the one deciding what it can tell ?

Sorry buddy, you are talking to the elected representatives of your own country about your activity concerning your own citizens. You spill all the beans, or you go to jail.

Simples.

Russians say they can grab software from Intel again

Warranty obligations ?

You only have those when you risk being sued.

I don't see that Russian citizens or corporations are in a position to sue anybody outside of Russia - although that might be a brilliant excuse for getting out of the country at this time.

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

The meltdown continues

Clumsy bull in China shop keeps breaking things. Soon will get angry because of all the broken pieces lying on the floor.

The only question remaining is : when will the fire start ?

Apple just cut Tim Cook's pay by 40%. How ever will he get by on that $50m?

Re: Christians have been trying

Not sure they've been trying that hard. After all, the Vatican is one of the richest places on the planet.

And the Catholic church has historically had dissentions in its ranks about the wealth of cardinals and such.

So it's more a case of "do as I say as not as I do" when the church is talking about Jesus being poor.

That is not, however, an excuse for paying one guy enough money per year to support 10,000 families. He's not doing the work of that many people.

Sure, his work is important and it is important that he know what to say, when and how to say it and to who. Those things are complicated and require an above-average intelligence, to be sure. But they're not worth $50 million a year - especially when that is on top of all the other stuff he gets.

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

I never said people don't imagine things, on the contrary.

What I'm saying is that, nine times out of ten, people imagine wrong.

And apparently you agree.

"They even asked for a physical description of the caller"

A physical description.

From a phone call.

There is no way anyone can infer anything physical from a voice over radio or phone. I cannot begin to count the times have I heard someone's voice on the radio, only to be shocked when I found a pic or a YouTube video featuring that person.

Some people sound younger than they are, some sound much more mature, and being fat or not is not something you can detect by voice alone (let's not even mention height).

Most of the time, the one and only physical trait you can possibly derive just by voice is whether that person is male or female (and even then, it can be tricky).

Short answer : that was a stupid question.

Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid

Re: Two things

Well, she's going to have a lot of time for doing nothing now . . .

Slacker got caught. No sympathy here.

Amazon's attempt to crush New York union slapped down

Re: undue influence?

Or actually coming to discuss things with the employees and outlining their rights.

The cheek !

HPE to face lawsuit for allegedly misleading DXC investors

Business as usual then

"it instead proceeded to lay off many of the company’s most experienced and highly paid employees in order to make cost savings, inflate its apparent financial performance and boost its stock price"

Sounds like standard operating procedure to me, eh IBM ?

Ex-Twitter Brits launch legal challenge against dismissal

"a collective consultation redundancy process currently under way isn't conforming to British law"

Musk's reaction : "Law ? What is this 'law' thing you speak of ?".

BOFH: It's 4ft tall, heavyset, has optional fax. No they didn't take the toner!

Great start to the year

BOFH and workplace accidents. Mmmm.

But seriously, the insurance premiums for that company should be bankrupting it by now.

Intel offers desktop chip that can hit 6GHz if everything goes right, you can keep it cool, stars align, pigs fly

"that test was running the 7zip benchmark"

Oh come on Intel, the 7zip benchmark ?

Are you that scared that your tech won't work ?

Run the Crysis demo, for Pete's sake, and show us that your chip doesn't melt and keeps the game chugging. That would be meaningful.

NASA overspent $15m on Oracle software because it was afraid an audit could cost more

IIRC, NASA doesn't have a single F35 on it's roster of flight vehicles.

Twitter's Singapore landlord says avian network still a tenant, despite eviction reports

One more step towards oblivion

I'm starting to feel like it will almost be sad when Twitter dies for good. Almost. So many jokes that won't be made anymore . . .

Because that is where Musk is going with Twitter : to the chopping block.

And once Twitter is dead, we can finally stop hearing about how that twat is such a genius.

His management sucks (surprise, surprise).

Microsoft fumbles zero trust upgrade for some Asian customers

"Double-byte characters [are found in] Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese"

And Borkzilla is staffed by pure, red-blooded American programmers who only know about the issue by looking at (gasp!) a manual.

No surprise there.

Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

Re: reducing the crew cost of operating the plane

On paper, yeah. So, for the beancounters, as usual.

How do you tell the autopilot that there's a crosswind ?

And how does it manage windshear ?

Cisco warns it won't fix critical flaw in small business routers despite known exploit

Re: Customer concern ?

That is soooo last millenium.

These days megacorps don't even need to pretend any more. It's just "fork it over and thank your lucky stars you don't live in China".

Games Workshop once again battles scariest monster of all: ERP gone wrong

Re: The Horror

I'm waiting for someone to point out something that is "better".

Not holding my breath though.

That said, a tabletop game company needs an ERP system ?

Really ?

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

I wish them well

Got the 32 and 64 torrents in place, will be seeding.

Government tech spending in England more than doubles in five years

"the non-digital leader can't really understand"

The non-digital leader needs to put his/her ego in a box and accept that not understanding is not an excuse for not taking the opinion into account.

In other words : shut your mouth and do as he says.

Can we get a cluebat icon ?

New software sells new hardware – but a threat to that symbiosis is coming

"get just a few new features, but peace of mind"

Peace of mind with Borkzilla updates ?

I don't think so.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

"will reveal the actual price only once the tool becomes generally available"

So, they're already lying through their teeth ?

Not only is Borkzilla not including the features that people want and need (aka good performance and no headaches), but it can't be arsed to lay down the rules transparently.

I thank my lucky stars that I don't need to use this shite on a daily basis.

Swiss Army's Threema messaging app was full of holes – at least seven

"infested with bugs – possibly for a long time"

I think it is time for governments and government institutions to realize that it is not because they say it's secure that it is.

Neither is it secure because whoever they contracted to do the job said it is.

And it's especially not secure simply because the contract said it had to be.

It's not secure until a proper security research firm has confirmed that it's secure.

Salesforce: There's no more Slack left to cut

"I take responsibility for that"

And the consequence will be ?

Are you going to step down ? I doubt it. Are you going to slash your bonuses ? Don't be silly.

Oh, I know : you'll skip your first coffee of the morning.

Yeah, that'll about do it.

Sourcehut to shun Google's Go Module Mirror over greed

"2,500 times per hour"

That is 2494 times too many.

Any sane code should control how long it's been since it downloaded that specific data block. If less than 10 minutes, there's absolutely no reason to automatically query it again.

Manually, you do what you want, but automatically you tone it down.

The Internet does not belong to your code.

The balmy equator of Mars looks rich in opal-bound water

"there could be a lot of water-rich mineraloids"

Okay, I have just one question : what exactly is "water-rich" when mentioned by scientists ?

I understand that it's not you drill a pipe into it and water flows, but much more you mine a cubic meter and squeeze the water out of it.

Okay, fine, but how much water are you going to get out of that cubic meter ?

Because if you only extract one liter, that's a lot of work for not much water.

Tributes flow as Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo - the mind behind Sound Blaster - passes aged 68

I've had six SB cards from 1995 to 2012

I've never bought a sound card from any other maker.

The SB Audigy was really very good, but my first card, the AWE 32, was most impressive.

SB definitely put its mark on PC gaming.

No more holidays for US telcos, FCC is cracking down

LastPass : "the attacker made off with customer data"

And that is why I do not use a password manager.

I'm old enough to manage my own passwords, thank you very much. I do not need to put my trust in a central entity whose every employee is a potential security risk.

Alibaba's Jack Ma out as boss of fintech Ant Group

"will now vote and act independently"

Sure they will. Because none of them have a smartphone, or each other's number.

This is insane. They're shareholders, they own the company, and you want to tell them how they should make their decisions about it ?

Only in a totalitarian state can you push such nonsense and expect it to work.

Mixing an invisible laser and a fire alarm made for a disastrous demo

Re: Button activated sprinklers?

Or it's a button.

Why wait for fire damage if you have human eyes on the alert ?

Microsoft’s Nadella: Tech is in for a rough two years

"but AI waits at the end of the rainbow"

Yeah, with a pot of gold. All you have to do is find it.

I would point out that I'm sick of this AI bullshit, but it would be useless as every marketroid in the industry is busy banging that drum senseless.

Tesla fails to push racial discrimination lawsuit into arbitration

"racist language was actually being used in a friendly manner"

Oh sure, because calling a person of color a fucking nigger is just peachy.

The fact that we still need to even have this kind of discussion is shameful.

FTC floats rule to ban imposed non-compete agreements in US

"healthy competition"

But Capitalism doesn't want healthy competition, it wants monopoly and will do everything it can to obtain it.

Capitalism mandates that you block your competition from accessing resources, non-compete clauses accomplish that.

All this talk about healthy competition is just talk. We'll see how well the lobbyists prove that.

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

Re: People are now starting to realise

No they're not.

The Kool-Aid is still strong on this one. In Luxembourg all of my colleagues are talking about EVs. Luxembourg buys its electricity from Germany because, officially, it doesn't want nuclear energy from France. Never mind that Cattenom is providing nuclear energy to Germany, which is selling it right back to Luxembourg (with a markup, obviously), Luxembourg happily buys its energy from Germany.

Which is building 10 new coal plants because The Greens in Germany have won the war against nuclear.

Well done in any case. All those smug EV owners in Luxembourg can be happy that they've shifted their pollution to somewhere else.

The CES tat bazaar: Bike desks, AI-powered bird feeders, and the smelloverse

Acer's charging bike

I'm sure that'll work about as well as all those gym club subscriptions.

On the other hand, I'd take one for surviving the zombie apocalypse, gaming in peace from my underground bunker while the shuffling hoards decompose above.

I just need to find a Cheetos dispenser and I'll be good to go . . .

No, AI can't tell if you've got COVID-19 by listening to your coughs

Too bad we don't have such efficient tools in politics

"But as we continued to analyse the results, it appeared that the accuracy was likely due to an effect in statistics called confounding – where models learn other variables which correlate with the true signal, as opposed to the true signal itself"

I'm reminded of that chapter in Asimov's Foundation, where the declarations of some diplomat were passed through a logical analysis procedure to conclude that said diplomat had said absolutely nothing of substance or significance.

I still think we need a tool like that.

Rate of disruptive tech and science discoveries has slowed over the decades, claims study

What ? Rounded corners didn't advance technology ?

Count my gast flabbered.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Hydrogen sounds like a nice idea, but as usual, when dreams hit reality the truth gets ugly.

And, in case you wish to dismiss just one voice raising concerns, here's another.

One thing is for sure, if hydrogen is indeed the chosen future, once again we're going to need nuclear to make it happen.

Japan lacks the expertise for renewed nuclear power after Fukushima

"an intermediary power source until the wider adoption of renewables like wind and solar"

No. Just no.

Wind and solar are stopgaps at best. They're unreliable, don't produce enough energy and they create spikes on the grid.

If we are to replace all ICE vehicles with electrical ones, the only power source that can provide the energy to do so reliably is nuclear.

That does not mean that we need to continue with the dangerous reactor needing constant surveillance that we have now. Nuclear can ba safe, especially if we push for Thorium reactors which we should.

But nuclear will not be intermediary. It is the only future.

OneDrive back on its feet, but ongoing Skype credit problem hasn't gone away

"I feel like I'm having an aneurysm with OneDrive being down"

No, you had your aneurysm when you chose to use One Drive.

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

"whether the car has an in-cabin camera"

Yeah, like I'm going to buy a car that not only records everything I do and when and where I drive at what speed, but also be spied on by an actual in-car camera.

Sure.

Intelligent people usually can.

Intel: Please buy these new 13th-Gen CPUs, now with 24 cores

Re: We are not as stupid as you think

Famous last words

NASA boss says US may lose latest space race with China

"the next two years were crucial for gaining a foothold on the Moon"

And ?

If I recall correctly, the Moon is a rather large body (as far as moons go). There's enough space for more than two, unless you're of the "everything is mine" mentality.

The real problem is going to be that, just like petrol on Earth, water is a finite resource on the Moon. It had better be managed better than the Colorado River, else there will be no long-term presence of Man on the Moon.

Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet

Re: Let's get rid of this 1 GB = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 nonsense too then

Nonsense ?

It looks like you have a brilliant career in marketing waiting for you.

Meanwhile, until you redefine the byte as having ten bits, what you want won't happen.