Posts by Pascal Monett

Secure boot for UK electric car chargers isn't mandatory until 2023 – but why the delay?

What great news

The industry is creating an entirely new market for skiddies to brick charge points unless you pay $$$ in funny money to unencrypt them.

I am so happy that this new ecological market is taking into account those poor malware writers. Truly we are in the 3rd Millennium.

Instead of just bonking a credit card or a phone on a contactless pad to pay a given amount and have everything local without needing Da IntarWebs to authorize everything. You want a blood sample with that ?

Honestly, I'm looking forward to my retirement, but the way things are going, I'm going to start looking forward to leaving this world for good.

Another day, another ERP project behind schedule: This time it's Norfolk County Council and an Oracle system

Re: Surprise, surprise ..... yet another cost overrun :)

Well, they're not actually "estimating" the cost savings, they're just repeating what the marketroid told them.

Mobile networks really hate Apple's Private Relay: Some folks find iOS privacy feature blocked on their iPhones

ISPs and networks are being paid by the contract you signed up for to use their services. They do not need additional revenue, else they should have priced their contracts differently.

Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike resigns, leaves WhatsApp co-founder to run things until a successor is named

Re: some unknown influencer

Now that is a contradiction in terms.

That said, I am severely disappointed. When I learned that this guy was creating Signal I had the utmost respect for him. He was really championing our privacy, and I felt that that deserved all the recognition.

Now he thinks his work is done, and the last thing he does is foist a funny money ecology-destroying scheme on us ?

Shame on you, Marlinspike.

JavaScript dev deliberately screws up own popular npm packages to make a point of some sort

Proof that the industry is mad

"Faker.js is incorporated into more than 2,500 other npm packages and is downloaded 2.4 million times per week; colors.js is incorporated into almost 19,000 other npm packages and gets 23 million downloads a week."

That is over 25 million web sites (or at least web pages) that outsource their functionality to a guy they don't know and don't pay every day of the year.

Are you out of your fucking minds ?

I'll never stop repeating this : your production server should have all of its code local and you should know all the code you put into it.

You find a package that is useful ? Fine, download it, test it and incorporate it into your code. But YOU DO NOT LINK TO IT.

It's called security. It's a bitch, but it works.

GCHQ was rebuked for ignoring spy law safeguards as pandemic hit Britain

Complaining about something that you have approved 99.94% of the time

Is that called CYA or what ?

OK, it's not CYA, it's just a politician trying to get brownie points.

But still . . .

The James Webb Space Telescope has only gone and deployed its primary mirror

"As the agencies ticked off each JWST milestone"

Because, contrary to UK councils deploying an ERP, NASA knows exactly what needs to be done, has recorded the milestones and is applying said knowledge to ensure that JWST will be functional.

I suggest that all UK councils wanting to deploy an ERP go take a learning course in project management at NASA.

They will utterly fail, but at least they will get a cluebat to the face.

No defence for outdated defenders as consumer AV nears RIP

Re: My own

And the solution is simple :

1) don't use Outlook. Every malware writer is on the lookout for that.

2) Use NoScript. 99.9% of all malware on the web needs JavaScript to install. Stop that and the virus is killed dead in its tracks.

Of course, point 2 requires you to not be a noob of the web, but hey, this is El Reg forums. You should know how to handle yourself in a browser.

UK government tool to monitor its legacy application estate is… LATE

Well of course

"She now heads up the government's 18,000-strong digital, data and technology professions and leads the function for government"

Obviously. She's already failed once, no reason to not let her fail again, right ?

Let us start by defining the word "administration".

Rocketing chip sales growth to ease off this year, reach $680bn, say analysts

COVID was not the only reason for supply issues

Taiwan had a drought, and TSMC was rather severely impacted by that.

We can all hope that COVID will end up going away, but there's every chance that droughts will happen again next summer.

That is probably why TSMC is building in the US (albeit in one of driest states of the Union <smacks forehead>).

Feeling virtuous with a good old paperback? Well, don't. Switching to traditional media does not improve mood

It's a dystopian future.

Wouldn't be much dystopia if everyone was treated well.

A book is an entirely different experience. An e-reader is a slab of plastic and glass. There is nothing especially pleasing about touching it. Of course, what you read on it is just as engrossing as a book, but you're still holding an inert object (which is still incredibly useful if you're on a trip - you just can't lug around a suitcase full of books, but an e-reader is the equivalent in your pocket).

A book is almost a living thing. Pages are tactile, and they keep trace of how you treat them. A well-read book is full of little scars, places where the page tip is folded because the reader was too fast in turning it. Looking at the state of a book is almost reading into its own history.

I read on a screen all day long. I'm a programmer so, if I'm not coding, I'm probably looking for a tip or a solution to a specific problem, or consulting the manual for a specific function, or on the lookout for news in my domain of expertise. I'm looking at screens from 7 in the morning to around midnight every day.

If I want to take a break from that, I want a book. A good old-fashion dead tree compendium that I can cherish and treat with respect, while letting my mind wander its universe.

But that's just my opinion.

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

Absolutely right.

That should be filed under contempt of court and fined accordingly.

Worst of CES Awards: The least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable

"the marginal cost of sharing and making copies of things is pretty close to zero"

Please go explain that to Apple. They still think that 30% is an acceptable share of profits from someone else's work.

Snap continues to make a spectacle of itself as it tries to trademark the word spectacles

Aimed at "creators"

Code for "the general public can't give a damn".

India says: Xiaomi the $88m in missing import taxes, please

"the company could remotely enable censorship tools"

That may be fine in China, but the rest of the world does not approve.

Yet.

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

"improve productivity in an organisation severely short of staff"

Well maybe one of the first things to do would be hiring more staff ?

Once you have enough people to deal with the day-to-day, you can start thinking about optimizing.

As usual, government is dealing with things ass-backwards.

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

"because you'll still be in the same job, I bet"

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Re: The kind whom disaster stalks daily

Seems like disaster hardly needed to stalk him, more like just look around and, "ah, there he is".

Moving an industrial electrical equipment without shutting it down and unplugging it first ? Where did he learn the job, at McDonalds ?

GPU makers promise relief is at hand over chip shortages, prices expected to fall in second half of the year

Re: I, for one, shall remain patient.

I have upgraded, last November, and I don't recall any specific issues with the RTX 3080 I ordered.

I didn't have to wait for weeks to get it. When I ordered it, it was marked as In Stock, and I got it with the rest of the kit.

Maybe in Europe there aren't that many cryptominers ?

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Re: And Furuno!

That's interesting. Furuno makes satnavs for boats. Seafaring boats are typically (but not always) bought by people who have a lot of money - or, at least, who want other people to think they have a lot of money.

In any case, those people are generally not inclined to appreciate that something on their precious boat is not working as it should, and they generally make sure that the provider of said knicknack knows about it.

It's too much of a coincidence to not imagine that the bug on Furuno is not the same bug on Honda. The fallout from this is going to be interesting to watch.

Seems to be a wet finger estimate to me.

You know, you wet your finger, find out which way the wind is blowing now and announce a number.

Honestly, if Honda knows that the issue will resolve itself in 7 months, then they know what the issue is and can explain what the hell is going on.

Otherwise, they're just pulling numbers out from where the sun don't shine.

North Korea worried a lot of countries when it said it test-fired a hypersonic missile in Japan's direction

Wikipedia confirms that a hypersonic missile goes at Mach 5.

Since you mention terminal velocity, I'm guessing that the ballistic missile attains that speed at re-entry. By definition, a ballistic trajectory has a high point. Before that point, it's going up, after that point, it's going down. Only when going down can it increase its speed, and it can only increase its speed while the atmosphere is not thick enough to slow it down.

"North Korea is banned from launching ballistic missiles"

Mmm yes, so now what ? A strongly-worded reprimand ? Send it to the corner for ten minutes ?

Oh, I know : no ice cream for a week. That'll show 'em !

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

Re: What a suprise...

Yeah, we really needed that Dark Mode.

Mine's the black one with the darker collar . . .

Bitcoin 'inventor' will face forgery claims over his Satoshi Nakamoto proof, rules High Court

The guy's a fraud - and a douche

If I were sitting on a million BitCoin, I wouldn't be shouting about it or claiming anything, much less suing people for calling me a liar.

I'd be retired, quietly selling a coin every now and then and living a comfortable, quiet life.

The last thing I would want is everyone knowing I had a million BitCoin.

Planning on buying a new motor? Chip shortages set to hit UK carmakers this year and next

"planning to increase their inventory levels"

Ah, so having stock is getting back into fashion now ?

Looks like the beancounters have come around to realize that the cost of stock is less than the cost of not doing business.

Never too late, I guess.

Remember Norton 360's bundled cryptominer? Irritated folk realise Ethereum crafter is tricky to delete

Let us agree to disagree.

First of all, I'm not talking about software. That's a minefield I will not go into. But the hardware is MINE. There is no discussion about that and I don't need to know about hidden bits and bobs to know that I bought it with my money and it BELONGS TO ME.

Just like my car. I have no notion of automotive engineering, but if I want to put a spoiler on it, it is MINE, so I can.

You, however, have no right to hop over and install a spoiler without my permission. Yet, because we're talking about software in the end, Norton believes that it does have permission.

Well it doesn't.

Not in my world.

"requires powerful hardware"

Yes, because people buying powerful hardware will not at all mind that 60% of the power they purchased will be going towards "mining" funny money pyramid scheme bullshit.

The entire professional world has lost its mind (along with the rest of us). NASA lost the Shuttle to beancounters, Internet companies are losing it to marketroids.

STOP HIJACKING MY PC WITH YOUR BULLSHIT EXCUSES !!

IT'S MINE, NOT YOURS !!

Please excuse this outburst of bombastic bob-levels, I'm off to get myself a whisky to calm me down.

Nurse ? Mine's the one with the flask of JD in the inner pocket.

It takes more clicks to reject their cookies than accept them, so France fines Facebook and Google over €200m

This site is one of the rare ones that, when you ask to check which cookies are enabled, only list essential cookies as on - the rest are unchecked.

So El Reg is a step above many others in this regard.

Car makers lock in long-term deals with chip giants for future autonomous vehicles

Good news, I guess

Now, what happens when everyone has long-term deals and there's a drought ?

Because no water means no chips, IIRC.

UK government stacks up to £1.8bn in vertical application framework

No rush

It'll all go to Crapita anyway.

Fugitive mafioso evaded cops for two decades until he was spotted on Google Street View

Well who'd a thunk ?

Facebook has finally been useful for something.

The world really is coming to an end.

US Army journal's top paper from 2021 says Taiwan should destroy TSMC if China invades

Maybe so, but if China does occupy Taiwan, you only have to look at Hong Kong to see how it will go.

And, for Taiwan, that will be the best-option scenario.

The other option is that all Taiwanese people will be shipped to the Uighur camps (or, you know, "disappeared") and Taiwan will be "repopulated" with 100% China-loyal citizens.

Re: the world needs more diverse fab capacity

And that is happening. There are a dozen fabs that are supposed to start being built this year, and more have been declared to be on the way all over the world.

Stinky tofu ?

You mean to say that there's a version of tofu that actually tastes like something ?

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

"the gambling instrument and ecological disaster that we know as cryptocurrencies"

Ooh, I like that phrase.

I'll be re-using that.

You better have patched those Log4j holes or we'll see what a judge has to say – FTC

Thank you, Senator

”If we had a strong privacy law on the books, Mark Zuckerberg would already be in jail for his serial lying about Facebook’s abuse of Americans’ data"

That was a great start of the year. Imagining El Zuck in jail. Hmmm.

Now, aren't you a Senator ? What's keeping you from proposing laws that tighten up privacy ?

Oh, it's your campaign donations that are in the way ?

Pity.

Microsoft pushes ahead adapting Azure for 5G telecoms after swallowing AT&T's Network Cloud

So that's it, then

The Cloud^TM has its teeth in our communications.

One more venue for the NSA to spy on us all.

Google Chrome 97 relaxes privacy protection just a little to help out Microsoft

Poor little users

"By providing users the ability to delete individual cookies, they can accidentally change the implementation details of the site and potentially break their experience on that site, which can be difficult to predict"

Oh, the poor little things, one of their webby thingies might not render that ad properly. Can't have that, can we ?

Heart attack victim 'saved' by defibrillator delivery drone*

Good for the old man

And well done to the doctor.

I have to say, if it's winter, snow on the road, and I happen to be driving by and old man clearing his driveway who falls down, I don't think "heart attack" will be the first thing I think of.

I'm guessing I would have driven past, completely oblivious to the issue.

That scares me now.

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

Except she's white, has been around money and been living a fantasy for quite a long time.

I would not be surprised if it was found that those were exactly her reasons.

Microsoft rang in the new year with a cutesy tweet in C#. Just one problem: The code sucked

A very nice point, which amply demonstrates that you have never had to parse a 10000+ line CSV file with dates from over 60 users and at least eight different date formats.

Did you know that some people use . to seperate year.month.day ?

I swear, if I had had a gun that day, you would have read of another shooting in the news.

The year ahead in technology fail: You knew they were bad, now they're going to prove it

The empty set

I am seriously wondering how this virtual concert thing is going to work (not enough to buy a VR headset, or go to a Bieber concert).

I checked out the linked page (on EW, as in Eww) and it states that The Bieb will be present on scene virtually (so, sitting comfortably in his chair at home), lipsynching belting out his tunes to all connected, some of whom could be present on stage with him during "dedicated fan moments", with the possibility of "influencing" his performance.

Okay, live virtual concert programs are not exactly a hot item on GitHub, if I'm not mistaken, so that means that there's a group of programmers hard at work to make this possible. Not saying it can't be done, but it never has been done before so the possibility of bugs is rather high, IMO.

I wonder how they're going to work them out - supposing that they're going to try.

ASUS recalls motherboards that flame out thanks to backwards capacitors

Re: OS reactivation

I don't think a new license will be required. Borkzilla is capable of understanding that you change your hardware. I think that you have five activations possible before they lock down activation, but even then, you can call them and explain the situation.

Of course, we're talking honest people here. If you activate your license on four different computers and use them concurrently or within a given time frame, don't be surprised if your key gets rescinded.

In this case, the situation is pretty clear : yes, you had activated on a certain configuration, but that config is gone and you're activating on a new one.

Honest people should not have any trouble.

India’s competition regulator launches probes into Apple over App Store fees and access

"[Apple] resists changes to its business practices"

Oh that it does, but that wall will crumble. The more countries call Apple's position into question, the more trouble it will have ignoring the issue.

And please, your online souk is not comparable to real-world resellers. The one major, vastly important difference is that you don't need to restock. You have one item, and you sell it and resell and resell it again and again and again. The other difference is that you don't know shoplifting, which is a clear budget line in the real world.

So, based on these two differences alone, you have no right to claim a 30% fee.

Then there's the fact that you serve millions with one store and a handful of personnel. If you had to box those apps and sell them on shelves, you would have to have thousands of stores, with the buildings and personnel count that would be associated to them, not to mention supply line costs.

So really, your argument is pure hogwash.

But hey, we know all about your Reality Distortion Field. Enjoy it while it still lasts.

Microsoft patches Y2K-like bug that borked on-prem Exchange Server

It's 2022 and we're still coding dates as numbers (badly) or strings (worse)

Object-Oriented coding exists since when already ? Why are we still coding dates in strings instead of having a date object that has, say, four elements : year, month, day, timezone ? We should have a time object with hour, minutes, seconds, hundredths. And we could have a date-time object inheriting from both.

That would avoid all these shenanigans about trying to convert dates into numbers.

And, Borkzilla, you might want to check your Excel code. It works there.

A time when cabling was not so much 'structured' than 'survival of the fittest'

Do you remember what you had for lunch 20 days ago ?

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

Cigarettes and computers . . . so many horror stories.