* Posts by Pascal Monett

16643 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

Pascal Monett Silver badge

It does solve a lot of problems.

Thursday, my daughter (who is living at home these days because of COVID) signaled that her laptop could no longer connect to WiFi.

I was giving a 2-day training course in Excel, so I couldn't do much at the time. I told her to sit tight and I'd take care of the issue in the evening.

That evening, my wife complained that her WhatsApp message hadn't gone out since 17h00 (5 P.M.).

After adding 2 + 2, I rebooted the Box (the Internet router), and everyone was fine again.

Question : how is it that a non-Windows platform still needs a reboot from time to time to work properly ?

FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I think it would be more because 51 years ago, nobody had the means to test 650000 variations in anything resembling a human lifetime.

Cryptographic experts today have likely not invented new ways of decrypting things, how to decrypt was known decades ago. It's just that, today, computers make everything faster so you can try more things and stumble upon the solution.

This was a brute-force hack. Beck then, they didn't have the means to do it.

Rogue ex-Cisco employee who crippled WebEx conferences and cost Cisco millions gets two years in US prison

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh

Someone who will never again get any job with admin credentials anywhere in the Northern hemisphere.

I don't care that his login was still available five months later. It's not because a door is open that you have the right to steal private property.

You've got to be shipping me: KatherineRyan.co.uk suggests the comedian has diversified into freight forwarding

Pascal Monett Silver badge
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Very unprofessional

I don't know the name of the person who was managing her website, but to let personal issues override your professional duty is sloppy at best.

Not someone I would want to work with.

Exonerated: First subpostmasters cleared of criminal convictions in Post Office Horizon scandal

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"six people cleared of criminal convictions"

Six people who have lived a decade and a half with a criminal conviction putting their lives in shadow.

I cannot image what it must have been to live through that.

Of course, now they must be very relieved, but I doubt very much that the Post Office is going to "redress" the situation in any satisfactory way.

The baseline for me would be all the years of salary they did not get, plus at least half of that as penance.

But it obviously won't happen.

CEST la vie: HMRC admits controversial IR35 status checker returns undecided verdict in nearly 20% of cases

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"HMRC stands behind every result it gives"

So HMRC is perfectly fine with a tool that tells 1 out of 5 people to go fudge themselves. How's that for service ?

Of course, when the time comes to pay taxes, HMRC will be the first to blame the contractor for not doing things right (obviously, not the same department).

France fines Google, Amazon €135m total for slipping ad cookies into people's computers without permission

Pascal Monett Silver badge

@Headley_Grange

I have a friend like that. I've been educating him on web security for almost twenty years now. He uses Firefox with an adblocker and NoScript, like I taught him, except that, a few weeks ago, he admitted that he had disabled NoScript.

It annoys him because he cannot access his usual sites likes he likes to.

WTF ? I explained how you can just Allow the sites you work with. Where's the problem ?

I think the problem is that many people just can't be bothered to think things through - at least, not where computers are concerned. It annoys them and <i<they don't want to know</i> .

I spend my life on computers. It's my job, and my hobby. I breath bytes. I cannot fault other people who like other things.

I can, however, feel dismayed by it.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Re: Two words...

There are countries that evaluate a speeding ticket based on your revenue.

Just daydreaming here . . .

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

Pascal Monett Silver badge

From the article

"The GCP Cloud Run defaults also played their part. "The max-instances is preset to 1,000, and concurrency set to 80," he said. If he had corrected this to small values like 2 and 1, the bill shock would not have occurred. "

So he did find the setting and understand its importance. Only he checked after the bill, not before.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

He should have checked the docs and settings before releasing the code

It seems to me that he did all the necessary checking after the fact.

I'm sure a $75K bill prompts you to do some deep verification, but it appears that he could have avoided the whole kerfluffle by, <gasp>, actually reading the documentation of what he was about to use.

It's quite obvious, as mentioned by a previous poster, that his contacts in Google is what got him out of the mess he put himself in. Anyone else could just go crying to the bank for a loan.

UK Ministry of Defence: We won't prosecute bug bounty hunters – oh btw, we now have one of those

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well yeah

"the whole technology community can effectively become your distributed dedicated full time CISO "

Absolutely. It's just like Microsoft making its dedicated customers its beta testers. You're sure to get results before the miscreants teach you an expensive lesson.

If you are too "proud" to use this as a tool, you have no business dealing with the Internet as a company. Unless, of course, you are a small company using widely-available tools and not doing anything more on the Web than hosting a basic commercial site or a personal site with next to zero functionality.

Apple fires warning shot at Facebook and Google on privacy, pledges fight against 'data-industrial complex'

Pascal Monett Silver badge

When he read the phrase "Terms and conditions may not apply in China " he just saw the word China and knee-jerked all over the keyboard.

Bitter war of words erupts between UK cops and web security expert over alleged flaws in Cyberalarm monitoring tool

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

What a bunch of tossers

First, they send out a PDF with a link to an outdated version. Why was that outdated version still available online ? It seems a bit of housekeeping is in order.

Then they get a second negative review and, instead of dealing with the issues, they abuse their power to send a menacing cease-and-desist because they're the Police and they don't want to waste their time any more.

Sorry, but that is illegal and unacceptable. Apple does not have the luxury of sending cease-and-desist orders to people criticizing its products, but you, because you have the authority, you just bang one out. And that does not solve the problems that were raised.

Oh, and saying that "...it is not conducive to the delivery of the programme's objectives to spend further time and public money engaging with these issues or with you " is really the most demeaning "speak to the hand" you can possibly deliver.

Congratulations on being assholes. You get an A+ for that.

Expect to work between Christmas and New Year as Brexit uncertainty continues, UK SAP users told

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"whether there is a Brexit deal or not"

I'm sorry, what "deal" are you still banging on about ?

There will be no deal. There is no deal. It's dead. You're leaving, and that's it.

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Thank you for the link. I've learned something.

You could have referenced that to start with, though.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Shortsighted analysis

Machine Learning on an Apple ?

If you have a reference, please share.

In the mean time, that's just fanboi daydreaming.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: What I do locally matters too.

You have basically just justified the entire premise of the article : Apple is painting itself into the smaller picture corner.

Reading El Reg while working from home? Here's a pleasant thought: Kaspersky says 1 in 10 of you are naked right now

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

"toiling away in the buff"

It is 1ºC outside.

In the northern hemisphere, this is not the season to be naked anywhere but in the shower or the bed.

Not unless your heating bills are not your problem.

And besides, having your sweaty crack oozing away on your chair all day ? Yech.

Uni revealed it killed off its PhD-applicant screening AI – just as its inventors gave a lecture about the tech

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"It was never used to make decisions to admit or reject prospective students"

And who exactly do you think you're kidding apart from yourselves ?

This application "reduced the number of full reviews required per applicant by 71 percent and, by a conservative estimate, cut the total time spent reviewing files by at least 74 percent ”. You'll excuse me if I infer that you only reviewed the applications that were favorably noted by your AI, which clearly indicates that it chose who you would spend your time on, therefor anyone it didn't like you didn't spend time on.

I'm sorry, but your statement is factually incorrect.

It is also a blatant lie.

FOSS developer survey: Mostly male, employed... and many don't care about 'soul-withering chore' of security

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

'I find security an insufferably boring procedural hindrance.'

Well maybe a prison sentence would help you focus your attention a bit ?

SAP's strength is the basics: Not RPA or AI, but 'consistent' data models that make sense for actual business processes

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"You cannot have these modifications that you had in the on-premises world"

Well I guess the world is going to do without cloud.

It's incredible that one company thinks it can dictate to all its customers how they are supposed to conduct their business.

So, The Cloud is not only "give me all your data, you might be able to work with it most of the time", but now it is also "you work the way I decide you work".

Well, in a word, no. Companies have spent millions on tailoring SAP to their needs - when it worked - I doubt they're going to spend tens of millions tailoring their company to SAP.

How'd they do that? It's classified: Microsoft's Azure cloud goes Top Secret

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Azure Government Top Secret

The Government would be barking mad to put top secret files in an environment where it does not have total control and cannot shut everything down in an instant in case of a breach.

Then again, the current US Government is barking mad anyway, so . . .

PSA: The 2020 monolith is a dead meme. You can stop putting them up now. Please

Pascal Monett Silver badge

You're the one who clicked the article. If you don't like it, go somewhere else.

Cops raid home of ousted data scientist who created her own Florida COVID-19 dashboard

Pascal Monett Silver badge

You know how to vote ?

Then you know what you need to do.

Uber sends its self-driving cars on a road to nowhere, with indefinite stop at automated truck aspirant Aurora

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Re: around the same time I get a fully functioning Robo-butler™

Oh, so you mean the same time we finally have fusion ?

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Yeah, well maybe, if you're a multinational conglomerate making billions, you could pay a paltry million to have actual people sort the wheat from the chaff and offer true phone support.

But yeah, I know, it'll cost a million.

Big deal.

Surprise, surprise: AI cameras sold to schools in New York struggle with people of color and are full of false positives

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

When the tool is not fit for purpose, there is no way to use it right.

UK Oracle users are all of us: They care more about Brexit and the pandemic than, say, cloud transitions

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"You're going to have to re-engineer processes within your company to match the product"

I'm sorry, it's the product that needs to adapt to the company, not the contrary.

One more reason to not use Oracle : you're forced to work the Oracle way, on top of paying a fortune to be obliged to do so.

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Joke

So it was your fault ?

Apologies accepted. <sound of neck cracking>

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "it is going to be happening"

No it won't.

I do Excel training. I did four VBA beginner sessions last year. I was to do the follow-up advanced sessions this year but, curiously, they were constantly pushed back.

Do you have any idea how many banks, insurance companies and other companies basically exist because of Excel spreadsheets with an ungodly amount of code attached to them ?

All of them.

If Borkzilla removes VBA from Excel, there will be riots in every large city in the world. No way will the Fortune 1000 let that happen.

The only thing that can happen is finding a kludge to make existing VBA code run on Azure.

Borkzilla doesn't have a choice.

Let's check in now with the new California monolith... And it's gone, torn down by a bunch of MAGA muppets

Pascal Monett Silver badge

And they're not cool !

Uncle Sam throws Huawei CFO a bone in her extradition fight, but deal will require an admission of wrongdoing

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Oh my God, I would have soo liked to see Trump go off on a warpath against Canada and try to justify economic sanctions on maple syrup.

That would have been one bright light in a sea of sewage.

USA adds China’s top chipmaker to list of companies American money can’t legally buy a slice of

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"SMIC’s foundries are now capable of producing 14nm devices"

Um, technology is now at 5nm.

You need to catch up.

Intel Labs unleashes its boffins with tales of quantum computing, secure databases and the end of debugging

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"once a human expresses his or her intention to the machine"

As in : "I need a video catalogue application". Sure, let's imagine a fantasy world where there is an AI that actually exists and will create the corresponding application. Will it suit your needs ? Probably not. Why ? Because there's not enough input data.

So we're basically going to go from debugging to SAP-level specifications in order to get an application. I'm not sure we'll be gaining much time.

Because we don't have AI. We don't have a sentient computer that can guess or infer that no, this application doesn't need a complete list of actors with their IMDB profiles embedded, but this one does.

So creating applications by specifications means spending hours upon hours on the specifications.

Might as well code the thing. With a bit experience, the debugging won't be too much of a hassle.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"1,000x to 10,000x larger"

If you're multiplying the data by a thousand fold, you're doing less encryption then you are simply drowning the data in noise.

Where's the mysterious metal monolith today then? Oh look, it's atop a California mountain

Pascal Monett Silver badge

A new kind of meme ?

It disappeared from Utah and showed up in California. That sounds like a marketing gimmick, although for who, I have no idea.

But in Romania also ?

That sounds like meme to me. A bit of an expensive one, but meme nonetheless.

.org owner Internet Society puts its money where its mouth is with additional IETF funding

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Hope ?

We now live in an age where CEO's and other administrative and political responsibles reinterpret and decide what the rules are instead of following the charter that was written in black and white.

ICANN started it (damn you to Hell for that, ICANN), and the rot has spread. Now, if an international body is headed by someone who is actually doing the job as intended, you can count yourself lucky.

Hope ?

Until those traitors are taken behind the chemical shed and shot, I don't have much.

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Pascal Monett Silver badge

What ?

"an option to disable a long-standing annoyance, that when you copy a cell and then press return in another cell, it activates paste "

Excel does that all the time. It was specifically introduced because the users were tired (even back then) of hitting Ctrl-V.

Why is that an annoyance now ? If you copy a cell, it means you want to put the contents somewhere. If you don't, just press ESC.

I really don't see what the problem is. Thank goodness that, unlike Android, they thought to make it an option.

I still would like to understand the reasoning of someone who copies a cell and then gets annoyed that its contents can be easily pasted though.

Four or so things we found interesting about Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888, its latest 5G chip for high-end Androids

Pascal Monett Silver badge

5nm engraving, wow

It would appear Murphy's Law is not dead just yet. That a tiny chip like that can handle multiple 4K videos is nothing short of amazing, but I have just one question : how can you watch multiple 4K videos on a mobile phone screen ?

Maybe they'll also put it in tablets ?

New study: DNS spoofing doubles in six years ... albeit from the point of naff all

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"about 1.7 per cent"

So, seven years ago it was at 0.85%.

And it's mostly in Indonesia and Iran. And that likely means government meddling, so not much of a choice for the people there.

So not really a widespread problem then, is it ?

DeepMind's latest protein-solving AI AlphaFold a step closer to cracking biology's 50-year conundrum

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Great progress

Good to know that our statistical analysis machine technology is finally giving back something useful.

Also good to know that the people involved are not touting this as a replacement for research, but as a valuable addition.

And the best to know is that it will be peer-reviewed.

That means it's serious, not like a lot of pseudo-AI news we've been getting this year.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

He's eating it. That's what's wrong.

Tokyo Stock Exchange lets CEO resign to atone for October outage, other execs take pay cuts and rebukes

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Well finally !

There is finally one place in the world where the top-levels are bashed for a mistake, not the peons.

Nice to see it happen at least once.

So bye-bye, Mr Ajit Pai. You drove our policy into the levee and we still wonder why

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"he was the first Asian-American to head the agency"

Yeah, well, I'm not sure that there are so many Asian-Americans that are going to be proud of that.

Internet Explorer fails to make the cut, banished from Microsoft Teams for good

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"we want to be clear that IE 11 isn't going away"

What a shame.

AWS reveals it broke itself by exceeding OS thread limits, sysadmins weren’t familiar with some workarounds

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Anyone remember 9/11

Indeed, and I will never stop saying that if your own server falls over, it's only you and your customers that are impacted. You have mitigation options, if you care to put the money on the table.

When The Cloud(TM) falls over, it's you and millions of other people that are impacted, and the only thing you can do is sit and wait until Someone Else's Server comes back online.

I do not see that as an advantage for any company that is serious about making money.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Agreed

As much as I despise The Cloud (TM), I have to admit that the engineers working on it are really pushing the limits.

Now, the amount of RAM on a server is no longer the problem - it's the amount of threads a CPU can handle that is.

Wow. Is there anything we can't push to the brink ?

Uri Geller calls off 20-year ban on Pokémon trading card that 'stole' his 'signature image'

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Re: being willing to be involved in making yourself look a fool

I'm sorry, I thought there were thousands of those on YouTube already.

On the 11th day of Christmas TalkTalk took from me... the email address of my company

Pascal Monett Silver badge

TalkTalk

It is high time that it's customers WalkWalk.

Gartner: You think Huawei's sales figures are bad now? Wait till you see next year's

Pascal Monett Silver badge

5G

Mobile phones are the new treadmill. Once upon a time it was desktop PCs, but the technology has hit a ceiling and nobody upgrades every year any more.

Now, we have mobile phones for that, with a new, must-have model every year and new connection technology every now and again.

Personally, I fail to see the interest. You don't need next year's model if you have a working phone already. Whatever way it is better is not worth the price. Use your phone until it breaks, then buy a new one.

Stop the waste. Mobile phones are full of toxic stuff.