* Posts by Pascal Monett

16645 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Great name, great beer

That does sound delicious. Too bad Munich is so far away from me.

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Re: At least the O-ring wasn't frozen this time...

Bloody O rings. It must be a Soviet conspiracy.

Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Joke

"a lesser but still troubling development"

What ? It's a bloody disaster !

I call for a nationwide effort. Breweries must immediately post open kegs at every street corner, and citizens must do their civic duty by taking a mug and ensuring that said kegs get empty as fast as possible.

Come on, Brits, you survived the bombing of London, you can do this !

Openreach boss denies BT selling stake in UK's national broadband plumber

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Cash in before the collapse

You're confusing telephones with communication. Communication is vital infrastructure. It doesn't matter if you use a phone, a laptop, a PC or a tablet. It doesn't matter if you're using the phone link, WiFi, Internet or mobile data ; it's all communication.

And if you think phones communicate any differently than PCs these days, you need to wake up to the 3rd millennium. POTS is long dead, everything is TCP/IP these days.

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Damn right.

Reporting on a murder doesn't make you an accomplice.

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: The law can and does constrain the government

It doesn't seem to be doing much to constrain Trump at this point in time.

It has done nothing in the past three and half years, and now that Trump has his cronies installed in every conceivable point of power, I don't think the law is going to do anything against him.

You do remember who Bill Barr is, right ? Do you really think he's going to authorize any action against Trump ?

I don't.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Popcorn !

I just love it when US judges are sent back to their corner.

And never forget : it is _not_ a good idea to upset someone in a wig. Ever.

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

Oh yes. God forbid you should ever be inconvenienced by such mundane things as protecting others.

Cyber attack against UK power grid middleman Elexon sparks in-house IT recovery efforts

Pascal Monett Silver badge

What ?

"these days more and more companies are forced to pay to speed up the process of getting back to business as usual"

No. It's just that, with the Internet, it is easier to find companies that haven't paid attention to the most basic security rule which is DO A FUCKING BACKUP.

I have zero pity for a sizeable company that still hasn't understood the value of backup. All your files are belong to them ? Pay the fucking fine, idiots, and then take your board and shoot the lot of them. It's not like this is news.

Either the board hired an incompetent IT manager, or the board did not approve the proper budget.

Either way, it's the board's fault. Shoot the bastards.

Now, if you're a small company, you've just received a golden lesson in the importance of backups. I sincerely hope you've learned your lesson because, if not, you're going to pay again. You might start a cost/revenue analysis to determine just how often you can afford to pay to not do backups.

Personally, my limit is zero.

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

What the frak ?

You didn't include Borkzilla ?

What's wrong with you people ?

Brit defense contractor hacked, up to 100,000 past and present employees' details siphoned off – report

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well duh

"quite a few people at Corsham would be unhappy with news that a contractor with full access to the sensitive site has been hacked"

Well then, how about not letting him use any personal equipment, nor take out any information, nor bring in USB keys ? You can even prevent him from sending email to external addresses, if you like, and not allow mobile phones. You know, for security.

It's one thing to bring a contractor in, have him sign an NDA and let him loose on internal equipment. It's an entirely different realm of stupid to let a contractor in with his own laptop and give him administrative access to your sensitive data.

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I note that,

of all the things Cerf has taken note of, lambasting ISPs for immoral interpretation of the word "unlimited", specifically not making any efforts to improve bandwidth and coverage, and doing their damnedest to ensure that their contracts are as nebulous and incomprehensible as possible while maximizing their profits is nowhere in the list of things that His Cerfness deems an issue.

Obviously, demanding government handouts is the way to go when you've sold out.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

The USA has been doing that for two hundred years and look where that's got them.

It's the spirit of the law that should count, not the letter, but you just can't write something that cannot be interpreted in a manner that was not intended. Courts should be there to keep things in the spirit of the law, but they have been undermined by decades of reinterpretations of script.

Unless you have a robust corps of judges who are well versed in the spirit of the law and hell-bent on refusing alternate interpretations, your legal system will break down.

And, on top of those issues, you have the lawmakers who can very well make laws for their own interest or financially-interested parties, instead of making laws that ensure that actual, living, breathing humans* have a chance at a decent living.

* I wrote people first, then realized that, in the USA, corporations have the same rights, so I had to correct that

Facebook to surround all of Africa in optical fibre and tinfoil

Pascal Monett Silver badge

My gast is well and truly flabbered

FaceBook actually doing something useful, and selflessly pledging open access.

Okay, sure, it will also be open access to FaceBook and it ad-slinging, privacy-violating platform, but still, it means people will be able to just surf the Internet, so not necessarily use FaceBook.

Wow. Has the temperature actually dropped a degree down in Hell, or is this just the visible tip of the iceberg of The Zuck's plan for world domination ?

TSMC to build new 5nm chip factory in Arizona with US government backing

Pascal Monett Silver badge

It's hardly ironic, it's the definition of brain drain and we've been doing that to ourselves for the past thirty years in the name of cutting costs.

Well, we've cut costs to the point we don't know the job anymore. All those beancounters must be giddy with joy now.

Back from the dead: Appeals court resurrects lawsuit claiming IBM stiffs its own salespeople on commissions

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Re: Not News

If IBM doesn't really need salespeople, then why hire them ?

I would just love to see IBM's quarter results after one quarter of no salespeople.

On the other hand, it would just be another in a long string of quarters of less revenue, so yeah, he might just be right after all.

Swedish data centre offers rack-scale dielectric immersion cooling

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: In days of yore

You can still find YouTube videos of guys doing that - and at least one is only a few weeks old.

I used to do watercooling when it was DIY. I still have a massive finned heatsink and two pumps that I cannot bear to get rid of.

These days, watercooling is practically the default solution. The range of CPU coolers that use it is impressive, and motherboards use nothing else.

Worried about the magnetic North Pole sprinting towards Russia? Don't be, boffins say, it'll be back sooner or later

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

It's the Atalantians

They're preparing to open the crust to hoist a great big trash catcher into space to gather all the crap we've put up there because it's interfering with their Instagram connection with Tau Alpha Ceti.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: obvious

Idem. I actually knew a friend who lived a few hundred kilometers away who always complained on the phone about how mice were not that intuitive to use.

Cue the inevitable visit and demonstration of how to properly use a mouse.

We all had a good laugh about that over dinner.

Flashy new toys for the next Windows 10? Sorry, fun-seeking Fast Ringers must make do with DoH for now

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Oh boy

"We are practicing our ability to change which branch we consider as the active development branch"

What could possibly go wrong ?

Well, nothing else than that that has already happened.

'iOS security is f**ked' says exploit broker Zerodium: Prices crash for taking a bite out of Apple's core tech

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Security is hard, m'kay?

When you have a professional opinion stating that iOS security is fucked, with a list of breach types that are so common that bounty prices are in freefall, you're beyond the realm of security is hard.

Yes, security is hard. especially if you don't give a shit about it.

Multi-part Android spyware lurked on Google Play Store for 4 years, posing as a bunch of legit-looking apps

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"In-depth spyware is normally the preserve of state-backed agencies"

Yeah, but since then the NSA was abysmally stupid enough to get its malware base pilfered.

It was only a question of time.

Google says it'll pick up the tab – and stick it in a lovely colour-coded Chrome group

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"it all boils down to help[ing] with logical grouping"

And right then it falls flat on its face because every user has his own logic.

At least, in my experience with users.

I prefer my Start menu well organized, only the icons for applications I use on the desktop, and as many tabs as I need in the browser.

Each to his own. With NoScript and uBlock Origin, obviously.

NHS contact tracing app isn't really anonymous, is riddled with bugs, and is open to abuse. Good thing we're not in the middle of a pandemic, eh?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Why, oh why...

"hoping against hope that they might just manage to do it right"

Hope springs eternal, but the NHS has, how can I say, a history as far as IT is concerned. Given that there was undoubtedly a smidgen of urgency, the fact that the app is bug-ridden and violates privacy was to be expected.

But, no worry ! There is never time to do things right, but there's always time to do things over again.

So, some time before the heat death of the Universe, there just may be a proper application that does what it says on the tin.

In the meantime, the snouts are firmly in the trough, so all is well.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

It's not because they don't wear the makeup that they're not clowns

Better late than never... Google Chrome to kill off 'tiny' number of mobile web ads that gobble battery, CPU power

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So nice of you, Google

Unfortunately, there is now a browser that simply does not allow ads. It's called Brave. And it is at least three times as fast as Chrome.

You can do your little bit on the side, but I am done using Chrome on my mobile phone. Brave gets me the page I want without any useless clutter, and it does so in record time.

You're history, Google.

Donald Trump extends ban on Huawei, ZTE telecoms kit in US companies to May 2021

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Ah, that old chestnut.

"security interests have been warning for over a year that Huawei Cisco and other Chinese US corporations are susceptible to governmental interference from Beijing Washington"

And, with the Cloud Act, it is happening every day.

Senator demands deep probe into spyware-for-cops after NSO Group touts hacking toolkit to American plod

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

"should only be used to combat terrorism or serious crime"

No contradiction there. Being a journalist is a serious crime in most dictatorships.

Stop tracking me, Google: Austrian citizen files GDPR legal complaint over Android Advertising ID

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: From my own investigations.....

I use Brave.

No ads on Brave. No need to worry about settings.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Google are so full of it

It does not need to verify any identity whatsoever. It has the AdvertisingID, and a request to stop. It stops, and that's it.

This "verify identity" bullshit is just to protect its revenue stream. It is not required for the user, it does not bring any essential service to the user, and the right thing to do would be to say : "Okay, we have stopped collecting data on that ID. If you wish to resume, you may reset your AdvertisingID".

But that would cut into its bottom line, so fuck the user, we keep collecting.

Once again Max Schrems is putting his finger on the point that hurts. I sincerely hope he wins this case.

Latest Microsoft 365 'wave of innovation' really just involves adding or renaming a bunch of update channels

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

And how about an Enterprise Optional Channel ?

Companies do not need you to change their working platform, Microsoft. You have forgotten that people use your UI to work with products, not to dick around with your settings panels.

Put your stupid new functionality into the App Store, and let companies download what they think they want to try, when they have time to try it out.

There is really no reason for you to foist changes on everyone at the same time, especially when you can so royally screw everything up in doing so.

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Windows that won't resize :(

Well of course. Do you know how much of a nuisance it is to create a resizable dialog box when a simple call MsgBox title, message seems good enough ? You have to set all those parameters and boolean flags. Ugh.

Of course, this is Windows we're talking about, so it would seem logical that somebody would take the time to write a message routine that could check the length of the message, determine if it holds in four lines and, if not, use the resizable version automatically, but you know, this is only the 3rd millennium, we're not that advanced yet.

And having someone write a routine that either calls the default message box or the resizable one following message length is, well, not being paid for, so . . .

Sky Broadband is not the UK's cheapest, growls ad watchdog

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Sky Broadband has been publicly punished"

No it hasn't. It has just been forbidden from running an ad that has probably already reached end of display. Marketing is a fickle world and the lifespan of an ad is approaching goldfish attention span.

A public punishment would have been the CEO of Sky appearing before a judge and getting a few weeks sentence (come on, it's just an ad) hard time. No, not comfy house arrest, that's for pussies. No, not community service, it's supposed to be punishment. If we did have the balls to do that, CEOs in general would become a lot more wary of the ads their marketing department put out, so it would be a win/win.

Lawyers hail 'superb result' in Facebook biometric privacy battle: They'll get 25% of $550m, Illinois gets the rest

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"From any the lawyer's angle, the proposed settlement is a superb result for the certified class lawyers, and represents a fair, reasonable, and adequate resolution of the case, for the lawyers"

There FTFY.

If you're going to spend $3tn, what's another billion? Congress urged to inject taxpayer dollars into open anti-Huawei 5G radio tech

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Open RAN

It's Open, right ?

So what's keeping Huawei from adopting the specifications and producing kit that is, once again, cheaper and offering equivalent or better functionality ?

Just wondering.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: I have wondered this before

Although I generally agree with most of your post, the USA is largely on track for having more deaths than China has had cases, so no, the USA is not going to lead the world into pandemic recovery.

Especially not with the OHSG sitting in the Oval Office.

US govt can talk about the end of lockdown, but Silicon Valley says 'as long as it takes' – and Twitter says 'WFH forever'

Pascal Monett Silver badge

It's going to be interesting to see how this evolves

I am frankly astonished reading in these hallowed pages about all the CEOs and important companies that are declaring remote working now a part of their culture.

I was expecting companies to shrug it off and, when deconfinement rolled around, initiate a gradual return to everybody at the office again. It now seems that that will not happen for much longer than I expected.

This is exciting for me because, as a freelance, I am right now working remotely all the time, and it's great. Customers are asking me to do things for them, providing me VPN access and credentials, and not discussing or complaining about not having me toil at one of their (invariably) under-equipped desks in a frakkin' open space office.

The longer this continues, the better it is for me, so I do hope that this change will become a semi-permanent part of the industry.

Sadly, 111 in this story isn't binary. It's decimal. It's the number of security fixes emitted by Microsoft this week

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

"opening maliciously crafted files"

Never open a file from someone you don't know until you've checked that they had a reason to send it to you.

Never open a file from someone who's mail domain is not from the domain they say they work for.

Never open a file without checking that the extension is legit (a .pdf.exe is a big no-no).

And never, ever open a file from an email that says some throw-away easy phrase like "Important information enclosed !". It's just another skiddie trying to get you to open malware.

India says its brains saved the world from the last colosso-crisis – cough, Y2K – proving it can become self-reliant

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Pint

Re: Are you insinuating something?

Came here to say much the same. I don't remember any of my colleagues at the time were Indian, but we spent lots of time checking and making sure that everything would tick over.

It's about time for one, so it's my round -->

Meteorite's tiny secrets reveal Solar System's sodium-rich, alkaline liquid past – a clue to formation of life

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Life must be everywhere

Our corner of space should not be anything special, so if asteroids are what seeded life on our planet by bringing water and essential minerals, then it has to have happened elsewhere as well. So it should be likely that there are millions of planets that have some of life on them, and of all those millions, there should be at least a few where some form of intelligence has evolved.

However, from what Kepler and other satellites have discovered, all solar systems do not resemble ours. Many of them have Jupiter-like planets orbiting close to the star. We still don't know how a Jupiter-size planet can form in close proximity to a star, but it may not be impossible. One thing is certain though, if those gas giants formed at a distance from the star, like our Jupiter, and somehow migrated inwards, it would most certainly spell doom for any inner rocky planets. The disruption to their orbits would be fatal, and ejection from the system would be likely.

On top of that, it is Jupiter that has protected us from the worst (well, mostly), by sweeping a large area clean from asteroids of all kinds. It is still acting as a guardian from Kuiper Belt asteroids, and has even taken a hit for us in recent memory. Rocky planets that develop in systems where there is no gas giant, or worse, where the gas giant develops close to the star, will not have that protection and will continue getting hit for eons. Life will have a hard time surviving in those conditions.

So maybe, just maybe, we actually are in a somewhat special place after all.

Don't trust deep-learning algos to touch up medical scans: Boffins warn 'highly unstable' tech leads to bad diagnoses

Pascal Monett Silver badge

And now we're adding automated image modifications, even though we haven't the faintest idea of how that actually works because it's done a black box that is called "AI".

Great idea, what could possibly go wrong with something that transforms medical images needed to make a diagnosis in ways we don't understand ?

Oh, and if you're expecting the US Government to "make sure things are up to scratch before approval for the open market", you need to cut down on the weed, my good sir. The US Government is no longer in any state to actually do something useful or needed for its citizens.

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

TMDX, PMDX and PRDX

I wonder just what goes through the mind of the guy who decided that it was a good idea to invent Yet Another Document Format in 2020.

You want competition with Microsoft ? Fine, go ahead and good luck (you'll need it), but for Christ' sake use ODF.

We don't need another frakkin' document format.

Penny smart and dollar stupid: IT jobs slashed in US, UK, Europe to cut costs – just when we need staff the most

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: It's not all bad.

Well that wasn't clear in your original post. Obviously, she's better off at home in those conditions.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Re: IT is like HR (should be Personnel though) in some respects

HR is very different from IT. HR always has the budget it needs because HR is who the CEO calls when it is time to fire IT people.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Re: It's not all bad.

I'm guessing the secretary would disagree with your point of view.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

Re: tldr

At this point in time, most stores that I can still go to have put up a sign stating that they simply don't take cash any more. How can anyone be "stockpiling" cash ?

CEO of AI surveillance upstart Banjo walks the plank after white supremacist past sinks contracts

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well, objectively speaking, I think this whole issue was inevitable.

Come on, if you had such a past, would you lay it on the table in front of the press as soon as you got nominated CEO ? In our unforgiving societal climate ? I don't think so.

Whether he is or not a better person now, he did the only thing he could ; try to keep it hidden as long as possible, because the issue was a foregone conclusion if it became known, as it now has.

If he had been in charge of practically any other type of company, he might have succeeded in keeping his past hidden long enough to demonstrate that he had indeed become a "good person" by managing the company well and making good deals. Unfortunately for him, he was CEO of a company doing facial recognition and security surveillance, and these days, such companies come under special attention, as well they should.

So basically he was doomed.

I am willing to believe that he became a better person. You cannot get rid of hate if you cannot forgive those that try to evolve. I hope that his career will survive this debacle somehow.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I'm sorry, are you saying that there is no bias in AI ?

Because, given the number of high-profile people that are talking about biases in AI, I think you would be wrong.

Papa don't breach: Contracts, personal info on Madonna, Lady Gaga, Elton John, others swiped in celeb law firm 'hack'

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well, with the upcoming lawsuit that is undoubtedly on the way, I'm sure something is going to rub off on this bunch.

India releases data-use protocols for its contact-tracing app... after five weeks and 100 million downloads

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"may be" uploaded on to an NIC server

It will be, rest assured of that. They're getting PII and location data, there's no way they won't hoover that up and try to monetize it later in some way or another.

You don't need location data to know if people have been in contact. It doesn't matter where they were, the app is indicating contact and that is what you're supposed to be looking for.