Posts by Pascal Monett

"Skywater Technology's 130nm process"

That is not a "not advanced" technology, that is dinosaur technology these days.

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be cheaper and more efficient to purchase a low-end Intel or AMD chip and program that. Even a 14nm general design would almost certainly be faster than a dedicated 130nm design, and more energy-efficient.

Of course, not if you're using Windows on it . . .

One day

One day, people are going to have to learn to stop clicking on every attachment sent by a complete stranger.

The day that actually happens, Infosec will globally have a lot more time to devote to more devious failures.

Where I live, in France, I use Orange for my Internet/TV/landline connection needs. Orange owns the backbone and everything up to my house. If I have a problem, there is no finger-pointing to be done, it's all Orange's responsibility from start to finish.

That is why I have no intention of leaving Orange for SFR, as SFR regularly asks me to.

If I did that, then I would be right smack in the middle of the same problem you had, SFR saying that it's Orange's fault and Orange saying the reverse.

I've been there before, I have no intention of going there again.

"Or written a temporary bit of code that ended up becoming too permanent?"

Oh I have, and I'm fairly certain that many, many people on this forum have as well.

I have bits of code running in several major companies in Luxembourg since 1998. I've got a "backup" ftp process piping data into a mainframe that was supposed to be decommissioned in 2015. There are some more bits and pieces I could mention, but mostly I can say that whatever code I have put in place likely only got replaced when the customer shut down the Domino server for the last time.

Now that is one hell of a tale

Given that a "simple" paternity test costs €74, the fact that a DNA history test costs less is, to me, rather laughable, but let us pass on that detail.

What is hilarious (from the outside), is police including a swab-packing working in a list of suspects.

Well, it must have been a lot less fun for her the day the cops showed up convinced that she was a serial killer.

Somebody should make a TV film out of that.

"Western nations [..] have explicitly stated they wish to dominate standards processes"

Good luck with that. Thanks to the belligerence of the Trump presidency, China has been forced to up its game on the IT side of things.

Things are going to go either of two ways, in my mind. If the current standards bodies play nice and treat China as an equal (and why not ? It's not proprietary, hidden stuff, it's all out in the open), then China will likely play nice and all standards will actually be standard in the world.

The other option is for China to manage its own standards and only use our Western standards when selling products to us. That will fracture the market, although I have no idea what the consequences would be.

"The change means that [..] customers only pay for what they actually use"

No. What it actually means is that customers have no more control over their budget.

But hey, no problem. The board will find out soon enough.

"it's probably best to have a plan in place than lapse into complacency and cynicism"

Indeed it is. And it has been for the past ten years at least. And a majority of companies still have nothing in place.

Frankly, I'd be surprised to know that a majority of companies have a proper data backup system (that has been tested).

It should be a given that large companies with a dedicated IT department should indeed be prepared, but malware doesn't pay attention to the size of the network it is attacking, it just attacks anything it can. So small and medium-sized companies are equally at risk - but they don't put the same effort into their IT budget because they're putting all their efforts into gaining market share and satisfying the customer.

Like hospitals, who put all their effort into taking care of people (thankfully). They come down hard when hit by some despicable miscreant, but they don't have the resources to implement proper protection.

I'm starting to think that the only solution for hospitals is to mandate an impenetrable air gap between hospital computers and the Internet, but I have no idea how feasible that is in reality.

Don't forget : this lawsuit will not benefit Joe Public

The 500K people who's profiles were at risk get nothing from this.

It's just a circle jerk between Alphabet, its shareholders and the lawyers.

So, the only people benefitting from this in any way are the lawyers.

Again.

"But in the cloud – including Azure, natch – users can instead scale only when needed"

Yes, and then they can be hit over the head with the bill at the end of the month, bill that goes twice or ten times over their budget, but it's to late to plead at that point.

It has already been said by people far more intelligent than me : you do not save money by going to the cloud. It follow that you save even less by switching cloud.

It's snake oil, nothing more, nothing less.