* Posts by Pascal Monett

16645 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Check the TUPE: Facebook's hire of Bloomsbury AI founders wasn't 'traditional' acquisition - so sacked bod can't claim law was broken

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"each cofounder had been hired individually – and therefore TUPE didn’t apply"

Leave it to The Zuck to find a loophole in a legal employment protection scheme.

That being said, we're talking about a co-founder here. That's not exactly the bottom rung in the employment ladder, if I'm not mistaken.

Where you're at the top, you take your chances and look out for yourself. Running to the employment benefit larder when you feel you didn't get your fair share is rather pathetic.

Why did automakers stall while the PC supply chain coped with a surge? Because Big Tech got priority access

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "a lot of power merely amplifies mistakes"

I think there should be a law that, for the first five years, a driver should not be allowed to drive anything with more than 80 horsepower - even if your dad is a billionnaire.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

If you need assisted driving tools you shouldn't be behind the wheel.

ABS and airbags are necessary, the rest is just an excuse for the driver to not pay attention to what he is doing.

And when you push that concept to the limit, you get a Tesla moron riding in the back seat.

Will the real IRC please stand up? Freenode’s forest fire leaves ashes – and fresh growth

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

"everything of worth was saved"

And that is good news.

Then again, this is the very spirit of the Internet : route around obstruction. The Internet was built on openness and trust, and that is why a moron with money will never be able to nail down any particular part that is not in the IP folders of some company.

IRC is Open Source at its finest. Lee just took over one organization, apparently thinking that he could bend it to his will.

Kudos to all those people who did not accept some petulant man child's idea of management and left him in his playpen to rot.

A smashing article. I enjoyed every line.

Space junk damages International Space Station's robot arm

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: How

Well I think it is safe to assume that, given the amount of junk we are responsible for having put up there, there's a good chance that the impactor was our fault.

Tiny rocks do travel in space, obviously, but they tend to come in swarms and are generally accompanied by bigger rocks that astronomers can find and track.

But, in the absolute, statistically speaking, yes, it could have been a very small meteorite on its way to Earth's atmosphere.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

There's also the issue that, even if all countries would agree to sign up for mandatory de-orbiting of end-of-use satellites, there's still the chance that a satellite gets damaged by an impactor and can no longer be de-orbited.

Back to square one on that.

Congestion or a Christmas cock-up? A Register reader throws himself under the bus

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Happy that it worked out for him

Honestly though, it's a coin toss as to whether you will get roasted or not.

In this case it was about money, so there may well have been someone up the chain blowing his lid and getting all vocal about it. The fact that the hierarchy chose to look at the positive side, aka network performance, is just a stroke of luck.

Days Gone PC: Melting pot of open-world influences makes for one of the more immersive zombie slayers out there

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Not one of these is a bad game so when you add them all together..."

Terribly sorry, but stringing together the good elements from other games does not always end up in a good game. Just sayin'.

As far as zombie games are concerned, I have to say that 7 Days to Die is my preferred sauce at the moment. They're in Alpha on Steam, but honestly they could go full 1.0 and start talking about patching, because 7DTD is the best Alpha I have ever played on Steam.

Four women suing Google for pay discrimination just had their lawsuit upgraded to a $600m class action

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

Something's not right

"even though she helped other employees pass technical interviews to get onto more senior technical positions, managers told her she 'lacked technical ability' "

Sorry, if you're using someone to review technical interviews, you cannot say that they are lacking in technical ability. That would mean that you are the idiot using people lacking in technical ability to conduct technical interviews.

US nuclear weapon bunker security secrets spill from online flashcards since 2013

Pascal Monett Silver badge

“investigating the suitability of information shared via study flashcards"

No. What they are investigating is who the hell thought it was a good idea to post military operational secrets online and why the frak did they not tell Google's robots to not index that.

And that all boils down to : guys, it was last millenium. In this millenium, you still have soldiers who wear their FitBits in combat zones. Nobody understands the security risk of the Internet, but everybody can contribute.

Is this supposed to be a surprise ?

I think it'll take another hundred years before the military nails down the proper procedures.

Either that, or 100,000 losses. It's a toss either way.

Big Tech has a big problem with Florida passing a law that protects politicians from web moderation

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Health Warning?

Actually, that should become a mandatory inclusion in any news post about any politician's declarations, just like the health warning on cigarette packs.

It will be just as ignored by those who don't care, but they won't be able to say that they haven't been warned.

Iran bans cryptocurrency mining for four months as the weather – and election campaigns – start to heat up

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: maybe sometimes even to promote peace in an area

Post WWII, the USA has never done anything to promote peace in an area.

Whatever it has done on the international scene was to promote the US-centric view of the world. If peace came about, it was a side effect.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Electricity is one of the few things in Iran that's cheap, thanks to the nation's abundant fossil fuels contribution to the global climate crisis"

TFTFY

Thorium, Iran. Invest in Thorium. You can't make nukes out of it, and you'll have zero emissions, so everybody will stay calm and you'll stop being a major contributor.

Ubuntu, Wikimedia jump ship to the Libera Chat IRC network after Freenode channel confiscations

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"confiscated by the new freenode management."

Freenode urgently needs to rebrand itself as Dictatornode.

Dominic Cummings: Health secretary's 'stupid' targets delayed building UK test and trace system to combat COVID

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"in my opinion, he should have been fired for that thing alone"

Oh really, Mr Cummings ?

And you have no such skeletons in your closet ?

I'm not really up to speed on UK politics, but I do seem to remember that you've done a few things that I thought should have gotten you the same result.

Pot calling kettle black, as usual.

Facial recog firm Clearview hit with complaints in France, Austria, Italy, Greece and the UK

Pascal Monett Silver badge
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“the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images”

Way to go to boast about how much personal data you obtained without consent in a post-GDPR era.

On top of that, way to go to demonstrate how little you understand of the functioning of Google. Google does not have the image stored in its databases, it has the link to the image, and the metadata surrounding it.

Might not be better, but at least Google cannot show you the image if the host removes it. You can.

USB-C levels up and powers up to deliver 240W in upgraded power delivery spec

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Thumb Up

Wow

The amount of geekery in this thread is impressive.

I would have thought that a 700+ page specification would be a guarantee of thoroughness and reliability - after all, this is not Borkzilla wat wrote it - but apparently there are a number of more intelligent people than me that have a lot to say about it.

El Reg is the best.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

We have Internet today, there's no need to lug around a computer to game with friends anymore.

Every Monday and Friday I have a gaming session in the evening with my friends. We play a range of games and we chat via Teamspeak at the same time. Works fine.

Of course, if you want to participate in a LAN competition, we're not talking about the same thing, but even then, I would think there are some who prefer to lug around their tower instead of trusting a laptop.

Insurance startup backtracks on running videos of claimants through AI lie detector

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Indeed. The USA has a strange attraction to the concept of detecting lies, despite the fact that its own Supreme Court has completely thrashed the idea - and that was a process including a trained FBI investigator overseeing the whole thing.

To think that we are capable of writing a program that can allow a computer to detect a lie is just bonkers.

And we don't have AI. We have statistical analysis machines, and we don't know how they work.

Big changes for devs: Chrome 91 lands with WebAssembly SIMD, JSON modules, clipboard file support

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"it could reduce ad fraud"

I can reduce ad fraud in an instant. NoScript and uBlock Origin kills ad fraud.

Oh, it also kills most ads. Well, you know what they say about omlettes . . .

Amazon puts an $8.5bn MGM in its shopping cart, clicks on checkout

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Interesting point.

Autoforwarding in Exchange Online falls over due to a problematic spam rule deployment

Pascal Monett Silver badge

An unscheduled lie down, eh ?

It would seem that the results are pretty clear : since Borkzilla borgified GitHub, things have gone worse.

Now the real question is : who is surprised ?

Google employee helped UK government switch from disastrous COVID-19 strategy, according to Dominic Cummings

Pascal Monett Silver badge

One thing is for sure

We're not done hearing about how things could have been managed better.

And it's not just the UK. In France I'm hearing a lot about how there are treatments that could facilitate the ordeal of the hospital bed, but apparently doctors are forbidden to mention them.

I have difficulty in believing that, but on the other hand the French government is clearly on a no-holes-barred quest to get everyone vaccinated at any cost, so what am I supposed to think ?

There will be fallout on this, of that I am certain.

The Epic vs Apple trial is wrapping up, but the battle has just begun

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Apple’s ironclad control of the iOS platform"

Nobody is disputing "Apple’s ironclad control". Apple has every right to police its Store as it sees fit.

The dispute is over money. 30%, to be precise, and I think that that is way too much for a platform that is done and dusted and resells the same bytes over and over again 24/7.

5%.

That's the limit.

Astroboffins think strangely porous boulders found on asteroid Ryugu may be the stuff of proto-planets

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well obviously it couldn't have been a prefectly even disk of dust, else nothing would have had enough gravitational weight to attract anything else.

Besides that, we difinitely need to get away from the idea that the Universe is perfect. It's its imperfections that created it.

The rules that govern its existence, on the other hand, are perfect. We just need to find them out.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Oh come on, if you had all the weak gnat's urine in the US you definitely be up for trying that.

Seeking an escape from the UK? Regulations aimed at rocket and satellite launches from 2022 have arrived

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"we want to be the first country to launch into orbit from Europe"

That's curious, I thought that Europe wasn't the best place to launch from.

France has its base in Kourou, because colonialism. Russia and the USA are "confined" to their own territory because no colonialism.

China and India use mainland launch because they are already well placed.

I would have thought that the UK would have seeked an agreement with its ex-colonies, some of which could advantageously host a launch platform.

IBM Cloud resets ‘Days Since Last Major Incident’ clock to zero – after just five days

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"another severity-one issue"

Might have been better to not lay off all those experienced people you used to have, eh IBM ?

Arm has another 'most powerful CPU to date' – this time, the 64-bit-only Cortex-X2 for laptops and smartphones

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Well that was an eye-opener for sure.

Thanks for the link.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"It also supports 128-bit-length vectors"

Interesting.

The entire x86 world is still trying, unsuccessfully, to shed its 32-bit past and become fully 64-bit, and here we have ARM boldly going where no x86 processor has even dreamed of going : to 128-bit.

Does that have anything to do with video, perchance ?

Patch me if you can: Microsoft, Samsung, and Google win appeal over patent on remote updating

Pascal Monett Silver badge

A patent on updating an OS

Isn't threre a metric ton of prior art on that ?

The fact that the OS is "mobile" is neither here nor there.

Good on the courts for slapping this nonsense down.

As usual, bad on the USPTO for granting the patent in the first place.

Snowden was right, rules human rights court as it declares UK spy laws broke ECHR

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

"dragnet surveillance laws"

The problem lies right in the title : dragnet.

No fine-tuning, no discrimination, just violate everyone's privacy and hope you find something. After all, you're The Law. The good guy. Except when you abuse your powers to check on your wife, which is sooo easy to do. Just rewatch True Lies.

I would like, nay, I demand, a report on how many times this global violation of privacy has resulted in stopping crime, let alone terrorism.

If you could prove, without doubt, that raping my privacy has stopped significantly more criminals than you could have without it, then I might rethink my attitude on that.

But you won't, because you cannot actually justify any concrete benefit.

Brit watchdog shows some teeth over McAfee antivirus auto-renewals

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"a cheap first year followed by a subsequent quiet price hike"

Which is inevitably revealed by a thunderous "HOW MUCH ?!" when you review your billing record.

Oracle intros Arm-powered cloud, includes on-prem option for big spenders

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Yeah, no worries.

Until The Cloud (TM) disappears for any number of reasons.

And all your work with it.

Look, I know that The Cloud (TM) can very well be a solution, but any company that uses Oracle's products has enough money to manage its own cloud.

And that still looks better to me than subscribing to a ginormous Single Point of Failure that can fall over at any time - mainly when it is least convenient - and for any amount of time, and you have no control over the recovery process.

I just can't fathom why large companies agree to take that kind of risk.

Finance Bill amendments to curb umbrella company malpractice fail to get traction in UK Parliament

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

Especially for companies apparently registered in the Philippines.

I've got nothing against Philippinos, but I would expect that a basic requirement for employement would be that you have a company registered in the country where you hire people.

This is a(nother) major fail of HMRC.

The Fuchsia is now. Google's operating system lands on real-world consumer devices, starting with 2018's Nest Hub

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

Vade Retro Satanas

"The Chocolate Factory has proposed it as a potential solution for embedded systems where hardware capabilities are limited (such as IoT devices and car infotainment systems), as well as for more potent smartphones and PCs. "

If you think I want anything Google in my car, think again. And the fact that you're marketing it for IoShite is quite obvious : you want the slurp on that too.

'We want to try and remove tools rather than add more...' Netlify founder on simplifying the feedback loop and more

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

As an old curmudgeon, I totally agree with you.

This trend that is trying to make developers code in The Cloud (TM) sickens me. How do I know that my code is secure ? Basic answer : it is not. It is up there for the world to see.

That might be an acceptable outcome if you're coding for Open Source projects, but when I code for a company, I would be very, very surprised if said company would accept my code being paraded on Someone Else's Server.

I will not stop saying that we need to stop trusting the Internet with production code.

Solarwinds123 is the result we can expect from that.

China's Digital Yuan not aimed at challenging US dollar, says former People’s Bank governor

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Replacing the US dollar’s role in international trade is not China’s plan"

Yet.

South Korea plans large scale quantum cryptography adoption, thanks in part to tech partnership with USA

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

Nationwide quantum encryption ?

I thought that quantum tech was still in labs. How is it that, all of a sudden, we have industrial technology ready and waiting to be installed ?

I must have missed the announcement from Intel, AMD or TSMC that they were starting production of quantum chips.

We’ve found them! Govt reinstates records previously missing from the Police National Computer

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well, the data was recovered

That is a good thing. It demonstrates that there is some functional backup system that can be relied on, with a bit of coaxing.

It is still to be hoped that a better backup procedure can be implemented, because restoring data in more than a quarter of a year is not exactly a stellar performance.

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Fuel is the least of the cost in the total life of the car

I'm not sure that I can agree with that statement.

Back in the halcyon days of pre-pandemic, I used to fill my tank once a week. That's give or take €40. Multiply that by basically 50, and that's €2000 per year of fuel.

The annual checkup costs me around €700.

So no, fuel is by far the biggest cost in the life of my car.

And actually, when I think of it, I'll be paying more for fuel than I paid for buying the car.

Hard cheese: Stilton snap shared via EncroChat leads to drug dealer's downfall

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Windows

"His palm and fingerprints were analyzed from this picture"

Dear $Deity, they can lift prints off of pictures now ?

Wow.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Indeed. And it's another case of not needing backdoored encryption or violating one's privacy without a warrant to get the job done.

Man found dead inside model dinosaur after climbing in to retrieve phone

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

To die for a phone

I understand the importance that mobile phones have today, but if you lose it in a ginormous model dinosaur and you're all alone, maybe you should start by going to the Municipal Hall and ask for help ?

Or even flag down a police car. Anything but going in headfirst without anyone to help you get back out.

Not to mention that he could have damaged the model.

That was an unreasonable act any way you look at it. I'm sorry that he died, but he really should have given the matter a bit more thought.

Apple patches macOS flaw exploited by malware to secretly snap screenshots

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"since Apple just threw its desktop operating system under the bus"

Thinking about that, it does not give me any confidence "going forward" that I will be inclined to use Apple OS, since it obviously doesn't consider it important enough to maintain properly.

I mean, if Apple is ready to throw it away at a moment's notice to justify something completely different, then Apple OS is not important enough to merit Apple's full attention. Why should I trust an OS when its maker doesn't care ?

I already don't trust Wondows 1 0.

Icarus moment: Mozilla Thunderbird was saving OpenPGP keys in plaintext after encryption snafu

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Encryption is very difficult to get right

And it is hard to know how to test that you've got it right.

Kudos to Kai Engert for having corrected the problem and getting it right.

Let us Play: Smartphone brand Honor lets slip it has gained access to Google Mobile Services licences

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Re: micromanaging little things and ignoring big things

Oh, you mean totally ignoring a world-wide pandemic but making sure everyon knows you order at McDonalds ?

Trump didn't manage anything. He just barked randomely and expected the underlings to solve all the problems.

This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook faced surprisingly tough questioning from judge

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Oh I get the strategy.

But a week into the trial on that specific issue and you don't have a clue ?

Pull the other one.

That's contempt, no doubt about it.

Roam if you want to: China’s Zhurong rover begins trundling on Mars

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"a notoriously difficult task"

Not only notorious, it's statistical.

More than half of the missions that have attempted to land on Mars have failed. That doesn't make for good odds.

Recentrly, we've been getting better at it, but it's still far from easy.

So kudos to the Chinese for succeeding on their first try !

The Microsoft Authenticator extension in the Chrome store wasn't actually made by Microsoft. Oops, Google

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Re: "I think you underestimate the power of bad publicity"

I vaguely remember having heard that there is no such thing as bad publicity.