Posts by Pascal Monett

"Maybe a handful of people can work remotely"

I think that 2020 has brilliantly demonstrated that a lot of people can work remotely.

As a freelance programmer consultant, I have been lucky in that 2020 did not event dent my yearly revenue. I know that there are a lot of people who have suffered. My daughter is a professional seamstress and she is sick of not having a proper work proposal since March 2020. I, on the other hand, have only had one customer demand that I come on-site since January 2020, and I have been lucky enough to get two additional customers during lockdown.

At this point in time, I have no less than 3 laptops specifically configured to access their particular networks, and my other customers I work with offline, sending them what they need when I'm done.

Work remotely ? If you're a programmer, it's a cinch - thanks to knowledgable network admins, obviously.

Why is that name not familiar ?

Is Elon Musk taking all the spotlight ?

This Peter Beck seems to working his ass off to do much the same stuff. I guess coming in second is always a curse. The article says, however, that he's already put 100+ satellites in orbit. That's not nothing.

High-level manglement can be just as much a nuisance as unions

I was once on a team contacted to create a document management application that would allow lawyers to, well, manage their documents more efficiently.

One would think that lawyers would appreciate that kind of functionality.

Here I was, explaining that the application could easily track the contributors and the changes, and all the filing would a quick press of a button. What I did not get was all the questions about whose name was going to be on the document and could the secretaries take care of it.

Once we had lost the deal, I twigged to the root cause : these guys didn't want to touch a computer, they wanted their secretaries to do the work. What I was proposing was that they had to do some work, instead of enjoying expensive lunches at fancy restaurants.

Obviously, that was not acceptable.

Of course it will be a better plan

It will be the best of plans. It will be the best plan ever made.

Funny, I thought we were done hearing bullshit like that. They "plan" to spend a quarter of what Biden is proposing and it's supposed to be better ?

Trump has amply demonstrated the efficiency of Republican planning : the border wall. Four years of xenophobia, lies and fabrications, not to mention financial shenanigans, and the great border wall is a few miles of vertical comb teeth being used by climbers as an exercise.

The only reason they think the plan is better is because it's their buddies who'll be getting the dough.

I think it is high time to make a change,

"follow the 3-2-1 rule on backups"

Interesting. That's the first time I've heard of this rule.

Up to now, for me the rule had always been a backup a day, a backup a week, a backup a month. 7 tapes for daily, 4 tapes for weekly, 12 tapes for monthly.

Granted, I'm not a network guy, much less a backup guy, but that seemed reasonable to me.

For a company, of course. For private individuals you'll be lucky if they have a backup of any sort on optical discs. I have a friend who told me he did his backups on an external HDD. I then proceeded to explain to him in great detail that an external HDD is a magnetic surface, subject to loss of information, and is not certified to be a backup platform in any way. An optical RW disc is.

I'm still not sure he does his backups on an RW CD or DVD.

"the ability to monitor battery health as well as CPU and memory usage"

And you can bet your bottom dollar that that information will somehow find its way into Google Sandbox, and be used to track you.

Proxima Centauri is a glimpse of our own future

In a few billion years, our Sun will become a red giant, just like Proxima Centauri. At that point, a tentacled boffin from planet ZX527125-OF846b will present his findings to his fellow amoebas in much the same terms.

"invest more strategically into their security architectures"

Um, you mean go with SolarWinds123 ?

Point solutions are fine (if they work properly). This whole blurb is just an excuse to push a cloud-based security service. Well I'm sorry, but cloud-based means relying on someone else's sense of security.

Security is hard, you learn it the hard way, and if you want it to be efficient you need to be the one knowing how it works.

Influencers

That is a term that is starting to join the sewer of "socialite".

Gandhi was an influencer. Thomas Edison was an influencer. Genghis Kahn was one hell of an influencer. Alexander the Great was the first influencer.

All these people have is a Twitter account. What do they actually accomplish ? Nothing.

I wonder how this is going to pan out

Whatever secrets this gang has got their grubby mitts on, I would be surprised if Apple pays them off.

Waiting for the follow-up article with great interest.

Oh sure

"China is building military space capabilities rapidly, including sensing and communication systems and numerous antisatellite weapons "

This from the country that still clings to the fable of modified mainboards from Huawei, despite never having ever brought a shred of proof to the table.

I'd ask for proof on this, but we all know that the answer will be : "Classified".

Of course the US military is hyping up the dangers. I completely believe China is building itself up. Why wouldn't it ? It has a bunch of American warships off its shores 24/7 (for many reasons, I know). But how do you know about any ground-based anti-satellite weaponry ? Did the Chinese military send you pics ?

"the Biden administration on Tuesday announced a 100-day plan to improve [,,] cybersecurity"

Is it me, or are we suddenly no longer hearing about the importance of backdooring encryption ?

"Protecting secrets during development is a tough problem"

Nonsense.

The only thing you need to do is not hook your internal code to someone else's code repository.

It's the cancer of today's attitude regarding the Internet : I'll just link that bit of code to my project, what's the worst that can happen ?

Well this.

Take that code inside, check it out and make sure it does what it says.

But of course, to do that you have be an actual programmer, not just a muppet stringing other people's work together.

Has anyone ever seen a non-disparagement clause in their contract ?

I've never signed an employment contract that had a clause that would prevent me from filing a complaint in court.

Obviously, an employee is expected to keep company secrets, but that only pertains to how the company functions and what it does with its data. It has nothing to do with how people are treated.

If you're treated badly, you have the right to complain to all and sundry, and if it's sexual harassment, take that bastard to court. The company should not be a shield for workplace harassment of any kind.

"should have been using well-known techniques"

Yeah, but that costs money. Vodaphone Idea is there to make money, not spend it.

Sorry guys

Being there at the right time in the right place is the definition of success.

The fact that the job entails raking in the money and not doing anything meaningful is a perk.

Sure, I wouldn't mind that job. In the meantime, well, I take solace in the fact that I'm actually helping people.

How interesting

It is extremely interesting to see that basically everyone except Google recognizes that targetted advertizing is an invasion of privacy and anything Google tries to get around that fact is just a lie.

Lobby money does not count when the rest of the industry is against you, and having WordPress against you is not a good sign.

"Due to the vastly increased patching and reduction in victims"

Citation please ? Where are the numbers that support this conclusion ?

It's not because you finally patched two Department Of Defense servers that were waiting for that since 1995 that all of a sudden the numbers of victims have vastly decreased. And it's not because Microsoft and other vendors are publishing patches regularly that anything changes.

SolarWinds123 was not a patching problem, it was a bloody fucking stupid security problem that never should have happened in the first place.

"overreliance on just-in-time supply chains"

Ah, the beancounter's dream. No, we don't have stock, we're JIT !

I hope you like all those economies you've made on not storing. Now, you even economise on revenue !

Oh sure

"The Demand Management process will ensure that all work meets the needs and priorities of the Home Office in the most appropriate and efficient way to deliver value for money "

Yes, because UK Government IT projects have a stellar record for meeting needs and priorities.

Well, the needs and priorities of the snouts that have access to the trough, that is.

"the robot can also find missing patients"

And soon it will get the upgrade allowing it to drag missing patients back to their holding area.

ROTM is what awaits us at the end of road paved with good itentions.

Pakistan

A country even more backwards than Trumpistan.

That takes effort.

"lots of young people"

Quite understandable. Young people fresh out of college with a student loan to pay back are likely to be grateful for the job and very unlikely to not do as they are told, even if what they are told makes no sense.

Old, experienced workers who know what they hell they're doing and how to do it are much less likely to be awed by a title telling them nonsense because they know how things work while the twat with title just knows how to give orders, never how to understand consequences.