Posts by Pascal Monett

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.

"a freelancer feels the urge to seek solace in full-time employment"

Nope. Not me.

I got out in 2009, following certain things that happened on the other side of the pond. I spent three years trying to get back in, following web training and writing hundreds of applications (on paper), nothing came of it. In the third year I told my wife that I was starting to feel like it would be easier to find customers than an employer. She agreed. So it started.

Now, I have been self-employed since 2012, and it's working out fine. COVID has actually improved my work status since I have customers and no longer need to slog the traffic jams on Luxembourg highways. Of course, it helps that I have FTTH, working over a 12mbps line would not be so easy.

So no, I have no reason at this point in time to want to have an employer, and I don't think that's going to change any time soon. I do want to be able to take my wife to the restaurant again, though. Can't wait for things to get back to some sort of normal.

"We can't wait to hear what you think!"

Really ? Here : TURN IT OFF !!

I want an OS, not a circus. Stop trying to transform Windows into the most interesting thing on my PC. It's there to run the stuff I need, not to remind me that I'm using a Borkzilla product.

Why can't Borkzilla understand ? You need to make an OS channel and a bullshit channel. The OS channel should be stable, reliable, no nonsense. The bullshit channel can have whatever brainfart you can concieve of, and users can subscribe to it if they want.

That would make things a lot simpler.

"Nominet’s board has dug in and effectively dared their own members to force them out"

Challenge accepted !

Quash those cockroaches once and for all. And make sure they can never be elected/appointed to such a position ever again.

Another win for GDPR

My am I happy to live in the EU these days. Between Max Shrems and the European Court of Justice, there's no better place for a lover of privacy and Democracy.

Those multinational behemoths will bow to the Will of the People.

Some day.

Translation

Infosys will be massively hiring inexperienced youngsters who will learn on the job.

The 130 new customers will undoubtedly be overjoyed.

Ah, warez

The good old days. The dawn of the New Information Highway, with plenty of people who wanted to show off their skills and make sure that you could run Settlers 2 or Battlefield Vietnam without needing to have the disk in the optical reader.

Bless them. They made my gaming life easier - without depriving authors of their revenue. Yes, I still have my Settlers 2 install CD. And Battlefield Vietnam, and about 600 others. I even bought two Battlefield 2 games because I played it so much that my first gamedisk shattered in the player. So much for my right to a license - in a normal world, I would have sent the pieces back and got a new DVD - because I only have license, right ? My license does not expire with the death of the disk.

So yeah, warez used to be good, until the crooks understood that they could distribute their version of a CD/DVD crack and include a nasty little package with it. It really didn't take all that long for the despicables to catch on.

Nowadays, warez is synonymous with malware. Thankfully, games no longer need to have a bloody plastic disc in a reader. Unfortunately, they do need to phone home every few minutes.

Progress ?

"updates to protect against new vulnerabilities in on-premise Exchange Servers"

How come there are always "new vulnerabilities" when it comes to Exchange ?

Frankly, it starting to look like Exchange is the new Flash.

"GitHub also has its own Secrets API"

Okay. For the past two decades I have been working with RSA encryption and I have repeatedly been told that knowing how encryption works does not mean you know how to decrypt a specific set of data.

Despite the NSA, I do still hold that to be true, so, instead of everybody creating their own Secrets API, I think the community would be better served by an official, open-source Specrets API. One that even the NSA can't break into.

Sorry, I'm not intelligent enough to write it myself - not to mention that it needs community adoption - but I'm guesssing that until we do have such a globally-accepting, publicly-reviewed tool in place, all we're going to get is different solutions who all base their efficiency on the words "highly unlikely".

And that is not enough.

How long can a MEV function ?

No word on that. Apparently, if it's in chunks of five years, it should at least be able to function ten years, otherwise it wouldn't be very good for servicing multiple satellites.

But I'd like to have more information on that. The wiki page hardly mentions any technical specs at all, and Grummans' site is only a polished marketing piece.

Could anyone get some cold, hard numbers on this thing ?

"[he] did not explicitly say why he decided to leave"

Of course not. One needs to demonstrate loyalty and discretion if one wants to stay part of the team and remain a high-flyer.

Blurting out the truth would be sure-fire way of not ever getting that level of position any more.

The future is FOSS

End of argument.