* Posts by Pascal Monett

16645 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Microsoft profits rise again despite knocks from China, Russia

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"It seems money markets are content"

Money markets are rarely unhappy with multinational behemoths that have billions at the bank.

Google Cloud growth slows, losses grow, bosses unworried

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So they lost less than a billion over $69.7 billion in revenue

Yeah, I don't think I'd fret much over that either.

Alphabet is a money-printing business. Unless your name is Ballmer, there's no way you can fail there.

Vietnamese attacker circumvents Facebook security with ‘DUCKTAIL’ malware

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Thumb Down

"Facebook’s credibility"

Those two words have nothing to do together.

LockBit ransomware gang claims it ransacked Italy’s tax agency

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Trollface

"the company found no signs of a cyberattack or a data breach"

Of course not.

It's Italy.

They wouldn't know a data breach if it bit them in the ass.

Besides, the data is probably wrong or outdated anyway.

UK immigration systems delayed by extra Ukraine visa work

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Trollface

Re: began in 2013 and was expected to be completed in 2017

Yeah but, Agile !

Infosec not your job but your responsibility? How to be smarter than the average bear

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Re: Not just for the non-pro

I have literally just come back from having lunch with one of my closest friends. He explained how he was happy to branch out into cybersecurity. He created a new company for that (he already has several that are functioning fine, so he has form in that), company which has secured partnerships with major anti-virus companies present in Europe. He told me how happy he was that this new creation already had about a quarter million euros in orders and upcoming sales.

The whole time I couldn't help thinking : my God what have you gotten yourself into ?

Sure, the money appears to be rolling in now, but what's going to happen to you six months down the line when Putin's dogs savage your clients' data through whatever means ?

I fear for him. Cybersecurity is a world of treason and backstabbing, and you never know where it'll come from.

Windows Start Menu not starting? You're not alone

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Facepalm

"its rich tradition of fixing one thing and breaking another"

Ah, Borkzilla. You can't even guarantee that your Start Menu will continue to function.

And you want me to believe that your Auto-Update is a Good Thing<supTM</sup>.

Nah, don't think so.

Intel’s smartNICs probably aren’t for you (yet) says Intel

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Facepalm

Wow, that's news

I think what is perhaps even more important, dare I say, than the device itself, is the software ecosystem that grows up in support of it

No, really ? Ya think ?

Gosh. Somebody call Monkey Boy. The 80s has finally found someone who listened.

Price, lead times and scarcity of fiber optics may derail projects

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Re: Given that the cost of deployment has suddenly doubled

Agreed.

The cost of the least expensive element has doubled. So ?

You're going to be spending a lot more on all those people and machines who have to actually make it happen.

Sure, margins are going to be slightly tighter. The marketing guy might not get his full bonus. The client might find that there is a bit more to pay.

But it costs a hell of alot to more to dig a ten kilometer trench that it does to lay fiber at double the price of 3 bucks per kilometer.

Let's dial the hysteria down a bit, shall we ?

Oracle to hike support fees in line with inflation

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"in line with inflation"

Yes, of course. Perfectly logical.

Because it is Oracle that is paying for the electricity that makes their clients' servers run, right ?

What ? No ? The clients have their servers hosted locally, or with a Cloud contract ?

So, basically, Oracle is just using an economic excuse to increase its revenues without any expenditure whatsoever ?

My, I would like to able to print money like that.

Couldn't connect to West Europe SQL Databases last week? Blame operator error

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Trollface

"stronger guardrails 'to prevent human errors' "

Sounds like better procedures should be used.

But that sounds like work . . .

Analysts question pace of SAP users moving to S/4HANA

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"60 per cent of customers committing to run S/4HANA on the cloud were new to SAP"

So basically he's saying fuck the old customers, welcome to the new, and YEEHAAAAWW we're going to rake it in.

I really love when customer loyalty is recognized.

He doesn't seem to give a flying one about that.

My Big Coin founder is – you guessed it – a $6m crypto-fraudster

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More fools are learning their lesson

It's like backups. You ignore the problem until it bites you in the ass, then (hopefully) you educate yourself.

Well, that another $6 million in education.

I'm hoping they won't need to relearn the lesson.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

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Re: Ambivalence

Well here's the choice :

1) You do not restrict copying technology. Tens of Youtube channels pop up to tell you how to perfectly copy a €50 bill. Thousands of miscreant idiots decide to give it a try, and tens of thousands of businesses are left out of pocket, plus tribunals are chock full of of the penny-pinching, freewheeling morons.

2) You control copying technology. Counterfeiters are forced to put a lot of work and not a small amount of technology into making plausible fakes, and then they are caught anyway after a while. One court case, problem solved.

I don't know about you, but I prefer option 2.

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Thumb Up

This is why I love El Reg comments.

You can learn the craziest things.

Microsoft sunsets Windows built-in data leak prevention

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Mushroom

"will be discontinued in future versions of Windows"

Guys, get your story straight.

Windows 1 0 was already supposed to be the last version.

Then you made Windows 11, and now you're clearly stating that there will be more to come.

So get out of the closet and say so.

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

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WTF?

What, again ?

I thought they had just proposed a law to make the telecoms guys responsible for being able to intercept before encryption.

Why are they flogging this dead horse again ?

National data privacy law for the US clears first hurdle

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"achieve a strong national standard"

I doubt that.

The work is already done, just copy the GDPR.

This is watered-down Kool-Aid.

Oh well, better than nothing, I guess.

Amazon buys US healthcare chain One Medical for $3.9bn

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Windows

"waiting weeks or even months to be seen"

Seems to me that that is a sign that there are not enough doctors. Being bought out by Amazon is not going to solve anything on that point.

Deploying disaster-proof apps may be easier than you think

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Well I'll be

So, can we finally stop hearing about how The CloudTM will save you so much money ?

The CloudTM appears to be just as expensive, if not more, than hosting servers on your own.

If you want to do things right, that is. Otherwise, you're obviously free to do the bare minimum and then cry a river when everything goes down.

Because, at some point, it will.

DiDi in deep doo-doo over 64 billion illegal acts of data collection

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"It has apologised for its actions, accepted the fine, [..]"

A far cry from any Western conglomerate, who (especially in the USA) never admit to any wrongdoing.

DiDi has "accepted" the fine ? No kidding ! Its CEO doesn't want to find out the insides of a Chinese jail.

There are some aspects of Chinese justice that I would dearly like to see imported around here.

Russia, Iran discuss tech manufacturing, infosec and e-governance collaboration

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So, Russia finds a dictatorship friend

Actually this is hardly surprising.

I wonder what relations Putin has with Kim Jong Whatever.

Dictatorships of the world, unite !

NASA stalls water-seeking VIPER lunar rover to 2024

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Going back to the Moon is required, but there's a problem

Moon dust is really abrasive, and gets everywhere.

We're going to have to find a solution for that if we want a base that isn't constantly exposed to outer space.

Samsung teases 11 Texas fabs as $50 billion CHIPS Act vote nears

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Eleven

Not one, but eleven semiconductor factories in one of the driest places on Earth.

What is wrong with these people ?

The Colorado river is already running dry what with all the almond farms in California.

Can't you choose Wisconsin, or Minnesota ?

There's water there.

Oracle, Microsoft agree to shared custody of your workloads in the cloud

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Well it kinda does, because if youd cloudy server is under attack, you might not know about it until it's too late.

Of course, you can also not know about your on-prem server being under attack, but that would be because you're not paying enough attention.

Microsoft to blockheads: NFTs and blockchains aren't welcome in Minecraft

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Thumb Up

Good

Glad to see that one of my favorite games is not going to fall prey to this nonsense.

Boffins release tool to decrypt Intel microcode. Have at it, x86 giant says

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"some people worrying the scripts could be used for mischievous purposes"

There's always a miscreant somewhere that will use whatever in bad ways.

That's not a reason to not do the job.

Suspected Gozi malware gang 'CIO' extradited to US on fraud, hacking charges

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Another one bites the dust

He made just one mistake : he didn't live in Russia.

Judge approves Twitter's request to hurry along Musk trial to October

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Re: This is just another example ...

He made a basic mistake : it's not because you have money that you know how the economy works.

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Trollface

But then he'll go on Twitter and rant about unfair the situation is . . .

Atlassian reveals critical flaws in almost everything it makes and touches

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I would prefer : get your finger out and do the updates, then you can consider it done.

Management will wait until tomorrow to have its precious Jira timesheets if it means quashing some bugs that have been present since years. And of course they are present since years, because the bug was created in a piece of code that Atlassian has been re-using ever since.

Logical.

Microsoft Teams outage widens to take out M365 services, admin center

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Trollface

"I Survived the microsoft teams outage 21 July 2022"

Guys, if you have to make a T-shirt for every Borkzilla outage, . . . well, you've got successful business going there !

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

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Holmes

"the increasing urgency to decarbonize transportation"

There is an even more increasing urgency to decarbonize energy production but, funnily enough, nobody is talking about that.

An EV or even a hydrogen vehicle is all very nice, to be sure, but if the electricity is generated in a coal plant, all you're doing is displacing the pollution, not eliminating it.

Is Microsoft going back to the future on release cadences?

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Re: Agile is pretty much the way to develop software

No it isn't.

At least, it's not the only way.

It is, however, become the way for people who can't be arsed to properly define the needs of the software and require multiple iterations to finally think : "yeah, that'll do".

The Apollo program wasn't built on agile.

I'm willing to bet that JWST wasn't built on agile.

Agile is just the excuse for the majority of people who can't plan properly.

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Trollface

"Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation"

Indeed not, it creates it.

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

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Re: Remoaners

Apparently, you need to read this.

Alas, you can bring a horse to the trough, but you can't make it drink.

Google, Oracle clouds still affected by UK heatwave

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"pride themselves on over-engineering to ensure resilience"

Pride themselves ?

More like talk about it.

Over-engineering costs money. The CloudTM is about making money, not spending it.

And, as this episode has proven, they didn't over-engineer their cooling systems, they put in the bare minimum to ensure "normal" operations.

Well they're going to have to go back and over-engineer that part a bit, because I'll wager that next summer, they'll be seeing those temperatures again.

Court OKs billion-dollar Play Store gouging suit against Google

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"as soon as Parliamentary time allows"

A.K.A. : as soon as we've cashed in all that lovely lobby money.

After 40 years in tech, I see every innovation contains its dark opposite

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Windows

Once again, convenience

Convenience will be the downfall of our civilization.

Pseudo-AI that tracks everything we look at in order to serve more of the same. Who thought that would be a good idea ?

The advertisers, of course.

Google, Oracle cloud servers wilt in UK heatwave, take down websites

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"As a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region"

Might be looking to start considering those temperatures as seasonal.

So start enhancing your cooling operations.

Microsoft lures SMBs to Cloudy PCs by connecting them to Xbox accounts

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"enable United States Government contractors"

Who should absolutely not be connected to The CloudTM in any way.

Congratulations. I'm sure Beijing is thrilled.

Security flaws in GPS trackers can be abused to cut off fuel to vehicles, CISA warns

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WTF?

Cut off fuel ?

It's a GPS. What the hell does that have to do with how the vehicle functions ?

I don't care that it's a tracker, the only thing it needs is power from the battery. It has nothing to do on the CAN bus.

But of course, as in all the stupid things people do, they've linked it to the CAN bus.

Morons.

Belgium says Chinese cyber gangs attacked its government and military

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Yeah well, it's China

China has form in saying one thing and doing something else entirely.

Which can be said for a lot of countries these days.

Walmart-controlled flight booking service suffers substantial data leak

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Trollface

Okay, we won't tell you.

India's central bank calls for cryptocurrency ban

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Crypto is not fine.

Exchanges are regularly folding and "clients" lose everything, while somebody makes off with the money.

The only way crypto will be fine is if it is handled by companies that have banking charters and the obligation to support the accounts of their clients - in which case, I ask : what's the point ?

Every country already has its currency that people use credit/debit cards/smartphones for without practically touching any coin (except the USA, but they obviously have a very shitty banking system, on top of their very shitty Internet network and their even more shitty telephone system).

Crypto is useless. Improve your banking system and the problem is solved.

Hush now: Baby talk has common features across languages and societies

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Trollface

"a special connection to infant care in human psychology"

Unless you're Klingon.

Klingons don't sing, they growl.

Sage accused of strong-arming customers into subscriptions

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I don't get it

This is a technical change. Shutting down TLS 1.0 and 1.1 is a good thing, but why does that imply a change in license ?

It has nothing to do with the license, it is just a technical change that the vendor should provide for the security of its clients.

This is disgusting.

Hundreds of millions up for grabs as UK taxman set to stick with SAP ECC6.0

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"saving £2 million a year"

But costing twice the price initially envisioned.

The bell tolls for the trough. Dinner time ! Cooome and get it !

Russia fines Google $374 million for letting the truth about Ukraine be told

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I gather that it's a bit difficult to get full citations in Moscow at this point in time.

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Facepalm

Gosh, really ?

"Not just restrictions but the almost-complete closure of access to foreign high-tech products is being deliberately, intentionally used against our country"

I wonder why.

Might it have something to do with the fact that you entertain Soviet-era fantasy about how your country is managed and what is going on in it ?

Maybe if you stopped murdering journalists who are just doing their job and face reality, things might start going for the better ?