Posts by Pascal Monett

Maker of crowd-sourced coronavirus spread tracker app sues Apple for 'arbitrary and capricious' iOS store snub

There are 2 things to take into account

One, Apple did indeed do a dirty by disallowing that app but allowing a very similar app from a group of hospital employees.

Hospital employees are generally not programmers. I would have more trust in an app made by actual programmers. In this case, of course, said programmers would have had to have some oversight in privacy protection measures and maybe medical counsel as well. I did not see that that was specified.

Two, a claim filed by an apparently non-existing "company" who does not identify a single person in the company, doe snot come forward with the list of its employees, partners or collaborators who worked on the app, and can apparently only be reached by calling the CEO of another company is not exactly a brilliant confidence generator.

So, as much as I'd like to harp on Apple for once again changing the rules after the fact to suit itself, the shady side of the complainant makes me side with Apple.

If you're honest, you're not supposed to hide stuff when filing a complaint in court.

On his way out, Trump emits exec order suggesting US cloud giants must verify ID of all foreign customers

Re: Was it Trump?

Do you really think the OHSG actually drafted anything ?

Ever ?

Underlings are made for that.

Top engineer who stole trade secrets from Google's self-driving division pardoned on Trump's last day as president

Re: the founding fathers absolutely did anticipate a president . . .

Bullshit.

The Founding Fathers expected the loser to become Vice President and serve his country as a gentleman.

Learn the history of your own fucking country before spouting such ignorance.

Virgin Orbit finally lives up to its name after second attempt with LauncherOne rocket

A rocket made with Agile is never going to get off the ground.

Break often = exploded rocket.

Kinda difficult to debug when its in pieces.

Windows Product Activation – or just how many numbers we could get a user to tell us down the telephone

No dice.

Every time I upgraded my graphics card - and with XP that was yearly, I had to re-authenticate with a call to Redmond HQ.

I would have thought that a graphics card was not that important in the grand scheme of things - I'm not changing the motherboard, but obviously Borkzilla did not agree.

FireEye publishes details of SolarWinds hacking techniques, gives out free tool to detect signs of intrusion

Let me see if I understood this correctly

So, in an Azure AD environment, you have the cloud AD and the on-prem AD, which both have logs, but there are some instances where you login in the Cloud and it is not recorded in the same log than in the on-prem log, and the Unified thingy does not carry the info either, so it's not all that Unified.

Great. Feels like that makes security controls real easy to handle.

Still doesn't let SolarWinds123 off the hook, though.

You look for the largest objects in the universe and two come along at once: Astroboffins spot mega radio galaxies dwarfing Milky Way

"more than two Mega-parsecs across, which is around 6.5 million light years"

Yowza. So, if that galaxy is 62 times larger than ours, does that mean that it has 62 times the amount of stars ?

That would easily be more than a hundred billion.

The mind boggles.

Indian government slams Facebook over WhatsApp 'privacy' update, wants its own Europe-style opt-out switch

"wants its own Europe-style opt-out switch"

No ! Not opt-out, it should be opt-in.

Always.

On a side note, it would seem that GDPR is having a certain influence outside of the EU <smirk>.

If my calculations are correct, when Google Chrome hits version 88, you're gonna see some serious... security

"once they achieved browser market dominance they no longer needed extensions"

I think Google is going to find out that they very much need extensions, for example, via a drop in the market share of Chrome in favor of browsers that do accept extensions.

Security for Google is like terrorists for the NSA - just a convenient excuse to increase their own power.

AnyVan confirms digital break-in, says customer names, emails and hashed passwords exposed

Network Monitoring/Intrusion Detection Systems

It is beginning to seem obvious that if you are an important company with Internet access these days, you need to have an IDS.

It took three months for AnyVan to discover that they'd been hacked into. To me, that clearly indicates that they had no IDS and weren't monitoring their network activity properly.

I guess they should be thinking about that now.

Oh, and no "we take the security of your data very seriously" ? You're not playing by the rules, AnyVan !

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

"police were allowed to fly drones after just two hours' in-house training"

That appears to be quite insufficient. I think they should boost that to 10.

Maybe even 11.

BT got £106m from £46m contract then won £20m extension on service that overcharged public by £39m

It's called lock-in

"There are technical reasons relating to the bespoke and complex nature of the solution which would lead to substantial duplication of costs and unacceptable technical risks which would not allow for the service to be transferred to another supplier "

As the saying goes : when you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will soon follow. So it has happened here.

That said, I'm in a bit of a bind here ; as much as I'd like to make a scathing remark on how BT is screwing its customer, this is a telecomms project. I do not know that there are any Open Source telecomms infrastructures available, so I guess that BT or anyone else would have landed the NLPS in pretty much the same boat.

Is there any other provider available in Northern Ireland ?

Scottish Environment Protection Agency refuses to pay ransomware crooks over 1.2GB of stolen data

I'm starting to feel like a broken record but there is : NoScript.

It blocks JavaScript and, since all malware starts by using JS to download and run the nasty, block JS and the nasty can't get in.

The hour grows late, the enemy are at the gates... but could Intel's exiled heir apparent ride to the rescue?

Bravo

I really appreaciated your article and I think you did a great job of outlining the situation Intel is in and the person Gelsinger is (and I envy you for having met him more than once).

I hope Intel is going to pull through for the same reason I'm glad AMD is having a moment in the sun : we need competition. We need people who can think of new ways to improve performance, reduce power consumption and generally make computing an even better experience.

So I'm looking forward to what Gelsinger is going to cook up.

Two clichés, one headline: 'No good deed goes unpunished' and 'It's always DNS'

"what would you have done in Sam's situation"

I would have to say that I would have told the guy to do his job and keep me out of it.

I would also have found it quite suspicious to come to me and specify that "it didn't have to wait until 3, you can do it early".

Nope, no way. You're not going to weasel way yourself into an excuse for blaming me.

Of course, I say that with the benefit of 25 years in the industry. I've seen enough office backstabbing happen around me, and sometimes to me, to not have a sixth sense about it.

Hallowed Bugtraq infosec list killed then resurrected over the weekend: We heard your feedback, says Accenture

"the CISA recommends [installing] ad blockers to avoid malicious ad injections"

Oooh, burn. So, what extensions does Chrome have that manages ad blocking ?

Let me see : uBlock Origin is not available, searching for "ad blocker" returns No Result Found, no, you only have Easy Ad Blocker which, curiously, finds that it has to override my searh settings to "eaburl.com".

I don't think so.

Xiaomi hit by US sanctions: Can't list on stock exchanges and investors can't invest

"The hardware it makes does go into the backbone of a critical resource, and if someone could disrupt, intercept, or disable that resource, there would be big problems. "

I'm sorry, are you talking about Cisco ?

Or maybe Netgear ? No, not Netgear - they disrupt themselves already, no need to meddle.

The fact of the matter is that there is no argument against Huawei that could not be made against any other provider as far as security is concerned.

And don't get me started on the "secret backdoor" or "modified mainboards" bullshit that is clearly a lie, plain and simple.

If there had been any shred of proof, do you really think Washington wouldn't have it plastered all over the Web and on billboards along the highway ?

It's a lie, fabricated to support a desperate effort to curb Huawei and give a chance to US companies in the 5G arena - chance they do not really deserve if the market is supposed to determine things.

But the US has form in fabricating lies to further its own goals (WMDs in Irak, anyone ?).

Signal boost: Secure chat app is wobbly at the moment. Not surprising after gaining 30m+ users in a week, though

Moxie Marlinspike is part of Signal ?

Say no more, I'm in.

Epic Games files competition lawsuit against Google in the UK over Fortnite's ejection from Play Store

Folks will always complain, that's a fact.

But complaining would be a lot more difficult if the fee was 15%. I personally feel that 10% should be largely enough for a Store that resells the same string of bytes indefinitely without having had to do any work to create said bytes.

Comparing to a brick-and-mortar store is not realistic. Those stores generally need to stock items before they can sell them. They need employees who are alert for shoplifters in addition to serving customers. The cost of running any store is higher than the cost of having a server that sells the same app again and again and again on demand, 24/7 and without any shoplifters.

Dell CTO shares his hottest trends for 2021: Four interesting technologies, one of which is still borderline sci-fi for now

Quantum and Edge

So it seems that someone has finally levelled the playing field on quantum computing. It's a lab rat for the moment, and when we do get that, you won't run a browser on it. That clearly indicates that we are not going to shift from PC to QC at all. QC will be in addition to the PC. That sounds like the ideal slot for a coprocessor to me. One fine day, Intel will reveal the i21000Q, a 64-core CPU with an integrated 200-qbit coprocessor, all engraved at 0.2 nanometers.

Then we will finally be able to run Crysis.

Edge, then. Edge computing, of course, not that thing you use to download Chrome. So Edge computing is going to go horizontal ? I'm guessing blackhats everywhere are already salivating at the prospect. A powerful CPU and lotsa RAM at their disposal for botnets and whatnot ? They're going to be overjoyed at the news.

Might want to think about security on those things before you start relying on them.

Dratted 'housekeeping', eh? 150k+ records deleted off UK’s Police National Computer database

"destroyed in a Buncefield oil depot fire"

So, they had a backup facility in 2005, which burned down, and nothing has been done about it in 15 years ?

Is there anyone with an ounce of IT competence anywhere in UK Government ?

Obviously not.

Infosys follows flag-waving US hiring spree with quieter Canadian and Mexican hiring spree

"COVID-19 has depressed travel costs in ways that may not prove permanent"

I'm sure the airline industry is fervently hoping for those words to come true.

MIT professor charged with failing to disclose China ties while hitting up US Dept of Energy for research grant

Another China-born immigrant turned traitor

This is far from the first time I read that a person born in China immigrated to the US only to steal research secrets.

Keep that up, guys, and nobody is going to want to work with you any more.

Watchdog urges Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S, X cars to fix knackered NAND flash that borks safety features

Great

A car's entertainment system failure can be a menace for the actual primary function of a car which is passenger safety.

How many times have I already said that the entertainment bus should be physically isolated from the car's command bus ?

I don't remember. I can't count.

In any case, well done Mr Musk. You might be a billionaire, but you still fail Basic Security 101 - all in the name of saving a few bucks.

Well I hope you're happy with your savings now.

Trump's gone quiet, Parler nuked, Twitter protest never happened: There's an eerie calm – but at what cost?

The one and only "benefit" that the Trump era can pretend to is demonstrating is no uncertain terms just how much Republicans are toxic for Democracy.

Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere

Hella

Yeah. That's the most important thing we have to worry about these days.

Did anyone tell Logitech about lockdown? Biz launches pricey video chat kit for office conference rooms and 'huddle spaces'

What's the point ?

I now have almost a year's experience in "video conferences".

Watching the bland faces of uninteresting people for 20 to 45 minutes at a time while they strive to say something relevant is, in the end, a very painful experience.

It's not surprising that video phones didn't catch on. Everybody hates them.

All we really need is audio. The rest is just selling a solution to a problem that does not exist.

And for the few of you who really do need to see who you're talking to, I'm sure your private jets can get you there without any problem.

Teasing HANA database upgrade, SAP leaves crowd wondering if software giant has lost its innovation mojo

SAP / Oracle - same combat

Extracting as much money as they can from their victims customers for as long as they can.

Samsung rolls out new Galaxy S21 range, including extra-lux Ultra

"starts at £1,149"

I stopped reading there.

No phone should cost more than €150.

I will certainly not pay more than that.

Attack of the cryptidiots: One wants Bitcoin-flush hard drive he threw out in 2013 back, the other lost USB stick password

"Now that the $7.5m is now worth almost $300m"

Oh gosh. What a shame you didn't put your money in a bank. You know, that government-backed, legally-defended infrastructure that would have guaranteed your money ?

Sticking it to The Man comes with risks. You failed. You lose.

As an interesting side note, I wonder what the BitCoin ledger does with lost bits of coin.

Another Rust-y OS: Theseus joins Redox in pursuit of safer, more resilient systems

"There are others, but most are not very active"

Which sounds to me just like most forks of existing projects on GitHub.

There are a lot of people who have an idea and are willing to try to start a project.

There are a lot less people who are willing and capable of bringing that project to term, not to speak of maintaining it in the long run.

The fact that a new OS might have trouble rubbing shoulders with the entrenched versions is not an excuse. When Torvalds unleashed Linux on the world, he had no idea he was the guy who was going to allow the Internet to function, most IoT crap to exist and be the father of dozens of similar distros.

He just did it, and thank God he did.

You make a new OS that actually works and does what is says on the tin, and you make something that will find its way organically into the IT infrastructure of the world.

Take the market into account and you might as well not start.

Fujitsu opens door, invites '200 to 250' staff from UK Delivery team to walk out

"employees fear process will become compulsory"

Oh, there's no need to fear.

It will.

Offshoring is kind of over, says Wipro, as financials surge thanks to offshoring

"other nations just don’t have as much talent for Wipro to hire"

Um, you mean other nations don't have as much cheap talent for Wipro to hire.

FTFY.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says Trump ban means the service has failed

"a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation"

Sorry, you made the platform available and did nothing to prevent people from mouthing off in any way they wanted.

Besides, your whole post is useless because the only way to promote a healthy conversation is put a stop to the unhealthy ones, and that would make you a moderator and that would make you responsible for what was posted - and that is the last thing you want.

So go ahead and cry your crocodile tears, I'm not impressed by them.

Pirate Bay co-founder criticises Parler for its lack of resilience

The Internet is made to allow people to post information and other people to find it.

As surprising as this may be to some, the disappearance of Twitter, Amazon, Facebook and even Google will not destroy the Internet.

Something else will come and fill the void anyway.

Airbnb, or not to be, if you're headed to Washington DC: Biz cancels bookings over fears of inauguration insurrection

Sorry, katrinab, but comparing Coronavirus to a bunch of confederate-loving hostage-taking-planners with Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs strikes me as a bit exaggerated.

How's about you express your figures in the number of people killed in car accidents ? Do you really think that's going to make me scared of cars ?

Nope.

But a bunch of violent, bloodthirsty hillbillies with SWAT-level weaponry ? Yeah, I'd be scared of that.

Want to let an AI-powered doctor loose on patients? Try slapping a food-label-like sticker on it, says Uncle Sam

"help patients understand the technology"

Here's a simple explanation :

It's statistics. We're using math to guess the result, and we don't have a clue why it works when it does.

There is no such thing as AI.

There. Reassured ?

Dropbox basically decimates workforce, COO logs off: Cloud biz promises to be 'more efficient and nimble'

“one of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make"

I'm sure your end-of-year bonus will reflect that.

Oh, and would you mind explaining how "growth" is prepared by sacking people ?

Boss behind 'reset' of delayed, overbudget Emergency Services Network shifts to new 'digital' Cabinet Office role

It's called spreading incompetence. The more you spread it, you thinner it gets, right ?

We didn't collude with Twitter to throw Parler off our servers, says AWS in court filing

"inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination"

And there are still people who try and justify that they should not be called terrorists.

Intel CEO Bob Swan is stepping down to be replaced by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

Good Lord, he's still alive ?

Not only that, but after 30 years at Intel and a cumulative 11 years being important elsewhere, he doen't retire, he goes back to being important at Intel.

That is definitely an impressive career. Intel can be chuffed to bits to have him back.

Look, we've sent space probes to Jupiter and Mars – makes sense to keep them going a while longer, says NASA

As well it should

They're working and they're on site, why abandon them ?

Given the time it took and the cost of sending them, the missions should continue for as long as they are in working order.

Anything less would be a colossal waste of effort.

UK network Three hikes pay-as-you-go rates by 400% to push punters to buy 'bundles'

Re: Smacks of greedy comms companies to me!

Are there any other kind ?

Salesforce relieves Republican National Committee of its tools citing 'risk of politically incited violence' across the US

They came with the intent of taking hostages and making demands. They had pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. What do you call that ?

It's not because they did not attain their objectives that they are not guilty of planning terror, ergo they are terrorists.

So this is what we're going to have for the next 4 years

A careful whitewashing of an actual terrorist assault on the basis that one side lost unfairly (demonstrably false), coupled with whining about Freedom of Expression (not the problem) and incessantly repeated falsehoods (we actually won) in order to ensure that the absolute fucking morons stay alert, primed and ready to start this shit all over again.

My message to the USA : you need to take 10% of your military budget and put it into educating your huddled masses, because they have become a danger to your Democracy. Try pushing courses on critical thinking (yeah, I know, as if that'll ever happen).

Re: Picking sides

So you're going to mount a terrorist assault on Salesforce HQ ?

Because Democracy seems to not be your way of thinking, and anyone who even pretends to find an excuse for this shameful demonstration of just how much the GOP pisses on the Constitution is just another terrorist.

That's it. It's over. It's really over. From today, Adobe Flash Player no longer works. We're free. We can just leave

NoScript. It blocks all JS by default.

The best addon I have ever used.

Study: AI designed to detect diabetic eye disease blinks in the real world, makes more work for doctors

Oh really ? You don't say

"This suggests that AI models may be more sensitive to image quality issues than human beings. "

No kidding. A computer that just might be totally incapable of not taking an image input otherwise than pixel by pixel. What a surprise when said pixels have an inordinate amount of impact on the algorithm's interpretation.

Computers do not see. They take the data they are given. Give them flawed data and the result will be wrong.

If there are so many parameters to take into account to do retina diagnostics, then maybe the tool isn't fit for the job.

All it took was a pandemic to revive PCs: Canalys proclaims sales up 25% in Q4 as world+dog stays home

"PCs are here to stay"

I don't think so. The pandemic has just given them a booster shot.

Then again, that depends on the definition of a PC. I'm old school ; to me, a PC is a large box - not too noisy - connected to two very large screens, with a keyboard and wireless mouse on a desk, along with a comfortable chair to sit in and enjoy the power. A PC is the most powerful computer there is, because it has the best heat evacuation ability, so its components can be ramped up.

Yet, the article cites Lenovo. AFAIK, Lenovo makes laptops, not PCs. Okay, the laptop is the modern computer, so in that respect, yes, PCs are here to stay - but nobody has ever said the contrary. Laptops are indeed here to stay, and some models desperately try to replicate the power of an actual PC.

Wouldn't want one of those on my lap, though.

So yes, laptops are the future of computing for Joe Public. True PCs, however, will remain the future of those who need the power that a tower can provide and do not need the mobility that a laptop ensures.

And if you need more than two screens, there is no laptop that can suit you.

Extreme Networks misses death-of-Flash deadline, suggests winding back PC clocks to keep its GUI alive

Re: Wow...

Indeed. Fiddle with the clock to manage your network ?

I have another suggestion : get a proper network management tool.