Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Well that explains it all. They've spent all the money, so there's none left for the boring stuff like keeping government IT creaking along.
Not a problem, when it finally falls over completely, there will be a great big, wonderful £10 billion contract that will immediately be handed to Crapita.
Indeed.
If it was a Cisco problem, the only valid patch I would install would have to come from Cisco.
Anything else and you're just asking for trouble.
If pressed, before applying the patch I would have searched for any problems with the patch (aka wait a day or two). In this case, the problem would have been largely reported and I would have gone, printout proof in hand, to explain why I wouldn't install said patch.
But hey, armchair general is easy, isn't it ?
And who gives a flying fuck ?
The USPTO has long outlived any credibility concerning what it approves and what it doesn't. It is a rubber-stamp for magacorps and has completely abandoned any semblance of pretending that it cared about controlling whether or not a patent was serious or not.
A patent used to be granted on the basis that the submitter could prove and demonstrate how the procedure could be accomplished - in other words, revealing the secret of how the thing worked.
Today, the USPTO rubber-stamps anything it is presented with (rounded corners, anyone ?), and leaves the the judicial system to deal with the fallout.
Useless twats should not have any legal importance whatsoever.
Methinks your "investigation" demonstrates why you got hacked in the first place : you don't have a clue.
That probably explains why the exfiltrated data was not encrypted - you don't have the expertise to manage that.
In other words, another payroll provider with a bit more savvy in the backend might be a good choice.
I can't say I'm too worried about that, for some reason. First of all, I live beyond the suburbs in a quaint little village à la campagne. If someone is rifling through my trash, they already know where I live. And if they absolutely want to know my water bill from last month, I'm nonplussed that they burden their neurons with that information.
I doubt that they'll hijack my water company account to have the privilege of paying the bills instead of me.
On the Web, though, that is another matter entirely. I have an non-negligeable amount of activity in the virtual information highway, and I have no idea how someone could piece together enough information to pinpoint my indentity from my various posts and web habits. That said, I never use the same password twice, so I guess any hijacking will be limited in scope.
I hope so anyway.
Qué sera, sera
What a waste of time just to push a Google product.
"Projects are effectively private clouds with isolated infrastructure primitives, and their own enclave"
So they're behind a firewall, duh.
"Only personnel with specified qualities such as specific citizenship are allowed access;"
There's an Access Control List, duh.
"Data locality is enforced by software."
The code writes to that location, duh.
Look guys, if you want to do marketing, go ahead, but don't try and make it look like you're writing a technical documentary. There is absolutely no company database in The Cloud (TM) that should not have these elements. We haven't been waiting on you to tell us that.
I still don't understand that argument.
To connect to the Internet, I pay my provider a monthly due. That is supposed to cover my bandwidth usage.
El Reg has a connection, and it pays its provider as well (probably more than I do). That covers its bandwidth usage.
Where is the unfair part of all of this ?
If it's because there's a carrier between me and El Reg, well it's up to my provider and El Reg's provider to manage the situation. El Reg is not supposed to pay every provider along the way.
This is nonsense.
Okay, one question : why the blazes was it so important to email them documents before evacuating the people you knew were going to be murdered ?
Wouldn't it have been better to just load them on the planes, get them to security and then let administration catch up with the situation ?
Or is that too much to ask from a "civilized" country ?
Technically I agree with you, but one must admit that the Internet is a very peculiar environment as far as software is concerned.
Before the Internet, the only way to attack a machine was to physically sit in front of it. In those days, a programmer was only concerned with making sure the product functioned as intended. Security was baked in because of the limitations of physical access.
Networks showed up, and suddenly computers had to be secured from unwarranted access, but that happened at the OS level, not at the program level.
Today, practically all computers are connected to the greatest network that has ever been implemented. The drawback is that now, programmers must not only ensure their product works, but also that it is protected from attacks that can happen any time, in any way. The minds that can concieve the attacks are intelligent, and more numerous than the minds that concieve the defenses. There is a basic inequality there.
Yes, buggy software is a nuisance that really should not exist, but that concerns functionality. Security is an ongoing concern because the miscreants have time to try things no programmer could protect against before the fact.
But that's the whole point of the article : Bitcoin is not a tool. No one has done anything useful with it.
Lasers started out as something useless as well, today worldwide communication depends on them.
Bitcoin will never become that useful.
Kill it.
With fire.
My group of friends and I had a blast with Battlefield 2. It's simple : I played that game so much that the DVD broke and I had to buy another one.
Of course, we played on my local server, hacked by a now-defunct team of dedicated Internet gaming experts which allowed me to run a 128-slot server populated by the largest maps and tons of bots for whatever slots were not taken up by players. We also had custom airplanes, and I particularly liked the Warthog.
We had tons of fun, and our own ranking board.
The only issue was that, of course, EA Games did not like that people had servers that they did not pay EA Games for, so every update broke the ranking and, sometimes, even broke the server. When that happened we had to find workarounds, like putting specific addresses in the hosts file to ensure that the server stayed local. It was an increasingly frustrating headache, but that did not make us stop.
What made me stop was BF 2142. It was not uninteresting, but you couldn't play solo and you couldn't have a personal server. EA Games had obviously learned the lessons of BF2 and was determined not to let players have fun on their own.
The issue I had with 2142 was that every single patch basically required that I reinstall 2142 from scratch. I did not have a fiber connection at the time, I was on a 10Mbps ADSL line. It took basically all day to update. It was a terrible update system and I hated every moment of it. The final straw came when the online install package asked me for my DVD key. DVD key ?!? What the blazes does an online store ask me for a DVD key ?
So I fired off a rather angry mail to support telling them what I thought of this insane situation. The response : my profile got banned.
You banned me because your shit-for-brains system didn't work and I had the gall to complain ? Fine, EA Games, we're done. You stole my money and you don't know how to make fun games anymore anyway.
EA Games is now banned from my life. I don't regret it.
It's a lot more difficult to upgrade a laptop's motherboard or graphics card, for one, and you just simply can't upgrade the CPU itself.
Plus its an expensive pain to change the screen on a laptop.
I've been upgrading my PC for over two decades as well, but it's a PC. I was talking about my work laptop.
Sorry, you can't have it both ways.
You can't say that companies have cupboards full of broken laptops/screens/keyboards, then say that the solution is "doing our homework" and choosing a rental service.
If a company is not doing its homework managing its laptops, what makes you think it's going to do its homework choosing a rental scheme ?
It's a management issue. IT does have managers, you know, it's not just peons running aound and ignoring tickets. If management is on the ball about managing capex hardware, then it will also be on the ball managing opex rentals.
Besides, I've never understood this obsession with capex. You're paying either way, and don't try and make me think that a company with 1000+ users is going to save money and helpdesk resources just because the laptops are rented.
On top of that, there's the argument that computer hardware is no longer progressing at the phenominal rates we witnessed from 1985 until, oh around 2010. These days, six years is a perfectly reasonable lifetime expectation for a laptop, whereas in 2005 I know of several large Luxembourgish companies who had a 3-year replacement plan.
Heck, I only just replaced my own work laptop that I got in 2012.
I think it has returned its investment in a perfectly satisfactory manner.
It hinges on a lot more than that.
Google Glass was an interesting project in itself, but much more in what it revealed about the people using it and how the rest reacted to it than it was actually of any use.
VR has been trying to break into the real world for years now, and none of the issues have really been solved. I'm talking about the weight of the headgear, its comfort and how long it can work, not to mention the sharpness of the image. That last point has a direct impact on how long the headgear can function. Want it to function longer ? Add more battery weight. It's a vicious cycle.
So, we're now pretending that we can have AR goggles that work all day long ? Most laptops can't do that, and they have bigger batteries.
I still have two crates full of those little barefoot menaces.
These days I let the nephews and nieces have their fun. I'm guessing in a decade, it'll be the grandchildren.
Personally ? I spent years playing with my Legos. Fond memories.
Now I have a computer. And for my computer, I have Minecraft.
Infinite bricks for the win.
Irreparable, yes, but not important.
Apple will survive even if Epic wins, and it's not like Apple will have to pay what Epic is not giving now.
Yes, Apple will make less money, but it already has litterally more money than it can spend. It is the top company in the world by market cap and is more valuable than Facebook, Nvidia and TSMC put together. It can take the hit.
Personally, I would not respond to this appeal.
Choice is crucial, for sure, the The Cloud is never going to be a level playing field.
It was created by behemoths, and the little flies that flit around them will only be tolerated as long as they don't become a bother.
OneNote's integration into Windows, as much as it irks me, was obvious. Of course Borkzilla is pushing Teams and Office 365, you can't stop that.
It took over a decade and a legnthy trial to give us the possibility of having another browser than IE as default, and now Borkzilla is trying to tie Edge in again.
It's the nature of the beast.
It is fascinating to view how criminals recreate and expand on everything legal markets have concieved of.
It sure would be interesting to see how criminals implement secure transactions - that has to be worthy of analysis.
Their only problem is that, well, they're all criminals. There's no guarantee that nobody is going to attempt to hack their own systems.
What a life.
Well yes. It's not cynical, it's perfectly normal. In a world where Zuckerberg is free to ignore repeated pleas and demands for making his cash cow more palatable to the concept of morality, it is obvious that one way to make that bastard focus on the issue is to drag the local CEO muppet in front of the beak and make him sweat.
Add a bit of inside pressure to the outside pressure that apparently does nothing at all to His Zuckyness.
And you can put the name of any multinational conglomerate that has a high presence on the web and no stores anywhere in the same basket. Right now we are under the influence of American companies, but nothing says that China, India or even Russia could not, one day soon, have an outrageously successful app on the Internet that is used the world over. When that day comes, we won't have more influence over the makers of that product than we have now over Facebook.
That is not acceptable when the risk is (young) people being stalked or abused.
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