Posts by Pascal Monett

Clearview CEO doubles down, claims biz has now scraped over ten billion social media selfies for surveillance

"We never want this to be abused in any way"

Great idea.

Here's a suggestion : delete your database, destroy the disks and shut the company down.

Words are just words. Actions are the truth.

Judge rejects claims Cloudflare should be held responsible for customers' copyright infringement

"We agree with the district court’s reasoning"

Okay, first of all, obviously they do. Duh.

But really, the judge is perfectly right. Attacking Cloudflare for hosting infringing sites is like attacking those who make roads for facilitating a criminal's getaway.

Sorry, Cloudflare is not responsible for what its customers put on their websites. That's normal.

I do indeed hope that this will put paid to future lawsuits on this subject. Yes, playing whack-a-mole is certainly not fun for copyright holders, but they're not going to attack the electricity company for providing electricity to the servers, now are they ?

Oh wait, it's the USA, so they could give it a try.

Never mind Russia: Turkey and Vietnam are Microsoft's new state-backed hacker threats du jour

"be protected from over 99 per cent of the attacks we see today."

There is no protection for the idiot who clicks on a link in a mail he got from someone he doesn't know.

US nuclear submarine bumps into unidentified underwater object in South China Sea

Re: How loud is crashing a sub?

The principle with submarines these days is stealth. You're not supposed to know that they're there. That is why they can be a threat - you never know where they are.

Loud sonar and telemetry signals is going to put the kibosh on that pretty quick.

Ireland signs up for plan to make Big Tech pay 15 per cent tax everywhere

Excellent point.

I will keep that in mind for future arguments.

Re: €750,000,000

If they did, I doubt the companies would be independant, they would most likely be subsidiaries and therefor the fiscal situation should remain the same.

There is one loophole I would really like to see closed : the bullshit one where one subsidiary holds all the patents and licenses them out to the others for, what a coincidence, exactly the amount of benefits they happen to have made in the quarter.

If you're all part of the mothership, then those licenses should not be tax-deductible.

Want to support Firefox? Great, you'll have no problem with personalised, sponsored search suggestions then

Re: You pay £60 a month to BT

No I'm not. I live in France. I pay €45/month to Orange.

I understand you have a pet peeve, but you need to understand that Firefox in not used only in the UK.

The Internet is wider than BT.

Ah yes, Tor. The NSA-created refuge for criminals, black marketers and intelligence agencies all over the world.

Brilliant idea.

Well one thing is for sure : sponsored search suggestions is not going to help.

Anything "sponsored" is 99.999% likely to be something I have absolutely zero interest in.

Besides, I use an ad-blocker and NoScript. They stuff it where the sun don't shine.

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

I doubt it's a steel lid.

I just went and tested one of my old IDE disks that I have lying around. A Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, 80GB ATA (hey, just big enough for Windows 11 !).

I scooped it up and went to our fridge, where I proceeded to try and stick a fridge magnet to it.

No luck, they all fell off as if it was made of wood.

I don't know what to conclude from that, though.

I also had an encounter with a magnet issue. One of the wife's friends had a son who called me one day about his Mac laptop. It would seem that it wasn't starting any more. I alerted him to the fact that I didn't know all that much about the Mac software environment, but agreed to go take a look.

When I got to his room, I started checking out the laptop and asked him when the issue had started. His answer was to point to a large lump of metal, about the size of my fist, in the form of a cylinder and said that it had fallen on the keyboard. I took one look at the thing, with its nails, paper clips and other assorted "decorations" clinging to it and told him that his disk was wiped and probably dead. He looked at me as if I was telling him the sky was green and asked me why.

That's when I had to explain to him about magnetic storage and how it doesn't do well with ginormous magnets in the immediate vicinity.

So yeah, not knowing about cassette tapes is likely a cause of ignorance of the issue.

Windows what? PC makers have bigger things on their minds

Hardly a good time to push out a new version that interests no-one

I'm beginning to think Borkzilla is becoming the specialist in pushing new product at the wrong time.

Independantly from the fact that nobody was expecting a new version of Windows, Windows 11 is about as welcome as was Windows 8, coming out barely two years after Vista.

Okay, Windows 8 at least had somewhat of an excuse since Vista was such a booger, but still, Borkzilla is really pushing it this time around.

Oh well, time will teach Borkzilla that it does not foist new versions on its customers at its own whim, the customers have to be needing it.

How not to train your Dragon: What happens when you teach an AI game sex-abuse stories then blame players

How is this possible ?

First problem : creating a dataset by choosing data containing child porn.

Second problem : going all huffy about filters after the fact, instead of curating the dataset.

Third problem : ending up blaming the players for the whole issue, knowing full well what your dataset contains.

When I learned that the creator of this mess was a young man, I could understand that he did not have the maturity to handle points two and three, but surely even a hormonal young adult can avoid the issues of point one, no ?

This kid has clearly given a lot more thought to the code and not so much to the content. I'm guessing that the $4 million he raised is going to have to be paid back.

And what exactly is the hotdog scene in Silicon Valley ?

Motivated by commerce, not conscience, Google bans ads for climate change consensus contradictors

I have one question

How does Google know what content is against climate change ? How is Google going to be able to target those pages, but not the pages that discuss the claim ?

If Google can actually do that, then Google has far more information about the Internet than I feel comfortable with.

Air gaps have been 'shattered’, says new Indian policy on power sector security

Re: what can go wrong?

Humans always are the weakest link. If the Internet-facing computers can only access whitelisted web pages, and if they are, essentially, on a private web, then there likely won't be very many amusing documents to copy to the colleagues.

Of course, said amusing document can always be mailed from home.

Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry awarded to boffins studying complex systems, organic catalysts

"This is the first time the Nobel Prize has been awarded for [..] the study of climate change"

Good.

Brit builders merchant Travis Perkins opts for Oracle after ERP disaster with Infor

"technology has been a source of pain for investors in recent years"

Oooh, poor little investors, have they been missing out on their yearly bonuses ? No ? Then where's their pain ?

They're not the ones doing the job.

And, to do the job properly, it would do good to have a bit less buzzword bingo coming down from the top. Nothing this guy has said apparently has anything to do with any technical aspect whatsoever. This guy is living in the clouds, surfing far above whatever issues his minions are battling with every day.

I'm guessing that investors are going to continue to hurt for a while, poor things.

Facebook rendered spineless by buggy audit code that missed catastrophic network config error

Re: locked out by their own system

I'd watch that !

Re: Out of band management?

Well, not a network guy, but if their network is down it kinda seems logical to me that they couldn't use remote tools to see what was going on.

In the end, somebody will always have to go and press the I/O button.

Re: Too bad their security wasn't better

Maybe, maybe not.

I say that in reference to the fact that, since FaceBook's rise, my email spam count has fallen into the very low single-digit zone, so most of the shit I previously had to deal with is now floating in FaceBook's waters and that suits me fine.

User to chatbot: Help! My kid has COVID! Chatbot to user: Always wear a condom

Re: Ii can't see the problem.

That's why I don't use "social" media.

Windows 11 in detail: Incremental upgrade spoilt by onerous system requirements and usability mis-steps

Re: more of everything that I've been taught in GUI design to avoid

Absolutely.

Someone should take every single Borkzilla UI developer and drag them, forcibly, to an underground dungeon where proper UI rules get whipped into them.

Back in the late 90s, I was given a copy of a Microsoft report on proper menu management. I have lost that document since and I deeply regret that, but reading that report was, at the time, an enlightening experience. It said logical things, as in : if you have more than 3 layers of menu, you need to rethink your menu structure. If you are coding for an international audience, you need to pay attention to the colors you use, since they can have different meanings on different continents. Etc.

Everything UI I design in my applications today is still based on that report. The one that I lost.

Apparently, Borkzilla has lost it as well.

Re: They're still gently caressing the dog

They need to.

They won't, though.

Re: No reason to upgrade

I stayed with XP until my genuine install disk could no longer install on my upgraded hardware.

That's when I chose to go to 7, and I'm staying there as long as I can.

"design paradigms from those devices could successfully carry over into a new Start"

Okay, now I get it. Borkzilla developers are young whippersnappers continually glued to their mobile phones, so obviously they think it's a good thing that their PC UI act in the same way. That way, they don't have to get used to a different environment. On top of that, they must all be using Surface or whatever other monstrosity with a touchscreen, so obviously, that's the way to go. Because everyone is using a touchscreen on their desktops, right ?

Never mind that more than a billion Windows users are using "normal" screens, never mind that, as of now, no less than TWO entire generations of Windows users have been used to the ol' Windows 3.11, XP, or 7 interface (or all of them), no, the new generation of developers wants its smartphone interface on a desktop and, by God, they're going to have it.

Well they can keep it to themselves. Absolutely everything in this article is rubbing me the wrong way. A Start Menu section I can't get rid of ? Fuck off.

Windows 11 ? Not in my house.

Google to build cut of its cloud operated by France’s Thales, for French government clients

Re: Still, they are a major.

Only because of the piles of cash that back them.

That said, Google does have a rather large experience of networking and managing massive demand, so I trust that Google won't have much trouble getting itself up to AWS's level.

Bonus : Google will do it differently, so there will be healthy competition, and that's always a Good Thing ^(TM)

Facebook far too consumed by greed to make itself less harmful to society, whistleblower tells Congress

"Facebook’s algorithms [..] put immense profit before safety and society"

Wow, what a surprise.

Not to diminish the testimony in any way but, honestly, US senators are the only ones who are going to feel a revelation here.

D-Wave claims it can build a gate-model quantum computer

"D-Wave claims"

Not a problem. We'll just wait and see what D-Wave delivers.

And, as far as quantum computing is concerned, even if D-Wave is a year late, it will still be an accomplishment.

Telegraph newspaper bares 10TB of subscriber data and server logs to world+dog

"Unsecured Elasticsearch clusters are relatively common"

Is it time to declare ElasticSearch a security threat yet ?

If not, when ?

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

Re: occasionally want edit a couple of pics

You, sir, are not the average Windows user. Of course you need a PC.

I hate touchscreens as well, especially my phone.

Nobody puts their grubby mitts on my screens - not if they want to keep their fingers intact.

Ah, the joy of Microsoft's auto-evaluation

Your PC will need a minimum of

- 1 Ghz CPU yes, if you want to do your computing at the speed of an anemic snail

- 4 GB of RAM yes, but that's just for loading Windows, if you want to actually use it, you'll need at least 4 more

- 64 GB storage yes, for loading Windows - you'll need another 500GB for the updates, then you'll need another disk for the files you actually work with

And besides, who today sells a 64GB disk ? If you buy an HDD, the minimum on sale is 300GB. For an SSD, it's 120GB.

I am aware that there are a lot of people who just read email and surf YouTube. They can do that on a tablet. If you're buying a PC or a laptop, it's because you have stuff to do on it and, in that case, 4GB of RAM is just asking for the pain.

Re: Mint

Agreed. Mint is a distro that helps make the transition to Linux with some ease.

As a long-time Windows user (since Windows 286, yikes!), I find the interface intuitive and it is not overly difficult to get where I want to go.

I still need some training, but my retirement is a decade from now, so it'll have to wait.

Hong Kong's central bank sees seven big issues to solve before a central bank digital currency can fly

"Do CBDCs improve existing business?"

In a word : no.

Businesses today have no technical issues paying their invoices or getting their customer's money. A so-called digital currency is not to help with that, so the entire exercise seems quite useless to me.

On top of that, if you want to make me download a terabyte of blockchain data on my smartphone just so that I can bonk it on a payment terminal in order to get my croissant, you can fuck right off.

That 'anti-NSO Pegasus spyware' download is actually a Trojan – so don't touch it

And the NSA/CIA are waiting down there to show them a few tricks.

Waymo, Cruise get green light from California's DMV for self-driving taxi services

"when the rain and fog aren’t too heavy"

Well they're not going to be opening offices in London any time soon then.

Mine's the one with the umbrella in the inner shotgun pocket.

Beijing explains what China's new data protection law really means – a month after it took effect

The Great Wall is being extended

And that is fine.

If Beijing wants to wall its companies and money-makers inside its borders, it is free to do so and that will trouble no one.

If China wants to make life more difficult for multinational behemoths, that's fine as well. The multinationals have largely enough money to cope, and largely enough analysts to define when too much is too much and it's time to pull out.

Keep raising the wall, China, and you'll find yourself alone behind it.

2FA? More like 2F-in-the-way: It seems no one wants me to pay for their services after all

A brilliant demonstration of how phones can become useless annoyances

Damn smartphones and the apps that go with them.

Damn the companies that pre-install useless shit I don't need and don't want but can't get rid of.

I hate smartphones.

Got enterprise workstations and hope to run Windows 11? Survey says: You lose. Over half the gear's not fit for it

"an upgrade will have to happen in the coming months or years"

Why ? Because Borkzilla says so ?

Windows 1 0 was supposed to be the last Windows. Frankly, I see no reason why there should be a Windows 11 - there's nothing in there that can't be handled by a patch.

Borkzilla is going to have to come to terms with the fact that companies are not there to endlessly stop working just so the latest, "greatest" Borkzilla software can be installed.

You know what people like with computers, Borkzilla ? Stability. There's no reason an OS should last less long than the hardware it runs on.

Virgin Galactic cleared to fly again after a spell on Federal Aviation Administration's naughty step

"Neither is currently capable of achieving orbit"

And as long as they can't, they're just toys for (billoinnaire) boys.

Billionnaire will billionnaire, but their toys are going to have to become useful if they want to make anything out of it.

People are not going to pay $100K to spend two minutes at the edge of space.

Anonymous: We've leaked disk images stolen from far-right-friendly web host Epik

"Epik happily hosts services and individuals who hold those views"

On the one hand, I'd like that platform to be shut down.

On the other hand, it's a treasure trove for the FBI.

So go free speech. Let those assholes hang themselves.

Of course not. Aliens means everyone who is not white.

Racists don't care if you were born there, they just see your skin color and react according to their (very) limited intelligence.

UK MoD data strategy calls for social media surveillance on behalf of 'local authorities'

"efficient and effective planning of supply chain and people"

Has got what to do with FaceBook ?

And why is the military preoccupied by that ?

It's a government issue. If the government can't be arsed to keep the peace, then it calls the military. That's when the military needs to intervene.

And, since the UK is, nominally, a democracy, the military should have nothing to do with social unrest because the solution is a change of government.

It's called elections. They're still a thing.

If a government goes so wrong as to spark a revolution, the military will be informed.

It does not need to follow Beijing's lead.

Attacks against Remote Desktop Protocol endpoints have exploded this year, warns ESET's latest Threat Report

the Nobelium gang

Putting more pressure on OS makers, industry and IoT-shite makers to secure their platforms.

As bad as it may seem, in some cases this pressure might not be a bad thing. It is going to push industry to better safety practices, maybe cleaning up their act and doing a better job overall. That will benefit everyone.

Oh, and maybe, just maybe, all those unsecured cloud databases will become a thing of the past. I can dream, can't I ?

But attacking hospitals for money should mean a bullet in the head. No pity there.

China demands internet companies create governance system for algorithms

"preventing the propagation of content deemed dubious"

And here we go.

Content deemed dubious in China ? Tienanmen Square.

Content deemed dubious elsewhere ? Good people on both sides, I won Arizona, the election was rigged, etc . . .

Let me give you my definition of dubious content : when it's a bald-faced lie, it's dubious. Otherwise, it's freedom of speech.

You have the right to call me an idiot, that's your opinion and you are entitled to it. You do not have the right to deny historical facts. The Holocaust happened. We landed on the Moon. Tienanmen Square happened. The Twin Towers were not a controlled demolition. The election was not rigged.

Period.

Email billing blunder meant MVNO iD Mobile told 24,000 customers to pay up or have their service suspended

"some customers have been sent an outstanding balance notification in error"

I know that, where email is concerned, it is really easy to fuck up even when you're trying to do things right.

However, it must be said that it would make things simpler if you could compare the recipients actually generated to the list you're expecting before sending out the mailing.

I do not know of any tool that allows you to do that. Of course, you could use Word and generate the mails before sending them off to Outlook, but that is you doing the job. I'm thinking of something integrated in your mailing tool that does the job and flags any discrepancies before proposing to send it all.

Infosec outfit Group-IB's website was defaced in weeks before CEO's arrest over high treason claims

Justice and Russia

Those two words just don't go together.

The Law is just a tool for the State to wield in order to crush whoever it is that is getting in the way. Putin will lift his phone, say "I want that guy to go down", and all the judges and police will do their best to find anything they can pretend to make stick.

State treason ? In Russia it is state treason to not like Putin.

Through the Looking Glass – holographic display hardware is great, but it's not enough

Progress, of sorts

We have achieved videoconferencing for the masses. We can even use our smartphones for that now, something that the phone industry promised decades ago but failed to deliver.

The result ? Everybody hates it.

Now, we are witnessing a new gimmick : pics which have some depth to them. To make it work, you have to have bespoke hardware. That is very much going to limit the market. Yet another thing with batteries to follow.

It's an interesting idea, but I want it on my 26" widescreen.

Microsoft warns: Active Directory FoggyWeb malware being actively used by Nobelium gang

Microsoft Active Directory

It was only a matter of time before it became an active threat.

Even the Borkzilla specialist wants you to migrate to something else.

Telling.

AWS US East region endures eight-hour wobble thanks to 'Stuck IO' in Elastic Block Store

Re: might I suggest rotating your case about 180 degrees?

Oh sure, I'm sure that won't be a problem what with the screens, PSU, keyboard, sound and network cables, among other things, that are attached in the back.

And yes, I obviously want to squat under the desk every time I have to interact physically with the tower.

Brilliant idea !