Posts by Pascal Monett 19006 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
We need to keep these names in mind as well :
Cobweb Technologies
Cognyte
Black Cube
Bluehawk CI
BellTroX
Cytrox
And we also need to be aware that there are more than that. NSO was just the tip of the iceberg. Even if it is shutting down, the people behind it are not going away to become burger-flippers. They will be back under another name.
LinkedIn ? That is your criteria ?
I had a LinkedIn profile for six years. Do you know how many useful contacts I had during that time, outside of all the people I already knew ?
Zero.
LinkedIn has given me nothing interesting, but a tanker full of marketroids and other assorted dredge trying to tack themselves on my success.
I dropped LinkedIn when Borkzilla borged it and I have never regretted that.
This past summer I signed two of the best contracts I've ever had. LinkedIn had nothing to do with that.
If LinkedIn is one of your criteria then we have nothing to talk about.
Apple is never willing to talk about anything outside of its next product. Under Apple-controlled conditions, of course.
Backdooring has nothing to do with sanity or logic, but everything to do with keeping market penetration and staying out of the eye of sovereign displeasure.
Apple is the whore of the market. It will bend over and take it in the blink of an eye when dealing with a country that just might banish it or take some of its higher-up muppets to jail, but in Western "democratic" countries (that are fewer by the day), it stands tall on the soapbox of "protecting its customers".
Nobody has ever died of hypocrisy, so all is well.
Apple does not make its billions from ads. You cross Apple and you will find yourself in a legal nightmare.
FaceBook ? Its fortune is based on ads. Its users are ad companies and its product is you. Why should it care about what happens to the data it has on you, beyond making token gestures to "respect its users" ?
The Zuck hasn't given a damn about people since he was born. What makes you think that he will change now ?
This is just another FaceBook PR stunt to generate goodwill without actually doing anything.
Honestly, the marketing people at FaceBook are real professionals. Somebody hire them into a real company. Such creativity deserves recognition.
Okay, I went and viewed the link. It's a nice fuzzy way of calling Kickstarter a company.
Only in the USA can you have a company not called a company.
Public Benefit means shareholders and for-profit. There is no "public benefit" to be found over other companies like IBM, Intel or Walgreens.
Honestly, this tip-toeing around the bush in a strongly pro-capitalist country is shameful.
We are long past 1984. The Panopticon is here, and Google, FaceBook, TikTok, Instagram and others have put it in place. Global surveillance is a thing, but the irony is that it is not any Government that is guilty of it, it's just the carrot that the sheeple are blindly throwing themselves at for their own convenience.
Some time in the future millenia, exoarcheologists will determine that we are the first intelligent civilization to have convenienced ourselves to death.
Okay, the situation is clear : NSO knows its goose is cooked so it's shutting itself down in order to transition to a new structure, bringing all its intellectual resources with it in order to re-emerge and continue business as usual.
By the time US lawmakers get around to being pissed off again, the new group will have made more hay on the souls of those it damned.
Agreed, but the fact is that Borkzilla still doesn't know what a true kernel is.
Windows started out as a GUI layer over DOS, and Borkzilla still hasn't made the transition to a true kernel. Everything is tied to the UI.
Besides, if you think that Borkzilla is going to make the Windows Experience (TM) something you can stick another UI onto like in Linux, well I have a bridge to sell you.
I'm guessing that that may be because of a difference in perception. A social media site is basically viewed as pseudo-local. French users of Facebook behave as if Facebook is French. Of course, all Facebook users are well aware that it is a global company, but in their little corner, it's local.
A travel site obviously reaches across the world, otherwise booking flights would be difficult. So, a travel site is percieved as "non-national", and is not expected to be local.
Maybe.
Now that explanation obviously doesn't work so well for food sites, so I won't try to explain that.
With all the new fabs that are being planned or being built, there's going to be a glut of processors of all kinds all over the place.
Prices will drop, and then they'll complain that their immensely expensive fabs aren't making enough money.
Really, how many fabs was there in 2019 ? I don't kow, but it seems to me that there's going to be double that amount by 2025.
Um, if I'm not mistaken, local machines have grown in power to an impressive extent.
The cheapest laptop today can run Office. Okay, not at blinding speeds, but have you tried Word 95 on a Pentium ?
Besides, a server is nothing but someone else's machine.
Some people are really desperately trying to reinvent the mainframe.
That is nothing more than rewriting history.
The absence of information can be just as significant as its presence. If something exists in one source and is absent from another, that means that there is a process that failed and could not write a log entry. For debugging purposes, that is literally more important than the pseudo re-creation of log data.
Not that I would defend Oracle in any way, but it is kind of hard to imagine that the Oracle engineers and technicians don't know how to install and configure their own product. I do think they have internal training on that question.
So the issue likely lies more with the civil administration who, despite having an ERP for a while already, have apparently not understood what they were getting themselves into. It's almost like they don't understand their SAP installation and, instead of trying to get to grips with it, they decided to go with another top-of-the-line behemoth only to hit their collective skulls against the same wall.
I might be reaching, but if the product you're thinking of acquiring needs more people to install it then you have people in your own IT department, maybe you should think twice before signing that contract.
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.
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