Posts by Pascal Monett 19002 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Although I agree with you wholeheartedly, I don't see that miscreants outside the US are going to be much bothered by being charged with extortion by a US court.
The only way to get a grip on this is by making it an international crime and rolling it into Interpol's purview.
And even then, Russian hackers won't give a damn (nor will Chinese hackers), but it might allow for shutting down the exchanges that make it possible.
That's a very good question.
I'd've thought that, after losing 500, somebody would be taking a closer look at what was going on.
It would appear that this activity was likely drowned under the hundreds of thousands of daily deliveries and also, that Amazon has been automated to the point that the whole thing administers itself.
Amazon needs to revisit the concept of activity alarms.
Oooh, you're stretching there. That would mean he knows how to install an app on a smartphone.
I'm betting he's barely capable of punching in a phone number. He's probably got a secretary to deal with all the technical details of inputting a phone number, and she (because of course it's a she, he's an alpha male, dammit) passes him the phone when the call is being made.
After all, he can't burden his two functional neurons with such mundane matters . . .
Not to mention the off-the-cuff question of exactly how experienced are the people designing these custom chips ?
If I had a car company, I think I'd prefer asking Intel (AMD/TSMC/whatever) to a meeting where I would specify what I need from said chip, and let them propose a solution.
I'm sure the tools to design a chip today are plentiful and good, but just like programming languages, that doesn't mean that the people using them are doing so at the top ability of the software.
It's programming. Programming was built in English. Yes, I know the USA is not the first place in the world programming took place, but it is the place where programming took hold and started swamping the masses.
You have two entities, A and B. You don't want people to feel like they're reading a mathematics treaty (even if they kinda are), so you want to humanize them. Back when those manuals were written, Alice and Bob were an acceptable, logical choice, not a colonial one. I kinda irks me how many people can feel offended for people they don't even know.
So let's cut the bullshit : make a survey of what names can replace Alice and Bob. Make it worldwide, but control that one IP address can only enter one ticket.
And if you end up with Aranahooteepie and BobbyMcBobFace, it's your fault.
Copper has proven anti-bacterial properties, does not need to be reapplied and would make for a killer keyboard+mouse combo.
Now that I've thought of that, I want it !
Okay, I agree that nothing is perfect, but it seems a bit of a stretch to say that you could detect LAN traffic from tens of meters away by "listening" to a shielded cable.
You might be able to do it from the other side of a wall, but if you want to target a specific cable, good luck.
I accept this could work if you can set it up in the server room, but then we're back to the Primary Rule : if you have access, security is gone.
Borkzilla has found no balance, it is simply surfing the sheer volume of applications that exist for the Windows environment, coupled with total apathy from the users who couldn't care less what OS they are running, and the apparent mind control it enjoys on the business users.
Legacy is what is making money for Borkzilla, that and the current Cloud madness.
The day Linux will have as many useful applications is the day Borkzilla will start to see its money vault shrink.
Well duh, computing hardware is nearing the bleeding edge of atomic limits. The golden days where Intel's new generation of CPUs was >25% faster than the previous gen are long gone.
The only improvements we're getting these days is in making the hardware multitask its duties and throwing more computing power at problems that were handled solely by the CPU before. And we're already reaching the limit on how much more can be done on that.
It sounds crazy, but there will come a day when new hardware designs will become few and far between. Computers will come in several sizes and power configurations, and the choices will stay the same for decades at a time.
And I might yet see the beginnings of that in my lifetime.
I understand what you're saying, and I am absolutely not contradicting anything.
The only thing I can say for certain is that my mobile data usage as of the time of this writing (October 13th, 2021, 20:10:23 CEST) is 47MB out of 40GB.
And I have been using some of my data allowance, for business purposes.
What I will do is, in November, before activating any mobile data allowance, I will check on the usage numbers.
That should clarify the situation.
On my Galaxy A3, WiFi is disabled, BlueTooth is disabled, Mobile Data is disabled and Location is disabled. I activate those things only when I need them, and deactivate them again when I'm done.
So, when exactly is all that telemetry happening on my phone ?
I'm guessing it's when I have them activated. So, almost never then.
They are basically trying to kill their fans' access to statistical data so they (the fans) can endlessly argue about who is better, bet on who will come ahead and, generally speaking, stay interested in the sport ?
If there is an issue with private data, no problem, take it out. Except that their height and weight is a matter of public record, like or not, and GDPR has nothing to say about that, so I really don't really don't see where this is going except another excuse for the players to milk yet more money out of running behind a ball.
I think they're already largely compensated for that.
That is true for Linux, which can be pared down to the bare bones of what you need to do.
I doubt very much that the latest Windows will alllow you to skip loading ten dozens of "services" for which you have no use, and will just bloat the RAM and diminish performance for nothing.
Especially Windows 1 0, which Borkzilla has specifically set up so the you no longer are in charge of your own computer.
"For your own good", of course.
Ah but Star Trek TOS has already explored that subject, and did a rather good job of it.
If government just stops spending you won't have schools, roads, hospitals or much of anything that you don't pay for yourself.
For fucks' sake, this is not about government. This is about multi-billion dollar behemoths sitting on their billions and not contributing to said schools, hospitals or fire stations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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