Posts by Pascal Monett

A man spent a year in jail on a murder charge involving disputed AI evidence. Now the case has been dropped

Agreed, but firing live rounds in a public place is not exactly a game plan I am willing to subscribe to.

Re: Really?

That actually sounds like an interesting idea - using blanks, of course.

The only issue I see is that, in the US, someone pulling out a gun in the middle of the street is likely to cause a flurry of calls to 911 or worse, someone else pulling out a loaded gun and challenging the tester.

That could end badly.

But the idea is interesting.

Re: do people have a propensity to try to abuse AI systems?

They definitely do, as Microsoft has found out to its detriment.

Horizon Workrooms promises a virtual future of teal despair

"the horrible inhuman void of Facebook's vision for the future"

An excellent summary of Zuckerberg.

Icon production is in a catastrophic downwards spiral at El Reg.

Sadly.

China's Mars rover assigned extended mission after exceeding life expectancy

"China's Mars rover assigned extended mission after exceeding life expectancy"

It's funny how objects made for space exploration regularly exceed life expectancy (as long as they survive the landing process), whereas objects made for Earth consumption regularly fail to live their life expectancy without issues.

Just sayin'

Facebook sat on report that reveals most-shared post for months was questionable COVID story

"We ended up holding it because there were key fixes to the system we wanted to make"

No.

You release the report, then publish the fixes you want to make.

That is transparency.

You were not being transparent, you were lying your ass off.

As usual.

China puts continuous consent at the center of data protection law

"death doesn't end the information collector's responsibilities or the individual's rights"

Interesting. I'd've thought that death meant the erasure of said data, but they're not going that way.

The only way the deceased' family can be granted access is if the deceased created a profile under his legal name and address. That means no anonymous logons.

Well, China's government is not big on anonymity . . .

More Boots on Moon delays: NASA stops work on SpaceX human landing system as Blue Origin lawsuit rolls on

Re: Good Value

Isn't NASA still making the SLS ?

Not all of them.

But billionnaires ? Yeah, they're hilarious.

From a distance.

Citation, please ?

Live, die, copy-paste, repeat: Everything is recycled now, including ideas

That was brilliant

"I must remember to post more messages to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit and TikTok to tell the sheeple how governments are tracking my personal life."

Love it.

Apple extends live-at-work to at least January 2022

Re: Shop Stores and iCovid

Yeah, but that's where you can make money, so it's okay.

"*every* other US made sold device"

TFTFY.

Everyone knows that all smartphones are made in Taiwan, sometimes with child labor.

The US makes nothing anymore (except military hardware), unless you count pompous politicians.

Epic lawsuit's latest claims: Google slipped tons of cash to game devs, Android makers to cement Play store dominance

Re: delete mobile

I don't even understand how they do it.

I can't play an FPS game if I don't have my trusty keyboard+mouse.

Not to mention my 28" screen.

UK's Surveillance Camera Commissioner grills Hikvision on China human rights abuses

"it is beyond our capability to make a judgement on this matter"

No it is not.

You are quite capable of making a judgement on the treatment of the Uighur people. It's just that, if you do, you'll likely be locked up with them.

"we do ensure our cameras are designed to protect communities and property "

Oh really ? How ?

Do you refuse to film people who are abused by the State ?

Microsoft, flush with cash, raises cloud office suite prices for businesses

Re: have you read

You're starting to repeat yourself, grandpa.

Might want to take those meds.

Re: Except for a few geeks office has not changed in 15 years

Oh, sure. The Ribbon has gone completely unnoticed by non-geeks.

Right.

Samsung sprints past Intel to become world's semiconductor sales leader

Good for Samsung

But Samsung doesn't make CPUs.

I'm looking at upgrading my desktop PC, and the choices are still AMD or Intel.

Intel has been very disappointing in the past few years. Seems that I'm going to go Epyc/Ryzen rather than Core, but I'm still not decided.

Oh, and it's for a gaming PC, so max performance is definitely a criteria.

Tesla promises to build robot you could beat up – or beat in a race

Humanoid bots

I fully expect :

- that this will take a lot longer than Musk says to hit the market (if it ever does)

- that the bot will not be able to do anything more useful than carry something or stand guard

- that it will have to be plugged in all night, else it will run out of power

- that you'd better not put it in a crystal shop

We don't have the technology for a fully-autonomous, humanoid robot. Hell, we can hardly make a dog-like robot that doesn't scream its presence to everyone within 100 meters.

This is a pipe dream. Not going to happen.

Trust Facebook to find a way to make video conferencing more miserable and tedious

"your table dynamically scales"

I've been in Teams meetings with more than 20 participants.

How exactly is that going to scale usefully ?

It won't.

Another "product" destined right for dustbin.

Eight-year-old bug in Microsoft's 64-bit VBA prompts complaints of neglect

I enabled SMB1. The difference in display time was insignificant.

On the Win 1 0 machine, time to display was over 60 seconds. On the Win7 machine, the same folder displayed instantly.

SMB1 is not the issue, but thanks for the tip.

"[Microsoft felt] the 32-bit version a safer choice for most users"

No. Just no.

You are not a nanny, you are a company with a product. If the user buys the 64-bit version, it's his choice, not yours.

Your stupid attitude and excuses might be valid for home users, but we are talking migration here. That means business users.

It's not up to you to decide what a business actually needs. And because you're selling the same product to anyone who buys it, that means that business users can buy home versions. Sure, they shouldn't, but you're not really blocking them from doing so.

So stop deciding for your users. That despicable attitude is why Windows' behavior changes over time : you're trying to "optimize" the OS during usage, and it doesn't work. All it actually does it make the computer slower for no good reason.

My pet peeve right now is the 75 seconds it takes to open a network share and get the file contents on screen. Right at the start, it states clearly that are NNN files in the folder, but the actual file names trickle in a dozen at a time. I have an old Win7 PC and, when I open that same folder, the results are instantly displayed on my gigabit network - like they should be.

Microsoft : what the fuck are you doing ? Whatever it is, stop it !

Apple's bright idea for CSAM scanning could start 'persecution on a global basis' – 90+ civil rights groups

Finally

Seems like the crickets have finally been silenced.

It's good to hear that there are official entities raising shields against this egregious invasion of privacy.

Think of the children is a nice excuse - let's not push it too far.

Edgy: HPE's first message from the International Space Station to Microsoft's Azure? 'hello world'

"self-sufficient computers enable self-sufficient explorers"

Um, yeah. Just like everything space-worthy has been from the beginning.

Does Borkzilla really believe it will have Windows 1 0 operating a million miles away from Earth ? Not happening.

Even a Moon base will not be able to use an OS that needs to phone home every day, or in order to install a new machine.

Linux is the future. Period.

Faster .NET? Monster post by Microsoft software engineer shows serious improvements

It's called security.

Security is not there to be user-friendly, it's there to protect you.

Yes, many, many websites do not render properly without JS enabled. The question you need to ask yourself is : do I wish to enable JS on this website ? With NoScript, you have the choice before a catastrophe happens.

Obviously, the websites you visit regularly will make you enable JS for them.

It's the websites you go check out that you can control. If you click on a link and nothing shows up, you need to ask yourself : do I really need to see content on this page if JS needs to be enabled ? Is there no other way I can get that information with putting my system to risk ? If no, then you can enable temporarily, check the site and forget it when you're done.

Let's be clear : JavaScript is the root cause for malware infections in 99.9% of all cases.

If you don't protect yourself, well, you can't complain when things go wrong.

Here's a hint : use NoScript and an ad blocker and that page size is down to the text and the images that have been included by the author.

Makes the web a lot faster. Try it, you'll like it.

New on Netflix: A corporate drama in which staff are sued for abusing early access to financial data

Re: it does so at the cost of truth and justice

Not in the Court of Public Opinion.

Pearson is a company. They settled, they're guilty. Period.

"charged by the SEC for violating anti-fraud provisions"

Proving that the system works.

An idiot made a stupid decision and got caught. End of story.

OK, so you stole $600m-plus from us, how about you be our Chief Security Advisor, Poly Network asks thief

Mr White Hat ?

No.

An actual white hat would never have taken any money (or maybe just a few cents, to prove the possibility). He would have contacted the company and told them how it would be possible to take some.

This asshole took the money, got caught (well, detected and blocked), and only then pretended it was all in good faith.

Calling that scum a white hat is an egregious insult to actual, honest white hats everywhere.

Senators urge US trade watchdog to look into whether Tesla may just be over-egging its Autopilot, FSD pudding

"Tesla owners should be 'paranoid' when using the tech"

Oh I am paranoid.

I am so paranoid that I don't have a Tesla.

If I'm putting between €40K and €120K in a car, I'll be damned if I rent it out to some puking party-goer who'll fuck all over the back seat and leave the mess for me to mop up.

Apple didn't engage with the infosec world on CSAM scanning – so get used to a slow drip feed of revelations

"it presupposes an attacker committing a very serious federal felony"

I'm pretty sure Russian hackers aren't much concerned by that.

Re: Notice how quite Samsung is?

Maybe Samsung has nothing to say ?

The fact that Samsung is using a Microsoft Cloud product does not make it responsible for what Microsoft does.

Re: Banning is effectively meaningless

I'm pretty sure that, if there is a country banning it from phones sold on its soil, the banning will be effective. Complicated to put in place, perhaps, but if, say, China were to tell Apple to take it out, you can bet that Apple will have it out in a jiffy.

Re: A useful analysis of Apple's announcements

Thank you for bringing this information to our attention.

Quite an interesting read.

China, Russia, India, and pals agree to create virtual satellite constellation

Wait, Brazil has a launch pad ?

The sentence "Of the BRICS members, only South Africa lacks its own sensing satellites " made me do a double-take. Brazil can launch rockets ?

Well, yes it can. And so can a lot of others I wouldn't have thought of.

In that list of 119 launch sites (including two at sea), there are countries I couldn't believe. Israel has a launch site. How that doesn't incinerate the whole tiny country is beyond me. Irak has a launch site. Who'd've thought ?

We have 119 rocket launching sites in the world. That makes for an insane amount of launch capability.

Chinese web giant Tencent predicts Beijing has more internet regulations coming – and welcomes them

"[Martin Lau] welcomed whatever's coming"

As if he had the choice.

But yes, on this matter I agree. Social media needs regulation. That doesn't necessarily mean mandatory user identification, but it certainly means moderation. I think there is ample proof that unmoderated forums quickly descend into a morass of screaming and foulness, which is quite useless overall.

So, bring on the regulation !

Watchdog 'disappointed' it took NHS England over a year to release details of access to Palantir COVID-19 data store

Watchdog 'disappointed'

Government watchdogs : all bark, no bite.

Said watchdog should have blocked the deal as soon as it was apparent that a foreign company was going to be managing the data. It makes no difference that the company was based in the US, nor is it really important that the company was Palantir (although really, the smell alone should have been warning enough).

Government data should be managed in-country by local government, or local companies that have zero ties with foreign interests.

Un-carrier? Definitely Unsecure: T-Mobile US admits 48m customers' details stolen after downplaying reports

"we have not yet determined that there is any personal customer data involved"

We have not yet determined that the stolen personal customer data includes credit card numbers and unencrypted passwords.

We have not yet determined that the personal customer credit card data has been used.

We have not yet determined that the customers' bank accounts have been emptied.

We have not yet determined that the customers' credit ratings have been demolished.

We have not yet determined whether we will sue a surprisingly large amount of customers that haven't honored their contractual obligations and appear to have a very bad credit rating.

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: The average IQ of a population is always 100

Just like money, it needs to be adjusted for inflation current stupidity.

Oh I think they went above and beyond just "look like".

China orders annual security reviews for all critical information infrastructure operators

Re: Mandatory Security Teams

And that is why unregulated capitalism cannot be accepted at a governmental level.

Without governmental meddling, there is no industry that would, on its own, decide to implement filters to reduce the pollutants being spewed in the air.

Without laws, no company would say "let's not dump these toxic chemicals into the river and, instead, spend millions every year on water treatment".

None of that would happen because capitalism is "shareholder interest" and that interest is money, not the environment.

The Internet has taken up such a space in our lives that it has reached the level of a public utility. Companies, however, are still doing whatever they want, deciding on what level of IT they are willing to pay for to make things work. The only reason there are any security protocols in place is not for the safety of customer data, it's for the safety of the company - because down time costs money and makes for lost sales.

We do need laws to bring home to the Board that their customer data is a treasure that needs proper protection, not just good-enough-protection.

We're getting there, but China is clearly leading the way.

Apple's iPhone computer vision has the potential to preserve privacy but also break it completely

Re: Android != Linux

From the Wiki article I linked to :

"Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open source software "

I didn't say it was Linux, I said it is based on Linux.

Blackbaud – firm that paid off crooks after 2020 ransomware attack – fails to get California privacy law claim dropped

"Social Good Entities"

What the heck are those ? Twitter ? Facebook ?

Good entities ?

British defence supplier Ultra Electronics to be sold for £2.6bn to US-controlled firm

"a Labour Party shadow minister questioned

Well, now you know the business model, the future governance and operational freedoms. They will be dictated by the USA.

Methinks you should have worried about that before the sale took place.

Zoom incompatible with GDPR, claims data protection watchdog for the German city of Hamburg

Very slowly.

Equivalent protection ?

From the NSA ?

Bollocks.

If you haven't updated your ThroughTek DVR since 2018 do so now, warns Mandiant as critical vuln surfaces

If you really want security, you have a proper system installed that has video capability managed by a company that has clearance to call the cops themselves.

It saves on time and peace of mind, and it's not that expensive.

Green hydrogen 'transitioning from a shed-based industry' says researcher as the UK hedges its H₂ strategy

Re: has something changed since O Level Chemistry days?

Well yeah : there are a lot less people who have their O-level in Chemistry.