Posts by Pascal Monett

Remember Apple's disastrous butterfly keyboards? These lawsuits against the iGiant just formed a super class action

Yeah but, rules are meant to be broken, right ?

Besides, you're typing it wrong.

Thousands of taxpayers' personal details potentially exposed online through councils' debt-chasing texts

"We take security and all matters of data protection extremely seriously"

That is why we sent out URLs to tens of thousands of people without ever checking that the procedure was secure.

Once the horse had bolted though, we very seriously closed the barn doors.

Hint : stop giving us bullshit about how seriously you take data security when it is absolutely clear that you did not.

Bournemouth, Christchurch, Poole Council awards reseller a multimillion-pound contract for Microsoft services

"Microsoft's Azure cloud is something of a favourite in the UK public sector"

Yes, well I'm sure the NSA doesn't even need to use its backdoors to get intel, it must be recieving daily updates by email anyway.

SK Hynix boss predicts CPUs and RAM will merge, chipmakers will hold hands to make it happen

Re: A Good Idea

Not to mention that 16GB may be enough for many, but I need 32GB and I'm looking forward to upgrading my PC to 64GB by next year.

With that system, I will need to by a 64GB version of whatever CPU I choose. I'm not sure they'll be making those.

OVH flames scorched cloud customers with pledge to build data centre fire simulation lab

"server fires and electrical fires need different dousing tech"

I'm sure he is much more competent than me, but could someone explain to me how a server fire is different from an electrical fire ?

Is it that an electrical fire is just the power cables and their insulation, whereas a server fire is the electricity plus the toxic plastics and metals that are melting ?

Does that really make such a difference ?

Re: Preferably in a different country

You don't need a different country, a different department would be largely enough.

Unless your data is hosted in Paris, in which case you need to choose your department a bit more carefully.

The kids aren't all right: Fall in GCSE compsci students is bad news for employers and Britain's future growth plans

Agreed. If a youngster wants to learn how to program, he doesn't need a teacher. I learned on my own with BASICA last millenium, then transitioned to Turbo Pascal before getting any "official" courses.

And those were the days before the Internet and YouTube. Today, any beginner can find a wealth of courses and tips on YouTube, plus there are many sites that offer free introductory courses for HTML, CSS, VBA and more. If they want to learn, they can.

What school needs to teach them is project management, code commenting and documentation. Some people skills would not be wasted either.

Google vows to build its own server system-on-chips, hires Intel veteran

Is that not the future of CPUs anyway ?

It seems to me that we are integrating more and more stuff, why not do it directly on the chip ?

Okay, maybe we'll be getting huge chips (like, twice their current size), but the motherboard will be slightly less cluttered (ports and expansion bays take up a lot of space) and we'll basically get as fast a performance as can be.

But the graphics card must remain external to this chip, and I would prefer not having the RAM on the chip either. I know it would be a lot faster, but lets just keep the current system which works fine. Put 16GB of Tier-1 RAM on the chip, by all means, but let me add RAM outside the chip if I want. 16GB is enough for a lot of people, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who prefers 32 (planning on 64 for the next upgrade).

Your hardware is end-of-life... and it's in space. Worry not, Anglo-Japanese sat to test new orbital cleanup method

Well done

I don't really care if this actually works (of course I'll be happy if it does), I'm just happy that there are people who are finally actively tackling the problem.

We've been hearing about this issue for over a decade, now someone is actually trying to do something about it.

Here's hoping it works !

TikTok no worse than Facebook for privacy, says Citizen Lab (although Chinese TikTok is a horror)

"nor strong deviations of privacy, security and censorship practices when compared to [..] Facebook"

Using Facebook as a baseline is not exactly a stellar argument as far as I'm concerned.

That said, it would seem that, with proper study, TikTok is not a threat. It may remain stupid, but it is not a threat.

OVH writes off another data centre – SBG1 – and reveals new smoking battery incident

"we believe that this is part of our internal standard"

You mean you "wishful thinking" that it is part of your internal standard. SBG was obviously not built following your own standards and, at €2 million per electrical line, I think we can all guess why two centers were loaded on the same line : beancounter interference.

So, beancounters, are you happy with your "savings" ?

What could be worse than killing a golden goose? Killing someone else's golden goose

"Things were purposefully not documented"

There may be a reason for that, but there is no excuse for it. If something is done to make things work that goes contrary to internal procedures, either it must be changed or, if it is indeed critical to the functionality required, then it must be raised in a meeting and either the rules must change, or an exception must be made.

But it still has to be documented.

And getting someone fired simply because they changed a bit of "your code" ? That is petty and pathetic - not that those kind do not exist, I am well aware. That "senior" developer should have simply gone to her and explained what it is that she had done wrong and why. That's what you do when you are a professional and a team player.

That guy was clearly batting only for himself. I've met a few like that, and I always like leaving them behind.

Cherry on top: Dell shoves MX keyboard into its Alienware m15 R4 ultrabook

Because thin is all the rage these days

All electronics makers are blindly following Apple, and Apple would dearly like to make a phone that is just 1mm thick, but that dang battery always gets in the way.

Personally, I don't care about thin. What I want is a laptop that has power and all the ports I can possibly ever need, plus a BluRay drive and space for another internal SSD. I want to be able to slot in 64GB of DDR5 as well, and have enough battery power for a marathon session of Lord of The Rings viewing.

So yeah, thin is not going to cut it for me.

What could possibly go wrong? Sublet your home broadband to strangers who totally won't commit crimes

Please, have some decency

" 'On average, our Pawns earn around $5-30 per month.' This in response to an individual claiming the amount was only about $0.15 per day. "

You cite costs per month, then contracdict with price per day. Not the same ratio.

$0.15 per day is $4.50 a month. That is easier to compare and quickly understand that nobody is getting $5 a month.

Moron traps would be more accurate

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp pause usual data collection with an outage

“We don’t have any additional details to share,”

Move along sheeple, nothing to see here.

It just means "less than all".

What happens when your massive text-generating neural net starts spitting out people's phone numbers? If you're OpenAI, you create a filter

"It's hard to tell"

It shouldn't be. It's a program, it should have a log of its activity. That way, you ask a question, you get an answer, and you check the log to find out how it got the answer.

I fail to see why incorporating an activity log wasn't thought of at the very beginning of the process. I've been incorporation execution logs of my automated scripts for over twenty years now. The amount of time that saves when creating a program is appreciable, the amount of time it saves when the customer comes back six months later with the inevitable "it's broken, no we haven't changed anything" is priceless.

Put a log in - it's not rocket science.

Boffins get first measurements of Jupiter's stratospheric storms that show 'unique beast' dwarfing Earth's issues

Here's hoping that it will last a long time

Jupiter wouldn't be quite the same without its Red Spot.

Yes, everything changes. In millions of years, Saturn will no longer have any rings, Jupiter's Red Spot will have disappeared, and may other things will have taken place.

But, just for now, let's revel in what we have.

Microsoft nudges Windows 10 21H1 toward commercial customers

"users should not expect much whizzbangery"

Users do not want whizzbangery, they want an OS that is stable and reliable and doesn't pull the rug from under their feet without warning.

Borkzilla still has not understood that people need an OS to run the programs they need to use, not to be bothered by an OS that wants the spotlight. The OS is supposed to be the background, near-invisible and unobtrusive.

Staff and students at Victoria University of Wellington learn the most important lesson of all: Keep your files backed up

Someone who has not yet realized the fragility of data.

Now they are learning the hard way, which is the only actual way to make the lesson stick.

The Audacity of it all: Version 3.0 of open-source audio fave boasts new file format, 160+ bug fixes

Got the Torrent link

Projects like that are things that I support by torrenting them and leaving them available for upload.

I don't have any use for the application myself, but if it is popular, then I will torrent it, just like I torrent the latest Linux Mint releases.

I am happy to give up some of my bandwidth to Audacity.

Swiss security provocateur who leaked Intel secrets indicted by US authorities

"My overall motivation is to free information"

You're obviously too intelligent for your own good. Information that is not yours is not for you to "free".

Crims with ties to Tesla and SpaceX 'fess up to computerized conspiracies

US$1M dollars

A nice amount, to be sure, but I would definitely want that in cash. $20 bills, preferably. You can use that to pay for gas and food and the IRS will be none the wiser.

Of course, that is based on the premise that I would accept the deal in the first place. This employee obviously did the right thing, or Kriuchkov's recruitment methods were not up to snuff.

Encrypted phones biz Sky Global shuts up shop after CEO indictment, police raids on users in Europe

"paint encrypted mobile phone services as something used exclusively by criminals"

Funny, I'm rather convinced that there must be a fair amount of CIA operatives who use encrypted comms as well.

DARPA picks Intel to automate conversion of FPGAs into ASICs for military applications

“security countermeasures capable of thwarting reverse engineering"

Well, the guy who manages to actually prevent reverse engineering is going to be one special mind for sure.

I'm not a specialist on the subject in any way, but I fairly sure that there is not much you can do to prevent an X-ray scan of your chip.

And I'm convinced that, as far as hardware is concerned, reverse engineering starts with an X-ray scan.

Trail of Bits security peeps emit tool to weaponize Python's insecure pickle files to hopefully now get everyone's attention

"they'll think about adding additional warnings"

Oh, that's just great.

There's already a warning nobody's paying any attention to. The solution is obviously to add another warning.

Would the maintainers of Python be bitten by the worm of administrative thinking ? You need to lock that functionality down. You need to ensure that pickled files are encrypted or something. You need to bake security into it somehow. I don't know, I don't have the answer, but just slapping another warning on and calling it a day is not the solution.

Boldly going where Elon Musk will probably go before: NASA successfully tests SLS Moon rocket core stage

Progress

Well done, NASA boffins. Have one on me.

Something fishy is going on in Taiwan as folk change name to include 'salmon' for free sushi

I've got a hunch

I think reastaurant chains in Taiwan are going to think twice before trying to pull this kind of stunt again.

I never knew there was a country in this world that allowed you to change you name like some games do. I live in France. If I wanted to change my name, I'd have to go before a judge and get it approved. Not impossible, far from, but a far cry from submitting a web form and getting it done.

Big problem: Nominet members won't know how many votes they're casting in decision to oust CEO, chair

"That's not to say this manipulation will happen"

Of course not, you counldn't publish that without being liable for a libel suit.

However, given the Board's track record up to now, I'm pretty sure they are preparing everything they can to tweak the results and find "a few more votes" in their favor.

OVH says burned data centre’s UPS, batteries, fuses in the hands of insurers and police

That is a proper response, with a reasoned argument.

Thank you for that information.

Re: in the hands of police

What for, pray tell ?

You seem to view OVH as a wretched hive of scum and villany. Why ?

Northern Ireland hands deal worth up to £87m to Fujitsu: Now keep our 15-year-old Oracle HR system up and running

"a transfer of intellectual property rights"

What is this nonsense ?

Oracle has the rights to its product, but it's the government/company/department that has the rights to its processes. As a contractor, when I go to a customer to write code or correct issues, I have no IP rights over the code I write or the fixes I apply.

I fail to see how Fujitsu can be considered having any IP rights whatsoever on a product that it does not own.

With Nominet’s board-culling vote just days away, we speak to one man who will publicly support the management

Re: you're a decent bloke

I'd say you're rather an optimist and a very kind person, which makes you, IMO, a much more decent person than him.

I fail to see, given the amount of articles on Nominet in the past few years, how anyone actually concerned by this situation could possibly ignore the actions and mismanagement of the current Board.

The fact that Michelle chooses to ignore it means to me that there is a vested interest in keeping the status quo, for reasons unknown.

"there should be a dialogue – not a double-barreled shotgun"

Difficult to have a dialogue when the Board cuts off the forum that would have allowed it.

I suppose this guy would have voted Trump if he lived in the US.

The Roaring Twenties: Future foreign policy will rely on rejuvenated 'cyber' sector, UK government claims

Nukes are an obsolete threat

The only country that ever got away with it is the USA and the only reason they got away with it is because everyone was sick of war and they hand-waved a half-reasonable argument that everyone accepted.

Today, a country that launches a nuke on another country, whatever the reason, is going to see itself placed under a ban from Humanity (best case scenario), or be the start of a global thermonuclear war that will erase life on the surface of the planet (worst case scenario).

If you're dead, it doesn't matter if you won or lost.

In the lab: Robotic AI-powered exoskeletons to help disabled people move freely without implants

"human-controlled override buttons to disengage the automated controllers,”

Hmm. I wonder how well that will work when the user wants to go down the stairs and the machine wants to walk stright ahead.

I applaud anything that will advance our ability to improve the life of disabled, but this strikes me as rather dangerous.

I wish them luck, though.

McAfee, the company, says Chinese attackers targeted Asian and US telcos

"the attack should not be vastly difficult to defend" (against)

Certainly not if you check the link before clicking on it and know who it is you work with.

I also imagine that the sender name is spoofed and that there are a number of ways to detect that the mail is not legit rather than seeing a logo that looks familiar and deciding to blindly trust the mail content.

For Pete's sake, how is it that people are still falling for crap like this after decades of mail spam ?

IBM's CEO and outgoing exec chairman take home $38m in total for 2020 despite revenue shrinking by billions

That is a shareholder problem

As long as shareholders agree to avoid tying a CEO's revenue to the company's revenue, that's what they get.

If shareholders continue to agree to give massive payouts to CEOs who deliver massive reductions, well they'll get less money out of it. I'm sure they can afford it because, if not, they would have done something about it already.

Brit college forced to shift all teaching online for a week while it picks up the pieces from ransomware attack

"a cut above ordinary criminals"

A cut below, actually. They would gettheir asses kicked by any "ordinary" criminal in a face-to-face encounter.

And "ordinary" criminals do not target hospitals, mdeical centers or places of learning. You have be a miscreant with a keyboard to think of that.

Someone defeated the anti-crypto-coin-mining protection for Nvidia's 'gamers only' RTX 3060 ... It was Nvidia

“The driver has been removed.”

As if the mining community hasn't made a copy of that available on some website somewhere.

Nvidia, you really screwed the pooch there. You could have just limited card purchase to one video card per credit card number, but why do something simple that works ?

Nah, much better to try and use software to lock down drivers whilst forgetting that you also publish developers drivers that don't have the limitation.

Really smart move.

</sarc>

Nokia inks Radio Access Network collaboration deals with Microsoft, AWS, Google

"the forever almost-here allure of 5G"

Compared to the forever peak petrol or fusion tomorrow, 5G looks very likely to be here quite soon.

'Business folk often don't understand what developers do...' Twilio boss on the chasm that holds companies back

"rather subscribing to cloud services and using them as components"

I am disappoint.

The book is nothing but a PR puff piece promoting a cloud-based company which, surprise, finds that using the cloud is the best thing sliced bread.

I'm sure OVH would agree, but I'm guessing some of its customers might have an issue with that idea.

Oh, and how does Twilio guarantee that it won't become another SolarWinds123 ?

PSA: If you're still giving users admin rights, maybe try not doing that. Would've helped dampen 100+ Microsoft vulns last year – report

Re: IT is still a blocker more than an enabler

Of course it is, manglement wants control and privileges are not for the hoi-polloi.

As a freelance consultant, I see many companies from the inside. As far as IT is concerned, my customers are all over the map. One has a strict non-admin policy, which does not bother me because my workstation there has the stuff I need to work. Another has a strict no admin policy for employees, but a rather lax policy for consultants that work with the IT department, meaning that my workstation there functions under admin access - and my workstation is the one dedicated to external consultants, meaning that every other guy or gal that works there uses that workstation. With admin access.

And lets forget about the companies where I am the only person who knows their network and how to fix things - which is frightening when you know that I am not a network admin.

I recently got a new contract at a large administration which has an interesting policy. Normal users do not have admin access and software requests must be approved by manager and deployed by IT. It works. But some people, me for example, do not fit the general population and get granted an admin account. Now wait before you howl : the admin account is not the work account. I can only work on the work account, but when I need to install something that is not in the IT list of approved software (because they had no idea), I can do so in my work account by giving my admin account login and password. So I have the flexibility to do what I need, with the security of my work account. Not bad, I think.

Desperate Nominet chairman claims member vote to fire him would spark British government intervention

Amen to that.

Microsoft customers locked out of Teams, Office, Xbox, Dynamics – and Azure Active Directory breakdown blamed

Re: the above quote isn't really saying a lot

Of course not, it's just another variation on the age-old "a small amount of customers have been impacted", for small < 100%.

Good one

Re: most people use a garage rather than maintain their own cars

Most people use a garage because cars are increasingly made so most people can't maintain them.

Bad analogy.

Russia, China say anyone will be able to use their south pole Moon base for 'peaceful' science and exploration

So there will be a Moonbase after all

It will be fascinating to see what problems arise and what solutions will be found - if, of course, they can avoid the Glorious Reporting Of Successful Communist Achievements reporting style.

I'm guessing it's time to sign up. A Moon base is an endevor that not even a billionnaire can achieve alone.

Ex-asylum seeker with infosec degree loses discrimination claim against UK cyber range provider after storming out

As Sir Humphry would no doubt respond, not finding something true does not mean finding that thing false.