Posts by Pascal Monett

India makes China app ban permanent, forces TikTok to hose out local office

"The latter three companies are Chinese though assemble many of their devices in India"

For how much longer, I wonder ?

Tab minimalists look away: Vivaldi introduces two-level tab stacks

"It was CEO von Tetzchner who made the initial request"

Well then that settles it, it had to be done. Now it is.

I'm not a person who has a hundred tabs open at the same time. My home PC does have 32GB of RAM, but I tend to reserve that power for my games. I do, however, have a growing list of YouTube channels that open at once - that is going towards 40.

So I can't say that nobody would have any use for this functionality.

However, on my work PC I only have the tabs I need to do my job, and that is typically less than 10.

Apparently, some people need more than 50 tabs in their normal work day. I don't understand how you could manage that, but it is not my place to say anything against it.

If this functionality is useful, then I look forward to seeing it in Firefox.

University of Nottingham looks for new HR and finance software just 18 months after massive Unit4 system upgrade

Unit4 - a "better way to work"

It seems that Business World isn't too good for business.

I checked out their website. I can't say that I find the guy laughing in the banner to be an indication of professionalism. It feels more like they're partying all the time.

In any case, there is no shortage of tales of botched ERP implementations, and no shortage of ERPs to choose from. I gather that an ERP is a strategic-level decision, with great, long-term implications for the company. So how is it that all these implementations are failing ?

And how can a university need such a level of complexity to manage room schedules and order whiteboard pens ? Moreover, how does a university have the funds to change an ERP a year and a half after having upgraded their existing ERP ? I was under the impression that universities are generally strapped for cash. This one is throwing money into a bonfire.

Decade-old bug in Linux world's sudo can be abused by any logged-in user to gain root privileges

"has been hiding in plain sight for nearly 10 years"

And someone at the NSA is seriously pissed right now.

Drone smashes through helicopter's windscreen and injures passenger

Chilean Navy helicopter

Gosh. I clicked the link thinking I was going to read about how some idiot near London airport managed to screw up royally, but no, the rot is extending its clutches to South America.

It seems that drones are indeed going to be the scourge of the skies. I see a heavily-regulated future for them.

Apple slapped with €60m lawsuit from Italian consumer rights org for slowing down CPUs in old iPhones

Re: The solution is just to replace the battery

Yep, but this is Apple we're talking about.

The company that makes products in which glue is a major component.

UK Cabinet Office spokesman tells House of Lords: We're not being complacent about impact of SolarWinds hack

Still didn't answer the question

So, how many UK government institutions are impacted ?

First element of response : all of those using SolarWinds' product. That doesn't necessarily mean they were hacked, but it does mean they might have been.

But we still don't know the number.

In a trial run, Google Chrome to corral netizens into groups for tailored web ads rather than target individuals

"serve them ads tailored to their supposed interests"

Bollocks.

The best you can manage is to show me ads based on what I bought yesterday.

Utterly useless.

Biden said to be assembling cyber dream team to sort out US govt computer security

"primarily public-sector people with relatively limited experience in the corporate world"

Good.

Hopefully that means that he chose people who aren't easily given in to favoring companies over their job obligations because they aren't expecting a cushy boardroom seat when they're done forgetting what their actual job is.

Eh, Pai ?

UK government's cloud ERP strategy seems to be in stasis following top civil servant's move to COVID-19 task force

"it's no good saying, once you get on the cloud, it's all going to be OK"

Wow, a politician with a smidgen of a grasp on reality.

Is it snowing in Hell yet ?

You guys need this guy to be Prime Minister real quick, before he gets caught up in the greasy pole antics.

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

Re: meanwhile......

What does that have to with the problem ?

People do whatever they want with their own possessions. You're not exposing anything new.

The problem here is that a branch of government, imbued with the responsibility of children, seriously dropped the ball.

Heads should roll.

Freezing in Newcastle? You're not alone: For one lonesome creature, the world stopped on 31 Dec 2020

"A metaphor, perhaps, for Brexit Britain"

Hey, you've taken back control !

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

I guess I'm lucky

I am apparently the only person here who knows a competent electrician.

We moved in our new house in November 2017. After one winter, we had discovered that the heating needed a bit of an upgrade. Fine, so we go looking for other solutions. My wife takes a fancy to some stone panels and I, obviously, agree with her choice. We enter into discussions and end up signing the contract.

In the summer, the guy shows up to evaluate the premises. He takes one look at the electrical panel and says to me "I can't install your radiators with this - you are completely off norm and it wouldn't be safe".

The previous owner had copiously boasted about how he had done all the electricity himself. Apparently what he had done was create a fire hazard. It's a small miracle that he still had a house to sell.

Obviously, I agreed to have the guy redo the electrical panel to modern standards, after which the new radiators were installed.

This guy has done a few other things for me (replacing cieling lamps with LED lights), and I have absolute confidence in him.

I guess I'm lucky.

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

"the software somehow started backing up those files"

Um, no. Dropbox does not scour your disk to find stuff to upload.

It uploads what you put in its folder, nothing else.

That is a very lame excuse, on top of whatever excuse the guy with three names had to install Dropbox in the first place.

And three names ? How many mafias are you a part of ?

ADT techie admits he peeked into women's home security cams thousands of times to watch them undress, have sex

Re: impossible to access by anyone else..

but your security company.

Signing up with a security company is an act of trust. You trust the company and all of its employees to respect your privacy and protect your belongings.

This is a case of a rogue techie. One asshole does not change my opinion of the security industry in general - they are there to help, for a fee.

I have an alarm system installed, some of the motion detectors have cameras. I have been told that the surveillance personnel cannot access the cameras, they only get the pictures that are sent by the detector when the alarm system is active. I trust that they are telling me the truth.

Aside from that, the detectors are not installed in any given room. They are covering hallways, the garage, the living room, the dining room, etc. Places where thieves have to cross, or will go to because that's where the loot is (TV, audio, etc).

Why would you put a motion detector in the bedroom ? The thief has to go through the hallway to get there and that's all you need to know.

We'd rather go down in Down Under, says Google: Search biz threatens to quit Australia if forced to pay for news

Re: Google isn't the internet

Technically you're right, of course - but at the same time, you're kinda wrong.

With all its datacenters and the time it has had, Google has indexed practically all the Web (except the few who tell it not to, of which there are zero honest businesses). Whatever you think of Google's practices (and I don't look kindly on the ad business in general), that amount of knowledge has become priceless, so, in a sense, Google is the Internet.

That is also demonstrated in the fact that, when you ask Joe User what browser he's using, there is a significant chance that he will answer "Google".

Five years after US promised crackdown on ticket-snaffling bots, the first prosecutions are in... and are a slap on the wrist

Re: Getting soft?

Indeed, since when do you ask the condemned how much change he can spare for the fine ?

If they go bankrupt then so be it. If you can't pay the fine, don't do the crime.

Scottish enviro bods shrug off ransomware gang's extortion attempt as 4,000 files dumped online, saying it's nothing big

Probably the same thing that happened in the US when it made a federal crime to pay kidnapper ransom money.

There's a lot less kidnapping for ransom these days in the US.

Honor has flown the nest: Announces first phone as an independent firm, inks deals with supply chain big dogs

To the author : Thank you

Thank you for having linked to an enlightening article about wireless charging. I knew it was inefficient already (I often link to this video when encountering someone blathering excitedly about it), but I did not know (or remember) that putting the phone just slightly wrong on the pad could double the energy cost.

Given how careless most people seem to be when it comes to how they put their phone down, I'm guessing that they're all costing double the charge.

Wireless charging has to be the worst, most inefficient way anyone could have invented to charge a phone. I really hope you will link to that article every time you write about it.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: Debian isn't remotely difficult to install

Nobody said it is difficult to install. The problem, apparently, is that it is difficult to get it to work with the hardware.

Which is not a problem because, apparently, the solution is Ubuntu.

I prefer Mint, these days.

Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking

Re: The ability to check and remotely turn off such things

is trounced by the ability to be organized and methodical and check to ensure that you don't leave the house with the gas still on.

Inviting hackers into your house with stupid-security IoshiTe stuff is not a solution because if you can check and turn off, a hacker acan check and turn on.

All of these automated thingamajigs are turning our brains into much and giving us the focus and attention span of a goldfish. Use your brain, do not trust automated whatevers.

You can drive a car with your feet, you can operate a sewing machine with your feet. Same goes for computers obviously

Ah, Wordstar.

I used to know the keyboard shortcuts for everything. It was so much fun.

Then Borkzilla imposed Word on the world, and ramped it up until The Ribbon.

Now, keyboard shortcuts in word processors are almost a thing of the past.

Almost.

That reminds me of the number of times I had to pick out the fluff from a ball mouse.

Thank God for laser mice !

Yeah, in those days there weren't any of the functions we have available now, such as the ability to swap buttons or redefine them in any way.

It was right click to select, left click for menu, and that was it.

Today, I am using a Logitech G602. It has no less than 8 buttons in addition to the basic 2, all programmable. I use all of them.

If Logitech had existed back then, and brought that mouse to market, I think people would have had strokes trying to wrap their heads around the amount of functionality !

But to get here, we had to start there.

It happened to me about twenty years ago.

One of my wife's friends was complaining over the phone about how difficult using a mouse was. The next time we went over for dinner, I had her show me what the problem was. It was simple : she had positioned the mouse the wrong way, buttons under the palm of the hand.

I smiled and gently turned the mouse around.

We had quite a fun dinner after that, and she took a gentle ribbing quite graciously.

We'll explore Titan with a methane submarine, a methane submarine, a methane submarine...

"its liquid absorbs the incoming radar waves"

That is a cunning ploy by the Atlantians to not be discovered before they are ready to greet us.

What is it, gentlemen in white lab coats ? But of course I will follow you to the restaurant . . .

Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

"it struggles to find anyone willing to host its digital bile"

I wonder why it doesn't buy a server, plug the Internet into it and host itself.

If nobody wants to host you, you can still do it on your own - for a bit of work and money, of course.

But, given the apparent content, I guess I'm not surprised that they go whining to be hosted back again. Whining is always easier than working.

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

'we believe this is not widespread'

Aka : It only affected a small number of customers.

Yeah. it affected at least 23000 children.

How on God's Green Earth did you order stuff from children without bothering to order from a properly vetted supplier ?

Oh, right, stupid me. It would have cost more.

Well, enjoy your savings now.

Microsoft SolarWinds analysis: Attackers hid inside Windows systems by wearing the skins of legit processes

"and does so from memory"

Fascinating. And how does the malware get stuff into memory ?

Does it download it directly there ? If so, how does it download it past the security barriers ?

Re: What?

Indeed.

Since the last Windows Update of my machine, I can no longer disable Windows Update.

I'd really like to know what to jiggle in that abomination of an excuse that is the Registry to be able to lock that shit down and have my PC behave as I wish.

Loser Trump's last financial disclosure docs reveal Tim Cook gave him $5,999 Mac Pro, the 'first' made in Texas

Re: or that they will ever win again!

They shouldn't.

The Republican Party should be dismantled for treason and all of its political members thrown in jail for for life.

Of course, that won't happen.

But don't think that the OHSG won't have problems presenting himself in 2024. Don't forget that there is a tsunami of lawsuits coming his way, and some of them have the potential to bar him from ever holding office again.

I'm stocking up on the popcorn as we speak . . .

Maker of crowd-sourced coronavirus spread tracker app sues Apple for 'arbitrary and capricious' iOS store snub

There are 2 things to take into account

One, Apple did indeed do a dirty by disallowing that app but allowing a very similar app from a group of hospital employees.

Hospital employees are generally not programmers. I would have more trust in an app made by actual programmers. In this case, of course, said programmers would have had to have some oversight in privacy protection measures and maybe medical counsel as well. I did not see that that was specified.

Two, a claim filed by an apparently non-existing "company" who does not identify a single person in the company, doe snot come forward with the list of its employees, partners or collaborators who worked on the app, and can apparently only be reached by calling the CEO of another company is not exactly a brilliant confidence generator.

So, as much as I'd like to harp on Apple for once again changing the rules after the fact to suit itself, the shady side of the complainant makes me side with Apple.

If you're honest, you're not supposed to hide stuff when filing a complaint in court.

On his way out, Trump emits exec order suggesting US cloud giants must verify ID of all foreign customers

Re: Was it Trump?

Do you really think the OHSG actually drafted anything ?

Ever ?

Underlings are made for that.

Top engineer who stole trade secrets from Google's self-driving division pardoned on Trump's last day as president

Re: the founding fathers absolutely did anticipate a president . . .

Bullshit.

The Founding Fathers expected the loser to become Vice President and serve his country as a gentleman.

Learn the history of your own fucking country before spouting such ignorance.

Virgin Orbit finally lives up to its name after second attempt with LauncherOne rocket

A rocket made with Agile is never going to get off the ground.

Break often = exploded rocket.

Kinda difficult to debug when its in pieces.

Windows Product Activation – or just how many numbers we could get a user to tell us down the telephone

No dice.

Every time I upgraded my graphics card - and with XP that was yearly, I had to re-authenticate with a call to Redmond HQ.

I would have thought that a graphics card was not that important in the grand scheme of things - I'm not changing the motherboard, but obviously Borkzilla did not agree.

FireEye publishes details of SolarWinds hacking techniques, gives out free tool to detect signs of intrusion

Let me see if I understood this correctly

So, in an Azure AD environment, you have the cloud AD and the on-prem AD, which both have logs, but there are some instances where you login in the Cloud and it is not recorded in the same log than in the on-prem log, and the Unified thingy does not carry the info either, so it's not all that Unified.

Great. Feels like that makes security controls real easy to handle.

Still doesn't let SolarWinds123 off the hook, though.

You look for the largest objects in the universe and two come along at once: Astroboffins spot mega radio galaxies dwarfing Milky Way

"more than two Mega-parsecs across, which is around 6.5 million light years"

Yowza. So, if that galaxy is 62 times larger than ours, does that mean that it has 62 times the amount of stars ?

That would easily be more than a hundred billion.

The mind boggles.

Indian government slams Facebook over WhatsApp 'privacy' update, wants its own Europe-style opt-out switch

"wants its own Europe-style opt-out switch"

No ! Not opt-out, it should be opt-in.

Always.

On a side note, it would seem that GDPR is having a certain influence outside of the EU <smirk>.

If my calculations are correct, when Google Chrome hits version 88, you're gonna see some serious... security

"once they achieved browser market dominance they no longer needed extensions"

I think Google is going to find out that they very much need extensions, for example, via a drop in the market share of Chrome in favor of browsers that do accept extensions.

Security for Google is like terrorists for the NSA - just a convenient excuse to increase their own power.

AnyVan confirms digital break-in, says customer names, emails and hashed passwords exposed

Network Monitoring/Intrusion Detection Systems

It is beginning to seem obvious that if you are an important company with Internet access these days, you need to have an IDS.

It took three months for AnyVan to discover that they'd been hacked into. To me, that clearly indicates that they had no IDS and weren't monitoring their network activity properly.

I guess they should be thinking about that now.

Oh, and no "we take the security of your data very seriously" ? You're not playing by the rules, AnyVan !

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

"police were allowed to fly drones after just two hours' in-house training"

That appears to be quite insufficient. I think they should boost that to 10.

Maybe even 11.

BT got £106m from £46m contract then won £20m extension on service that overcharged public by £39m

It's called lock-in

"There are technical reasons relating to the bespoke and complex nature of the solution which would lead to substantial duplication of costs and unacceptable technical risks which would not allow for the service to be transferred to another supplier "

As the saying goes : when you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will soon follow. So it has happened here.

That said, I'm in a bit of a bind here ; as much as I'd like to make a scathing remark on how BT is screwing its customer, this is a telecomms project. I do not know that there are any Open Source telecomms infrastructures available, so I guess that BT or anyone else would have landed the NLPS in pretty much the same boat.

Is there any other provider available in Northern Ireland ?

Scottish Environment Protection Agency refuses to pay ransomware crooks over 1.2GB of stolen data

I'm starting to feel like a broken record but there is : NoScript.

It blocks JavaScript and, since all malware starts by using JS to download and run the nasty, block JS and the nasty can't get in.

The hour grows late, the enemy are at the gates... but could Intel's exiled heir apparent ride to the rescue?

Bravo

I really appreaciated your article and I think you did a great job of outlining the situation Intel is in and the person Gelsinger is (and I envy you for having met him more than once).

I hope Intel is going to pull through for the same reason I'm glad AMD is having a moment in the sun : we need competition. We need people who can think of new ways to improve performance, reduce power consumption and generally make computing an even better experience.

So I'm looking forward to what Gelsinger is going to cook up.

Two clichés, one headline: 'No good deed goes unpunished' and 'It's always DNS'

"what would you have done in Sam's situation"

I would have to say that I would have told the guy to do his job and keep me out of it.

I would also have found it quite suspicious to come to me and specify that "it didn't have to wait until 3, you can do it early".

Nope, no way. You're not going to weasel way yourself into an excuse for blaming me.

Of course, I say that with the benefit of 25 years in the industry. I've seen enough office backstabbing happen around me, and sometimes to me, to not have a sixth sense about it.

Hallowed Bugtraq infosec list killed then resurrected over the weekend: We heard your feedback, says Accenture

"the CISA recommends [installing] ad blockers to avoid malicious ad injections"

Oooh, burn. So, what extensions does Chrome have that manages ad blocking ?

Let me see : uBlock Origin is not available, searching for "ad blocker" returns No Result Found, no, you only have Easy Ad Blocker which, curiously, finds that it has to override my searh settings to "eaburl.com".

I don't think so.

Xiaomi hit by US sanctions: Can't list on stock exchanges and investors can't invest

"The hardware it makes does go into the backbone of a critical resource, and if someone could disrupt, intercept, or disable that resource, there would be big problems. "

I'm sorry, are you talking about Cisco ?

Or maybe Netgear ? No, not Netgear - they disrupt themselves already, no need to meddle.

The fact of the matter is that there is no argument against Huawei that could not be made against any other provider as far as security is concerned.

And don't get me started on the "secret backdoor" or "modified mainboards" bullshit that is clearly a lie, plain and simple.

If there had been any shred of proof, do you really think Washington wouldn't have it plastered all over the Web and on billboards along the highway ?

It's a lie, fabricated to support a desperate effort to curb Huawei and give a chance to US companies in the 5G arena - chance they do not really deserve if the market is supposed to determine things.

But the US has form in fabricating lies to further its own goals (WMDs in Irak, anyone ?).

Signal boost: Secure chat app is wobbly at the moment. Not surprising after gaining 30m+ users in a week, though

Moxie Marlinspike is part of Signal ?

Say no more, I'm in.

Epic Games files competition lawsuit against Google in the UK over Fortnite's ejection from Play Store

Folks will always complain, that's a fact.

But complaining would be a lot more difficult if the fee was 15%. I personally feel that 10% should be largely enough for a Store that resells the same string of bytes indefinitely without having had to do any work to create said bytes.

Comparing to a brick-and-mortar store is not realistic. Those stores generally need to stock items before they can sell them. They need employees who are alert for shoplifters in addition to serving customers. The cost of running any store is higher than the cost of having a server that sells the same app again and again and again on demand, 24/7 and without any shoplifters.