Posts by Pascal Monett

One of the world's most prominent distributed ledger projects has been pushed back by a year

Re: Scalability not in the specification?

Yeah, that caught me as well.

A Stock Exchange already handles billions of transactions per day. How is it that they didn't have enough scalability in the specs already ?

Re: Security by obscurity?

Yes it does.

Do you know the location of the various US fleets ? China and Russia may know of one or two, but they don't know all the them. Those they do not know are secure.

Do you know the location of CIA safehouses in the world ? Neither does anyone else. They are secure, until the CIA thinks they're not and decommission them to create one somewhere else.

Security through obscurity works very well, just not on the Internet. At least, not if the target is interesting enough. I totally agree with the idea that the Itanium is not interesting for hackers.

That, plus the fact that the Stock Exchange is the most watched, audited and controlled place in the world - due to the overpowering flow of money - means that any hacking attempt will likely be flagged, traced and blocked faster than you can blink. On top of that, police authorities will treat it as a red alert priority one, putting every relevant asset on the case.

No, neither Russia nor China would be daft enough to mount an attack against any Stock Exchange, and no mere lone blackhat would dare try. So the fact that they're running Itanium is actually a very secondary concern.

WeChat wins right to stay in US app stores for at least a couple more months as court denies US govt appeal

“demand [..] countries cease and desist from conducting cyberespionage against our companies”

Start by demanding that Facebook be actually transparent about what ads it shows to which people.

And throw The Zuck in jail if he doesn't comply. It is high time somebody kicked him down a notch - or ten.

Facebook tells academics to stop monitoring its political ads for any rule-breaking.... on privacy grounds

"the browser plugin scrapes information in violation of our terms"

Your terms do not govern my right of using my browser however I feel like using it.

This is just The Zuck in panic mode whenever someone else is controlling "his" information - especially when it doesn't make him look good (when did that ever happen ?).

Oculus owners told not only to get Facebook accounts, purchases will be wiped if they ever leave social network

"a wave of anger among Oculus users"

I felt that wave the minute I read that The Zuck was buying Oculous. It was at that moment that the product died for me, and that made me angry because it was promising at the time.

The problem is that you never signed an actual contract. It's the miracle of the Internet and Terms of Service that you automatically accept when you use the site. If the terms change, which they definitely can, then it is up to you to not use the site if you don't agree.

Generally, if a website actually comes up with something I do not agree with, I will indeed no longer use the site (eh, LinkedIn ?). However, one must admit that Facebook has the easy upper hand here, because of the amount of people who basically have it connected intravenously.

So The Zuck just goes and makes a monopolistic dick move, because he can.

I really would like to see a class action lawsuit on that, but I don't see that you can complain legally.

Your IT department should behave like a jellyfish, says Gartner

"coordinated action without central brain"

Impossible. The budget must remain under control at all times, at that means control from the top. You can't have dozens of managers spending money just because it's justified, that would be madness.

President Trump's H-1B visa crackdown wiped $100bn off market value of America's largest corps, top study finds

"Putting up a 'not welcome' sign [..] won’t help our country"

No it won't, but it will please the white supremacist Nazi sympathizers who think that they are above the fray and don't want to see any people of any shade other than dead fish.

Except for those who carry the trash and mop the floors, of course.

However, it would seem that such policies will, in the end, be damaging to their lofty position as well.

So go for it. Continue bleeding economic value because you aren't intelligent enough to understand that you need everyone, not just masters and slaves, and everyone, including those 'brown people', need to have a valid chance to make it big, not just the dead fish color population.

Hackers rummaged about in Finnish psychotherapy clinic – now patients extorted with public data dump threats

"A crisis hotline was made available for victims [..] to access support and therapy"

Pray tell, are they going to be directed to the same clinic that got them in this mess in the first place ?

SAP stock price crashes 23%, €28bn wiped out as firm warns of Klein(er) revenues, profits ahead due to COVID-19

Fear not

I'm sure the Board will find a reason to allocate itself its usual XMas bonuses.

Uber drivers take ride biz to European court over 'Kafkaesque' algorithmic firings by Mastermind code

"irregular trips"

How exactly do you make an irregular trip ? Do you go from point A to point B.2 instead of C ?

What does Uber know about how people react on the spur of the moment, such as seeing something and saying "oh, just stop me here" ?

I'm guessing that Uber demands that the driver bring the customer from the recorded starting point to the recorded destination, and customer satisfaction be damned. You said you wanted to go to Downton Abbey, and that's where you'll end up, even if your daughter called you in the middle of the trip and tearfully asked you to go pick her up.

Microsoft drives users to the Edge: Internet Explorer to redirect to Chromium-based browser in November

"There are workarounds"

Yeah, it's called Firefox, with NoScript and Ublock Origin.

Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope

So, to get 1 liter of water you need to process 3 cubic meters of regolith

That does not sound like it will be easy to maintain human life. Better to set up shop on the south pole, where there is apparently many tons of frozen ice to deal with.

QUIC! IETF sets November deadline for last comments on TCP-killer spawned by Google and Cloudflare

I don't get it

"makes it possible for a client and server that have never connected to send data without any round trips between the devices "

So the server never gets the request from the client but it knows what to send where ? QUIC is using magic divination ?

There is obviously a notion that I'm missing here, but it seems to me that the protocol used does not prevent the request from needing to get to the server before the server can respond to it and that sounds like a round trip to me. I'm sure they know what they're doing, but my basic understanding of networking is insufficient for me to grasp the intended meaning of those words.

RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music

Awesome tip !

Thanks to you, I have now learned how to permanently get rid of that logon crap.

Thank you so much !

Ublock Origin is already great, but now it is on par with NoScript. An indispensable tool to protect my security and privacy.

Thank you Ublock Origin !

Got a problem with trust in AI? Just add blockchain, Forrester urges. Then bust out the holographic meetings. Welcome to the future

Yet another desperate attempt to find a use for blockchain

It's been a bit more than a decade now that someone finally found a use for blockchain, and the buzzword bingo has had it on the list since.

Blockchain here, blockchain there, lots of mouthy discourse and absolutely zero achievements.

Now they want to foist it on the statistical analysis machines, because of course they do. Astonishing they didn't think of it before.

Oh and, sure, please quadruple your budgets for the year after the worst economic period since 1929 and 2008 put together. Yeah, we'll get right on it.

Forrester. Should be nuked from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Today's tech giants won't be as naive as I was in DoJ dealings, says former Microsoft chief Bill Gates

Well, at least a hammer can be quite satisfying, right ?

Love Minecraft: Java? You'll have to learn to love your Microsoft account as well – it will be required next year

"security should be better with multi-factor authentication"

I'm sorry, we're talking about Minecraft. This is not a platform that enables bitcoin mining, or personal detail stealing.

It's a game. A small, block world game.

You're telling me that, all of sudden, I need Fort Knox protection to mine cobblestone ?

Fuck off.

NHS awards £500m everything-and-the-kitchen-sink framework to a long list of resellers

Sopra Steria ?

Another failure in the making, then.

Oh, but it's the NHS. Carry on, then.

Developer survey: C# losing ground to JavaScript, PHP and Java for cloud apps, still big in gaming

I appreciate any support given to Lotus Notes development, but pairing Notes with Access indicates that you don't understand how one of the two work.

It's not because we call it a database that it is the same thing on either platform.

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

Actually I would take Meg Whitman against the OHSG any day.

Obviously, I'd prefer someone of Obama's caliber, but hey, you take what you can get.

Iran sent threatening pro-Trump emails to American Democrats, Russia close behind, says US intelligence

Oh really ?

"We’re not going to tolerate foreign interference in our elections or any criminal activity that threatens the sanctity of your vote or undermines public confidence in the outcome of the election "

You might want to have a word with OHSG currently lounging his fat ass in the Oval Office.

He's been undermining public confidence in the outcome of the election since he understood that he can't win it.

Dulux feel lucky, punk? Samsung wades into paint world with interior emulsions designed to 'complement' your, er, TV

What ?

No link ?

Bitcoin value jumps as PayPal says it will accept cryptocurrencies... once it has the kinks worked out

Only one good thing to come from this

"allow its users to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies "

That is one thing that could finally wipe the slate clean of all the criminals and incompetents that are holding this market today.

I am expecting PayPal to give serious thought to security and transaction control in this wallet implementation, so that hacking them will become extremely difficult, if not impossible. That, plus the fact that PayPal cannot simply leave with the cash, means that other exchanges of dubious honesty (ie all of them, at the moment) will see a market downturn in the number of idiots customers trusting them with their funny money.

Also, I expect PayPal to not put extortionate costs on transactions, meaning acquiring and spending funny money will become more normal, like with any other debit card.

So I welcome this move from PayPal. Not that I'm going to embark on a journey into funny money, but because I view this as the taming of the shrew. Things are going to calm down on the funny money shenanigans and that can only be a Good Thing (TM).

We know there are a lot of, er, distractions right now but NASA's got some sweet video of its asteroid rubble raiser

The probe is 322 million kilometers away. It's shielding, I think, is more for protecting the probe's electronics than for protecting regolith that has been bombarded by radiation from our Sun and from cosmic rays of all sorts for billions of years.

Oh Mi: Xiaomi shows off 80W wireless charging, claims battery fully fat again in under 20 minutes

Kill wireless charging, please

I don't care that the hipsters find it cool. Wireless charging is just one more drop in the ocean of problems that is climate change.

Never have we found a worse way to waste electricity for the sake of convenience. Get your ass off the couch and plug that sucker in. You have limbs, you need the exercise.

Microsoft unleashes production-ready Edge Runtime. WebView2: This time it's Chromium

Re: Arrgh

Recently I had to get my Win 7/64 machine to update Defender, so I allowed the service again.

When the update was finished and the PC rebooted, I went to shut down Windows Update, as per usual. Except now, I can't. Borkzilla has decided that me, lowly user, is not qualified to disable Windows Update, even though Borkzilla is no longer bothering to update my version.

You think you know what's best for me, Borkzilla ? So do I. It's called Linux.

God I can't wait to retire to get rid of this shit.

Remember insider threat? Old news now. Focus on malware detection, says EU infosec agency

"combining these advances with artificial intelligence and machine learning"

I doubt that anyone will be able to create machine learning around software and hardware vulnerabilities. The problem with doing that is that you have to start by teaching the statistical analysis machine (or SAM) what a vulnerability is. It would likely be very tricky to create a database of vulnerabilities that a SAM could analyze.

Okay, I agree that lack of input control is often a gateway to gaining control of a computer, but honestly I think it is nigh impossible to teach a machine to react with the experience of a seasoned, state-level blackhat.

It is not AI, it's just statistics, and I don't think we can analyze vulnerabilities via statistics.

NASA hires Nokia to build first 4G network on the Moon as part of plan to boldly go back to lunar surface by 2024

So now they want lunar wifi

There seems to be a lot of hubbub going on about the Moon all of a sudden. Where's the money to put all that stuff in rockets to get it there ?

There is no real political will to go back to the Moon. There is scientific will, but scientists don't have any money.

Then you have Musk, be he wants to go to Mars, not the Moon.

I don't see any of that stuff being used on the Moon before a looong time.

IBM still not offering future revenue guidance, suffers yet another quarter of falling sales

Much more automation, at IBM ?

I highly doubt that that will result in "even higher service delivery excellence".

If that automation is of the same kind as their website design for partners, it will just drag customers even deeper into the IBM rabbit role.

And yet IBM still makes $53 billion a year. Must be doing something right, but I can't imagine what.

Cisco warns VMware vCenter bug puts hyperconverged tin in ‘unrecoverable’ state

Well Cisco is certainly being proactive about it

If, however, they're only sending emails to existing customers, then there are a number of potential new customers that might get caught.

Except, of course, for the fact that the bug is rather hard to encounter since the buggy software is not compatible with Hyperflex in the first place, so I'd guess it's a bit difficult to encounter it.

Feels a bit like a case of headless chicken.

We need a chicken icon.

China passes Tik for Tok export ban law

Well America has set such a great example, why not follow it ?

Thailand calls on telcos and ISPs to censor information about pro-democracy protests

"made it an offence to take a selfie at protest events"

Wow, a government that feels threatened by selfies.

Not a very good indicator of stability or justice.

Gamers are replacing Bing Maps objects in Microsoft Flight Simulator with rips from Google Earth

Re: I think the key point is that you CAN import from elsewhere

If I were an avid Flight Simulator player, I might move along with you.

As it stands, I'll let you move to ambivalence while I continue gloating about how Bing is once again only used to find Google.

Samsung aims boot at Apple's decision not to bundle a charger in with the iPhone 12, foot ends up in mouth

It is definitely a step in the right direction since it means that mobile phones will have to be compliant with a single model of charger, and that is a Good Thing (TM).

I have a drawer full of chargers with connectors of every kind imaginable (and probably some unimaginable ones). The day I can throw that into the recycling bin and replace it all with one or two truly universal chargers is a day I am looking forward to.

Software billionaire accused of hiding $2bn in income from IRS – potentially the largest tax scam in US history

he "created and used a proprietary, encrypted email system"

His employees shredded incriminating evidence, destroyed electronic media, and yet, with all these precautions, the IRS still knows what's in the emails, the codenames of the accomplices and probably much, much more.

Next time the FBI wants to crack an iPhone, instead of once again whining publicly for Apple to put in a backdoor, I think it should call the IRS for help.

That said, given that every time the FBI has whined about Apple, in the end it still proclaims that it got results without the backdoor, so maybe they already do.

If you can see this headline, you're certainly not reading it on Twitter: All tweets, notifications vanish

"All tweets, notifications vanish"

And nothing of importance was lost

"Nothing to see here,"

Well, it's Twitter. There never was anything to see.

Your web browser running remotely in Cloudflare's cloud. That's it. That's the story

"send you only safe content"

Thanks, but I have NoScript for that.

Don't need no effing cloud.

We bought a knockoff Lego launchpad kit from China for our Saturn V rocket so you don't have to

I have been a LEGO fan since I was born

The greatest set I was ever gifted with was the yellow medieval castle. I have practically an entire trunk load of bricks of every kind, plus the moon set that some parent graciously gifted me before my 10th birthday.

It is impossible to count the hours that I have spent building and tearing things down with all those bricks. Everything could be repurposed, set to another use, and it was always fun.

Now, of course, I'm an old fart and don't really like kneeling for hours any more. But whe, three XMASes ago, I saw my nephew get the Saturn V, I was initially impressed. Of course, on XMas morning, he started about building it. I watched, bemused, as he spent about three hours putting it together. And all the while he did so, I was asking myself : and what else can you make with those specific parts ?

LEGO has changed to a point that I can no longer wish to follow. It used to be that you could use everything in a myriad of ways. Now, parts are so specialized that you can only use them in the set they were intended for.

That's a shame.

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

"We were caught quite off guard"

Yes, you obviously were. You are also apparently caught off guard by the notion of (gasp) actually updating your software.

I use LibreOffice, because for what I need to do, it fits the bill and, at a cost of zero, that bill works fine for me. I also view the frequent updates as a Good Thing (TM).

That said, I also view LibreOffice as a pale copy of what Office 95 would give me if I could still get it working today. Don't get me wrong, I respect the work that has been and still is being put in LibreOffice, but a contender to Microsoft Office it is not.

To read that OpenOffice hasn't had an update in 6 years makes me shudder to think of the state of things. Multiplan, anyone ? Word 4 ?

LibreOffice is obviously the future. Go LibreOffice.

Remember when Zoom was rumbled for lousy crypto? Six months later it says end-to-end is ready

Good on the method, but bad implementation

The encryption should be automatic and transparent. There is no reason to require user opt-in in this case, nor is there any reason not to activate it all the time automatically.

But at least this is progress.

Good news: Boffins have finally built room-temperature superconductors. Bad news: You'll need a laser, a diamond anvil, and a lot of pressure

What a great discovery

We have now replaced the temperature problem with a pressure problem. Instead of cooling a mile of cable with liquid hydrogen (or whatever it is they use), we'll have to maintain that mile of cable under millions of atmospheres of pressure while zapping it with lasers.

I really don't see how this improves the situation.

Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts

Oracle ? Generous ?

Reminds me of another generous man who said "I am changing the terms of the deal. Pray I don't change them again."

Obvious icon is obvious.

Elizabeth Holmes' plan to avoid her Theranos fraud trial worked out about as well as her useless blood-testing machines

Re: This Case is Only Remarkable because

Oh really ? Because the name Martin Shkreli means nothing to you ?

Comcast’s president of tech falls offline while boasting about how great cable is for connectivity

"There is [..] no way to independently verify"

There doesn't need to be. It doesn't matter what he was using, what matters is that he very publicly shot himself in the foot by not having a reliable connection.

That is on par with Bill Gates' first presentation of Windows 95 that introduced the world to the wonders of the GUI of the future as well as the Blue Screen Of Death in one single presentation.

Years after we detected two neutron stars crashing into each other, we're still picking up X-rays. We don't know why

"the emissions are 100 billion times brighter than those from the Sun"

So they're getting x-rays from a merger that are stupendously bright. Did they point an optical telescope there to see if anything was visible ?

How about infra-red ? If the two neutron stars don't have nuclear fusion, they should certainly be radiating heat like crazy.

Of course, if they've become a black hole, then the source has to come from the jet, but couldn't the jet be visible if it 10,000 billion kilometers long ?

EDIT : after a short search, I found this article that details nicely all the important things about this merger, and there are many. But nothing on the jet.

UK's Cheshire Police tenders for whole new ERP system after Oracle Fusion went live with 'significant deficiency'

"after a troubled launch of Oracle Fusion"

What is it with all these major vendors that botch project after project ? It's at least the third time this year.

I cannot believe that there are so many incompetent project managers getting these high-profile projects. When you have a multi-million dollar (or pound/euro/whatever) project you put someone of experience in charge. The programmers don't necessarily need to be the best, but the project manager does.

Yes, there are clients that don't know what they want, or have internal politics that are murkier than a toilet after beer and tacos night, but that does not explain all these high-level failures coming from companies that have the experience to do better.

UK govt advert encouraging re-skilling for cyber jobs implodes spectacularly

A gerbil can replace Donald Trump.

And the world would be a better place.

UK taxman waves through £168.8m Fujitsu contract because no one else can hold up 30-year-old infrastructure

"awarded Fujitsu a £168.8m contract without competition"

Thank God there are procedures and such to ensure that the Government gets the best deals possible, right ?

Oh, I'm sorry, the Government has decided to bypass the procedures ? How lovely. Just you try bypassing paying your taxes. You'll find the procedures are firmly in place and well respected, I'm sure.

As usual, one rule for them, one rule for us.