Posts by Pascal Monett

My bad! So you're saying that redacting an on-screen PDF with Tipp-Ex won't work?

"it's only simple when you know how to do it"

How true.

Big data: Study suggests even a moderate gambling habit is linked to increased mortality and other bad stuff

"the study is silent on these factors"

Well, if the data has been properly anonymized I do not fin dit surprising that socio-economic class is not in the analysis.

Gambling is certainly an activity tainted with reproach, but, just like tobacco, that doesn't keep every government from benefitting from it by allowing it and taxing it.

Of course, you cannot forbid gambling because, if you do, you'll just get criminal gambling centers run by thugs. So it makes sense that the government has a hand in ensuring that, at least, the gambling is done fairly.

You also have casinos, where gambling is authorized and, hopefully, the casinos are regularly audited.

But, just like prostitution, gambling is not going away.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

I got a wierd call one evening

It was the very evening of my last day on a contract in a large Luxembourg company. The contract had been slightly difficult because, on my first day, six months before, I quickly assessed that the IT manager's right-hand man had something against me and was not shy of being clear on that point.

Well, I didn't need to work with him, so it didn't bother me much. I learned the hard way that you don't need to work with someone to be bothered by them - especially when they work above your glass cieling.

Suffice it to say that I was not sorry to see the end of that contract. Then I got the call, which went something like this :

Caller : "Hi, it's me. Um, we've had a problem with the database you were working on, would you happen to have a backup of the code ?" <cue antennas starting to quiver>

Me : " Hi. What happened ?"

Caller : "Well the server crashed and, when it came back up, that db was corrupted. We need your backup."

Me : "I'm sure I have a local copy on the desktop of my account."

Caller : "Yeah, but Security was quick to erase that before we could assess the problem."

Me : "Well, there's the backup of my account. Surely you can restore that."

Caller : "Well, no, there is an unplanned maintenance on the backup server - we can't use it. We really need your copy." <ok, this stinks now>

Me : "I'm terribly sorry, but I would remind you that the NDA I signed specifically forbids me from taking any code from your premises. I have no backup copy. You're going to have to wait for the backup server's unplanned maintenance to end."

Then I hung up. The caller had been a guy I worked with, who had generally been nice to me - or so I thought.

This had obviously been an attempt to frame me for doing something that I definitely should not (and didn't). Had I been stupid enough to take the code, and even more stupid enough to admit to it, I would have undoubtedly found myself in very hot legal water, and possibly the end of my budding career.

This event taught me two things early on : 1) never trust anyone when someone high up doesn't like you, and 2) always stick to the rules.

Useful lessons.

That was very stupid from the security company, and it could have landed them in court.

An ex-employee has no authority to be on company premises after hours - certainly not when an alarm had been tripped.

They could have unwittingly been setting you up - or wittingly.

In any case, refusal was the only appropriate answer.

Japan’s COVID-19 contact-tracing app hasn't warned users of encounters with carriers since September

Re: Info request

Can't remember reading anything positive about them anywhere.

Except maybe Taiwan, where it was made mandatory and will now become a tool for their local Big Brother. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

“We are proud of our 2020 election coverage ..."

I have no doubt that you are very proud of having relentlessly lied about everything in your blind obedience to the GOP and it's values that date from the days of slavery.

The amount of lies and false information made up to prop up those lies is completely staggering. You did a very good job, really. 60 lawsuits filed and all of them lost, what a record.

Unfortunately for you, all of that pile of trash is public information, you will have no chance refuting it, nor will you be able to brush it away by saying that it was satire.

You're going to be in front of a judge this time, and judges are not well known for appreciating being taken for fools.

I hope Fox News will find the bill very heavy, and I hope that those three pundits will get what's coming to them as well.

It is high time Fox News begins to understand that they are not immune, and are accountable for what they say.

Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit used by police

"the program's source code is a trade secret"

How can they claim that about DNA testing ?

It's a scientific process, there's nothing secret about it.

Also, why not accept NDA's for the people who review the code ? I think that's fair. But there's no need to put a monetary charge on it. You leak, you get caught, you're guilty and risk a sizeable fine anyway. Especially in the USA, where the company could scream bloody murder and ask for many, many millions.

How do you fix a problem like open-source security? Google has an idea, though constraints may not go down well

Leave the FOSS developers alone, Google.

You say yourself that you have a private repo for all the stuff you link to.

You give up the true solution, and ignore it because you want something that is easier for yourself.

I think the real solution is that companies that use FOSS libraries should all have their private repos, and control what it is they put into their production servers.

If SolarWinds123 had done that, they would have spotted that there was a change in a module, checked the change, analyzed what was going on, and pulled the whistle on the issue.

I see no need to try and impose an administrative structure with external checks and balances on people who do their work for free.

I see a great need to impose private repo management on all those paid developers who just link to a library on Git and think that their job is done.

I do not recall that it is forbidden to do proprietary software on Linux, just as it is perfectly possible to do FOSS on Windows.

Of course, if you do go proprietary on Linux, then you have to go all the way and build your own library stack, because woes to the guy who uses open libraries to make his proprietary software.

If it's convenient, then it's not secure.

That's the problem with security : it's necessary, but it's a bloody nuisance.

UK's Superfast Broadband programme delivered value for money, says report, just don't ask about rural deployments

"only five contracts have been terminated"

Five contracts, by the same local authority to the same provider, terminated for the same reason.

Um, after the third time, wouldn't it have been an idea to look for another provider ?

Of course, when you're living with the cows, you don't always have the choice.

If you really must have Edge on your Apple M1 silicon, there's a compatible stable build for Microsoft's browser

"version 90.0.782.0"

Could someone please explain to me how we got to the point where softwere version numbers are rivalling with asteroid names for incomprehensibility ?

Version 90, okay, got it. Point zero I would guess means that it is not an official version (since the article plainly states it is a dev version), fine. Point 782 - wow, how many dev versions do you need to get things right ? This has to be developed using Agile.

This I could understand, but what the hell is the last Point zero for ?

Microsoft backs Australia’s pay-for-news plan, risks massive blowback over a lousy $3bn and change

Re: Putting an advert for LibreOffice on the Google homepage for a month or two

I'm not sure that would work. A few years ago now, I had the opportunity to help set up a small education center. Of course, they were strapped for cash and of course, they needed word processor and speadsheet stuff, but didn't have the money for MS Office.

I told them about LibreOffice and, with their enthusiastic approval, installed it for them.

A week later I learned they were all working on Word and Excel with an unregistered licence. Apparently, they did not find LibreOffice user-friendly enough.

I suspect that they all worked on pirated copies of MS Office on their home computers, and were unwilling to go through the feeble effort to learn something slightly different on their work computers.

I think that is the mentality of a lot of people today. Least effort.

The only use for Bing is to find the link to download Firefox, or eventually Chrome.

Then you use StartPage, or eventually DuckDuckGo to do your searches.

Location tracking report: X-Mode SDK use much more widespread than first thought

Why ?

"Google [requires] apps that scan for Bluetooth devices also to have access to full Location Services, and that Google’s Location Services have to be running "

What is the technical justification for that ?

If I activate mobile data and call on Google Maps, I expect to get a request for location data, and if I'm on Google Maps on my phone, it's most probably because I'm looking to get somewhere, so I will activate location data. It is useful to me to be located so I know where to go.

There is absolutely zero use to me to be located if I'm using headphones. I'm listening to music - where I am is none of your damn business.

Rubbish software security patches responsible for a quarter of zero-days last year

I definitely agree, but we all know why this has come to pass : the availability of the Internet.

As much as I simply cannot do without it these days, back when it was barely available with a 56K modem, software makers had to get it right out of the door, because patching was inconcievable. You would have had to create tens of thousands of floppies, make deals with computing magazine vendors and publish that you had a patch for your product. The cost alone would have been enough to make beancounters faint.

No, back in the day, you got it right before getting it out. But today, we don't need to do that any more. We get it just about right and ship it, secure in the notion that, if somebody happens on an issue, well, we'll post a patch and all will be well.

What is worse is that patching is apparently become a shoddy process as well. The article states :

So he analyzed the patch and found it was incomplete – it addressed one way of exploiting the bug but not another. So that led to CVE-2020-6883 and another patch. But that patch caused other problems, so an updated patch was issued

The coder patched the problem he was submitted, he did not analyze the issue in its entirety. Then he had to patch the other part, and screwed that up so he had to re-patch. Three patches for the same thing. That is shoddy programming, because we can.

In Rust we trust: Shoring up Apache, ISRG ditches C, turns to wunderkind lang for new TLS crypto module

I knew it

"We currently live in a world where deploying a few million lines of C code on a network edge to handle requests is standard practice, despite all of the evidence we have that such behavior is unsafe "

I knew it. This is hacker heaven waiting to happen.

There's no 'I' in Teams so Microsoft issues 6-month warning for laggards still on Skype for Business Online

Re: Kill it now

Dear $deity, am I going to be driven to regret Skype ?

Nooooooooooo !

Going underground with Scaleway's Apple M1-as-a-Service: Mac Minis descend into Paris nuclear bunker

All very impressive, to be sure, but your mountain doesn't have river flowing over it, now does it ?

So how does that compare ?

You want an impressive underground bunker ? Check out NORAD.

Slack fingers AWS auto-scaling failure in January outage postmortem

"it is a matter of balancing different risks and finding the best compromise"

We're still at the stage where we are finding out what works. Slacks' downtime is proof that all the kinks are not ironed out yet, and proof that engineers haven't thought of everything.

At least, I expect a complete log review and meetings to amend the processes that are in place.

We'll see what happens next year.

Death Becomes It: Who put the Blue in the Blue Screen of Death?

Only too true. I resintalled that bastard over 300 times - I know, I counted.

When XP came along, what a relief ! Finally a system that could last a week without borking itself !

Met Office tenders for £30m data science deals to build 'future of operational meteorology'

"in the middle of executing a data visualisation strategy"

Wow. I reached for my bullshit bingo card on reading that. Then I found machine learning, and The Cloud(TM).

I missed blockchain though, so no bingo for me.

Spanish banished: Google Chrome to snub Camerfirma for lax cert management

Re: Removing the CA will start a lot of fireworks in Italy, I guess

Good.

Security is not a hobby, it's a job. You do it right, or you get fired.

Nominet boardroom battle may already be over as campaign to oust management hits critical milestone

"90 per cent of the membership is disengaged and rarely, if ever, expresses a view"

Well there's your problem. A Byzantine voting structure and obtuse rules and you convince the small guys to not bother. Then you buddy up to the few who have actual influence and you spend years influencing things to your fancy. All is well.

Until you end up having done a 180° on your madate and somebody wakes up and makes a fuss. And you're so busy burning Rome that you can't even hear the messengers that are clamoring for you attention.

Beheading. It's the only solution.

A new management is best - the existing one has proven its incompetence.

Virtual cycling service bans riders for doping – doping their data, that is

Re: it is for some a good way to get some social contacts

And how much social contact do you have riding your bike in your living room (garage/whatever) ?

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

The compatibility list

Having a compatibility list is perfectly understandable and acceptable, forcing customers to choose one type of drive is not.

Synology is not in the business of making drives. It can most definitely say which drives are preferable, but it is not credible when it states that only "its" drives are acceptable.

A compatibility list is clear - you purchase an element of the list and you can expect proper performance and reliability. You purchase outside the list and you're on your own. We know the rules.

Synology has a deal with Toshiba, fine. Point us to that fact and wax lyrical about how that specific range of Toshiba drives are the best, fine. Don't put your name on it and pretend that they're the only ones that work.

You're not a disk maker. Stop pretending you are.

Accused of underpaying or snubbing women and Asian techies, Google spends pocket change to make it all go away

Re: being too trusting of the unknown could get you killed

Newsflash : it can still get you killed.

Especially if you're a teenage girl hitchiking a ride.

Chrome 89 beta: Google presses on with 'advanced hardware interactions' that Mozilla, Apple see as harmful

"a single Share button that calls the operating system's sharing feature"

What ? They've pushed that bull to the OS level ?

Today's operating systems are turning into everything-and-the-kitchen-sink levels of madness.

Looking forward to the day where I can have a toaster service to command my IoT toaster and set the darkness on the bread. Not.

Ransomware attack takes out UK Research and Innovation's Brussels networking office

Well done

Being the subject of an attack is one thing, being able to shrug it off and resume functioning without either having lost important data or paying the miscreants is, unfortunately, another thing entirely.

Well done to UKRI, who has apparently been some of the too rare institutions that had proper backup plans and procedures, and was capable of implementing them quickly.

Let's just hope that they've found the entry point, and will do what is required to plug the hole so that the miscreants have to find another way in.

Microsoft's Extensible Storage Engine (JET Blue) source code arrives on GitHub – sadly comments not included

"Microsoft Access shipped"

You could have stopped there, the damage was already done.

£30m in contracts awarded in Post Office's £357m ATM overhaul

"decommission 600 existing ATMs it said were little used"

Oh, so the small amount of electricity and maintenance on an ATM is more important than its usage ?

I'm guessing that 600 less ATMs is going to inconvenience a fair amount of people. How are they going to be able to get some cash then ? Drive another 20km to some bank teller and wait in line ?

Honestly, what is the cost of maintaining an ATM and where do you draw the line on its usefulness ?

NASA to have another go at firing Space Launch System engines because just over a minute of data won't cut it

"will put further pressure on the already slim chance of a landing in 2024"

I think we can scrap that already, unless some miracle happens.

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

"killed off competing efforts such as DEC Alpha"

And that is a bloody shame.

Sopra Steria wins Highways England National Traffic Information Service deal after £8m falls off contract value

What ?

"under-used traffic data sources, including automatic number-plate recognition "

Automatic number-plate recognition is under-used ?

So there are no more speeding tickets ? I don't think so.

Missing GOV.UK web link potentially cost taxpayers £50m as civil servants are forced to shuffle paper forms

Re: just accept that mistakes happen

What competition ? How many private companies were bidding to not include that link ?

This has nothing to do with competition and everything to do with the higher-ups being incapable of having a proper view of what it is they are supposed to be doing.

And 700K users is no small number. Many, many websites would kill to have that level of traffic.

Momentum builds behind campaign to fire Nominet CEO, board – though success still far from certain

"could wreak havoc on the operations of the company"

Havoc has already been wreaked. Nominet is no longer fulfilling its office, it is only filling some people's coffers.

Beheading is fitting.

It must be quite galling for the person who created Nominet, Ivan Pope (hell of a name), to see what a prostitute his creation has become.

I wholeheartedly support this move, and I'm not even concerned.

A not-for-profit should never be hell bent on making profits.

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Re: Lies

Thank you for that post.

I have to say, I do not remember ever needing to check that my laptop's power cable was compatible with EU or UK power.

Of course, I know that a 110V power supply is going to die a quick death if you plug it into a 220V mains, but the cable ? It doesn't care.

So I really don't get that the cable is the cause of the whiteboard's problem. There has to be some other reason - maybe the cable was faulty, had a kink in it or something.

But I'm convinced that a cable that can handle 110V is not going to have much of a problem handling 220V. They don't make the metal wire thinner.

Re: also I still don't get what advantages 110v has

Your comment prompted me to search a bit, and I found this article which has a sentence that can resume the issue :

The Pearl Street Station also provided DC at 110 V, considered to be a "safe" voltage for consumers, beginning September 4, 1882.

One has to admit that it is the United States that pioneered electrical distribution, based on the work of that guy who electrocuted elephants to cast doubts on AC, Thomas Edison. But then, it would appear that a Berlin company decided, in 1899, to switch to 220V because, apparently, distributing electricity at that voltage was cheaper and more efficient.

Europe switched, the rest of the world largely followed, and here we are now.

IKEA China and ASUS team on gaming products, resist urge to call them FRÄG

superior products that “increase performance”

A desk, a cup holder, a mug. The mug could eventually increase performance, but that will depend on what you pour into it.

The only thing that might be remotely interesting is the motorized table. If you can switch from sitting to standing and back, then that might be something worth having. Maybe.

How embarrassing: Xiaomi and Motorola show up to high school prom both wearing remote-charging tech

Dear. God.

So, we have the abomination that is wireless charging, and now they want to have us subject ourselves to a radiation emittor 24/7 on the off-chance that our mobile phone needs its battery topped off.

Please continue to reference that article on how iffy wireless charging is. Someone has to put a stop to this madness, which has just gotten worse.

Is remote charging more inefficient ? I say it bloody well has to be. Wireless charging has you at least going to the effort of placing your blower on a pad (God that must be exhausting), remote wireless means that the charging thingy is emitting energy in a sphere. I'm impressed that anyone should imagine beam-forming capabilities in a sub-€1000 charger, but I personally doubt there's going to be a beam of any sort. That darn thing is just going to blast power in all directions, and everyone and everything will be subject to it.

I wonder how cats and dogs are going to react to that. I wonder how fish in aquarium are going to appreciate their water heating up.

Please stop the madness. Ban wireless charging now.

Nominet faces showdown with British internet industry: Extraordinary vote called to oust CEO, board members

Re: Too little, too late.

And that axe is far overdue.

He "welcoms dialogue" ? Hypocrite. If you welcom dialogue, you don't shut down the forum that actually permits dialogue, even if said dialogue is telling you that people are not happy with your decisions.

I am very gald to see that there is, finally, a way to curb the over-enthusiastic reign of assholes who think they can use any structure to make themselves more money, without any regard to what the structure is supposed to do in the first place.

Somebody oust the board at ICANN, please.

Remember life on Venus? One of the telescopes had 'an undesirable side effect' that could kill off the whole idea

Science is difficult.

Google QUIC-ly left privacy behind in its quest for a speedier internet, boffins find

Wait a minute

"QUIC attack accuracy can reach about 95 per cent with only 40 packets and Simple features, compared to about 60 per cent attack accuracy for HTTPS "

So, the takeaway from this is that HTTPS has a 60% chance of revealing what you're doing, and QUIC is worse than that.

Bad news all around.

Transcribe-my-thoughts app would prevent everyone knowing what I actually said during meetings

It's a business meeting

Fuck the possibility of denial.

Personally, I don't take minutes, but when the meeting is almost done, I specify aloud what I believe the conclusion of the meeting is. Anyone who disagrees can set me right at that time.

If no one does, then I'm right.

Whatever the issue, the first thing I do after a meeting is send a mail to all the participants where I state what decisions were taken. If it takes someone two months to disagree, well tough cookies.

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

Re: 2^16

Shh.

Marketing doesn't understand exponents. They only understand bonuses.

Re: 01/26/2004 would have been cleared

Personally, I prefer the ISO standard of 2021/12/31.

We need to ditch local stupidity and get with the program.

I have wasted way too many days of my life programming around every one else's petty preferences.

Did you know that there are some monsters who write their dates as 12.31.2021 ?

Monsters.

Microsoft's Gooseberry is a dish best served really, really cold: Progress made on silicon quantum computing

On a side note : research refrigerator

Holy cow : $5000 for a fridge ?

What's so special about them ?

My fridge keeps my food at 7°C just fine, thank you, and it only cost me €900.

Google allows 15 more nations to offer gambling in the Play store

"such apps must be free"

Why ?

Where is the law that says that ?

I googled this, and I found many articles that say the exact same thing, but none of them linked to the legal document that justified it.

Now, don't get me wrong, but the fact that gambling is legal somewhere doesn't imply that the app should be free. It should, on the other hand, be just, and the chances to win should be fair. In other words, apps should be verified to not be specifically programmed to cheat you out of your money.

But free ? Both Apple and Google specify so on their Store guidelines, but that does not make it a law.

So, why ?

Biden administration pauses ban on Chinese tech companies suspected of military entanglements

Re: Too late

For sure, Trump has brilliantly forced Chinese companies to understand that they need their own tools and market stores.

The United States will pay that position dearly in the years to come.

Robinhood plays Sheriff of Nottingham as it pauses GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry etc stock sales, gets sued

Re: this time around it was different so it had to be outlawed ?

Well obviously.

You can't have the rich losing money, now can you ?