Posts by Pascal Monett

US ponders tech export ban on SMIC, China's biggest chipmaker

"SMIC is open to sincere and transparent communication"

Too bad the current US government isn't.

Darknet market's peacemaker sentenced to 11 years in prison

Snowden validated in a court ruling

That is indeed something to celebrate.

China launches and lands its first re-usable spacecraft

One must admit that China is not your average country, is not chatty about what it does and, contrary to the average teenager, does not feel the need to post everything it does to FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram etc.

So we are just now learning that China got its hands on the Space Shuttle design, has been working on recreating it, and has now successfully launched and recovered one of its prototypes.

Wow.

I wonder if they've solved the problems with the protective tiles ?

Apple commits to support human rights - 'We believe in the critical importance of an open society'*

"Apple has a huge influence on people’s freedom of expression globally"

No you don't.

Not when you kowtow to whatever dictatorial demand is made in a sector where you want to make more money.

Do not try to abuse the fact that actual democracies allow you to support freedom of speech without consequence with the fact that you will not enforce said freedom of speech if it cuts into your market share when you're dealing with a repressive regime.

Either you have the balls to put your money where your mouth is, or you shut the fuck up.

Microsoft: We're getting rid of Flash by the end of the year - except you can still use it

"updates that arrive in the summer of 2021"

Heh, heh. I'm on Windows 7. Borkzilla is no longer supporting that version, so I'm immune from Flash updates.

Ah, being obsolete is starting to feel good.

Larry Ellison abruptly pulls rug from under philanthropy foundation after two years to 'focus on COVID-19 fight'

Oh, so now he's focusing on something ?

The difference between Ellison and Gates is that Gates was an opportunist who became a philanthropist who is actually making a difference in this world.

Whereas Ellison is just an asshole who does the minimum for his image but is way more interested in his money.

TCL notices lockdown has made tablet market a thing again, tosses out pair of cheapish 'droid fondleslabs

"loath to fork out for iPads"

Given that Apple counts its guarantee period from the time the thing is on the shelf, and not the date of purchase, you can damn well bet customers are loath to pay the price of a kit that won't be guaranteed for as long as it says on the tin.

'We're not claiming to replace humans,' says Google, but we want to be 'close enough' that you can't tell it's a bot talking

Bollocks

"customers will prefer to use speech interfaces "

Given that we don't have the choice, I really wonder where Google is pulling that notion from.

I don't mind being given a choice between four possibilities, as long as the last one is "TALK TO AN ACTUAL HUMAN BEING" (with a brain, preferably).

I perfectly understand that there are very common issues that can be efficiently solved by pressing button 1, 2 or 3, but if your phone talky thingy is the only choice I have to contact you, then you had damn well better have some human operators for dealing with the edge cases your bunch of stupid managers forgot to plan for.

Taiwan tightens rules around local tech firms sharing tech with China

Remember when people were afraid of the balkanization of the Internet ?

It seems that we are creating the balkanization of industry, and because it's all in the name of National Security, nobody is complaining about it.

Not saying that someone should complain, just observing that nation states are pulling the curtains and closing the shutters more and more.

But since we've always been at war with Eurasia . . .

Cisco mostly silent on when and what it knew about malicious WebEx wipeout

I hate that

I hate it when a company doesn't come clean on what actually happens. It always makes me suspicious about what shenanigans are still going wrong.

This attitude of not disclosing the full truth even after it has become known is despicable and, for me, means that there are many more issues that are just waiting to surface so Switchzilla is keeping its PR to the minimum in a "trust in me" hushed voice (think the serpent in The Jungle Book).

Five Eyes nations start new club for competition regulators and paint target on digital giants

They could add a few more countries

I'm sure France and Germany would love to be part of that club.

On the other hand, I'm also convinced that the USA and the UK would constantly disagree with German suggestions - if this new club is going to be managed the way I think it is : a front for pretending to do something about the Wild West that is the global Internet.

In any case, I hope they have thought of a procedure for adding members. They're going to need one.

Unexpected victory in bagging area: Apple must pay shop workers for time they spend waiting to get frisked

Absolutely correct. And I would wish to add that, if Apple demands that employees clock out before searches, then legally those employees have every right to walk away because they are no longer under Apple control.

You can't have your cake and eat it. If you let your employees clock out, they are gone and you have no right to keep them there for anything.

Snowden was right: US court deems NSA bulk phone-call snooping illegal, possibly unconstitutional, and probably pointless anyway

Great, so NSA slurping back in Snowden's day was illegal

Wonderful to know, nice to see justice being done, etc.

Now, what about the slurping the NSA is doing today ?

Because you don't think this ruling is going to stop it, now do you ?

When low-balled projects go bad: Scottish pensions agency starts £10m procurement to buy the system Capita could not

Re: So...

It's far worse than that.

"The project failure left the SPPA "unable to progress strategic, business and workforce plans as originally intended" and it therefore required an additional revenue budget of £9.8m between 2019/20 and 2022/23, as well as capital allocations of £13.6m "

So it's 6.3 + 2.4 + 9.8 + 13.6 for a grand total of £32.1 million. And Capital paid back £0.7m.

So yeah, get project, fail to deliver, profit from not having to pay back more than a tenth of what it got and impose four times the amount in cost to the organization that was foolish enough to trust it.

One of these days, the British Isles are going to get the message. One of these days.

Any time now, just you wait and see.

Here comes an AI that can predict hurricane strength. Don't worry, NASA made it so it probably actually works

The Earth is a complex system

And we are just beginning to understand how complex it is.

Now seems to be the right time to link to this.

Watch and be amazed. You might learn something.

TCL's latest e-ink tech looks good on paper, but Chinese giant will have to back up extraordinary claims

Looking forward to seeing this in action

Maybe a new generation of laptops could use that. If you can actually watch films on it, the energy savings would be immense for those who send their days reading and writing email.

Technology can be great.

Why cloud costs get out of control: Too much lift and shift, and pricing that is 'screwy and broken'

So now the truth is coming out

"organizations 'make a lot of compromises' "

Oh do they now ? Funny, five years ago going into The Cloud (TM) was accompanied by a chorus of angels playing their harps and chanting "bonus, bonus, 100% uptime and no hassle anymore, bonus".

At least, that's how the marketing played it out.

Now, when The Cloud (TM) is firmly entrenched, we discover that no, it is not easy to manage, yes, it is easy to lose customer data and have data breaches and no, your costs are your problem and, if you don't pay attention all the time, those costs will go up.

In other words, you have to have a Cloud Admin who is overseeing all the company activity and reacting accordingly.

The only difference with a SysAdmin is that a SysAdmin had direct control, knew what was happening where and had the means to shut things down if it came to that.

So we've basically replaced SysAdmins who were in control by CloudAdmins who have to continually check to see if they are in control.

Yay progress.

Everything's falling apart. The Moon is slowly rusting up – and it's probably Earth's fault

"1.5x10^27 oxygen particles [..] annually"

So that's 1.5 followed by 27 zeros which means 1.5 billion billion billion of these particles (why didn't they say molecules ? Is the word not hip any more ?).

And all of that is just the oxygen that our Moon is recovering from being, once a month, in our magnetosphere.

Which means that during the rest of the month, those particles are just streaming off into deep space. This is a world crisis ! Our precious oxygen is venting into space ! Forget the border wall, we need a Space Wall ! It's time to panic !!!!

With a million unwanted .uk domains expiring this week, Nominet again sends punters pushy emails to pay up

"Nominet has been run by former acquisitions and ventures specialist"

Now I get it. Somehow this bottom-feeder with large amounts of cash saw fit to weasel his way into the Board and is now calling the shots as if he was running a capitalist enterprise.

How did his nomination get approved ? And by who ?

They have some explaining to do.

Re: But

The problem is that the person wants another bonus.

Google, Amazon pass on UK Digital Services Tax by hiking ad prices, fees at same rate the government takes

Re: Good

I don't get it ; what exactly are we taking from Google and Amazon ?

In one case, we're being tracked, in the other, we pay for what we order.

I don't see that we're taking anything from them.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... a pair of black holes coalesced resulting in largest gravitational wave we've seen

Yeah, but that doesn't mean we should stop studying it.

You're stuck inside, gaming's getting you through, and you've $1,500 to burn. Check out Nvidia's latest GPUs

Re: Mouth-watering specifications and possibilities

It's not just the PlaySkool interface, it's the ads for "apps", the principle of pushing you to the Store and just the overall feeling that MY computer no longer belongs to me.

But, since I am an avid gamer, and since that card really calls to me, it seems that I will fall to the Dark Side before long.

<sigh>

Mouth-watering specifications and possibilities

But no Windows 7 drivers.

This is going to be a real soul-crusher for me. I want the performance, but I don't want Windows 1 0.

Arrgh !

COVID-19 tracing without an app? There's an iOS and Android update for that

Re: UK IS testing app based upon the Google & Apple system...

So I was right. Initially, UK Gov refused to use the Googapple solution.

It's just that, as every UK Gov IT project ever, they fouled up badly and now are forced to make do.

Re: UK IS testing app based upon the Google & Apple system...

Citation please ?

I do seem to remember that UK Gov specifically refused to use the Google/Apple solution on the basis that it used a decentralized approach, whereas UK Gov, obviously, wanted a centralized approach.

Please point me to the web page that says I'm wrong.

Re: Contact tracing is no substitute for mask wearing

It is not being proposed as such.

It's a package deal. You distance socially, you wear a mask, and if you still get infected (as you likely will at some point), contact tracing is used to ensure that you don't spread it.

This is not a multiple choice area, you use all of it or you don't get the best results.

The countries that have had the least COVID-19 impact are all countries that have implemented confinement, testing and tracing to the fullest extent.

It's not rocket science. The procedures are well known. It just requires political will.

And that's where the cookie crumbles.

Help. The political process is corrupted, full of lies and state-sponsored deep fakes. Now Microsoft's to the rescue

Re: Double check everything

As far as being aware of what you're watching, I completely agree that the questions you ask are good questions and worth it to ensure that you're not being had by a staged video. However, it is obvious that Borkzilla's Video Authenticator will not detect those videos, because they are, technically, real. Only human analysis can detect the fakeness there.

But I disagree when you state that racists militia is crossing state borders on purpose because Trump can pardon them. That Trump will still be there to pardon them when their case comes to court is not guaranteed. On the other hand, they're obviously stupid enough to go and kill people just because they are not of the same color, so maybe they can't actually think that far ahead.

Ugh. The United States is now officially a shithole country.

Samsung supremo Lee Jae-yong indicted for fraud over role in 2015 merger deal that made him heir apparent

Um, honestly, I do think that this is not a situation that is restricted to Korea.

Take any multinational behemoth and I dare you to find one that has not had the possibility of bending the law in its favor.

Google Chrome 85 to block ads that hog power, CPUs, network: Web ads giant will black-hole 0.3% of web ads

Lorem ipsum

It's always fun to see a Lorem ipsum in an article anywhere. Any web developer will understand.

As for controlling ads, I will never rely on Chrome. Good on the article author to mention Brave. I installed that on my Android A3 and have never used anything else since. So good on the page loading, so nice on the bandwidth.

Go Brave !

In the frame with the Great MS Bakeoff: Microsoft sets out plans for Windows windows

What Borkzilla really needs is to understand is that the UI and the OS are two different things.

Linux got that right, why can't Borkzilla ?

Oh, right, legacy.

What rhymes with 'boom' and is veritably raking it in thanks to the coronavirus pandemic?

Growth is a Wall Street mandate. If you do not grow, you stagnate and die. That is the Capitalist bible.

That is also why marketing people are always changing company. They go into a new company with a target they can meet, work to attain and exceed it to get valuable bonuses, then are saddled with a bigger target year after year.

Inevitably, there comes a point when they can't meet the target. Then they change company and the cycle starts over.

From my experience, Cisco Web Meetings is pretty reliable and easy as well.

I installed it because a client wanted it, so I have no idea of the actual security implications, but it has never failed to be a good platform.

Not Half bad: Microsoft back to 16 bits with new storage-saving type in .NET 5

"the total precision was actually 11 bits"

Count on Borkzilla to not actually be capable of clearly specifying how its stuff works.

As promised, Apple will now entertain suggestions from the hoi polloi on how it should run its App Store

On this subject, I will never forgive my French teacher for having mislead me about how wonderful a living language is when I finally understood that a living language is basically defined by people who can't speak it properly.

Latin is dead language, therefor whatever bastardization happened is over and its form is now pure.

French (and English and many others) is, on the other hand, under continuous assault by the ignorant who cannot conjugate properly, who insist on saying "je vais au coiffeur" instead of "je vais chez le coiffeur", etc.

And I love the poster who said that English followed other languages into a dark alley to beat them senseless and steal vocabulary. I've been reading English novels for over 30 years now, and I'm rather shocked by the amount of French terms that I find in today's English novels that are employed in exactly the same sense.

It's bewildering.

A larger share ?

Don't give them any ideas, even sarcastic ones.

Apple does not understand sarcasm.

Facebook rejects Australia's pay-for-news plan, proposes its own idea: How about no more articles at all, sunshine?

Oh I so agree with you.

I am incensed every time I search for a solution to technical issue only to find that some mumbling idiot posted a YouTube video that lasts 10 to 25 minutes, where half of it is him mumbling "um", "eh", "you know" and other completely useless drivel, and about 1 minute actually contains the solution I'm looking for, which would have taken only about 5 minutes to write and 30 seconds to read.

If you want to post a video, at least have the decency to prepare what you're going to say in as efficient a manner possible. Don't just wing it, you're not that good.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a 56-year-old satellite burning up in the sky spotted by sharp school kids

"retired in 1971"

Fell into atmo in 2020.

That gives a pretty clear idea of how long our space junk can continue to pose a problem.

It took that massive piece almost 50 years to get to rentry, imagine how long a simple bolt or screwdriver can last.

Pakistan demands TikTok and YouTube block 'vulgar' content

Block 'vulgar' content

Look, I don't like vulgarity very much. I prefer Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, personally.

But nudity ? I have no problem with that, I must admit, especially when it's a beautiful woman. So sue me.

That said, nudity everywhere is not something I appreciate either, but on the Internet, I have the choice of not clicking on it. So I'm responsible if I see nudity. That doesn't happen when I'm watching TV and suddenly a shampoo commercial (or car commercial) is spewed onto my screen with an alluring young woman. I don't have the choice, there, I have to submit, and most of the time, I couldn't care less.

It's always the same problem : the Internet is global, so the concerns are global. It doesn't matter if we consider an attitude to be backwards and puritan, Pakistan has the right to be backwards and puritan in its own space. The issue at hand is how that space translates into the global Internet.

It's going to be a while before we, as a species, get a handle on this issue.

Someone's getting a free trip to the US – well, not quite free. Brit bloke extradited to face $2m+ cyber-scam charges

I will root for anyone who goes after cybercrime. Frankly, as far as the law is concerned the Internet is the Wild West, anything goes.

And that goes for multinational behemoths as well, who impose their views in the structures that are supposed to manage how we access and use the Internet.

I really would like a proper legal structure imposed everywhere that protects privacy and enforces fairness, but that is a pipe dream.

However, making the USA respect international treaties and extradition requests is not a pipe dream. It's just unfeasible at this point in time.

ByteDance says it will abide by China's new export laws

"all-American security arrangements"

Does that include backdoored encryption ?

Just asking.

Mine's the one with the 4096b certificate.

Nominet backtracks on .uk domain expiration money grab, critics still fear sweetheart deal to come

"it may again find itself under review by the [BIS]"

Given the result of the last review, I fear that that is not really an incentive for Nominet to Do The Right Thing, namely it's fucking job.

What would really stir the hornet's nest is if Nominet was found by a judge to actually be a for-profit organization, and forced to change its legal structure.

Looking forward to that, actually.

When Irish screens are borking: Ticketing trip-up for Dublin-based Windows 10 IoT terminal, but at least it's not XP

Dear God

Windows 1 0 on a point-of-sale thingy. What nincompoop approved that ?

Honestly, point-of-sale machines should be on Linux. I don't care which distro, but use Linux for Pete's sake.

Linux does not have customer-facing popups that ask if you want to update Now, or Now.

AWS unleashes a new homegrown Linux that's good enough to bottle

Re: Missing tools?

The article states that it has everything it needs to run a container.

That sounds like a pretty good idea to me, and demonstrates brilliantly just how adaptable Linux can be.

You'd be hard pressed to get Borkzilla make a Windows 1 0 For Containers version that wasn't actually just Windows 1 0 renamed.

Forget Fortnite and FIFA: India wants to develop games based on local legends

“Can we make games based on them?”

Please do.

I welcome new insights into the gaming culture. I'm sure that the addition of Indian culture will bring a lot of diversity to the game pool. Go for it.

China trolls Trump with tech export rules changes that could imperil TikTok sale

It's true that it is rather difficult to pretend to the moral high ground after having spent the entire second half of the 20th century selling weapons and ammo to any country that had a revolutionary movement, often to both sides at a time.

And, as for not wanting Trump to win the upcoming elections, I hardly think China is the only country with that disposition.

In any case, I fully support that stance.

Microsoft reprieves SHA-1 deprecation in Edge 85 security baseline

More like they're continuing to screw themselves. If they still need SHA-1 since it has been deprecated, it means that they've done diddly-squat to solve the problem and migrate to something more secure.

Once again, business-critical applications whose original vendor has long bitten the bullet are still lurking about, preventing any change because of the prohibitive cost in replacing them by something more secure.

Of course, companies in this situation could just physically isolate the affected machines from the Internet, but if they're already doing that and there are no other machines accessing the outdated security components, then the Edge/SHA-1 issue already doesn't impact them, so where's the problem ?

What a time for a TITSUP*: Santander down and out on pre-Bank Holiday payday

I thought that was akin to religious practice in IT circles.

Obviously, religion has not been passed on to the new generation.

So, be Agile Monday through Thursday, but be wary on Fridays. Always.

Life with Amazon's fitness band: Upload your half-naked pics to see how fat you'll look without exercise. You now sound stressed – relax!

Beware

Don't forget that there are people, apparently a majority of whom are women, who take a lost pound as never being enough and force themselves to lose more even though they are more than thin enough and could actually benefit from taking a pound or ten.

Anorexia is no laughing matter.

Worried about the Andromeda galaxy crashing into our Milky Way in four billion years? Too bad, it's quite possibly already happening

The only problem is the fact that our planet is going to be an roasted husk in about a billion years, due to the Sun's increased activity as it goes through its hydrogen reserves.

Humanity will have to have migrated from Earth by that time if we want to have a chance of being around when the merger actually becomes visible.