Posts by Pascal Monett

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Crypto exchange cracked, Bitcoin burgled

"new payment players [..] not allowed anywhere near its innermost workings"

That is a wise decision. Crypto exchanges are not banks and are not run by banking professionals. Anyone can set one up and, by the rich history of exchanges having been hacked, anybody does.

Even if I did want to give funny money a try, I would be at a loss to choose someone who is worth trusting because there aren't any. It would be like walking into a den of thieves and handing my money over to the guy who did not have an eye patch yet.

Re: banks are robbed on an almost daily basis

Citation please ?

When is the last time somebody digitally broke into a client account and siphoned off the money ?

That doesn't happen, pure and simple.

Oh, ATM's can get pilfered, for sure. And there's that one transfer that got cracked, indeed. But that was not access to client accounts, that was the hijacking of money in movement between banks and it happened because it was an inside job and the security was lacking.

I have never read that a true bank's customer's account got hacked, and I doubt very much that I ever will.

IT guy whose job was to stop ex-staff running amok on the network is jailed for running amok on the network

"is unlikely to be hired again as an IT worker"

Are you kidding me ? He is unlikely to ever be put in a position where he has access to a computer again. And that serves him right.

An IT specialist has a duty of behavior. When we are given access rights, it is to help people do their jobs, not take personal benefit from it and certainly not to wreck company data.

A year and a day makes his sentence a felony crime, and that will go down on his record. Good.

He can spend the rest of his life flipping burgers.

Error-bnb: Techies scramble to fix Airbnb website bug that let strangers read each others' account messages

Re: Ahh! The classic cookie clearing fix to the rescue...

Indeed. If I had heard that I would have replied that if my cookies allowed me to see other people's data, then the problem is a lot bigger than I would have thought.

"Hello, bank ? I have access to your CEO's account."

"Clear your cookies and call back."

"Really ? Well don't mind if I make a transfer first."

Ridiculous.

Alphabet promises to no longer bung tens of millions of dollars to alleged sex pest execs who quit mid-probe

Indeed. Not only is this perfectly consensual, but the guy had shares. That is his property and he can do whatever he wants with them.

The first affair is the issue, and what I would like is an explanation on how Google waited until now to decide to not pay tens of millions to top execs under suspicion of sexual misconduct. I'm sorry, I'm just a lowly programmer, but if are suspected of sexual harassment or misconduct and there is an inquiry ongoing, if you decide to bail and I'm the CEO, you're on your own and I won't give you a single cent.

Bailing out like that is a clear sign of guilt. There is no reason to shower a guilty person with money.

Facebook is the internet's cigarette: Addictive and laced with nasty stuff – 'shocking images, graphic videos, headlines that incite outrage'

Re: Zukerberg has made enough

A billionaire who decides stop making money ?

Fat chance.

EDIT : by pure coincidence, I just found this.

'Robbery, economic plunder, victim of larcenous cronyism and a heist'

Agreed, except that that is an act that should have been executed when China banned Facebook, not years later by a blabbering idiot who can't get his stories straight from one hour to the next.

HubSpot must prove core sales features to be taken seriously in enterprise CRM market

"its new CRM is flexible enough to fit customer processes"

To me, that sounds like it is a nightmare to configure, with an abundance of settings that have obscure names and incomprehensible consequences.

SAP is flexible too, you just need to pay a team of experts for ten years to (maybe) get it running like you need.

Key API management platform for UK public sector scrapped: DWP ends £5m MuleSoft project

"an IT strategy centred around shared services and asset reuse"

So basically there is going to be a lot of csv files being exported and imported, while all the crap that has accumulated from wrong decisions and lazy planning will keep churning.

Sounds like a plan.

England's COVID-tracking app finally goes live after 6 months of work – including backpedal on how to handle data

I live in France as well. As a general rule, since the beginning of all the hoopla I have found my compatriots to generally be of the obedient persuasion. When walking outside there are people who wear masks in the local cities. In my village, that is not the case, but social distancing is observed. People walking their dogs cross each other on the opposite side of the road. If they are acquainted, they stop and chat, but the road is between them.

In shops, everyone wears the mask.

This is a far cry from the reputation of the average Frenchman, who scorns authority and rebukes government directives. It is the Esprit Gaulois and we persuade ourselves that we are all little Asterix and the government and police are the Romans. We are convinced that any invader would leave after a while because "we are ungovernable".

Well I don't see any of that spirit in the streets these days. That said, I live in Moselle, a stone's throw from the German border. Maybe there's a bit of German discipline overflowing the border bit by bit, like an invisible fog.

Uncle Sam's legal eagles finally make up their mind on internet giants' Get Out Of Jail Free card – and it's not as bad as you may fear

Now that is a link to keep handy.

Microsoft leaks 6.5TB in Bing search data via unsecured Elastic server. *Insert 'Wow... that much?' joke here*

"The data was, apparently, not encrypted"

That is just about as damning a sentence as one can write in this kind of case. In what world does a major multinational behemoth create a database of user-identifiable data and not encrypt it ?

There should be a law on that.

That, and the fact that the authentication was removed (why ??) means that I am quite happy to have never used Bing and won't be using it any time soon.

At least not until my aneurysm. After that, no guarantees.

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

Oh. My. God.

I've just read through the first 86 pages of this report and the one adjective that comes to mind is : damning.

Boeing is 100% guilty of taking an airframe and putting engines on it that didn't fit, then designing faulty software around that for the sole purpose of having a plane that could respond to the latest Airbus threat.

Security was never part of the equation. Speed of production and profitability were the only criteria. To the extent that engineering personnel bringing attention to possible issues were literally ignored or silenced.

That smacks of manslaughter to me.

The FAA is guilty of having a buddy relationship with Boeing that extends to Boeing representatives paid by Boeing working at the FAA and pushing the Boeing point of view on the regulator instead of being mediators between the two. Who is the fucking idiot that thought that was a good idea ?

If I disregard the appalling cost in human lives that this entire marketing project has created, the entire report reads like a particularly macabre episode of Yes Minister, where Sir Humphry would be a perfect fit in orchestrating self-certification and FAA approval while quashing the irritating reality of issues.

Shame. Shame.

Shame all around.

There's a slight difference between designers not being infallible and designers deliberately creating a death trap.

Swift tailored for Windows no longer folklore: Apple's programming language available for Microsoft OS

It's okay

It'll just be another Google Beta thing until Google gets bored of it and shuts it down in a few years.

.uk registry operator Nominet responds to renewed criticism – by silencing its critics

Re: or they are going to be fucked

I think it's a bit late for that.

Oracle adds Arm-powered servers with up to 160 cores to its cloud – must be why it sunk millions into Ampere

Maybe, but what's the point if you're paying 5 times the cost in licensing ?

Humans suck so much at beating this pandemic that Microsoft has made an AI to enforce social distancing

"uses artificial intelligence to count the number of people in a room"

I'm sure Borkzilla will have no problem putting Azure containerized thingamajigs onto people's mobile phones in order for its AI to count the people in the same room.

I'm also pretty sure that counting is something that computers hardly need AI for - don't they do that out of the box ?

This is definitely a solution in search of a problem. A BluTooth mobile app reporting to Borkzilla Central and counting the number of answering apps in the vicinity would have been quite enough - but hey, I'm just a programmer.

Contractor convicted of pinching supercomputer cycles to mine cryptocurrency

Well it is a supercomputer. Generally those things have quite a bit more CPUs than the one you find in a desktop. Some have tens of thousands of the things, with the assorted RAM and storage arranged in a specific way.

That's going to gobble quite a bit of electricity, methinks.

'I don’t want to see another computer for the rest of my life'... Brit Dark Overlord cyber-extortionist thrown in an American clink for five years

Re: Hardy surprising...

Indeed. So he's crying now ? Serves him right, I wager he's made enough people cry.

He went through every page in the Creepy Threatening Blackmailer's Handbook and didn't blink once.

No pity here.

GNOME alone: FOSS desktop folk to start counting in whole numbers again

"especially from an engagement and marketing perspective"

These people know things I don't. What exactly is the downside of 4.0 ? Who cares if it's 4.0 or 40.0 ?

I don't think the users do. The only thing they care about is it is the next version. Those faithful to Gnome will continue using it whatever the number is.

So what's the negative in going with 4.0 ? I'd really like someone to explain that to me.

UK govt urged to bolt tough legal protections onto Arm and protect jobs – or simply veto Nvidia's £31bn acquisition

Why sell Arm anyway ?

It's doing good, isn't it ? What's the point in selling it ? Who benefits from this ?

Arm won't. Being folded into Nvidia will obviously get those in Arm's graphic section shed when their specific knowledge has been "transferred". For Nvidia, well it already has chip designers that do a fine job, it doesn't really need more of them. This must simply be to gain control of Arm's IP and patents, in order to control that down the line.

If that is true, then it is all of Arm's employees that are at risk.

Remember those Salesforce layoffs after that bumper Q2? Yeah, forget that, SaaS player set to hire 12,000 staff

"CEO Marc Benioff declared that he was in hiring mode"

Does that mean that he'll be hiring back the 1000 people he fired ?

If not, how will he justify firing 1000 people and then hiring 12 times that ?

I know all about creative accounting, but Jesus, this is creative employee management. There are supposed to be laws about that.

Before you buy that managed Netgear switch, be aware you may need to create a cloud account to use its full UI

"hand over information about themselves to the Netgear Cloud"

Fuck that.

If I paid for a product with a given list of functionality and find out, after the fact, that using said functionality depends on me recording my private data on some effing cloud, I guarantee that there will be some people regretting getting my calls.

So that's NetGear on my blacklist. Good to know.

Not that I'd buy that kind of equipment for myself, but if they can do that on the high-end, then they'll definitely do that on the low-end.

Another reminder that bias, testing, diversity is needed in machine learning: Twitter's image-crop AI may favor white men, women's chests

"focus on women's chests"

So it's a teenage AI then ?

Have no idea WTF is going on with the Oracle-Walmart TikTok deal? Don’t sweat it, here’s our latest rundown

"The result has been a circus"

Oh, so just like the last four years then.

We're not getting back with Galileo, UK govt tells The Reg, as question marks sprout above its BS*

"Assuming, of course, one is thinking rationally about such things"

If the UK government were thinking rationally, it would never have pushed to leave the EU.

So rational thought is not part of this process.

MP promises to grill UK.gov over revelations that Uber handed '2,000 pieces' of user data to London cops a year

"Police units supporting Uber's appeal"

Well duh. The Police these days are just an extension of the NSA - they want all the data they can get whether it is pertinent to the case or not.

And it's very nice to know that Uber sends thousands of user data to the police - how much of that sharing actually brought a condemnation ?

How much of it was actually useful in court ?

That's the other problem I have with all this data sharing going on. Law enforcement all over the world now steadfastly declares that it is very useful to them, but never declares how many cases they won because of it.

Imagine working for GitHub and writing a command-line interface for the platform, then GitHub makes an 'official' one

"start fresh without the constraints of 10 years of design decisions"

Great idea. Now you can make all the same mistakes than before, along with some brand new ones, but in an entirely new way.

Anglian Water fishes for on-trend laundry list – including low-code work – in £24m trawl

Forgot blockchain

There's almost everything and the kitchen sink in that list.

Explainable AI ? Good one.

Citizen app development ? Oh, so they're going to get the users to do part of the job. Smart move.

Low-code dev platforms and augmented analytics tooling & capability. Can't wait to see you demonstrate how to do augmented analytics with low-code tools.

One thing seems clear to me : the guy who wrote all that bull will certainly not be around when the fertilizer hits the rotating dispenser blades.

Let's go space truckin': 1970s probe Voyager 1 is now 14 billion miles from home

Ah, 1980

I was 15 years old and eagerly scouting National Geographics for news on Voyager. It was a wonderful publication at the time. I remember seeing the first ever "close-ups" of Jupiter and Saturn and the pictures just blew my mind.

In one monthly edition there was a poster of our galaxy, our position in it, and it's position in the local cluster. I had that poster on my wall for years and years. Sadly, I lost it when I moved at some point.

I think I should credit National Geographics and Voyager for getting me interested in space.

As we stand on the precipice of science fiction into science fact, people say: Hell yeah, I want to augment my eyesight!

Upvote for Yes Minister reference alone ! A true masterpiece of British humor, and a testament to skeptics everywhere.

I found the extract, relish it here.

"testing the limits of what's possible"

I'm sorry, but I don't see that there is all that much that is possible for the general public right now. Apart from laser eye surgery, there is nothing high-tech that anyone can have implemented which will improve their eyesight or hearing (there are no hearing aids implanted in the ear), much less their strength.

And as for improving one's strength, how could that possibly work via implant ? What would you implant ? I know of nothing that could even begin to do that. Improving strength is via exoskeletons at this point in time and that's all we've got (and we don't have too much of it either).

There are lab experiments trying to allow control of a mouse via thought, but I haven't heard that they're ready for market yet.

Anyone know of some implantable thingy that actually enhances a human being ? Beyond an RFID chip that allows you to open a door, I mean.

Alibaba wants to get you off the PC upgrade treadmill and into its cloud

Re: Little question

Given that the data is created under the user's profile, privacy protection should be a blanket case.

But I'm sure there will be lawyers to find otherwise.

Oh it certainly could be viable - QuakeOnline has been rocking it for years now and it's not your browser doing the graphics.

It boggles the mind to think that we are indeed headed straight back to the 90s. Apparently the future of IT is everyone on a dumb terminal connected to a CPU datacenter. You upgrade by paying a bit more on your monthly plan. I'm guessing they'll want to bill you for amount of CPU activity and electricity you consume, because otherwise how can it be economically viable ?

Well I will leave the younguns the pleasure of finding out how that works. My data and my activity stays local, thank you very much.

Apple 'proud to support Indian customers and their communities' – but maybe not so much for COVID-slammed retailers

"has lobbied the Indian government to change that requirement"

I hope the Indian government will hold fast to its requirement.

Apple is the company with the most money in the bank, it can take the hit.

Bit by bit, multinational behemoths will participate in the local economy. They will dragged in kicking and screaming, but it will happen.

iOS 14 suffers app preference amnesia: Rebooting an iThing resets browser, email client defaults back to Safari, Mail

Another summer intern problem

Apple really has to learn to not give important jobs to the summer intern. Last time it was with the time zone issue, where Apple became the only company in the world to forget that there is such a thing as a time zone. Now, Apple has forgotten to respect people's settings after a measly reboot.

Not even a system wipe and reinstall, which would be perfectly acceptable and nobody could complain, but just a reboot.

So Apple kit is no longer meant to be turned off. How green.

Well, Apple may not offer any explanation, but I'm betting there will be a patch coming real soon.

You have to be very on-trend as a cybercrook – hence why coronavirus-themed phishing is this year's must-have look

Both of your observations are perfectly correct, of course, but even if a person doesn't know what email headers are, they can still tweak to the fact that the email they're reading is supposed to be from Microsoft and was sent from a Gmail account.

You don't need to be a high priest to know that Microsoft has no Gmail account, and anyone in Microsoft sending "official" corporate mail from Gmail would likely see their career ended pretty quickly.

A tiny bit of logic and observation is all that is required to avoid a vast majority of nasties, especially those that are not specifically tailored for you (as in phishing attacks - I would guess those are better conceived). Unfortunately, logic and observation are rare commodities these days.

Not content with distorting actual reality, Facebook now wants to build a digital layer for the world

It likely is, but personally I consider that, when I'm in a public area, what I'm doing is public as well. If someone takes a picture and I'm on it, then so be it.

However, anyone specifically taking a picture of me is going to have to answer some questions - if I notice, that is.

Need to track IT kit? Business continuity? Legal? ServiceNow has a package of satellite apps for you... now

The no-code approach

I cannot imagine building a database of any complexity without coding. If you have a no-code design environment, then you will have to have modules and you will be constrained by what the modules allow. The modules will only allow for what has been coded in them by actual developers and the no-code approach means you can't modify them in any way.

So the only "applications" you can make are the ones that correspond to the modules' abilities. If what you need lies outside that scope, you can't build it.

There may well be some types of application that benefit from this approach, but I can't see people building everything they need simply with a drag-and-drop environment.

Where China leads, Iran follows: US warns of 'contract' hackers exploiting Citrix, Pulse Secure and F5 VPNs

"malicious persons from Iran"

Well isn't there a simple solution ? Block all Iran IP addresses on the router, problem solved.

I can understand that media sectors and, eventually, financial sectors could welcome IP traffic from Iran, but please explain how exactly an Iranian citizen in Iran is going to sign up for US healthcare, insurance or use US government facilities ? Don't they all require US residency ?

Maybe there are dual-citizenship US/Iranian people who regularly go to Iran, but they can understand that they need to be in the US to conduct their US business. And a VPN is not all that expensive.

Why is it that key government websites accept traffic from any country other than their own anyway ? I fail to see what benefit a Chinese citizen in China can find in browsing impots.gouv.fr, especially as that site is exclusively in French, and they don't have a login anyway.

Sounds like Spotify and Epic have been chatting: Music streamer blasts Apple One service as 'anti-competitive'

"threaten our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect"

Um, sorry, but I have trouble accepting that statement.

It is not because your competition has a strong platform that it is stifling freedom, creation and learning. As for connecting, take your grievances to FaceBook.

I'm not defending Apple in any way shape or form, but my liberty to learn, create and share does not depend on Apple's good will and benevolence. There are other means and platforms to use, and Spotify will not be able to transform this in a meeting at OK Corral. If Spotify dies, Apple will not take over the world.

I understand that lawyers have to build a case, but saying that Apple is the guardian of freedom and creation is going a bit too far.

And, as far as learning is concerned, there's Curiosity Stream, Brilliant, TED talks, SciShow, Geographics and hundreds more.

Sorry, Spotify, you're on shifting sands if you go down that route.

Astroboffins reckon evidence of Martian life has probably been destroyed where liquid acid flowed on the Red Planet

So there's no problem then ?

Okay, where acid flowed biosignatures are destroyed in the clay, understood.

But Perseverance is not landing in a acid-washed clay basin, so everything is good then ? If there are signs of life to be found, Perseverance might find them.

Do I need to use this as another reason to panic ? Because I have enough of those at this point in time.

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

I find that difficult to believe. If a programming language does not have a proper date object, then I seriously doubt that dates are stored as anything but a string.

Because if dates were somehow magically stored as objects, then writing to a csv file would not have so many different formats.

Right

So, now that I am reassured that I'm far from the only one having had to deal with this specific bunch of vipers, could someone please explain to me why is it that we are in the 3rd millennium, using object-oriented 4G or even 5G languages, and we are still writing dates as strings ?

Why is it that there is no language today (caveat : that I know of) that treats a date as an object with three parameters and the format it is shown in depends on the OS ?

Is it really that hard ?

(Yes, of course it is, because legacy - but dammit, couldn't we at least get a choice ?)

Surprise! Apple launches iOS 14 today, and developers were given just 24 hours' notice

"Cupertino's rigorous software and human-driven testing"

Oh, you're just being cute now, aren't you ?

Brit MPs to Apple CEO: Please stop ignoring our questions about repairability and the environment

"how Apple was tackling past and future carbon emissions"

With glue.

Lots of glue.

Russian hacker selling how-to vid on exploiting unsupported Magento installations to skim credit card details for $5,000

If you have to do all that work, you might as well migrate from Magento 1 to someone else who actually gives a frack about business continuity.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

Re: Chainsaw, anyone?

Well they score points for leaving a very clear message in any case.

Is Little Timmy still enthralled by his Leapfrog tablet? Maybe check he hasn't sideloaded an unrestricted OS onto it

Wasn't aware of that, thanks for the heads-up.

Another company on my Do Not Buy list.