Posts by Pascal Monett

Pervasive digital surveillance of citizens deployed in COVID-19 fight, with rules that send genie back to bottle

Should have seen that coming

All the signs were there : my President gravely announcing that we were at war, that civic responsibility was paramount, that all means would be brought to bear. Yup, digital surveillance. I guess that now, Facebook and Google have a new category of customers to sell their data to : governments.

I wonder just one thing : how can Twitter posts, Facebook walls and Google location data pinpoint a COVID-19 carrier ? It's not like our keyboards have medical sensors. I think we'd know about that.

In any case, this is the greatest excuse ever to implement worldwide government surveillance. Nobody is going to complain, and when the crisis is over, surveillance will obviously stay in place "to be ready for the next crisis".

It's our civic duty, citizens.

Obvious icon is obvious.

Not just video-conferencing apps taking a dive: IBM Cloud hit by partial Tuesday outage

Quinn is right

I've had to deal with IBM as a partner for five years, from 2012 to 2017, and I had no trouble recognizing the IBM Way of presenting information - meaning in the least useful and intuitive way possible. The choices made are inconsistent and basically tailor-made to drive you mad. Of course, I was dealing with their Partner Portal, something I still have to do from time to time.

I see that IBM has remained steadfast in dealing with the future with the same incomprehensible approach it always has had. Well, that's $30+ billion for RedHat down the drain. I do not know if IBM will ever, ever realize what usability is, but it sure has a way of putting new acquisitions into the cookie mold to ensure that all newcomers come out formatted to the IBM model - the one that made them successful from the 30s to the 90s. Shame that they stayed in the last millennium.

Microsoft starts a grand unification attempt with .NET 5

What a grand future in sight

And to think that, in several years from now, Microsoft will drop it all for some new, grand idea.

But don't let that keep you from pouring your heart and soul into this, dear developers ! We need you - for now.

It's Baaaaaack (or is it?): Microsoft Teams suffers a Tuesday totter

"a $15m donation"

Well yeah, he gave his pocket change. He wasn't going to give a billion, that's for the shareholders.

IBM veep partly blamed Sopra Steria for collapse of £155m Co-Op Insurance Agile project

I think more likely that the US version does not have encryption, so putting it in would indeed be a significant change - especially if requested at the last minute.

Security is not a last-minute bolt-on. Shame on Co-Op for treating it that way.

Nigerian spammer made 3X average national salary firehosing macro-laden Word docs at world+dog

Respectable and beloved by his colleagues - by day

But a criminal by night, with an oversized ego which got in the way of his thinking clearly.

It is rather obvious that, if you are partaking in criminal activity, you do not go to the police in order to avenge yourself of a (perceived) slight - at least, you don't put your own name in the fray.

I'm sure he was generally smart, but he blew a fuse on that last move. Serves him right anyway, criminal scum that he is. He stole from hundreds, if not thousands, of people - people who likely could ill afford his activities. I hope he is made to repay every cent to the people he stole from.

That upgrade from Java 8 to 11 you've been putting off? UK fintech types at Revolut 'quite happy' after a year in production

"Software gets new features"

I find it horrifyingly fascinating to observe people choose the least stable platform and the guarantee of having to change and upgrade everything every three years as the platform to use for banking applications - you know, the kind of thing that needs to work every second of every day, Monday to Sunday, without fail and without being hacked.

Way to go to ensure chaos and customer dissatisfaction. Was there absolutely no other choice that can be upgraded without a complete refactoring every thousand days ?

Who the heck even owns this company? Where is it? Biz risk outfit uses graphDBs to build mammoth compliance network

"working with small scrum teams was a much better way of working than waterfall"

That's because waterfall requires that you know what you're doing and how to do it. Here, you didn't have a clue, you were making it up as you go, so yes, agile was the solution.

Agile is not always the solution and, as we see here, neither is waterfall. As for a hybrid approach, I don't see what the problem is if that gets the project done.

A good project manager will choose the tool best suited to the job.

Facebook does the right thing for once: Joins Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube to clean out dodgy COVID-19 info

Re: Alex Jones selling anti coronavirus toothpaste

I heard yesterday that that little enterprise had been shut down. Frankly, I think he should be put in jail for that. You have no right to claim something is a medical cure when it is verifiably not. Medical quackery should be a federal crime, especially and more so if it puts people's lives in danger.

So now they've taken the first step

Now that they are collectively demonstrating that they can indeed curate their content, they will have a lot of trouble avoiding being taken to task on other issues.

So we are going to be faced with the next problem : who decides what should be curated ?

Oh and, side remark, I've got the feeling that there will be no outcry from the rabid defenders of Free Speech in this case. How curious.

India crowdsources COVID-19 response – startups told to make YouTube vids to win

Re: COVID-19 status in India

There's also this link.

Your link does have the advantage of zooming in on India-specific data, but its numbers don't quite match up with WHO's Situation Report. Your link is probably updated more often, which could explain the slight discrepancy.

Data centres are warm and designed to move air very efficiently. Are they safe to visit during the pandemic?

"viruses don’t like the low humidity"

And there's the fact that, yes, a datacenter creates a lot of heat, but that heat is evacuated outside and server rooms are constantly cooled. The start of the article makes it sound like all the hot air is being ventilated around the building, carrying viruses with it.

Between the hot air being evacuated, the atmospheric control keeping humidity low and the constant cooling everywhere, I agree with the remark that a datacenter should be a pretty good place to work right now. Just keep that hand sanitizer ready and don't touch any doorknobs or door handles if you can avoid it.

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, surely has no frozen water, right? Guess again: Solar winds form ice

Interesting process

One major point that makes this whole thing possible is the lack of atmosphere. If Mercury was massive enough to hold an atmosphere, no ice would be possible because the atmosphere itself would be hundreds of degrees.

But I guess it's only Jupiter-sized planets that can hold an atmosphere when the orbit is that close to a star. Any rocky planet that close will have the solar wind strip it bare in a few million years (a galactic blink of an eye).

Health workers are top of phishers' target lists thanks to data value

Thanks to Microsoft having had the brilliant idea of hiding file extensions, I'd wager that that number is probably in the billions.

Browser minnow Brave nips at Google with GDPR complaint

Re: 20M users per day adjust their privacy

Absolutely. Claiming that millions are checking their permissions means diddly-squat when your user base is measured in billions.

Besides, if you pre-empted GDPR and configured yourself to actually respect privacy first, then nobody would need to check their permissions because you would be waiting on them to grant you permission to their data.

If that ever happens, I'll bet my shirt that Google will be using popups and popunders to get people to give them permission to use their data.

But, since it'll never happen, I'll just keep on dreaming.

Data surge as more Brits work from home? Not as hard on the network as their nightly Netflix binges, claims BT

What was that ?

Spain has a full-fiber broadband network that covers 75% of the country and it is still asking people to cut down on their Internet usage ? How shitty is their fiber ?

I'm guessing that ISPs have once again let loose with "up to" claims and now they're in the obligation of, <gasp>, actually having to provide that bandwidth.

After the "Oh shit !" moment, they're now running around like headless chickens, reconfiguring backends and adding bandwidth capacity that will allow them to handle the load that they've already sold.

I have trouble shedding a tear, there.

Microsoft's GitHub absorbs NPM into its code-hosting empire: JavaScript library vault used by 12 million devs now under Redmond's roof

Re: Embrace...

Oh, I think we are firmly in Extend territory here. Microsoft has officially Embraced Linux for a while already and, with Github now in its pocket, it is in the process of taking control of the major code repository of most, if not all, Open Source projects.

The Extinguish step is going to be interesting to watch. Will Microsoft force all code to talk to Azure before executing ? Or will it find some less obvious way to control everything ?

Make your bets, the wheel is turning.

Some good coronavirus news: Monster Google-Oracle API copyright battle on hold as bio-nasty shuts Supremes

$9bn ?

Well, it would seem that that is barely 18 days of revenue for Google.

What's the problem ?

Control is only an illusion, no matter what you shove on the Netware share

"Or heard the sphincter-loosening words: 'What's a backup?' "

Oh I've heard the words all right, but the sphincter-loosening generally comes when I answer "Well, I guess you're data is screwed then".

That has happened a few times in my life, and once to person that I had personally counseled on backups prior to the incident. In any case, it's always followed by much gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair and some wailing about how life is unjust and can't I really do anything ?

No, I can't. You hard disk is dead. The solution is the backup I told you you needed. Now you know why you needed it. Now, you can still send your disk to a data recovery center. How much ? Oh, between $50 to $1500. You don't have that kind of money ? Like I said, a backup is the solution. Sorry.

India's tech hub Bengaluru tells IT outfits to send workers home as part of COVID-crimping action

"our satellite office was also deep cleaned"

That may or may not have been useful, I couldn't say, but if you're putting people back in there now then it almost certainly wasn't.

It's not cleaning the office you need to do, it's keeping people out of it to stop the spread.

Azure admins' cold sweat likely caused by a 'isolated' power problems that browned out West Central USA region

So it's Office 363 now, isn't it ?

Google reveals the wheels almost literally fell off one of its cloudy server racks

Re: A couple of degrees...

I checked the pic and had somewhat the same reaction. It's really not tilted much.

On the other hand, liquid doesn't need much to start going down hill, so that tilt was certainly sufficient to have the coolant pool on one side, which means the other side didn't get cooled. It also obviously indicates that Google is not using pumps for its coolant system (saving on electricity), otherwise the liquid would not have a choice.

Apple bans COVID-19 games and restricts virus-related apps to authoritative souces

Re: Is this really any different to what Facebook etc are doing?

Yes, it is. Fake News should always be suppressed - and yes, that means that Fox News should be shut down. But the subject is games. Who is Apple to decide what kind of game is allowable when they allow fart apps by the dozens ?

If you want to impose certain standards, you can't cherry pick.

TensorFlow gets its quantum of solace, lid lifted on 'all-seeing crime-detecting' AI upstart, and more

"Pink Unicorn Labs’ apps were removed from the Google Play Store in 2016"

Which still means that they got there in the first place. Google's security needs to stop being reactive and start being proactive. Yes, that means that they should test apps before granting them a place in the Store. Yes, it will cost money. Google has the money. It can do it.

Quick, show this article to the boss, before they ask you to spin your own crisis comms Power App in 2 days

Wait a minute

"you probably do not want every employee to be able to check out the location coordinates of everyone else"

I'm all for privacy, but your desk location in a company is no more private than your phone or email in the company. Anyone may need to talk to you and, if they have to phone Helpdesk to get a special permission slip to get your location, then that company is not lasting long.

You absolutely want to keep that information secret from the outside world. Having random customers phoning anybody in the company because they think they have a problem is the best way to keep your employees from doing actual work.

But keeping your location details secret inside the company ? That is not only useless, it is counter-productive.

No, the kind of details you want to keep secret inside the company is HR info, number of sick days, chances of promotion and so on. That is something you can make an app out of, and you will want to keep that secret.

Your data was 'taken without permission', customers told, after personal info accessed in O2 UK partner's database

"able to access customer data on 26 February through an external backup database"

Um, one question : how is it that a "backup" database was accessible through the Web ?

It is child's play for an experienced, competent administrator to firewall any part of his network from the Internet if he has the funding and the will of the Board. The fact that the backup was "external" changes nothing. Am I to understand that the admin in charge did not have those elements, or that he is incompetent ? Which is it ?

Oh, we may have found the COVID-19 silver lining: Coronavirus pandemic halts Xerox hostile takeover of HP

Well that's new

Taking a global pandemic for an excuse to not pass buy orders from one's computer. Wow. That has to be a first.

In this extremely volatile market, thanks to the OHSG who makes the stock market fall 1700 points every time he opens his lying maw, one would think it is exactly the time for a hostile takeover.

Well, it seems that the balls have dropped from Xerox, dropped entirely from the sack to the ground.

Or maybe this is just the excuse they use because HP has defended itself too well for their own comfort.

In any case, there is no chance for Xerox to start over. Such opportunities must be pursued when have been created, not put on ice. You pursue, or you fail. Xerox has failed.

Icahn must be incensed. I wonder what kind of reason he'll put in his lawsuit against Xerox ?

Apple fans may think they can't get viruses but Cupertino disagrees: WWDC 2020 dev summit goes online-only

Conferences and summits need to get with the program

Entire countries are going into lockdown, other countries are shutting down the entire educational system, come on, isn't it time for all conferences and summits to declare forfeit and stop pretending that they can happen ?

Anything scheduled before July 2020 should right now acknowledge that they are cancelled and will find out if they can happen in Q3 or Q4 or next year.

Nobody is going to go anywhere with 500 other people at this point in time for the foreseeable future.

Hell, I was in a supermarket a few hours ago and the cheese aisles looked like the aftermath of a war zone. The cheese. I know it's France but come on, people, you don't stock up on cheese, you plunder the canned goods and maybe the chips. Don't forget the toilet paper. At the checkout the family in front of me had no less than 5 extra-large bags.

If this is the Coronacalypse, these people are all going to die because they bought chips instead of canned meat and veggies.

Okay, I admit, I'm exaggerating, but you didn't see the state of those aisles. I was wandering through in a daze when I spotted an employee. I went over to her and I asked "Did a war happen ?". Completely unfazed, and obviously a bit tired, she answered straight back "Yep. It's been like that all day. At one point, we could have just left the entire palette in the aisle, people were taking everything so quickly". She then told me that the aisles of canned foodstuffs were in even worse shape.

It was true.

So, summits ? Not happening. Period.

Microsoft's Bill Gates defrag is finally virtually complete: Billionaire quits board to double down on philanthropy

"Bill founded our company with a belief in the democratizing force of software"

After which he promptly forgot all of that to go closed-source and do his damnedest to counter all possible rivals by inserting control code into his various OS versions to make sure everyone else's products would be as slow and unstable as possible.

Sorry, but even though I appreciate what he is doing philanthropically, the guy was an asshole and a machiavelic behind-the-scenes manipulator. The angel dust does not impress me.

Apple reopens stores in China as Middle Kingdom regains control of COVID-19 – after closing all its outlets in Italy

Well, last night that's exactly what my President did on French television. He gave a long explanation about how difficult a decision it was, then declared that all daycare centers, schools and universities are closed until further notice.

He mentioned twice that health was our greatest asset and he would protect it "whatever the cost".

It's probably going to cost a bundle, but I think he did the right thing. And he was damn Presidential while saying it.

It's been a long time since I've been proud of my President, but last night I was.

Microsoft picks up Your Phone – unless you're an Apple fan – in a fresh Windows 10 build

Ah yes, the smug superiority of the Apple fan. Entirely justified, I must admit. Apple had the user interface down pat, back in the day.

Before it forgot how to make laptop keyboards, that is.

That said, there's one thing I can do with my Samsung that you cannot on your iPhone : I can swap out my battery on my own, in seconds, without any tools whatsoever.

I rather prefer that over copy/pasting from my phone to my computer - especially since I never do that nor have had the need to.

Replacing the battery, on the other hand, I have a need for.

Borklays soz for the ailing ATMs but won't say if fix involved a Microsoft invoice

What makes you think it's Windows 7 ?

The window icons on that command console look decidedly 95 to me. Or maybe XP, I can't really remember the difference between the two, icon-wise.

In any case, those are not the icons I have on my Win 7 command console window.

EDIT : it's XP, because of the gradient background at the top. 95 didn't do that, and 7 doesn't do it either.

We checked in with the new Windows 10X build, and let's just say getting this ready for late 2020 will be a challenge

"Microsoft cannot afford a re-run of Windows 8"

Oh yes it can. It has largely enough money for that, and apparently it can repeatedly screw up its OS, its Office 365 and even its Azure - none of that makes people stop and wonder why they put up with the continuous stream of BS and productivity-halting shenanigans.

Oh well, at least Win 10X will provide a brand new reason to guffaw at how MS screws things up.

Microsoft throws a bone to those unable to leave the past behind: .NET 5 support on the way for Visual Basic

"MS is also pushing to get rid of VBA"

That will never happen. There are waaay too many people coding their Excel spreadsheets to do insane things for VBA to ever disappear. Last year I gave two initiation trainings for banking/investment types. I'm already slated to do another one in May this year.

Companies use VBA and they will not accept MS doing away with it.

We already have a lot of ugly unreadable code to deal with

European electric vehicle sales surged in Q4 2019 but only accounted for wafer-thin slice of total car purchases

"would help to kick-start the market"

Um, when you're selling over half a million units per year, I think it is safe to say that the market has been kick-started already.

What actually mean to say is that you want to kick-start growth in the market, or something like that.

And, apparently, COVID-19 means that that is not going to happen right now.

Indeed

Is it just a coincidence that 500 miles is 800 kilometers ?

I think not.

Not exactly the kind of housekeeping you want when it means the hotel's server uptime is scrubbed clean

Re: Who was really at fault?

I'm guessing that, given that it was in a hotel, the equipment was regarded as about the same as the vacuum cleaner. Even though the hotel would not function if the server didn't, it still didn't twig anybody to treat it with care.

I'm wouldn't be surprised to learn that hotel receptionists today would do practically the same.

Re: while he waited for someone to fetch a longer one

Um, even back in the 80s, he should have had one in his kit, or in his vehicle. The cigarette was almost mandatory back then, so nothing to say about that, but he definitely should have had an extension cord.

Ex-director accuses iRobot of firing him for pointing out the home-cleaner droids broke safety, govt regulations

He obviously misunderstood his position

He wasn't hired as director for compliance, he was hired as rubber stamp director for compliance.

The fact that the company spouts the good old "we take ... very seriously" clinches it for me. They will fight the charges vigorously until they settle of court to not be officially noted as guilty.

Uncle Sam stonewalls probe into its secretive airport facial-recognition technology. Now the ACLU is suing

"analyses of the effectiveness of facial recognition technology"

We have one already, and the effectiveness is 12.5%.

I doubt US airports are doing any better.

Fresh virus misery for Illinois: Public health agency taken down by... web ransomware. Great timing, scumbags

Re: But how?

Unfortunately, there's always an excuse for not patching.

Re: NetApp

Congratulations to you and your company. At least, you had a backup. That seems to be a rare thing these days.

Avast pulls plug on insecure JavaScript engine in its security software suite

Re: A JavaScript engine running as root

It's another case of rogue engineer. Happens a lot these days.

Butterfly defect stripped from MacBook Pros, Airs by Q2 2020, reckons Apple analyst

"once famed for its intuitive and refined industrial design"

Yeah, back when it had a 5% share of the market.

Back then, it had to differentiate, to 'think different".

Nowadays it's surfing on its base, doesn't need to really think things through. Sometimes, you get bitten like that. This is one of those times.

Microsoft, Google, Slack, Zoom et al struggling to deal with a spike in remote tools thanks to coronavirus

"after the current COVID-19 crisis"

First question : when is the current COVID-19 crisis going to end ?

Because right now, it's ramping up. And US health officials are doing less to get it under control than companies are.

Good on companies. Shame on the US Government.

Resellers facing 'months' of delays for orders to be fulfilled. IT gathers dust on docks as coronavirus-stricken China goes back to work

You are correct to outline that, but given that China counts for more than two thirds of cases, the impact of the USA's failure to properly manage the crisis (which is, apparently, slowly being reversed) is likely unimportant at this time.

When the US Government has pulled its finger out and gotten down to business, the actual numbers will probably not change more than if it had done its job properly in the first place.

Just an FYI

The WHO Situation Report 51 states that there are, as of yesterday, 118 322 confirmed cases, and 4 292 deaths worldwide.

That is a mortality rate of 3.6%.

Not 1%.

Not 0.1%.

I thought it might be useful to say that, because there are some people out there who still think that COVID-19 is nothing more than the common cold.

It isn't.

Oh, and by the way, it's not getting better. The sitrep from a month ago had 2 560 new cases to report. Yesterday, there were 4 623 new cases. That's over 50% more new cases.

In one month.

Russia-backed crew's latest malware has discerning taste – when screening visitors to poisoned watering holes

"the C&C [command-and-control] server replies with a piece of JavaScript code"

Which is blocked by NoScript.

Again, NoScript to the rescue. Frankly, NoScript should be considered as a must-have, receive a Public Utility Award as well as a Keeping The Internet Safe Award, and be enshrined as a tool that defends Democracy and Privacy.

Oh, and somebody give its author a million bucks. He deserves it.

Meanwhile, a Flash Update ? Really ? And "high interest" people fall for that ?

I wonder what the malware guys will do when Flash has been eradicated from the Internet. Are they going to try to push YouTube updates ?

US telcos tossed yet another extension to keep going with Huawei kit despite America's 'security threat' concerns

Re: There is as yet no hard evidence of Huawei malfeasance

And there never will be, because if there actually was some hard evidence, someone would have leaked it by now. A motherboard is not a state secret, and there is enough Huawei hardware all over the world that, if someone had actually spotted something truly fishy, it would be all over Twitter in a heartbeat.

This whole thing is simply due to the fact that Huawei is eating Cisco's breakfast, and getting ready to eat Cisco's lunch as well. So the OHSG is doing the only thing he knows : kicking up a stink based on a gigantic lie to try and preserve Cisco's market share.

That's all it is, and that is why Huawei's situation can be "negociated". Because if it were actually true that Huawei equipment was talking to Beijing, you can bet your bottom dollar that its equipment would have already been banned and existing equipment would have been literally torn out by ISP and telcos everywhere.