Posts by Pascal Monett

Come on baby light me on fire: McDonald's to sell 'Quarter Pounder' scented candles

"Slap it all between two cheddar grilled cheese sandwiches for buns"

Sir, I salute you and your casual disregard for your arteries. Maybe we can have lunch together one day ?

"Please let it be a joke"

I'm convinced that there are many people who would gladly light up one of those candles purely for fun, out of sheer curiosity (does it really make it smell like a Mc D hamburger) and, for some, for simple convenience (it's a candle).

I would be part of the curiosity crowd, then I switch to convenience. Only for the one, though. Scented candles are not really my thing.

If you're struggling to keep new year resolutions, try NGTS-10b, a mere 1,000 LY away. One year is just 18 hrs

Shirley is away for the moment, but I'm sure she'd agree when I say that, if Earth was hit by an object with 0.1% of its mass, Earth would survive just fine.

For life on Earth though, the matter would be quite different.

Doubtful. Our Sun is 99.8% of the mass of our solar system. Throw Jupiter on it and you're just adding 0.1% of its mass. Won't make a difference.

AMD takes a bite out of Intel's PC market share across Europe amid microprocessor shortages, rising Ryzen

"success based on successfully executing our strategy"

Um, look, I'm very happy that AMD is riding the wave right now, but you're fooling no one. AMD has had capable products before and not attained such levels. You and I both know that, despite AMD having an excellent product, it is Intel's failure to deliver over a long period that has pushed companies and consumers to switch their mindset and go to you.

And that's fine.

Decent, legal, honest and searchable: C'mon, Ofcom. Let us check up on the ad-slingers ourselves

An online, searchable ad broker activity database

I'm all for it.

And, while we're at it, let's set up an online database for tracking who is paying lobbying which elected official.

Breaking bad... browser use: New Mexico accuses Google of illegally slurping kids' private data via G Suite

"we are committed to partnering with them"

Oh, I can believe that all right. You are committed to catching them all, as soon as you can, for as long as you can.

Yup, we can agree on that.

Windows Dressing: Psst... Fast Ring folks, whispers Microsoft. You're in this for the cool icons, right?

"carrying more than a whiff of Windows 7 (or even XP)"

Um, I use Windows 7 and 1 0 regularly. I can't say that the icons on 1 0 are so much more appealing. Maybe XP icons would be jarring, but I wouldn't know since I haven't used XP for more than a decade now.

Frankly, I'm happy that the winter intern's work gets some recognition, but there are more important things to take of as far as Windows is concerned.

Google product boss cuffed on suspicion of murder after his Microsoft manager wife goes missing, woman's body found, during Hawaii trip

Why "tell them where their Mom is" and not "bring their mother back home" ?

Did he already know she wasn't coming back ?

How's this for a crossover? Scumbag scammed victims with fake gem mines – then pivoted to fake crypto-mines

"The investing public should be aware that cryptocurrency schemes are" . .

A massive load of bullshit, and always will be.

I've said it before and I'll say it again : if you want to lose your money in funny money crypto, buy yourself a PC with the latest specialized NVidia graphics card and churn them out yourself.

Samsung will be Putin dreaded Kremlin-approved shovelware on its phones, claims Russia

"Fines for non-compliance range between 50,000 and 20,000 roubles"

That's interesting. Generally, when price ranges are quoted, they go from smallest to largest value. Might there be a 0 missing ?

VCs warn: Pumping millions into an AI startup? You mean, pumping millions into Azure, AWS or Google Cloud...

I didn't say no bullshit.

To summarize

Statistical analysis is hard, and costs a lot before you can hope to start generating revenue.

Good. When there's a high barrier to entry, less bullshit is created.

Just look at IoT for the reverse example.

When the air gap is the space between the ears: A natural gas plant let ransomware spread from office IT to ops

Re: Consequences

That's nice, but if you burn everyone at the stake for their misdeeds, you'll have no one left who have learned from their mistakes and you'll always be on the witch hunt.

Re: Paranoia mode on

If you're in, it would be a lot better to not make waves since doing so would inevitably introduce changes. As in, now this plant has likely separated the production network from the admin network. So, now that you have raised almighty Hell, your knowledge and access had been shredded and you can start again.

Real spies leave no traces of their access.

Re: This is with the presumption that it is a Governmental facility

We're talking about the USA here. If something can be monetized, it will most certainly not be a Governmental facility.

Well the clean up has to happen, so no surprise there.

What is always astonishing is finding out that nobody bothered to implement any sort of security beforehand.

Oh well, two days revenue lost is a lesson. Now, how many other natural gas plants will sit up and take notice ?

Because I'm guessing that plant was not unique in any way.

Oi, Cisco! Who left the 'high privilege' login for Smart Software Manager just sitting out in the open?

I'm guessing no senator is going to step up and rant about this

No way any political figure is going to step up to a microphone and rant about how the security of US citizens and institutions was put in grave danger by this.

Nope. Not gonna happen.

Forcing us to get consent before selling browser histories violates our free speech, US ISPs claim

And there's your problem. Everything wrong in the US today can be traced back to the day that decision was made.

Galileo got it wrong – official: Jupiter actually wet, not super-dry: 'No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet'

“No one would have guessed"

Interesting. I know nothing about the layers under Jupiter's visible surface, but from here, it's pretty obvious that the bands of color don't mix very much. It logically follows that the contents of one band mostly stay inside that band and don't mix with neighboring bands. That would go for water as well.

The great big open-source census: Most-used libraries revealed – plus 10 things developers should be doing to keep their code secure

Something's missing in the Top 10s

I note that in none of the top 10 most used modules listed is there anything to help with input sanitizing and checking.

That goes some way to explain the horrendous fiascos we've witnessed in the past few years.

Microsoft crack habit reports: User claims Surface Laptop 3 screen fractured again after repair

"Physical damage do[es] not happen if there is no external force"

Right, so the customer is holding it wrong then ?

It's always nice when customer support basically tells you to your face that you're a lying twat, isn't it ?

Reddit gets downvoted as site takes a Wednesday tumble

"Major Outage"

Get me General Failure !

Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers' network setups, but we do it for their own good

Yeah okay, but it's not your provider that helped you with that.

Torrent is great to get and share Linux distro images. I'm sharing Mint 19.1 and 19.2 images and the ratio on that is sky high.

"Our service helps overcome these issues"

Could someone please explain to me how capturing the MAC and IP addresses of the stuff I use in the privacy of my own house is going to overcome any issues whatsoever ?

I am well aware that any service provider likely has this capability - after all you're paying it to provide you with connectivity, so it obviously has the means to manage that connectivity. And that includes knowing what you connect to its service. Fine.

Except that, I can have a WiFi printer that the rest of computers can use. That printer is not going on the Internet, cannot be used from the Internet, and my computers using it do not send anything over the Internet to get to it to print. So why should my provider grab that address and what can it do with said address to "overcome these issues" ?

Apart from being able to tell me what I have connected to my network, I don't see how any provider can optimize anything at all with that information. And I'm not saying my provider is selling that info, I don't think so, honestly.

So what good it is to have that info ?

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

I don't think of the high seas as a place where you'd lug a powerful aerial on a boat to hack passing cargo container wifi. The open ocean is not exactly a comfortable place to be, unless you're in a very big ship.

And even then, things can get rough.

Poor infosec in the middle of the Pacific ? I think the cargo companies can live with that.

Fire Brigades Union warns of wonky IT causing dangerous delays in 999 control rooms

"Capita [..] declined to comment"

We don't need a comment. It's Crapita, that says it all.

I'm sorry, Elon. I'm afraid I can't do that... SpaceX touts robo-rides for orbital vacations, lift-off in 2021-ish

"The crew will spend up to five days in space without visiting the International Space Station"

They will pay $20 million to be cooped up in what looks like a large-ish Gemini capsule for five whole days ?

If you can splurge that amount of money, you are a person that has the habit of doing whatever you want, going wherever you want, whenever you want. You're also used to spacious, luxurious environments and people whose only job is to ensure that you're happy. Being locked up in a large telephone booth for five days is not your habitual environment, and doing that with four other people who are just as uppity as you are is going to drive someone crazy without a shred of doubt.

Plus, you'll not only not have caviar and champagne on demand, you'll also be defecating in full view of four total strangers. You'll have to get along with them, and that's not something you're used to either.

Paying that amount of money sure will bring you bragging rights back home - if you live to brag about it - but the experience is going to be unique in more ways than one, that's for sure.

One man is standing up to Donald Trump's ban on US chip tech going to Huawei. That man... is Donald Trump

"Such a rule would, say, block Huawei from buying chips made by Taiwan's TSMC"

And in what world does the US think it can impose on a Taiwanese company who it can deal with ?

If TSMC gets notice that it cannot sell to Huawei, it should shrug and say "sure", and continue right on dealing with Huawei. America's problems are not Taiwan's problems, Taiwan has bigger fish to fry.

And if the US starts getting uppity and saying thing like unless you do as we say we will stop dealing with you, well, let's just say I'd like to see Trump try that. The US can't live a day without the chips TSMC makes for it. Apple would have an aneurysm, Intel would have an attack, IBM would lie helpless on a gurney and HPE would be agonizing.

A measure like that would last all of 24 hours before the entire IT industry would scream for its reversal with its dying breath.

Among those pardoned by Trump this week: Software maker ex-CEO who admitted hacking into rivals' systems

Ah, Trump

The shit stains you leave everywhere will provide a mountain of work for historians to pontificate on for decades to come.

Your mere existence in the White House is a demonstration of how broken Democracy is in the USA. And you're breaking it a bit more every day, this time by whitewashing your scummy pals.

I would say shame on you, but you don't know the meaning of the word.

Ring in the changes: Mandatory two-factor authentication, login alerts, targeted ads opt-out after punters voice privacy gripes

"allow users to opt-out of sharing personal information"

Bzzzt ! Wrong attitude, Ring. You should have created your "privacy vault" to not allow for sharing personal information unless the user opts in on that.

For Pete's sake you don't need to have a PhD to understand that. You do, however, need a company that is not obviously built on sharing personal information with advertisers instead of being built on providing a service to its customers.

Ring is just another company that caters to the ad market, using its IoT tat to farm the information from its stable of clueless users.

Now Internet Society told to halt controversial .org sale… by its own advisory council: 'You misread the community mindset around dot-org'

"this board already works in a very transparent way”

Sure it does; the ICANN way. You know it exists, so bow down and grovel.

Congratulations, ICANN, in demonstrating a thorough disdain for everyone else's opinion, and the complete ignorance of the spirit of your own rules. You have shown the way for other groups to do the same, and now ISOC is emulating your despicable behavior.

Line them up behind the chemical shed and shoot them all, I say.

Google lives in an Orange submarine: Transatlantic cable will get by with a little help from some friends

Re: Les grèves sur la côte

Nah, can't happen. Strikes mostly happen in Paris and sometimes a few other big cities, and they are done on purpose to keep people from getting to their job or vacation spot.

The cable is safe, it's already on the beach.

Microsoft to bravely defend US democracy for a slack handful of voters in Fulton, Wisconsin

Re: Anonymity?

It's not that difficult.

1) You go into the voting booth where no one is supposed to see what you're doing

2) you insert the ballot of your choice into an envelope and close it

3) you bring your ballot to the box where you insert it and your vote is counted

4) nobody looks at your envelope before it is time to count who won - by then your envelope is one of many and, therefor, anonymous

That'll take the spring out of your step: Apple warns of iPhone shortages, revenue miss due to coronavirus

"The virus might do more"

Well yes, it will, because the virus is actually affecting China, whereas the tariffs are being paid by US companies and - by direct consequence - US citizens.

The only part of Trump's tariffs that have any impact on China is where US companies order less stuff, or no more at all following the famous forbidden list that erased 30% off the revenue of a company that needed parts from China.

The Chinese company is just suffering a small loss of revenue, the US company is hit for a third of its activity. Who's suffering the most ?

Auf wiedersehen, pet: UK Deutsche Bank contractors plan to leave rather than take 25% pay cut for IR35 – report

"the bank will only work with contractors [..] of its outsourcer, Resource Solutions"

And take a 25% pay cut. This whole thing is seriously starting to look like an orchestrated plan to diminish costs on the back of a specific category of workers who can do nothing about it.

Severe vuln in WordPress plugin Profile Builder would happily hand anyone the keys to your kingdom

"submit input on form fields that didn't exist in the actual form"

What kind of bloated mess must Wordpress be to accept input from fields that it isn't even expecting ?

Samsung gives China wide berth over coronavirus woes, uses sea and air freight to ship smartphone bits to Vietnamese factories

Wow. I had no idea that the consequences could be so widespread. In retrospect though, yeah, basing a big chunk of your production capacity in the same country is asking for trouble when things like this crop up.

I guess this is going to be a wake-up call for quite a few industries. From now on, companies will need to diversify their production centers and not only implant in countries with cheap labor. From time to time, having a site in a less-cheap country will be useful to pick up the slack when the cheap country has a hiccup like this.

I'll let the MBA's find the right balance for this.

Tutanota cries 'censorship!' after secure email biz blocked – for real this time – in Russia

Right. With backdoored encryption, for example.

Everything OK down there in the Oracle trench? Good. Big Red has a cloud-based data science platform for you

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science

And nobody at Oracle has thought of calling that ORCIDS ?

Or are they waiting to add something and call it Oracle Cloud Hypervisor Infrastructure Data Science ?

ORCHIDS. Come on, it's basically begging to happen.

It is with a heavy heart we must inform you, once again, folks are accidentally spilling thousands of sensitive pics, records onto the internet

Only $1.3bn of damage in the US ?

What is Emsisoft trying to do, be reasonable ? That's not how you report virus damage at a country level. You speak of hundreds of billions, not a measly single billion. You're talking computer virus. It's Armageddon time, not beer o'clock. You're supposed to scare the bejeesus out of people, not deliver a school report.

Go back and put some pizzaz on those numbers. I want to feel the fear, you understand ? FEAR.

Please check your data: A self-driving car dataset failed to label hundreds of pedestrians, thousands of vehicles

Patent trolls

I am sick of hearing of this scum bothering people that are actually trying to make a product.

You have a patent ? Good for you. Are you making anything with it ? No ? Then shut up and fuck off.

Patent law should be changed to include an article that states that a patent is valid only if the patent holder can justify that product is being made and sold using that patent. Doesn't need to be the holder, who can grant usage to whoever he likes, but product must be made or you have no right to complain.

That would clear out quite a few portfolios that are in zombie mode right now.

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Ah, Norton Undelete

Those were the days of truly useful and powerful little tools that have certainly saved dozens, if not hundreds, of hides from the roast.

And mine too, once or twice, I must confess.

Ofcom: Rule change to force UK comms providers to tell you when your contract expires

Re: How many people *ONLY* ever want the cheapest thing ?

A lot of them, apparently. That's why the shoe stores have entire aisles with cheap shit that won't last a year - it ensures that customers will be back next year.

It took my wife a looong time to get the message. She's a self-admitted shoe addict. She used to bring back a new pair every two months. I waited, because we had the means and it's her thing so who am I to tell her off and tell her to stop ? My thing is computer equipment and she never complained, so how could I ?

Then one day, she started complaining about how she was fed up with shoes that couldn't last more than a season. She said herself that she had all these nice-looking shoes, but after wearing them more than two times they started to hurt her feet. After six or ten times, they were falling apart. She told me that, from that point on, she would buy less pairs of shoes, but of better quality. Hallelujah.

Since then, and it's been quite a few years now, she occasionally brings back a pair of shoes. She is very happy to show them to me and I'm very happy that she's buying quality that will last, on top of things that look good on her.

But it took time, a lot of time. People will understand, but they have to have the means to do so. If we were minimum wage earners, I don't know that the lesson would have made it through.

Windows Terminal and Azure Data Studio both get a tickle from the Microsoft update fairy

"being a Windows component that is tied to Windows versions more of a possibility"

Would that mean that MS has finally started looking into having the various functionalities of Windows be separate entities as far as updating is concerned ?

Going further, is MS finally going to start looking at its OS as a kernel that has add-ons bolted to it, and treat the various parts accordingly ?

Might we finally one day have a Windows that can live through a video driver update without needing a reboot ?

I pray that this is the case.

Steve Jobs, executives shot down top Apple engineers' plea to design their own server CPU – latest twist in legal battle over chip upstart Nuvia

Nothing but typical Apple

You do what we say, period. And if you leave, you'll still do as we say, or we'll sue you to the ground.

Think outside the box ? That's marketing. Shut up and get to work.

Google burns down more than 500 private-data-stealing, ad-defrauding Chrome extensions installed by 1.7m netizens

Re: LOL

Yup, they were guilty of the absolute treason : costing Google money without the actual eyeball action included.

They were also guilty of redirecting to malware sites, so there's that.

But it's essentially lèse-majesté to profit from Google. Only Google profits.

Roses are red, IBM is Big Blue. It's out of RSA Conference after coronavirus review: IBMers will not attend infosec event over 'health concerns'

"RSA Conference is still planning to proceed as scheduled"

RSA Conference is going to learn the hard way that no, it will not proceed as scheduled.

It's just a question of time.

Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?

Larry is the company. Whatever he does, the company's image is involved. So they care.