Posts by Pascal Monett

Securus sued for 'recording attorney-client jail calls, handing them to cops' – months after settling similar lawsuit

Indeed, it would appear that I missed that. Thanks for the heads-up.

Re: Well done to the cop

The ones suing are three defense lawyers. The only mention of cops in the article is to say that they obtained illegal recordings.

And, if they obtained them, they used them. What is not said is if the cops knew the recordings were illegal, although I bet listening to the recordings should make it pretty clear.

SQLite maximum database size increased to 281TB – but will anyone need one that big?

How is that possible ?

"This is a bug, but by the time the problem was discovered there where so many databases in circulation that depended on the bug that the decision was made to support the bugging behavior moving forward, "

I will readily admit that I'm no database administrator, but even I know that there is always supposed to be a primary key. How on Earth did not only someone find a way to need null primary keys, but more than one someone did too, to such numbers that it is now a feature ?

Could someone explain that to me ? I'm really curious to know.

Trump backs Oracle as potential TikTok buyer

Re: Oracle and Ellison are more evil than the Chinese government

And being praised by the OHSG is just the nail in the coffin.

Cloud now bigger than Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Cisco combined

So the numbers are in

Everyone is going to The Cloud (TM) and, lo and behold !, now The Cloud (TM) is where the big money is being made.

What a surprise. Not.

Cloud evangelists have been pushing us in that direction for at least a decade already. It's no surprise that, with the largest multinational corporations throwing tens of billions into The Cloud (TM) and refining their offerings every year, that money is to be made there.

We're back to the mainframe server paradigm of the 70s and 80s, except that now, the mainframe belongs to someone else, you only get a slice of it, you can't discuss conditions and, when your link goes down for whatever reason, you can only wait for the mainframe operator to resolve the issue. Oh, and if you have trouble, a million other people probably do as well.

Yay progress.

Amazon makes 850,000m² bet that its people will get off the kitchen table and back to an office

1 in 6 corporate positions ?

You'd think a guy like Bezos who apparently hates paying his employees would have less overhead.

Outage: Faulty UPS at data centre housing London Internet Exchange causes grief for ISPs and telcos alike

"to provide the sense of scale of this outage"

That 150 companies are affected provides absolutely no sense of scale unless you know how many companies there are in total.

I do not. Is it 150 out of 300 ? That would be important. Is it 150 out of 10,000 ? That would be marginally insignificant.

So which is it ?

How to have a more positive 'outage experience' according to Microsoft: Please don't rely on the Azure Status page

What a great way to blame the customer for problems

"Outages are 'an unfortunate inevitability of the technology industry' "

The Cloud (TM) is sold as being always on, always there, so you have no right to make that argument.

""Azure has operated core compute services at 99.995% average uptime across our global cloud infrastructure "

So you're boasting about the fact that you've got 4 nines performance when you sell at five nines and, on top of that, you're talking about how your cores are functioning, not about how reliably your customers are accessing said cores.

"more than 95 per cent of our incidents" do not appear there

Then your Status page is worthless and you should do better. A Status page that only says there's a problem when every single customer can see that there's a problem is just a cover-up.

there is a separate Azure DevOps status page

Which proves that there is a cover-up. If you have to separate your failure warnings over multiple web sites, you're just diluting the information willfully.

And this last one is a beaut : "reliability is a shared responsibility"

Not when you're making your customers pay for said reliability.

This entire piece is just a "it's your fault, we're doing everything we can" puff piece.

Despicable.

CenturyLink caught trying to steal customers despite promising court it wouldn’t, promises it won't do it again

Re: See also

I think the Hare checklist would be of more immediate interest.

“may be held in contempt,”

I think it's pretty much in fucking contempt right now.

Slam the CEO in jail for two years, he's where the buck stops.

Oh what a feeling: New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums based on driver behaviour

Re: It communicates the vehicle's exact location to emergency services

From what I understand, eCall only activates when there's been an accident, which is quite different from a spy looking over your shoulder and whispering everything to its boss.

I am fine with eCall - until it gets proven that eCall is actually on all the time, in which case it will go into the same basket as Toyota, ie the Do Not Buy basket.

Former HP CEO and Republican Meg Whitman – who split HP with mixed success – says Donald Trump can't run a business

Re: the Democrats should have won easily

That is something I will never get. Trump is by far the candidate that the Democrats should have mopped the floor with. Where were the attack ads on his failures, multiple bankruptcies, cheating, prostitutes and pussy-grabbing ?

I don't remember hearing anything about all that.

The Democrats had the ammo to bury Trump alive, yet they did nothing.

It's like they let it happen on purpose.

"three other prominent Republicans who said they will put country before party"

It is a sad state of political landscape when you have to actually count on people who state they will put their country first.

Personally, if you don't put your country first, you have no business being in politics.

Samsung slows smartphone upgrade treadmill with promise to support three Android generations on Galaxies

That _is_ good news

But not enough to make me change for a new phone.

My A3 suits me fine for what I do with it.

Reply-All storm sparked by student smut sees school system shut down Google Classroom for up to a week

Re: Surely they're using G-Suite Enterprise for Education?

Whatever they are using, it's pretty clear that they've only just discovered access management and user control options and are trying to understand how they work, what the consequences are on their daily life and how to set up said options in the way that best corresponds to their needs.

Ain't it a shame that nobody thought to bother with all that when they first subscribed to the service ?

Bah, it's like patching. They are part of the wait-until-you-get-bitten crowd.

Trump administration reportedly offers Oracle cheap end to $400m wage discrimination case

I think you mean Autocracy, and it's already your current form of government.

Re: Where's their outrage when Trump goes even further than that?

It's called hypocrisy partisan politics. The Republicans will spare no effort denouncing a Democrat who does something shady, but if it's a Republican, then they will spare no effort to publicly state that everything is normal, fine, it wasn't done with that intention, etc.

It's political bullshit that has now been stretched so thin that you can easily see right through it, but since the Democrats are apparently helpless to stop Trump & Co, who cares ?

Not the Republicans.

"Herold has been moved off the case"

So, a person does her job and is rewarded by being shifted to another role. Gagging order, anyone ?

She was responsible for managing the case and complained about a shady, manipulative intervention by someone who should have known better (but hey, it's Trump government, so anything goes).

I fail to see the justification in moving her out.

Docker shocker: Cash-strapped container crew threatens to delete 4.5 petabytes of unloved images

Re: Docker tweaked its terms of service

Right. Because paid for Ts & Cs have never been changed by the company offering the services.

Sorry, that argument does not wash.

Docker tweaked its terms of service

If a landlord tweaked his terms of leasing, there would be a court case, but because this is the Web, one-sided changes like that can be made and nobody can complain.

When will Terms of Service be recognized as a binding contract for both sides ? I understand Docker is struggling, and it's a shame for its employees, but it offered a free service and didn't think things through. Now it is trying to find a way to stay afloat, so it modifies the contract to put people's images in danger if they don't pay up.

Not fair. They offered a service under certain conditions, now they are unilaterally changing the conditions. That should not be allowed.

This NSA, FBI security advisory has four words you never want to see together: Fancy Bear Linux rootkit

Re: How nice.

I would have liked to know how it gets installed as well. The article says "When deployed on a victim machine" and stops there.

How does the nasty get deployed ? Phishing ? Targeted email ? USB carried by a sleeper agent ?

Is this a plot of The Americans ?

Well, what are we waiting for? Three weeks later, Windows Embedded Standard 7 still didn't have the answer

"one of the UK's medical institutions"

Not sure this is actually Borkzilla's fault. It's not a BSOD, after all.

There's a fair chance Windows is functioning perfectly well, and it's just waiting for some network service that has been shut down or is otherwise unavailable.

Epic Games gets itself epically banned, launches epic Fortnite death match with Apple over App Store's epic 30% cut

"join the fight to stop 2020 from becoming '1984' "

Oh boy, you guys are soo late on that one. We've been in 1984 since the 1970s, when Echelon was created.

When the Internet became ubiquitous, the NSA upgraded our 1984 status by tapping all the calls under the excuse of terrorism.

We've been in 1984 since practically my birth, and we're not getting out of it any time soon.

Obvious icon is obvious.

Re: After all the appeals

Neither Sony nor Borkzilla have any clause mandating a fee over in-game purchases, so nothing will happen there.

NHS tests COVID-19 contact-tracing app that may actually work properly – EU neighbors lent a helping hand

Re: Won't work anyway

The point of the app is to alert you to a possibility of infection. If you don't trust the alert, why use the app ?

All those people who don't care about quarantine, protecting others and saving lives will not use the app for sure. Those who do likely will, and likely will pay attention if alerted.

Sources: Oracle Commerce Cloud devs laid off as platform struggles to gain traction, move to modern architecture

"Big Red seeks to downsize the struggling platform"

Well I think Oracle is not going to have any problem downsizing it now.

Developers are leaving. That means it's not a good idea to invest in it. That means there will be no customers.

This is undoubtedly going to be a successful downsizing operation.

Tencent’s gaming surge trumps potential loss of the one or two percent of cash it makes in America

Going to have to get used to it

The USA is not the only economy in the world any more. Chinese companies deal internationally, but they can very well grow inside their own country as well.

And if the US government throws a hissy fit every other President, then some Chinese companies are likely to start thinking that it's not worth the trouble.

You weren't hacked because you lacked space-age network defenses. Nor because cyber-gurus picked on you. It's far simpler than that

Ah, now I get it

All those major companies that get hacked, proclaim that customer data security is their #1 priority and then claim to have installed "top level" security measures, they're just installing the patches now.

Well, if you need to be hacked to get the idea, so be it.

ZX Spectrum reboot promising – steady now – 28MHz of sizzling Speccy speed now boasts improved Wi-Fi

Well done

With all the losers who can't deliver on their empty promises these days, it's nice to see that there still are people who can not only promise, but actually ship a functioning product that does what it says on the tin.

And now, they're even improving on it.

If I were to buy any retro console, it would be theirs.

They deserve it.

UK.gov to propose new rules for online political campaigns after last election marred by an avalanche of fake news

"create more transparent rules for political campaigning online"

How about this for a rule : every politician's every tweet/post/declaration has to include a link to the full list of his/her contributors sorted descending by amount.

That way it'll be a bit easier understanding why he/she says what he/she says.

What looks like a global pay freeze, sounds like a global pay freeze, but isn't a global pay freeze? Ask IBM

Yep, it ain't fun not getting any raise

But it's still better than being fired.

Which might still happen to some.

Three Facebooks, four more Amazons and one Apple to collect Indonesia’s digital services tax

"digital services [..] consumed within it deserve to be taxed"

The ball is rolling. Multinational corporations are going to have to bow to the inevitable some day.

They will pay taxes.

Everywhere.

Transport for London asks Capita to fling Congestion Charge system into the cloud

So Capita scored another huge government contract

And it is going to make transformations to bring the system into the cloud.

I eagerly await the article that will tell us how Capita screwed this one up.

How did you spend your time at university? Pizza, booze, sleeping? This Oxford student is snooping on satellites

Re: Would be really interesting if he could send to the satellite too.

I don't think he really needs to. If internal Windows traffic is being sent to and from space, he can likely gather enough info to make a targeted attack via a proper land connection and, if he's got enough, he might even be able to authenticate without any hacking involved.

Who in their right mind would think "Hey, why don't we just include our non-encrypted satellite link right in our LAN ? Makes things a lot more simple, right ?".

Right. It makes things very simple for hackers to infiltrate you and scumbags to mount ransomware attacks on you.

Brilliant.

Whoops, our bad, we may have 'accidentally' let Google Home devices record your every word, sound – oops

Re: Damn those lone rogue engineers

He's a consultant now.

Still sits in the same office though.

British Army does not Excel at spreadsheets: Soldiers' newly announced promotions are revoked after sorting snafu

"Lessons will be learned"

Lesson #1 : When needing to compile data for thousands upon thousands of employees in order to judge promotions, use a proper database with controls and safeguards, not Excel.

But hey, this the military so the lesson will be Get Somebody Else to Double-Check The Figures.

Android user chucks potential $10bn+ sueball at Google over 'spying', 'harvesting data'... this time to build supposed rival to TikTok called 'Shorts'

You'll get spied on whatever the box you tick.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Re: Correlation does not equal cause

It's not even a mistake, it's the gold standard in IT : touch something and everything that goes wrong with that something or whatever touches that something is your fault.

Even when you can demonstrate that you had nothing to do with it.

And it's not just with users. I've had IT guys blame me for a bug because I had created code that did something entirely unrelated. But it was on the same system, so it was my fault.

It's just the gold standard.

USA decides to cleanse local networks of anything Chinese under new five-point national data security plan

"pervasive state surveillance, represent a threat to human rights"

Yes indeed.

You hear that, NSA ?

This is all just so much bull. Hey Pompeo, you know what ? Every single other country out there can have Huawei equipment. You wanna be secure ? Cut off all international calls. And shut down all routers that allow Internet connection from abroad. And don't forget to make your lovely little wall, but make it around the entire country. And close the ports, those foreign boats could be bringing in lethal viruses. And shut down international airports, they bring foreign terrorists.

Just wall yourselves in and you'll be nice and safe. Safe to go mad, it seems.

We Kana believe it! Raspberry Pi Foundation launches Japanese keyboard

Re: SAMBA was made by packet sniffing - far more reliable than reverse engineering

Here's me who always thought that packet sniffing is reverse engineering.

Sure, reverse engineering can be applied to code - you take the assembler code and build the corresponding functions and procedures.

But taking what is going through the wire can allow to reverse engineer the procedures that are sending the data, then you have what you need to build the application that replicates that.

The results are in: Science says the Solar System's magnetic heliosphere looks like a deflated croissant

"Its job is to mostly shield our system from galactic cosmic rays"

Um, I think the Sun's job is fuse hydrogen and stave off gravitational collapse for as long as possible. The fact that that generates a ginormous magnetic field around a heliosphere is just a side-effect that happens to be beneficial to us.

That being said, I have now learned that the heliosphere has a magnetic shell around it. So we have the heliospheric magnetic shell protecting us, plus our own Earth-bound magnetosphere, and yet we still are capable of measuring cosmic rays.

Does that mean that there are "weak" cosmic rays that are stopped or deflected by the heliomagnetosphere ?

Re: If the latter, it's not a croissant, ask any Frenchman.

Je suis entièrement d'accord avec vous.

Re: Magnetic as motion

I don't think we have the technology to observe things that are moving backward in time.

That would mean we would have to record the result before taking the measurement.

This is real life, not science-fiction fantasy.

Mozilla warns more Firefox website breakage to come because devs just aren't checking for SameSite snafus

Re: How about...

The problem is easy to fix. Google is considering that now, the SameSite default value is Lax instead of none.

Just go and set it to None and the problem goes away.

Of course, if you've never paid attention to that, you might not know where to set it. Time to learn.

UK insurance biz Direct Line drops 'misrepresentation' claims against IBM in £36m database platform lawsuit

Project management failure

It seems obvious to me that this is not really a coding issue, this is a project management issue.

Client is complaining about some things where the supplier is saying they weren't at that stage yet. IBM use to have very competent project managers - I guess IBM has lightened its payroll a bit too much. That being said, IBM does have experience in managing projects, I'm not so sure the client does.

In any case, this is one more project that got out of hand because somebody wasn't doing his job managing the various aspects of the project.

It's even possible that it happened on both sides.

NSA warns that mobile device location services constantly compromise snoops and soldiers

How terrifying

"Commercially available rogue base stations allow anyone in the local area to inexpensively and easily obtain real-time location data and track targets. ”

Just a minute there : am I supposed to understand that there are rogue base stations implemented everywhere ? Controlled by who ?

Because if that is not the case, then they are being implemented to track someone who is already known, and that is state-level spycraft, so doesn't concern me.

What a good eye-dea: Battery-less, grain-of-sand-sized 2.4GHz transmitter to help save your eyesight

Could someone translate that into English ?

"For example, it incorporates a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with NMOS and PMOS cross-coupled transistors that support 2x lower startup current and 10.5db lower phase noise at 1MHz offset than an implementation that only uses standard NMOS or PMOS components. "

All that sounds very impressive and very technical and I have no doubt that it is important, but I can't for the life of me understand what the hell is going on and why it is important.

Help ?

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe – because we used astrometry: A Saturn-like world hugging its star

Great success !

"Quasars are very far away so they do not move "

When I think about it, the amount of knowledge we have gained in the past forty years on the Universe we live in is amazing.

Forty years ago, we were still wondering if ours was the only solar system with planets. Quasars were an unknown object and black holes were a theory.

Now, we have learned that quasars are just supermassive black holes at the center of a galaxy gorging on stellar gas, pulsars are white dwarfs that rotate real fast, white dwarfs have ginormous magnetic fields, some so powerful they are called magnetars, practically every star has planets, there are neutron stars, etc.

Its bewildering.

And then there's dark matter and dark energy to figure out.

We've learned so much, and there is so much more to find out.

Interesting times.

China slams President Trump's TikTok banned-or-be-bought plan in the US

Right

So China bans FaceBook, Google and Twitter but the USA banning TikTok is unfair and goes against market transparency.

Okay, basically Trump banning TikTok is unfair, but come on, find another argument. That one is totally not justified.

European Commission: Full-scale probe launched into data-slurping potential of Google's $2.1bn Fitbit buy

Re: “Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads”

Agreed, but it can even be more sneaky than that.

Google absolutely has the means of creating an entirely separate structure that will use the data for its ads - that are then not Google ads.

Never forget : every multinational conglomerate is a Russian Doll construction of truth. They say what you want to hear, and interpret the words to their own advantage, never in the way you think the words apply.