Posts by Pascal Monett

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

I'm glad you had the luxury of being able to do that.

AT&T tracked its own sales bods using GPS, secretly charged them $135 a month to do so, lawsuit claims

Re: I hope this guy has the evidence to follow through

So do I, because AT&T is going to want to settle as soon as it realizes that a judicial decision will not be in its favor.

Besides, if I'm a salesperson, I fail to see why I should be "rewriting and correcting technician orders of wireless and wired television boxes", "assisting the technicians in rewriting customer orders", or "changing customer install internet speed upon customer request" and the other stuff that is clearly the domain of support, not sales.

Far be it from me to actually defend salespeople, but there is a clear divide between sales and support, and it seems obvious to me that this divide was not respected.

It also seems obvious to me that, because AT&T is clearly abusing their sales reps, AT&T will "fight these claims" until it becomes obvious that a judge is going to rule against them, at which point, just like Oracle, IBM and countless others, they will fold like a wet mop to avoid having an actual judgement against them that will cost a lot more than another court case against some disgruntled salesdroid.

Honestly, it is high time that the US judicial system refuse settlements and lay down the spirit of the law clearly and unequivocally to avoid behemoth US companies from continuing to profit from their shady practices.

With millions upon millions out of work in the US, here come the scammers claiming victims' unemployment money using stolen info

Why does this continue to happen in the US ?

Stolen identity is no laughing matter in any country, but frankly the USA seems to take the cake in the amount of ways someone can pass himself off as someone else and benefit from it.

In France, you cannot get a bank to send money from an account, no matter how many details you have on the person. Basically, even if it is actually your account and you are you, you can't get your bank to do it over the phone. The bank wants to see you in person at the nearest agency. More so if you want a loan. So that's most banking issues solved.

However, France also has a government portal. You can do most administrative stuff on it with your government-assigned ID and password. I shudder to think what would happen if someone got hold of my details, but on the other hand, there's no money there. The worst thing a hacker could do is change my annual income report. A hassle, to be sure, but nothing that couldn't be handled with a face-to-face meeting with a tax inspector.

And given that we don't have public credit ratings (I'm sure banks have their rating of you, but they don't share), nobody can go and ruin mine.

So how is it that the USA is basically a constant target for identity theft and that it is so lucrative for the scammers ?

FCC boss pleads with Congress: Please stop me from auctioning off this spectrum for billions of dollars

So it's actually more of the same

Pai is not acting to protect emergency services or - heaven forbid ! - consumers, he's acting to save telcos from forking over money for spectrum they don't need now.

The fact that this, for once, actually helps other people, is not on his mind.

Attorney General: We didn't need Apple to crack terrorist's iPhones – tho we still want iGiant to do it in future

"no thanks to Apple"

And that's a Good Thing (TM).

Apple is not law enforcement. If the law wants to decrypt, it pays the tech consultant the market price to do so. It does not make Apple put a backdoor in a secure encryption system.

What's next, cars that automatically call the police when criminals are driving them ? Of course not, this is just another jab at backdooring encryption by the morons who think they can just wish it so.

Luckily, they can't.

Apple's MagicPairing for Bluetooth fails to enchant after mischief-making bugs found hiding in the stack

So, several versions of badly written code

Code that still works, but has minor flaws in it.

Well I don't care that they are minor flaws. When I hand over my code to the customer, if he finds some "minor flaw" in it you can bet I'm getting my sorry ass back in the saddle lickety-split and I'm correcting that flaw right damn NOW.

Of course, the big difference is that I depend on my customer's satisfaction to get paid, whereas those three guys obviously didn't.

Car crash: Uber axes another 3,000 jobs, closes 45 offices as punters snub app during coronavirus lockdown

All that AI money down the drain

All that effort to steal Google employees and knowledge, the settlement and the infrastructure, and now, poof ! All gone up in smoke.

All those offices all over the world, lots of money spent setting them up and now, poof ! All gone as well.

Looks like Uber was getting a case of too much cash in the bank and started many projects it didn't actually have the money for.

And that means it could be paying drivers better.

If you're appy and you know it: The Huawei P40 Pro conclusively proves that top-notch specs aren't everything

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger are nowhere to be seen

Sounds like the ideal phone for my retirement, when I will be able to do without Google and just live my own life.

Waiting to see how all this evolves in the next ten years.

Crooks set up stall on UK govt's IT marketplace to peddle email fraud services targeting 'gullible' punters

Re: Replacement for TITSUP

Continuing Omnishambles Concerning Known Untrustworthy Politicans ?

Huawei's defiant spinning top says Chinese vendor can cope with renewed US sanctions

Re: Bloody tourists

What, and ban money ? Are you mad ? Do you have any idea how much they spend in Paris ?

Can't go without that. Although, that's exactly what we're doing at this point in time . . .

Microsoft gives Office 365 admins the heads-up: Some internal queries over weekend might have returned results from completely different orgs

"Under extremely rare circumstances"

So it was a million-to-one chance, and we all know that it happened 9 times out of 10.

No biggie, right ?

Latest NHS IT revolution is failing to learn lessons from the last £10bn car crash

"lead digital transformation in the NHS"

From all of what I have read about NHS IT projects, it seems that, in order to fulfill that lofty goal, you need to start by firing everyone above department manager.

Then you need to get a clear list of needs from the people "on the ground", and then you can start designing an IT system that will do the job and cuddle up to someone's buddy because his wife knows someone high up so it has to be done that way.

Also, given the cost/benefit ratio of previous IT projects, top-level NHS suits know diddly squat about specifying and following IT projects, so keeping them out of the loop is #1 top priority if you want to get anything useful done.

Why is there not a ROFL icon ?

Brit competition regulator will soon be able to seize rogue traders' domains – and even Amazon accounts

Re: So

Yup. And the part where the ad agency had to sign a waiver is typical bullying. Oh, we made a mistake, you lost money, but unless you promise to not sue, you're screwed.

Liberty and Justice for all my ass.

Podcast Addict banned from Google Play Store because heaven forbid app somehow references COVID-19

Well there's the problem

"as a single human I don't scale well"

Well duh. Google has billions in the bank and can't be arsed to hire more than a single person to manage app rejections ?

Ridiculous.

India’s contact-tracing app unleashes KaiOS on feature phones

So they ported an app to a feature phone

Impressive. Now, how do the feature phone owners go about getting it ? They can't navigate to a web site or portal, so are the phone companies going to beam it to them as an update ?

India opens its space industry to private companies

Citation, please ? What are your sources for saying that India is "militarizing" outer space when international treaties ban that ?

And making an ICBM is not militarizing outer space. ICBM are ballistic, it's in the name, meaning they go up and come back down again. It's nothing new either, quite a few countries have them.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

Re: Please please please...

No! No! No!

The last thing I want is to see his effing mug on this site.

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

I'm pretty sure Intelligence types say the absolute minimum to politicians already. The trouble is, politicians are on top. When they ask a question, Intelligence is supposed to answer.

If you really want politicians to not get information, you wind up with the NSA, an entity that does what it wants and tells lies when asked questions.

What's better ? I really don't know.

Re: Great name, great beer

That does sound delicious. Too bad Munich is so far away from me.

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

Re: At least the O-ring wasn't frozen this time...

Bloody O rings. It must be a Soviet conspiracy.

Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

"a lesser but still troubling development"

What ? It's a bloody disaster !

I call for a nationwide effort. Breweries must immediately post open kegs at every street corner, and citizens must do their civic duty by taking a mug and ensuring that said kegs get empty as fast as possible.

Come on, Brits, you survived the bombing of London, you can do this !

Openreach boss denies BT selling stake in UK's national broadband plumber

Re: Cash in before the collapse

You're confusing telephones with communication. Communication is vital infrastructure. It doesn't matter if you use a phone, a laptop, a PC or a tablet. It doesn't matter if you're using the phone link, WiFi, Internet or mobile data ; it's all communication.

And if you think phones communicate any differently than PCs these days, you need to wake up to the 3rd millennium. POTS is long dead, everything is TCP/IP these days.

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

Damn right.

Reporting on a murder doesn't make you an accomplice.

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

Re: The law can and does constrain the government

It doesn't seem to be doing much to constrain Trump at this point in time.

It has done nothing in the past three and half years, and now that Trump has his cronies installed in every conceivable point of power, I don't think the law is going to do anything against him.

You do remember who Bill Barr is, right ? Do you really think he's going to authorize any action against Trump ?

I don't.

Popcorn !

I just love it when US judges are sent back to their corner.

And never forget : it is _not_ a good idea to upset someone in a wig. Ever.

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

Oh yes. God forbid you should ever be inconvenienced by such mundane things as protecting others.

Cyber attack against UK power grid middleman Elexon sparks in-house IT recovery efforts

What ?

"these days more and more companies are forced to pay to speed up the process of getting back to business as usual"

No. It's just that, with the Internet, it is easier to find companies that haven't paid attention to the most basic security rule which is DO A FUCKING BACKUP.

I have zero pity for a sizeable company that still hasn't understood the value of backup. All your files are belong to them ? Pay the fucking fine, idiots, and then take your board and shoot the lot of them. It's not like this is news.

Either the board hired an incompetent IT manager, or the board did not approve the proper budget.

Either way, it's the board's fault. Shoot the bastards.

Now, if you're a small company, you've just received a golden lesson in the importance of backups. I sincerely hope you've learned your lesson because, if not, you're going to pay again. You might start a cost/revenue analysis to determine just how often you can afford to pay to not do backups.

Personally, my limit is zero.

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

What the frak ?

You didn't include Borkzilla ?

What's wrong with you people ?

Brit defense contractor hacked, up to 100,000 past and present employees' details siphoned off – report

Well duh

"quite a few people at Corsham would be unhappy with news that a contractor with full access to the sensitive site has been hacked"

Well then, how about not letting him use any personal equipment, nor take out any information, nor bring in USB keys ? You can even prevent him from sending email to external addresses, if you like, and not allow mobile phones. You know, for security.

It's one thing to bring a contractor in, have him sign an NDA and let him loose on internal equipment. It's an entirely different realm of stupid to let a contractor in with his own laptop and give him administrative access to your sensitive data.

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

I note that,

of all the things Cerf has taken note of, lambasting ISPs for immoral interpretation of the word "unlimited", specifically not making any efforts to improve bandwidth and coverage, and doing their damnedest to ensure that their contracts are as nebulous and incomprehensible as possible while maximizing their profits is nowhere in the list of things that His Cerfness deems an issue.

Obviously, demanding government handouts is the way to go when you've sold out.

The USA has been doing that for two hundred years and look where that's got them.

It's the spirit of the law that should count, not the letter, but you just can't write something that cannot be interpreted in a manner that was not intended. Courts should be there to keep things in the spirit of the law, but they have been undermined by decades of reinterpretations of script.

Unless you have a robust corps of judges who are well versed in the spirit of the law and hell-bent on refusing alternate interpretations, your legal system will break down.

And, on top of those issues, you have the lawmakers who can very well make laws for their own interest or financially-interested parties, instead of making laws that ensure that actual, living, breathing humans* have a chance at a decent living.

* I wrote people first, then realized that, in the USA, corporations have the same rights, so I had to correct that

Facebook to surround all of Africa in optical fibre and tinfoil

My gast is well and truly flabbered

FaceBook actually doing something useful, and selflessly pledging open access.

Okay, sure, it will also be open access to FaceBook and it ad-slinging, privacy-violating platform, but still, it means people will be able to just surf the Internet, so not necessarily use FaceBook.

Wow. Has the temperature actually dropped a degree down in Hell, or is this just the visible tip of the iceberg of The Zuck's plan for world domination ?

TSMC to build new 5nm chip factory in Arizona with US government backing

It's hardly ironic, it's the definition of brain drain and we've been doing that to ourselves for the past thirty years in the name of cutting costs.

Well, we've cut costs to the point we don't know the job anymore. All those beancounters must be giddy with joy now.

Back from the dead: Appeals court resurrects lawsuit claiming IBM stiffs its own salespeople on commissions

Re: Not News

If IBM doesn't really need salespeople, then why hire them ?

I would just love to see IBM's quarter results after one quarter of no salespeople.

On the other hand, it would just be another in a long string of quarters of less revenue, so yeah, he might just be right after all.

Swedish data centre offers rack-scale dielectric immersion cooling

Re: In days of yore

You can still find YouTube videos of guys doing that - and at least one is only a few weeks old.

I used to do watercooling when it was DIY. I still have a massive finned heatsink and two pumps that I cannot bear to get rid of.

These days, watercooling is practically the default solution. The range of CPU coolers that use it is impressive, and motherboards use nothing else.

Worried about the magnetic North Pole sprinting towards Russia? Don't be, boffins say, it'll be back sooner or later

It's the Atalantians

They're preparing to open the crust to hoist a great big trash catcher into space to gather all the crap we've put up there because it's interfering with their Instagram connection with Tau Alpha Ceti.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: obvious

Idem. I actually knew a friend who lived a few hundred kilometers away who always complained on the phone about how mice were not that intuitive to use.

Cue the inevitable visit and demonstration of how to properly use a mouse.

We all had a good laugh about that over dinner.

Flashy new toys for the next Windows 10? Sorry, fun-seeking Fast Ringers must make do with DoH for now

Oh boy

"We are practicing our ability to change which branch we consider as the active development branch"

What could possibly go wrong ?

Well, nothing else than that that has already happened.

'iOS security is f**ked' says exploit broker Zerodium: Prices crash for taking a bite out of Apple's core tech

Re: Security is hard, m'kay?

When you have a professional opinion stating that iOS security is fucked, with a list of breach types that are so common that bounty prices are in freefall, you're beyond the realm of security is hard.

Yes, security is hard. especially if you don't give a shit about it.

Multi-part Android spyware lurked on Google Play Store for 4 years, posing as a bunch of legit-looking apps

"In-depth spyware is normally the preserve of state-backed agencies"

Yeah, but since then the NSA was abysmally stupid enough to get its malware base pilfered.

It was only a question of time.

Google says it'll pick up the tab – and stick it in a lovely colour-coded Chrome group

"it all boils down to help[ing] with logical grouping"

And right then it falls flat on its face because every user has his own logic.

At least, in my experience with users.

I prefer my Start menu well organized, only the icons for applications I use on the desktop, and as many tabs as I need in the browser.

Each to his own. With NoScript and uBlock Origin, obviously.

NHS contact tracing app isn't really anonymous, is riddled with bugs, and is open to abuse. Good thing we're not in the middle of a pandemic, eh?

Re: Why, oh why...

"hoping against hope that they might just manage to do it right"

Hope springs eternal, but the NHS has, how can I say, a history as far as IT is concerned. Given that there was undoubtedly a smidgen of urgency, the fact that the app is bug-ridden and violates privacy was to be expected.

But, no worry ! There is never time to do things right, but there's always time to do things over again.

So, some time before the heat death of the Universe, there just may be a proper application that does what it says on the tin.

In the meantime, the snouts are firmly in the trough, so all is well.

It's not because they don't wear the makeup that they're not clowns

Better late than never... Google Chrome to kill off 'tiny' number of mobile web ads that gobble battery, CPU power

So nice of you, Google

Unfortunately, there is now a browser that simply does not allow ads. It's called Brave. And it is at least three times as fast as Chrome.

You can do your little bit on the side, but I am done using Chrome on my mobile phone. Brave gets me the page I want without any useless clutter, and it does so in record time.

You're history, Google.

Donald Trump extends ban on Huawei, ZTE telecoms kit in US companies to May 2021

Ah, that old chestnut.

"security interests have been warning for over a year that Huawei Cisco and other Chinese US corporations are susceptible to governmental interference from Beijing Washington"

And, with the Cloud Act, it is happening every day.

Senator demands deep probe into spyware-for-cops after NSO Group touts hacking toolkit to American plod

"should only be used to combat terrorism or serious crime"

No contradiction there. Being a journalist is a serious crime in most dictatorships.

Stop tracking me, Google: Austrian citizen files GDPR legal complaint over Android Advertising ID

Re: From my own investigations.....

I use Brave.

No ads on Brave. No need to worry about settings.

Re: Google are so full of it

It does not need to verify any identity whatsoever. It has the AdvertisingID, and a request to stop. It stops, and that's it.

This "verify identity" bullshit is just to protect its revenue stream. It is not required for the user, it does not bring any essential service to the user, and the right thing to do would be to say : "Okay, we have stopped collecting data on that ID. If you wish to resume, you may reset your AdvertisingID".

But that would cut into its bottom line, so fuck the user, we keep collecting.

Once again Max Schrems is putting his finger on the point that hurts. I sincerely hope he wins this case.

Latest Microsoft 365 'wave of innovation' really just involves adding or renaming a bunch of update channels

And how about an Enterprise Optional Channel ?

Companies do not need you to change their working platform, Microsoft. You have forgotten that people use your UI to work with products, not to dick around with your settings panels.

Put your stupid new functionality into the App Store, and let companies download what they think they want to try, when they have time to try it out.

There is really no reason for you to foist changes on everyone at the same time, especially when you can so royally screw everything up in doing so.

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

Re: Windows that won't resize :(

Well of course. Do you know how much of a nuisance it is to create a resizable dialog box when a simple call MsgBox title, message seems good enough ? You have to set all those parameters and boolean flags. Ugh.

Of course, this is Windows we're talking about, so it would seem logical that somebody would take the time to write a message routine that could check the length of the message, determine if it holds in four lines and, if not, use the resizable version automatically, but you know, this is only the 3rd millennium, we're not that advanced yet.

And having someone write a routine that either calls the default message box or the resizable one following message length is, well, not being paid for, so . . .