Posts by Pascal Monett

Tor soups up onion sites with bountiful browser bump: No more tears trying to find the secure sites you want

How do you know that ?

"paradoxically the most popular website for Tor users is Facebook "

How is it possible to make that affirmation when you don't know what Tor users are up to and Tor prevents metadata from being used ?

I just went through Tor's Overview page and it specifically states :

Using Tor protects you against a common form of Internet surveillance known as "traffic analysis." Traffic analysis can be used to infer who is talking to whom over a public network.

So you don't know who is talking to who. To me, that means you don't know if Facebook is the preferred web site for Tor users because you don't know what other websites they're using.

Also, using Tor to post your life on FaceBook. Now that's ironic.

Watchdog slams Pentagon for failing – for a third time – to migrate US military to IPv6

I appreciate the fact that, apparently, the DoD is treating this migration just like morning exercise. Plan ? Just go out and run, numbskull. Oh, it's harder than it looks ? Maybe we should follow the recommendations ? Nah. Just put on another pair of shoes and it'll sort itself out, probably.

These "security concerns" of theirs, they do not prevent planning. There's no reason to not plan properly because of them. Lack of personnel trained in IPv6 ? So plan to train personnel. Email not compatible with IPv6 ? Plan to replace it, or upgrade it.

Planning is not doing, but if you don't want to plan, you won't be doing for sure.

And the DoD quite obviously does not want to plan. Probably because really doing so will put a lot of ugly figures on an official report, and the DoD doesn't want to show those figures.

You're 3 billion years too late to see Mars' impressive ring system. The next one will be along in 40 million years or so

There is still water on Mars. Seems like most of it is trapped in the south polar ice cap, but more has been discovered under the surface in the Utopia Planitia region (wherever that is).

That said, when Mars lost most of its atmosphere and it dropped to the 1% density it has today, all surface water that wasn't frozen simply boiled off and was swept away by the Sun's wind. I have trouble finding a reference as to when that happened exactly.

Boffins step into the Li-ion's den with sodium-ion battery that's potentially as good as a lithium cousin

Fake flu ?

There have been more than 370,000 deaths globally and you're talking about a fake flu ?

You work on Fox News or what ?

Microsoft's carefully crafted Surfaces are having trouble with its carefully crafted Windows 10 May 2020 Update

Totally unacceptable

This is a Borkzilla OS on a Borkzilla platform. Borkzilla knows damn well how Surfaces can be configured - they're not PCs with endless possible configurations.

And yet, Borkzilla still can't get its shit together.

I am so glad I am staying with Win7.

UK.gov dangles £100m for service slingers for back office 'transformation' that'll kill off bespoke systems

"deals which could be worth up to £100m"

Is it me, or is the UK Gov making it rain money ?

And on IT projects, no less. Deals worth £100 million ? Don't worry, by the time the project is finished, it will have cost £500 million and still won't work properly.

And kill off bespoke systems ? Impossible. Everything government is a bespoke system.

Unless you want to replace everything with Excel. Which, actually, just might - no, no. Not gonna finish that phrase.

As the US maybe gets serious about coronavirus-tracking apps, Congress wakes up to the privacy risks

Location data has no use for contact tracing

You have an app that reveals who was in contact with who. That is what doctors need to know. Where it happened has no medical use whatsoever.

Therefor, any contact tracing database that purports to include location data is just a PII grab and should be avoided.

Contact-tracer spoofing is already happening – and it's dangerously simple to do

Jumping the gun a bit, aren't they ?

The UK contact tracing app has just been made available and scammers are already on the hunt ?

It's a bit quick I think, and a lot of those calls must logically end in "but I don't have the app on my phone yet, so how did I get into your database ?".

Of course, there still is the obvious issue of users not engaging brains when getting a phone call, so maybe it's okay for the scammers.

Fujitsu unveils new laptops 'optimized for remote work' – erm, isn't that what laptops have always been for?

"laptops that can survive for nine hours on a single battery charge"

Doing what ? Typing memos ?

This kind of declaration is completely useless. If you're editing video on a laptop, there's no way it can last nine hours on battery. Even if you're just watching videos, I highly doubt it.

Mozilla cautions India's national open digital plan is 'open-washing'

Leap of logic there

"open source should be preferred, but not mandated [because it] will prevent the problem of vendor lock-in"

Preferred, but not mandated. Hmm. Sounds to me like private companies are going to be all over this with closed-source stuff and, now and again, drop in a little widget in open source just to say there is some.

Let's be honest : if you say open source is not mandated, you open the door to a lot of capital that want returns and the best way capital knows to get something is through closed source.

That's not how you prevent vendor lock-in.

Had a bad weekend? Probably, if you're a Sectigo customer, after root cert expires and online chaos ensues

"OpenSSL was, and is, fundamentally shit at verifying 'real' certificates"

Wow. Looks like there aren't many SSL-capable programmers that want to tackle the problem.

A shame for an open spec.

UK.gov dangles £400k over makers of IoT Things: Go on, let's see how you'd make a security cert scheme

They had a great idea, then shot it in the foot

"The Ministry of Fun* declared that it wants a multitude of "industry-led" assurance schemes rather than just one"

No. You let the industry create a certification scheme if you want, but you don't go and have many of them, otherwise the customer isn't going to know which one is good and which one isn't.

This is daft. You finally get around to mandating a security scheme, which is a bona fide Good Thing (TM), then you completely undermine the system by allowing many different schemes. That is only going to create confusion and give rise to miscreants that will take advantage of the system.

Bad government. No cookie.

Home Office waves a cool £1bn to outsource handling of British visa, citizenship applications

"hand over [..] its operations to the private sector in deals that could be worth up to £1bn"

Wow. Government privatizing the handling of its border control. UK Gov has obviously not had enough examples of IT stuff going wrong, and can't help but set up a new line of funding for the same coterie of incapable sloths who are going to have a new trough to plunge in.

What can possibly go wrong ?

Thought GPT-2 was powerful? OpenAI teases GPT-3. Meanwhile, Microsoft dumps human journos for robots

500GB of text

That's a lot of text.

But, with all these models and better and cheaper etc, where are the actual products that use them ?

Is it all done so that Siri can become actually useful ?

75 million smartphone sales up in smoke in Q1: Let's drill down into which brands took the most pain

High-range phones are like high-range graphics cards

Not everyone needs one, and certainly not everyone who buys one needs one. Some people buy highly priced kit simply to show off that they can.

The fad for highly priced phones is going to wane not because of current economics, but because the new model brings next to nothing new compared to the previous model. 5G support is the only real addition of value, and you're still likely to not have a 5G network available until next year, aka next year's new model which will also, obviously, support 5G. So a reasonable buyer is going to hold on to his current model and splash for a new, 5G-enabled model when he'll actually have the chance to use it.

Microsoft and VMware end ancient grudge with new VM privilege workaround

In the end, isn't that better for security ?

The Workstation VM manager now runs at user level, and VMware no longer has "direct access to the CPU".

Shouldn't that mean that, in case a VM sandbox is breached by malware, that malware will have less opportunity to muck things up ?

Seems like a good thing to me.

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Agreed, but then upping the limit to 100 is just bonkers. Why should there be a limit anyway ? Just line-wrap when you get to the edge of the screen. If you type over five lines, who cares ?

Of course, that does imply that the command line utility needs a rather drastic upgrade, but that would really be putting his code where his mouth is.

Bite me? It's 'byte', and that acronym is Binary Interface Transfer Code Handler

Ah, but the English are masters in writing a lot more letters than that which they pronounce.

As in Worcestershire, which is pronounced Worstershire if I'm not mistaken.

Nokia's reboot of the 5310 is a blissfully dumb phone that will lug some mp3s about just fine

EDGE. Oh yeah, that's when you spend all day on the edge of getting a connection.

High-level musical chairs continue at SAP as yet another senior exec departs

"Todd's track record of accelerating enterprise growth"

I'm sorry, he's a beancounter. The only thing beancounters do is restrict budgets. I fail to see how that accelerates anything.

Were he top salesdroid, then yes, he could definitely accelerate growth by closing six-figure deals.

Beancounters don't close deals, they just record them. Then they cook the figures so that the salesdroid doesn't get the bonus he thought he was entitled to.

Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays

Re: Silly way to drive customers away

Which rival ?

Did you read this : "In the wake of the issues, Seagate and Toshiba also confirmed some undocumented use of shingled magnetic recording in some of their drives." ?

They're all doing it.

Remember when Republicans said Dems hacked voting systems to rig Georgia's election? There were no hacks

Re: Just one nose-picking minute

A very good remark. If a standard (i.e. poor) citizen were to try and pull that off, that's no doubt what he would get, but for some reason, politicians can lie their asses off without any consequence whatsoever.

Even if the consequence of their lies is a lengthy investigation that costs plenty of money.

I think it would be good to reinstate corporal punishment for lying politicians that throw gratuitous accusations. If you can't prove what you alleged, and the investigation proves that you were wrong, you get twenty lashes.

I would pay to watch that.

AR flop Magic Leap's 'pivot' spins CEO right off his throne

Re: Golden cushion

You may be right, but I'll always have problem with admiring a con artist.

He may have raised $2.6 billion (not 6.2), but he did it by lying continually and deliberately, and posting videos that were fake and not representative of the true abilities of the product.

As for “the ability for businesses to operate across vast distances and connect with their customers in ways that mimic physical interactions ”, if MagicLeap does ever manage to pull that off, it will rake the money in by the tanker load because the porn industry is going to be all over it.

Guess who came thiiis close to signing off a €102k annual budget? Austria. Someone omitted 'figures in millions'

They came this close . .

to defining a law to enable them to change a budget after having voted it.

Come now, this was a clerical error and, had they voted the thing as is, they would have just voted a change. It makes for a great article, but honestly it would not have condemned an entire government to a budget of a Mercedes or two.

This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year

Re: I remember it in the early 90s

Turbo Pascal is what I cut my object-oriented teeth on. I had self-taught myself BASICA (like everybody else, back then) and it was clunky but okay, but programming in Turbo Pascal just . . felt right. Like it was what real programmers do.

Then I went to uni and got smacked across the head with Assembler, C++ and Lexx & Yakk. That put some sense into me.

But I think I'll always prefer Turbo Pascal.

Software bug in Bombardier airliner made planes turn the wrong way

Just a reminder

This is an autopilot program for a plane. It does not need to detect obstacles, trees or other vehicles. It does not need to worry about weather conditions or if there is snow or ice on the ground (the pilots do, not the autopilot). It does not have speed limits, or wrong ways, and doesn't need to care about street signs. It just needs to manage the ailerons and the engine power.

These programs have been worked on for decades, and we can still find (small) bugs.

And you're telling me that we'll have autonomous cars by the end of the decade ?

Did nobody tell them about the lockdown? Logitech releases new 'luggable' mechanical keyboard for LAN parties

Re: No numpad

Don't care. Every keyboard fits in a backpack, if some of it sticks out it's no big deal.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

I worked as an operator on a BULL DPS 7 for a while back in the day. Everyone knew that the system engineers on site had the most powerful computers, but during the night we had the run of the place.

Somebody had put Lode Runner on one of the engineer's PC, and the night crew, while the tapes were turning, would take turns playing.

Somehow, he found out. He wasn't happy, but he didn't bother with an inquisition ; he just activated the BIOS password on his PC.

Night shifts were a lot more boring after that.

After 30 years of searching, astroboffins finally detect the universe's 'missing matter' – using fast radio bursts

So that's how dark energy is created !

Dell says the hard part comes next after rapid pandemic response helped it to stable Q1 revenue

"meaningful business insights"

I can't help but feel a disconnect between business insights and where people work. The only thing that is meaningful is that the job is getting done, and there should already be business insight on that.

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Re: If he died tomorrow he would die with a smile on his face

<sigh> Why is it always for tomorrow ?

Re: So is Blackwater

And that's exactly what Blackwater does : what it wants.

FYI: There are thousands of Chrome extensions with so, so many fake installations to trick you into using them

Oh for Heaven's sake

"I think that the Chrome Web Store does not take good care of its developers and forgets the most important thing, the users"

It's almost mid-2020 and there are still people who do not understand that anything Google is there for the ad views, not the users.

Extensions are just wallpaper to get the clicks. So some of them are dodgy ? The clicks are all that counts. More clicks, more ad views, more money in Google's coffers.

It's what they do.

I wish that was actually a joke.

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

"He says he was approached in July 2019"

If you are approached by Microsoft, it's just like if you are thanked by Putin.

Expect the knife in the back any time after that.

Pablo Escobar's big bro and former accountant sues Apple for $2.6bn over FaceTime bug

"Apple failed to provide a phone free of exploits"

Um, I don't think Apple has ever declared that any of its models were "free of exploits", so that allegation is spurious and will be thrown out.

And concerning the $100K he supposedly plunked down to secure the phone, I do wonder what on Earth he could possibly have acquired for that sum that would be any good to secure a phone. Encryption is not that expensive.

Great success! Finance app was able to inform user that their action was unsuccessful

Ah, nothing like polite customer service . . .

Boeing brings back the 737 Max but also lays off thousands

I just checked Boeing's Company page. There is a list of 12 people, and 10 of them joined the company after 2007. Only 2 have been there longer, one since 1982 and one since 1988.

So no, not funny at all and rather inevitable.

Switzerland 'first' country to roll out contact-tracing app using Apple-Google APIs to track coronavirus spread

Why do they keep repeating that ?

"people's whereabouts and movements, that could prove to be extremely helpful in tackling the virus"

Let me get this straight : an app is going to track all contacts it gets near enough to, and if anyone gets the bug, all people the app has recorded will be contacted.

So why the hell do they say that people's movements and location are "extremely helpful" ? You've got the list of people that were in contact, what more do you need ? Go see them, go test them, and the ones that are actually sick flag themselves and you repeat the process.

Governments do not need to know where people have been since the only point of that information is finding out who they contacted, and the app does that for them.

What am I missing ?

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

Re: Lying Liberace

At this point, an actual monkey could govern the country better than Trump.

Apple promises third, no, fourth, er, fifth time's a charm when it comes to macOS Catalina: 10.15.5 now out

It's time somebody went to Marketing and applied a vigorous slap to the face.

With generosity.

Gone in 9 seconds: Virgin Orbit's maiden rocket flight went perfectly until it didn't

Re: Every man and his dog can do that

Really ?

Because, last time I checked, there are less than five groups that can do that. Ariane is one, Apparently China and India are on good footing, and then there's SpaceX that is favorably viewed to supply the ISS, and Boeing that is going to get its shit together.

Sorry, but every man and his dog is not sending stuff into space. It's not called rocket science for nothing.

Not going Huawei just yet: UK ministers reportedly rethinking pledge to kick Chinese firm out of telco networks by 2023

Re: Scepticism...

Of course, nothing. The truth is staring you in the eye : Cisco has no 5G gear, Huawei does. The USA cannot stand Capitalism if it is not the one benefiting from it, so anything goes to sink Huawei's influence.

Unfortunately for Trump, economic reality trumps Trump's wishes. Money talks louder than partisan politics.

And, as has been repeated for months now, if there were actually any basis in the allegations, someone would have posted a pic on Twitter by now.

But nothing. On the other hand, the USA has enabled the Cloud Act, which authorizes their government to demand any data on anyone as long as it is hosted on a server managed by a US company.

That is public information - no need for some nebulous motherboard chip that we've never seen.

Draw your own conclusions.

Google brews up a fresh pot of Java for its serverless Cloud Functions service

Java ?

Are you talking about that pile of shit that hasn't been capable of updating itself for the past three months ?

Every day I get a notification that Java needs updating. I click Update Now, and after a few minutes I get a failure message that Java could not download it's update package.

I am on FTTH with a 1GBps line - don't tell me I don't have the bandwidth.

Also, the problem is ongoing. I have gone twice to Oracle's effing page to update manually - they still can't get it right.

What a bunch of wankers.

5G mast set aflame in leafy Liverpool district, half an hour's walk from Penny Lane

Re: If you haven't grown up with the internet

Oh. My. God.

Since when has "growing up with the Internet" been a guarantee of intelligence ? Or critical thinking ?

It seems to me that "growing up with the Internet" has, on the contrary, reinforced stupidity across the globe.

I have had to warn friends of mine who repeatedly posted pics of their underage daughters on Facebook. I am not going to lie, their daughters were beautiful (um, they still are). And that's why I told them to stop posting pics of them continuously on Facebook. As far as I'm concerned, they were literally endangering their girl's lives. Thankfully, they listened.

As far as I'm concerned, if you "haven't grown up with the internet", you might just have a chance at having a bit of a head start on critical thinking. And critical thinking is the one thing that you desperately need when you are surfing the intartubes.

Okay

This is definitely the right time to post this link.

If you are intelligent, you'll learn something.

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

"people can't use some of its stuff in the cloud nor access their documents"

Ah, progress.

You pay through the nose to not be able to access your own documents when someone else's server is feeling iffy.

Once upon a time, we had Personal Computers. We now have Someone Else's Platform, and we pay royally for the privilege.

Well, those of us who can't avoid it, that is.

Uber plans to ride out of stable Singapore, move APAC HQ to high-tension Hong Kong

"It's simply not possible [..] to make significant investments without regulatory certainty"

Wait, so you're no longer disrupting ?

Or is it that, in a now China-controlled Hong Kong, you actually fear being arrested instead of a visit from an ineffectual government inspector ?

It's easy to have balls in the West, that pretends to have democratic values. It's a lot harder to have balls in a country where you can dragged off to jail as soon as the local government has decided it doesn't like you.

While waiting for the Linux train, Bork pays a visit to Geordieland with Windows 10

Re: Need a bit of Raspberry Pi action

The problem is that Windows comes with a built-in bork generator in the form of constant updates and changes that modify its behavior. It fills its disk with data it doesn't need, then ends up borking because it doesn't have enough space to function.

A Pi is good enough for a stupid infomercial screen, and doesn't modify its behavior from one day to the next. Just get a product to manage a million of them at a time, and maybe Windows will finally get out of places it never should be in the first place.

And maybe I'll win the Lottery this week. I think I know which has a better chance of happening.

Highways England waves around £62m contract for National Traffic Information Service after brief chat with vendors

"a new system to perform this function"

Why ? Is the hardware rusting ? Why can't modular elements be added ?

Why is it that, even at government level, we have a culture of consumerism and throw out the old, it's time to buy some new stuff ?

So they want to modernize. Well, here's the deal : your new system ? Make independent modules out of it. Do not make any part require all other parts to function. Also, make it so new parts can be added at a later time. That way, you can add or upgrade individual modules without having to fork out for an entire system the next time.

Or is that just too 3rd millennium for you ?