Posts by Pascal Monett 18221 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Apparently the terrorist angle has been worn out, so let's rile up the mothers and make Yet Another Push for backdooring encryption - despite every single FACT that has been laid down against it.
While you're at it, legislate Pi to be equal to 3.14, makes things simpler, right ? No need to bother with pesky rules of mathematics, lawmakers never understood those anyway.
Personally, when I attend an important meeting - whether or not notes are allowed, when I get back to my desk, I will record somewhere the most important points as I remember them.
Because, days or weeks later, there will always be someone to say "yeah, that was decided at that meeting" and, unless you have a record, you cannot disprove it.
Okay, a lot of things happened to muddy the waters, but I retain one thing from all this : nobody did an end-to-end test and validated the results.
Was it really necessary to have an email generated for a separate database ? When it was found that that confused the system and ended in spam, I would have tried to find another way of doing things.
Also, no monitoring of the applications' activity took place. The system went live and everyone was certain that it was working. Nobody made any sort of checks until months later, when the results were below expectations. Jon is not the only person responsible for losing two and a half million subscriptions - every manager implicated in the application was guilty of just assuming it worked without checking everything thoroughly for its first month of production.
If someone had checked the mail status regularly, they would have noticed the amount of incoming mail from server logs and the amount of actual subscriptions, and that would have revealed the issue well before losing even a hundred thousand subscriptions.
Wow. Maybe somebody is actually remembering something about the past and doesn't want a repeat - that'll be a first for HP.
Apart from that, it's management as usual. Kudos for having erased a layer of management, that's new, but 9000 layoffs to "save costs" ? Looks like not everything is changed at HP after all.
DDoS is practically only used by pathetic losers who, not being able to handle real life, use that to "get back" at someone or something for a trivial issue they deem way too important to let pass.
Curiously enough, there was a time when we heard about DDoS blackmail, as in pay up or I take your site down, but it's been a while since I've heard that being used. Has it fallen out of fashion, or have encryption blackmail schemes taken over as goût-du-jour for the miscreants ?
But DDoS as a form of civil protest will never fly. If you want to protest against a governmental organization, you will have to DDoS a government web site and I think that is already a federal crime.
that security, in 5G, is software-defined.
Meaning wrote by humans. Humans don't have a great track record in writing secure software, otherwise there wouldn't be so many AV companies, data recovery companies and security consulting services, all of which fall prey at some point to the very threats they promise to protect you against.
5G may work, but when it goes wrong it will go very wrong, and there will be much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair.
Why ? There are other browsers. If Chrome starts shitting on your front lawn, throw it out and use something else.
After testing its suitability, of course.
With all the bullshit major corporations are pulling (looking at you as well, Microsoft), I foresee a future where it will be legally mandatory to ensure that existing production versions never change without full disclosure of what changes and what the impact might be, and failure to disclose or make updates optional is passable of fines up to and including, say, 4% of global, worldwide revenue before taxes.
Nothing like hitting them in the wallet to get the shareholders' attention.
First and foremost, it was the most awesome thing Mankind has ever done.
Second, it birthed many of the technologies we use daily today. You ever had a cordless drill ? You can thank the space race for that.
Actually, I have no need to say more, just go here, and here and here, and read about all the stuff you wouldn't have if NASA had not gone to the Moon.
On one hand, I understand that he wants to keep this under the radar. He wants to get rid of the page and doesn't want anyone to know who he is and what page he wants to kill.
On the other hand, it is kind of obvious that, if you don't tell the judges who you are and what you want deleted, it will be kind of hard for the judges to decide whether or not the request is justified.
So ABC really is in a corner of his own painting.
Given the competence of UK Government in managing IT projects, it will be dream job to nationalize and properly manage a country-wide phone/data network, along with the international connections that go with it. Oh yeah, sure. And that will not at all allow you to implement half-backed Age Verification schemes without asking anyone's opinion, no, no, of course not. Nor will that allow you to "filter" certain sites without having to mention it to anyone either, right ?
Free broadband for everyone ? I give it six months before nobody has anything better than 3G anywhere.
There's not enough popcorn for that shitfest.
Indeed it is not. But if you have an office full of a dozen consultants that are there every working day of the month for a "project" that is planned over two years (a scenario I have seen repeatedly where Sharepoint is concerned), then I think you're going about the hiring process in the wrong way.
In France or Luxembourg, I would publish a time-limited contract for one year, renewable twice, and advertise the job to be done. That is perfectly legal and, when the project ends after it is finished in the allotted time (yeah, I'm dreaming, but humor me), the participants go away and leave copious documentation for those in charge of maintaining the beast (again, humor me).
There is apparently this thing that business has with the size of the salary line in the budget sheet - they like to have that minimized, for some unfathomable reason. So they don't hire, but take on consultants because those guys go under operating costs, or some other bull like that.
I will never understand the reasoning behind that. I would prefer having the talent in the company, ensuring that, when things go wrong, I have the people who know how things work on-site and ready to intervene, and that in the long term.
I'm obviously not modern CEO material
On my mobile phone and my desktop.
On the phone, I absolutely love it. Chrome can go take a hike. Pages load almost instantly, and I no longer see the clutter around and in between what it is I actually came to read.
On the desktop, I curiously continue using Firefox, although I am telling everyone else to use Brave. My wife adopted it immediately, because of all the hassle ads are on the shopping sites she goes to. Isn't that ironic ? Ads on a shopping site. You'd think they'd be more interested in providing a clean experience to make a user happy and get more repeat visits, therefor selling more. Oh well.
Where his own finances are concerned, that is. Everything I have read about him tells me he is also a major pain in the behind.
So Icahn is behind this merger. Well now things are taking shape : Icahn wants it because he thinks he will be able to benefit from it. The number of layoffs that this merger would generate is none of his concern. So he will push and maneuver, then bother everyone to hell, then rant and rave until he gets what he wants.
I almost feel sorry for the boards of HP and Xerox. Almost.
I find it fascinating to see how some people can create a dedicated team around an idea, raise serious money, and yet fail to bring the awesome idea into existence. Oh sure, Magic Leap has a belt thingy and a goggle thingy, but it utterly failed to make it interesting, and certainly not as interesting as the hype machine it pushed on everyone.
Kind of like the Segway, with the exception that the Segway cannot be faulted for what it does, simply for what we were brought to think it would do. Hype can be a dangerous thing.
Now Magic Leap is gasping for breath, and if I were a VC, I would really be thinking very hard why give money to a company that ate through over $2bn and has a dud to show for it.
JP Morgan is going to get ownership of the patents. What on Earth are they going to do with that ? License to Nreal I guess, and rake in the other license fees that already exist. I wonder what is going to come out of those patents, since what exists now doesn't exactly rock the world.
Good to see that some people are taking care to get all the information before making a decision.
Elizabeth Denham should resign. Her job is not to protect companies and, unlike Ajit Pai, she is not working in the US. She should be ashamed of having expressed her authority in a matter where she had not seen all of the available information.
For an Information Commissioner, she acted in a singularly uninformed manner.
No, I haven't. Ever. The fact that I don't use Outlook might have helped, from the look of things, but first and foremost I actually pay attention when I reply to or write an email.
There's also the fact that never use Reply To All - my ego is not of sufficient size to believe that everyone is interested in my response.
Maybe, some time in the future after my brain aneurysm I might, but up to now my record is spotless on that account.
I do believe that the Tesla is actually better suited to European travel distances. Here in 30km, you can actually reach another major city. In the US, you've barely exited the suburbs of the city you're in.
I see a few Teslas going to and from work. Not saying they're popular, but there are quite a few around.
Yeah, but it was also fucking awesome and it could lift 140 metric tons into orbit.
Today's best lifter would apparently be the Falcon Heavy with up to 50 tons (taking into account only those rockets that have actually lifted something into orbit).
There are a number of rockets promising to approach the venerable Saturn V's record, but none of them exist anywhere except on paper yet, so we'll just have to wait and see.
"Our people need to be clear about their career path at DXC"
Oh, the path was quite clear before : the exit was right there. It's going to be one hell of a job to regain employee trust and demonstrate that management has indeed changed, if that is the case. Still, at least the are words about employee retention, that's a first change.
If this Salvino guy does turn DXC around, in mentality and not just profits, then I might well consider myself impressed.
Because he's starting pretty far down, one must admit.
That is likely the responsible answer. If the user is legitimate, then it is indeed up to the user to correct any profile mistakes.
Unfortunately, that means that you are subject to the whims of a nitwit that couldn't enter his own phone number properly.
Well, they do specify that the tool was made by Kaspersky Labs.
1) Their website is not good. They claim to have international clients, and only show three logos, none of which point to a testimonial from the website of the company in question. Oh, and they use the same guy on the two pics that show people - looks like they don't have all that many techs available.
2) They brag, that's not professional.
3) They tout a 100% success rate in "decrypting, analyzing and preventing ransomware attacks", which is simply ludicrously impossible.
4) Their testimonials are badly written, with the same kinds of mistakes across several "different" entries.
I look at that website and the wording itself screams "scam!" at me.
The amount of data collected by Facebook is several orders of magnitude greater than Uber gets.
Facebook has 15 datacenters and has spent a billion dollars on the technology. You don't make that many without the data that they need to store.
Uber, on the other hand, has not built any datacenters, and spends less than $250 million annually on hosted equipment.
It is therefor obvious that Facebook is getting more data than Uber.
Is it any surprise that a Google-hosted event to talk about how great Google is has people mouthing nice words about privacy while defending ads and the data collection it implies ?
Of course not. Obviously engineers are trotted out to reassure people : look how reasonable we are ! We know privacy matters !
You mouth the words, but you're working for the biggest ad giant on the planet. You fool no one.
Yup, you nailed that : people are rubbish at proper document handling and storage. Oh sure, there' the odd exception - like my wife actually, but generally speaking papers are to be stuffed in a closet and forgotten, or judged useless and thrown out. Medical records ? Why would I keep a five-year old bill from my local pharmacist ?
Medical documents are much better in the hands of medical professionals. That does not include Google, even if they hire a "Chief Medical Officer". Is that person even a doctor ? Well I'll be damned, she is. And the head of Google Health is as well. I hope that's a good sign, but that still doesn't make Google a medical company.
That dates way back to the apparition of GDPR, yeah. Oh, and the jury is still out on whether or not Office 365 is GDPR-compliant, might want to clear that up.
Oh well, at least Microsoft is paying lip service to the notion of privacy. We'll just have to wait for the inevitable cock-up to find out how much it is fooling around behind our backs.
Agreed, but the alternative is another government-funded space program and, to do so, more taxes because NASA is already rolling on three wheels instead of the six it would need to actually get things done.
So, the future of space is Capitalism, and that means profit. I don't like it either, but that's where we're going.
Excellent response. I was going to link to a video on a YouTube channel (Curious Droid) that talks about just that problem and outlines everything you have said, but I do not have the access to do so where I currently am.
You can look at the channel and find it though, so if you're interested . . .
Right now we're still learning the ropes. I am convinced that Cloud is complicated, and DevOps, go fast and break things, and all the new thingamabobs they keep adding to remain "competitive" are certainly not helping in the stability and availability sides of the operation.
In twenty or so years, when the long-toothed DevOps guys have actually gained the wisdom of experience, I'm sure Cloud progress will be at a much more sedated pace, and availability will be up there with the famous Five Nines.
But first, we're going to have to live through the breakneck (and neck-breaking) pace of those young whippersnappers who have to invent everything Right Damn Now and get it into production yesterday.
I'll keep my data on my own network during that time, thank you very much.
Yeah, just like a guy getting caught running a red light admits it to the cops who caught him red-handed.
Sorry bud, but admitting it in this case is not getting them any brownie points. It would have been simple to include a question at install time, collecting performance data is not something new and a lot of programs and other things offer to participate, so why did they think they were above that ?
They're not, and they deserve the fallout.
Right, so people are automatically going to volunteer the information that they had a deactivated firearm. Sure. That will in no way bring attention to them, there will be absolutely no investigation launched into people who "notify" several weapon transfers, and nothing bad will ever come to the people involved.
Come on, you don't require registration of such weapons, why do you suddenly need notification of change of ownership ? That is equivalent to saying that someone else now has it, which is the same as a registration in that person's name.
Might as well impose ID cards.
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