Posts by Pascal Monett

Tupperware-dot-com has a live credit card skimmer on its payment page, warns Malwarebytes

"the little HTTPS padlock shows up in the browser address bar"

That is going to be an interesting explanation, when Tupperware gets down to it.

IT services sector faces armageddon as COVID-19 lockdown forces project cancellations – analysts

That's one point of view

Another possibility is that companies are going to want that project completed double-time, since they've had to wait for it to get done.

I'm not convinced project cancellations are going to be all that legion. Sure, there will undoubtedly be some, but I think there will be more that will request urgent finishing, or undertaking.

We'll see.

World's smallest violin to be played for opportunistic sellers banned from eBay and Amazon for price gouging

"filters were in place"

Well, they're working very well, are they ?

At the same time, this is Ebay we're talking about. I think it's a bit unfair to single out the guy who posted an offer at 0.01 and the offer reached 210. It's not the sellers' fault if people are nuts, even if it is rather obvious that he fully intended to take advantage of the nuts.

India tech firms warned not to abuse their exceptions to national coronavirus lockdown

"contracts carrying penalties"

It seems obvious to me that, given the period, a judge will not rule in favor of a client complaining that the job wasn't done on time.

It should be useless to even try. Nobody is going to be on time for a few months at least. This lockdown is going to throw plenty of schedules into the shredder.

Asterix co-creator Albert Uderzo dies aged 92

I have the whole collection

Book by book, I collected them over about two decades. There are a few I had to buy again, because they were worn out.

I will now read them again, with him in mind.

Stuck inside with nothing to do? Apple fires out security fixes for iOS, macOS, wrist-puters... and something weird called iTunes for Windows

iTunes is still a thing ?

But, we were told that Apple was replacing it and banishing it from its OS.

I guess it's still good enough for Windows users, though.

Samsung says it has the future of DRAM sorted after success with new EUV process

So EUV chips can be made faster, are more dense and they consume less

Sounds like paradise. And, made faster and easier means making more with the same resources means each unit costs less, so it's a win-win-win.

Except that they're going to want to recoup the costs of putting it in place, so we're not going to see price drops any time soon. And the gaming crowd won't care because it'd DDR5, man, look at those framerates !

Microsoft goes into Windows lockdown for builds from May, citing 'public health situation' (yes, the coronavirus spread)

"preview releases [..C and D..] will be suspended"

And that will not delay anything because they'll just be folded into the B release. No problem, right ?

Capita CEO and CFO take 'voluntary' pay cut of 25% amid coronavirus outbreak

"a 'voluntary' pay cut of 25 per cent"

Sure, but that's only on the base salary, not the bonuses, pension plans or whatever else rolls down their way.

They can afford it. Hell, they can afford 75% in those conditions.

Dell files to trademark 'Podference' – presumably the mutant offspring of COVID-19 and a virtual conference?

Okay, let's sort the chaff

a Podference is : "Downloadable or non-downloadable podcasts [..]; Downloadable or non-downloadable video recordings [..]; Downloadable or non-downloadable written articles"

In other words, videos or documents that can or cannot be downloaded. That the subject is supposed to be technical is irrelevant.

So, my question is : how can you trademark something based on stuff that is not only not yours, but pre-existing since practically the beginning of the Web ?

I might as well push for a trademark on Monettference, where I blather on about any specific subject. Who cares ? It's a video, like the gazillion other videos that are out there. Each and every YouTube channel could push for <channel>ference and what would change ? Nothing.

This is marketing at its finest. Requalify something that already exists for your own benefit. It costs nothing and changes nothing but might increase "brand awareness".

Yes, I have an increased awareness of just how stupid Dell is now, mission accomplished.

Techie collective to whip together official WHO-backed COVID-19 app within a week to meet 'urgent, global need'

First of all, recenter the project goal

This should not be considered a COVID-19 response app, but a pandemic response app. The next time a pandemic occurs, the app should be quite capable of handling the info for that pandemic, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Of course, the timeframe for a response app to be actually useful for this round is limited, so consider that whatever you can cobble together is basically a trial run. Limit the functionalities to the bare minimum. Right now there is a perfectly functional website. People can go there, so it's not like we have no information to go on.

By all means, make an app if there's any chance that it can help get the right information out to people, but take the long view. COVID-19 is not the first pandemic to hit us, and it certainly won't be the last.

It's 2020 and hackers are still hijacking Windows PCs by exploiting font parser security holes. No patch, either

"a miscreant can include a malformed multi-master font in a document"

That means that the miscreant is sending me a mail with a document attached and expecting me to open it because COVID-19 or my bank or whatever.

I have a very fine bullshit detector and I can assure you that your mail will be filed in SPAM faster than you can blink and your document will not be opened or previewed in any way.

That settles that problem.

Now, I've checked my Win 7 installation and it has, in perfect Microsoft form, no less than 12 copies on disk. Two that are in Windows\System32 and \SysWOW64, and ten copies in \winsxs\ followed by a slew of characters that would take way too much time for me to type here and nobody cares about reading that anyway.

Then there are two more copies in \winsxs\Backup, in which the file names start by "amd64_microsoft_windows_gdi_" and another slew of characters etc etc.

Which ones can I get rid of, anybody know ?

Taiwan collars coronavirus quarantine scofflaws with smartphone geo-fences. So, which nation will be next?

Re: What if you leave your phone at home?

You have the authorities sending SMSs at regular intervals, and you're supposed to respond in a limited amount of time.

So leaving your phone at home ensures that you will not be able to answer the SMS, thus triggering police action, apparently.

Forget about those pesky closures, Windows 10 has an important message for you

You're right. The only use for the built-in tool is to partition the disc during install. After that, you need Partition Master or some other tool that is capable of resizing and moving partitions, which Windows is totally incapable of.

"not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"

Just how much is enough ? Windows has long been the specialist in eating up the disk space, nice to see that the latest version is keeping with tradition.

Microsoft has always considered that it has the entire disk to itself. Partitions ? Yeah, it's heard of them - there's even a built-in tool since, I think, Vista, but if you actually want your OS on one partition and your data on another it's a world of nuisance to get it done, and there are still parts that cannot be elsewhere than on C: - whether you like it or not.

So yeah, dumping all the security updates on C:, what can possibly go wrong ?

Make haste slowly when deploying tools to cope with global coronavirus pandemic

'try our solution for COVID-19'

A big red flag indeed. It likely means they weren't there before, but cobbled something together in a hurry to profit from the situation.

There are no products "for COVID-19". There are videoconferencing products, there are networking products and there are calendar and planning products and all of them have existed before this pandemic. Analyze one of those for suitability and steer clear from the ones who have just popped up now.

Your Agile-built IT platform was 'terrible', Co-Op Insurance chief complained to High Court

Re: Whitebox

I agree that it does seem that CO-OP missed a crucial step : a tech demo of the alleged whitebox product.

I'm pretty sure that it should not have taken much time for actual experts in UK tax law to sniff out the major issues, and then tech wizards would have had a field day explaining how difficult it would be to get stuff changed.

Not really blaming CO-OP, but hey : if you didn't find any ready-made package in your own country, why did think going to foreign source was a good idea ?

Self-driving truck boss: 'Supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype. It isn’t C-3PO, it’s sophisticated pattern matching'

Finally, a proper description of what the media dubs "AI" actually is

Sophisticated pattern matching. Sounds about right. When I did the Google Beginners Course in AI, I followed a dozen lectures in statistics. There wasn't a hint of AI, it was just how to define a slice of dataset to get the desired result.

Now a head of company has finally called it. Good. I'm not expecting that to actually change the media's mind, but I'm glad that somebody is putting "AI" back into its place.

No, the head of the World Health Organization has not emailed you – it's a message laced with malware

Well, there's at least somebody else that agrees with you concerning the markets.

Personally, I wouldn't set foot in such an area. I need my meat to be cut, cleaned and lay in a refrigerated enclosure without flies or anything running around.

Workday will PaaS up the opportunity to open its platform to third parties

"taking a cautious approach to product development"

What ? But that's not how you do things these days ! You go Agile, you Scrum around and create lots and lots of functionality that you break fast and often ! You make sure that your customers are regularly complaining about stuff because that means that dialog is well and alive !

In the old days, programmers would hole up for months and years, carefully crafting a monolith of functionalities that, when released, would work out of the box with only minor adjustments needed. In the old days, nobody knew who was working on the project because nobody ever saw them ; they were in their office, coding.

But that's not how it's done anymore. These days you engage with the customer, you meet to explain why what broke and how the next release will not only correct that issue but include new things that are broken. Then you meet again, after release, to explain that the issue is not solved because a side-channel in the new functionalities is having an unforeseen effect that the next release will correct for, as well as correcting the new broken stuff and adding yet more stuff that nobody asked for that won't work anyway.

That's how developers have become visible, and that's important to show everyone that they are working. Of course, meanwhile nobody else gets to work because the tools are broken, but hey, the developers are working.

Peak greenwashing: SAP backs oil and gas giants with Accenture partnership, eco-credentials go up in smoke

"create new revenue opportunities"

I have a new revenue opportunity for you : make Thorium reactors work.

Nuclear is not going to go away, not when we all have at least one smartphone, not when electric or hybrid cars are being sold at the rate of half a million a year, going up.

We are continually pushing the grid to do more and more things. Once, it was just the lights, now its lights, heating, kitchen appliances, computers, handhelds, washing machines, water purifiers, and soon electric cars everywhere.

We need nuclear, and we need safe nuclear. Thorium is safe. Let's get that running.

Microsoft drops a seemingly innocuous Windows Insider build, teases the future

"it is a reminder that - hey"

- you're doing Microsoft's Quality Assurance.

Forget toilet roll, bandwidth is the new ration: Amazon, YouTube also degrade video in Europe to keep 'net running amid coronavirus crunch

Re: Why

Oh, you are so right. Why should you have to sacrifice anything in a time of global pandemic ?

FYI: You can trick image-recog AI into, say, mixing up cats and dogs – by abusing scaling code to poison training data

Re: Kudos to the boffins

Because, down the line, the results will not be optimal and customers will be unhappy ?

Maybe ?

Watching you, with a Vue to a Kill: Wikimedia developers dismiss React for JavaScript makeover despite complaints

I don't give a flying frak how you indent your code, but if you don't I will strangle you with my bare hands then and there.

Re: Front-end development is a complete mess

I am relieved to see that there is at least one other person that considers framework churn to not be the bee's knees of development environments.

And, as for decisions, removing frameworks because of lack of popularity is the kind of thing that makes me wince. Popularity is more important than features and stability ? Everything seems to be a show these days. Unfortunately, sometimes it's a shit show.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Black hole quasar tsunamis moving at 46 million miles per hour

"They reckon it’ll only get faster over time"

How does that work ?

Unless I missed something in science class, in space you need some form of propulsion to go faster. This quasar tsunami (as awesome as it is named) is just gas and particles hurtling across a galaxy and encountering other gas and particles.

Those are not conditions that are favorable to acceleration.

Bad news: Coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the world. Good news: Nitrogen dioxide levels are decreasing and the air on Earth is cleaner

"according to Worldometer's stats"

Please use official sources to report on this pandemic. WHO's situation report indicates 8778 deaths globally as of yesterday.

Let's not go rounding up for no reason, shall we ?

Former Googler Anthony Levandowski ‘fesses up to pinching trade secrets about self-driving cars

"admit guilt for only the charge of lifting the tracking document"

Why of course, let the guilty determine what he will be charged for. Don't forget : the USA has the best justice money can buy !

He's fucking guilty. Get him on all counts and be done with it already.

Dell publishes data centre cleaning guidance, suggests hiring pros to disinfect enterprise kit

Indeed

I'm kind of surprised that Dell needs to publish guidance on cleaning datacenter equipment. I was unawares that datacenters see a constant stream of public, visiting to witness the blinkenlichten.

Finally – news that something is guaranteed to be healthy and well looked-after for the next six months. That something is Windows 10 1709

So, let me get this straight

Microsoft is not updating its OS now, when we're working from home and not capable of doing much, but suspending updating Windows to such a time as we'll all be back at work, working double time to catch up.

Great idea, Microsoft. I couldn't expect more from you.

Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature

"the variety of websites visited and software installed"

And porn. Never forget the porn. It's not just the lowest rungs of the ladder either - CxOs and manglement are quite capable of having an interesting browsing history as well.

That said, my sister's oldest used to be an expert in getting his mother's laptop into such a state that I had to go and purge the system. Curiously, when I pushed for him to have his own laptop, that stopped. What a coincidence, eh ?

Thankfully, our AI savior is here to nail the COVID-19 pandemic: A neural network that can detect coughing

No, but it's a great marketing opportunity.

Netflix starts 30-day video data diet at EU's request to ensure network availability during coronavirus crisis

Re: Ooops.

As long as you don't do it again . . .

Re: If we can't act sensibly during this crisis we've really quite failed as a society

But we have failed as a society. We are selfish, we raise our kids to be consumers, we elect blithering idiots who can't see farther than their next election, and we are ready to blame all the foreigners for everything we aren't doing right.

Yet, somehow, society endures.

Amazing, isn't it ?

Firefox to burn FTP out of its browser, starting slowly in version 77 due in April

Does that mean that hosted servers are not going to use FTP anymore ?

I have two hosted servers and I need FTP to update the files and check the local versions. I am, obviously, using a dedicated FTP client to do that, but if everyone is throwing FTP to the dogs, I do hope someone is going to think of a solution because managing my hosted files via a browser would be, I believe, a pain in the neck.

I rather like LDS's idea of an FTPS. Is there a good reason not to do that ?

What do you not want right now? A bunch of Cisco SD-WAN, Webex vulnerabilities? Here are a bunch of them

"at least one being a buffer overflow"

Really ? A buffer overflow ? In 2020 ?

Dear God that should be a hanging offense by now.

Oh-so-generous ransomware crooks vow to hold back from health organisations during COVID-19 crisis

"Ransomware operators of DoppelPaymer and Maze malware stated . . ."

Um, just a question to the FBI : can't you fucking get a handle on these guys if they have an actual PR channel ?

Maybe you should go ask help from someone capable, like Jim Browning ?

Microsoft Teams usage jumps to 32, no, 44 million as Windows-slinger platform slides onto home workers' PCs

"440,000 employees at Accenture"

Well yeah. Accenture signed with Microsoft, so their employees have it on their desktop whether they want it or not. Big deal.

Mine's the one with Teamspeak in the pocket.

Reach for the sky: Pixar founders win Turing Award for pioneering 3D animation – and getting rid of jagged edges

I've been upgrading my graphics card since - (checks records) - 1992. Yes, I've read up on interpolation, yes I know what NURBS are and can tell that I want a card to do that. But know how it works ?

Sorry, bud, I'm a gamer, not a mathematician. I check the specs and choose my card because I've been told what to look for. I have a vague idea of how stuff works because I read about it. I absolutely cannot fathom the math behind it and, being a gamer, I don't have the time. Those games aren't going to play themselves, you know.

Now, if only I could get a version of Minecraft that used Toy Story graphics. That would be awesome.

Look ma, no Intel Management Engine, ish: Purism lifts lid on the Librem Mini, a privacy-focused micro PC

Checked out their site, looks good

And I have to admit that, one, I like their approach to my security and, two, I like the Librem 15 laptop a lot. Its aspect, the fact that ruggedness and reliability is repeatedly mentioned, and the specs are nothing to sneeze at either. The $1400 price tag is surprisingly acceptable for the quality and specs that are put forth, at least in my opinion. I was expecting a larger price tag then that.

Unfortunately, I have no use for PureOS at this point in time. Still stuck with Windows until I retire. I hope they'll still be around by then.

Forget James Bond's super-gadgets, this chap spied for China using SD card dead drops. Now he's behind bars

"Peng will now spend years in prison for compromising the security of the United States"

Peng is not the guy compromising the security of the USA, he's just the courier.

The guy doing the compromising is, apparently, Ed. He's the guy the FBI should find.

Of course, Peng is part of an espionage ring and guilty, no doubt there, but I think the wording is wrong. Peng participated in compromising US security, but he did not do so directly himself.

Tencent is now bigger than Cisco and Lenovo – and predicts this virus thingy will help it get bigger still

"Such tools, execs said, should find wider markets in the future"

If they work, that is. I find it extremely unlikely that a phone app can do any medical diagnosis whatsoever. With the exception of a bad-quality heartbeat monitor (the microphone that you can put against your chest), the typical mobile phone has no monitoring hardware for temperature, blood pressure or anything.

And if you're just asking questions to the user, then you run into the issues of response reliability. Not to mention understanding the question appropriately.

In short, I'm skeptical.

Hong Kong makes wearable trackers mandatory for new arrivals, checks in with ‘surprise calls’ too

Yes , the app will know where you are, but I think the HK government is honestly not interested in knowing that. Apparently, the app does not upload that information, it just keeps it internally to compare with the new location. I guess it squawks to the government when it has nailed a new location, telling that the location has changed but not giving away the new location.

At least, I hope that that's how it works.

Remember that blurry first-ever photo of a black hole? Turns out snaps like that can tell us a lot about these matter-gobbling voids

Heh

If you really want a mind warp, check this out (SFW).

NASA to launch 247 petabytes of data into AWS – but forgot about eye-watering cloudy egress costs before lift-off

Just wondering

I wonder if anybody at NASA made a comparative cost evaluation of how much it would be for NASA to upgrade its DAACs to meet the 240+ PB storage mark vs properly costing AWS to get the job done.

With the download costs added to the mix, I really wonder if it wouldn't be better to go and upgrade the DAACs.

SpaceX beats an engine failure to loft another 60 Starlink satellites

"Shows value of having 9 engines"

Sure, but does not show value of having so-called recoverable rockets.

Too bad, that.

Apple updates iPad Pro with a trackpad, faster processor. Is it a real computer now?

"you get 128GB of storage"

I'm sorry, Apple is touting a laptop for video editing and the basic version only has 128GB of storage ?

If you're editing video, you know full well that a terabyte these days is not too much. Yet, the terabyte version is the priciest.

That's like Renault selling you a Twingo named Ferrari. It's cheating, pure and simple.

Freedom of Information coverup clerk stung for £2k after deleting council audio recording

Oh, great

Some third-rate Council in a tiny burg has been found guilty and prosecuted to the final extent. Yay for Justice.

Now, how about those FOI requests that land in London and never get an answer ?

Just a question.

Virtual reality: Now even the online Google Cloud Next event is postponed

"We are fully committed"

Right. So, given the 3rd Millennium double-speak standard, it will never happen.