Posts by Pascal Monett

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.

HPE celebrated diversity on International Women's Day not with pictures of its own staff but stock images of models

"it was posted prior to the start of the event"

Way to demonstrate just how fake the whole thing was. You prepared all the marketing material beforehand, so you could make a point about how "progressive" you are.

Unfortunately, you just underscored how fake all that progressiveness is.

The better way would have been to hold the fiesta, take pictures of actual participants, and post a news blog after. Of course, that does not allow you to run ahead of the news. It does, however, prevent you from smacking your face into the wall of shame, like you did.

Small business loans app blamed as 500,000 financial records leak out of ... you guessed it, an open S3 bucket

Ok, the lesson to learn here . .

. . is that it is time to stop trusting small startups with your private data.

Yeah, I know, that is going to put a crimp on startups that propose money. In the meantime, we need a certification that proves that the startup knows what security is and knows how to manage cloud accounts.

I know, I'm dreaming. Just don't trust financial startups that don't have a banking charter.

Pervasive digital surveillance of citizens deployed in COVID-19 fight, with rules that send genie back to bottle

Obviously not. We just have to look at the NSA to know how this will pan out. In the best of cases, governments will proclaim and swear that they have stopped, but some service is going to be assigned to "maintenance" of the procedures, and it will keep things going.

Let's not exaggerate, we are not forbidden to leave our homes, we are just asked to restrain from doing things that we do not have to do.

The form just states the reasons that will not get us fined, reasons which include going to and from work, shopping for the bare necessities, health requirements, important family requirements, and short, close-proximity movement that are not in groups.

This afternoon, I need to go and get my daughter at the train station. I will fill out my form, indicate that it is an important family requirement, and that's it. I foresee no problem with that, nor am I being restricted in my movements beyond the reasonable, given the current situation.

This is not worth a revolution. It's a global health requirement.

Should have seen that coming

All the signs were there : my President gravely announcing that we were at war, that civic responsibility was paramount, that all means would be brought to bear. Yup, digital surveillance. I guess that now, Facebook and Google have a new category of customers to sell their data to : governments.

I wonder just one thing : how can Twitter posts, Facebook walls and Google location data pinpoint a COVID-19 carrier ? It's not like our keyboards have medical sensors. I think we'd know about that.

In any case, this is the greatest excuse ever to implement worldwide government surveillance. Nobody is going to complain, and when the crisis is over, surveillance will obviously stay in place "to be ready for the next crisis".

It's our civic duty, citizens.

Obvious icon is obvious.

British Army adopts WhatsApp for formal orders as coronavirus isolation kicks in

"the Army's top Sergeant Major"

With all due respect to a man who can certainly bury me in any physical fitness test he should care to mention, how is it that a Sergeant Major is in charge of defining Army protocol ?

Isn't that the charge of generals, or something ?

IBM puts 1,248 frontline techies at risk of redundo, warns of data centre closures

"our overhead"

"1,248 people have been put [..] at risk"

IBM, you might want to go and check the definition of "overhead". It's no use complaining about your overhead if the people you lay off are not managers.

Google reveals the wheels almost literally fell off one of its cloudy server racks

Check any motherboard, video card or CPU cooler today. Liquid cooling is self-contained. I'm sure they can do the same for HDDs/SDDs.

There is no hose coming through the wall to squirt cold water over the components.

Re: A couple of degrees...

I checked the pic and had somewhat the same reaction. It's really not tilted much.

On the other hand, liquid doesn't need much to start going down hill, so that tilt was certainly sufficient to have the coolant pool on one side, which means the other side didn't get cooled. It also obviously indicates that Google is not using pumps for its coolant system (saving on electricity), otherwise the liquid would not have a choice.

BT's Wi-Fi Disc ads banned because there's no evidence the things work

"Only we guarantee Wi-Fi in every room"

The comments here alone demonstrate that BT is overly exaggerating once again. WFi extenders have existed since the Internet came into our homes. BT is far from being the only company creating such equipment.

On the other hand, it seems that BT doesn't have the requisite experience to make a good product, unlike many other vendors who've gotten the tech down pat since last millennium.

Who'd've thought ? Oh, everybody. I see.

Eight-core 3.8 GHz CPU. 12 TFLOPS GPU. 1TB NVME SSD. 16GB RAM. Not a half-decent workstation, it's the new Xbox

"eliminate loading times between levels"

I think it's a bit premature to announce that, Microsoft. You have no idea how game developers can bog down a top-of-the-line system with the latest titles.

There's a simple rule of thumb actually : a new game will require 180% of the resources your high-power gear has. It's only three years later that that year's high-level gear will be able to run said game properly.

Also, sometimes loading time can actually be used intelligently and be a valid part of the gaming experience.

Re: games optimised PCs

That's already what they are. There's just a little hardware chippery added to make sure you can't just plonk Windows in it and use it as a PC.

I'm pretty sure the components are mainly off-the-shelf stuff. It's probably just the motherboard and BIOS that are a bit special, in order to enable the OS restriction and prevent tampering.

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz's patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

Re: Simple solution

Yes. Absolutely that. You can only file a complaint over a patent that you use to create a product.

I said it before and I'll say it again : patents that are not used should be invalidated automatically by the Court. No need to do an expensive and extensive review of existing patents, just wait for the trolls to show up in Court, ask them what they're making with their patents, and if there's nothing, boom, case thrown out, trolls fined for contempt, lawyer trolls disbarred and everyone has a good laugh.

That would eliminate patent trolls overnight.

You forgot one little detail : those assholes who you want to accuse of Murder One are rich. They set up a company, snaffled the patents and started litigation in the same week. They have money, and in the US, that is a great shield against your bounty hunters.

They have no need to leave the country, they already have lawyers.

Philippines sends all workers home, outsourced call centres for Acer and telcos suffer degraded service

A disease for the rich

"less well-off Filipinos don’t come into contact with those who travel"

Wow. I know I have zero chance of passing a billionaire in the street, but there's a lot of millionaires and I have to have stepped next to one at some point in my life. I sometimes wonder if I'm not living next to one.

That's one serious level of social segregation over there.

Looming ventilator shortage amid pandemic sparks rise of open-source DIY medical kit. Good thinking – but safe?

As far as staff is concerned, I am confident that five minutes of discussion between the seasoned nurse and the new intern is likely to alleviate the issue. Once the machine is in place and working, I would think the flurry of activity is over. At that point, the nurse can leave immediate surveillance to the intern and go set up someone else.

The real issue is being overwhelmed. Right now, in France, we are consigned to our homes and should not go out unless we have a very good reason. That might seem a bit excessive, but when I look at WHO's SitRep from yesterday and check the graph, I can see that Europe in general is now replacing China as reservoir for the virus.

So yes, now is the time to keep everyone at home because now is when the virus is poised to do the maximum amount of damage and spread its influence to the point where our hospitals will be overwhelmed.

The response is European-wide, some countries like Austria have actually locked their borders down. It's the only way if we don't want to count our dead by the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands.

It's not the common cold. It's much worse than that.

Not just video-conferencing apps taking a dive: IBM Cloud hit by partial Tuesday outage

Quinn is right

I've had to deal with IBM as a partner for five years, from 2012 to 2017, and I had no trouble recognizing the IBM Way of presenting information - meaning in the least useful and intuitive way possible. The choices made are inconsistent and basically tailor-made to drive you mad. Of course, I was dealing with their Partner Portal, something I still have to do from time to time.

I see that IBM has remained steadfast in dealing with the future with the same incomprehensible approach it always has had. Well, that's $30+ billion for RedHat down the drain. I do not know if IBM will ever, ever realize what usability is, but it sure has a way of putting new acquisitions into the cookie mold to ensure that all newcomers come out formatted to the IBM model - the one that made them successful from the 30s to the 90s. Shame that they stayed in the last millennium.

Microsoft starts a grand unification attempt with .NET 5

What a grand future in sight

And to think that, in several years from now, Microsoft will drop it all for some new, grand idea.

But don't let that keep you from pouring your heart and soul into this, dear developers ! We need you - for now.

It's Baaaaaack (or is it?): Microsoft Teams suffers a Tuesday totter

"a $15m donation"

Well yeah, he gave his pocket change. He wasn't going to give a billion, that's for the shareholders.

IBM veep partly blamed Sopra Steria for collapse of £155m Co-Op Insurance Agile project

I think more likely that the US version does not have encryption, so putting it in would indeed be a significant change - especially if requested at the last minute.

Security is not a last-minute bolt-on. Shame on Co-Op for treating it that way.

Nigerian spammer made 3X average national salary firehosing macro-laden Word docs at world+dog

Respectable and beloved by his colleagues - by day

But a criminal by night, with an oversized ego which got in the way of his thinking clearly.

It is rather obvious that, if you are partaking in criminal activity, you do not go to the police in order to avenge yourself of a (perceived) slight - at least, you don't put your own name in the fray.

I'm sure he was generally smart, but he blew a fuse on that last move. Serves him right anyway, criminal scum that he is. He stole from hundreds, if not thousands, of people - people who likely could ill afford his activities. I hope he is made to repay every cent to the people he stole from.

That upgrade from Java 8 to 11 you've been putting off? UK fintech types at Revolut 'quite happy' after a year in production

"Software gets new features"

I find it horrifyingly fascinating to observe people choose the least stable platform and the guarantee of having to change and upgrade everything every three years as the platform to use for banking applications - you know, the kind of thing that needs to work every second of every day, Monday to Sunday, without fail and without being hacked.

Way to go to ensure chaos and customer dissatisfaction. Was there absolutely no other choice that can be upgraded without a complete refactoring every thousand days ?

Who the heck even owns this company? Where is it? Biz risk outfit uses graphDBs to build mammoth compliance network

"working with small scrum teams was a much better way of working than waterfall"

That's because waterfall requires that you know what you're doing and how to do it. Here, you didn't have a clue, you were making it up as you go, so yes, agile was the solution.

Agile is not always the solution and, as we see here, neither is waterfall. As for a hybrid approach, I don't see what the problem is if that gets the project done.

A good project manager will choose the tool best suited to the job.

Facebook does the right thing for once: Joins Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube to clean out dodgy COVID-19 info

Re: Alex Jones selling anti coronavirus toothpaste

I heard yesterday that that little enterprise had been shut down. Frankly, I think he should be put in jail for that. You have no right to claim something is a medical cure when it is verifiably not. Medical quackery should be a federal crime, especially and more so if it puts people's lives in danger.

So now they've taken the first step

Now that they are collectively demonstrating that they can indeed curate their content, they will have a lot of trouble avoiding being taken to task on other issues.

So we are going to be faced with the next problem : who decides what should be curated ?

Oh and, side remark, I've got the feeling that there will be no outcry from the rabid defenders of Free Speech in this case. How curious.

India crowdsources COVID-19 response – startups told to make YouTube vids to win

Re: COVID-19 status in India

There's also this link.

Your link does have the advantage of zooming in on India-specific data, but its numbers don't quite match up with WHO's Situation Report. Your link is probably updated more often, which could explain the slight discrepancy.

Data centres are warm and designed to move air very efficiently. Are they safe to visit during the pandemic?

"viruses don’t like the low humidity"

And there's the fact that, yes, a datacenter creates a lot of heat, but that heat is evacuated outside and server rooms are constantly cooled. The start of the article makes it sound like all the hot air is being ventilated around the building, carrying viruses with it.

Between the hot air being evacuated, the atmospheric control keeping humidity low and the constant cooling everywhere, I agree with the remark that a datacenter should be a pretty good place to work right now. Just keep that hand sanitizer ready and don't touch any doorknobs or door handles if you can avoid it.

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, surely has no frozen water, right? Guess again: Solar winds form ice

Interesting process

One major point that makes this whole thing possible is the lack of atmosphere. If Mercury was massive enough to hold an atmosphere, no ice would be possible because the atmosphere itself would be hundreds of degrees.

But I guess it's only Jupiter-sized planets that can hold an atmosphere when the orbit is that close to a star. Any rocky planet that close will have the solar wind strip it bare in a few million years (a galactic blink of an eye).

Health workers are top of phishers' target lists thanks to data value

Thanks to Microsoft having had the brilliant idea of hiding file extensions, I'd wager that that number is probably in the billions.

Browser minnow Brave nips at Google with GDPR complaint

Re: 20M users per day adjust their privacy

Absolutely. Claiming that millions are checking their permissions means diddly-squat when your user base is measured in billions.

Besides, if you pre-empted GDPR and configured yourself to actually respect privacy first, then nobody would need to check their permissions because you would be waiting on them to grant you permission to their data.

If that ever happens, I'll bet my shirt that Google will be using popups and popunders to get people to give them permission to use their data.

But, since it'll never happen, I'll just keep on dreaming.

Data surge as more Brits work from home? Not as hard on the network as their nightly Netflix binges, claims BT

What was that ?

Spain has a full-fiber broadband network that covers 75% of the country and it is still asking people to cut down on their Internet usage ? How shitty is their fiber ?

I'm guessing that ISPs have once again let loose with "up to" claims and now they're in the obligation of, <gasp>, actually having to provide that bandwidth.

After the "Oh shit !" moment, they're now running around like headless chickens, reconfiguring backends and adding bandwidth capacity that will allow them to handle the load that they've already sold.

I have trouble shedding a tear, there.

Microsoft's GitHub absorbs NPM into its code-hosting empire: JavaScript library vault used by 12 million devs now under Redmond's roof

Re: Embrace...

Oh, I think we are firmly in Extend territory here. Microsoft has officially Embraced Linux for a while already and, with Github now in its pocket, it is in the process of taking control of the major code repository of most, if not all, Open Source projects.

The Extinguish step is going to be interesting to watch. Will Microsoft force all code to talk to Azure before executing ? Or will it find some less obvious way to control everything ?

Make your bets, the wheel is turning.

Some good coronavirus news: Monster Google-Oracle API copyright battle on hold as bio-nasty shuts Supremes

$9bn ?

Well, it would seem that that is barely 18 days of revenue for Google.

What's the problem ?

Control is only an illusion, no matter what you shove on the Netware share

"Or heard the sphincter-loosening words: 'What's a backup?' "

Oh I've heard the words all right, but the sphincter-loosening generally comes when I answer "Well, I guess you're data is screwed then".

That has happened a few times in my life, and once to person that I had personally counseled on backups prior to the incident. In any case, it's always followed by much gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair and some wailing about how life is unjust and can't I really do anything ?

No, I can't. You hard disk is dead. The solution is the backup I told you you needed. Now you know why you needed it. Now, you can still send your disk to a data recovery center. How much ? Oh, between $50 to $1500. You don't have that kind of money ? Like I said, a backup is the solution. Sorry.

India's tech hub Bengaluru tells IT outfits to send workers home as part of COVID-crimping action

"our satellite office was also deep cleaned"

That may or may not have been useful, I couldn't say, but if you're putting people back in there now then it almost certainly wasn't.

It's not cleaning the office you need to do, it's keeping people out of it to stop the spread.

Azure admins' cold sweat likely caused by a 'isolated' power problems that browned out West Central USA region

So it's Office 363 now, isn't it ?

Apple bans COVID-19 games and restricts virus-related apps to authoritative souces

Re: Is this really any different to what Facebook etc are doing?

Yes, it is. Fake News should always be suppressed - and yes, that means that Fox News should be shut down. But the subject is games. Who is Apple to decide what kind of game is allowable when they allow fart apps by the dozens ?

If you want to impose certain standards, you can't cherry pick.

TensorFlow gets its quantum of solace, lid lifted on 'all-seeing crime-detecting' AI upstart, and more

"Pink Unicorn Labs’ apps were removed from the Google Play Store in 2016"

Which still means that they got there in the first place. Google's security needs to stop being reactive and start being proactive. Yes, that means that they should test apps before granting them a place in the Store. Yes, it will cost money. Google has the money. It can do it.

Quick, show this article to the boss, before they ask you to spin your own crisis comms Power App in 2 days

Wait a minute

"you probably do not want every employee to be able to check out the location coordinates of everyone else"

I'm all for privacy, but your desk location in a company is no more private than your phone or email in the company. Anyone may need to talk to you and, if they have to phone Helpdesk to get a special permission slip to get your location, then that company is not lasting long.

You absolutely want to keep that information secret from the outside world. Having random customers phoning anybody in the company because they think they have a problem is the best way to keep your employees from doing actual work.

But keeping your location details secret inside the company ? That is not only useless, it is counter-productive.

No, the kind of details you want to keep secret inside the company is HR info, number of sick days, chances of promotion and so on. That is something you can make an app out of, and you will want to keep that secret.

Your data was 'taken without permission', customers told, after personal info accessed in O2 UK partner's database

"able to access customer data on 26 February through an external backup database"

Um, one question : how is it that a "backup" database was accessible through the Web ?

It is child's play for an experienced, competent administrator to firewall any part of his network from the Internet if he has the funding and the will of the Board. The fact that the backup was "external" changes nothing. Am I to understand that the admin in charge did not have those elements, or that he is incompetent ? Which is it ?