Posts by Pascal Monett

Apple, Google begin to spread pro-privacy, batt-friendly coronavirus contact-tracing API for phone apps

"the politically fraught task of policing home-grown implementations"

Now that I can understand. And we have a magnificent example, don't we, NHS ?

I do prefer that the two major players get their teams on this issue and iron out a common solution. I like that they say that no data goes back either of them, but I'll wait until the experts demonstrate that that is true.

In any case, I do believe that Google & Apple (Googapple ?) are less of a risk than some local company who got the job because the CEO goes golfing with the minister's brother.

Plus, at least the techs in both companies know exactly what their platform can do and how to call on it most efficiently. Knowing how to program an app for a mobile platform does not mean you know how to do the job using the least amount of power possible.

So good on Googapple. Let's just keep in mind the age-old adage : trust, but verify.

US senators call for more transparency over $12bn TSMC fab plant investment

"whether the Taiwanese giant was lured with the promise of financial incentives"

Really ?

Are these guys new to the concept of capitalism or what ?

When a supermarket chain eyes a spot of land it wants it not only gets the local authorities to exempt it from taxes for ten years, but also gets roads and infrastructure made on its behalf then takes off after nine and a half because, all of a sudden, it remembers that it won't be making money soon.

And now these senators are wondering about a $12 billion plant ? Were they born yesterday ?

Of course there were incentives. Of course there were promises to not tax them on the basis of surface usage, or headcount, or anything that ensures that TSMC will build the damn thing and employ local people to make it run.

And even if that means that the only locals are janitors, it still means that there will be an influx of housing improvements, as a whole lot of people will be flying in from Taiwan to be part of the plant.

Because the USA no longer has that expertise. So shut the fuck up and take what you can get. And smile while you're at it.

Hey Siri, are you still recording people's conversations despite promising not to do so nine months ago?

Apple promised a “thorough review of our practices and policies”

And I am absolutely certain that Apple did a thorough review as promised.

Except that Apple never promised to change anything. Apple just promised to review the situation.

People are going to have to learn to read what is said, and act accordingly. Words are words, and actions speak volumes more, but you cannot expect one of the richest companies in the world to have the same interpretation of "review" as you do.

If you have any questions, ask yourself why you are not managing billions in the bank, and Apple is.

UK MPs to off-payroll workers: Delay IR35 reforms until 2023? You wish

A right pig's breakfast

Slop all around and nobody wants to mop it up.

Somebody remind me why we have government already ?

NASA's Human Spaceflight boss hits eject a week before SpaceX crew launch

Re: Going while the going's good

Yeah, but he could have made that choice six months ago and not taken the job at all.

It's not like the situation was unknown in November.

And besides, his departure does not exonerate him from responsibility for what happened during his (short) tenure. If, Heaven forbid, there is an explosion on the launch pad, he'll still be questioned for the decisions he took.

Huawei to sling Google-free mid-range P40 Lite 5G at British shores this summer

A hard sell ?

Maybe.

It will mostly be a measure of how many people are really fed up with phoning their life to Google.

Tech's Volkswagen moment? Trend Micro accused of cheating Microsoft driver QA by detecting test suite

"We believe this allegation is misleading"

Of course you do. So please provide an official explanation for why that code was included.

This is not a bug, nor a mistake, nor a case of rogue engineer. The code was written specifically to check on Borkzilla's driver certification. There is no reason why the guy should have alerted you beforehand so you could silence him with spurious excuses while you renamed MysteriousCheck to PerfectlyNormalCheck and pretended everything was ok.

It is not ok, and I hope you'll get raked over the coals for it.

ITAM Forum opens: 'People just want to talk to other managers about how to defend against software audits'

"learn to defend themselves against audits"

I'm sorry, where's the problem ? I thought audits were a consensual kind of thing. It's a "I'm here to chek on your licensing landscape", "Please come in" type of thing.

Because if some guy thinks he can barge in and check my kit without my consent, I'll have him know that he needs cops and a warrant to do so.

And if he thinks he can just send me an invoice if I do not comply, well that does not mean I'll pay it.

Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps

Re: Is it really

Is it really indeed. The USA has a bunch of laws that protect individual privacy, but the NSA routinely runs roughshod over all that, and the FBI gleefully follows suit.

Laws are worth nothing if you don't have people in the right positions that know and do their job to protect citizens.

And there appears to be a dearth of that kind of human being these days.

Re: Oh what a tangled web we weave!

Harperson ? Who is Harperson ? The article is about Harriet Harman.

If you want to rant, it would be really useful to at least seem like you know what you're talking about.

SD cards hop on the PCIe 4.0 bus to hit 4GB/s with version 8.0 of storage spec

128TB ?

Dear God, please give me a NAS enclosure that can support 128TB SDs.

I promise I'll be a good boy.

Google rolls out pro-privacy DNS-over-HTTPS support in Chrome 83... with a handy kill switch for corporate IT

"We understand this concern"

And we don't give a flying fuck about it.

Typical behavior these days. We want it this way, so you can wave goodbye to every habit you have because this is how we roll.

I absolutely hate web developers that believe they have the right change people's habits. Once upon a time, before the Internet was a thing, Microsoft had put out a document where it set down the rules for making a proper UI. Rules that it shat upon liberally when it created its PlaySkool interface called Metro, but I digress.

I really would like to get my hands on that document. I remember reading it and thinking to myself : "this is very sensible". Yes, I know, a Microsoft document about UI that was sensible. What can I say ? It was before Y2K.

Things have changed since.

Get off my lawn.

PowerShell inventor Jeffrey Snover gets new gig driving ‘modern workforce transformation’

Re: thats not the only reason I dislike The Cloud

Exactly.

If you want to impress me with the Cloud, tell me how my data is secured and encrypted and protected from the US CLOUD Act.

If you manage to convince me, I will find that impressive.

But I still won't put anything in that Cloud.

It's, it's, a red-and-blue striped golfing umbrella... Facebook teaches its online tat bazaar to auto-identify stuff for sale

Rotating View

That sounds awesome. Give four or five pics of a chair and get a full 3D view of it. Wow. That is a worthy accomplishment.

Too bad it's done by a privacy-invading ad monster.

You know this Land of the Free thing, yeah? Well then, why allow the FBI to trawl through America's browsing history without a warrant?

Re: Fourth AND Fifth Amendments

Yes, those are excellent words and they transcribe a wonderful ideal, ideal that the US government has been slowly chipping away at for decades.

Now, that ideal is all but lying in the dust, gasping its last breaths. The Statue of Liberty is fixed, because if not she would have skipped town a long time ago.

The thing is, if there is one thing that you cannot take away from the USA, it is its citizens. I know quite a few American people, they are good people. They will prevail, and I am convinced that America will once again be a true beacon of liberty and justice. It's just that, at this point in time, they have a bunch of right white racists in every position that counts.

That will pass, in time, and things will get better. Right now, we all just have to weather the storm. The shit storm.

TLS termination, Teams toys – and holy 5G, Batman, Microsoft buys UK network software biz Metaswitch

"That last line didn't really work, did it?"

Honestly ? It was awesome.

Congratulations to the author.

Even if it isn't the season.

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

Re: customary incompetence

Customary incompetence ? Really ?

Okay, let's compare and contrast. I am at Credit Mutuel. We bought our current house in October 2017. We had one meeting in person to iron out the loan details, everything else happened either over the phone or by the bank's portal. The amount of hassle was minimal, and everything went through swimmingly.

My daughter used to be at the Caisse d'Epargne. She was a student studying in Paris when we bought our house. She needed a student loan. The Caisse d'Epargne was obviously a bunch of muppets because they refused the loan based on the fact that her access card did not mention the word "student". One call to our Credit Mutuel agent and she had her loan within the week.

I don't know who you dealt with, but I strongly believe your issues were not solely with Credit Mutuel.

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 ?

Project Reunion: Microsoft's attempt to tear down all those barriers it's built for Windows developers over the years

Borkzilla looking for a new foot to shoot

Honestly, Borkzilla is responsible for every single restriction to its various OSes. Now it is trying to pretend that it cares about some amount of backward compatibility. Seems to me that that means that Windows 10 is not dominating the market like Borkzilla would like it to.

Well guess what ? The market is defined by businesses that have developed procedures to solve their problems, not yours. If you don't tow the line, they won't budge until you do.

Being the biggest player in the market also means you have the biggest forces to deal with.

Good luck.

Rogue ADT tech spied on hundreds of customers in their homes via CCTV – including me, says teen girl

"ADT failed to monitor consumers’ accounts"

Right. Absolutely true. Just like White Star Lines failed to put enough lifeboats for all passengers.

ADT is guilty of trusting its employees. A harsh lesson, and one that will bring down a raft of restrictions and technical difficulties that will indeed make it impossible in the future to do such things as spy on an underage girl. And that is undoubtedly a good thing. However, given that ADT threw the book at the guy and delivered him to the police, and pledged to do what was necessary to keep this from ever happening again, I do not see that that ADT should shoulder all the blame.

Honestly, the technician was there to install the system. He has authority to define the email addresses that have access. Internal procedures already forbade any unrecognized manipulations, what more do you want ? The creep cheated. The system is not at fault.

Now, ADT is going to have to modify the installation procedure to ensure that the technician has a list of approved email addresses, shows them to the customer and gets a signed approval, in order to ensure that this does not happen again. Because of one asshole, countless time and money will be employed to get customer approval of every address added to the system.

That's exactly why we need laws : because of the 0.0001% of assholes who ruin everything for everyone.

Beer rating app reveals homes and identities of spies and military bods, warns Bellingcat

"this particular one used his surname as part of his username"

It is truly astounding to realize that people who should be intelligent enough to know better still sell their lives to any app that tickles their funny bone.

I really would like to read a psychiatrist's study on this apparently innate need to sell one's personal life in order to give one's opinion on something.

And that is now 70 years old . . .

Podcast Addict Play Store ban: Android chief says soz for incorrect removal, developers aren't impressed

"We are still sorting out kinks in our process"

The kinks in your process is that you have one guy to review everything.

Take a million out of all your billions and hire a few dozen more guys to review the issues. That will help.

AI won't.

MIUI importante! Xiaomi's updated Android fork bears better permissions plus new ultra-battery-saver mode

Congratulations

Now it is Chinese companies that are giving us privacy-protecting settings by default.

What is the world coming to ?

Microsoft promises big things for Edge... and they'll be ready for folks some time before universe's heat death

"what Edge really needs is more users"

Yeah, well, good luck on that.

Honestly, even if Edge admits NoScript and uBlock Origin, I still won't use it. It brings nothing to me.

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.

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.

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.