Posts by Pascal Monett 19394 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
In the political sphere, perhaps, but in the medical sphere, all the doctors want tests. And they're all saying that contact tracing is a requirement, but it needs to be followed up with tests. And they say that the only way we'll deal properly with this pandemic is by testing.
They have their mouths full of the word, in every way they can say it. For some reason though, the politicians are not hearing the message very well. Well, not many of them. Some countries got their shit together quite quickly, and they're on top of the problem. It's just Europe and the USA who are not putting their money where they should. One group because God knows why, and the USA because their government is a pile of shit right now.
Let's not forget that only Huawei has shoddy programming practices.
That's what the experts say.
With the amount of people who just include a library on GitHub and never worry about what it actually does until said library falls over, it's not really uncalled for.
Personally, where I to include someone else's library, I would import it into my code stack, review the code to ensure that it does what it says on the tin and nothing else, and - after testing the thing to hell and beyond - include it in my production code stack.
Of course, it is then up to me to set a watch over that library to check when it is updated and what the update is, but that's my problem.
The rub is, developers hate problems, so they just link to library and let history run its course.
It's not because, in this particular case, developers had no way to avoid the issue that the argument does not stand.
How can you possibly design a program to accept commands if the user is not authenticated first ?
I just cannot fathom how it is possible for a developer to not design the code to stay in the authentication ring until that is validated. You can't program defensively against everything, but you sure as hell can refuse any input before validating a user's right to send commands.
I had a similar issue in one of my consulting gigs. I had created the application that the user had specced, and testing had gone swimmingly until one day the user called and complained that his notifications in said application were not going out to the right people.
I checked the code and the logs, and could find nothing wrong. I racked my brain trying to find out what the issue could actually be. After two days of searching, I finally hit upon an idea : he was using a local group that was named the same as the group defined on the server.
Not bothering with asking him the question because I was sure he'd deny any fault on his part, I simply changed the log to record the actual names of the people that were supposed to be notified. Sure enough, the next time he called to complain that it was _still_ not sending to the proper people, I checked the log and compared it to the server group : not equal.
I printed out the log and went to his desk and confronted him with the proof.
Never heard of him again.
Maybe, maybe not.
But I have one sure-fire solution : mute the speakers.
At home, of course, my speakers can be active, especially now that I have somewhat more time for YouTube. But I use uBlock Origin with NoScript on Firefox, so I don't see ads, therefor they cannot spout any ultrasonic anything.
With my laptop, I also use the same browsing configuration but, on top of that, I have my speakers muted. Good luck spouting any noise whatsoever.
So, whether or not an app is listening, I am the deep sea nuclear submarine that passes unnoticed.
Officials need to re-read the Cloud Act.
Basically put, nobody's data is safe from US scrutiny if it is stored on a server that is controlled by a company that has a presence in the USA. And no judge is going to go against that.
Excerpt from the article :
"First, the Act amended U.S. law to authorize U.S. law enforcement to unilaterally demand access to data stored outside the U.S."
It's a demand, not a request.
No they don't. They can continue ripping each other off as long as they like.
Besides, all it takes is an honest intermediary to do the job right, and the whole thing will crumble.
The problem is, they're all thieves. They can choke on their fees.
Agreed. Putin is subservient to no one. Does this Elwood remember that Russia and China have been on the brink of open warfare several times in the past ? They re both itching for a fight.
So Huawei has rather shoddy coding practices. You're telling me that Cisco doesn't ? I seem to remember a rather embarrassing goof not so long ago, one that actually forced Cisco to offer a free replacement.
No, this is just another excuse for laying it on Huawei. They have no proof of anything, but since they're "experts", they can spout their bile without needing proof.
I have a personal bone to pick with that pile of crap. Ever since IBM shoved Notes into Eclipse on R7, the Notes developer client has gained an unstability that it never had before. You do your normal programming of agents or script libraries, you check the results in views and such, and all of a sudden, you're not getting the result you know you should get.
Well, after a while and a lot of experience, you understand that your Notes environment has gone to the dogs, with one or more processes than you are actually using. I don't know what Eclipse does, but it fails to remain in the processes that should normally be running and creates new ones without asking your opinion, thus you're doing something in a process that no longer has anything to do with the one you were coding in.
It's fucked up, and the only solution is to use the Task Manager to kill all Notes processes and get a clean situation - until it fucks itself up again, that is.
I hate Eclipse.
I will admit that I have a throwaway password for sites that I do not consider important, yet still ask me for a login, or sites that I have no intention to return to after the reason for which I went there in the first place.
But for anything important, I have a system that gives me at least 13 characters, and I have a database to store them in along with the URL that is concerned.
We're in the midst of the greatest disruption to our lives that has ever happened outside of a World War (which most of us have never known), most of us are consigned to our houses with little opportunity to get out, and Salesforce is looking to sell us something that we're going to be getting for free to help us emerge from our hobbit holes.
Two of the greatest money hoarders have teamed up to make this happen for free, and Salesforce wants to sell us something that is supposed to do the same thing.
I guess that's marketing for you.
Um, what's to say that Latvia is the only country that can be affected ? At 70km/h for 90 hours, that's a potential 6300km distance. Even if it's going around in circles, there's a possibility that it goes over a border somewhere, given that Latvia seems to be barely 600 km wide and lass than half of that high (on the map, that is).
Oh, and who was the genius that thought it was a good idea for a test to fill the tank for 90-hour flight capability ? If you're doing a 2-hour test, give it 5 hours of fuel, that'll be largely enough. I think somebody thought "to hell with this, I'll fill 'er up this week so they won't bother me with this until next week".
That is the unfortunate reality. When you believe a conspiracy, anything that is done against your movement is proof that you're right.
It takes an intelligent mind to question one's beliefs, and it takes a truly intelligent mind to do so despite being absolutely convinced that you are right.
Einstein and Hawking were truly intelligent minds who both ended up admitting they were wrong on some point. Anti-5Gers are no Einsteins.
Probably that. But neither am I, you know. I use Gmail for my professional mail only. For the rest, I have a French national mail account (with La Poste, the French mail service), and then I have my personal mail server for everything strictly private, between friends and a special spam account for when I have to sign up to some site that doesn't deserve it.
I access my Gmail with a Chrome, obviously (work, remember ?), but I forward everything I get to one of my personal accounts which I access with Lotus Notes via POP.
For all the rest of my email accounts, I use Thunderbird, which is configured to not leave mail on the server. And I purge my Gmail account as soon as a thread is no longer relevant.
In other words, my mail is local, I don't leave it on someone else's server. Not even mine.
It is dangerous when so-called experts in their field confuse a statistical analysis machine with actual AI.
Their software is not hallucinating anything, it is spewing what its black box analysis tells it to.
Put a frakking activity log on your contraption and check what the hell it is doing.
"publishers have always paid distributors of their content yet Google performs the same service for free"
Of course you do. You do it for free because you slap your ads on content you scrape from them, and you make billions from it.
If, on top of that, you were demanding payment from the publishers, that would just be taking the piss.
You started your business on scraping without asking permission. When there was an uproar, you made specious arguments about how you were doing nothing wrong. When that didn't work, you cut the newsfeeds and the publications activity dropped like a stone, which prompted them to come back begging for you to continue scraping.
It's not because you have managed to place yourself in a position of power that you can justify it by how it works now. That's like the blackmailer saying "hey, they're not complaining, what's your problem ?".
Nice idea, unfortunately when I travel abroad, I don't take my phone.
So, what's the solution there ? Do I get a government-approved phone to trace me ?
I would actually have no problem with that. Use it as prescribed while I'm there, give it back when I leave. Sounds perfect to me.
