Posts by Pascal Monett

Microsoft Teams: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Teams is the symptom of a Microsoft that is all over the radar and desperately trying to stay relevant in a world where PCs are heading towards oblivion. Microsoft has failed all of its attempts to enter the portable hardware market (with the sole exception of the latest version of Surface, and that isn't exactly flying off the shelves), has lost control of the browser market and pathetically failed to regain it, and went straight into the wall with its phone attempt.

That is why Microsoft is plugging everything it can into Azure, because that is the only long-term life buoy it has left. Cue the Frankenstein monster that is Teams, a patchwork of anything Microsoft can stitch together and pretend that they had planned it that way.

No ghosts but the Holy one as vicar exorcises spooky tour from UK's most haunted village

"the trainers allow wearers to 'walk on water' "

I think the best remark on that has already been made. Go here and skip to the 3:42 mark to have a laugh.

American intelligence follows British lead in warning of serious VPN vulnerabilities

What's that ?

"The US National Security Agency (NSA) is warning admins to patch a set of months-old security bugs that have recently come under active attack" they don't need any more.

There, FTFY.

Europe publishes 5G risk assessment; America scrawls ‘Huawei’ on the side of a nuke and goes for a ride

Re: Question

Most importantly, 5G is apparently going to transform our phone and comms network into the same security nightmare that is the Internet. I can't help but feel that this push to software-defined everything is simply the Pandora's box of fun.

On the other hand, while US officials and politicians descend into even more depths of blind political hatred and spout things that are clearly becoming more and more biased and unfounded, I am getting the feeling that Huawei is actually a good thing to have around.

Not to mention the popcorn festival it is watching them squirm without being able to do anything.

Mission Extension Vehicle-1 launches to save space from zombie satellites

"a rescue makes more economic sense"

I should think so. Launching a new satellite means building it, then risking losing it during the launch.

This MEV tech means you can contract someone to repair, and if the MEV is lost its no skin off your back. Or is it that you buy a MEV and risk losing that ?

Probably.

So the question then is : which is less expensive to lose, a MEV or a new satellite.

Space is a risky business.

Forget Brexit, ignore Trump, write off today: BT's gonna make us all 'realise the potential of tomorrow'

Well, given that they've laid off another 13000 employees, it doesn't bode well for getting to talk to a human.

Interesting thing, though, this onshoring. I wonder if it will take ?

Ah, businesses are always reversing their position on this anyway.

Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months

Lode Runner, IMO, stands the test of time. It is still excellent.

Boulderdash may have aged a bit, but I'd like to find a working version for my Win7 and find out.

"It is unclear whether Atari will be able to complete its beleaguered project"

Nope, it is crystal clear that Atari will not complete anything at all. Two years into the project and all they have is one miserable dev board that needs debugging ?

Get lost, Atari.

Plusnet is doing us proud again with early Christmas present for customers: Price hikes

"four months' worth of bills at once"

Okay, Plusnet will obviously not forget what they are owed, especially since they kept the service alive even though they could not bill for it.

Still, it is entirely their fault, so recovering four months' worth in one go seems a bit exaggerated. Plusnet should spread it out over eight months billing 150% per month.

But hey, that would be a correct thing to do, so beancounters won't think of it.

If you thought Windows Insiders was lacking a little in the leadership department, it is now

Dev in 5 minutes ?

Clearly this lady has not given training courses. I do, regularly, and out of a pool of 6 to 8 people, I can tell on the first day which ones will never get past basic concepts, such as passing parameters and declaring subs or functions.

I'm absolutely not saying that they are all idiots, I'm saying that programming is a rather particular state of mind, and not everybody can adapt to it.

In any case, I do hope this will be an opportunity to get more stability into Windows 1 0.

God knows it needs it.

GNU means GNU's Not U: Stallman insists he's still Chief GNUisance while 18 maintainers want him out as leader

"misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of what I have said"

Oh, so we shouldn't pay attention to the transcripts, we should just hear your version and be content with that ?

I guess Trump is rubbing off on more people than I thought.

RMS has been at the head for long enough. It is time for him for step down and let new blood run the show.

The successor of Doom was Quake. It was influential in bringing true 3D environments to gaming. It was a blast to play as well. I had lots of fun, LAN parties with friends and noon sessions with colleagues. Good memories.

Yeah, it was violent. So was Doom. So is every shooter today.

What? No way. Apple? Censoring iOS 13 to appease China? Gosh. How shocking. Who'd have thought it?

Let us not forget

. . how proud Apple is of standing up to unreasonable requests by the authorities.

Of course, any request made by China is reasonable, eh ?

When they have you by the balls, your heart and mind follows.

Re: Apple Are Hypocritical B******s

In other words, you are just as hypocritical since you are apparently showering a hypocrite with your money.

Heavy data protection regulation looms in Labour plans for post-Brexit flows and IoT devices

"compared the rise of the IoT to the Industrial Revolution"

At first I was going to reply with scorn, but now that I think of it, he may actually have hit the nail on the head.

The Industrial Revolution, by completely ignoring human rights and placing profit before everything else, engendered syndicates, protest marches and the very concept of strikes until corporate magnates got a (feeble) grasp that employees have rights.

The IoT, as of now, runs roughshod over things like security and privacy, not to mention simple things like reliability. This is already starting to get a backlash, so maybe we can envision a future where IoT will actually be comprised of secure, easy-to-use elements that bring an actual improvement to our lives instead of just wirelessly adding a toothbrush to our IPv6 environment.

Who knows, maybe IoT has a bright future after all ?

That was some of the best flying I've seen to date, right up to the part where you got hacked

"one of the heli's various wireless receivers"

What the hell is a combat helicopter doing with wireless receivers ? Even if I can accept that they may have a use when on base, shouldn't they be shut down when in flight ? Isn't that something that could enable their detection ?

Even if not, I highly doubt that a combat helicopter is broadcasting anything that a wireless receiver could have a use for. There is undoubtedly a (shielded) wired data bus between all elements that need it. Any wireless receiver should be shut down when in flight, that would end the problem.

Do you run on a cloud Down Under, where data's shared and governments plunder... Oz joins US, UK in info search-warrant law

"respond to lawful orders [..] without fear of running afoul of restrictions on disclosure"

Of course there will be no fear of "running afoul of restrictions on disclosure", those restrictions are being removed.

I'm quite sure that this "agreement" is just a tool to simplify things for the US to go on fishing expeditions abroad. I'm also pretty certain that Australia is in for a rude surprise when they ask for data on a US citizen - they won't get it and will instead get a lot of bla bla about how their request is not relevant, badly formulated, not within the proper time frame, etc.

The US is expert on making everyone else kiss their ass, but avoiding doing any ass-kissing themselves.

Tough luck, Jupiter, you've lost your crown for now: Boffins show Saturn has more moons

How long are they going to last ?

It's starting to look like a demolition derby is taking place near Saturn. We know that the rings already contain the remains of one or more bodies, and with these 20 newly discovered lumps racing around in various groups and completely different ways, there will be more collisions for sure.

Maybe that will lengthen the life span of Saturn's rings for a few more millennia.

Online deepfakes double in just nine months, scaring politicians – and fooling the rest of us

Deepfakes are not a problem now

I'm guessing that the tech isn't perfect and fakes can be rather easily detected. A shadow that falls wrong, lighting that is not changed, etc. Today's deepfakes are just the draft versions, it's tomorrow's deepfakes that will be frighteningly realistic.

So I'm going to do what you cannot count on Joe Public to do : if I see a video on the web with a prominent politician doing unspeakable acts, I'm going to wait for journalists to confirm that it is not a fake and the video is real. Until then, by default everything concerning political figures or celebrities is something I will file in Deepfake until otherwise notified.

Euro ISP club: Sure, weaken encryption. It'll only undermine security for everyone, morons

Not a moment too soon

It's about time somebody slammed the door on those stupid backdoor arguments once and for all.

Law enforcement has everything it needs to obtain data on someone ; it's called a subpoena and it just has to be signed by a judge who agrees with it.

You have no right to transform every petty police officer into a member of the NSA, capable of delving into people's private lives on a whim.

And, talking about the NSA, the violation of people's private lives simply because you can is disgusting.

Boris Brexit bluff binds .eu domains to time-bending itinerary

I agree completely. There is absolutely no reason that an .eu site should be shut down on the very day Brexit happens. After all, every .eu site had an authentic EU address when applying for the domain name, so it is entirely unjustified to not leave a bit of time to those businesses to adapt.

On the other hand, those businesses have had well nigh two years to adapt now, so it seems also a tad excessive to be running around like headless chickens simply because - gasp - there may only be a few weeks left !

In any case, it seems that UK businesses are capable of just as much foresight as UK government.

Not a good sign.

Rule #1 about downvotes : never talk about downvotes.

Android dev complains of 'Orwellian' treatment as account banned after 6 years on Play store

"We are a small British company up against a monolithic, faceless Goliath."

Yes, and you always were and you knew it when you signed up.

It's only that now, you are feeling just how small you are and how Goliath Google is, and that feeling is not comfortable at all.

A wise man once said : do not put all your eggs in the same basket. You should have diversified, that would have lessened the blow.

In any case, you have little choice now but to educate your users in how to accept the security warning.

HPE's Eng Lim Goh on spaceborne computers, NASA medals – and AI at the final frontier

"process data at the source"

I can understand the obvious importance of that, but for science it is imperative to able to consult the actual data, not just the result of the processing. So data will still have to be re-transmitted in some form or another.

It might however be feasible to use a backup SSD and bring the data back "manually", rotating a new backup with the next flight.

Windows builds, Azure axings and Microsoft pushes will.i.am's buttons

"Microsoft has added an emoji key to its next batch of keyboards"

That's it, civilization is officially over. Robot overlords, your time has come !

A Nord VPN bug, a(nother) bad Microsoft patch, Zynga data farmed out, and more

Re: Calling Nord 1.1.1.1

Apparently, some people really adamantly do not want the NSA to know that they're viewing those cat pics.

Iran tried to hack hundreds of politicians, journalists email accounts last month, warns Microsoft

Because convenience, lack of awareness or lack of caring, and all of the above.

We have sleepwalked into a surveillance state and the state had nothing to do with it.

Re: If you're doing stuff you shouldn't be doing using email

And what exactly is a journalist not supposed to be doing ?

His job ?

Here we go again: US govt tells Facebook to kill end-to-end encryption for the sake of the children

Re: Easy to hack ...................

Because you are not required by law to use FaceBook, Google or Amazon. They are private companies and you can avoid using them if you so wish.

You cannot avoid the police if they decide to set their sights on you, and resisting them will, in the best case, land you in jail, and could land you in the morgue.

Re: "Facebook doesn’t know who a user is, [..] what their address is, or anything"

I take it you have no idea what FaceBook is working at with its AI. My wife had a FaceBook account for two years or so. FaceBook was regularly asking her to confirm if she lived in a given village, and the name of that village regularly got closer to where we actually lived at the time.

You may avoid giving specific information to FaceBook, but you have friends, and FaceBook is watching their interaction with you, as well as everything you do. Post pictures ? FaceBook is interpolating with pics from your friends. FaceBook is correlating your messages. FaceBook is watching every damn thing you do.

Obviously FaceBook knows a lot more about you than you think.

Re: "Notably Apple appears to be missing"

Um, have you forgotten the whole iPhone decryption affair we had a few months ago ? Where the police were practically stomping their feet to get Apple to decrypt a phone, which Apple refused, and then the police somehow got the phone decrypted and (IIRC) there was nothing incriminating in it ?

Apple is quite proud of ensuring people's secure communications - unless we're talking about China in which case Apple is just a proud to ensure government access.

I'm guessing that that irks American politicians to no end, but in the US you can't lock up and torture someone to get information - not on US soil anyway. You have to be abroad for that, and the suspect cannot be white.

Surprise! Copying crummy code from Stack Overflow leads to vulnerable GitHub jobs

"the researchers developed a Chrome extension"

So the researchers are all about security, and then they use Chrome ? The browser that tells everything to Google ?

Does not compute.

Kaspersky warns of encryption-busting Reductor malware

Turla, another group of highly intelligent people gone over to the Dark Side

Well, at least that kind of tool should be restricted to attacking people that that state is interested in, right ?

Us plebs should be unaffected then, right ?

Please say yes.

The OS is 'no longer' important to Microsoft, and yet new Surface kit has 3 Windows flavours

So we're back to "Developers ! Developers ! Developers !" then ?

I think that's a good idea. Of course, it's not a new idea, but it's a good one.

That also means that Microsoft is going to have to stick with its tools for the long term. No more burying a product after only a few years, you're going to have to grin and bear it.

In this day and age, that might be a bit too much for Microsoft to do.

FBI softens stance on ransomware: it's (sort of) okay to pay off crims to get your data back

Indeed. If this ransomware craze can be found to have a single silver lining, it will be to educate the morons that backup IS the only solution.

Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out

"Media Bridge, based in Virginia, and LCX Digital, based in California"

Simple solution : take the CEOs of these companies out behind the chemical shed and shoot them. As a lesson to the others.

It's a good thing I'm not World Dictator In Chief.

HP polishes the redundancy cannon, prepares to fire 16% of workforce

"even more customer focused"

With less employees to do the job. Sure, that's going to work.

As of now, I am just waiting for the CEO who will whittle down employee count to 10,000 and spout the same bullshit.

Being CEO in a large corporation is apparently easy : all you have to do is have no soul and cull the staff numbers. Your bonus is ensured, and in the worse case, you have your golden parachute made from the tears of all those people you fired.

The immovable object versus the unstoppable force: How the tech boys club remains exclusive

Re: Misguided

No, but sometimes you need a slap in the face to realize that you've done wrong.

This is an interesting time for women's rights. They gained the right to vote in the 60s, they are now gaining the right to be respected.

I, for one, am willing to bow to that.

Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software

So, Oracle is getting desperate ?

Finally.

When the satellite network has literally gone glacial, it's vital you snow your enemy

I love reading On Call comments

You learn the damnedest things.

Agreed. I took that to mean that, when he looked out of the window, he realized that snow could have something to do with it.

Re: the dish had been eaten by a giraffe

You mean to say that they had installed a vegan dish ?

Right, I'm going, I'm going !

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

Reminds me of an episode of Yes Minister, talking about some chemical thing that had almost the same name as a dangerous one.

Re: Allez, Marcel!

At times I find them infuriating as well, and I'm French.

I don't know about other French alarms, but mine also has a battery backup.

And, given that the phone and internet connection are on a UPS, any burglar thinking of cutting the power would be well advised to wait half an hour at least before attempting entry, which means that the police will have largely enough to mosey on down to my place and cull the miscreant red-handed.

Because in the event of a power failure I get a notification, and will act accordingly.

Watch out! Andromeda, the giant spiral galaxy colliding with our own Milky Way, has devoured several galaxies before

Simulations are never detailed enough

Even though science has already simulated this a number of times, it is obvious that more data can only yield better understanding and more precise simulations.

So go for it, boffins !

DXC has picked a brand new people person: Finch lands as freed Mason preps to depart

"Mason [..] was not mentioned even once"

Obviously. Why should one mention the underlings ?

They're just doing what they were born to do.

Devs getting stuck into Windows 10X on Surface Neo will have to tussle with UWP

"avoiding registry bloat"

Twenty years in and Microsoft still hasn't been able to reign in that abomination of an excuse to put DRM into the OS. For that matter, it hasn't even included any tool to search for orphaned keys and list them for deletion. You still have to use 3rd-party tools to clean up your Registry efficiently.

For shame, Microsoft. For shame.

You only need to click once, fool: Gaming rig sales up as Trump presses continue on trade tariff tussle

"IDC reckons the market will hit 55.2 million by 2023"

Did they factor in the fact that current hardware is used for much longer these days ? My current rig was last updated in 2015, and I have no urge or need to update it now. Laptops are a different story, they cannot be upgraded in any meaningful way aside, perhaps, memory, but they can last a good many years as well, especially the more powerful ones.

I doubt that a change in chip availability has that much of an impact.