Posts by Pascal Monett

Remember that 2024 Moon thing? How about Mars in 2033? Authorization bill moots 2028 for more lunar footprints

Getting to the Moon is no walk in the park

It requires sustained political will, which is something hardly any country has these days.

Space exploration will go forth with private companies, helmed by billionaires, because they are the only forces left that have the vision and the willpower to get things done.

I personally doubt that NASA alone, on public funding, will ever get it done. NASA will be part of the trip, no doubt, but it is losing its position as leader. The question is, which billionaire is going to take point ?

Teenagers today. Can't take them anywhere, eh? 18-year-old kid accused of $50m SIM-swap cryptocurrency heist

"Soldiers are being told to make use of either Signal or Wickr"

You mean, apps that have true end-to-end encryption without any back door ? Really ?

So, when it comes to soldiers, the Government wants proper encryption, but for everyone else, there should be backdoors. Hypocrites.

Microsoft previews Visual Studio update with added Linux love, many new features

Windows is technically superior ? In what universe ?

Do not confuse the fact that tens of thousands of developers have desperately tried to make something that works and is useful under Windows with any technical superiority. Linux is demonstrably superior to Windows and you only have to look at Azure and the fact that its networking is managed by Linux boxes to realize that.

Yes. Microsoft uses Linux to manage Azure. Let that sink in.

You know what "the days of paper tape and teletypes" had ? Reliability. That is what Linux has, and that is what Windows will never have. One day, businesses will wake up to that fact, when the new generation that has not been brought up on Windows comes of age and starts managing things.

Microsoft puts away the Catnip: Windows Insiders community app axed due to 'technical limitations'

"the issue causing Narrator Home to crash when selecting the "What's New" button in Narrator Home"

Um, if your app crashes when you select Home then you need to reevaluate your ability as a programmer and go raise turtles or something.

Everyone loves our new desktop web search design so much – the one with ads that look like links – that we're tweaking it, says Google

Damn

I've been using Startpage for ages now. That is not good news for me.

Protestors in Los Angeles force ICANN board out of hiding over .org sale – for a brief moment, at least

How is it that the entire board of ICANN has not been arrested for blatant and repeated breach of trust ?

I really would like someone to explain to me how an organization with a government mandate can just act any way it wants and suffer no repercussion.

If I had the power, I would just line them up against the wall and have them all shot.

No big deal, Rogers, your internal source code and keys are only on the open web. Don't hurry to take it down

"We have multiple layers of security"

But keeping our code from public viewing is not one of them.

Apple: EU can't make us use your stinking common charging standard

"It'll stifle [..] innovation."

Innovation ? What innovation ? A charger is a hunk of components that have one job : dividing wall outlet power into what the device requires. The biggest innovation that chargers have ever had is the possibility of modifying the power output. That's it, and it's been done already and you, Apple, did not do it.

And besides, you can go and "innovate" the charger if you like, we're not preventing you from doing that. What we want is one kind of power plug and the ability to use the same charger on multiple devices. THAT is innovation - the kind that is useful for the user. You know ? Those nebulous entities that pay you money for your overpriced tat ? Money that you are happy to put forward on your balance sheet and show to shareholders ? Yeah, those things.

Clunk, whirr, buzz, whine. Shared office space can be a riot and sounds like one too

Watercooling is your friend. The kits are efficient and easy to install these days.

I have a DS414j sitting pretty with 4 3TB drives and it's never made a peep - except when I turn it on, obviously. It is resting on a slab of styrofoam though, just like the boombox of my speakers.

Agreed. I got lucky last week ; I had a 5-day contract in a university and, upon arriving the first day, I found out that they had reserved an actual office for me, and I was alone in it ! In my 25-year career this must have been the first time I've had an office to me and me alone !

Needless to say, I agreed to everything they asked of me and did my absolute best to solve their problem.

It's good to talk: Union says IBM failed to consult system support techies as Scottish Power contract nears end

Well IBM is one problem

It is a well known fact that IBM is having some issues with employees at the moment, and has been for some time.

On the other hand, Scottish Power signed a 10-year contract to have someone else manage its IT ? Where's the rationale in that ? Frankly, this whole outsourcing thing is getting out of hand. You bring in a consultant or two if you do not have the expertise to handle something, but once you've identified the need, you hire the expertise or train somebody you have.

Signing up to pay someone else to take of things for ten years at a time is a waste of money and resources, plain and simple.

In the red corner, Big Red, and in the blue corner... the rest of the tech industry

This was an eye-opener for me

I had no idea that things could get that bad. Now I will be following this case with intent, whereas before I was just reading with passing interest.

I now hope that Google will win. That is a first for me.

Co-Op Insurance and IBM play blame game over collapse of £175m megaproject

Ah, England and IT

Is a marriage not made in Heaven. So, another wreck along the IT highway. What's betting that we'll have IBM on one side, with all the documentation needed to prove that they respected the specifications and were forced by the client to do a lot of additional work, and Co-Op on the other side with a hodepodge of contradicting emails and some meeting minutes where they will try to prove that IBM was playing fast and loose with the definitions of the specifications ?

Let the mudballs fly and we'll see where they land.

Bank IT bod pocketed nearly $1m in kickbacks from tech contractor bosses for sending deals their way, Feds claim

What's $13K between friends ?

Looks like he had himself a nice little bonus-maker. He was smart enough to glean info and serve it up, but dumb enough to do it on corporate email and his own bank account.

Well, he's going to have a lot of time to think about burner phones, anonymous bank accounts and the like. Too bad he'll never get the chance to improve while working the fryer during the night shift.

German taxpayers faced with €800k Windows 7 support bill due to Deutschland dithering

Well, looks like that migration to Linux is getting cheaper and cheaper

Yes, I know about retraining costs and all the rest.

But once they've retrained everyone, no more problems and no more surprises. Oh, for sure, manglement is going to spend some time without the pretty charts and snazzy presentations, but it's a small price to pay when you've excised the Microsoft Tax from your budgets, is it not ?

*David Attenborough voice* And here we have, in the wild, a rare glimpse... of what may be... a positive IBM quarter

And right after that you'll drop back into the red because there will be no one left to do the work.

It's a tightrope exercise, to be sure.

Capita Education Services accidentally spaffs email addresses in Helpdesk snafu

And you would replace email with what ? Facebook postings ? Twitter notifications ? An SMS, maybe ?

Email is still very useful, especially in a business environment.

Obviously, for those who spend their free time on social media, yeah, not so useful. It's okay though, nothing they do there is useful either.

A-high: Prototype drug squad bot to patrol Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc for dodgy ads for opioids

"At the moment, the tool is about 70 to 80 per cent accurate"

And the problem with that is ? If you get rid of 70% of illegal drug posts, that will be an enormous blow to the criminals' revenue, won't it ?

So get on with it already. You can increase the accuracy while you go.

From WordPad to WordAds: Microsoft caught sneaking nagging Office promos into venerable text editor beta

"beautiful, relevant and useful"

Those are words that have never, ever been used to described the ad experience on a computer.

None of those words have anything to do with ads on an electronic device, and likely they never will.

Ads are a nuisance, a malware vector and totally useless. You can slurp all the data you want, you can hoover all the info you get your hands on, you will never realize that when I've just bought a UPS, seeing ads for a UPS just makes me want to strangle you. Get your finger out and code your ad pseudo-AI to note the date of my purchase and start showing me ads on that when the expected lifetime of the object is about to be reached. THEN you will be relevant.

Of course, by that time your marketing manager will have long been changed, so no impact on his bonus. Well he's not getting one now, now is he ?

We need to nuke the whole ad system and restart from scratch. Start by taking all ad agencies and shooting the lot of them. That will clear the ground to do something useful.

Microsoft boffin inadvertently highlights .NET image woes by running C# on Windows 3.11

"Visual Studio is a paid-for product"

I never did understand that move. If you want people to use your language, you have to give them the interface to learn it. The fact that MS made Visual Studio not a free package is just another gun->foot moment in my mind.

Traditionally, all programming environments have been free. Turbo Pascal didn't make you pay for its dev environment, nor did Borland ever do that. They understood that you need to incite people to come and discover, and if you set a price for entry, it just becomes a barrier that only those who have to pay will do so.

So it's no use complaining that people aren't using your language, Microsoft. You're the one who is keeping them out, for the sake of a few more bucks to throw on your bottomless pile.

Alan Turing’s OBE medal, PhD cert, other missing items found in super-fan’s Colorado home by agents, says US govt

A world of her own

What a sad life she has. I wonder if she went off the rails, or if she never was on them and found Alan's life appealing/attractive and used that to build her own.

In any case, unfortunately for her, his things will obviously be returned to their rightful place. It just might be a good idea to post a full-time guard because she seems quite capable of going and stealing them again.

WTF, EFS? Experts warn Windows encryption could spawn nasty new ransomware

Yeah, but that second point is the weakness in your scheme.

Not that I disagree with your scheme. Not at all.

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Excellent marketing move

Pay us now, and pray that we don't alter the terms of the contract.

Don't worry about the quarantine, Sonos, you are quarantined out of my home.

Opera hits back at 'short seller' whose report claimed its 'predatory' microloan droid apps could hurt, er... investors

What is this ?

Creating an app that harvests user contacts to badger their friends and family for getting a loan repaid ?

And that was created by a browser maker ?

Is that really true ?

Because if it is, Opera is getting nuked from my PC.

I will be following this affair closely.

No backdoors needed: Apple ditched plans to fully encrypt iCloud backups after heavy pressure from FBI – claim

"concern that punters would [..] lock themselves out of their backups"

Now that is a valid concern, as well as an acceptable reason to not implement total encryption. The Helldesk is hard enough as it is, and the idiots who lock themselves out of their pics would likely be the first to blame Apple for it.

That said, it's obvious that authorities are back to the "think of the children" angle. They must have a rotating wheel with Terrorist, Pedophile, Mass Murderer and Evil Thug, and at the beginning of the month they spin it to know what angle to use on the public. This month we've been getting Pedophile, last month was, I think, Terrorist.

Anything to keep them awash in private data without a warrant.

Let’s check in on the .org sale fiasco: Senators say No, internet grandees say Yes – and ICANN pretends there's absolutely nothing to see here

There is one important difference : sports organizations, including the Olympics, are private affairs, they do not have a Government mandate.

If sports is corrupt, well, it's their business.

The corruption at ICANN is everyone's business.

ICANN's commitment

"would violate ICANN's commitment to ‘preserve and enhance ... the operational stability, reliability, security ... and openness of the DNS and the Internet"

If that is the case, then what is the penalty ?

Let's be clear : ICANN is a rogue organization now. It does what it wants to best serve its own interests, and its charter is pretty much a charred lump of ashes in the furnace. If there is not a clear and imminent danger facing its Board and directors, nothing is going to change.

It just blows my mind that an organization chartered by the Government to do a specific thing in a specific way can just completely ignore its duties and do whatever it wants without the police marching in to round up those responsible, throw them in jail for treason and have the Government set up new management.

Why is that not happening ? WHY ?

Ubisoft sues handful of gamers for DDoSing Rainbow Six: Siege

"the number of attacks has dropped by 93 per cent"

Well that certainly is a successful lawsuit.

I personally don't care for Ubisoft games in general, but you have to be a special kind of loser to want to actively hurt the play experience of people you don't know and will never meet. These four don't care about that, they're in it for the money, which is just evil. I hope they go down for the count.

LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them

Why is it so hard to learn ?

What is it with people who just have to have their life online without backup ? Nothing against password managers, but for Pete's sake don't you have a local backup ?

I coded my own password manager. I have it where I need it, and I have a backup at home where it is easy to get to. Of course, I'm not using three different platforms to access the Internet, so managing the password database is much easier for me, but still : I have a backup.

Back it up, people. It will save your bacon one day.

Intel server chip shortages continue to bite: HPE warns of Xeon processor supply drought for the whole of 2020

"AMD's share price is at a record high, and has more than doubled in a year"

Go AMD !

For sure, Intel is handing AMD the market now. Intel doesn't want to lose the big four, but it is certainly not gaining traction elsewhere. AMD is perfectly poised to scoop up a larger share of the market and I can only hope that it reaps all the rewards that it can.

That said, this scuffle is in the server market. Consumer-oriented chips are just as available as before, right ? Intel doesn't just make Xeons, there's the entire iX family (i3, i5, i7 and i9). Those aren't being hit by any major restriction, right ?

Intel will keep making money hand over fist, and AMD will have a bit more room to grow. That's good news everywhere.

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

How did that work ?

He edited a DLL with Wordpad and didn't transform the thing into a meaningless string of text ? It was Wordpad, not a hex editor. That shouldn't be possible.

Image-rec startup for cops, Feds can probably identify you from 3 billion pics it's scraped from Facebook, YouTube etc

Re: Legality

Clearview is quite incorrect indeed. There's this thing called decency, where it is not because you can do something that you should consider yourself justified in doing it.

You can follow someone in the street. If you do that for too long though, that person is going to get cross at you. Arguing that you have the right to be in the street does not change the fact that you do not follow people. Here, it is the same thing. You can look at a picture. That does not give you the right to copy the picture and monetize it.

Unfortunately, the law is not going to react on this point.

To catch a thief, go to Google with a geofence warrant – and it will give you all the details

Wait a minute

What do we have here ?

A police inquiry that makes an official request for information to an organization that keeps GPS information far longer than any company should need to. The inquiry is legit, restricted to specific, determined area and backed by a judge. This is justice in motion and I have no problem with that.

If there is any issue, it is in the fact that fucking Google has the means to become an auxiliary of justice. Who gave Google the authority to store GPS data on its customers ? Who delegated to Google the means of recording the life of Joe Public ? How is it that we continue to accept that a commercial, for-profit company has the right to record and store more data about our lives than the government ?

One day there should be a reckoning about that, if we are to hope to preserve the privacy of our lives.

'Friendly' hackers are seemingly fixing the Citrix server hole – and leaving a nasty present behind

How does that work ?

" In effect, the hackers exploit the flaw to get access to the server, kill any existing malware, set up their own backdoor, then block off the vulnerable code from future exploit attempts by mitigation."

So basically these hackers can do a better job than AV vendors ? They're in the wrong business. They should create and sell an AV suite (they could call it HackerGuard). They'd make millions and it would all be legitimate.

You're not Boeing to believe this: Yet another show-stopping software bug found in ill-fated 737 Max airplanes

By God that's a good article

"They always understood that they were an engineering-driven company, not a financially driven company . If they’re no longer honoring that as their central mission, then over time they’ll just become another company."

Yep, well that train has now arrived at the station.

Triple processing

That was thrown out the window when the beancounters persuaded the Board that using only two processing units would save 33% on costs. They mentioned that it would be just as accurate and reliable.

The Board, obviously, only saw how much money they could augment themselves by, so it was approved because there are no lowly engineers on the Board to state the problems with that approach.

Except that, now that the entire world doesn't want anything to do with the 737 MAX (and the FAA is not going to let them self-certify any more), all of a sudden they have to listen to actual engineers because that plane has to fly, or else Boeing is ruined.

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

Looks like it is time to link to this again.

Autonomous Logistics Information System gets shoved off the F-35 gravy train in favour of ODIN

"replaced by ODIN [..] by 2022"

Or 2025, because special circumstances, then 2026 because oops, we forgot something, then 2027 because gosh darn it, there are unforeseen problems.

And all the while, millions are being spent and bonuses are fat at the top.

Google Cloud rolls out of bed, slips on suit, draws up premium support, vows to take it SLO to lure enterprises

Re: Catch up

Well yes, but they also have the money to do so.

Copy-left behind: Permissive MIT, Apache open-source licenses on the up as developers snub GNU's GPL

Just one question

"we have witnessed several companies in the past 18 months making license changes to block the cloud providers from continuing this trend"

And how exactly is that going to do anything to block Azure or AWS from taking any open-source code, fiddling with it until it does what they want, and stashing the result where nobody can see it ?

It's not like those several companies are going to be granted investigative powers and check what state that now-proprietary code is in.

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, muaha... Boffins build laser-eyed intelligent cam that sorta sees around corners

"the researchers believe their technique is promising"

Of course they do, they need the funding. I, however, am very doubtful that this can, one day, be used to help self-driving cars navigate the crowded streets of New York. I doubt very much that their laser will even be able to hit the wall and, if it does, it certainly won't be able to reflect anything back to the vehicle's detectors.

Besides, given that you have to get the angle just right, I don't see this working at all outside laboratory conditions.

For this tech to actually work, statistical analysis machines need to progress and miniaturize to the point where each vehicle has its own. I don't see that happening any time soon.

The $4.3bn trial of the century is over! Now we wait for judgment

Of course they'll have grounds for an appeal : they'll have lost money !

Azure consultant's Google image search results hotlinking sueball booted off the pitch by High Court

"replace the hotlinked image with something unsavoury"

It didn't need to be unsavory, but in those barely-less-civilized days, it sure seemed more fun.

I wonder if it still happens ?

Spanking the pirates of corporate security? Try a Plimsoll

I second that. Great article and, for once, an actual solution that can actually be used with minimal disruption.

Way to go !

The dream of a single European patent may die next month – and everyone is in denial about it

10 minutes is enough for spelling errors, and obvious mistakes. Anything else and you have, as you have used, the additional comment.

There is no way to change that without endangering the coherency of the entire forum thread.

We all need to think twice and proofread before submitting, myself included.

Google reveals new schedule for 'phasing out support for Chrome Apps across all operating systems'

So, Google is pulling a Microsoft ?

Putting in place a form of technology, then pulling the rug out from under everyone who put effort into it a few scant years later.

The only difference is that it's Google, perpetually in beta. Microsoft does that with products that are supposed to be long-term, drumming up support via expensive marketing and endless hype, right up to the day it decides that nah, it's done with this crap and moving on. Just the same, tens of thousands of enthusiasts of that tech are left bereft, drifting in the Sea Of Abandoned Ideas.

Kinda makes you think about sticking to things that last longer than a CEO's attention span, doesn't it ?

Microsoft's on Edge and you could be, too: Chromium-based browser exits beta – with teething problems

"Basic, Balanced, and Strict"

They forgot Nuclear, the option that not only doesn't accept trackers but also nukes the site the tracker comes from.

If they implement that, I will switch to Edge in a heartbeat.

China tells America, with a straight face, it will absolutely crack down on hacking and copyright, tech blueprint theft

Disney must be all excited right now

It is probably already hiring an entire new law department to stomp all over the Middle Kingdom. I wonder how China will handle copyright claims (if it will) ? I mean, how long is copyright in China ? If it's e.g. five years, then they could logically oppose any legal action concerning something made 20 years ago and nobody could do anything about it, while validly claiming to respect copyright.

Did you feel that ? I think Mickey Mouse just fainted.

Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

"the ECJ has made clear that national security concerns do not override citizens’ data privacy"

It seems that there is a digital divide looming in our near future. There will be one bastion of freedom and privacy, the EU, and there will be the rest of the world living in totalitarian surveillance states "for your protection, citizen".

I'm glad I live in France. And I'm glad there still are people in this world who retain their sense of duty when they attain important positions.

No, Pai, I'm not talking about you.