Posts by Pascal Monett 18239 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
And you didn't need a backdoor for that, now did you ? You just did actual police work.
Oh, go ahead and implement your backdoored encryption. The rest of the world will use proper encryption and everyone will point and laugh at you.
"[Pivotal] failed to disclose to investors: (1) that the company’s PAS [Pivotal Application Service] product was not compatible with the industry-standard Kubernetes platform;"
So you invest in a cloud services company and you do not check that it is Kubernetes-compatible beforehand ?
Are you HP or what ?
As consultant I have seen all types in the past thirty years, but one I will always remember. She was a gorgeous young blonde, really strikingly beautiful, and I immediately understood on entering that company that she deemed me beneath any effort to interact with. She ignored me royally for the two weeks of my intervention, until one day near the end when, surprise, surprise, she came over to me with her nicest smile and asked me if I could change something in her mailbox.
Unfortunately for her, it was something that was not possible to do, and I was happy inside that I had to tell her it couldn't be done.
Obviously, she never looked at me again.
Financial loss ? Well you're obviously not in charge of an airline, that's for sure.
Airlines are already running close to red, they really can't afford to just go around losing more money.
Honestly, given how difficult it apparently is to operate an airline, I'm surprised they don't just give up and quit. There must be more money in it than I think.
For that price I can get a top-of-the-line laptop that has much more computing oomph and a much bigger screen.
Two grand for a phone with delusions of grandeur. I just wish for a phone that can allow me to actually talk to someone and send text messages easily, maybe with attachments, and receive the same. With a battery life that exceeds the attention span of my cat.
Bollocks. As far as the UK is concerned, this is just as true with Cisco.
In any case, with Huawei one thing is sure : China has attained technological independence from the Western block. It is on track to no longer need anything from us to grow its own IT industry, which means we will now have the chance to witness true competition in the IT space, with products grown in an entirely independent sphere.
Who knows what Chinese inventiveness and ingenuity is going to bring to the computing table of the future ?
Right, well, given the current quality of Microsoft internal testing I'm not sure they're worse off.
After all, it's the users that do the testing these days. They're just going to be testing a bit earlier than planned.
Ah, Microsoft Quality. Not only do they not test, they don't even control what they're publishing any more.
The future is looking good . . for Linux.
From a ROI point of view, it is far less efficient to spend time crafting an attack for 5% of the market than it is for 95%.
Now that Apple has upped its market share, it is becoming a better attack surface from that point of view.
If I decide to try to scam Bill Gates out of a billion, I am going to spend years of effort to get to know him, his family, his house and his habits, and it will cost me a small fortune for no guaranteed return.
On the other hand, if I craft a threatening letter over torrenting or somesuch, hire a spammer and split the proceeds for an attack of 10 million people, I'll likely cover my costs and reap a nice bundle, while likely staying out of reach of the law.
If I were such a criminal, what do you think I would prefer ?
Um, sorry, no. Digital money has been around for quite a while already and was invented by bankers. Cash represents a laughable percentage of all money that is in circulation and a minuscule part of my monthly spend. My VISA is by far the greater part of my spending methods.
The age of funny money has arrived, and it is funny right up to the point where the exchange that has yours folds in a puff of smoke, leaving you with nothing. It's funny to stuff it to The Man until you realize that when you try to purchase something, you're likely to pay more in fees than the value of what you bought. It's funny until you see the conversion value hit the floor when you bought it for $3000.
Yeah, some people have made it big - invariably they got in early. And some people win the lottery. The lottery is more reliable.
Bankers have no reason to be scared of this kerfluffle. There's a dozen cryptoshenanigans available now and no economy is going to collapse because of that. Bankers have other things to do, as in respect their charter and keep track of all the money.
The day I will feel threatened by cryptostupidity is the day Goldman-Sachs puts out its own. But why would it ? It already has all the money.
"we are an organisation that takes data protection and privacy with the utmost seriousness"
Except when you don't, like when you set up a URL to specifically contain person-identifying data and not a single nitwit in your organization wakes up and says "hey, should we really be doing that ?"
But go ahead and trot out that threadbare carpet with the "we take your security seriously" embroidered on. It's not like that already hasn't been used to the bone, right ?
I sure hope those guys at 0v1ru$ are not based in Russia or thereabouts. That contractor will never be heard of again, and if those hackers are not on another continent, I think they are going to have to learn to live while looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
The CIA, the DoD, the FBI, they can impress you, but the FSB is going to send a team to kill you. After interrogation. Painful interrogation.
"If we allow this dangerous biometric spying to spread and become ubiquitous, it won't be used to keep us safe – it will be used to control us"
Finally, someone with a smidgen of authority says out loud what everyone is thinking. And why is it that we suddenly have this rash of facial recognition in cities that have no history of terrorism ? Since when has Oakland been a hotbed of terrorist activity ?
I could eventually accept that New York try facial recognition, it unfortunately has a history of terrorism. But California ? Give me a break. The only reason cities other than New York or Washington D.C. want to try facial recognition is have that feeling of power over the people.
Except that, it doesn't work. Which calls into question all those reports about how airports are delighted with it. How can they make it work when entire cities can't ? Something's fishy in the land of surveillance cameras.
I found this article about him and it states that he was a naval officer with access to classified data. So the fact that he got access is clear now, but it would have been nice to put that in the article.
And, as he was an officer, decorated no less, I guess it would be pretty standard for him to come and leave with a briefcase or something, making it look official. So there might be an explanation.
Now someone please explain how is it that the NSA, an organization devoted to the security of the nation, apparently has security procedures that rival that of the Flintstones.
I'm a consultant as well, and I regularly walk into the IT departments of banks, insurance companies and other large organizations. I can swear that, not only am I not walking out with any document whatsoever, I am certainly not plugging in USB keys. So banks and such are more secure than the NSA. My mind is boggled.
My personal opinion on this problem is that, on the one hand, people definitely deserve to be paid for their work, but on the other hand, I fail to see why I, having paid for a film on DVD, should be subject to an unskippable FBI warning on piracy every time I want to watch a film. I paid for it, so get that shit out of my way.
I also care very little for the often unskippable film previews that are frankly ridiculous five years later. And, if I had it my way, I would force all studio logos to appear on screen at the same time, and they would be limited to 15 seconds max. Deal with it, Lionsgate, Dreamcast and the rest. Do you really think I bought the film because you made it ? No, I bought the film because I wanted that film. Who made is anecdotal.
So I buy a film on DVD, then I go to torrent sites and find a ripped version without all the bullshit and I watch that. It's a much more pleasant experience.
But landing on a comet was fucking impressive as well, not to mention a great advance for Science.
All of the Voyager stuff has brought - and is still bringing in - indispensable information that increases our knowledge of our Solar System and of the Universe in general.
NASA can be proud of many things, and can regret some decisions, but for the sheer exhilaration of daring and success, nothing will beat the Apollo program before a long time.
Wall Street was expecting a record year, it got a bit more of a record year, so everything is fine. Cloud is justified, using customers as beta testers is justified, telemetry is not a problem, the sky is bright and blue and everyone is happy.
Now, if Microsoft had managed "only" $123bn, then it would have been doom and gloom and the share price would have dropped, right? Because they would have missed the mark by barely one per cent while still raking in the dough by the supertanker.
Stupid Wall Street analysts.
Well there's an app, isn't there ? You can be sure the app is not just there to display notifications and show nice charts. It's going to need access to your GPS, your contacts, your camera, your storage and your WiFi password as well. Which will be stored on Pamper's AWS storage bucket (which just might not have default password access).
For your security, of course.
Well then, it seems to me that the problem is not actually Magecart.
You can hardly complain about being robbed when you leave the front door wide open. Of course, this problem exists because everything Internet is made to be as simple as possible. Create your web site in one click ! The goal is get people to subscribe, not to ensure they do so securely. And people are not security-minded, not to mention that many, if not most, have no idea what they are supposed to pay attention to.
It should be easy to prevent any web site from going live as long as the passwords are still default, but hey, that would be bothering the customer and we can't have that, now can we ?
So we have Magecart instead.
Let's be clear : nothing in the bill is forcing pop-up notices on users. It is the ad companies who are going to use pop-up notices to try and get consent. Because they cannot simply go with no consent by default, and if someone changes their profile to accept, then gather details.
That would be a privacy-respecting, adult way of doing things. It would also not bring in any money.
So, pop-ups it is.
For starters, there's the problem of incompatible equipment. Then there's the bandwidth issues, which is kind of surprising. The there's the random disconnects, which, given the bandwidth issues, is understandable. Finally, you have a backend that the police force is not qualified to run, which is hardly surprising (I doubt they have many statisticians in uniform).
In other words, the whole thing was a fiasco from the start. It's nice to know that Rekognition can apparently only handle one camera at a time, and is very picky on the camera it can connect with. Good.
All in all, I am quite pleased with the results of this project.
"After investigating further, the usernames and passwords were found to have been lifted from a Slack network intrusion that occurred more than four years ago"
Did I read that correctly ? They had a network intrusion and didn't think of changing the passwords ?
Somebody should be fired over that, somebody high up. It is network security 101 : when you have detected a breach, you change the passwords. All of them.
So they want to do a trial, but no vendor is giving them the equipment to do so ? That's interesting. I would have thought that some big name would be falling over itself to put its name on a successful trial.
I therefor conclude that the trial would not be satisfactory, meaning 5G is just a load of hot air and everyone prefers blowing wind instead of actually making it work. So 5G is not yet ready for trials. See ? The trial worked !
Sorry to disagree, but in this case Microsoft is doing exactly what I said needed to be done : make voting secure and posting the code for the world to see.
I fail to see how things can be worse than they already are, what with Diebold being utterly incapable of doing anything properly and having tried to sue people to keep them quiet.
Microsoft is on the right track, and when the code gets posted, people will be able to scrutinize and validate it, and maybe even improve on it.
Except NSA guys. They can keep their stinking paws off our liberty.
Of course, the real problem is how to make the popular vote actually count, but no software company can do anything about that.
Oh, it's going to be such a problem to find out who should be compensated, and maybe one or two were actually happy, so let's just throw a rug over the whole thing, m'kay ?
Put another way : Your Honor, yes I stalked all these women and took pics of them in their nighties, but since one of them is an exhibitionist, what's the problem ?
Sometimes I feel judges should be able to arbitrarily double, or even triple, a fine if the defense presents such stupid arguments.
It is indeed. But, instead of creating one gigantic Single Point Of Failure by putting confidential financial data into The Cloud (TM), they could have shored up their IT by not putting muppets at their heads and getting competent people to . . oh, I forgot, competent people cost money and the muppets are friends who have been promised good things.
Well, looking forward to the inevitable headline : AWS goes down, London is paralyzed.
Absolutely. The smartphone market is saturated. I'm willing to wager that, even if a new must-have feature turns out in the next few years, only a fraction of users will spring for a new model with that feature when it comes out. After that, every year people will indeed buy a new phone, but it is in replacement of what they have, not in a rush to get the new shiny. 2.9 years ? Try 5, that'll get closer to the mark.
Besides, the equipment we have is fast enough. We don't need new features, we need batteries that last ten times longer.
And I'm not holding my breath for that.
Well, if you're not staying in Windows, then you don't need a new machine. Linux works better than Windows on the same hardware, without question.
But, if you want to keep playing all 1000 of your Steam titles, then you're going to have to stick with Windows for a while longer - just like me.
And that is basically my problem. I'm a gamer, and the games I play do not (except for a paltry few) exist on Linux, to my dismay. Yes, I know about Wine, but I'm lazy and have other things to do than play around with a virtual machine to get my gaming on. When I have time to game, I don't want to waste time fiddling. I said goodbye to that around Windows XP SP3 and I have no intention of going back there.
I have a Linux server (Mint) with a Minecraft server on it, works perfectly fine for my needs. But my gaming platform is still Windows because 99% of all games are on Windows.
I'm not happy about it, but here we are.
"The tiny gizmos are powered by the Sun and equipped with GPS, accelerometers, temperature, pressure and humidity sensors"
And they made thousands of them, which has to mean that they are cheap to make. So, when are we getting temperature, pressure and humidity sensors in our smartphones ?
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