Posts by Pascal Monett

That'll take the spring out of your step: Apple warns of iPhone shortages, revenue miss due to coronavirus

"The virus might do more"

Well yes, it will, because the virus is actually affecting China, whereas the tariffs are being paid by US companies and - by direct consequence - US citizens.

The only part of Trump's tariffs that have any impact on China is where US companies order less stuff, or no more at all following the famous forbidden list that erased 30% off the revenue of a company that needed parts from China.

The Chinese company is just suffering a small loss of revenue, the US company is hit for a third of its activity. Who's suffering the most ?

Auf wiedersehen, pet: UK Deutsche Bank contractors plan to leave rather than take 25% pay cut for IR35 – report

"the bank will only work with contractors [..] of its outsourcer, Resource Solutions"

And take a 25% pay cut. This whole thing is seriously starting to look like an orchestrated plan to diminish costs on the back of a specific category of workers who can do nothing about it.

Severe vuln in WordPress plugin Profile Builder would happily hand anyone the keys to your kingdom

"submit input on form fields that didn't exist in the actual form"

What kind of bloated mess must Wordpress be to accept input from fields that it isn't even expecting ?

Samsung gives China wide berth over coronavirus woes, uses sea and air freight to ship smartphone bits to Vietnamese factories

Wow. I had no idea that the consequences could be so widespread. In retrospect though, yeah, basing a big chunk of your production capacity in the same country is asking for trouble when things like this crop up.

I guess this is going to be a wake-up call for quite a few industries. From now on, companies will need to diversify their production centers and not only implant in countries with cheap labor. From time to time, having a site in a less-cheap country will be useful to pick up the slack when the cheap country has a hiccup like this.

I'll let the MBA's find the right balance for this.

Tutanota cries 'censorship!' after secure email biz blocked – for real this time – in Russia

Right. With backdoored encryption, for example.

Everything OK down there in the Oracle trench? Good. Big Red has a cloud-based data science platform for you

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science

And nobody at Oracle has thought of calling that ORCIDS ?

Or are they waiting to add something and call it Oracle Cloud Hypervisor Infrastructure Data Science ?

ORCHIDS. Come on, it's basically begging to happen.

It is with a heavy heart we must inform you, once again, folks are accidentally spilling thousands of sensitive pics, records onto the internet

Only $1.3bn of damage in the US ?

What is Emsisoft trying to do, be reasonable ? That's not how you report virus damage at a country level. You speak of hundreds of billions, not a measly single billion. You're talking computer virus. It's Armageddon time, not beer o'clock. You're supposed to scare the bejeesus out of people, not deliver a school report.

Go back and put some pizzaz on those numbers. I want to feel the fear, you understand ? FEAR.

Please check your data: A self-driving car dataset failed to label hundreds of pedestrians, thousands of vehicles

Patent trolls

I am sick of hearing of this scum bothering people that are actually trying to make a product.

You have a patent ? Good for you. Are you making anything with it ? No ? Then shut up and fuck off.

Patent law should be changed to include an article that states that a patent is valid only if the patent holder can justify that product is being made and sold using that patent. Doesn't need to be the holder, who can grant usage to whoever he likes, but product must be made or you have no right to complain.

That would clear out quite a few portfolios that are in zombie mode right now.

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Ah, Norton Undelete

Those were the days of truly useful and powerful little tools that have certainly saved dozens, if not hundreds, of hides from the roast.

And mine too, once or twice, I must confess.

Ofcom: Rule change to force UK comms providers to tell you when your contract expires

Re: How many people *ONLY* ever want the cheapest thing ?

A lot of them, apparently. That's why the shoe stores have entire aisles with cheap shit that won't last a year - it ensures that customers will be back next year.

It took my wife a looong time to get the message. She's a self-admitted shoe addict. She used to bring back a new pair every two months. I waited, because we had the means and it's her thing so who am I to tell her off and tell her to stop ? My thing is computer equipment and she never complained, so how could I ?

Then one day, she started complaining about how she was fed up with shoes that couldn't last more than a season. She said herself that she had all these nice-looking shoes, but after wearing them more than two times they started to hurt her feet. After six or ten times, they were falling apart. She told me that, from that point on, she would buy less pairs of shoes, but of better quality. Hallelujah.

Since then, and it's been quite a few years now, she occasionally brings back a pair of shoes. She is very happy to show them to me and I'm very happy that she's buying quality that will last, on top of things that look good on her.

But it took time, a lot of time. People will understand, but they have to have the means to do so. If we were minimum wage earners, I don't know that the lesson would have made it through.

Windows Terminal and Azure Data Studio both get a tickle from the Microsoft update fairy

"being a Windows component that is tied to Windows versions more of a possibility"

Would that mean that MS has finally started looking into having the various functionalities of Windows be separate entities as far as updating is concerned ?

Going further, is MS finally going to start looking at its OS as a kernel that has add-ons bolted to it, and treat the various parts accordingly ?

Might we finally one day have a Windows that can live through a video driver update without needing a reboot ?

I pray that this is the case.

Steve Jobs, executives shot down top Apple engineers' plea to design their own server CPU – latest twist in legal battle over chip upstart Nuvia

Nothing but typical Apple

You do what we say, period. And if you leave, you'll still do as we say, or we'll sue you to the ground.

Think outside the box ? That's marketing. Shut up and get to work.

Google burns down more than 500 private-data-stealing, ad-defrauding Chrome extensions installed by 1.7m netizens

Re: LOL

Yup, they were guilty of the absolute treason : costing Google money without the actual eyeball action included.

They were also guilty of redirecting to malware sites, so there's that.

But it's essentially lèse-majesté to profit from Google. Only Google profits.

Roses are red, IBM is Big Blue. It's out of RSA Conference after coronavirus review: IBMers will not attend infosec event over 'health concerns'

"RSA Conference is still planning to proceed as scheduled"

RSA Conference is going to learn the hard way that no, it will not proceed as scheduled.

It's just a question of time.

Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?

Larry is the company. Whatever he does, the company's image is involved. So they care.

Re: You have (the right) to remain silent

Freedom of speech means that you have the right to your political and religious views and cannot be pursued for them by the government.

It does not mean that you have the right to say anything you want, nor do you have the right to do so anywhere you please.

After just one phone, Essential Products ascends to the great venture capitalist in the sky

"the primary reason behind its demise"

It seems to me that the primary reason for its demise is the fact that it didn't learn anything from its first mistake. It should have taken stock in the market's reaction, reviewed the issues and built a point-by-point action plan.

Instead, EP management obviously decided to just go and do the same thing again (create an even more "revolutionary" model) but expecting fame and fortune as a result which, as we all know here, is the definition of insanity.

MWC now means 'Mostly Without Companies', as Nokia, HMD Global, Facebook, and BT drop out

"making a fact-based decision"

Well, that's one way to call "following who checks out and waiting for the biggest names to cover the fact that we didn't have the balls to take that decision before".

Now that the high-profile names have all declared out, the rest can follow meekly, citing "overabundance of caution" and "our people are our most important asset" as an excuse for what they didn't do last week.

Razr sharp foldable: Samsung whips out Galaxy Z Flip – and, oh snap, it's £1,300

$1,380 and no 5G ?

With all the hoopla around 5G for the past months, they are selling a high end foldable without 5G ? Are they setting themselves up for failure ?

I cannot fathom the rationale behind that decision. Samsung is pushing 5G in all of its new models, and now this. Did Samsung marketers deem that the target market for that model was not interested in 5G ? But, if that's the case, then what was the point of all the marketing pushing 5G ?

So many questions . .

Ever had a script you just can't scratch? Excel on the web now has just the thing

XLookup, that's nice

Yet another hour for an Excel Advanced training course. Thank you, Microsoft !

Coin of Vantage looks good to Etix Everywhere: US bit barn beast eats European rival in bid to crack the Continent

Blockchain "infrastructure" ?

What is that abomination ? Is there something blockchain has suddenly been found useful for, apart from stealing money from the clueless, that we now have an infrastructure to supply it ?

I went and did a little search and I found this document (PDF) which contains, right in the introduction, this gem of a declaration :

"It is as yet unclear what business needs, if any, the blockchain will truly resolve, and some question whether this technology is “looking for a solution.” "

The document then goes on to serve a hefty coating of reassuring technical terms about hybrid and decentralization but, honestly, it just looks like the whole thing is simply companies trying to get their share of the clueless-skimming pie in a legal manner.

You want a Y2K crash? FINE! Here's a poorly computer

Re: "Oh pull the other one mate!"

I think it is time to educate yourself : watch this and learn.

It's a Bing thing: Microsoft drops plans to shove unloved search engine down throats of unsuspecting enterprises

"The move was buried in documentation"

Always a sign that what you're doing is perfectly above board and not at all a stab in the back, no siree.

Step by step, little by little, even Microsoft learns that the Customer Is Always Right. Who knows ? Maybe another thousand years and we'll get there.

Tens of millions of biz Dell PCs smacked by privilege-escalation bug in bundled troubleshooting tool

"yet another flaw in Dell's SupportAssist software"

Look, guys, I am very well placed to know that writing good code is not easy, but when you go out of your way to help hackers insert malware, it's kinda on you. Loading a DLL from a non-admin folder ? Who thought that that was a good thing ? In what kind of meeting was that approach approved and for what reason ?

Or is this another case of rogue engineer ?

Oh well, at least they found it and patched it.

Crypto AG backdooring rumours were true, say German and Swiss news orgs after explosive docs leaked

"over a hundred states paid billions of dollars for their state secrets to be stolen"

So, success then !

And, obviously, it is a "different company" with a "different owner, different management and a different strategy" and found the reports very "distressing"

Yeah, I'll bet. Their yearly result is likely going to find things "distressing" as well.

Microsoft's little eyes light up as Oscar-winning Taika Waititi says Apple keyboards make him 'want to go back to PCs'

Worth every penny

Google's second stab at preserving both privacy and ad revenue draws fire

Re: Paywall

I like the idea, but it will be a cold day in Hell before Google agrees to implement that.

Game over, LAN, game over! Windows software nasty Emotet spotted spreading via brute-forced Wi-Fi networks

"after the malware was installed and running on a PC"

If it's running on a PC, it won't be detecting wireless anything unless the PC has a wireless networking card. I don't think that is so common. Possible, yes, there are PCs who do connect via wireless, but I would think most PCs have an Ethernet cable because when people bought PCs wireless was not a thing.

Now if you're talking laptops or tablets, then definitely yes, there will be wireless available to explore.

PCs not so much.

Coronavirus to decimate server supply chain, analysts claim: Sales to fall 10% as factories stay shut

"public health experts banned Foxconn [..] from restarting production at the factories in Zhengzhou"

Are those workers going to still have a salary ? They already get paid a pittance, I hope this won't be an excuse for Foxconn to just shut the door and leave them in the cold.

Crazy idea but hear us out... With robots taking people's jobs, can we rethink this whole working to survive thing?

Possibly one of the worst examples you could have chosen. Washing machines did not replace anyone's job. There was no army of laundry ladies going house to house to do the laundry, it was the housewife doing the laundry.

Washing machines gave the housewife a bit more time to do the other chores, such as cleaning and cooking. No jobs were lost, and jobs were created because you had the people repairing the things that didn't exist before.

Xerox ups bid in hostile takeover of HP Ink to more than $36.5bn

"best-in-class human capital"

Where ? The ones that were laid off because they had the experience and a salary to match ? They're gone.

What's left has either been hired from the bottom of the salary pit or stayed in HP simply because not good enough to command a high salary.

There is no more best-of-class at HP. There's just couldn't-find-another-job.

Forget the Oscars, the Solar Orbiter is off to take a close look at our nearest (and super-hot) star

"other missions [..] have endured long past their expected expiry date"

The boffins can obviously take some credit for that, of course, but some credit is due to the engineers and technicians who built the things in a such a sturdy way.

Who knows ? Maybe it's just the fact that building things to survive long exposure to space radiation also makes them inherently more durable than the specifications call for. In any case, I do believe that there is no case of an orbiter, satellite or probe that failed before planned mission end as long as it was put on the right orbit / landed safely.

Long may we continue that tradition.

Don't tell us to go Huawei, Chinese ambassadors tell UK and France

Re: The irony

Indeed.

"did not explain why the Chinese state is mounting a multi-nation diplomatic effort to back said private company"

Sorry ? The US has been doing that for decades, promoting Boeing everywhere the POTUS could. France has been doing that as well, defending Airbus while doing "diplomatic" stuff.

Presidents these days are just high-class salespeople. It's hardly new.

Time to call off Mobile World Congress yet? Nvidia, Amazon and Sony all sidestep trade show over coronavirus fears

Pull the plug

MWC should call it off, citing the well-being of presenters, visitors and staff.

Do it already.

Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down

Adobe Genuine Monitor Service

Yet another company that deems it has the right to take control over MY computer because of something it thinks might be happening.

Thank goodness I have no Adobe software, cracked or otherwise.

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

"something more durable – with upgrade paths"

Yeah, like we used to have. Once upon a time a fridge was repairable, a dishwasher was serviceable, the TV repairman was a household guest.

Today ? Nothing electronic is repairable any more, it's all made to just be thrown out and replaced. That's a bloody foolish waste of resources, and it's the companies that have forced this upon us because, up to now, hardware was always progressing at a rapid pace.

But that pace has slowed to a crawl. Today, a 5-year-old laptop works just fine and almost as well as a brand new one. This year's new phone model has literally nothing over last year's, and may even have something less (headphone jack, anyone ?). But companies still chuck out a new version every year, even if the hardware is practically on a 2-year cycle now, because marketing has to have something new.

Never mind. We are on the path to a world when a new model only comes out when it genuinely has something new over the previous model. We will, soonish, begin to live in a world where a new phone model will be about as common as a new model of fridge, and we'll be replacing them about as often.

I'm looking forward to that.

A new entry in the franchise: Microsoft Windows and the Goblet of Meh

the usual "Untitled"

And what is wrong with Untitled ? Do you think I want all my documents to be titled "Dear Mr/Mrs Whoever" ?

And I suppose that the title will be the first choice for when I want to save my document. Oh well, thankfully all I'll have to do is just start typing the actual file name I want, as usual, so no big deal there.

Starliner snafu could've been worse: Software errors plague Boeing's Calamity Capsule

"re-verifying flight software code"

Once upon a time, we didn't have the Internet (at least not like it is today), but we did have game consoles. In those days, when you shipped a console to be sold, it had to work. There was no such thing as a firmware update, no downloadable software patches, nothing. If your console didn't work 100% out of the box, you were getting returns and a bucket load of bad rep.

Today, we have the Internet, and ever since there has been nothing that has worked out of the box. There's always a patch, always an update, and nobody knows how to write and review code so that it works first time. Including, apparently, large industrial companies with a long engineering history that should damn well know better. But, since we now have the convenience of being able to patch, we all wait for something to crop up and scramble to find the bug when the product has already shipped.

Let's face it ; humans are lazy. With the Internet, we have lost the drive to check and re-check and polish that code until it it glows. We just chuck it out because we know that, if something does go wrong, well we'll just patch it. This attitude is now so ingrained into our minds it is tainting the minds of engineers who should know better.

Ex-Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain was accused of sexual misconduct against Darktrace staff – report

Quite tasteless indeed.

A gentleman will appreciate the sight of a lovely pair of legs, especially if the lady is bent over for whatever reason, but he will never ever say he does.

Latest battery bruiser Android from budget Moto G range appears ahead of MWC after an Amazon whoopsie

Re: Still no wireless charging that costs pennies to include?

Looks like it's time to post this again.

Wireless charging may cost pennies to include, but it wastes pounds of electricity that we barely make enough of and generally use coal to get.

Stop the nonsense.

MWC now means 'Mobiles? Whatever! Coronavirus!' as Ericsson becomes latest to pass on industry shindig

They needed an "extensive internal risk assessment" ?

Why did the risk assessment need to be extensive ? It's pretty simple to comprehend : go to place packed with plenty of people in the middle of world-wide pandemic and your people might get sick. Do you want to risk that ? Yes / No (check as appropriate).

What other factor was extensively examined ? The amount of money they wouldn't make vs the costs of being there ? Doesn't that make their declaration a bit hypocritical (as in : we found that we wouldn't make enough money to justify risking the health of our employees) ?

Android owners – you'll want to get these latest security patches, especially for this nasty Bluetooth hijack flaw

Aaand we're back to physical access.

So it's basically what I thought : a Blutooth-during-discovery bug, which means the attacker has a window of about 1.5 seconds in my case.

Not losing sleep over that.

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

That is worth way more than just one upvote, so have one on me !

EU we go again: Commission takes aim at Qualcomm over 5G antitrust concerns for radio frequency front end chips

Well, US corporations can get a National Security Letter and have to do whatever is in it, plus they are forbidden from talking about it.

The only difference I can see is that the Chinese version is just a tad quicker.

Contractors welcome Lords inquiry into IR35 before tax reforms hit private sector but fear it's 'too little, too late'

Re: Too little, too late

Don't worry though, I'm sure your shiny new PM has a bunch of "progressive" stuff in reserve, and soon you'll all party like it's 1793.

Oh, wait . . .

Team China: Nation's biggest mobe makers link arms to battle Google's Play Store

Well done, Trump

You have given the impetus required to create an entirely new competition, congratulations. Now, the Asian block will know that they can perfectly well survive without Apple or Android.

The cherry on the cake being that they're the ones making Apple and Android. In other words, the day they decide that they're no longer interested in making our tat, they'll just make their tat, and we'll up the creek without a paddle.

Might be a good lesson for some.

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

An interesting point of view

Now, how exactly is tens of thousand of satellites in the same orbit not going to increase our chances of the Kessler Syndrome ?

Billionaire pulls out of reality telly show that was supposed to find him a date to take aboard Musk's space loveboat

"there was a part of me that still had mixed feelings"

Oh really ? Do tell : was it the part where you were going to publicly choose a very young woman to have sex with, or was it the part where you were going to be filmed having sex with her ?

He’s a pain in the ASCII to everybody. Now please acquit my sysadmin client over these CIA Vault 7 leaking charges

Okay, missed that. Still, 54GB of illegal content does not mean 54GB of kiddie porn. Still seems a bit stupid, but it's happened before, so too bad for him.

LCD pwn System: How to modulate screen brightness to covertly transmit data from an air-gapped computer... slowly

Another 007 scheme ?

Or would it be more Wiley Coyote ?

Obviously, nobody's going to wonder what that guy is doing two desks back, holding his smartphone at their back while not moving at all for over an hour. Or, nobody is wondering what that smartphone is doing poised on a stand facing someone's screen when it never was there before. Given that smartphones are generally grafted to the hands of their owners, a smartphone on a desk on its own would be very, very weird.

A webcam not facing its owner ? Even weirder. Honestly, I can't think of one seemingly innocent string of circumstances where this tech would not be at risk of discovery. This reminds me of that drone spy that would, eventually, get data from a photocopier - it just had to have line-of-sight, meaning it would be very visible through the window and everyone would be wondering what the hell it was doing there.