Posts by Pascal Monett

Literally rings our bell: Scottish eggheads snap quantum entanglement for the first time

"with considerably increased compute capacity"

That is not necessarily true. A quantum computer will be able to give instant results for certain types of calculations, but we're still going to need good ol' PCs to do the drudgery of waiting for the user to click a button.

Then there's the question of how will we use those instant results. Do we use a function that returns a table of results, or will the function return one result after another and we have to call it until it returns nothing ?

I don't remember reading anything anywhere about stuff like that. I don't think anyone knows, at this point.

Brilliant Boston boffins blow big borehole in Bluetooth's ballyhooed barricades: MAC addy randomization broken

I agree with you totally, but that is what happens when a ridiculously small number of fucking assholes screw it up for everyone else.

Cough up, like, 1% of your valuation and keep up the good work, says FTC: In draft privacy deal, Facebook won't have to change a thing

"it just has to swear it won't break that 2012 agreement"

So, all FB has to do is swear to abide by an agreement it already broke ?

Man, justice is hard on rich people in the US.

Facebook: The future is private! So private, we designed some handy new fingercams for y'all!

The future is private

That is effing rich coming from that fucker.

Train maker's coder goes loco, choo-choo-chooses to flee to China with top-secret code – allegedly

Re: "US train makers have a long experience in such kind of transport"

So long that the railways are in dire need of repair, or even replacement.

I'm glad you have such faith and admiration in a part of your country's industry. You might want to check that though, by finding out how long it's been since your beloved US train makers have made a new model of train.

When an industry is advanced, it's because it keeps advancing. France made the TGV because France has a long experience in such kind of transport and there was a need for it. Japan has a supertrain because Japan just has to be at the front of everything technological. If China wants to steal train secrets, given the size of the country, I'd be expecting them to steal from France or Japan.

The US may have mastered putting several engines together to pull a long string of freight cars, but they did that thirty years ago and have done nothing since. I don't see any value in stealing from that.

"software blueprints" ?

Is that a fancy new name for source code ?

Nvidia and friends: GPU giant's AI data centre network is going global

What was that ?

"We are delighted to be part of Nvidia's initiative to make it quicker and easier for these organisations to deploy AI statistical analysis machines at scale."

There, FTFY.

Rackspace cloudy 'mix and match' stacks now available for EMEA mortals

"It's basically a create-your-own-stack service" . . .

. . which is subject to US court subpoenas and NSA surveillance.

No thank you, I am not giving my data to any US company voluntarily.

How an ace-hole AI bot built by Facebook, CMU boffins whipped a table of human poker pros

"learned how to play the popular card game by playing trillions of games against itself"

Once again we are shown that the computer is only quicker, not necessarily better. I sure that, if I had the time (and the means) to play anything a trillion times, I would become the undisputed world champion of it.

Facebook devs devise Hermes to push cross-platform JavaScript to godlike speeds

Well I didn't know

"Hermes is intended as an alternative to Google's (Chromium's) V8, Apple's JavaScriptCore, Mozilla's SpiderMonkey and ChakraCor [..]"

I had no idea that there were that many projects intending to improve Javascript performance. If there is that much trouble with JS performance, maybe it's a sign that it should be scrapped altogether ?

Yeah, I'm dreaming, I know. Blessed be NoScript.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean Google isn't listening to everything you say

Not Okay Google

I understand that programming language recognition in foreign languages is a bitch.

That still does not give you the right to record everything.

But don't worry Google, GDPR is here and you will change because otherwise, it'll cost you billions.

Because obviously, you can't do The Right Thing (TM) on your own, so we need GDPR to "convince" you what The Right Thing (TM) actually is.

It's happening, tech contractors: UK.gov is pushing IR35 off-payroll rules to private sector in Finance Bill

"This measure is expected to impact 170,000 individuals" . . .

. . . who will be off to the EU within the next year, making a stonking big experience hole in what the government has available as far as expertise is concerned.

You've been told people don't like something, and you expect them to stay when their expertise is useful anywhere ? If they are intelligent enough to fend for themselves, they will not blink at the prospect of expatriation to a place that doesn't choke them in taxes.

Guy is booted out of IT amid outsourcing, wipes databases, deletes emails... goes straight to jail for two-plus years

And apparently, Blue Stone doesn't do backups either

"it spent about 10 hours restoring as much data as possible"

If you'd had a proper backup, stored offline and not available to the miscreant, it would not have taken 10 hours.

Then again, seeing as management didn't think of stripping him of his access in the first place, it's more than likely he could have gotten to the backup as well.

Well, Blue Stone has learned an expensive lesson and will now be making regular backups and not letting employees keep accesses that they no longer need, right ? RIGHT ?

And I'm going to win the Lottery next Friday.

Oracle sued by ex-sales manager who claims she was fired in retaliation for suing former bosses

"the employer doesn't want in its midst an employee who dares to file a claim against the employer"

Thus, the employer terminates the employees' contract wrongly, thus creating a situation where the employee is justified in filing a claim against the employer.

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy . . .

'It’s not a surveillance program'... US govt isn't going all Beijing on us with border face-recog, official tells Congress

"it is not, apparently, employed for surveillance purposes"

Funny, I am getting a furious impression of déjà vu on reading that. As if there was another US TLA that had promised it wasn't listening in on American citizens. Surely, it must be just an impression, right ? Riiight.

So Homeland Security is now one-upping the NSA with cameras at border stations and in airports, all of which is obviously linked to the same database somewhere (a wild guess, Fort Meade ?), which the NSA obviously has access to.

So yeah, the mouthpiece can confidently stand in front of Congress and claim that they do not do surveillance because he has not been told what the NSA does with that data.

But do not try and convince me that the NSA is not perusing that data and correlating it with all the other stuff it gleans. It's National Security, man, you know it's necessary.

Sea Turtle hackers head to the Mediterranean, snag Greece's TLD registrar as a souvenir

An interesting variation of the MITM attack

And one where the target can have as much security on its local network as it can afford, it won't make any difference.

So, if you're "worried about attacks", go ahead and add multi-factor authentication, but don't forget to phone your registrar and ask them what security they have against this.

Facebook and Max Schrems back in court again, both pissed off at Ireland's data regulator

Mr Schrems, I salute you

Thank you for your dedication to the privacy of my data. Without you, the NSA would have free reign over the entire Internet and Google & Co would have an even easier life. Thanks to you, Google & Co is starting to feel the pinch, and the NSA might actually (gasp !) have to work to get their juicy data.

You are a true soldier of freedom.

Can you trust Huawei... or any other networks supplier for that matter?

"he doesn't think it is possible to rank them"

Nonsense, let me give you some criteria :

- amount of bugs discovered in software

- mean time to patch bugs

- overall efficiency of products

- friendliness toward the NSA/China/Russia/Other

- level of security implemented in software

- level of security implemented in hardware

There you go. It may take a bit of preperation, but I'm sure you can assign a number to those criteria and thus obtain a ranking.

Prenda Law boss John Steele to miss 2020 Olympics... unless they show it in prison

Re: Copyright trolls....

Looking forward to your next post defending drug dealers.

Who's been copying AMD's homework? Intel lifts the lid on its hip chip packaging to break up chips into chiplets

So now we're going to have "chiplets"

Since everything in the computer industry tends to get more and more user-friendly, I wonder how long it will take for me to build my CPU out of the various chiplets I think I need.

I mean, I remember the first time I upgraded the video card in my PC, the first time I replaced motherboard/CPU/RAM, the first time I put in water cooling, etc. I look at how it works now, and it's a piece of cake today compared to two decades ago. So how long before you'll be able to say that you want 3 floating math parts, sixteen thread parts and six GPU units ?

Grav-wave eggheads come closer to nailing down Hubble's Constant – the universe's speedy rate of expansion

"this approach relies neither on the cosmological model nor the cosmic-distance ladder"

And, unfortunately, it appears to agree with neither.

Space. It's big, it's complicated and we still have much to learn.

Mozilla boots alleged snoop troupe from its root cert coop: UAE-based DarkMatter thrown onto CA blocklist

"multiple independent reports [..] credible allegations that DarkMatter [..] involved in spying"

I did a half-hearted search for Darkmatter and spying, not expecting to find much, but wow was I wrong.

And there's more where that came from.

Internet imbeciles, aka British ISP lobbyists, backtrack on dubbing Mozilla a villain for DNS-over-HTTPS support

Re: Dear Police

Right with you there, well said.

Two pentesters, one glitch: Firefox browser menaced by ancient file-snaffling bug, er, feature

"and hey presto – some naughty JavaScript swoops in"

and is stopped cold by NoScript.

Once again, NoScript is the solution because JavaScript is and always has been a Bad Idea (TM).

Anyone for unintended ChatRoulette? Zoom installs hidden Mac web server to allow auto-join video conferencing

"to avoid this extra click"

I've said it before and I'll say it again : Humanity will not die in the fire of a nuclear holocaust or an Armageddon from asteroid, it will die of convenience.

Chrome's default-on ad blocker – which doesn't block adverts on 99% of websites – goes global

"Google shifting the playing field to its own advantage yet again"

Given the backlash from developers and the public opinion that is shifting clearly away from accepting ads, I don't see that this shift is an advantage for Google.

I have never met anyone who likes ads or finds them useful. Frankly, I wonder where all the clicks come from, because everyone I know is annoyed by ads and just ignores them, or goes into volcanic rage when a video autostarts and has no button to shut it down.

Boffins find asteroid with the shortest solar year of any space rock in our Solar System

Now I get it

After a quick search, I learned that Atira asteroids are "confined to a zone inferior to Earth orbit".

So that is why they can be so quick around the Sun. Also, I guess we have nothing to fear from them as long as they stay where they are.

On the other hand, if something jolts them out of their orbit, it won't take long to become a very serious threat.

Years late to the SMB1-killing party, Samba finally dumps the unsafe file-sharing protocol version by default

I think the situation can be far worse than that

A few years ago I was doing support for an industrial company making plastic wrapping. As usual, I was working in the IT Admin's bureau because that's where the development PC was, so I was privy to all their conversations, and one conversation was about updating to Windows 7 (at the time).

Their situation is as follows : their production floor is based on machines that are piloted by WinXP PCs who use drivers that are undocumented, talking to the machines using a protocol nobody knows. The pilot app was coded about twenty years ago and has survived upgrades from Win 3.11 to Win XP, because the guy who coded it all was still around to help. That is no longer the case (and that there is your long lost source code).

So, in order to upgrade the PCs, either they have to commission the complete rewrite of the drivers and the apps based on unknown rules, which will take vast amounts of time and an ungodly amount of money, or they can replace the production machines, which will cost upwards of a quarter million per unit, which them has to be configured with a new PC and a new app, and that throws their entire production line under the bus for weeks at a time.

So yeah, upgrading Windows has kinda hit a brick wall there. Thankfully, the admin is not stupid enough to have the XP systems connected to the Internet, but they are on the network, so there is a risk despite the firewall cutting them off from all but the admin PC that is overseeing them (not the admin's PC, that's a different one).

Agreed. Computers were new and very intimidating to the average Joe who found them complicated enough. Adding a modem and dialing to some number was almost akin to witchcraft. Very few people needed to do that, but those who did had to learn everything themselves, because there was no Internet or Google to help them find the way.

So not only did most users work unconnected, I'd wager that most of them didn't even know you could add a modem for quite a long time.

Not all heroes wear capes: Contractor grills DXC globo veep on pay rises, offshoring, and cuts to healthcare help

"the workforce doesn't carry the hopes and dreams of shareholders on their back"

Actually, it is the workforce that carries the "hopes and dreams" of shareholders, because it ain't the CEO going on-site to deal with customers, now is it ?

It might be time to reevaluate the pecking order. The CEO is the mouthpiece of the company, gives the direction in which the company should go and oversees that the engagements are being kept, and that's it. It is a job, to be sure, but so is going to client site and keeping the client happy.

And, you can replace a CEO anytime without impacting either company revenue or customer satisfaction. You can't do that with the peons that actually do the work and bring in the money.

As HMRC's quarterly deadline for online VAT filing looms, biz dogged by 'technical difficulties'

"there were a number of problems with the pilot"

And nobody thought of ironing out the problems with the pilot before going live ?

Or was it just a question of absolutely having to obey the schedule ?

Fun fact : a pilot is where you test a solution against real-life data in order to find the inevitable bugs, correct them and ensure that the go-live will go well.

If you do a pilot and you don't correct the issues before go-live, you're doing it wrong.

Who needs 4th July fireworks when there's a new Windows 10 build?

Something is missing

What ? A new Windows 1 0 release and no tale of woe ? I feel weird.

And I stocked up on the popcorn . . .

38 billion reasons to say goodbye: Ex-Mrs Bezos splits from Jeff with 4% of Amazon shares in tow

Re: Fair's fair

Agreed. I don't know what has happened behind the scenes, but publicly this is a model divorce that has been dealt with in a very civil and adult manner - despite the amount of money involved.

Next to that, I have seen people go for the throat for less than €150,000. Shame on them.

I don't know but it's been said, Amphenol plugs are made with lead

"The router went dark"

Why ? There is nothing that tells me what happened, except that the cable apparently went "between the guard rails". And ? Did it hit the circuit board ? Did it somehow fall in the power supply, making a short-circuit ?

Could someone please explain why a cable falling on a router makes it "go dark" ? I don't have a clue why this happened.

Fibaro flummoxed, Georgia courts held for ransom, and more

"the DOL says it has found no indications of a compromise"

Well, if the database was open to Internet access, it wouldn't need to be compromised, it just needed to be accessed.

Have they found traces of access ? If not, then okay, there's plenty of stuff available that no one looks at because nobody knows about it.

Wide of the net: Football Association of Ireland says player, manager data safe after breach

Well done there

"the FAI got in touch with the Irish Office of the Data Protection Commission as soon as the breach was discovered"

That's the right way to do it. Of course, it happened in Ireland, which is not Irexiting from the EU, and the GDPR is starting to look like a very effective cluebat, but still, somebody had the balls to stand up and get counted, so congrats to him.

The fact that the breach did not result in anything getting out is a relief for everyone involved and makes the diligence of the FAI all that more commendable. I'm sure the ODP will not treat them harshly.

Let's check in with Samsung to see how it's riding out the memory glut. Operating profit down 56%. Oops.

So, when profit falls, hire 15,000 people

Well that sounds like perfect timing. Well done there.

I get then that, when profits return to sky-high levels, there will be massive layoffs ?

UK competition bods to stick probe into worrying lack of said competition in online advertising

"the UK government appears to be ready to [..] get tough on regulation"

Woah there, let's not get too excited, hmm ?

Wait for the amount of the fine before you talk about getting tough. After all, we're talking about Google and FaceBook, two ginormous multinational corporations who . . pay almost nothing in taxes. There certainly is room to get tough.

MapR misses deadline for sale, biz prospects looking thinner than a Hadoop sales pitch

It's the law of capitalism

When nobody buys a product, that product disappears.

Sorry for the employees, but they had better been searching for a while already.

Get rekt: Two years in clink for game-busting DDoS brat DerpTrolling

Re: Hackers v crackers v DDoSers

Yeah, but that's nerd-level knowledge.

Today, anyone doing anything nefarious to a computer or network will be called a hacker by the press, and Joe Public will only go along with it.

UK's Openreach admits 50k premises on 'gigabit-capable' FTTP network can't get gigabit speeds

"all of our current and future build"

Well, no, 50K of them do not.

And the solution seems simple : replace the stupid ECI kit.

Ah, silly me, that costs money.

Amazon: Carbon emissions from our Australian bit barns aren't for public viewing

"release of the information [..] would negatively affect Amazon's competitive position"

It's that bad, eh ?

Finally in the UK: Apollo 11 lands... in a cinema near you

I look forward to seeing it, then

As a big fan of space exploration and of the Universe in general, I greatly appreciated Apollo 13, which I watch about once a year. Your report makes me confident that I will have a new item to add to my list of yearly walks down memory lane.

How do we stop facial recognition from becoming the next Facebook: ubiquitous and useful yet dangerous, impervious and misunderstood?

"It is not the right way to regulate,"

Well obviously it doesn't suit Moore, but his arguments don't really suit me.

1) he doesn't know of any law enforcement agency that wants to use the technology for real-time surveillance

The word missing there is "yet". He also states that we don't have the processing power, again missing the word "yet". We will get there, and the police already have a fairly extensive track record of abusing their powers and tools with gay abandon.

2) He says that combined with improvements in the technology, we are rapidly getting to the point where within two-to-three years, the degree of accuracy in facial recognition will be in "high 90s" for all types of people

Come back in two-to-three years then, and we'll talk about it again.

3) it would be harder for a police officer to justify, say, stopping a black man because he thought he looked like a suspect if there was a facial recognition result that said it was only 80 per cent accurate

I think a policeman would take a 4 out of 5 as a perfect reason for stopping the guy, with whatever consequences that may follow.

4) the issue only got a "spotlight on it because facial recognition was in the same sentence."

Well duh, if there hadn't been a camera, the guy wouldn't have felt the need to hide his face. Facial recog was at the very base of the problem, so yeah, it got the spotlight and rightly so.

5) "Guns are a serious problem," he notes. "This technology is there to make better decisions."

Sure, because FR is going to keep someone from pulling a gun. Way to go there, Moore. Let's not address the issue of guns, let's just put a band-aid over it and we can all feel all nice and fuzzy.

6) We have turned down multiple clients where their use of the technology was not aligned with what we wanted to do.

I am so impressed. How lucky we are to have you. Now what are you going to do about your competition ? Are you going to ensure that they act with the same, admirable, attitude ? How ?

It may be that regulation should happen at a federal level, I'm not qualified to have an opinion on that either way.

But I'm pretty sure that,whatever the level, the regulation should give clear guidance as to where FR is acceptable, how the data should be treated, how long it can legally be stored and what procedures should ensure that the data is properly deleted when its expiry date is passed.

Oh, and selling the database should be a federal crime passable of 5-10 years without parole.

Re: Facial recognition itself isn't bad

Yes, at this point it is. Did you miss the part where it only works averagely well if you're white ? I think black people already have enough chances to be wrongly arrested (and possibly shot) without adding a "computer says so" to the list.

Trump: Huawei ban will be lifted!
US Commerce Dept.: Yeah, about that…

Re: "stopping an avalanche requires a bit more effort than starting one"

You do realize that you're talking about someone who has never had to clean up after himself in his whole life ?

Trump has never stopped anything, he just says "stop that thing" and underlings scurry about to get it done or else they will be fired. With that kind of mentality, how can he possibly care how much effort it takes ? He's never made an effort in his life.

US Cyber Command warns that the Outlook is not so good - Iranians hitting email flaw

Re: Bad iranians, bad!

Well, the thing is, the US is quick to point out how much other countries are wreaking havoc, but it is veeery quiet on what the NSA is doing abroad.

Not to excuse foreign hackers, but I have a feeling that they're just giving back, so to speak.

Russian 'Silence' hacking crew turns up the volume – with $3m-plus cyber-raid on bank's cash machines

The sound of Silence

Appears to be the rustling of lots of bills.

So they could be only 2, and they have managed to completely pwn a bank, control its PCs and get control over ATMs.

Man, they are evil, but that is awesome intelligence applied to a bad use. I wonder if intrusion detection is going to take off in those parts now ?

UK's North Midlands hospitals IT outage, day 2: All surgery and appointments cancelled

"Where is your contingency planning for such events?"

Probably in the same place as the budget for it - limbo.

These are hospitals, not luxury resorts. When even Google doesn't have a backup fiber link to its bit barn, you can hardly blame a lowly hospital for not having redundancy and multiple servers.

Code crash? Russian hackers? Nope. Good ol' broken fiber cables borked Google Cloud's networking today

"Mitigation work is currently underway [..]"

It's called REPAIRS. Mitigation is what you do to get around a problem, but there is no getting around a broken fiber link. It just has to be repaired.

Why is it that today's PR people can't just say it as it is ?