Posts by Pascal Monett

Oil be damned: Iran-based crooks flinging malware at Middle Eastern energy plants again – research

If everyone was doing this all the time, we'd all be having trouble filling up our cars, don't you think ?

Icahn and I will force a Xerox and HP wedding: Corporate raider urges HP shareholders to tell board to act 'NOW'

I feel vindicated

Things are proceeding exactly as I have foreseen.

Re: they can get funding based on their future worth

So that's why the capitalist system is breaking down. Too much stock put into virtual reality, not enough put into actual reality.

Somebody needs to put a brake on the madness.

Windows 10 Insiders: Begone, foul Store version of Notepad!

Notepad++ complicated ?

I have no idea where you get that from.

Open text file, edit text file, save. Nothing complex there. Oh, there are menu options, but it's like Word, you can ignore them if you just want to edit text.

Staffer representation on our board? LMAO! Good one, cackles Microsoft

Indeed

We've lost enough values as it is. Good to see someone is holding on to the ones that work.

Never going to happen.

First of all, in companies the size of Microsoft, there's always something happening that should not be known to the workforce before the appropriate time - decided by the board.

Second, there are some things that need to be kept secret. Having an employee representative is a world of possible leaks waiting to happen.

Third, do you really think these kind of people are going to want to shoulder it with a representative of the peons ? They're above that, and that's where they want to stay.

Onestream slammed for 'slamming' vulnerable and elderly folk: That's £35k to Ofcom, please

"ensuring there can be no repetition of the mistakes that were made."

Sorry, but there was no mistake there. This was a calculated and programmed operation with a specific target market, and the people responsible for putting this in place should definitely go to jail.

And the CEO should be first in line, because that's where the buck stops.

Our society is not going get better any time soon if we can't teach the right lesson to the criminals in white collars.

How to fool infosec wonks into pinning a cyber attack on China, Russia, Iran, whomever

Um, confusing El Reg and the NSA is quite a leap to make. I'm not following you there.

With El Reg, the headlines are to grab your attention. With the NSA, the headlines are to make you go home and lock yourself in.

Feds slap $5m bounty on 'Evil Corp' Russian duo accused of running ZeuS, Dridex banking trojans

What was that ?

"Because many of the victims are small and medium enterprises, their accounts typically don't have the same legal protections afforded to consumer accounts."

What kind of schizophrenic country allows for different levels of legal protection following what entity it is that opens a bank account ? A bank account is a bank account, whether it is held by a corporation, a person or an illegal alien from Mars.

And how ironic that corporations who can potentially lobby to have laws written in their favor have less legal banking protection than voters whose votes don't count.

Reasons to be fearful 2020: Smishing, public Wi-Fi, deepfakes... and all the usual suspects

Hold on a minute there

"The company recommended people take the same precautions with text messages from unknown mobile numbers as they would with emails from unknown sources"

People apparently blindly accept email from unknown sources, clicking the links and forwarding as requested ; telling them to do the same with SMSs is not really a good idea.

Huawei with your rural subsidies ban: Chinese comms bogeyman fires sueball at US regulator

"Everybody I've spoken to is not going to go forward"

And Mexico is going to pay for the wall, and China will pay the tariffs.

Yeah, we know you, Donald. You live in a curious little world that will soon no longer affect us.

Scammy and spammy harassers are chasing veteran pros off crypto-collab platform Keybase

Re: Who in this era ...

Yeah. It's not like these problems are new, right ? These Keybase guys totally ignored everything that happened to Skype and other such platforms and just traipsed into the messaging world believing in unicorns and pots of gold at the end of rainbows.

Idiots.

Your duckface better be flawless: Huawei's Nova 6 mobe has a needlessly powerful selfie camera

No, you're not

I find the whole selfie thing revolting.

Pictures are to record the special things you've seen, to remember them later. If you're in the middle, you're taking up space uselessly. Of course you were there, you took the pic. You don't need to be in it to remember.

But you do need to be in it to show off. I hate that.

Uncle Sam challenged in court for slurping social media info on 'millions' of visa applicants

I wouldn't worry. If you've made negative comments about a French company, you can be sure that there are many, many of my countrymen who have made even worse comments.

It's in our nature to complain. When it's hot, it's always too hot. When it's cold, it's not hot anymore. When there's sunshine, we'd like rain. When it's raining, we're fed up with rain.

It's called being Gaulois. It's the reason why no invader will ever stay - we'll drive them nuts because we drive ourselves nuts already. Vive la France !

Oh please

I have no need for a sequel, nor does anyone else.

If there's somethin' stored in a secure enclave, who ya gonna call? Membuster!

"the attacker needs to install a custom-printed circuit board"

I stopped reading there.

Physical access and all that. Nothing to lose sleep over.

VCs find exciting new way to blow $1m: Wire it directly to hackers after getting spoofed

Well, someone has learned an important lesson

Never settle on only using email when dealing with money. Get a phone number, arrange a meeting, and get the financial details there, face to face.

It's the only way to be sure.

Asteroid Bennu is flinging particles of dust and rock from its surface – and scientists can't work out why

It's going to be interesting reading about how they solve this mystery

Space is decidedly awesome. Last year that rubber ducky-shaped asteroid we put a lander on actually demonstrated landslides, now we have an asteroid that ejects solid matter without a volcano.

Explaining that is going to take some serious genius. I can't wait for the result.

BOFH: I'd like introduce you to a groovy little web log I call 'That's Boss'

Ooohhh ! We're back to sneakily dreadful.

First, this one is dead on as far as Twitter is concerned. I completely agree with its position.

Second, although nobody got rolled up in carpet, there's potential for a lot of mayhem in a follow-up piece, and I'm looking forward to that.

If you want an example of how user concerns do not drive software development, check out this Google-backed API

"We received very positive [..] feedback from partners"

And who are those partners exactly ? Users ? I don't think so.

Google's partners are companies that advertise. If they are happy about this, then I'm not.

Whoooooa, this node is on fire! Forget Ceph, try the forgotten OpenStack storage release 'Crispy'

Just out of curiosity

Could someone explain to me how is it that the motherboard was fried and the box was hot enough to cook a meal, yet the hard disks had survived ?

How is that possible ?

In a touching tribute to its $800m-ish antitrust fine, Qualcomm tears wraps off Snapdragon 865 chip for 5G phones

"It's very easy to share and collaborate with the cloud"

Yes, I'm sure the NSA and hackers all over the world are in total agreement with that statement.

You are out of you mind if you honestly think that I am going to trust my entire desktop and all my data to someone else's computer, to be accessed under someone else's whim. I have a PC, a Personal computer, and I intend it to stay that way.

Re: Cheers

Interesting post with a lot of interesting information.

Thank you for that.

Since the FCC won't act, Congress finally moves on robocalls by passing half-decent TRACED Act

Re: Robocalls cost cell phone companies money

I think the issue is about land lines, not cell phones.

Sorry, but where in his track record do you have any instance of him doing anything else than delaying the application of the law when said application would diminish telco revenue ?

Former Oracle product manager says he was forced out for refusing to deceive customers. Now he's suing the biz

Re: deliver something that is feature complete on day 1

As much as I complain, like everyone else, about Microsoft products, I disagree with that sentence. Most software companies actually have product when they declare that they are selling it. Sure, said product will have patches and upgrades, but there is something working.

Oracle is apparently guilty of selling a non-existent product to customers, and tasking this guy to keep said customers patient while it was being developed. That is not at all the same thing.

In any case, it would seem that Oracle should partner up with Escobar Inc. They are obviously made to match.

Escobar Fold 1 snort all it's cracked up to be: Readers finger similarity to slated Chinese mobe

Escobar Inc

I am comforted in my opinion that anything related to this company is to be avoided at all costs. It is astounding that such a family of criminals can openly deal on the international market without any backlash.

Escobar can keep its trash, I'm not going to help them launder a single cent of ill-gotten gains.

AT&T subscribers back in court to crack open telco giant's $60m FTC settlement over limited 'unlimited data' plans

I'm sure he'll get around to that next year.

Take Sajid Javid's comments on IR35 UK contractor rules with a bucket of salt, warns tax guru

"Now, we are calling on all parties to [..] halt the 2020 roll-out"

Seems a bit late, given that companies are already getting rid of their contractors.

You guys made a pigs breakfast of it all and somebody's going to have pick up the pieces. As usual, it's the peons that will suffer.

Lazarus group goes back to the Apple orchard with new macOS trojan

What is the point ?

The article does not mention that the malware sample was found on VirusTotal. That means that somebody has scanned it, which has to mean that those Norks leaked it out.

However, the article states that the control server is not handing out the payload, which prevents the malware from doing anything at this point in time.

So that begs the question : has this malware actually been installed and then the Norks shut down the service because they were only interested in one target ? Or are they still in the ramping up stage and want everything to be perfect for when they do unleash the malware ?

Which still does not explain the sample on VirusTotal.

We know this sounds weird but in future we could ask fiber optic cables: Did the earth move for you... literally?

So they can detect a disturbance in laser intensity

But can they detect where the disturbance is, meaning how far down the cable ?

To me, this reads like a boolean result : the laser signal is disturbed, or it isn't. There is not enough description in the article to tell me whether the boffins knew where those 6000 perturbations were. On the other hand, they knew they had 6000 perturbations, so they must have some way of counting.

I'd like to know.

Just in case you were expecting 10Gbps, Wi-Fi 6 hits 700Mbps in real-world download tests

Well if you're streaming up to 700Mbps then surely browsing can't be all that bad, and I don't see any impact on gaming. These days you're connected to server, so in effect it's just like streaming.

We're not trying to be rude here but... there's an ice giant stripping down, emitting gas as it orbits a hot white dwarf

Unless we've found a way to fold space or something by then. If so, we'll be watching the fireworks from a space station in the asteroid belt, or we'll have migrated to another system and left a giant camera in orbit around Jupiter to stream the live feed on the GalNet.

Amazon drops battery-powered Echo speaker so you can play Despacito on the go

"10 hours of continuous music playback, or 11 hours on standby"

So, playing the music is just a bit more taxing than just listening to everything and sending that to the mothership, I see.

Customers in 'standoff' with SAP over 2025 end of support for Business Suite: Who'll blink first?

"Delaying [..] may be a less attractive solution"

Translation : we are so going to up the license fee that your head will be spinning.

Mozilla locks nosy Avast, AVG extensions out of Firefox store amid row over web privacy

Gosh, I remember when Avast was free

It was a plucky little AV program, efficient and user-friendly. I dropped it when it started charging and dropped the free version.

My how it has gone all wrong.

EFF warns of 'one-way mirror' of web surveillance by tech giants – led by Google

Re: the bulk of Internet consumers are American

Um, sorry pal, but in case you haven't got the email, the Internet has escaped USA borders and most of its users now are not actually American citizens.

Larry leaves, Sergey splits: Google lads hand over Alphabet reins to Sundar Pichai

Just a second

"We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company someone who can make even more money - and we're a bit tired of counting our billions"

There, FTFY.

Pablo Escobar's brother is Medellín in the foldable phone biz, sniffing out new markets

"Pablo Escobar"

Sorry, any company touting that name as a reference earns an immediate boycott reflex from me.

Mayday in Moscow as devs will be Russian to Putin mandatory apps on phones, laptops, TVs

"the company cannot tolerate that kind of risk"

Yeah. Let's see just how long Apple takes before deciding that it actually can tolerate that kind of risk.

After all, it's not about morals, it's just about how much Apple will lose if it doesn't comply.

Ah, the beauty of Capitalism.

Sorry Apple, but if you think for one second that I believe you give a flying shit about morals, I have a bridge to sell you.

We took a shot every time Qualcomm said 5G, AI or mobile gaming in its Snapdragon 865, 765 system-on-chip launch...

" 'desktop-level' performance"

Nope.

Never gonna happen.

A desktop is plugged into the mains, a phone has a battery that has a finite - and very limited - duration.

Even if you plug the phone into a charger, it is designed for a heat envelope that is orders of magnitude less than what a true desktop - with watercooling these days - is designed for.

So go on and say that your new design is the highest performer, sure, but a desktop it ain't and never will be.

Trump Administration fast-tracks compulsory border facial recognition scans for all US citizens

Careful.

Second-generation immigrants are born in the country and raised in the country and are just as much a citizen as you are (*). A name does not imply that the person is not from your country.

* - not saying that 1st-generation immigrants aren't, obviously, as long as they've been officially accepted through the immigration process.

EU wouldn't! Uncle Sam brandishes 'up to 100%' tariffs over France's Digital Services Tax

Apparently, they have amounted to an additional cost of $500 to $1700 per year per US household.

I'm sure US households will have no problem dealing with that additional charge.

Den Automation raised millions to 'reinvent' the light switch. Now it's lights out for startup

"a modern-day retelling of the story of Icarus"

Stop trying to transform basic IoT crap into a great idea that unfortunately failed.

It was a bunch of lights. What the hell did they have to develop a proprietary protocol for, and why the hell did they have to tie that into a remote server ? Because they did what all the rest do : try to control everything.

Kudos on having understood that they had no chance unless the product could be used on existing sockets, but the failure was inevitable since they tied their product to the survival of the server.

You can invent all the manufacturing excuses you want, if they had started by making a lightbulb that didn't need a remote server to work, they might have made something actually useful and they might have survived.

No pity here.

It's Hipp to be square: What happened when SQLite creator met GitHub

"GitHub has to be both independent and neutral"

Excuse me, but if that were actually true, GitHub would not have let itself be borged by Microsoft.

Ergo, that is a lie.

Personally, I do not understand what made them accept being bought. Microsoft did not need to buy them in order to use the platform, and Microsoft does not need another paltry few million to pad its already well-padded coffers.

Of course, being showered with billions was most probably a very nice incentive, but if you're all about independence and neutrality, then you stay the course and remain independent. GitHub was not in need of money, so it's just basic greed that made them sell out.

Europol wipes out 30,000+ piracy sites, three suspects cuffed to walk the legal plank

Re: There isn't a real problem with counterfeit products copying overpriced tat

Agreed. Someone who knowingly buys counterfeit luxury goods is not someone who would buy the original luxury goods. They don't want to pay the price, so it is not a lost sale.

And, I would argue, someone buying a luxury item at a vastly reduced price knows exactly what they are buying.

It's only the person who is willing to pay full price, but gets nabbed by a counterfeit at, say 30% off, who is being harmed and the sale lost for the original company.

I wonder how often that actually happens ?

Russian FaceApp selfie-slurper poses 'potential counterintelligence threat', FBI warns

"could conceivably be used by the Kremlin for intelligence"

Anything on a phone could conceivably be used for intelligence. That is not news, it is not even a warning, it's just a fact.

Come back with an actual, proven risk that that app is under orders from Moscow and then you'll have something interesting to say.

Oh, I forgot, TLAs these days have no proof of nothing, they're just bleating FUD to keep the peons in line.

Re: Meanwhile

Yes, but based in America, so it's safe !

And it's monetized in America ! U S A ! U S A !

UK parcel firm Yodel plugs tracking app's random yaps about where on map to snap up strangers' tat

"we can confirm that it is now resolved"

But, first you said there was no problem. So all of sudden there was one and it's dealt with ? After you ignored an initial warning ? Isn't that convenient.

The worst thing about this is that it is something that affects you whether or not you have the app, since it is other people who get to see your details. So, saying "well I'm not going to download that app" is not a solution.

That is bad. I do hope that it has been effectively dealt with.

A little product renaming here, a little RISC-V magic there, some extra performance, and voila – Imagination's 10th-gen PowerVR is born

Re: And driver support?

Yeah, my first accelerator card was an m3D as well, back in the day. Wasn't too impressed with it after the first few minutes.

Then I got a VooDoo 2 and never looked back.

Still, it's good to know that they've been improving. This new gen is no m3D, that's for sure, but it won't be beating the RTX 2080 any time soon.