Posts by Pascal Monett 19020 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
If you can replace your laptop with a phone, you're not doing much with either.
One day, maybe, when we have finally discovered how to make room-temperature superconductors that will allow us to push processors past 4GHz, we might get computing platforms with the power of a mainframe and the size of a phone, but there is no phone today that can match an i7-powered laptop with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD.
Not one.
That is an interesting article, but I didn't read anything in there that contradicts what I said. Facebook is not going to be investigated under the first reason of statutory alignment with social security or state unemployment schemes. Neither is Facebook being investigated for fraud, and Facebook is really, really far from being bankrupt.
As I said, Facebook management is practically immune from legal reprisals.
Because Facebook is an enormous corporation that gives a lot of lobbying money and campaign fund support, so it will not be treated like you or me, simple citizens.
Then there's the fact that Facebook has it's own army of lawyers who would fight an incarceration tooth and nail, and probably without much trouble.
Finally, there's the fact that jailing company executives for doing the company's bidding is simply not in the law. You fine the company after a lengthy lawsuit, but the people in it are all but immune unless they commit a real crime (ie killing someone, insider trading or such, that cannot be excused by the company).
So what is needed is a change in the law, making executives personally responsible for the behavior of the company - and that is whole other ball game.
How is it possible for a computer to allocate a room that is already occupied ? It should indeed be a computer problem because I very much doubt that there is any booking system where the clerk can override room status on an occupied room - that way lies madness.
So there clearly is a bug in the system, but what on Earth could it be ? The database is corrupt ? The system got hacked and nobody's noticed yet ?
Anyone got any ideas ?
So, two low-scoring vulns could be combined into one big problem. Sure, theoretically, but how do you evaluate just how many low-scoring things can be combined and in what way, before you can rate all of them properly ?
Security is always in hindsight. We know to look out for privilege escalation issues because some hacker one day taught us that it worked. We have a body of knowledge today that is certainly impressive, and it will be one hell of a task to knit all that knowledge together to create a proper rating system, but there is no such thing as automating the risk evaluation - it has to be analyzed by a human. Humans don't know everything, and are rather bad at taking into account hundreds of parameters at once.
It is obvious the CVSS is not very valuable, but crafting a good replacement is going to be a massive headache. And yet, it should definitely be done. Good luck with that, then.
Funny you should say that, given how many times you've already been nailed to the post for misleading reporting on performance. So either you employ incompetent people to draw up your reports, or you don't do enough reviewing before publishing, or . . you're marketing efforts are a bit too zealous (yeah, let's put it that way).
This kind of behavior is quite common in the industry, just look at the continual skirmishing between NVidia and AMD on the graphics side of things. AMD is always being forced to defend the performance of its processors in all domains, because AMD is a worthy contender and we need AMD to keep everyone else in line.
IT is the one domain where the numbers should not lie. Thanks to AMD for their continual efforts to keep it that way.
Yup, when I read the words "all you need to do is set up a funding URL" I immediately thought "and all the hackers have to do is hijack that".
I totally agree on the principle, but JavaScript being the most hijacked thing in the IT world, I can't see how that will not attract all kinds of scum.
Still, at least they are trying something.
An $8bn company starts talking about buying a $27bn company. Reality stares back and says "Nope".
If I had $8000, I could conceivably persuade my banker to loan me another $20000 to buy a $28000 car, but even if I had $80000, I don't think my banker would loan me $200000 to buy a $280000 house. Not at my age and not on my salary.
So what is the real reason behind this pie-in-sky thinking ? Xerox can re-evaluate its cash flow, redo its financials six ways to Sunday, it doesn't and will never have the cash or the means to match HP's weight.
The whole affair is nonsense.
You do realize that hard drives are not backups ? They are subject to failure, magnets, and various other risks.
An optical disk is the only proper backup. Keep it in the shade at reasonable temperature and your photos will still be viewed decades from now. I suggest a BluRay writer and buying the 50GB disks. They are a bit more expensive per GB than the 25GB disks, but hey, double the storage is worth it.
The problem is not in private APIs or not. The problem is the rule said do not use them, developers used them and got away with it for a while, building their base and reputation, and now boom, no more private APIs.
That is not consistent. The developers should never have been able to post those apps in the first place. That would have been consistent.
After that, if you don't like it is another matter entirely. But if you ban them then you ban them from the start, not after a few years of saying so.
And therein lies the rub : consistency. Apple is well-known for wanting to control everything, but how it controls is not consistent. It is useless to lay down a rule if you only enforce it after years of ignoring it. That is how you get backlash and discontent among your user base.
Of course, it may be that Apple has decided it doesn't care, but the lapse between declaring the rule and enforcing it is just sloppiness. When a company decides to only accept Word files as job submissions, you can bet that it won't let the first 20 PDF files through anyway, just because. No, those PDF files are going straight to the round filing cabinet and those who submitted are likely never even going to hear about it.
It is disheartening and despicable to realize that we are in the 3rd Millennium CE and there are still men who treat women as objects to be acquired, without acknowledging that they are also people.
I do not understand that mentality. If you really think a woman is just an object, then go buy yourself a Real Doll. You'll have exactly what you want and women will have what they want : not you.
These days, it would seem that the ability to post inane tweets, a picture of your meal or some other equally useless thing is quite enough to validate the usage of people's data.
The only reason we're having this discussion is because people don't actually care what they are being used for on the Internet. There appears to be a general approach of "I can do whatever I want, there are no consequences and I will use anything that is free without thinking".
As long as the majority think that way, companies will be able to get away with a lot. That is why GDPR is likely the best thing to happen to the Internet in general. Only the fines will keep companies in line.
All the wonderful things that come with "smart" now also include "the provider can shut it down without your consent". Just like all those defunct music services where you thought you buying music tracks, remember ?
Man that really encourages me to dash off and purchase all that smartness.
The heliosphere is based on solar wind, so why isn't the heliosphere centered around the Sun ? Looking at the diagram, I see a very exaggerated version of Earth's magnetic field. I know the Sun is moving around the center of our galaxy, but surely the heliosphere encounters the pressure of the interstellar medium in all directions, no ?
So why the gigantically-disproportioned tail ?
It seems that, in their rush to provide yet another way to monitor consumer behavior for no benefit to consumers, all these "smart" thingamabobs are opening yet another Pandora's box worth of trouble.
The Internet appears to still be in its Wild West period. Maybe, in a few decades and after many, many lawsuits, companies will finally be capable of design products that do not shit on their their customers without them having a clue.
Maybe.
Bezos's Amazon is a company, and it has it's .com address already. What are we supposed to do, have a .ibm, a .apple and a .whateverthefuckelse as well ?
Companies are on .com, end of.
Yes, I know that will bruise the ego of those multi-billionaires, but there should be some things that money cannot buy.
With a data trove like that, no payment data was needed. Miscreants will exploit that to extract payment via blackmail.
One can only hope that the people using the sites were using a throwaway mail account, but the odds of that are likely rather low.
Ok, points for having weaved through all the issues, but points docked for having thought that the server bandwidth was free and not checking to ensure that it was.
It is fascinating to see how the dominoes fall in real life, and that obstacle course was rather hair-raising at times.
A very interesting tale.
After being asked to please publish the full report, the FTC answers that it is outside the scope of FOI requests. Congratulations on not answering the question in such a way that we instantly understand that you don't give a damn.
Trump and the Republican Party has managed to literally behead justice and professionalism in almost every governmental agency. It is frightening to witness how quickly a country that once had a functional and fairly respectable system has become a banana republic.
Yes, I bet you have, because this time it's the customers you desperately want to keep : those that pay you the big support contracts and enormous license fees. So yeah, you listened, because those are not the Joe Public nobodies you don't care about when they whine about your craptastic GUI.
Sure, if I was paid to make a computer play StarCraft II, I would also think it's worth it.
So, what domain do we have in real life that could possibly benefit from this experience ? What domain has constantly changing variables that require the intuition of experience in order to not get blinding by the sheer amount of data and cut to the right solution in as short a time as possible ?
Maybe Wall Street trading, or eventually weather forecasting, but we already have massive computers that handle that (albeit not always very well). Anything else that we humans can do happens at human speed and we're better equipped to handle it than a 3K core cloud computer.
I'm pretty sure nobody is going to scrap existing theory. We'll amend it to fit the new findings.
And if you think you'll be the winner, you're dead wrong.
China can not only raise a 10 million-strong army, it can also afford to lose it and raise another one.
The US lost a mere 50441 men (no disrepect intended) in Vietnam and the US government almost imploded.
If you intend to fight China to the death, you may as well dig your own grave.
640 million ? That's almost as much as the entire North and South American continents !
Are there that many terrorists on US soil ? Why are they not apprehended more quickly ? I mean, if 1 in every 2 people are terrorists, either you need to drastically expand your prison infrastructure, or your political base.
Honestly, am I supposed to believe that there are over 200 million terrorists on this planet ? Where does the FBI get that data from ?
And it will still take up to 3 years to get it to the consumer.
And after that, it will take another few years before Apple, Samsung and Huawei avoid having their models burst into flames while recharging.
So, in ten years time, we'll finally have batteries we can recharge in just five minutes - from cars, to phones, to rechargeable AAs.
Looking forward to it then.
Simply because he wanted to see if the (at the time) latest Intel CPU could do proper semaphore stuff and other things, this kid (at the time) kickstarted an entire industry that now has a firm majority of all the servers in the world under its reign.
No, he didn't write all of it and yes, it took a lot of people a lot of time to get to this point, but he was the pebble that started the landslide and he is still the God-Emperor, The One Who Decides. And thank God he does.
I don't think we'll be seeing ads in Linux any time soon.
Yeah, I got those too. At least one also claimed to have hacked my email as well by including an actual password that I used to use on sites that required a login and I didn't care about it. The wording was actually above par for what is generally written by that kind of scum.
Of course, it didn't impress me for one second. No, you haven't hacked my computer. That means that you have not enabled the camera, since I disabled it in hardware. Even if you had, you can't remove the lens lid and record anything. Also, I have never used that password for my email. And finally, no, there is no clock ticking now that I have read your stupid email. Email does not work like that, and you didn't think of requiring a return receipt so no, you have no way of knowing that I read it.
But I have to admit, the non-tech-savvy population could be impressed by all the verbiage.
As far as I'm concerned, for the home user there is most likely only one use case : viewing videos when your IP is deemed unworthy of being granted the privilege.
What's that, BBC ? You don't want me to check out that short informational video you made on <some subject> ? Fine, I fire up TunnelBear, choose the UK as my exit point, and I can view the video now.
I'm not saying I do it all day long, but it's an available solution to a problem that should not exist in the first place.
Apart from that though, I have no idea why I would want to use a VPN all day long.
There we go again. Since some bad people use encryption, nobody else should be able to.
Well I have some similar information for you : guns are often used by drug kingpins and terrorists in the course of their criminal activity.
Funnily enough, there is no call to limit the availability of guns.
We need a merry-go-round icon.
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