Posts by Pascal Monett

Repairability fiends crack open a Surface Laptop 3: Nice SSD, but shame about the battery

I don't care

I don't care that the item is the fasted, cheapest, best performing in its category - if the battery cannot be swapped out in less than 5 minutes without any tool more specialized than a screwdriver, I will not buy it.

End of.

Haunted by Europe's GDPR, ICANN sharpens wooden stake to finally slay the Whois vampire

So, GDPR has cowed ICANN

Man, it's good to be alive today.

After all the times I wanted to personally go to 12025 Waterfront Drive, drag whoever was at the helm of Suite 300 behind the chemical shed and shoot the effin' bastard, finally, finally I can envision my future without a striped shirt and iron bars.

ICANN is still scum, but now that it has been emasculated I can live with it.

Republican senators shoot down a triple whammy of proposed election security laws

In the current American political climate, it's obvious that the corruption is self-serving, with a side of knee-jerk Republican vs Democrat reflex included.

Re: Foul Play

Yeah, okay, but do you really need evidence ? Isn't it blindingly obvious ?

Microsoft's cloud keeps printing cash, Surface not so much as Windows giant pockets $119m profit a day

"Every Fortune 500 company today is on a cloud migration journey"

And when that migration is finished, every Fortune 500 company will get hit in the balls every time Azure has a hiccup.

Ain't the future wonderful ?

No need : it's zero.

Wondering where the strontium in your old CRT monitor came from? Two colliding neutron stars show us

It's awesome when Science advances

So, neutron star mergers make the heavier elements. It's nice to have confirmation for that, but that brings a question to my mind.

A neutron star is, if I'm not mistaken, a star that failed its end-of-life bid to become a black hole. So, if I understood that correctly, if a neutron star is the last step before punching a hole in the Universe, then how many neutron stars can merge before the result finally turns into a black hole ?

Ideas, anyone ?

AMD sees Ryzen PCs sold with its CPUs in Europe as Intel shortages persist

A sensitive blow indeed

But good for AMD, which gets to shore up its finances a bit to better compete in the future.

I'm sure Intel will pull through, and AMD will be stronger. Competition FTW !

Would you open an email from one Dr Brian Fisher? GP app staff did – and they got phished

[we] "have taken a lot of time to do things right"

You bloody well did, and a refreshing difference it is to read about somebody for whom the security of personal information is indeed a priority.

They detected the threat and neutralized it before a breach occurred, their patient data is on a separate system - bloody hell somebody give those guys a medal !

To all the morons that got their unsecure, unencrypted databases hacked this year alone : THAT is how you demonstrate that security is your top concern.

What simultaneously sucks and doesn't? This new robot vacuum cleaner

2000 pascals, 20,000 pascals

All that is very nice, but how much noise do they make ?

Because suction power is important, but me being able to not leave the house when they work is as important to me.

Luke, I am your father... which is why I must eject from JEDI decision, says US Defense Sec

Re: Ethics?

It's a bit late in the process to congratulate him, don't you think ?

If he'd really had ethics, he'd have stepped out right from the start. It's not like he just learned that his son worked for IBM.

Hell hath GNOME fury: Linux desktop org swings ax at patent troll's infringement claim

Re: Ten Beeellion Dollars

As I have already said numerous times, there is a simple solution to patent trolls : tie the amount of damages awarded to the sales made by the owner of the patent.

You sell nothing ? You get nothing.

That would kill patent trolls right from the start.

Inside the 1TB ImageNet data set used to train the world's AI: Naked kids, drunken frat parties, porno stars, and more

"some of the labels used to describe them are biased and racist"

Now that is a real problem. You can argue that images posted on the Internet are public, but you absolutely cannot argue that the guy labeling images made a slip of the keyboard. If image labels are racist it's only because some asshole in charge of classification was a racist.

No wonder facial recog systems are acknowledged as being biased against non-white people. If any random AI training project has racists labeling pics then it would seem quite difficult to have any AI project that only has non-racist people handling the data.

To think we're in the 3rd millennium. Seems like we'll need a few more millennia before Humanity actually becomes intelligent.

Well, they couldn't actually say they were deleting the images, now could they ?

US customers kick up class-action stink over Epson's kyboshing of third-party ink

Indeed, and replacement cartridges are not priced following the gold standard.

When I got fed up with inkjet printers that could barely last one full cartridge, endlessly needing head cleaning and whatnot, I got a B&W laser printer and I've never been happier. Pages are printed in mere seconds, quality is excellent and a toner cartridge lasts hundreds of pages (of text, obviously).

One day, I just might shell out for a color laser printer, but for now I have no need of that.

In any case, inkjets are for suckers.

Nothing's certain except death and patches – so that 'final' Windows 10 19H2 build isn't really

Of course it's the final version

Until the next update, that is.

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Re: The UK is one of the most welcoming and non-racist countries in Europe

Racism is everywhere, buddy, and if you think you're country has the least of it, you're blinding yourself to the truth.

And besides, you just have to look at UKIP to know that what you said is wrong.

Cloud file migration geek Mover packs boxes for Microsoft

"a seamless and cost-effective experience"

Yeah, right up to the point when the connection goes down, a regional hub goes down, or everything goes down and the backups are lost.

Trusting your data to anyone is a risk. Trusting your data to Microsoft is a game of Russian roulette.

Big Red tells crypto-coin publication: One does not simply call one's website 'OracleTimes'

But of course

If I were an avid tarot reader, it is absolutely obvious that I would immediately think of Oracle Corp when stumbling upon a site named Oracle Times. It is blindingly obvious that nothing containing the name Oracle has ever, in the history of Mankind, ever meant anything other than Oracle Corp.

Someone is going to have to invent a new concept for Ellison's ego. Or maybe we just use him as a reference, as in "that guy has an ego of 1 ellison".

UK tech freelancer numbers down for first time in 5 years since IR35 tax reforms hit public sector

So HMRC basically wants everyone to be employed

I'm sure that's a great thing, right ? All the government contractors that are going to disappear are going to have to replaced by somebody, and that means hiring, right ?

Oh but, the government doesn't have money to hire anyone ?

Well then HMRC is basically putting a halt to every IT project there is in the UK. Well done !

Infosys shares dive 15% as regulators investigate false accounting claims

"Salil Parekh, is still CEO and managing director"

For the moment, apparently.

Look, one whistleblower event can be a mistake, but two ? That has to mean that Infosys some serious issue to resolve one way or the other.

Steve Bannon-backed flick attempts to expose evil lurking at heart of Huawei *cough* Huaxing

Yeah, sure

Given that the whole Huawei hoopla started with lies, I am giving zero credit to this new raft of lies. We know exactly why US Republicans are on the warpath against Huawei : Huawei has 5G network tech ready, and Cisco does not.

Let me be very clear : you have the right to be unhappy about the fact that your country is not the leader in a given domain, you do not have the right to slander and cheat your way to leadership.

Instead of dissing Huawei, kick Cisco's butt and make it do something worth something in the 5G arena.

On top of that, it's really rich to have the party of Free Enterprise be against capitalist competition when they're not the ones winning.

HP CEO: Help us save the world one tree at a time... by printing stuff (with our kit, of course)

"We are going to make printing forest-positive"

So all the printing that has already been done is all good because of efforts that you promise to make in the future ?

That's like a teenager saying that you can give him his allowance this week because he'll start cleaning his room next month.

And what of all the cartridges in landfills ? Are you going to pledge to recycle that and make your entire line carbon-free with offsets ?

Somehow I doubt that.

Oh, and that "monitor the types of paper used" thing. Does that mean that we'll also have to buy HP paper or the printer will say no ? Now that's something that could happen - until the inevitable court case throws that toy out of the pram, that is.

No one would be so scummy as to scam a charity, right? UK orgs find out the hard way

Charities are not the only ones to get hit by fraudulent email attempts

There are a number of companies who have paid rather important sums on the basis of an "urgent" email alone. And those are companies who have a finance director who is supposed to be an actual professional, not a charity whose "finance director" is the guy who agreed to take the burden.

After reading the above posts, I have to agree that it is hard to be sure that you can trust a charity. There are indeed many charities that are nothing but scam operations in disguise. But there are many more charities who are doing the work they proclaim. And there are some charities who are extremely important, and need to have competent people at the helm. The International Red Cross is a charity that I think is trustworthy, and I hope the CEO at the helm of that one is getting some good coin because he's got loads to do to keep things running smoothly (if they ever do in that area).

Assange fails to delay extradition hearing as date set for February

So he's playing the sickness card now ?

What a coward.

And all his talk about pardoning his lawyer was just that : talk. Cohen is still in jail.

Just say the 'magic password': Boffins turn up potential backdoor in SQL Server 2012, 2014

"only expose MSSQL servers to the internet if necessary"

Well duh, Microsoft. People don't create SQL servers and plug them into the Internet just for the fun of it. For lots of people, it's the only way they can do business.

The sound of silence is actually the sound of a malicious smart speaker app listening in on you

And, lest we forget

[we have] "put mitigations in place to prevent and detect this type of skill behavior and reject or take them down when identified"

Seriously, guys, four times in the last four paragraphs ? If that is not called padding out the word count, I don't know what is.

Your readers are generally intelligent people and many are technical. You do not have to repeat things to have them understood, and certainly not four times in four successive paragraphs.

Euro data watchdog has 'serious concerns' as to whether EU deals with Microsoft obey GDPR

"unlikely to discover all the nuances and implications of the various data flows"

In other words, there is no way to be sure that GDPR can be respected.

That said, the only possible conclusion is that Window 1 0 and Office 365 should not be used if privacy is your concern.

Funnily enough, the report does not come to that conclusion.

ATTK of the Pwns: Trend Micro's antivirus tools 'will run malware – if its filename is cmd.exe'

And those are known system files, with known sizes and locations. Why does an anti-virus program, of all things, find it normal to run either of those files without checking their size and location ?

Er, hi. Small Q. Where's our billion-ish dollars gone? We summarize Bitcoin exchange's subpoena requests

"how and why did the cash vanish"

That's simple : the money vanished because the entire Bitcoin industry is run by thugs, criminals and incompetent idiots. The idiots serve as unwitting patsies for the criminals to launder the money made from illegal activities all over the world.

That is why, in this case, a US-based exchange has money frozen in accounts in Poland. That is why two companies are run by the exact same people.

The whole thing is a sham and a cover for criminal activity. It may not have started like that, but that's how it is now.

Just a friendly reminder there were no at-the-time classified secrets on Clinton's email server. Yes, the one everyone lost their minds over

It's useless

Republicans, Democrats, they both did it, both got caught and nothing came of it. They'll both do it again, and get caught, and nothing will come of it.

The only reason Trump isn't doing it is because he's incapable of even being that smart.

Call me when they actually do lock someone up over this kind of behavior. That will be news.

We need a Yawn icon.

Microsoft and dance partners coordinate firmware defenses with Secure-core PCs

"The operating system must be Windows 10 Pro"

Congratulations for inventing yet another something that ties everything to your OS, Microsoft. Apparently you haven't grown tired of lawsuits for monopolistic behavior.

No matter, you can keep your "Secure-core" initiative and you Windows Eternal Beta. I can't wait to see how it fails.

Don't look too closely at what is seeping out of the big Dutch pipe

Well it's a question of research, right ?

And, BTW, the Internet Archive utterly failed on that one.

Boo.

Re: 2. blacklisting sites we definitely did not need and giving those modem speed

Sorry, would you mind explaining why you still allowed any sort of access to blacklisted sites ?

That's not the meaning of blacklist.

Google ads from the po-po can prevent vengeful gamer nerds going full script kiddie – research

"between 30,000 and 50,000 such attacks every day"

That's a lot of pathetic losers.

Samsung on fridge cert error: Someone tried to view 'unsavoury content' in middle of John Lewis

So it's the store's WiFi control that blocked something

I guess it's a good thing they did, or we would have read an article about how John Lewis has porn on its fridge displays.

So well done then !

Malware hides as iOS jailbreak, Sucuri is insecuri, and China is about to get even worse

"the attackers managed to take down a pair of failsafes"

So it wasn't just a DDoS attack, it was a planned attack. Whoever did it had to have scouted out their network to find the failsafes and did so without being detected.

Or is it that a DDoS is just so big that the failsafes where overwhelmed ? Because in that case, they weren't so failsafe.

Either way, Sucuri does not come out of this looking good.

All we need is just a little patients: Google's Alphabet hires new chief health officer

If it was illegal, there would have been a complaint filed and a judge assigned, and it would be a court case.

As it is not, you cannot say that it was illegal. I readily concede that it was highly immoral, but we're talking about government decisions, so they will try until public outcry tells them "oops, we went too far on this one".

Microsoft Teams: The good, the bad, and the ugly

You can view the effect of "that old trope" here.

As you can see on the graph, PCs hit their maximum sales year in 2011, and have been on the decline ever since.

I totally agree that PCs are the best. I have three in my home office, and two laptops for work. I would hate using a tablet for just about anything.

But that does not change the fact that tablets and light computing units are replacing PCs in almost every customer-facing job, and tablets are now a favorite of non-IT home owners because they are less complicated to understand (and not having Windows makes their maintenance a lot simpler). Not to mention all the kids who won't even know what a PC is until they get to school, madly typing their SMSes and watching YouTube as they are.

So yes, like it or not, PCs are going to be reserved to the (relatively) small group of people of actually need the power, group of which I am part.

What's the scoop with Mars InSight's mired mole? It's digging again, thanks to trowel trickery

You got the wrong date. November 8th 2016 is the date at which the USA stopped being a democracy and became a pathetic joke. The only one who can be genuinely happy about that is Dubya, because everyone's forgotten him now.

Yet I disagree with your conclusion. Yes, the USA has fallen far, far below what the Founding Fathers had wished for, but the American people are good people, and some of them are trying their damnedest to turn the ship around and head back to calm waters. In the end, I'm sure they will prevail.

The only question is how many generations will be wasted in the meantime.

Pack your pyjamas, Zuck: US bill threatens execs with prison for data failures

Relocate ?

Have you forgotten how many governments still want to ask him questions ?

He can't relocate to the UK, they want his head on a spike. He most likely won't relocate to Canada, there's been some grumblings there too. I highly doubt that he'd relocate to anywhere that doesn't speak English, but even if, it wouldn't be anywhere in Europe because of GDPR and the fact that both France and Germany want to speak with him very intently.

So, what's left ? Mexico ?

Yeah, that would go down well.

Good guy, Microsoft: Multi-factor auth outage gives cloudy Office, Azure users a surprise three-day weekend

Great ! Just log in and configure that in your profile settings.

Oh, wait . .

Guess who's dreaming of facial-recog body cams now? US border cops: AI tech sought to scrutinize travelers

"facial recognition and facial comparison"

Given that it has been largely proven that current facial recog tech has trouble recognizing people who are not of Caucasian complexion, and given that this is undoubtedly going to be deployed along the Mexican border, I can't wait for the inevitable tales of false positives and the outrage that will follow.

Gotta to stock up on the popcorn now . . .

I discovered the world's last video rental kiosk and it would make a great spaceship

A brilliant start of the week-end !

Thanks for that, as always Dabbsy.

A cautionary, Thames Watery tale on how not to look phishy: 'Click here to re-register!'

Re: I reckon it's about stale contacts

I agree. CRM data is often a total mess, and that does not help when migrating to a new system.

Good news – America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives

I'd really like to agree with you, but then I remember that, at one point, all the passwords to access the system that could annihilate all life on Earth were set to 0000.

Google slings websites into Chrome's solitary confinement on Android to thwart Spectre-style data snooping

How touching

It is so nice to see that Google cares about our security - to better snaffle up our private lives and monetize them.

Use a script blocker. It doesn't matter what browser you use if you have a script blocker, because 99.9% of malware on the Web comes in the form of JavaScript.

Block JavaScript and you are safe.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

As I've said before

PayPal is not your pal. As long as everything is fine, you can be happy, but when things go pear-shaped PayPal is the last place you can expect to find help from.

Especially since there is no phone number to get someone to talk to and resolve the issue.

Use PayPal at your risk and peril.

Three UK goes TITSUP*: Down and out for 10 hours and counting

Re: Huawei introduced to network...

Either that or it's the NSA patch that is causing problems . . .