Posts by Pascal Monett

Giga-hurts radio: Terrorists build Wi-Fi bombs to dodge cops' cellphone jammers

Re: Even manual counting of results should only result in a delay of a couple of days

Sorry, but in France the presidential election metropolitan results are available the same day. It is understood that External Territory results (ie the islands and other ex-colonies still under French rule) will take a few more hours, but in mainland French territory the ballots are hand-counted, verified and the tallies are centralised in Paris before 8 P.M.

So no, manually counting ballots does not impose a delay of several days. Stuffing the election, "arranging" the results and plain disorganization, however, can very well have such an impact.

It's 50 years to the day since Apollo 10 blasted off: America's lunar landing 'dress rehearsal'

Those were the days

Heady times indeed. But the risks were enormous. Had it not been for a truly impressive collection of very intelligent and dedicated people, many more people would have died than the unfortunate count we already have.

Do we have the technology to go back ? I'm confident we're getting there. Do we have the intelligence and dedication to do so safely ? One can only hope.

In any case, I think it is a good thing that private companies are flexing their muscles in that arena. NASA has demonstrated that the beancounters at the top are not to be trusted with life-or-death decisions, so a private company that puts its reputation on the line is a much better guarantee of safety.

Cray's found a super scooper, $1.3bn's gonna buy you. HPE's the one

Re: CRAY emblematic enterprise

Yes, congratulations. Now Cray is going to emblematically be ground into fine powder and scattered in the wind of HPE's incompetence. Yay.

China trade tariffs? Fuhgeddaboudit, say Cisco execs. We, er, shifted some production

Re: Hang on just one moment

"Cisco make their kit in China"

Don't you just love the irony of the situation ? We're supposed to believe that Huawei kit made in China is an existential threat to US communications, but Cisco kit made in the same country is clean as a whistle.

Yeah, sure. Pull the other one.

It's 2019 so now security vulnerabilities are branded using emojis: Meet Thrangrycat, a Cisco router secure boot flaw

There is Huawei hardware made in the US ? Now that's news.

Get in line, USA: Sweden reopens Assange rape allegations probe

"Assange has always denied the accusations"

We're talking about Sweden, here. If there is a country in the world where I would be confident to go on trial if I was innocent of an accusation, it would be Sweden. Before my own home country of France, actually.

So he should go deny the accusations in Swedish court, where he will undoubtedly get a fair trial.

I can't help but think his first motive is to avoid a fair trial. I wonder what could possibly be the cause of that ?

Japan on track to start testing Alfa-X, fastest train in the world with top speed of 400kph

Re: nice pictures

Yeah, not like the blurry mess on the Bloomberg page.

Talk about a ticket to ride... London rail passengers hear pr0n grunts over PA system

Cockfosters

It just has to be Cockfosters.

Right ?

It woz ransomware wot did it: ConnectWise spills beans on cause for day-long outage

What a shame

"In order to reduce the possibility of a repeat attack, ConnectWise has added an extra layer of authentication for all users and added shored up security between the SQL clusters and the rest of the environment."

Isn't it too bad that security is such a nuisance ? Only when the miscreants actually get through does anyone accept to actually lock things down the way they should be.

Don't tell me that this "extra layer of authentication" was a genius moment, it was the layer that was lacking in the first place.

Hey, on my home network I don't have much authentication going on either - but I'm only responsible for my personal data, not for thousands upon thousands of clients.

Security - you do it right, or you pay the price. In this case, apparently, they got lucky. That is far from being the usual.

Amazon agrees to stop selling toxic jewelry, school supplies to kids, coughs up some couch change ($700,000)

Re: "I've been a customer of theirs since 1999 when they only sold books"

It's kind of difficult to find lead, mercury and cadmium in books. I think you really have to find a very specialized print shop to get that stuff into a book.

However, Chinese companies have already been found guilty of putting lead into almost everything under sun, including milk formula. What kind of utter asshole thinks that was a good idea is beyond me.

In any case, although you may be right, the post you replied to is not necessarily wrong either, because when Amazon started expanding its product base, it quite obviously behaved toward the new products just like it had with books - ie no check whatsoever.

In other words, you're both right.

NPM today stands for Now Paging Microsoft: GitHub just launched its own software registry

Looks like NPM has been successful after all

Successful in fostering competition that will extend developers' ability to get what they the way they want, without having to support utter arseholes while making their programs run.

So, it's a win-win situation for everyone, right ?

Well, everyone except NPM, which is just poetic justice.

What's that? Uber isn't actually worth $82bn? Reverse-gear IPO shows the gig (economy) is up

Now Uber is going to face the harsh reality of Wall Street

Up to now, upbeat press releases and damage control have maintained the illusion that Uber is a successful company.

Today, however, Uber will be judged by that indisputable measure that is the share price, and no amount of bluster or PR control is going to cover up a falling share price. I believe that Uber is going to find out what it is really worth to the market, and the final say will not be pleasing.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.

Timely Trump tariffs tax tech totally: 25 per cent levy on modems, fiber optics, networking gear, semiconductors…

Re: Same old, same old

It's funny ; why do people still insist Trump has a plan ?

He has demonstrated none of the higher cognitive functions required for foresight and planning. Not one. For fuck's sake he can contradict himself from one day to the next, there is no planning.

The only thing he persistently does is masturbate his ego, especially in public.

Panic as panic alarms meant to keep granny and little Timmy safe prove a privacy fiasco

Re: who exactly is going to bother

Who knows ?

That is the problem.

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

"don't start a sentence with a conjunction"

Indeed, that is something up with which we shall not put !

Just in time for the Wiki-end: Chelsea Manning released from prison

"Chelsea will continue to refuse to answer questions..."

So, just like Trump, then ?

I can't say Mike Lynch knew about Autonomy dodginess, star witness tells High Court

At least he knows what he's talking about

US government internet and spectrum overseer resigns, along with legislative director

Trump is burning the White House down

With his arrogance, stupidity and mind of a 5 year old, Trump is annihilating every semblance of governance and burning every ounce of credibility the United States has ever had.

Whoever will be President after that waste of air is basically going to have to rebuild the US government from the ground up. And I'm thinking there will be a lot of candidates to go in and help clean up the mess, because all the competent people are on the sidelines, probably chafing at the bit, thinking of all the damage that is being done now. They're going to want to help make things right.

Photo 'memories' storage biz Ever uses family snaps to train facial recognition AI

“We have always taken steps to ensure that Ever is in compliance with all applicable laws"

Well I am so reassured.

FaceBook is also in compliance with all applicable laws, look how well that train wreck of a privacy violator is going.

Ever is clearly a project masterminded by some seriously smart people. Ever wants to make its money from facial recognition, so it creates a photo-storage space and suckers people in with a free app to create a database it can use to train its statistical analysis machine. That is smart, no doubt there.

And, since it's in the TOS, they have no risk of a lawsuit. And of course, people have flocked to the thing like the sheep they are.

<sigh>

Take my bits awaaaay: DARPA wants to develop AI fighter program to augment human pilots

Well, progress is going to be made

We're firmly on the road to introducing Yet Another Point Of Failure, congratulations.

I mean, we already don't know how the statistical analysis machines actually determine their results, but we do know that we can make them think an elephant is a banana, so yeah, let's plug many $100-million worth of hardware into the fuzz generator and expect military discipline and surgical results.

What could possibly go wrong ? Oh, I know : if they decide to plug the ejector seat into the AI as well. Oh well, Lockheed will be getting more orders, I guess, so success ?

And how many missiles have you implemented that in ?

Techie with outdated documentation gets his step count in searching for non-existent cabinet

So it wasn't his job

Then why did he not talk to the guy who's job it was ? And how come there was no support ticket ?

It took four weeks to get that request sorted out and I'm supposed to believe that he was in charge of that all that time ? The organization of that company was obviously a mess, and the proper procedures completely lacking.

And there wasn't even a fire. I am disappointed.

Amazon backtracks on planned S3 changes that would hamper free speech activists

Well obviously

"I am quite sure there are zero people who have experienced government internet censorship themselves who are making these decisions"

Yup, nobody managing anything Amazon is from China, Russia or North Korea, you got that right. Brilliant insight there.

I myself had no idea that AWS was being used as a refuge from censorship. I learned something today, and I'm sure Amazon management has as well.

So now we have a situation whereby a cloud thingy is being used in a certain manner for a specific reason by a subset of customers, and a certain evolution on the technical side (that has surely been thoroughly thought through technically and proposed for some good reason) is going back to the drawing board for reasons that are anything but technical.

I'm guessing Amazon could preserve both ways of accessing a bucket, but I think that, if they've bothered to setting all this up, it's going to be a nuisance for them (on the technical side) to not go forward with it.

I don't see Bezos allowing himself to promote censorship though - that looks bad in press releases.

US minister invokes Maggie Thatcher, says she would have halted Huawei 5G rollout

"we have to talk about sensitive things as friends"

Yes, let's talk about sensitive things. Let's talk about how the USA uses the NSA to grossly violate the privacy of every communication they can get their their grubby mitts on. Let's talk about how the US judiciary sees no problem in claiming it has the right to view emails stored on servers outside of US soil. Let's talk about how Cisco is subject to National Security Letters that can force it to root any of its equipment in the world and divert data to the NSA. Let's talk about NSA wiretaps on international communication lines, where the NSA has no authority.

Let's talk about "sensitive" matters. Let's indeed.

I'll, er, get the tab? It's Internet Edgeplorer as browser pulls up chair to the Chromium table

"non-malicious trackers"

I'm sorry, that is a concept that I simply do not understand. How is it that a tracker that is following my Internet activity and browsing habits not be deemed malicious ? My life is private, no one should have the right to track me without a warrant simply because they have the means to do so.

Eggheads confirm: Rampant Android bloatware a privacy and security hellscape

I agree

Coming from a computer background, it irks me to no end to see that I don't actually have any true say in what is on my phone. There is no question of license here, the hardware is mine, bought and paid for with my money, yet I'm not given the tools to manage my hardware out of the box.

That is just one reason I hate the damn things.

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

What ?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!

I wish you all the best, Andrew, but this is terrible.

You'll be missed.

Blame Canada! Zuckerberg subpoenaed to face Cambridge Anal. probe from Canucks

I second that

Make it an Interpol warrant, the slime won't be able to dodge that.

Autonomy's one-time US sales chief can't remember if he took part in grand jury hearing

It was certainly important, but after a decade it got thoroughly boring.

Age verification biz claims no-payment model for 40% of Brits ahead of July pr0n ban

Not to mention that this is a company that states it will start making money later, with something that I very much doubt anyone is interested in.

I mean, who is going to give a damn about 1Accounts' "pay service" when they're already paying for their porn ? is 1Account going to have an agreement with every single porn site out there ?

Somehow, I doubt that.

Put a stop to these damn robocalls! Dozens of US state attorneys general fire rocket up FCC's ass

Lots of ideas about controlling ID spoofing

It makes for an interesting read, to be sure, but let's get real : what is it you want ? Peace and quiet, only disturbed by a call from someone you know.

In France, we have the Red List. It is a list maintained by a government-controlled entity and imposes that any number on that list may not be called by commercial entities without prior approval from the person.

So cold-callers avoid numbers on that list like the plague because, if they do make the mistake and call me all I have to do is call my operator and lodge a complaint and they will be found and fined - I don't know how and I don't need to care.

About fifteen years ago I got mighty angry at one point about all the marketing calls at dinner or during the evening film, so fed up was I that I signed up to that service. Since I explained to my operator how much of a nuisance the marketers were, my operator signed me up for nothing.

Ever since that day, I have been asking myself why I hadn't signed up earlier. Even if you pay the one-time fee of €50, it is worth it for the peace and quiet you experience for the rest of your life. For the last fifteen years, I got one call. The lady started her speech and I just said, "Excuse me, you are aware that I'm on the Red List ?" (except it was in French, of course). After a half-second of silence she immediately started offering excuses and saying how sorry she was, then hung up in a hurry. I had never felt so good.

Does that not sound like a good solution ? I don't care if the ID was spoofed, it's not my problem. If they call, I just complain, then it will be their problem.

You're right, Pai is a party of corruption, swamp and deceit all by himself.

Late with your financial paperwork? Here's a handy excuse: Malware smacked your bean-counter cloud offline

"Assuming CCH has good backup in place"

I'm assuming that, given the number of times we hear of companies being hit by ransomware and paying up, those backups aren't as common as you'd like to think.

I'm also assuming that, once they've been subject to that kind of extortion, a proper backup system must start looking like a golden investment.

But maybe I'm assuming too much there.

Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router

Re: No shit!

Apparently, they do. And, more than likely, they're going to have to repeat it.

And there will still be morons that won't listen.

Re: Big disconnect

I have used AirBnB, I have never been disappointed. I've met with some interesting people like that. We don't stay friends or anything, this is not a meeting service, but I'm always ready for an interesting conversation.

Of course, you need to choose carefully and be wary when on-site for any bad surprises, but I have never had any bad surprises so far.

Re: Some people would argue....

Have a bit of a schizophrenic day, sabroni ?

Blockchain is a lot like teen sex: Everybody talks about it, no one has a clue how to do it

the "Trough of Disillusionment"

My guess is that it will stay there. Blockchain is useless in a corporate environment that has servers, SQL databases and competent people to administer and program the stuff that is needed. As for Blockchain in the cloud, don't get me started. Blockchain's only useful application has been cryptocurrency and, if nobody has found any other use for it by now, there is really little chance for any stunningly useful new application to appear tomorrow.

And the criminals, scammers and other incompetent buffoons in charge of so-called Exchanges that regularly seem to lose people's virtual coins couldn't care less. They'll make off with the dough just fine, thank you very much.

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Yup, it's failure all the way down.

Literally.

I desperately hope that manglement was not involved in writing the specifications - they probably couldn't write specifications for finding their own arse with both hands. No, I much prefer an actual engineer for writing the specs.

However, it is manglement's purview to approve the specifications, so pretending they had no clue as to what is going on doesn't cut the mustard for me.

If Boeing's management of their flagship product doesn't have a clue what's going on with the software, they should be sacked and replaced by people who actually do their jobs. Trump may be President, but that does not give managers in charge of products that are responsible for people's safety to just excuse themselves from knowing what the hell is going on.

Rocket Lab picks up the pace while SpaceX sends a Dragon to the Space Station

Kudos for mentioning Iron Sky

Great film, and great performances from everyone involved. If you like Sci-Fi from the good old days, you'll love this.

That said, I have trouble imagining that NASA is going to have trouble with asking for the budget. Okay, not really, I can imagine full well what is going to happen, but if it doesn't get the budget to do the things that will allow for putting people on the moon again, then it is Trump that is going to be blamed, no ?

Not that that will bother Trump in any way ; he'll just spout some nonsense and ignore the problem as usual.

On a final note : they're still using the same spacesuits from the 60s ? I would have thought the suits would be replaced more regularly. Seems that NASA really is operating on a shoestring budget. That does not bode well for anyone going into space. The spacesuit is the last thing that stands between your body and the utter void of space. I'd prefer mine developed on a solid budget and well tested, thank you.

The Year Of Linux On The Desktop – at last! Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 brings the Linux kernel into Windows

Re: properly installed and setup

Where exactly do you come from ? There is no such thing as a "properly installed and setup" Windows system because, as soon as you start using, it fucks itself up. It writes things in the abomination that is the Registry and forgets them there. It attempts - badly - to tune itself to "respond to your needs". And it downloads updates that bork everything.

The only Windows system that works perfectly is one that is shut down.

Linux, on the other hand, is universally recognized as a rock-stable system. The fact that Linux does not fiddle with its own settings may have something to do with that.

HPE court witness subjected to own LinkedIn page

Re: Random executions

As much as I like the idea, one must not forget that this whole mess only concerns HPE, who is crying over the milk it itself spilled.

So random executions may be a tad excessive for a private issue like that.

Brexit, on the hand, has been mismanaged from the start. A few random executions in the lot of politicians that are responsible for that mess would be good.

Taylor drift: Finally, a use for AI emerges? Cyber-smut star films fsck-flick in Tesla with Autopilot, warns: 'I wouldn't recommend it'

"I wouldn't recommend it"

Yet, you still posted the video.

Seconded.

That was entirely disgusting.

Personality quiz for all you IT bods: Are you a chameleon or an outlaw? A diplomat or a high flier? Vote right here

Interesting

As of this posting, the Outlaw category is highest with 267 votes, a full 70 votes above the second-best which is Chameleon.

So El Reg is full of Outlaws and Chameleons.

I think that's quite fitting.

Europol takes down Wall Street market: No, the other cesspool of dark international financial skullduggery

Re: Just call it something nondescript and easily confused

But that wouldn't be cool.

If you have a "dark net" delivery service that is lawful and visible, as you say, then call it DHL and you're done. If you want it to deliver stuff outside of the law, then it has to be, itself, outside of the law. And that's just a recipe for disaster.

The only reason there is this culture of dark net is because the Internet is not the real world and fudging one's existence, location and identity is very much easier on the Internet than it is in meatspace. However, when real goods need to be moved, you don't have the ability to fudge the destination or the amount unless you're smuggling - which is a crime in itself.

And, as good as the dark net denizens think they are in hiding from the law, in real life their experience is probably a lot less valid, not to mention subject to the whim of fate and random police stops.

Top Autonomy exec Sushovan Hussain: Bond villain or Mob boss? Both, say prosecutors

Hang on

Sanjay Kumar got 144 months for losing a paltry $400M when Charles McCall got only 120 months for burning over $8 billion ?? That's hardly fair.

In any case, this Hussain guy seems to be a real scumbag. And a rather efficient one at that.

Looks like he's got a job waiting for him at Uber when he gets out.

UK taxman falls foul of GDPR, agrees to wipe 5 million voice recordings used to make biometric IDs

It's not that bad

Apparently it's a lot more reliable than facial recognition (not difficult, I know). The Guardian posted an article answering just that question last September.

It can be fooled, as can everything, but The Guardian appears rather positive about it.

NASA fingers the cause of two bungled satellite launches, $700m in losses, years of science crashing and burning...

Re: Those responsible

It would seem that the situation is a bit more complicated. Formerly-known-as-SPI is now part of a Norwegian conglomerate.

So who's to say that the rot was purely local ? I'm sorry, but multinationals are not high on my list of trusted things these days.