Posts by Pascal Monett

Why worry about cost of banning certain Chinese comms providers? Fire Huawei, says analyst

I'm getting tired of this bullshit

So, China has its fingers in Huawei, hmm ? And nobody mentions that the NSA has access to Cisco equipment ? If you're beating the security drum, beat it all the way.

The main hacking threat comes from China ? Really ? So Russian hackers are not that much of a threat, then ? All the data encryption and ransomware we have heard about this year came from China ? I don't think so. And let's not forget North Korea. I seem to recall a lot of fuss centered around a state-sponsored Nork team, but that is not important anymore now, right ? Riiight.

Strand Consulting is obviously just another Trump muppet, spouting the bull and spreading the FUD. He's toeing the line, dumping on China and waving unicorns. The US has achieved nothing in 5G. Show me the market using it before telling me how good you are.

Time to check in again on the Atari retro console… dear God, it’s actually got worse

It is breaking. Goodwill has been spent and used up. Now the fans are in torch & pitchfork mode, as well they should be.

Re: Cheese it!

Get away clean ? I think they've already blown that as well. Atari fans will never forget this shambles of a botched project, nor the names of the people attached to it. The head architect may have gone to another startup, but that will not diminish the furor of the people who paid good money on a promise made of empty.

And frankly, said architect managed to go for over a year with nothing to show for in the end. I would not want to have anything to do with his new startup after such dismal results.

Roscomos: We know all about how the hole in the Soyuz went down, but we're not telling you

Re: Success rate

Given that the rover's job was to study the regolith in the South Pole region, and that the results were highly anticipated by just about every space agency on the planet, I think that measuring success by the distance covered is wrong.

You do not pass an exam by showing up at the school door.

That the orbiter be credited with a 100% succes rate is fine, it is doing its job. But the mission had two components and one is DOA.

The success rate for the mission is 50% at best.

EU court rules Right To Be Forgotten doesn't apply outside member states

"illegal content should be deleted where it is stored"

That can only apply if it is stored in the country where said content is illegal, and that is the whole problem with the Internet that lawmakers are trying to comprehend.

This one clearly doesn't.

Re: if the EU is allowed

The EU is making decisions on what content is allowed inside the EU. The whole point of the article is that the EU decided it cannot impose its decision outside its borders.

Way to completely misunderstand what you theoretically read.

The US is free to decide that its laws apply worldwide.

Sending in the cops, however, is a non-starter, even if they send the FBI.

No happy ending for the 93,000 Kazakh domains that got nixed instead of massage parlour's site

Well it is Khazakstan. They're already happy they have wires.

How to fix the global slowdown in broadband rollout: Redefine what broadband means

"thoughtful approaches towards meaningful universal connectivity"

Meaningful connectivity means you have a connection that brings you the information you need in less than a minute. 4G should basically cover that, so why faff about it ?

It's all very nice to heartache over populations that cannot afford a mobile phone, but I think they probably have more pressing problems - like how to get something to eat for lunch, or (in some cases) how to not get shot before dinner.

Chef melts under heat, will 86 future deals with family-separating US immigration agencies

Re: Screw Chef

I applaud your attempt to educate the rabid white racist portion of your population, but I fear that, by using more than 20 words, you lost their attention and they are back to watching Fox News again.

Good try, though.

Nine words to ruin your Monday: Emergency Internet Explorer patch amid in-the-wild attacks

Emergency ?

Hardly. IE isn't even mentioned on StatCounter any more.

At ease, everyone. Carry on with your normal lives.

Vimeo's Clippy-for-video-bumpf app 'breaks biometric privacy law by slurping thousands of faces without consent'

Re: You are the product

It's another New Age in Sillycon Valley : now they are out to get all the data.

After all, FaceBook has brilliantly demonstrated that government doesn't have a clue and can't stomp down on anything privacy-related, so why restrain oneself ?

Quick!! The! top! five! things! you! want! to! see! from! Yahoo! – what! are! they!?

Hadn't thought of that one, but I have to say that the intersection of consumer media and what passes for AI these days does seem like exactly the place for her. Nothing special to do, looking good while doing it.

Devonitely not great: Torbay and South Devon NHS declares 'major IT incident'

Re: it would be unfair to penalise the current members of the committee

I do not see the current members of the committee putting in £6bn to correct the situation, so they are guilty.

Unless they can demonstrate that they are scraping every farthing they can find to correct the situation, they are guilty.

What ?

"There is £6bn backlog of repairs across the NHS & the underinvestment in physical & IT infrastructure has led to repeated safety failures & delays"

A £6bn lack of funding is not a mistake. This is not somebody who forgot to sign an expense. This is willful negligence and someone should pay.

More likely an entire committee. The last five years of top-level decision-makers are all collectively responsible for this complete and utter failure of management.

Are you a Nim-by? C-ish language, gentler than Go, friendlier than Rust, reaches version 1.0

Re: I see not a few pascalisms...

Ah, Turbo Pascal, that was fun. My first OO language.

What memories.

Trump-China trade war latest: Brave patriot Apple decides to do exact same thing, will still make Mac Pro in US

Re: Oooh, Look..

Yup, that's about the most exact description of the situation I could think of myself.

Calling all the Visual Basic snitches: Keep quiet about it and so will he...

Tell me, if you're the top boss and you want a 4-letter password that never changes, do you really think you're going to accept one of your employees tell you NO ?

Probably were, and they had the official version. The reality of IT is that any rule is only a generality, a guideline, rather than hard fact. That is because it is IT's job to make sure everyone else can work, and nobody is interested in hearing IT say that they can't because rules.

When a manager wants something, he doesn't care about the rules, he just wants the result. So IT bends the rules because, in the end, it's always IT's fault when something doesn't work.

Several months after the fact, CafePress finally acknowledges huge data theft to its customers

"Dear Valued Customer"

Not valued enough, however, to bother encrypting your passwords, or implementing network traffic awareness tools, or just locking down our fucking database in the first place.

But you are valued, until you give us your money, that is.

Microsoft: Dynamics 365 to hook up online, physical retail... 'cos we love tracking so much we want it offline too

"alert staff of long queues at checkouts"

Because without a cloudy server, there is no way some mere human could possibly be charged of supervising the floor and noticing such problems. Funny that, when I got to a supermarket and arrive at checkout with long queues and half the checkout lanes closed down, pretty soon somebody shows up to open a lane. I'm pretty sure that they don't have no Microsoft Cloud Supervisor available.

I wonder how supermarket chains have managed for the past century.

If you have enough of this type of gut microbe, you can get drunk for free after eating carbs

Re: Reverse it and get rich!

There's a simple solution : when you start feeling tipsy, stop drinking booze. Drink water and eat something filling, then wait an hour or two. After that, maybe you can have another glass.

It's ace that UK.gov 'in 2030 will be joined up, trusted and responsive' – but what about now?

Re: Let's be clear...

Oh, cut them some slack. They're not going to be slurping people's personal data for political reasons, they'll be slurping it for marketing reasons.

But they'll be slurping it.

Pizza prankster's prisoner plea plot perturbs police, Norks invading and Uber woes

I think Twitter is doing not too bad a job. If you compare it to FaceBook, Twitter is a paragon of virtue.

I won't ever use it and I think most of its users are nincompoops, but those who manage Twitter I have to grudgingly admit some respect for.

Please explain

Please explain why a voting machine needs an overblown behemoth like Windows to run ?

Apart from the fact that the developers (and their managers especially) don't know anything else, of course.

Class-action lawsuit claims DXC 'selectively timed' job cuts to inflate short-term profit target

"The allegations in this suit have no merit"

Um, sorry but the decline in share price is a fact, and that decline is clearly due to publication of news that the shareholders did not like.

I don't like Wall Street, but one clear benefit is the ability to counter run-of-the-mill PR bullshit with cold, hard numbers.

Emergency button saves gamers from sudden death... of starvation

"pissing into the empties in situ to avoid leaving their chairs for toilet breaks"

Well that's me never participating in one of those things, then. Congratulations, you have just completely grossed me out.

Those furious gun-toting Aussies were just a glitch. Let's try US drone deliveries, says Wing

Re: the stock would have to be held locally

I totally agree. Amazon is surviving because is has vast central storage with high turnover. Turn that into many local storage points where 70% of the stock is just going to sit there and you are bleeding money.

I can't see that this will work either on the drone side, or on the storage side.

Bulgarian phishing gang member who lived with his parents jailed for part in £40m fraud ring

Re: crime doesn't pay

Well it did for those who got their mitts on the rest of the £40 million.

It's like pyramid schemes ; when you're at the top, it's great. It's the peons at the bottom that are doing all the work and making none of the money. He was one the peons.

My Little Bromium: HP Inc inks security deal to slurp micro-VM slinger

"a family health matter"

Yup : the ship is sinking and he doesn't want to drown with it. That's a health matter all right.

Hey, NPM. How do you like your Bogensberger? He's, well, done: CEO Bryan ejects from biz

"to pursue new opportunities"

So he's going to go fuck up some other company then ?

We sense a great disturbance in the Salesforce: File-slinging feature breaks down for more than 12 hours

Not to bash Salesforce, but

I have to wonder how many file issues there were when everyone had their server locally on the network.

Cloud is just someone else's server, and that also means subject to someone else's problems.

I can't help but think that this cloud mania is going to die down and recenter itself on things that people really need Cloud for : sharing data (securely, I hope) between distant locations.

Using Cloud when everyone works in the same building every day is just asinine, you win nothing and you set yourself up for this kind of problem.

Disgraced ex-Kaspersky guy made me do it, says bloke in Russian court on hacking charges

"passing details of an FSB [..] investigation to the US FBI"

What ? That's not in the right direction ! No wonder things went wrong.

Normally, information goes from the President of the United Shaesh to Putin and the FSB, not the other way around.

The '$4.4m a year' bug: Chipotle online orders swallowed by JavaScript credit-card form blunder

Re: How many people use the exact same faulty auto-fill software as this guy?

Why ? What version did you install ?

Since you're so much smarter than the rest of us, please point us to where we can download a proper autofill patch.

You better get a wiggle on then: BT said to be mulling switching off UK's copper internets by 2027

Re: How many connections is that?

Indeed, but they're not starting now. They're not even talking about starting. They're talking about planning and the need to finish before 2028.

Lots of talk about planning, fair competition, lots of heads nodding in agreement, and lots of knives being sharpened behind backs.

And if the government plans this like they planned Brexit, it won't be done this century.

Uni sysadmins, don't relax. Cybercrooks are still after your crown jewels, warns NCSC

Threats have always been escalating

When the Internet started, the biggest threat was spam mail.

Then the Internet got the ability to manage transactions, so getting user credentials became important.

Now, state-level confidential information is stored on cloud servers or otherwise internet-accessible data repositories, so well-funded actors are looking for ways to infiltrate and monetize that information.

The more complexity we add to our Internet experience, the more attractive that will become to well-heeled blackhats.

You know SAP's doing a great job when a third of German users say they 'have no confidence in it'

"The survey showed that 70 per cent of customers [..] are satisfied"

And you're happy with that ?

Real companies strive for 100% customer satisfaction.

What SAP really is is an excuse to give work to hundreds of consultants, placing them for years in companies to suck the teat as long as possible without actually delivering on the marketing promises.

SAP lives on the fallacy of throwing good money after bad. Once you've spent tens of millions to get something working, you'll agree to spend a million more per year to ensure some sort of performance.

Congratulations! You finally have the 10Mbps you're legally entitled to. Too bad that's obsolete

That hasn't always been the case, and it only happened after a lot of conflict and maybe even bloodshed, but the EU laid down the law on that point and thank God for that.

In any case, I cannot forget Les Guignols and our national PPDA in one episode where he proudly announced : " France-Telecom has lowered prices to over 120 countries - too bad France is not included".

Pure. Comedy. Gold.

Backup biz Acronis ascends to unicorndom after $147m splurge led by Goldman Sachs

"Acronis has headquarters in Singapore and Switzerland"

I'm sorry, headquarters is not actually plural. You can't have two, or more, headquarters.

You have one headquarters, and one or more delegated station(s) that handle specific zones, but there can be only one Big Boss, and He is at Headquarters.

Analytics exec nicked as Ecuador tries to rush through privacy laws after massive data leak

Re: You have to ask why??

Is that really any different from the NSA consultant working with a cracked version of Office and transporting countless secret documents on the same computer ? That idiot couldn't even be arsed to pay for Office, no wonder he got pwned. Yes, Office is not cheap, but if you're your own business, it's tax deductible.

If you want security and professionalism, you have to be ready to pay for it. A proper, professional server structure costs money, so stop taking the cheapest offers you find.

You get what you pay for.

Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

Holy cow, that was an eye-opener. I was absolutely not aware that Stallman was such an asshole.

Google age discrimination case: Supervisor called me 'grandpa', engineer claims

"Mendez boasted of his criminal connections"

And he's still working there ?

This whole thing sounds like a personal issue between Mendez and Broome. Mendez obviously had it out for Broome and wanted to take him down.

As a manager, Mendez is not fit for purpose and should be fired. Either an employee is performant or he is to be trained, humiliation is not part of managerial functions.

World's oldest human was a 122-year-old French smoker after all

Re: Conspiracy theories is a national sport in Russia

Because it's not a national sport in America ?

There is nothing in your post that hasn't been presented by American conspiracists. Please clarify.

Just as Ecuador thought it had seen the back of leaks, over 20m citizen records are exposed

"leaked from an unsecured database in Miami, Florida"

What the fuck was a server in Florida doing with personal details about Ecuadorian nationals ?

Two years ago, 123-Reg and NamesCo decided to register millions of .uk domains for customers without asking them. They just got the renewal reminders...

Re: I'd just have transferred the domains

To who ? Do you have a dozen available providers for .co.uk domain names ?

I'm all for wishful thinking, but it still has to be realistic.

Fitbit fitness fans furious following flummoxing flawed firmware float, fleeting feedback, failed fixes

"a full factory reset of their Fitbit device and re-installation of the app"

My God, it seems that Fitbit owners are learning the hard way that you never auto-update your software until you've read about if it works or not for the rest of the population.

Microsoft has educated us about that for decades now, you'd think the lesson would have been understood by now.

The results are in… and California’s GDPR-ish digital privacy law has survived onslaught by Google and friends

Re: admit defeat?

Absolutely right. Big Tech has the money and the dedication. Like the rising sea, they will hammer the legislative bodies anywhere and anyhow they can until they win.

Until corporations are deprived of the right to lobby, the fight will go on.

Wake me up before you Gogo ... so I can jump out: Kenyan MP takes on aeroplane flatulence

I must have been lucky

During the course of my existence, I have crossed the Atlantic a mere twenty times, and you can add a number of Europe-to-Africa and intra-Europe flights to that number.

I have never been subject to such a situation. As far as I'm concerned, everyone farts on a flight, and the air system takes care of it.

Maybe I've just been lucky.

700km on a single charge: Mercedes says it's in it for the long run

"a driver could project the arrows and so on in front of the car"

Just what we need, encumbering the roads with projected images. What could possibly go wrong ?

What's wrong with heads-up display ? Why do we have to absolutely bother everyone around with our little problems ?

I blame Twitter.

Now that's what we're Tolkien about: You need one storage system to rule them all and in the darkness bind them

A single version of the truth

As usual, the hypothetical idea has good ground but, in a world where encryption attacks are run-of-the-mill, companies that are big enough to have big storage and backup solutions are also going to be targets for data encryption.

So a single version of truth means a single target to encrypt to cripple the company and potentially extort millions.

How does this pie-in-the-sky thinking cope with that threat ?