Posts by Pascal Monett

The lighter side of HMRC: We want your money, but we also want to make you laugh

@codejunky

One word : Brexit.

You no longer have the right to complain about the EU - you're leaving it.

EU will have agreed a tech tax by March, says French finance minister

French politicians have a history of declaring what the Eu will decide - and being wrong

Not saying that my current Finance minister is actually wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if things were a bit more thorny than that.

French data watchdog dishes out largest GDPR fine yet: Google ordered to hand over €50m

If extortion is what it takes to obtain justice, I'm all for it.

Or do you think poor little Google has been scraping by all these years of getting paid ad money for content other people made ?

Extortion on one side, theft on the other. They deserve each other.

As far as cookies are concerned, I am sick and tired of web sites that immediately assault me with a large popup talking about how they need cookies etc etc and the popup doesn't go away until I click Consent.

There is no Refuse option available.

As far as I'm concerned, that is forced consent, aka no consent at all. I hope GDPR will take note of that annoyance as well.

Holy crappuccino. There's a latte trouble brewing... Bio-boffins reckon 60%+ of coffee species may be doomed

Re: So-called 'global warming' (this cycle) stopped at around 2010

Citation, please ?

Looming EU copyright rules – tackling Google news article scraping, installing upload filters – under fire from all sides

I think Disney rather disagrees with you.

I think it might be because copyleftists are basically saying that nobody should get paid for their work, and everyone should benefit from everyone's work for free.

That is very nice in a purely intellectual sense, but there's just one little issue : how are the artists who don't get paid manage to pay for their food ? Not to mention rent, heating, and all the rest. Not to mention the hypocrisy of removing revenue for artists when the copyleftists are quite happy being paid for their work.

I personally have no problem with copyleft on software I create in my spare time, but I find it difficult to accept that for software I write for a living because I need money to pay for my bills, and copyleft removes that money source.

I have an idea for a compromise : Google doesn't want to pay copyright fees ? Fine, but then it can't put ads on pages containing copyrighted content.

Google certainly won't like that either, but it is high time Google started to feel some sort of squeeze after all those years of stealing everyone else's content and profiting from it.

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

Well that was an invisible problem

So everybody got a scare and one guy quietly learned that doing a big file copy was a no-no at the time. Everyone else began their long journey learning just how to equate reliability and Microsoft.

That was a rather soft one compared to some big scares and even some catastrophes that have already appeared. Oh well, I guess we can't always have tales of how Wall Street servers almost crashed.

Amazon shareholders revolt on Rekognition, Nvidia opens robotics lab, and hot AI chips on Google Cloud

Interesting shareholder attitude

Coming from a population that is generally percieved as only being interested in money, this "don't sell Rekog to the government" is a very big surprise.

I wonder what could have motivated that attitude ? A conscience ? Nah. So it has to be that they fear backlash from the population if these deals go ahead.

Well I can accept that as a reason. They don't need to have a conscience if fear gets them to do the right thing.

DNAaaahahaha: Twins' 23andMe, Ancestry, etc genetic tests vary wildly, surprising no one

2) These tests are full of crap.

Let me put it this way :

- 23andMe are selling their "analysis" for $99

- a simple paternity test done in a lab in France sells for around €150

I'll let you do the math.

The Iceman cometh, his smartwatch told the cops: Hitman jailed after gizmo links him to Brit gangland slayings

Proof once again

If you actually have something to hide, like your whereabouts as a professional killer, having something on you that can link you to a crime scene is exactly the thing you should avoid.

So, to all professional hitmen out there : when you're on the job, take nothing electronic with you. Have a normal watch, without any Internet connection. Lose the phone, it is literally a legal snitch. If you are into physical fitness, by all means use your Fitbit, but not when going anywhere near a potential target. On the contrary, give it to a friend who'll run for you while you take out a target, giving you a potential alibi.

And use a GPS that cannot talk to anything. Erase all location history when you're done with your surveillance. When you go on the hit, you should know the area well enough to not need it because if something goes wrong and you're on the run, you won't have time to look at a screen to know where to go.

Think, people, think.

Diplomat warns that tech industry has become a pawn as politicos fight dirty

Won't someone think of the brands ?

Those poor brands, being all diluted. The work of dozens of very highly-paid marketers spending . . dozens of minutes trying to invent a new whalesong, before writing up an invoice for millions and opening a crate of champagne.

Those poor, poor brands. Please, let's open a fund for the multinationals whose brands are in peril. Bids start at $250,000.

Be generous !

Oracle boss's Brexit Britain trip shutdown due to US government shutdown

Re: Bill gates did not invent CTRL_ALT_DEL

By Jove, you're actually right.

Re: WTAF?

No, what he said is that normally he could go and order a peon (aka government worker) to hand over a passport pronto, because he's Mr Bigwig, see ?

You would be entirely screwed if you tried that, but He knows the right people. Handy when you don't have enough brains to remember your papers. Except that, aw shucks, this time the right people weren't available, so he's stuck just like us mudders.

It’s baaack – Microsoft starts pushing out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

"our next generation machine learning model"

Dear Lord in Heaven, now they've saddled a pseudo-AI to determine which computers should be "blessed" with the next upgrade.

I wonder what the criteria is ? Should it prefer machines that got borked last time, or the ones that didn't ?

Well, at least we finally have an excuse for all that telemetry - Microsoft is just trying to maximise its annoyingness.

World's first robot hotel massacres half of its robot staff

Not to mention that technology today is anything but smart. If it is reliable, it's because there is decades of experience behind it. But as soon as it is connected to the mother ship it becomes dumb as a rock, subservient to the whims of its maker, and should be discarded.

FCC's answer to scandal of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile US selling people's location data: Burying its head in the ground

Re: they should be held accountable

I'm sorry, a corporation being held accountable ? In the United States ?

The country defined by corporate lobbying ?

Ah, what's the point - I'm outta here.

Huawei's horror show 2019 continues as Taiwanese research institute joins banhammer club

Re: Truth to be told...

That falls under the "Be careful what you wish for" clause.

Re: Accusations

I totally agree. There's swimming pools full of accusations and bluster, but not a thimble's worth of actual proof.

You'd think, in this day and age, that someone would have reverse-engineered one of Huawei's switches and found something - or nothing, but no, let's just hop on the bandwagon and enjoy the ride.

I grow weary of this point-me-to-a-target-and-expect-me-to-rage climate that we live in. Come on, it's not that difficult to check, now is it ?

What a cheep shot: Bird sorry after legal eagles fire DMCA takedown at scooter unlock blog

Re: Will it really worry Bird?

More like 36 hours for replacing the scooter, but I'm sure that the investors in Bird would like to get some money out of the scheme before replacing a scooter.

"They could possibly mitigate against this attack by pouring epoxy into the case that houses the board and using non standard screws. At least that way anyone expecting a cheap scooter has a lot more work on their hands to make it work.

So would any official repair shop - not that Bird appears to want to maintain its fleet. It has obviously sourced the mopeds at the lowest possible cost and, when they break, they just replace them.

From a business point a view, that may constitute a sane decision - repairing the things would cost more in time and components than just replacing them.

From an ecological point of view, it is utter madness and wasteful in the extreme. There should be a law against doing that.

Re: If Bird were depending on buying impounded scooters . .

. . . then they would be terminally stupid. It is not economically viable to re-purchase your own fleet on a regular basis.

Personally, I don't get why Bird lets their hardware go missing in the first place. They should have thought about that problem before shoveling the scooters into the streets.

Come mobile users, gather round and learn how to add up

Did you use Option Declare ?

I think not. Which means you were working with Variants - and that is the usual consequence.

Computing boffins strip the fun out of satirical headlines

Re: What is funny in one culture or language may not even be transferable into another...

That is the reason why English speakers often find German speakers to lack humor. The thing is, it is impossible in the German language to tack on a word at the end of the sentence to change the sense - which is what at least 50% of English-speaking humorists do.

In other words, English-speaking humorists have it easy.

US Department of Defense to fling $1.76bn at Microsoft

Dear God, run for the hills

“..custom changes to Microsoft source-code when applicable”

Holy fuck, the DoD is doomed. Given how Microsoft can't manage its own planned changes and updates without borking everything every month, I would be exceedingly wary of any "custom" changes.

Might be better to have a primary update section, with a hundred PCs of all required configurations, and start updating those first to find out what is still running after Patch Tuesday.

Unless, of course, those "custom changes" are actually just a central Windows Update Hub computer with a big red button labelled "Take Your Chances". Then I get it.

Nissan EV app password reset prompts user panic

Hey, it's a car maker

Cut Nissan some slack, it's not like they can hire competent programmers and consultants to paint them a picture of how the world actually works...

Poland may consider Huawei ban amid 'spy' arrests – reports

Re: Cynical, moi!

That would be nice to think, unfortunately I think reality is not so simple.

What seems to grow more and more certain each passing week is that the hallali has been launched against Huawei. Arresting a salesperson for spying ? What has the world come to ?

In the Cold War days, the Soviet embassies would have attachés and PR people and you knew that they were the spies trained by the KGB. The US replicated with CIA agents working as chauffeurs, weather forecasters and, of course, PR people. It was a job.

Now spycraft has been given to bloody salespeople ? Oh the humanity.

It's raining, then? Hallelujah. Big Blue super 'puter sharpens forecasts

3.5PB of Spectrum Scale parallel access file storage

That is what is needed for a forecast precision of 3km and hourly updates. I wonder what will be needed for 1km precision and quarter-hour updates.

I also wonder when they will be able to accurately tell me what time it is going to rain, because these days they pretend to know, but they're wrong 50% of the time which, as we all know here, means they know diddly squat.

I'd also very much like to have a weather forecast that doesn't radically change between the time I go to bed and the time I wake up. Going to bed expecting rain and waking up being told rain is for tomorrow makes me feel that very much don't have a clue and are making it up as they go along.

To forecast is to plan ahead. If you change your forecast every hour, you haven't forecast anything better than looking out the window would.

Goddamn the Pusher man: Nominet kicks out domain name hijack bid

How about some simple logic ?

Fine, Pusher fucked up and didn't do its due diligence. I get that.

Now please explain to me why some guy in Romania needs a .co.uk domain in the first place, and explain in detail why he needs it to be named Pusher. He wants the domain ? Okay, give him a month to set up a viable business website and start doing business.

If he doesn't start doing business within a month, then he purchased the domain in bad faith and it should go back to Pusher - with an administrative fee tacked onto it, of course (like, triple normal - lessons and all that).

Brit hacker hired by Liberian telco to nobble rival now behind bars

"..with no consideration as to the damage it would cause"

Um, I'm pretty sure he had very well considered the damage it would cause. What he had not considered was that he might risk getting caught.

AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile US pledge, again, to not sell your location to shady geezers. Sorry, we don't believe them

Indeed

And don't you just love the answer ?

".. T-Mobile will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen."

Notice how that neatly sidesteps the heart of the issue ? We don't want them to stop selling just to the "shady middlemen", we want them to STOP SELLING THE DATA.

But hey, it's only telecoms companies. They must have gotten a garbled version of the memo.

Windows 10 Insiders sent on quest deep into Registry to fetch goblet of Reserved Storage

That is not an excuse for depriving us of choice.

But that is obviously not Microsoft's priority.

Reserved Storage

So, that's the first thing to be deleted at the next update, right ?

And hey, it's 2019 but Microsoft still does not understand that it is possible these days for people to have more than one disk on their system ? Or that disks have gone over 128GB in size ?

Come on, Microsoft, any serious Windows user has been buying a second disk since Windows 95 in order to shove the damn PageFile.sys on a different drive than C:\ - because performance. And then there's the fact that HDDs these days go over a terabit, so even regular users can get bold and have a second partition in order to avoid losing their data when your fucking OS kicks the bucket AGAIN. You might want to start taking a clue on that.

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

Since we are genetically predisposed to like sugar and since soft drinks are full of the stuff, you are not justified in saying that soft drinks taste awful. They do not because if they did, nobody would be buying them, so that is not the case. Castor oil tastes awful and that's the truth because nobody drinks that without a prescription - or their mother spoon-feeding them the stuff.

As far as being unhealthy, smoking is unhealthy as well and that has never stopped anyone from smoking. It's the doctor telling you you're going to die that (sometimes) stops people from going on with their vice. So that argument carries no weight.

And as far as being expensive is concerned, you only need to go to airports or most likely any country fair, market or public event to find that you can get a Coke for less than a bottle of pure water (although that is changing slowly).

You have the right to your opinion, but that does not make your opinion fact.

Re: "if an incumbent monopoly becomes moribund, it will no longer be top dog"

And what does that matter if the competition bought the farm ? If you are a monopoly today, you have billions in your coffers. Microsoft has been moribund for years and doesn't care - anything interesting shows up on the horizon and Microsoft just throws a few billion at it and borgifies it.

Competition ? What a quaint notion.

No. Upvotes suggest people like what they read. And possibly agree with it. There is no revelation required to click upvote.

Baddies linked to Iran fingered for DNS hijacking to read Middle Eastern regimes' emails

These shenanigans are not going to stop any time soon

It would seem that there are so many possible attack points concerning mail that the only true solution is point-to-point encryption.

Thank goodness we have robust, efficient systems available and that no politicians are trying to undermine encryption schemes with anything foolish like backdoors or any such nonsense.

Oh wait . .

Just for EU, just for EU, just for EU: Forget about enforcing Right To Be Forgotten outside member states

"rights to freedom of expression and to information"

While I applaud the idea in its purest sense, I cringe to think that this "freedom of expression" has been denatured to allow some people to spout outright lies and nonsense without being taken to task for proving their words.

In other words, I'm fine with the freedom of expression, as long as you do not use it to denature the truth and spread falsehoods. If you're an individual, it's fine - you'll just pass for a cook. But if you're a corporation, I fail to see why you should be able to use your influence to spread lies.

And yes, I'm sure someone will harp on the question of who defines the truth ? That is only a question if you're interesting in spreading lies. If you are a responsible, intelligent person, you want the truth.

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

That also has to do with the fact that most of the developers that learned those GUI lessons are now retired and the new generation is not aware of the issue.

We'll need another 20 years of this mayhem before standards are set by habit and the situation returns to something more controlled and easier to cope with.

Dark matter's such a pushover: Baby stars can shove weird stuff around dwarf galaxies

Re: This seems to me deeply anti-scientific

You might wish for a little refresher course on the Scientific Method here.

It's a little excerpt from talks from one of the greatest scientific minds to have graced our little planet : Richard Feynman.

Re: more energy coming out than going in

Sorry, but I refuse to believe that. Either they measured wrong, or there were shenanigans going on.

Cold fusion was the same thing : everyone was in awe, but nobody could replicate the experiment properly. It turned out to be a hoax.

I will gladly change my mind when a working system is shown to exist and proven to work.

Until that time, you got your downvote.

Stormy times ahead for IBM-owned Weather Channel app: LA sues over location data slurp

"To the contrary, the app misleadingly suggests . . ."

I understand that this is a lawyer speaking, but that is a really nice way of saying that THE APP LIES.

A lie is a lie, whoever says it, and I am (again) disappointed at the sheer amount of effort people go to to avoid saying the word.

Re: Somebody downvoted this? Seriously? I’d love to know why.

They work for Google ?

Fake 'U's! Phishing creeps use homebrew fonts as message ciphers to evade filters

Re: BOFH solution

I'm ready to bet that no manager was ever sent to that training.

Re: From bitter experience I must disagree

Absolutely that. I cannot count the times I have been forced to call someone and ask them if they had read my mail. "Of course I did !" is always the answer, to which I reply : "Then could you please send me the information I requested in the second paragraph ? I need it now."

Cue several minutes of re-checking, mumbling, faffing about and, rarely, an "Oh sorry, I must have missed that." Yeah, you did.

People who don't understand what they read are the bane of businesses all over the world. So I totally get your solution, even if I don't like it either.

LA Times knocked out, HackerOne slips up and – amazingly – router security still sucks

"Luas technicians [..] are working to restore the site,"

Why are they still working on it ? Don't they have a backup of the site in its functional state that they can upload ? Don't they ?

If they wanted to explore the infection, I would think downloading the entire site onto an inactive disk then plugging said disk into an isolated server would be the thing to do, but right now I would have wiped the site entirely and restored from backup. That shouldn't take a week. What is it I don't know that prevents them from doing so ?

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Re: Any computer game after 1994...

I wonder what 7 Days to Die is a clone of ?

Huawei or the highway: Chinese giant whacks marketing drones for tweeting from iPhone

Re: Easy

Fear is a great motivator.

Come over here and let me show you how my BOFH-modified cattle prod works. You'll understand in a flash.

Yeah but Huawei could hardly demote an employee of an outside agency, now could it ?

I think this fall smore under the complete lack of engagement on both sides of the coin. Marketing blokes couldn't be arsed to find out if their representative of choice actually uses the brand, and the so-called "brand spokespeople" couldn't be arsed to actually change phones for the duration of the contract for which they accepted a tidy sum.