Posts by Pascal Monett

Bet you can't guess what I'm wearing, or where I'm wearing it

So, Adobe publishes your personal details and that is not sensitive data ?

Why hasn't GDPR been shoved in its face to educate it a bit yet ? There's massive potential for a stonking big fine there, I would think.

Thought you were good at StarCraft? DeepMind's AI bot proves better than 99.8% of fleshy humans

"DeepMind reckons the whole effort is worth it"

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.

Astroboffins rethink black hole theory after spotting tiny example with its own star buddy

In this case it couldn't be accretion, because there is no reason why would the neutron start stop accreting when it turned into a black hole.

I'm pretty sure nobody is going to scrap existing theory. We'll amend it to fit the new findings.

Just take a look at the carnage on Notepad++'s GitHub: 'Free Uyghur' release sparks spam tsunami by pro-Chinese

"when it is only we and they left standing, we will fight to the death"

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.

The Feds are building an America-wide face surveillance system – and we're going to court to prove it, says ACLU

"the FBI has a larger database of over 640 million faces"

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 ?

Guess who the Co-op Bank chose for £141m outsourcing deal? Can't be. Yes, it's Capita

"testament to a new Capita"

We'll see how long that sentence can stand.

Capita certainly needs a turnaround, just be sure to not do a 360° by mistake.

Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'

"simple but elegant"

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.

Linux kernel is getting more reliable, says Linus Torvalds. Plus: What do you need to do to be him?

An exceptional mind

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.

So how well did you block fake news, Google? Facebook? Web goliaths turn in self-assessment homework to Europe

Re: I try to ignore that crap

Use Brave. You won't have to try anymore.

Come on, you can't be serious: Now Australia mulls face-recog tech for p0rno site age checks

You really think so ? Last time I checked, he's still in office.

Re: Optional

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.

Q. Who's triumphantly slamming barn door shut after horse bolted at warp 9? A. NordVPN

Re: I'm torn

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.

WhatsApp slaps app hacker chaps on the rack for booby-trapped chat: NSO Group accused of illegal hacking by Facebook

"strongly encrypted platforms are often used by pedophile rings, drug kingpins and terrorists"

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.

UK ads watchdog slaps Amazon for UX dark arts after folk bought Prime subs they didn't want

Well they didn't complain to Amazon, they complained to the ASA, who proceeded to do its job.

Well done there, ASA. Good to see that there are some government functionaries that actually have teeth.

'Earworn Wearables' will save the day (wireless earbuds, but cool name for your D&D halfling)

They call that smart ?

"Tommy Jeans [..] included chips in some of its products that allow the user to track how frequently they're wearing a particular garment"

That is what we are polluting the environment for now ? A chip that can tell you how many times you wore something, wow. Gobsmacking. How utterly useless.

You want to put intelligence in clothes ? Make chips that can tell if the shirt goes with the pants. Make chips that bleep when garish color combinations are being chosen. Make chips that tell you "Alert : clothes tissue is stretching beyond advisable limits - choose larger size".

That would be smart.

Europe's digital identity system needs patching after can_we_trust_this function call ignored

Well, now that you've mentioned it, Johnson is preparing a National Government ID project to tie all different services together and bridge these various ID number issues.

It will be a grand, sweeping project with an initial budget of just £80 million, to be completed in three years. Three years after that, costs will have ballooned to £450 million, and the planned end date will be six years from then. After ten years working on the project, UK Gov will sadly conclude that £935 million were wasted and bin the project.

"a validate() function call [..] was ignored, and the software progressed regardless"

And now the system is patched, and the function call result is no longer ignored, right ?

So all the systems that were put in place and tested based on ignoring the function's result are now going to have to deal with a new, untested scenario : the function returns False. I'm sure they planned for that back then, but how come nobody ever tested a False before ? Because if they had tested the False scenario and found it worked anyway, this bug would have been raised a long time ago.

Once again, improper testing is the source of a bug.

Microsoft welcomes ancient Project app to the 365 family, meaning bleak future for on-prem

"It makes perfect sense for Microsoft"

Of course it does. Bring everything into Azure, tag on subscription plans and watch the Cloud revenue stream gradually replace the OS one as Windows slowly fades into oblivion (ok, veeryyy slowly).

Microsoft is not full of idiots - just the GUI department is.

Move over Ceres! There's a new, smaller dwarf planet in town called Hygiea

"its surface only had two meager craters"

Yeah, well its size is minuscule and it is far, far out there. There's a good chance that most meteorites missed it and went on to hit the Moon - or Jupiter.

Nonetheless, great science !

Median speeds for UK 5G four times faster than 4G, but still way behind US and South Korea

I understand now. Thanks for the clarification.

So you're saying that the SIM can have an effect on the phone's 5G performance ?

How can that be ?

Annoyed by too many kernel testing projects? Good news. Linux Foundation anoints chosen one – KernelCI

Secretive companies

I don't get it. You're doing kernel development, not photo-enhancing software, raytracing optimization or advanced Wall Street financial algorithms. You want your kernel to run on all the hardware ? Then publish your test data and get the bugs fixed.

But that will fix your competitor's bugs ? Um, we're talking about Linux. It's free. You're contributing to the community and making all products better. There is no competition here, there's only the product that best suits the customer's needs.

This is definitely the area in which product is judged on merit, not on price. There is no prejudice in publishing all the details of the bugs so that the community can benefit and solve the problem.

This secrecy mindset is legacy from the time when everything was closed source. The world is changing, get with the program.

Cringe as you read Horrible Histories: UK Banking Sector, sigh as MPs finger cloudy Big 3 as future risk

Re: Which is a bigger worry?

They are both an enormous worry. Once upon a time, the notion of confidential had meaning. Now, apparently, banks have forgotten that and see no more problem in putting customer data on someone else's server.

And if this is the trend, then saying that you won't deal with a bank that uses The Cloud (TM) is not an option because they're all going to be doing it.

Reminds me of a saying with the words 'Hell' and 'handbasket'.

I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

Re: no airline will want to be seen buying self certified aircraft

Somehow I think that that is something that will become acceptable again after the public has had enough time to forget and the financial pressure makes the beancounter's words interesting again.

That may be true for literary texts, but for technical manuals English is by far more precise and specific than French. I once had the opportunity, early in my IT career, to do some Assembler coding on a microchip from the French chip maker Thomson. My mentor asked me if I wanted the English manual or the French one, with a hint of a smile. Being bi-lingual, I answered that I would prefer the English version, if you please. He was obviously pleased, and that intrigued me.

When I asked why, he just handed me the French version to compare.

Oh. My. God. What a mess. They tried to keep the pages identical, but most things that were said clearly in one sentence in English were a complete paragraph in French, and still not clear after all that.

That's when I learned that, at the time at least, Thomson's official stance was to send the manual in English when you bought the compiler. The French version was an optional extra.

Rekognition still racist, politicians desperate over deepfakes, and a good reason to go to (some) music festivals

7 out of 10 are white people and you tout the diversity horn ? Who do you think you're kidding ?

If there was actual diversity, it should be 20% african, 10% arab, 10% asian, 10% indian, 10% chinese, 20% south american and 20% caucasian (I think that about covers it all). You can adjust the percentage points as you see fit, but 68% caucasian is a massive bias towards white people. Again.

And, given that white people are apparently rather easy to recognize, other ethnicities should be getting the lion's share of that database.

Your kids will be glad a UK government-funded robot will be changing your nappy and not them

"make robots better protected against cyber-attacks"

How about not putting in a WiFi or BluTooth antenna ? That will already do wonders to protect them.

Because if you're expecting connected robots with a robust firewall and efficient intrusion detection, well let me just say that, post-Brexit, it would appear there won't be much competence available to write that kind of code.

Red hangs up the Hydrogen phone as firm exits handset business

It cost over a thousand bucks

and had features that are basically six to ten years old, and there were still people to buy it ?

I am gobsmacked.

With the thickness, the bezels, the dismal camera quality, I would have expected it to be priced at $80, not more than a grand.

Extreme pricing failure.

We can go our own Huawei! Arm says it can flog chip blueprints to Chinese giant despite US trade embargo

Just a second

"Uncle Sam remains convinced that the vendor's close ties to the Chinese state serious advance in 5G technology make the manufacturer a massive espionage and surveillance competition threat"

And Uncle Sam is right, and Uncle Sam can also shut the fuck up. This is Capitalism At Work, and you, after having spent the past eighty years screaming the apology of Capitalism with a capital "C", have no right to be against it when you're not the one reaping the rewards.

Pentagon beams down $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft: Windows giant beats off Bezos

Re: They know how to run a cloud 365 or 366 days a year

Actually, Microsoft's best record for now is in the range of 350 days per year.

Just sayin'

Oh good. They're looking for an NHSX CTO. Hopefully they'll see off 'snake oil' pushers, says GP

"it still takes me 17 minutes to log on"

Um, sorry but that's not a Windows problem, it's a hardware problem.

Upgrade the RAM from 1GB to 8GB, upgrade the processor from a Pentium to an i7 4600 and put a 1TB SSD to boot on and you'll only need a minute to log on, if that. Of course, you might want to upgrade the processor first, because there's a good chance you'll need to change the motherboard as well.

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

Re: sometime last century

Obviously, around the time of the first BOFH episodes where it was explained :)

You're flowing it wrong: Bad network route between Microsoft, Apple blamed for Azure, O365 MFA outage

I'm guessing because, at design stage, they're not supposed to go down, so nobody bothered to build a case for testing that.

In truth, this cloud thingy is still pretty new and we're all learning the ropes. In a decade or two, when most of the bad situations have been encountered and resolved, we will then have a manual for proper design and rollout of a cloud infrastructure.

Right now I think we're still feeling our way.

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

Thank you all for your insights. I have once again learned something fascinating about our Universe.

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 ?

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.

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.