Posts by Pascal Monett

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 . . .

UK culture sec hints at replacing TV licence fee, defends encryption ban proposals and her boss in Hacker House inquiry

"I do think it is right that we should understand what pages are most popular"

You don't need PII to know that, you don't even need IP addresses. You have server logs that define pages that are accessed.

That is a bullshit excuse to have people sign up.

Some assembly required as Dream Chaser mini-shuttle's empty husk arrives in Colorado

Re: Windows are a pain in the a$$

For the engineer, they might be, but as a human being I do prefer being to see things with my own eyes.

That said, I must admit that, when watching sci-fi spaceships of a certain size (the ones you can land on), I really think that having the control of an entire vessel one window pane away from the void of space is kind of asking for trouble - especially if it's a combat ship.

I would think that the control center should be embedded deep in the structure of the vessel, and have redundant monitoring equipment to manage attitude, roll and direction.

But for small vessels ? Put the windows back in.

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

No. Parenting is not about relying on devices.

Parenting is about talking with your children, about discussing things, helping them understand and make informed decisions.

A device is no better than a government filter - it takes the job away from the parents, explains nothing to the children and makes everyone think everything is fine.

Pornography is an important subject, it should be addressed in an adult manner and not avoided at all times

Of course, the discussion must be at the level of the child. I'm not saying that you should tell everything to a 5-year-old, but I am saying that you don't let a 5-year-old loose on a screen without supervision.

Microsoft says .NET Framework porting project is finished: If your API's not on the list, it's not getting in

That was doomed to failure anyway since people have been lugging about VB runtimes since Visual Basic came out.

I'm honestly not sure anyone noticed that the library was not included because nobody ever had the habit of it being included in the first place. I know that it was not until XP that I stopped worrying about having my VB runtime versions in a system folder.

Conspiracy loons claim victory in Brighton and Hove as council rejects plans to build 5G masts

He's not entirely wrong, there are secret listeners in residential tech - it's just not military.

They are called Alexa, Cortana and FaceBook and people are buying and subscribing on their own.

Re: Many microwave ovens leak microwaves

Citation please ?

You do know that technology is not static ? Pacemakers are constantly improving, security standards are in constant review, microwave technology is standardized and 5G masts are not being put in your backyard, or in your neighbor's backyard. They are being put on top of the tallest buildings in the area, and their height is to ensure that nobody gets fried if walking on the roof.

Honestly, it's time to put this kind of bullshit to rest.

Telstra chairman: If those darn kids can earn $5m playing Fortnite, why can't execs?

"that it's somehow morally wrong they get rewarded for it"

Oh, poor little rich exec would like some form of recognition other than a rather large bank account.

Be still my aching heart.

Okay, let's make two things clear : success in any computer game is a time-limited proposal because, as any StarCraft II top-lister will tell you, you get old and your actions per second are inevitably going to go down, meaning you will be replaced by someone younger sooner than later.

So, just like professional sports players (which earn 10x more), your time in the limelight is on a schedule, and you don't have all that long to enjoy it.

CEOs, on the other hand, not only get 1000 times the salary of the lowest ranks, they also have this thing called a Golden Parachute, which nobody else gets, and which allows them to absolutely screw everything up and drive a company into the ground and yet still waltz away with millions in severance pay.

THAT is immoral.

So cry me a river, asshole.

Pitney Bowes: Can we be frank? Ransomware has borked our dead-tree post systems

It would seem that you are right.

How would a backup program know that the file is encrypted ?

Since Office 2010, files are stored in compressed format. Is there a way to determine that compression is not encryption ?

Sure is quiet from Adobe. No security fixes this month? Great job. Oh no, wait, what's that stampede sound...

Adobe

The professional amateur of application development.

If we didn't have Adobe, we'd only have Microsoft to complain about. So yay for diversity ?

Mine's the one with the brick in the pocket. Bricks don't need no updating.

Ye olde Blue Screen of Death is back – this time, a bad Symantec update is to blame

The irony is strong in this one

Endpoint Protection Client. Yeah.

This kind of situation is always hilarious - when you're not among the ones affected, that is.

Imagine finding this bad boy in your shower: Brit startup pulls the sheets off Moon spider mech

"the four-legged robot can also jump"

Sure, but can it land and stay operational ? Have they tested that in a Moon-like gravitational environment ?

Is AWS sponsoring Rust? Only a bit – and so is Microsoft Azure

Re: "not the best way to rebuild your credibility"

So you're saying that Microsoft had credibility on that and lost it ?

News to me.

UK govt snubs Intel, seeks second-gen AMD Epyc processors for 28PFLOPS Archer2 supercomputer

I have to wonder

What OS does such a monster run ? Is it a variant of some form of Linux ?

Do they make a specific OS for every supercomputer ?

Apple insists it's totally not doing that thing it wasn't accused of: We're not handing over Safari URLs to Tencent – just people's IP addresses

What do you mean, the IP address is data Google/Tencent would not normally be receiving ? You send a data request, they have to know where to send the answer.

And I'm sorry but if you don't want anyone to know what your IP address is, then you just have to stay off the Internet.