Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Wait a minute, if he's clearly indicating that he is willing to deal with the scum on the victim's behalf, he should be in the clear from the point of view of the law. He's offering his services, he's not imposing them, and he's honest about what he will be doing.
If you accept that, the law has no to say against it.
I was wondering which English-speaking country would be the first to exact this mind-bending stupidity. With the repeated, heavy hinting from the FBI and UK government, I was expecting the UK to be first to bat, but no, it's Australia.
I'm guessing that now the UK and USA and going to observe what happens to see if it's worth following in these steps.
In any case, the ball is now clearly rolling in the sense of forcing programmers via threat of jail to cripple their encryption. You can't do it ? Jail.
They think that is going to reverse the laws of Mathematics in their favor. The only thing they're actually going to get is a lot of companies putting "This application cannot be used in (list of stupid countries)" and washing their hands of the problem.
Is this the end of miniaturization ?
It seems this tech straight out of science-fiction is edging towards reality, and I applaud that is it can be made to work. I fear that Moore's Law will effectively reach its EOL date at that point.
I'm sure we'll be improving hardware organization for decades to come, but once you're down to electron spin, I doubt that you go any further.
Yes, they do.
I accept that a human driver is imperfect because I don't have the choice.
I do not accept that a software-driven car can make any mistakes. Every instance of doubt should immediately result in either a slowing down or an emergency stop of the automated vehicle to ensure life preservation. Resuming trajectory to happen only when all sensors give the all-clear. If that is impossible, request of a traffic drone to check and authorize continued movement, or call in a support team - or the police if necessary - to resolve the situation.
Being in a car is not a God-given right. It is a privilege that stops when human life is endangered. A human can disregard this, and end up in jail with one or more deaths on his conscience for the rest of his life.
There is exactly zero reason to give that privilege to a computer.
Not knowing what this was about, I did some quick research.
What I found is that, yes, this is a thing and yes, it can be real headache.
However, there are a few prerequisites :
1) sim-swapping targets "profitable victims", which means said victims have been identified among the many - not so obvious
2) "Laying the groundwork for a SIM swap scheme involves collecting as much information about the victim as possible. - sounds like work, even if clueless people also have money
3) living in a country where phone providers activate new sims via phone call
And that is the crux. If you live in a country where the phone provider will not do any such thing over the phone, and instead send the legitimate owner a new sim via mail to the legitimate address, then this whole scheme is dead before it started.
They did, except that they were dumb enough to post notice during the week-end.
They should have posted the notice Monday morning, then waited until Thursday to implement.
Instead, they thought people were really intent on following their services during the week-end. That's what you get when you take FaceBook as an actual news platform, and confuse your number of followers with your number of friends.
Not necessarily.
Exactly that.
I've seen renders of VR games - heck, you can see scores of screens on Steam. If you think you're going to be playing Call Of Duty with all the details on a VR headset, you're dreaming. None of those games have anywhere near the level of detail of last year's triple A games.
You might get to play The Sims - that's about the best level of detail you can get.
And VR porn ? Please. I'm pretty sure that that slab of pink is not going to make me believe it's a woman.
Yes, you're right on all counts.
Unfortunately, we also see that those damn icons (Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn et al) are not only a tool being used to track us, but also a tool for miscreants that can use such links to reverse-engineer your accounts when breaching a seemingly unrelated one.
This whole rigmarole is getting too complicated. Maybe if we slap a dash of "AI" it'd help ? Nah.
Well that would be a bit brain-dead on the part of the DOD. Obviously the funds will be paid out in return for actual acquisitions, otherwise there is a very large window for error, honest or no.
Still, some champagne will obviously be opened in the marketing departments of the six companies, because hey, that counts for this year's bonus !
Facepalm indeed. Microsoft is really starting to look ridiculous. First it can't seem to publish updates that don't have problems, now it's actually getting into break-it's-own-hardware territory.
From there to brick it permanently, there's just a short hop and a skip.
So, let's break out the popcorn and see how far this rabbit hole goes !
All of those theories appear to be an attempt to do away with the singularity using dark energy as an excuse in order to remove the destruction of information that was supposed to happen in the singularity and is not compatible with the quantum rules of the Universe.
But that destruction has been recognized as wrong by Hawking himself, so these theories have no more object.
Plus, the Event Horizon Telescope has not led to new, Earth-shattering revelations about the Milky Way's central black hole, so it looks like it is indeed just a black hole.
Opinion to be revised if scientific news warrants.
Incoming gas is labelled "molecular", outgoing fountain gas is labelled "atomic".
I can readily imagine that the maelstrom around a black hole is the absolute worst place to be, but are gas molecules already torn into atoms at that stage ? Or is that just another way of saying "plasma" ?
Yup indeed. Microsoft used to be a company that benefited of a minimum of respect concerning its products. Office in general and Excel in particular have been viewed as top-of-the-line and no business these days functions without Excel.
With all the clueless blundering around Windows 1 0 updates, that respect has now gone down the toilet.
It starts out by saying "unprecedented levels of protection", and then we get this :
"Clinicians working in any location with any third-party technology will be able to view and share vital patient information safely and ethically"
So you're telling me that any 3rd party app is going to be able to hook into this data container that has "unprecedented levels of protection" ?
Because zero protection is not exactly unprecedented, and anything more is going to be a big hassle for 3rd party apps to be able to use.
.. they can get hacked, and black hats can get their mitts on juicy zero-days that they can exploit quickly because the spooks will have a devil of a time admitting that they sat on those problems instead of protecting the public - which is their official duty and gives them all their powers.
One day, I would like a Game-Of-Thrones ruler to turn on them and say "You knew this and kept it to yourself ?" - and then a public beheading.
As a lesson to the rest of them.
Never going to happen, because National Security is more important than your security as a member of that Nation.
The hardware you paid for, using the OS you paid for (one way or the other*), is going to stop working unless you install the update that doesn't work.
Man am I glad I stayed on Win 7.
Waiting for Linux to do everything I need doing.
* either you updated a Windows that you paid for, or you bought a new computer - so you paid for it
Wrong. Those consequences have been repeatedly and frequently exposed, so that there is no one that works anywhere near IT who can claim that he didn't have a clue.
What this is compares much better to a lesson in sheep herding, with major CEOs and "decision-makers" being the sheep, herded to this position bleating gleefully about how much money would be saved (and counting their additional bonuses on the way).
Well, people, you can now take out your calculators and count the money lost, per hour, for all your employees who cannot do their jobs. You should at least return your bonuses in a token gesture to offset the cost of such short-sightedness.
Given that the admin was on the ball and the breach was closed before any data extraction took place, I do not think it is fair to start bashing Dell on having been breached.
They did a far better job at securing their data than many others who have been discussed in these columns this year alone.
Security is not a passive affair. Firewalls and such are not the only answer, you need active surveillance to be able to catch issues before things go bad and data is extracted. That is what happened here, so kudos to the IT people who knew their job and did it well.
My question exactly. I've had radio headphones plugged into the TV for years, they didn't need no stinkin' app to work.
My current headphones are a not-too-pricey Sony model that work fine and plug in like every other kind I've ever had. I fail to see what is the point in having an app at all. You have an app for the sound card (or chip these days), that is where the tweaking should take place.
But headphones are for listening to the output, not for fiddling with it.
Wrap the obligatory "AI" around it, and attach a 3D printer and voilà ! you have a grant and a project.
But there is no AI in there. The color analysis can be done in Photoshop and, unless I've missed that news, I don't think Adobe is crowing about how it crammed AI into Photoshop.
So it's a program that inputs an image, does some pre-programmed fiddling and outputs said image. Don't try impressing me with the mixing of inks, that's something that dumb inkjets do a hundred times a day.
I'm not saying this is a useless project, don't get me wrong, but there's even less AI in this one than usual.
There's a minimum of decency that is supposed to exist between the people who agree to something and that is to stick to what was agreed.
Anybody tries ignoring any part of an agreement with me is going to find a closed door the next time they come knocking.
Did you hear that rushing water sound ?
That's the sound of millions of Microsoft customers salivating at the prospect of a cloud that actually helps them, instead of keeping them from working.
But hey, Nadella, stay the course ! Nothing like being a living promotion for Open Source tools, right ?
Meanwhile, US telcos will do everything in their - admittedly - immense power to retain the status quo.
Might as well try to stop the winter from coming. Change is inevitable and trying to avert it only means you will fall harder.
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