Posts by Pascal Monett

Reg now behind invisible HTML5 Bitcoin paywall

Re: Nice one

Indeed. I'm actually hoping El Reg does implement something like that !

Facebook, Google, etc: Yeah, yeah, we'll work on the nasty stuff about bombs – but we ain't doing no backdoors

Re: "that fruity company"

Remind me exactly which social media thingy Apple is responsible for ?

Europe to push new laws to access encrypted apps data

Re: "not be much of a challenge for an intermediate programmer"

Encryption is NOT EASY, and implementing it properly is NOT the domain of an "intermediate programmer".

In order to properly implement encryption into a home-grown product, you have to have a programmer that is bloody good. Not Torvalds-level good, I agree, but better than "intermediate" for sure.

Financial fraud losses in the UK last year topped £20m a day – report

"every organisation with a role to play unites to tackle it"

Meanwhile, CryptoLocker criminals get (traceable) BitCoin payments every day and that just sails under the radar.

Fighting crime is not easy, I'm sure, but dammit all, when most transactions take place electronically in a world where a single government organization can listen to and record every single mobile phone conversation, you still try to make me think that you can't trace a frikkin' bank transfer and find a criminal ?

Sorry, not buying it.

New plastic banknote plans now upsetting environmental campaigners

"300 football fields of rainforest per hour is cleared"

Okay, that is a statement that demands verification.

The total land surface of the Earth is apparently 148.3 million square kilometers.

Of that, rainforests cover allegedly 6%, which means 8.898 million square kilometers.

From this wiki entry, I find that a football field is 7140 square meters which, with the magic of the metric system, means 7.14 square kilometers.

300 football fields is therefor 2142 square kilometers, which is supposedly cleared per hour.

So in a day, 51408 square kilometers are "cleared", and at that rhythm it takes a mere 14.67 years to remove all the rainforests on the surface of the planet.

Given that I've been hearing about this issue for the past 20 years, we've already finished clearing rainforest and have started clearing, what - savanna ? Desert ? Dirt ?

If I'm not mistaken, the rainforest still exists, if only because there are still people trying to save it. I do not dispute that logging companies and, apparently, local farmers are indeed clearing out land, nor will I dispute that some oversight must be put in place to control that and ensure that we are not, in fact, burning the Earth's lungs to provide yet another effing snack, but claims like that do not incite me to think that the issue is as serious as it undoubtedly is.

BDSM sex rocks Drupal world: Top dev banished for sci-fi hanky-panky

Many people have wrong, preconceived notions concerning BDSM. I am not personally into that sort of thing, pain - or inflicting pain - goes full contrary to what I believe sexual pleasure should be. But BDSM is not just about sex, nor is it just about pain.

I have read about BDSM and people who practice it. I think a good starting point is this article.

Read it and think about it. Make a decision if you want, or don't. But do not remain willfully ignorant about it if you intend to decry other people's practice of it.

@ dan1980

"What those comedians are doing is getting a cheap laugh by shaming someone's private sexual preferences."

Not just any someone, the President of the United States. The most public person on this planet - one who is still supposed to be an example of moral rectitude, even in these days of almost-anything-goes. And if Clinton could risk impeachment for a simple blowjob, then presidential sex with prostitutes is definitely on the table.

How to leak data from an air-gapped PC – using, er, a humble scanner

Is this some James Bond-esque fantasy ?

I thought this was going to be an article about a credible-but-obscure threat. Instead, I get a Rube Goldberg machination that would only work in a Hollywood spy film.

Let's list the setup requirements :

1) a bot-infiltrated network

2) an open scanner next to a window

3) a drone with a laser

4) nobody looking out the window wondering what the heck a drone is doing there while a document is being scanned

5) nobody standing between the scanner and the drone while a document is being scanned

6) the document being scanned is miraculously transparent to laser light while simultaneously being scannable

7) no heavy gust of wind during the entire process

I can accept that, to scan a document, the user leaves the cover open. I have done that very thing every time I had a sheaf of papers to scan. But, if I have a sheaf of papers to scan, I am not moving from in front of the scanner, which would put me squarely in the path of the laser beam. And if I am only scanning one (or two), then I always close the cover.

Plus, on multifunction printers these days, the cover is likely not just a cover, but integrates a paper-feed mechanism that is way too heavy to effectively leave the cover open.

And, if we're talking big multifunction printers, they're in a separate room, likely without windows, or a window high up.

All of that to spend over 3 seconds sending "d x.pdf", which is 7 bytes. God forbid you need to send a dozen ddos orders - you'll be there all day and somebody will end up taking a shotgun to your drone (or, more realistically, calling security).

If this is your solution to sending commands to your virus bot, you're going to die of hunger before next month.

How about a nice game of ... Tetris? Oxford eggheads slow PTSD onset with classic game

Does it have to be Tetris ?

I will attempt to validate that study with extended sessions of Minecraft if ever I find myself in such a situation.

Windows 10 Creators Update: Clearing the mines with livestock (that's you by the way)

Re: "it's unfair of me to blame Microsoft's OS"

I beg to differ.

Windows 1 0 is supposed to be the very best, the cutting edge, the bees knees of OS products. Sleep mode has had trouble since it was introduced in the previous millennium - you'd think MS would have had the time to iron out the kinks by now. Vendor drivers are unstable and can crash the OS ? It's Windows 1 0 - you'd think the OS would be robust enough to have the code to not crash from a bloody driver. And it's not like nobody else manages either.

The OS is made to run programs and interface with the hardware. It has been since its inception. An OS that crashes because of a program (or driver) is NOT an OS - it's a POS.

So my ISP can now sell my browsing history – what can I do?

Well now it's final

The Land of the Used to be Free has finally entered its sunset period. The Empire is waning, and all this will end in tears.

President Eisenhower warned you, but it was too late.

Oh well, we'll just have to wait for the storm to pass. It'll take years, but it will pass.

Oracle doing due diligence on Accenture. Yep, you read that right

"If buying Accenture was a 100 metre race, Oracle is at the 10 to 15 metre stage now"

Which still means that the race was prepared, the track put in place, the public and journalists convened, the athletes trained and gotten ready, everyone put on the starting line and the referee pointed the gun and fired the starting shot.

A hell of a lot of activity needs to take place before a race, and it doesn't take place if the race is not supposed to reach the finish line.

ICO fines Flybe, Honda for breaking data rules. They were, um, trying to comply with GDPR

Time to get the message, methinks

You do not ask your customers or prospects if they want marketing email - they don't.

You put the option on your site and you wait for the clicks to tell you about those who do.

This whole situation just might have an interesting effect down the road. One day, we just might see marketing managers be like mother hens : very attentive to how much they contact their (short) list of email addresses lest they provoke yet another enraged Customer to come in and opt out of their marketing. Losing 20 contacts gets them fired.

I like the sound of that.

Firefox Quantum: BIG browser project, huh? I share your concern

"It surprises me that Firefox seems to take such ongoing criticism ..."

This is the Internet - there's always some vocal minority taking a stand and, as soon as you do something, somebody will be unhappy about it.

For me, I see the proposed orientation favorably, if I can keep using NoScript and uBlock Origin, that is, because those two add-ons are the keystone to online security. Without them, I am exponentially more vulnerable and I don't like that.

So go for the changes, Mozilla, but keep things secure where at all possible.

CompSci boffins propose scheme to protect privacy in database searches

Agreed

DBadmins are going to wince while reading that.

Engineers and experts have spent the past thirty years trying to lighten the load imposed by database queries, and here these guys come proposing to apply each and every query to every record in the database - in multiple ways.

The performance impact is going to be ugly.

Ex-military and security firms oppose Home Sec in WhatsApp crypto row

Oh my Gawd

A Gubbermint mouthpiece with a clue. And The US that elected a racist carrot.

Clearly, The Rapture is nigh.

Repent ! Repent before it is too late !

What's that ? Oh, yes nurse, I'll take my meds, thank you . . .

Boffins crowdsource hunt for 'Planet 9'

And who has Deep Mind beat at Poker recently ?

Dear Lord, don't temp them !

Northamber's Phillips ponders non-exec role after nearly four decades

"blessed with some of those unwanted encumbrances of age"

Nicely said.

I'm going to have to remember that for in a few dozen years.

DevOps brings your teams to delivery faster and with better quality

Commenters are forbidden to make PR posts

I would think that El Reg writers should be as well.

Where is the bite ? Where is the (objective) criticism ? This "article" is just a PR puff piece to sell a book. There is no commentary on the expertise of the writer, no reference to previous publications that would allow us to evaluate the possible quality of the product, nothing, in short, that is meaningful and forthcoming.

DevOps does not have a saintly aura around it - not in these forums anyway. I'm going to need a lot more persuasion before shelling out on something I view as basically "get the developer to talk to the sysadmin" - which is something any professional worthy of the name has been doing since sysadmins exist.

Please elaborate on why this book is of use to me a bit further on than just saying "companies don't get it yet".

Robo-Uber T-boned, rolls onto side, self-driving rides halted

Indeed. It is high time that Uber show it can do something right.

Astroboffins stunned by biggest brown dwarf ever seen – just a hop and a skip away (750 ly)

Re: "It was invented to prop up existing theories"

Sorry, but you are misinterpreting the facts.

Nobody is talking about dark matter as a means to sweep an issue under the rug. Quite the contrary, scientists have agreed that our existing view of the Universe is lacking and we need to find out what is missing. Dark matter is one theoretical possibility that scientists are, in the purest tradition of the Scientific Method, trying to find proof of to determine whether or not it is a proper answer.

This period of research may take a while, so buckle up and settle down, we're not there yet.

TRAPPIST-1's planets are quiet. Quiet as the grave, in fact

I believe the structure would be made of metal, enclosing spaces filled with rock for the protection it offers from harmful radiation. There would be no tension to speak of on the rock, although there could be a modicum of compression as the station rotates.

Coppers 'persistently' breach data protection laws with police tech

@David 132

In theory you are absolutely right and I support your point of view completely.

In reality, unfortunately, police business is done by humans, not robots. A 2% rate is, I think, just about as good as it's going to get.

Microsoft loves Linux so much, its OneDrive web app runs like a dog on Windows OS rivals

Re: Loved to Death

Trump loves the poorly educated as long as they remain nowhere near him.

It's happening! It's happening! W3C erects DRM as web standard

"improve online privacy"

Since when has DRM ever "improved" anything for the law-abiding end-user ? The list of DRM failures is longer than I care to mention, much less research.

This whole article tells me one thing : Internet authorities have finally been bought out by RIAA/MPAA et co.

Thank God for Open Source, it's all we have left.

Malware 'disguised as Siemens software drills into 10 industrial plants'

4 years

This malware has been spreading for 4 years and we are only hearing about it.

How many industrial companies have been brought to their knees because of that ? Apparently none. How many gas lines have exploded because of that ? None either.

How long did it take for Heartbleed to grab our attention ? What about Conficker ? And let's not forget CryptoLocker, which has birthed a slew of variants that are very much a threat today.

Person of Interest may be called visionary, but unfortunately Live Free or Die Hard quite obviously isn't.

Can we learn to love AI and sex robots?

"Can we learn to love AI and sex robots?"

Are you kidding me ? We're going to welcome them with open . . ahem . . arms.

Yes, that's it. Arms.

Uber bans 'brilliant jerks', will train staff on Why Diversity Matters

Re: What profits ?

I don't think that it is the absence of profits that matters. If that were so, we never would have seen the startup bubble with so many young companies bleeding cash yet still looking like darlings. Well, until Chapter 11, that is.

The thing is, Uber is operating in the billions range, and that matters. It is what makes Uber a company with weight. The fact that, like a young bully, it doesn't yet know how to throw its weight around properly is neither here nor there.

What should password managers not do? Leak your passwords? What a great idea, LastPass

"local storage is great... if it's not 2017 and you don't already have half your life in the cloud anyways, trusting it with tons of other important shit like I don't know, your finances, School curriculum, taxes, email, calendar, photos, relationships, etc"

Congratulations, you have been perfectly assimilated integrated and are now a valuable marketing commodity. I wish you luck on relying on someone else's server and backup procedures to provide you with what you apparently still think is your data.

As for me, I prefer "losing a small piece of my life" actually backing up MY photos and data, rather than discover one day that the cloudy thingy I thought had my back actually didn't.

Nokia blasts 250 Gbps across Atlantic in optical test for Facebook

"PCS will let the cable handle as much as 32 Tbps per fibre in the future"

Wonderful. Brilliant.

Can I finally get a 100mbps connection then ?

Now THAT'S a landslide victory: Astroboffins snap avalanche on a comet in science first

Unbelievable

It's incredible that something with only a few cubic kilometers of mass can have enough gravitational influence to enable landslides. I would have thought that it was already extraordinary enough that it can hold together, given its rather exotic shape, but no, it just wasn't enough, was it, Mother Nature ?

You had to one-up things once again, didn't you ?

Mother Nature : the ultimate over-achiever.

Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down

Outlook, Skype, XBox, OneDrive, Hotmail

Once upon a blissful time, all these were separate products, with separate authentication services etc etc. When one broke down, it didn't hinder any of the others.

Now, tell me again why it was such a good idea to regroup all these totally different products into the same Single Point Of Failure mode ? Economies of Scale, you say ?

Well, you're not economizing on the scale of the failures, now are you ?

Beijing deploys facial scanners to counter public toilet abuse

Agreed

"concerns that pensioners are purloining large amounts of tissue from municipal facilities to use at home"

There's your problem. No use trying to restrict public toilet usage, the solution is to distribute toilet rolls among the public. There must be some assbackwards (sorry, couldn't resist) economy rule at play here for this to even be a thing.

I think we can file this under "growing pains".

The Register's guide to protecting your data when visiting the US

Re: Court cases have decided

I'm sure you'll have a very good time explaining that to the Border cops.

Good luck getting out of there in time for your next flight !

@ GingerOne

He didn't say Dropbox was for sensitive data. He specifically stated that Sync was superior to Dropbox for sensitive data. It's in that little > sign he included.

Sync is superior to Dropbox because Sync includes end-to-end encryption, something that Dropbox lacks.

Friday security roundup: Secret Service laptop bungle, hackers win prizes, websites leak

Re: "it's hardly likely to matter"

I beg to differ. It is much more reassuring to be sure that classified data was not on a stolen laptop then it is to trust in the strength of encryption to keep it hidden.

If it is there, they might just have the resources to dig it out, and then there will be trouble.

If it's not there, they cannot find it, period.

US military's latest toy set: Record-breaking laser death star, er, truck

Next step

Now all we need to do is install this tech in all international airports and on top of all prisons and we'll be sorted.

As long as they don't target actual planes, that is . . .

Face down in a Shoreditch gutter: Attack of the kickstarting hipster

"Surgically implanted digital enhancement"

You need to go back and watch Johnny Mnemonic again. You know, the documentary on what happens with surgically-implanted digital enhancements ?

It's not pretty, and you end up needing Keeanu Reeves to save the world. I'll give the whole thing a pass.

Barrister fined after idiot husband slings unencrypted client data onto the internet

@ usbac

I hear you.

In 20 years consulting in Luxembourg, I've done a few lawyer establishments in my time. As fancy as the marble floor at the entrance may be, I've always been surprised at how the IT guy would never have a spare PC for me to work on in his office under the roof that you can only get to through rickety stairs that haven't seen a carpenter since 1946.

And of course, he would have to stay right next to me (standing because no additional chair) while I worked on his PC to solve whatever problem it was I had come for.

I was always glad to leave those places. Suits and ties do not mean everything.

Re: Gavel picture in article.

I accept that that is true, but it is also very likely that the English population has been just as brainwashed (if not more) with all the American police shows as the rest of the world, so the gavel remains a pertinent image.

Indeed

This is the exact issue I have with all the "automation" that is being offered willy-nilly.

You have a job dealing with people's personal data. You cannot allow yourself to treat the paltform you're working on as something on which you can just go and install any FaceBook, SnapChat, DropBox or whatever other shiny-shiny you feel like.

With a barrister's revenue, one would think that it would be possible to have one laptop for working and another one for dicking around on Instagram or whatever.

In any case, this fine is a necessary wake-up call to everyone dealing with personal data on their laptops : do things right and, if you're not sure, ask an IT pro what is right. Yes, it will cost money. What you need to ask yourself is how much more would it cost to your reputation to not do things right.

This week's top token gesture: Google Chrome chokes energy-hungry background tabs

"if Google stopped serving ads..."

And if the Earth stopped turning tomorrow the Sun wouldn't rise any more. Let's keep the comparisons in the realm of the possible, shall we ? Google is an ad broker, whatever we use is just a vehicle for those ads. As such, it's ecological stance is a PR stunt, nothing more.

Google's Deepmind NHS deal 'inexcusable', says academic paper

"every trust in the country uses IT systems"

Obviously they use IT systems these days, but between that and being directly linked to the Hive Mind there's one heck of a difference.

Unless there's something we don't know . . .

Euro Patent Office hit with wave of anti-Battistelli letters

"[..] Admin Council chair Jesper Kongstad who is attempting to protect Battistelli .."

I believe that, given the toxicity of this whole affair, anyone putting their support behind Battistelli must be aware that they could very well be caught in the downdraft when the hammer finally falls.

Because the hammer is on its way, now.

UK.gov gears up for IR35 private sector crackdown – say industry folk

"Hopefully the government will have learnt its lesson.."

Given the amount of disastrous failures that have followed one another for almost the same reasons since years, my guess is : no.

Germany to Facebook, Twitter: We are *this* close to fining you €50m unless you delete fake news within 24 hours

Re: "burnt at the stake for criticising religion"

I see, so for you, racially insulting someone is criticizing religion.

No wonder this world is going in circles.

And you need to get with the times : these days stoning is out, beatings are given with baseball bats.

We're modern now.

Re: "which gives strong legal defense to all forms of speech no matter how offensive"

Personally I am sick and tired of hearing that "free speech" means I have to accept someone racially insulting someone else.

Free speech should mean free to bring intelligence to the debate, not hate.

Canonical preps security lifeboat, yells: Ubuntu 12.04 hold-outs, get in

Interesting situation

I'm looking forward to seeing a comparison table between MS XP/Win 7 EOL and public reaction to it, and this.

Somehow, I doubt that there will be as many holdouts, and I doubt even more that the rest will be pointing their fingers and laughing as much.

White-box slingers, Chinese server makers now neck-and-neck with US tech giants

Europe is not the one doing the shafting - you've bloody well done it to yourselves.