* Posts by Pascal Monett

18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

AI biz borks US election spending data by using underpaid Amazon Mechanical Turks

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"cut turnaround time for election filings by 90 per cent"

Seems it also cuts accuracy by 90%.

Also, don't you just love when government-level info is sent abroad without any control or authorization ?

With all the talk about encryption backdoors and NSA surveillance, you'd think they'd at least keep the data within their own borders.

PPI pushers now need consent to cold-call you

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Administration is frustrating

If a certain kind of company is most likely to produce bad behavior, why does the administration not spend more attention to the people behind the application ?

A company does not just fold, there's a director with a name and an address. Should that name show up again, an alert should show up. I don't know how the system works, but reading this article I'm under the impression that there's a group of miscreants who regularly fold a company to make another one further away. It's almost certainly more complicated than that, but how is it that all those computers we have these days cannot weed out the chaff and signal when a given name is once again applying to set up the same kind of company ?

Surely there's a limit to the number of brothers, cousins and uncles that can be used as patsies ?

Voyager 1 left the planet 41 years ago – and SpaceX hopes to land on Earth this Saturday

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Menah Menah

For those who don't know, it's right here.

And, if you're still interested after that, please view the greatest, all-time best Muppet sketch here.

Ah, the Muppets. Good times.

P.S. : This one is a pretty good runner-up to the title of all-time greatest.

HubSpot outage KOs Red Hat Ansible site and other hapless marketers

Pascal Monett Silver badge

That's gotta hurt

Going down is already a problem, but going down while live and in a major presentation event ?

Ouch.

They must have lost some customers there.

Ever wanted to strangle Microsoft? Now Outlook, Skype 'throttle' users amid storm cloud drama

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "It's a really cool site, found at https://www.googlel.com."

I don't think so. I tried, and the browser said "Site Not Found".

</sarcasm>

I would also appreciate a website clearly listing cloud failures, date, time, reason and duration. Searching with Google is possible, but there's too much noise for anything precise.

Actually, El Reg is not a bad place to search. Just search for TITSUP and you'll get a lot of good hits.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "Not really, it's how it's implemented."

I don't care how it's implemented if it's falling over all the time.

Explaining why is all nice and good, but it doesn't change the fact that The Cloud (TM) is as reliable as it is solid.

I'm glad you have your contingency plans. More companies need to wake up to that fact.

Not so much changing their tune as enabling autotune: Facebook, Twitter bigwigs nod and smile to US senators

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

"[..] requiring anyone who takes out an online political advert amid the US election cycle [..]"

Given that the US is constantly in an election cycle, that means all the time then ?

Neutron star crash in a galaxy far, far... far away spews 'faster than light' radio signal jets at Earth

Pascal Monett Silver badge

What's hard about all this is that a) it's hard, and b) we don't have all the answers yet.

So, like evolution, those who have the least patience and knowledge just want to clear the table and start over.

Scientists, on the other hand, know that what they do know is pretty solid, it's what they don't know that they want to find out. Clearing the accumulated scientific knowledge base is not going to help.

The point is : we must let them do their jobs. Time will reveal the answer.

No, no, you're all wrong. That's not a Kremlin agent. It's someone with 'inauthentic behavior'

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I have one for you : treason.

Treason to the Constitution, treason to the law, treason to the People.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Hit the 'Reset' button

Starting over is useless if we can just go and do the same thing all over again.

We need official guidelines to start over with, and legal (maybe penal) sanctions if those guidelines are not respected.

As for efficiency, stating that your statistical analysis machine prevents 85% of anything is meaningless without proof. Show me what it blocked, and what it let through, then I'll decide what the percentage actually is.

FaceBook needs to be held to account on this, and that means oversight. I know FB doesn't like it, it thinks it is a company and no company likes external review (hell, most don't even like internal review), but like it or not, you're dealing with Society and what you do (or don't do) has an impact that Society has the right to know about.

Premera Blue Cross hacker victims claim insurer trashed server to hide data-slurp clues

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Am I missing something?

I agree with you that something doesn't fit. Mandiant had time to find the malware on the destroyed computer, find that there were archives for exfiltration, find everything it needed to determine the scope of the problem, but did not put the computer under quarantine, did not take it away, nor even put a "Do Not Touch" sign on it ?

What kind of forensic data management is that ?

And how is it that no manager at Premera told the IT peons to leave that thing alone ?

Mikrotik routers pwned en masse, send network data to mysterious box

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Never underestimate a human's ability to not complete an action properly.

That is a valid remark in all areas of life, but I think it is especially true in IT. Ironically, IT is the only domain where you generally only need a keyboard to do stuff, and even then, people can be too lazy to finish properly.

Lights, camera, AI-ction! Robo-drones turned into spies, er, filmmakers

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"The drone travels slowly at 7.5 metres per second"

Um, 7 meters per second is running speed. That's not slow, unless you're expecting your drone to chase cyclists in which case, yeah, it's probably not good enough. But on foot ? You'll need to go into a store to lose it. Out in the open, once it has you in its sights you are not running away from it.

Not as long as the battery is good, that is.

What I'm wondering is how much noise the thing makes in flight. People are talking about surveillance, but if the drone is screeching like a banshee to stay aloft, its "surveillance" is going to be quite obvious. They'd need to have near-silent drones that can track people from a dozen or so meters up, to be as inconspicuous as possible. Still, I'm guessing the drone isn't very small, so it will be quite visible in the day time.

Uncle Sam wants tech toolkit to snoop social media stock scammers

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Good luck with that.

Yeah, but as soon as some people read "AI" they think we actually have it, and the money flows.

Doesn't matter that the statistical analysis machines are crap at anything touching human communication, they have a shiny label. Look, it glitters !

Where the stat machines are good is in correlating humongous amounts of data points and deriving directions in which more analysis could bring beneficial understanding of said data points and what they mean. But as soon as you ask them to deal with keyboard activity they're out.

Hundred-million Kiwi Oracle project on hold after Deloitte review

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Are all government health IT projects doomed to fail ?

Okay, in the UK it's a given, I know, but IIRC Australia has had its problems and now it's New Zealand that is wasting money.

Is there a special curse on IT in healthcare ? Or is it that healthcare manglement is particularly clueless about project specification and procedures ?

Google skewered in ad sting after Oracle-backed bods turn troll

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"we have taken further appropriate action to upgrade our systems and processes"

Oh, so you're not auto-filling Russian contact details anymore, is that it ?

Because that really represents a massive change. Not that someone can't enter it manually, right ?

And CfA is now a competitor to Google ? Really ? In what alternate universe is that possible ?

Google PR spokesdrone trying to paint Google as a victim. FAIL.

Microsoft Azure: It's getting hot in here, so shut down all your cores

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "A hard day for keeping the nines"

Well five nines was shot before Easter, four nines are in the toilet as well.

The only question is how long will three nines last ?

The Cloud (TM) is really not the best place to host your data.

Microsoft takes a pruning axe to Skype's forest of features

Pascal Monett Silver badge

“maintaining simplicity while enhancing functionality is critical to usability,”

The fact that a spokesdrone says that at all is nice to hear.

Too bad it's just PR and nothing will change as far as Microsoft's mentality is concerned. It has been a long time since MS ever thought of _maintaining_ simplicity.

Anon man suing Google wants crim conviction to be forgotten

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

How is it Google's fault ?

"ABC wants to remove public references from Google to a criminal conviction that are apparently stopping him from setting up an investment business"

I'm sorry, but a country with a registry of companies should have its own access to police records, and should definitely be capable of deciding whether or not to grant a license to someone without using Google.

In Luxembourg I can tell you that if you have a criminal record, you will not be setting up a company, nor will you have manager status in any company - and Google has nothing to do with it.

If this ABC thinks Google is keeping him from becoming CEO, well that says a lot about his level of intelligence.

TSB goes TITSUP: Total Inability To Surprise Users, Probably

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"some of our customers are experiencing intermittent issues with online and mobile banking"

Yeah, 99% is "some".

The same old words, the same lame excuses, the same bungling ineptitude. I feel like yawning, it's not even funny any more.

On the other hand, maybe TSB is going to be the first bank where customers actually vote with their feet.

Nah, not gonna happen.

So, what's the news about bears in the forests these days ? . . .

Let's get ethical, says Salesforce as revenues rocket 27% – thanks in part to US Border Patrol

Pascal Monett Silver badge

The USA is not supposed to compare itself to lesser countries to feel good about itself.

Since WWI US policy has always been to set the best laws and follow them, compare its success to itself and declare whether or not it was doing well. If it wasn't, it was time to try harder.

Until the NSA took over, Eisenhower left the political scene (with a warning) and fraidey-cat politics became de rigueur. So now you have to compare yourselves to Russia and China to feel better.

What a pity.

Huawei's Alexa-powered AI Cube wants to squat in your living room too

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"it isn't that large – as you can see."

No, I can't see how large it is. There isn't a single thing I can use as scale on that first picture. The second one has apparently some fleshy bit on it I interpret as a hand, but I'm not sure. As far as I know, that iThingy could well be sitting on a regular 1 meter diameter kitchen table, which would make it frikkin' huge.

The next time you want us to "see", chuck a ruler next to it.

C'mon, if you say your device is 'unhackable', you're just asking for it: Bitfi retracts edgy claim

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: my grandfather [..] invested in Russian railway shares

As did half of France at the time.

I found my grandpa's shares in the attick, while cleaning it out one day. They went to the recycling bin.

Apple to require privacy policy on all apps

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Apple needed my starting location and my destination

Well of course it did, but that doesn't mean you were at the starting point. Not until you start using Apple GPS, obviously.

I can check out the road from New York to Philadelphia, but I live in France, so any consideration that I am at either of those locations is wrong. Of course, I'm guessing that >90% of such consultations is done by people who actually are at the starting point, so the assumption must be generally right, but still : until you've turned on your GPS, the app is not supposed to know where you are.

@Richard 12 : your SatNav is a complete package, with self-contained maps (that you should be able to update). A smartphone may have maps for "offline" use with certain apps, but generally they use the server for the data and for navigation.

DraftKings rides to court, asks to unmask 10 DDoS suspects

Pascal Monett Silver badge

“[..] the attack prevented [..] users from actively engaging with the [..] Website,”

In other words, the DDoS prevented DraftKing users from . . gambling.

Come on, if your site gets DDoSed and all you do is publish rankings, then your users are going to wait it out patiently until your site is online again and you're not losing money from users that are temporarily not "actively engaging".

If you're loosing wads of money for a "sports" site because you're offline for half an hour, then your site is a gambling site.

Lyon for speed, San Francisco for money, Amsterdam for fun: the best cities to be a techie

Pascal Monett Silver badge

300+ mile range ?

Hey, don't knock it - they're progressing.

While we have 500+ miles as standard, USAians used to have very cheap oil. Twenty years ago, had there been an Internet, he would have been saying that he had a nice 200+ mile range.

Now that they're paying around the same price, their mileage is starting to go up. Good for everyone.

Good news, bad news, weird news – it's the week in networking

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: A private network for aircraft controllers shouldn't be all bad

No, it would just be very costly. And replicating the resilience of the global web is very hard on a tiny replica, so public internet it is.

But I don't like the idea that some state-sponsored hackers (NSA no more than anyone else) are going to be able to play merry mayhem with ATC data.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: ATC over IP

And that is why our aircraft crisscross the world with so little accidents. If air traffic was controlled like Paris controls its périphérique, we'd be reading about a plane crash every hour.

Air traffic is the very last bastion of actual redundancy requirement, even NASA has trouble doing as well (not a good sign).

I remember that one time when a Swiss ATC was responsible for a plane crash. It shocked the world because everyone thought that Switzerland was the last place beancounters would have been able to interfere, but that's what it was.

Beancounters and safety do not go together.

Congress wants CVE stability, China wants your LinkedIn details, and Adobe wants you to patch Creative Cloud

Pascal Monett Silver badge

“Funding this key cybersecurity program through piecemeal, short-term contracts..."

is exactly how the true amount of funding can be obscured to the public eye, so I really doubt much will change there.

And while on that kind of funding, does the White House still buy $1,000 toilet seats ?

Google goes bilingual, Facebook fleshes out translation and TensorFlow is dope

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

"using a combination of various new and old techniques, such as adversarial training"

Adversarial training ?

They whip the AI until it gets it right ?

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

First they came for the fish and I said nothing . . .

Europe's GDPR, Whois shakeup was supposed to trigger spam tsunami – so, er, where is it?

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"spammers could run wild with no way to identify and stop them."

Well given how much spam was going around before GDPR, I'd say they were already running wild with no way to identify and stop them.

So, no change.

I love it when facts come like a clue-by-4 in the face of people who spew bullshit to the benefit of only themselves.

Chinese hotel chain warns of massive customer data theft

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Inside job / 8 bitcoin per record

I smell a guy who had the data and got the bright idea to add another line to his revenue stream.

Anybody else think that 8 bitcoin is a tad expensive for info on one ID ?

No do-overs! Appeals court won’t hear $8.8bn Oracle v Google rehash

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "if their strategy had been different in the 80's"

If that were the case, IBM might have filed a patent on their PC and we wouldn't have the Internet today, or smartphones, or much of anything else in computer tech because IBM would have stifled the market by forcing everyone to work with it at its prices.

Companies would have a few PCs, like in accounting, design and HR, but that would likely be all.

Maybe Apple would evolved very differently, and the war between PC and Mac would have given Apple a far greater share of the market, but we're still talking closed design here.

It is the fact that IBM never put a patent on its toy that birthed the computing world we have today.

And gave many of us our careers.

So thanks, IBM, for not having had today's patent lawyers on hand back then !

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "the only thing that forces things like Linux to be open"

Is that they were presented like that from day 1, and thus they stay that way.

I do not care what copyright law says, if someone says : this is free, then I can take it and nobody can complain.

The law can dance any way it wishes, it cannot prevent free.

There can, however, be conditions to free. Not paying does not necessarily mean you can do anything with it, as in free for private use means you cannot build a company around it. But that is in the contract when you download the code and you are supposed to know about it.

Huawei elbows aside Apple to claim number-two phone maker spot

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "a 10% rise in food prices due to the weather"

Citation please ?

Or are you just pulling that out of somewhere I'd rather not mention ?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Indeed. A fine actress, and a fine series.

It's a wonder to think how the series would have evolved if they hadn't changed principle actress.

ZX Spectrum reboot scandal: Directors quit, new sack effort started

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

"Indiegogo is continuing the process ..."

Of pretending it gives a shit about scam artists using it to get money from the sheeple.

This is not first, and certainly not the last, group of pathetic liars to take advantage of this kind of service to line their pockets. And as long as Indiegogo cannot be held responsible, they've got no reason to stop the cash from flowing.

And hey, if some projects actually pan out, it's just a fringe benefit and good PR.

Ah, um, let's see. Yup... Fortnite CEO is still mad at Google for revealing security hole early

Pascal Monett Silver badge

No, the moral of this story is that 30% is visibly perceived as normal.

Success is when your victims agree with your practices.

Windows 0-day pops up out of nowhere Twitter

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"unaware of a practical solution to this problem"

Well that's reassuring.

MS continues its glorious history of selling swiss-cheese security to millions.

Thank goodness XP, Vista, Windows 1 0 were all rewritten "from the ground up", otherwise we'd have the same bugs and exploits that we had in every previous version.

Oh wait . . .

Boffins bork motion control gear with the power of applied sound

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Holmes

There are limitations to the attacks

No shit, Sherlock.

As in, you'd have to set up your emitters in the vicinity of the intended victim. Good luck trying that inconspicuously in public.

Then you need to have an eyeball on what the intended victim is doing, in order to manipulate at the right time. Good luck doing that if said victim lives on the 3rd floor.

As a theoretical exercise, this is somewhat interesting, but as a threat I really do not see how it can possibly be deployed.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Pascal Monett Silver badge

That is going to be one hell of an expensive failure

So let's see, what is the UK Gov history on hardware accomplishments ?

Oh yeah, they built a new aircraft carrier, but forgot the catapults.

Yep, great indicator of confidence there. They'll send up GPS satellites and forget the communication system, or something like that.

This is the start of a looong popcorn era.

We can rebuild him, we have the technology: AI will help security teams smack pesky anomalies

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"UEBA baselining with machine learning can adjust its worldview of a user's behaviour"

So all a hacker needs to do is ensure that his package can shift the pseudo-AI's worldview bit by bit and then he will be right at home.

Given that there have been Tesla buyers stupid enough to think that their car was self-diving, marketing any technical solution with the notion of AI is a surefire way to ensure a catastrophe. Complacency and habit means that when this so-called "AI" security will be in place, as long as it doesn't squeak, admins will just take care of the daily panics and not worry about whether or not the machine is working right.

Hackers of the future will have a lot of fun with these toys, I think.

Intel rips up microcode security fix license that banned benchmarking

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: No Benchmarks

Yes indeed. There should simply be a law stating that benchmarking is a perfectly normal thing to do and publishing said benchmarks is protected by Free Speech (aka these are the results I got in this situation).

From that point on, companies can put whatever they want in their licensing terms, a judge will throw out any gag attempt on the spot.

Winner, Winner, prison dinner: Five years in the clink for NSA leaker

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Reality Loser

Neither united nor a democracy any more.

States are refusing to implement universal healthcare, companies are subverting officials all over the place and even high-level government-appointed people are no longer doing their job to protect people, they're just catering to companies.

The USA is now officially a shithole country.

Just how rigged is America's broadband world? A deep dive into one US city reveals all

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: How hard is it really?

Well of course, if you put like that it is quite easy.

So you're going to post online the list of addresses Provider Y can deliver broadband to ?

Oh, you don't have it either ?

Well maybe it's a tad harder than you thought.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: When I read articles like this...

Because 640K is enough for everyone, right ?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Choice

Actually, it's more like 30 identical versions of the same breakfast cereal made by the same company under 30 different brands.

Because companies use branding the same way you and I use disposable mail addresses.

Muslim American woman sues US border cops: Gimme back my seized iPhone's data!

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Entering a country becomes more and more like entering a prison.

Do not confuse entering the USA and entering any other country.

Practically every single democratic country in the world is quite polite and somewhat subdued in its border controls - the USA is the only one I have ever been to to be so stuck-up and openly paranoid about visitors.

And yet, they still come.

Back to school soon – for script kiddies as well as normal kids. Hackers peddle cybercrime e-classes via Telegram

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Okay, so where are law enforcement students ?

What should be done is that law enforcement should have some personnel sign up to these courses and learn the techniques.

Shouldn't be difficult and I don't see the crooks doing any reputation checks from their home base.

Once we have officers fully trained and up to speed (because $1,100 for 40 days seems a pretty good deal to me), then our Cybercrime units will know what to look for and how to fight it.

If that isn't being done, then our governments are even stupider than I thought - which, of course, is quite possible.