Posts by Pascal Monett

Dutch director cops roar deal after selling off lion-based schlock to China

He has no success at home ?

Having watched the trailer, I'd say 'duh'. Glad to know that he'll be off to China. With any luck, he might even learn how to make a good film.

The curious case of a WordPress plugin, a rival site spammed with traffic, a war of words, and legal threats

and three times is a conspiracy

Re: Smart. Not.

Agreed. And I personally find quite stupid to maintain that posture because it's quite easy to prove if it is in the code.

Maybe Pipdig thinks that, because they changed the code (hey, that was quick), nobody will think of keeping a copy of the code that had issues ?

In any case, I do not appreciate the idea of a theme plugin with code to "reset to default". If I want to reset to default, I can do that myself thank you very much, or I will get a plugin that says it does that on the tin. I hate hidden features that I only discover when something goes wrong.

FYI: You could make Tesla's Autopilot swerve into traffic with a few stickers on the road

@ John Robson

First of all, they should bite the bullet and stop calling it Autopilot. People have died for believing that it actually is an autopilot. It is not, it is a sophisticated cruise control.

So name it Ultra Cruise Control, or Tesla Control, or something, anything that does not say autopilot.

If you want the message to pass, you have to be coherent. This is not a coherent situation.

"a driver can easily override Autopilot at any time [..] and should always be prepared to do so"

That is something that Tesla should be saying more loudly and more often.

Good news, Man City fans: You can watch your team lose the title in on-demand 3D

Personally, I prefer sex.

Right, I'm out.

Only one Huawei? We pitted the P30 Pro against Samsung and Apple's best – and this is what we found

It doesn't really matter anyway

A phone camera is just a phone camera. Good enough for a quick pic when you've got nothing better. For anything important, I have my Canon EOS with 3 lenses that answer all my problems. One is x200, and I don't even use it all that much.

Yes, I do take snaps with my phone, in order to remind me of how something was, what it looked like or where it was, so I can find it back later. It's utilitarian. If I want a proper pic that I'll keep in my album, I use my Canon.

Citrix mysteriously quiet amid whisperings of senior layoffs: Executives, teams logged out, it is claimed

Shamed out the door ? Really ?

How is it that people still take it personally when a company decides to terminate their contract ? Haven't they gotten the memo yet ? You're working for a multinational - nobody knows you outside of your direct colleagues and your manager. And his manager, following how (un)lucky you are.

The kind of employer who is a father to his employees, who takes care of them and manages the company as a great big family - is long gone.

Companies today are cutting edge, emphasis on cutting. When they want to trim the workforce, they choose a criteria, and then they trim. It is ruthless, it is soulless, and you have nothing to be ashamed of if you are caught in the net. It is not personal, because if it was, you'd be face-to-face with an accusation of incompetence or something worse.

No, it's just that the company has decided that your years of hard work no longer count because they've shifted focus and you are no longer part of the picture.

It's unpleasant, to be sure, but it has nothing to do with you or how good you are. You were just in the wrong slot.

So do not be shamed, just tell yourself that it is the company's loss.

Take that, America! Huawei flips Trump & Co the bird after reporting double-digit % rise in sales and profit

Backdoors ?

The only backdoors anyone should fear are the ones the NSA has in place.

With Huawei, it's not backdoors we need to fear, but rather shoddy coding and bad patching practices.

Tallk about choosing your poison . . .

HP crashed Autonomy because US tech titan's top brass 'lost their nerve', says lawyer for ex-CEO Mike Lynch

Truth squad ?

To do what, convince people that Meg wasn't responsible ?

There is a multi-billion dollar deal on the table and I'm supposed to believe they handed it to the intern ?

For frak's sake I am sick and tired of CEO's finding any pathetic excuse to weasel out of being responsible for what happens while they are at the helm. She gets the pay, so she takes the blame.

Anything else is pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.

FAANGs for the memories: Breaking up big tech's biggest isn't a matter of if, but of when

"a much-needed quickening of pace"

Woah there, the last thing we need right now is a quickening of pace. Cloud is already racing in every direction, each year we get new smartphones that are entirely incompatible with last year's, new mobe makers are appearing on the market and doing their damndest to differentiate, Surface is gaining traction and changing habits and STOP, let me breathe for a minute for Pete's sake.

I have read this article and I still don't know how I feel about it. On the one hand I will applaud anything that cuts Google and especially FaceBook down to a manageable size (ie something that no longer has the luxury of lying to our faces and we not being able to do anything about it). On the other hand, what exactly says that a breakup in the shareholder's best interest ? Where was that rule explained ? Because I don't think shareholders think that at this point in time.

Things like that in this article bewilder me, so, despite the fact that I completely agree with the initial premise of breaking up the FAANGS (and where did that come from ?), I can't say that I entirely agree with everything as it is stated.

Some more citations needed, I guess.

With the right training, algorithms can predict Li-ion battery lifetime – with 95% accuracy

Great news - oh, wait

Yet again another article on batteries, but no mention of carbon nanotubes.

Oh well, we've only been promised those a decade ago. I guess I might actually start seeing them after I retire.

Humbug.

Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed

It clearly isn't because if it were, Boeing would have required input from multiple sensors and correlation with a gyroscope or something.

Seriously Boeing ? A lone data feed can instruct the software to push the nose down ? On the input of one single sensor you change the attitude of a passenger-carrying plane ?

There was a time when redundancy was the name of the game. Once upon a time an airplane had three computers doing the calculations and at least two had to get the same results before any action was taken.

Am I to understand that Boeing is now using only a single Playstation for its calculations, and there wasn't enough USB ports to allow data from another sensor ?

DXC Security exec: Yes, I'd have thought we'd spend more on certs and laptop kit for staff, too

"Our success is dependent on ourselves and I find that exciting"

That sentence is a model of a phrase without actual meaning. It's almost as if he checked his motivational rolodex and decided to use that one. Of course your success depends on you, it doesn't depend on the grocery store next door.

It is exactly the kind of empty words someone without empathy will spout to try and make people think that "we're all in this together", in order to foster a sense of group and togetherness.

In the meantime, the bigwigs get the bonuses and the peons get laid off. That's how together we are.

NASA's first all-woman spacewalk outside ISS cancelled – due to lack of spacesuits that fit

Theoretically it shouldn't, unless there is no way to know by how much she would grow before the mission was planned.

Remember the film Apollo 13 ? NASA has a reputation for having everything quantified and on record, therefor they know what suits they have on board and their size. If they know how to determine by how much a person will grow in space before launch, then they should have the whole thing planned, checked and validated before even thinking about announcing it.

Of course if, despite their extensive experience, it is still impossible to determine exactly how a given person's height will vary, then the planning stage will have to allow for an on-board check that the intended suit still fits. Maybe that is what happened.

There are pictures all over the internet of a big dark spot on Uranu... Oh no, wait, it's Neptune

Economies of scale start kicking in when you build 2000 of the same thing, not 2. By all means, lets build the probes, but the second one will likely cost the same as the first.

Max Schrems schreds another 'blockade' to challenging Facebook data transfers in Austria

GDPR for the win

If there is anything that will bring The Zuck to bow before the law, it appears that the GDPR is the best chance.

Go GDPR !

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

I think the human mind has an infinite ability to go through with an act, despite all countermeasures and protections, even if we are screaming at ourselves inside to NOT DO THAT THING (*).

And we do it anyway, and then we can only shake our heads at ourselves in disbelief that we actually did it.

* : ask the Air Force about how many ways they have tried to alert a pilot that his landing gear was not down while in the process of landing and how efficient the methods were - if I'm not mistaken, they still don't have foolproof method

Would obviously not be good enough. Colorblind does not diminish the ability to see the difference between black and white, and that is all a racist needs.

The same problem every time

All of these stories demonstrate that we had to learn the hard way about visual identification and accidental triggering.

Not one of these stories would happen today because it is blindingly obvious that you enclose general shutdown buttons in protective covering, and they should be red and not any other color. Harsh lessons are the ones best remembered.

NASA 'nauts do what flagship smartphone fans can only dream of: Change the batteries

Not incredible, inevitable. There's only so much budget, and since the Russkies were beaten, there were top-of-the-line carriers to build.

What is incredible is that there are now privately-owned industries that have not only the money, but also the know-how to build rockets and get to low orbit. They are the ones that will get us to the stars, not the governments.

Geiger counters are so last summer. Lasers can detect radioactive material too, y'know

"It begins with shining an infrared laser beam near a radioactive source"

Um, sorry, but if your method of finding a radioactive source starts with targeting it then your method doesn't work if you don't know where it is.

Geiger counters work because you just walk around and detect radioactivity. The laser method would mean you have to scan every individual package or crate, and that would only work if every incoming/outgoing crate passes through the same point. I don't think that's going to happen at a large port, or any port for that matter.

Obviously, I know nothing about ports (for ships, that is - for firewalls I know more).

Intel gets court order telling former engineer to return confidential docs in Micron row

Nothing to return

I fail to see how anyone would be able to find a few digital files if he doesn't want to admit having them. There is a baffling amount of places and ways he could stash them away and services that are begging for users to hold files for.

There is no way the police can hope to find them even they do get a court order to do so. Turning his house inside out would only give results if the guy was stupid enough to hide evidence there, which seems unlikely. Once they find nothing at home, what do they do ? Subpoena his ISP for every IP address he used and check them all out ? Not enough resources and, even if that were possible, there's the chance he did it on someone else's wifi, so dead end there.

This just might be a landmark case about digital file discovery. That could prove more interesting than the actual case.

Campaigners cry foul over NHS Digital plans to grant policy wonks and researchers access to patient-level data

Yes, it was made up, but there's a specific definition.

Concerning GDPR, in five days that'll be a moot point and, as for permission, yes they have, by the act living under the good UK Government.

Pre-checked cookie boxes don't count as valid consent, says adviser to top EU court

Not if you use NoScript. With NoScript, only the code you allow runs and by default it allows nothing.

Of course, these days that means that lots of sites are broken out of the box, but you can decide which code you want to let run and see if it gets better. If it doesn't and don't have a real need, just leave.

I guarantee you that neither FaceBook nor Google nor Twitter are tracking me.

Re: Not quite the same issue

It is exactly the same issue - they are forcing you to accept cookies to use their site. That is violation of consent.

Chap joins elite support team, solves what no one else can. Is he invited back? Is he f**k

I seem to remember some rock band who had already come to that conclusion.

New phone who dis? Facial recognition models more farcical despite progress

"AI doesn't always work as well as you'd expect in real life"

AI works exactly as the scenario says it should because the only place we have AI is in science-fiction.

In real life, we only have statistical analysis machines and they are only as good as the data they were trained with and the humans who wrote the code - which means not very at this point in time.

I don't hate US tech, snarls Euro monopoly watchdog chief – as Google slapped with €1.49bn megafine

Trump never forgets anything - except to do his fucking job, that is.

And whatever it is he said yesterday if it's inconvenient today.

Apple's revamped iPad beams a workhorse in from Planet Ludicrous

Re: Still waiting...

Yeah, but you see, that's a nightmare scenario for vendors. Where will they be able to differentiate and, most importantly, how will they be able to lock customers in ? They won't, so they don't.

The knives are out for cloud gaming as Nvidia flashes blade-based box packing 40 RTX GPUs

And, in the meantime, the rig we have is fine and working and does the job. Even in a year when the games finally become compatible, there isn't going to be a mad rush to get a hold of them.

Oh sure, the enthusiasts will jump at the chance to splurge yet another grand to show off their new power, but the rest of us ? The last purchase I made on my I7-6700 was in 2015 and it still chews through the games I play without any trouble. Why should I go and throw good money at something that is only going to improve performance by what, 5% at best ?

I'm off the upgrade treadmill now (after having gleefully participated for the past two decades), and unless there's a game out there that I simply cannot avoid playing that really requires this new tech, I'm staying off of it.

In a humiliating climbdown, Facebook agrees to follow US laws

"prevent landlords, employers and money-lenders from bypassing anti-discrimination laws"

And how is it that these types were permitted to bypass these laws in the first place ?

Oh, silly me : because Facebook.

So now we have another promise. I'll put that on the dung pile with all the others.

Want to cruise your auto auto around but don't fancy killing people? Nvidia has an answer

All this hoopla for nothing

Unless you're going to try and make me believe that these virtual training worlds contain perfect replicas of sun glare, intense rain, snow and potholes in inconvenient areas ?

The only thing these virtual worlds are, at best, going to do is guarantee that the vehicles will run okay in perfect conditions - which is already something, I guess, but not enough.

Silence of the WANs: FBI DDoS-for-hire greaseball takedowns slash web flood attacks 'by 11%'

I'd like to know

Exactly how many pathetic little morons are there to make this DDoS-for-hire stuff viable, and who exactly are they pointing their pathetic attention at ?

Does the FBI have the customer records as well ? I'd just love to see the face of one of those basement-dwellers when the FBI comes knocking at their door with a pair of handcuffs.

Formulus Black – the artist formerly known as Symbolic IO – trumpets its new breed of dedupe

Yay, let's add yet another layer of complexity

What could possibly go wrong ? And when it does, how can anyone possibly be sure where the problem actually originated ?

Not to mention, I'd like to know just how security and private data are impacted by this. Sounds to me like some hacker is going to find it more interesting to just encrypt the FbM packets behind the markers and job done, pay up.

Ransomware drops the Lillehammer on Norsk Hydro: Aluminium giant forced into manual mode after systems scrambled

Looks like they will finally decide to allocate some budget to IT security now

And, with a truckload of luck, some other heavy-industry companies will take this as a heads-up and start moving their ass on the subject as well.

Yeah, it's gonna cost money. The only question is, are you going to pay that money before the enforced shutdown and cleanup, or after ?

So about that Atari reboot console... you might want to sit down. It's going to be late, OK?

I concur

They could slap a Pentium in there and have more than enough oomph.

This is shaping up to be Yet Another Fiasco. All the ingredients are there : nostalgia, vague assurances and a lot of affection, but no hard data, no actual promises, no plan or schedule and, most important, no explanation on how the catalog is going to be ported to the new hardware. It's just "hey, we're redoing the Atari ! Yay !! And you're going to pay for it ! Yay !!".

They could also add "You're going to pay for executive bonuses before any product is even built ! Yay !!"

Another dud in the making.

Boeing big cheese repeats pledge of 737 Max software updates following fatal crashes

Forget ROTM

I more and more have the feeling that if we collectively kick the bucket, it will simply be by our own stupidity.

We are obviously interfacing the human and the machine with more and more software, however we are singularly failing to properly think about the consequences, or properly test all the scenarios before we put it into production.

Do that in a bank or an administration and you only get headaches trying to set the situation straight again (and some loss of money). As we have seen, do that in flight automation software - which we need - and you lose lives.

Sorry Boeing, someone was not thinking right when they drew up and improperly tested this functionality. And more than 350 people have paid that negligence with their lives.

Sign of the times: Mirai botnet strain fine-tunes itself to infect digital signage, projectors

"businesses are, usually, a lot quicker to spot malware attacks and lock down their systems"

A spot of wishful thinking there, I think. Of sure, medium and large businesses may have the clout to do so, but there are a number of small but rather wealthy businesses (think lawyers and doctors and vets) that haven't a clue, yet might have a need for that shiny screen in waiting room. I don't think they have the faintest idea what Mirai even is and why they should bother about it.

They might not have the need for a "business" screen either and just prop up a bland, non-connected screen like any sane person would, but when you couple ignorance with money, crazier things have happened.

Why, just last month I had a very interesting conversation with my ophthalmologist who talked about his laptop (yes, he knows I'm an IT guy) and that his work application needed an update and told me that he had another "expert" who promised him he could get it for him for free. I had to then explain that first, there isn't a big chance that a company making ophthalmology software would leave their updates on BitTorrent, and if so, there was an even smaller chance that the update wouldn't have an "update" of its own. I then proceeded to explain that the golden age of people hosting cracks for various software and games out of the goodness of their hearts was long gone and today, said cracks are to be assumed to be accompanied by malware.

In the end, he agreed that it was probably a better idea to just pay for the damn upgrade. Whew ! One bullet dodged. This time.

This being my use case, you must understand that this professional is not only an intelligent man and a good professional, he's also far from poor. Yet, he was entirely ready to rely on some schmuck offering a free upgrade for an obscure application. You really think that he'd be able to spot some Mirai infection on the screen he has in his waiting room ? I can assure you, he wouldn't even notice the impact on his bandwidth, because I'm sure he's got a 100Mbit line and he uses one percent of that.

Wondering why 'Devin Nunes herp-face' was trending online? Here's the 411: House rep sues Twitter for all the rude stuff tweeted about him

You have now planted in my mind the image of 12 jurors with buckets of popcorn and gallon jugs of fizzy drinks loudly laughing and clapping at the various arguments bandied about in the courtroom, having great fun, and sometimes throwing some popcorn at the various participants.

I'd pay to see that film !

Agreed

He's got Freedom of Speech standing on the other side. Plus the fact that he's a public figure, so people have the right to lampoon him.

He's just proven that his hide is too thin to be a proper politician. That's a serious fail in his line of work.

Bandersnatch to gander snatched: Black Mirror choices can be snooped on, thanks to privacy-leaking Netflix streams

Re: Oh for god's sake...

Seconded. I would really like to see how, in a unique scenario where choices are predetermined, somebody could guess that I like zapping zombies and I don't like brussels sprouts. It's not like the film director integrated that significance in the choices, now did he ?

Okay, they can detect what choice was made. From there to deducing "significant" things about anyone, I think they're pushing it a bit too far.

Nonprofit OpenAI looks at the bill to craft a Holy Grail AGI, gulps, spawns commercial arm to bag investors' mega-bucks

"the for-profit company is ultimately controlled by the nonprofit's board"

Yeah, sure. For the moment. Until the for-profit company's stock soars so high that eagles gasp for breath. Then there will be a decision that, regretfully, the duty of the board is to the well-being of its shareholders, so, off you go, little boffins, back to your science desks and let the big things be handled by the Men In Suits.

There is a reason Armani does not make lab coats.

Boeing... Boeing... Gone: Canada, America finally ground 737 Max jets as they await anti-death-crash software patches

More than 300 dead is largely worth an abundance of caution

This decision is entirely normal. One crash is a subject of commiseration, two of the same kind with the same airframe and on new planes and it is time to realize that something is likely very wrong.

I'm not pouring fire and brimstone on Boeing though, they have one of the most complicated jobs on the planet. I'm sure they'll find out what is wrong, if only because now that the planes are grounded, the pressure on them is skyrocketing.

So yeah, they'll solve the problem. They have to.

What today links Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram – apart from being run by monopolistic personal data harvesters?

The "hiccup" lasted well into 2 P.M. for me

At some point this morning between 8:30 and 9 I lost access to my GMail account, and it did not come back until after 2 P.M.

I did find all my morning messages at that point, so nothing was lost.

We can do this the easy way or the Huawei, US tells Germany with threat to snip intel over 5G fears

Re: Wot?

And this from a country whose president has forced Security clearance for people who are a liability.

Astroboffins spot hefty pair swinging together. What? Um, we're talking about record-breaking massive binary stars...

It would have been nice if the article had mentioned that. I had to go find another source to find that number.

Iranian-backed hackers ransacked Citrix, swiped 6TB+ of emails, docs, secrets, claims cyber-biz

In any case, this amply demonstrates that Huawei is not the major threat. Weak passwords and insufficient network security is.

And this with a company that specifically does networking. That doesn't look good for their reputation.

Buffer overflow flaw in British Airways in-flight entertainment systems will affect other airlines, but why try it in the air?

"I was not probing [..] because I didn't know the existence of any vulnerability at that time."

No, you weren't probing, you were just dicking around.

In a plane full of passengers.

Not knowing what you might trigger.

You might have missed a Darwin award there, bud.