Posts by Pascal Monett

Years late to the SMB1-killing party, Samba finally dumps the unsafe file-sharing protocol version by default

I think the situation can be far worse than that

A few years ago I was doing support for an industrial company making plastic wrapping. As usual, I was working in the IT Admin's bureau because that's where the development PC was, so I was privy to all their conversations, and one conversation was about updating to Windows 7 (at the time).

Their situation is as follows : their production floor is based on machines that are piloted by WinXP PCs who use drivers that are undocumented, talking to the machines using a protocol nobody knows. The pilot app was coded about twenty years ago and has survived upgrades from Win 3.11 to Win XP, because the guy who coded it all was still around to help. That is no longer the case (and that there is your long lost source code).

So, in order to upgrade the PCs, either they have to commission the complete rewrite of the drivers and the apps based on unknown rules, which will take vast amounts of time and an ungodly amount of money, or they can replace the production machines, which will cost upwards of a quarter million per unit, which them has to be configured with a new PC and a new app, and that throws their entire production line under the bus for weeks at a time.

So yeah, upgrading Windows has kinda hit a brick wall there. Thankfully, the admin is not stupid enough to have the XP systems connected to the Internet, but they are on the network, so there is a risk despite the firewall cutting them off from all but the admin PC that is overseeing them (not the admin's PC, that's a different one).

Agreed. Computers were new and very intimidating to the average Joe who found them complicated enough. Adding a modem and dialing to some number was almost akin to witchcraft. Very few people needed to do that, but those who did had to learn everything themselves, because there was no Internet or Google to help them find the way.

So not only did most users work unconnected, I'd wager that most of them didn't even know you could add a modem for quite a long time.

Not all heroes wear capes: Contractor grills DXC globo veep on pay rises, offshoring, and cuts to healthcare help

"the workforce doesn't carry the hopes and dreams of shareholders on their back"

Actually, it is the workforce that carries the "hopes and dreams" of shareholders, because it ain't the CEO going on-site to deal with customers, now is it ?

It might be time to reevaluate the pecking order. The CEO is the mouthpiece of the company, gives the direction in which the company should go and oversees that the engagements are being kept, and that's it. It is a job, to be sure, but so is going to client site and keeping the client happy.

And, you can replace a CEO anytime without impacting either company revenue or customer satisfaction. You can't do that with the peons that actually do the work and bring in the money.

As HMRC's quarterly deadline for online VAT filing looms, biz dogged by 'technical difficulties'

"there were a number of problems with the pilot"

And nobody thought of ironing out the problems with the pilot before going live ?

Or was it just a question of absolutely having to obey the schedule ?

Fun fact : a pilot is where you test a solution against real-life data in order to find the inevitable bugs, correct them and ensure that the go-live will go well.

If you do a pilot and you don't correct the issues before go-live, you're doing it wrong.

Who needs 4th July fireworks when there's a new Windows 10 build?

Something is missing

What ? A new Windows 1 0 release and no tale of woe ? I feel weird.

And I stocked up on the popcorn . . .

38 billion reasons to say goodbye: Ex-Mrs Bezos splits from Jeff with 4% of Amazon shares in tow

Re: Fair's fair

Agreed. I don't know what has happened behind the scenes, but publicly this is a model divorce that has been dealt with in a very civil and adult manner - despite the amount of money involved.

Next to that, I have seen people go for the throat for less than €150,000. Shame on them.

I don't know but it's been said, Amphenol plugs are made with lead

"The router went dark"

Why ? There is nothing that tells me what happened, except that the cable apparently went "between the guard rails". And ? Did it hit the circuit board ? Did it somehow fall in the power supply, making a short-circuit ?

Could someone please explain why a cable falling on a router makes it "go dark" ? I don't have a clue why this happened.

Fibaro flummoxed, Georgia courts held for ransom, and more

"the DOL says it has found no indications of a compromise"

Well, if the database was open to Internet access, it wouldn't need to be compromised, it just needed to be accessed.

Have they found traces of access ? If not, then okay, there's plenty of stuff available that no one looks at because nobody knows about it.

Wide of the net: Football Association of Ireland says player, manager data safe after breach

Well done there

"the FAI got in touch with the Irish Office of the Data Protection Commission as soon as the breach was discovered"

That's the right way to do it. Of course, it happened in Ireland, which is not Irexiting from the EU, and the GDPR is starting to look like a very effective cluebat, but still, somebody had the balls to stand up and get counted, so congrats to him.

The fact that the breach did not result in anything getting out is a relief for everyone involved and makes the diligence of the FAI all that more commendable. I'm sure the ODP will not treat them harshly.

Let's check in with Samsung to see how it's riding out the memory glut. Operating profit down 56%. Oops.

So, when profit falls, hire 15,000 people

Well that sounds like perfect timing. Well done there.

I get then that, when profits return to sky-high levels, there will be massive layoffs ?

UK competition bods to stick probe into worrying lack of said competition in online advertising

"the UK government appears to be ready to [..] get tough on regulation"

Woah there, let's not get too excited, hmm ?

Wait for the amount of the fine before you talk about getting tough. After all, we're talking about Google and FaceBook, two ginormous multinational corporations who . . pay almost nothing in taxes. There certainly is room to get tough.

MapR misses deadline for sale, biz prospects looking thinner than a Hadoop sales pitch

It's the law of capitalism

When nobody buys a product, that product disappears.

Sorry for the employees, but they had better been searching for a while already.

Get rekt: Two years in clink for game-busting DDoS brat DerpTrolling

Re: Hackers v crackers v DDoSers

Yeah, but that's nerd-level knowledge.

Today, anyone doing anything nefarious to a computer or network will be called a hacker by the press, and Joe Public will only go along with it.

UK's Openreach admits 50k premises on 'gigabit-capable' FTTP network can't get gigabit speeds

"all of our current and future build"

Well, no, 50K of them do not.

And the solution seems simple : replace the stupid ECI kit.

Ah, silly me, that costs money.

Amazon: Carbon emissions from our Australian bit barns aren't for public viewing

"release of the information [..] would negatively affect Amazon's competitive position"

It's that bad, eh ?

Finally in the UK: Apollo 11 lands... in a cinema near you

I look forward to seeing it, then

As a big fan of space exploration and of the Universe in general, I greatly appreciated Apollo 13, which I watch about once a year. Your report makes me confident that I will have a new item to add to my list of yearly walks down memory lane.

How do we stop facial recognition from becoming the next Facebook: ubiquitous and useful yet dangerous, impervious and misunderstood?

"It is not the right way to regulate,"

Well obviously it doesn't suit Moore, but his arguments don't really suit me.

1) he doesn't know of any law enforcement agency that wants to use the technology for real-time surveillance

The word missing there is "yet". He also states that we don't have the processing power, again missing the word "yet". We will get there, and the police already have a fairly extensive track record of abusing their powers and tools with gay abandon.

2) He says that combined with improvements in the technology, we are rapidly getting to the point where within two-to-three years, the degree of accuracy in facial recognition will be in "high 90s" for all types of people

Come back in two-to-three years then, and we'll talk about it again.

3) it would be harder for a police officer to justify, say, stopping a black man because he thought he looked like a suspect if there was a facial recognition result that said it was only 80 per cent accurate

I think a policeman would take a 4 out of 5 as a perfect reason for stopping the guy, with whatever consequences that may follow.

4) the issue only got a "spotlight on it because facial recognition was in the same sentence."

Well duh, if there hadn't been a camera, the guy wouldn't have felt the need to hide his face. Facial recog was at the very base of the problem, so yeah, it got the spotlight and rightly so.

5) "Guns are a serious problem," he notes. "This technology is there to make better decisions."

Sure, because FR is going to keep someone from pulling a gun. Way to go there, Moore. Let's not address the issue of guns, let's just put a band-aid over it and we can all feel all nice and fuzzy.

6) We have turned down multiple clients where their use of the technology was not aligned with what we wanted to do.

I am so impressed. How lucky we are to have you. Now what are you going to do about your competition ? Are you going to ensure that they act with the same, admirable, attitude ? How ?

It may be that regulation should happen at a federal level, I'm not qualified to have an opinion on that either way.

But I'm pretty sure that,whatever the level, the regulation should give clear guidance as to where FR is acceptable, how the data should be treated, how long it can legally be stored and what procedures should ensure that the data is properly deleted when its expiry date is passed.

Oh, and selling the database should be a federal crime passable of 5-10 years without parole.

Re: Facial recognition itself isn't bad

Yes, at this point it is. Did you miss the part where it only works averagely well if you're white ? I think black people already have enough chances to be wrongly arrested (and possibly shot) without adding a "computer says so" to the list.

Trump: Huawei ban will be lifted!
US Commerce Dept.: Yeah, about that…

Re: "stopping an avalanche requires a bit more effort than starting one"

You do realize that you're talking about someone who has never had to clean up after himself in his whole life ?

Trump has never stopped anything, he just says "stop that thing" and underlings scurry about to get it done or else they will be fired. With that kind of mentality, how can he possibly care how much effort it takes ? He's never made an effort in his life.

US Cyber Command warns that the Outlook is not so good - Iranians hitting email flaw

Re: Bad iranians, bad!

Well, the thing is, the US is quick to point out how much other countries are wreaking havoc, but it is veeery quiet on what the NSA is doing abroad.

Not to excuse foreign hackers, but I have a feeling that they're just giving back, so to speak.

Russian 'Silence' hacking crew turns up the volume – with $3m-plus cyber-raid on bank's cash machines

The sound of Silence

Appears to be the rustling of lots of bills.

So they could be only 2, and they have managed to completely pwn a bank, control its PCs and get control over ATMs.

Man, they are evil, but that is awesome intelligence applied to a bad use. I wonder if intrusion detection is going to take off in those parts now ?

UK's North Midlands hospitals IT outage, day 2: All surgery and appointments cancelled

"Where is your contingency planning for such events?"

Probably in the same place as the budget for it - limbo.

These are hospitals, not luxury resorts. When even Google doesn't have a backup fiber link to its bit barn, you can hardly blame a lowly hospital for not having redundancy and multiple servers.

Code crash? Russian hackers? Nope. Good ol' broken fiber cables borked Google Cloud's networking today

"Mitigation work is currently underway [..]"

It's called REPAIRS. Mitigation is what you do to get around a problem, but there is no getting around a broken fiber link. It just has to be repaired.

Why is it that today's PR people can't just say it as it is ?

$30/month email upstart Superhuman brought low with a blast of privacy Kryptonite

I will never forget that.

Google's Fuchsia OS Flutters into view: We're just trying out some new concepts, claims exec

A new OS from Google

Okay, fine. One question : what's the telemetry on that thing ?

This is Google, it exists in order to find out everything about you. So how will this new OS feed it data and what data will it feed on ?

Here's a great idea: Why don't we hardcode the same private key into all our smart home hubs?

"smart home product manufacturing 101"

Currently, the "smart" home product manufacturing 101 manual is as follows :

1) Find some everyday thing and make it more complicated, and need batteries

2) Definitely do not do any sort of penetration testing whatsoever

3) Hype the shit out of whatever it is and flog it off at the highest possible price

4) Cash in and never change anything until your customers are readying their torches and pitchforks

Security ? They've heard of it.

Google open sources standardized code in bid to become Mr Robots.txt

That's your problem right there

"it includes code to accept five different misspellings of the "disallow" directive in robots.txt"

Technical solution : code in all different forms of a reserved word, in order to ensure that every fat-fingered idiot who can't spell will still get his directive working

Real life solution : learn how to spell 'disallow'

No wonder code gets sloppy. Back in my day you barely had enough bytes to check one version of a word.

Kids are spoiled these days.

Microsoft: OK, we admit it, spring is over. Here's your Windows 10 19H2

So, waiting for the fallout now

The dice are rolling - will this release cause any mayhem, or has Redmond finally put a stop to the shenanigans and made an update that doesn't break anything ?

Place your bets.

Politicos freak out over facial recognition and deepfakes, Apple saves Drive.AI, and more

So, I've got question

"The model, a neural network, works by tracking the locations of buses over time and analysing local car traffic conditions [..]"

Okay, how long until Google can predict your next bowel movement ?

I get it : all those Android phones are nothing but GIGS (Google Information Gathering Sources) and cities who sign up for Google services are CHUGS (Cities Hopelessly Underestimating Google's Sollicitude), but still, is there anything left that Google doesn't have data on ?

Former UK PM Tony Blair urges governments to sort out online ID

"trying to come up with new forms of ID card"

The problem is simple : you cannot have individual ID without a corresponding token to prove your ID. Until the plod has a portable, pocket-sized token verifier, the easiest way to prove your ID is with a card.

The problem is therefor not the ID card in itself, it is the fact that UK gov wants IDs and UK citizens wants them to fuck off.

There is no solution to this.

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come early July

Re: This is the way copyright works

No it is not. The way copyright works is that the person writing a book has a copyright on it. The seller is generally not the writer, and if writer and seller have a falling out, the book I bought is still mine and no one can take it away from me.

Google's reCAPTCHA favors – you guessed it – Google: Duh, only a bot would refuse to sign into the Chocolate Factory

Wait a minute

Could someone please tell my why Google should have access to my mouse movements and how that is possible or legal ?

Oh right, it's not illegal, so anything goes.

I hate companies who just decide that whatever is possible is fair game.

It's MY computer, dammit. What will it take for you to understand that, pitchforks and torches at sundown ?

Re: Synology

Would you mind explaining how it is that you get a captcha when connecting to your home NAS ? I have a DS414j and I have never seen a captcha when accessing its local IP on my browser.

Granted, I have also configured it to refuse Internet connections.

Scumbags can program vulnerable MedTronic insulin pumps over the air to murder diabetics – insecure kit recalled

Re: they also see it as self defence

Bullshit. Self defense against what ? How is a diabetic going to harm them ?

Building a radio transmitter for a software/hardware solution made to make insulin pumps go wrong is not self defense in any way, shape or form.

It is murder, pure and simple. And yeah, shooting is too good for 'em.

Stop using that MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW, says Uncle Sam: Loyalists suffer burns, smoke inhalation and worse – those crappy keyboards

"I could not imagine going back to Windows"

Well how about going "back" to Linux ? Try Mint, it's a rather easy start for an ex-Windows user.

I should know, I'm transitioning at the moment.

However, the problem is the the OS in itself, the problem is the applications you need to use. If you're in the graphics industry you use Apple and there is nothing comparable AFAIK either on Windows or on Linux, so you have to stick with Apple.

Suspected dark-web meth dealers caught by, er, 'using real address' when buying stamps

Re: somehow they knew where the shipping point was

Well yes : the Feds bought some of their goods, so they got a few letters and traced the postage. Given that the guys had made the mistake of taking an account in one of their real names and addresses, they knew who and where to look.

It's not always a conspiracy, this is actual police work. It's what they are paid for.

Firefox Preview for Android: Mozilla has another go at a mobile browser

Firefox

With NoScript and UBlock Origin. It's the only way to be sure.

That said, I learned today in another article that Brave is a browser with ad blocking that is actually integrated into the browser itself, and it's pretty damn fast. I tried it on my smartphone and I'm quite happy about it.

One teeensy little 13-minute power cut, and WD you look at the size of that chip supply cut!

Re: Backup Power

Yeah. Seems like expensive lessons are the ones best learned. Again.

What a shame that there's not a body of information that could have warned just how important it is to have control over one's power supply. Especially in an industrial environment that is time-critical.

I mean, gosh, it's not like power cuts have ever happened before, right ?

Good news: NASA and Homeland Security just passed their government IT exams – and we really mean *just*

"many were neglecting to address even the most basic of cybersecurity requirements"

Yes well security is . . Oh My God look : hackers in Russia !

Oh God there are also hackers in China !

And look : hackers in North Korea !

We're being hacked, I tell you ! Run and scream like headless chickens !

US cop body cam maker says it won't ship face-recog tech in its kit? Due to ethics? Did we slip into a parallel universe?

Wait a minute

How come all of a sudden we have an important company that says that face recognition tech is not reliable enough ?

I seem to recall a slew of articles this year touting how FR is being implemented in plenty of places, mostly airports, and there were glowing articles about them.

Is all that a bunch of malarky then ? Or have I somehow unknowingly been Fringed into a parallel universe where reality is suddenly better ?

Or did someone patch the Matrix ?

Observation: Slow-burn space HAL 'em up fires adventure game genre into the exosphere

Re: No Steam? No Thanks.

Right with you there, no Steam, no deal.

Steam is the only platform that respects my hardware, my time and my money. All of the others try various things to lock my PC down to what their idea is it should be, and if anything changes then poof ! away go my games and I can re-download everything.

In the worst case scenario, even a simple update can do that (glaring at you EA).

So yeah, if it's not on Steam, to me it does not exist.

In Rust we trust: Brave smashes speed limit after rewriting ad-block engine in super-lang

Thank you for this article

I now have Brave installed on my mobile phone and it is very satisfactory.

I will undoubtedly be installing it on all my PCs and on all PCs and laptops I can get my hands on.

I will be talking about that browser, you can be sure of that.

The dread sound of the squeaking caster in the humming data centre

Stan, Sid, let's make it simple, okay ?

Instead of trying to find a new name every week, let's just convene that the week's On Call guy is Brian and the week's Who Me guy is, I don't know, George or something.

In other words, just keep the same name every week, that way you can just start the column by "This week's Brian tells us about how . . ."

What do you think ?

Your server remote login isn't root:password, right? Cool. You can keep your data. Oh sh... your IoT gear, though?

Actually, I forgot the part where the hackers were Iranian when typing my comment.

I stand corrected and, because it is now Friday, this round is on me.

"targeting [..] companies within Saudi Arabia [..]"

So they are wreaking havoc on their own instead of attempting to attack US industrial facilities.

Could it be that Moscow told them it had that covered and they should go play elsewhere ?

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

"airborne splinters of razor-sharp shards of metal travelling in all directions at 300,000km/sec"

Wow, you don't go halfway when it comes to secure disposal, do you Dabbsy ?

Mike Lynch in court: I was not aware of every single thing Autonomy did around the world (so don't blame me)

So, it's a case of Rogue Beancounter then ?

Decoding America's spies: What does the NSA's cryptic memo really mean? Citizens illegally spied on again

Re: spy programs aren't set up with evil intent

It is not the intent that is the problem, it is who is using it and for what. Whatever the intent was initially, it can be used to, for example, keep tabs on people who are not happy about the program and dig up dirt on them to shut them up.

It would be a very large deviation from what I do sincerely believe the NSA wants to do, ie protect US citizens, but it is possible that part of NSA activity has to do with things that have nothing to do with the protection of US citizens.

The fact that the NSA is consistently lying about its activities with the straightest of face is not very reassuring either.

Before we lose our minds over sentient AI, what about self-driving cars that can't detect kids crossing the road?

“Shouldn’t we worry about the emergence of consciousness in AI?”

I love how that question really demonstrates how the term AI has been degraded. If it were AI, it would be conscious.

So they know that they are just slapping a trendy moniker on a statistical analysis machine, then they smoke a joint and start believing that statistics can become sentient.

Well, they are politicians, after all.

There's Huawei too many vulns in Chinese giant's firmware: Bug hunters slam pisspoor code

Maybe so, but at least this time it is based on actual data - whether you like the data or not, it is not just an article accusing without any basis.

Bloomberg did the FUD and never backed it up. Here is proof - of something. There are obviously many people here that can analyze this way better than me, but I'm just glad that someone has made an actual study based on actual data, and not just ran screeching through the streets that Huawei is dangerous.