Posts by Pascal Monett

Microsoft will ‘lose developers for a generation’ if it stuffs up GitHub, says future CEO

There's no reason for playing coy : Microsoft is buying GitHub, so GitHub will die.

At this point in time, the reality of it is statistically mandatory.

WikiLeaks took 10 days to reject Cambridge Analytica's US emails bid, says Tricksy Nixy

If other business meetings are not an entrapment attempt, it may just be because other business meetings are between normally dishonest business people doing normally dishonest business and not between some shady person in search of scum to do even more shady stuff.

Coming from the guy who vouched to provide prostitutes to ruin people's reputations, I find this remark particularly rich.

RoboCop-ter: Boffins build drone to pinpoint brutal thugs in crowds

Re: Comments from the Author

Any idea what the accuracy is at an altitude of 50 meters over a packed football stadium ?

Because, if I'm not mistaken, that would be a prime target for this kind of tech.

No lie-in this morning? Thank the Moon's gravitational pull

Re: entropy will win

It will, especially if the Universe continues to expand without ever stopping.

But that is in a timeframe of eons upon eons.

Tidal power is in the timeframe of years, and by that timeframe, tidal power is renewable.

Boffins quietly cheering possible discovery of new fundamental particle: Sterile neutrino

This is not making physics any easier

So now neutrinos "oscillate" from one type to another ? And they do it fast enough to be emitted as one type and switch twice before hitting something (much) less than an Earth's diameter away ?

Can we just admit that quantum physics is batshit crazy now ?

IETF wants packets to prove where they've been, to improve trust

So each node adds its part of the key

What about routing around failures ? The Internet is supposed to remain flexible, there is no single path from source to destination because if there were, a connection failure along the line would mean packets don't arrive any more at all.

How do they take that into account ?

Smart bulbs turn dumb: Lights out for Philips as Hue API goes dark

Re: "a long overgrown pathway to your house, and you're coming home late"

There's already a solution to that, it's called a movement detector. Place it near your light looking down and the overgrowth will not keep it from detecting you and turning on the light.

Why people absolutely have to go with the least secure bit of shiny instead of using proven tech that is safe is beyond me.

Stingray phone stalker tech used near White House, SS7 abused to steal US citizens' data – just Friday things

I am still surprised

Honestly the thing that surprises me the most is the fact that we're all talking about how a Stringray device deployed by an unknown entity was used in proximity to the White House and yet there has not been a massive deployment of police, military, helicopters and SWAT teams to find the perpetrator.

Seems to me that such a move in a Hollywood film would be the perfect excuse for such an exercise, but in Real Life it's just "well, seems somebody has been spying on comms near our most strategic historical building, let's write a letter to the FCC to complain".

The Cold War is so last milennium I guess.

Is Microsoft about to git-merge with GitHub? Rumors suggest: Yes

Re: Look at LinkedIn, Skype, Minecraft, Nokia, WebTV ....

Uh, MineCraft is doing fine, you know. Don't ask me how, but I am an avid Minecrafter and my experience has not changed one whit.

Since MS bought MineCraft, the only real new thing was the introduction of Realms, which is entirely optional but I guess there are people who find it useful, so good for them. I don't know what exactly is happening on Realms, but there is quite some activity judging from the info panel on the game launcher.

Meanwhile, no microtransactions or advertisements have appeared, and no hint of that sort of thing on the horizon, so, from where I sit, MS is not, for once, doing bad with its acquisition.

Here's hoping that will continue.

Facebook stockholders tell Zuck to reform voting rules as data scandal branded 'human rights violation'

"the assembled group applauded his entrance and exit"

So the sheeple still go "baaa" on cue.

Congratulations. Way to make The Zuck still believe he is doing The Right Thing (TM). His Apology Tour turned out to be a Meet the Politicos Tour with hardly any rough spots, now his annual shareholder meeting starts and ends with applause.

People, he ain't never gonna learn he's doin' wrong if you keep behavin' like that.

Whois? Whowas. So what's next for ICANN and its vast database of domain-name owners?

Re: We don't have a popcorn icon

Yes, I absolutely second that : we need a popcorn icon !

Chinese president Xi seeks innovation independence

The dragon is waking up

China is a big country with an enormous population and easy to control - because tourists are just so visible. It's not easy to be a foreign terrorist in China, much less easy than in Paris.

China has used Western economics to its advantage up to now, and now it is wanting to do more than just use other people's tech ; it wants to make its own. And that is perfectly normal.

The question in my mind is will China become a world-wide supplier when its language is so totally incomprehensible to everyone else ? If that is what it wants, it'll have to make its tech in English, because nobody outside of China will buy something with a Chinese interface. And my guess is yes, China will want to sell abroad.

That's going to give us a lot of funny pics showing some popup of a Chinese product saying one thing in funny, broken English that obviously should be written quite differently. In the mean time, Chinese software houses will become proficient, their Universities competent, and we will see Chinese products come to our stores in waves.

That day is coming closer.

AWS outage killed some cloudy servers, recovery time is uncertain

Re: Isn't cloud supposed to be fault tolerant?

Oh, but it is supposed to be. It's also supposed to be reliable, as near always available as marketing can dare say without actually writing 100% (because that'd make 'em legally liable), and fast.

It is supposed to be all that and more - the operative word being supposed.

I remember times when we use to argue that a server going down in a company's server room would only affect the customers of that company, but the cloud won anyway and now we know that when a cloud server goes down, it's the customers of many companies that are affected.

Yay progress.

Artificial intelligence... or advanced imitation? How DeepMind used YouTube vids to train game-beating Atari bot

Re: overfit?

And that is all they ever do. We hear about AI, but none of their computers are capable of doing anything else than what they have specifically been trained for.

A true AI would look at one video, then play the game several times to get the hand of it. Then it would go play a different game, maybe without watching anything. Then it would surf YouTube for a while then it would read a book. Then you'd ask it a question and it would say "Can't you see I'm busy ?".

MH370 search ends – probably – without finding missing 777

A sad end to a terrible event

I feel sorry for the families who will likely never have proper closure on this horrific event.

Anyone who thinks that someone else has to die for a plan to be successful should go back and re-evaluate the plan.

Some things are worth dying for. Nothing is worth killing for.

How much is the drone biz worth to the UK? How's £42bn by 2030 sound? – PWC

Re: No chance

I agree with most of your post, but I doubt very much that drones will put any kind of dent in the number of pilots and manned aircraft, most of which are either leisure or people/cargo transport.

No way a drone can persuade a true pilot to let go the stick and sit in a chair in front of a screen. he knows how to do it for real.

GCHQ bod tells privacy advocates: Most of our work is making sure we operate within the law

"If you whack governments on privacy it will only drive the vulnerability market."

You mean, like all the stuff the NSA had stashed for a rainy day and got stolen ?

You can tout the NSA's "efforts" at transparency all you want, we all know that the NSA is just lying through its teeth, making puppy eyes to better stab us in the privates (pun intended).

Encryption, encryption and more encryption. No backdoors, proper stuff. If it just delays discovery by a week, that'll be good enough for TLA's to throw up their hands in disgust and give up.

Either that, or Intel gets pressured into inventing a new 48-core desktop CPU that runs at 8Ghz and has 100GBps bandwidth. Can it run Crysis ? Can it ever !

Better privacy and more powerful computers. Who can complain about that ?

Cloud is a six-horse race, and three of those have been lapped

Yeah, like saying that Azure is a fine choice - especially if you are already committed to Microsoft.

The words no, shit and Sherlock come to mind.

Smut site offers VPN so you don't bare all online

Re: stats like what's popular at Christmas, halloween etc.

That does not mean they're tracking you, they're just counting the pages you open - count that goes to a total that they can then play with. Once totalled, the data is effectively anonimyzed.

It's ironic that the only industry that doesn't play fast and loose with our private data is the porn industry - in other words, it's the porn guys that are the cleanest of the lot.

Softbank's 'Pepper' robot is a security joke

Default password ?

Misleading. A default password is just something that the hardware maker provided because there has to be one - all that needs doing is to change it. In this case, however, the password and the user name are hardcoded and are not changeable. That makes it much more than a default password. That makes it a permanent entry point to anyone who knows that information, which is just about anyone who bothers to look for it.

The team that built this robot were obviously people without even the most basic notion of the definition of security. I mean, how hard can it be to allow for changing the bloody password ?

Epyc fail? We can defeat AMD's virtual machine encryption, say boffins

Publishing microcode ? What are you smoking ?

That will simply never happen, no more than Google will publish its Page Rank system or FaceBook will publish anything at all.

1) Microcode is how everything can actually happen, and it is the equivalent of the Crown Jewels. It is the reason a processor does what it does, and you do not want your competition to see what you are doing or how you are doing it.

2) Microcode is difficult to grep, and there are not all that many eyes available to check it out - plus, most of those eyes are working for the competition anyway.

Max Schrems is back: Facebook, Google hit with GDPR complaint

For sure, as long as you're dreaming, might as well go the whole hog.

The great wearables myth busted: Apps never, ever mattered

So it was a platform game, eh ?

Looks like reality stepped in and gave a great big slap with a fish in a newspaper to a large set of very expensive suits.

Good. I am sick of hearing how many useless new things a not-watch can barely do (for the few hours its battery lasts, that is).

Is your smart device a bit thick? It's about to get a lot worse

Re: Only Women Bleed?

I don't bleed, but I will confess to having periods - the time between whiskeys are my periods.

US websites block netizens in Europe: Why are they ghosting EU? It's not you, it's GDPR

Re: I am in the UK thanks.

Well, apparently there are Trump fans everywhere.

Agreed.

Personally, I am overjoyed with all the mails I am getting that are telling me that I will no longer receive their mails if I do not click on some damn link and approve.

You think I'm that stupid ?

Finally, a true end to all the spam (well, most of it anyway).

Thanks, GDPR !

BOFH: Their bright orange plumage warns other species, 'Back off! I'm dangerous!'

I am totally convinced that there will always be some arsehole who thinks it's perfectly all right to park right in front of a fire engine - with or without cones.

You know that silly fear about Alexa recording everything and leaking it online? It just happened

@ Martin an gof

Thanks for that. It made my day :)

New Facebook political ad rules: Now you must prove your ID before undermining democracy

Re: democracy

Don't know where you live so I have no idea of who "we" is, but the USA is most definitely not a democracy.

You can find the Democracy Index mentioned in that article here. The United States isn't listed as a Full Democracy, it is under Flawed Democracy.

Uber robo-ride's deadly crash: Self-driving car had emergency braking switched off by design

Re: a root cause investigation

I don't see what her physical state has to do with the fact that this accident could have been avoided if the driver simply had his eyes on the road.

Besides, the article is misleading because returning positive for substance abuse does not indicate just how positive the victim was and frankly, I don't give a damn. She could have been tripping over Saturn, she should still be alive today and she would be if it weren't for a despicable company having yet again taken every single shortcut to profits.

Uber is directly responsible for placing a broken and dangerous vehicle on public roads and mandating the driver to not look at the road periodically to fill in fucking administrative paperwork. It's basically manslaughter with intent, and I hope Uber's management will get nailed to the wall on this.

Tufts boffins track device location without GPS or towers

"Offloading positioning to the devices makes it . . ."

. . possible for hackers and criminals to fudge the system. What's that, Your Honor ? Of course I wasn't robbing that house last week. Check my phone, you'll see that I was on holiday in Spain at that time. I only got back yesterday. Can I go now ?

Welcome to your sci-fi dystopia: Sonic firewalls to crumble inaudible ad-tracking phone cookies

Re: JTFC

I never use my phone for anything else than actually talking to people. I don't download apps and I barely use any of the ones provided out-of-the-box.

Of course, if actual permission granularity was provided in the phone OS by default, maybe I'd venture a bit forward in this domain. As it is, I consider phones and app stores to be a nest of vipers waiting to strike at my privacy.

Police block roads to stop tech support chap 'robbing a bank'

Must have been a quite impressive experience

Personally I thought it was always a button under the desk or on the side. I would have been very careful about not brushing against that. But a bar on the floor ? I'm not sure I would have made the relationship with the alarm.

EmDrive? More like BS drive: Physics-defying space engine flunks out

@ handleoclast

I'm thrilled to learn that someone who is competent in physics had a good YouTube video of why something could not actually work.

Unfortunately, if I'm not mistaken, YouTube is not a recognized, peer-reviewed, scientific news platform.

So please point me to his published paper on why the EMDrive couldn't work, because if there isn't any, I fail to see why Science should take that into account.

Re: The Germans don't watch youtube enough

Legend has it that, when Thomas Edison had invented the light bulb, someone said to him something like "so it took you (let's say) 1480 tries to make it work ?", to which Edison replied "No, I invented 1479 ways not to make a light bulb".

This is Science. We don't just need to know that it doesn't work, we need to know why it doesn't work, in a mathmatically quantified way. Because maybe, one day, somebody will be able to revisit the maths and find a way to make it work. Or maybe the maths will give him an idea for something completely different.

In any case, some bloke on YouTube is not a scientific reference.

Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04: Make yourself at GNOME. Cup of data-slurping dispute, anyone?

Ok, I concede

Perhaps this has nothing to do with GDPR after all.

So I take it everyone is A-OK with opt-out ?

Well I'm not.

"opt-out was probably the best choice"

Not if you want to be GDPR-compliant.

Methinks Canonical might be getting a call from some lawyer soon . . .

Ongoing game of Galileo chicken goes up a notch as the UK talks refunds

"the UK again reiterated its position on the project"

We are so glad you did. We might have been afraid we didn't get it the first time but, then again, we have people who know how to read.

In other words, you are not Trump and repeating your opinion endlessly does not make it any more relevant.

US Senator Ron Wyden to Pentagon: Encrypt your websites

@ Lee D

Now that is an argument that I can understand.

Thank you for enlightening me.

@ Serg

Please excuse me, but the fact that the largest whatever trust chain out there does not recognize DoD as a trusted root chain is neither here nor there. I'm not expecting anyones's browser to be happy about it, I'm expecting the people who need to access DoD websites to know that they're accessing the right ones.

Your remark tells me that browsers are basically beholden to the largest trust chain, which means that I can't trust who I choose to trust. For Joe User that may be a very good thing and I do not dispute that, but for specific military users, I'm not convinced that that is so useful.

Why is self-signed such a bad idea ?

If the DoD creates a master certificate and all other military sites get theirs from the DoD, what's the problem ?

Trusted certificates only mean they have been signed by a Cert Authority that is recognized by a central organism and we've seen that go badly already.

I think it wouldn't be such a bad idea to have all military sites of a country have their own trusted authority. Sounds good from a security perspective, IMO.

Microsoft and boffins cook up hardware-secured database

What's that ?

"aims to keep data and database queries secure even when the host system has been compromised"

When you say compromised, does that include running on Windows Telemetry Version ?

Because Microsoft ain't offering the NONE setting on that.

Microsoft gives users options for Office data slurpage – Basic or Full

Basic or Full ?

What about NONE ?

Machine learning for dummies: You needn't go back to uni to use it

Who is this Mike Berners-Lee and what exactly is his expertise in dishwashers ?

@ trottel

Thank you for avoiding the use of "AI" in your post - especially since you declare being in the field.

I saw the words "although you may find the module is buried inside an analytics or data science programme" in the article and immediately wanted to go on a rant saying obviously, because that's what ML is and THERE IS NO A.I. TODAY.

I did the Google beginner's course in ML and all there was was statistics and how to apply them. If you don't grep mathematics, you're up the proverbial creek without a paddle, and I'm not good at maths.

UK chancellor puts finger in air, promises 15 million full fibre connections by 2025

Re: So...

Not absolutely necessarily, I think.

My personal situation is that I have moved to a rural village where there is next to nothing - just a communal WiFi tower that works when it damn well pleases. We are, however, going to get FTTH come next August and no, it's not a pipe dream. it's really happening.

Right now, Orange is laying the fibers and will control the backbone, but other operators are allowed to come in and manage the last mile. There are two available right now, one is obviously Orange, and the other is a local telecoms company that already manages connections elsewhere in the region. There may be more operators signing on shortly - or not.

In any case, if I were absolutely anti-Orange, I have a choice. I don't have to go to Orange to use that connection.

YMMV

Kids and the web latest: 'Won't somebody please think of the children!' US Congresscritters plead

Re: children have no feasible way of understanding the consequences of handing over their data

Visibly quite a lot of adults lack that ability as well - as soon as they connect to Facebook.

Uber jams Arizona robo-car project into reverse gear after deadly smash

Uber is moving, yes, but as far is the Arizona employees are concerned, unless they all move to Pittsburgh, it's shutting down.

IPv6 growth is slowing and no one knows why. Let's see if El Reg can address what's going on

Re: Well with IPv6 you can have "vanity addresses"

Oh great. We have to go through all this shit for the sake of having vanity addresses ?

Now I'm pissed off.

Summoners of web tsunamis have moved to layer 7, says Cloudflare

Unless ctrl-v is blocked by the password-input UI. Then you just have to type normally again.

Not common, but I have seen it happen to me.