Posts by Pascal Monett

Not one, but 20,000 black holes hiding in Milky Way's heart

Re: Interesting

Glad to finally find a brother mind watching SciShow.

Have an upvote and keep spreading the word.

Commonwealth Games brochure declares that England is now in Africa

"We found out about it maybe 10 days ago"

So, what you're saying is that your Quality Control is inexistant, you have no one in your team that gives a flying one, and you get your essential news about what happens on CNN ?

Sounds like your working environment is very nice. I'll take the couch over there, and a bottle of Jack's, thanks.

Do(ug)h! Half-baked security at Panera Bread spills customer data

Floury words indeed

And they only appear after a flaw has been publicised, meaning that before the public knowledge, they couldn't have cared less.

If you want us to believe you take data security seriously, sitting on a vuln for 8 months is not the right signal to send.

Hold the phone: Mystery fake cell towers spotted slurping comms around Washington DC

I'm getting pretty meh about Trump news myself, but I think you're missing the point here. If some unknown entity is operating unregistered cell towers in the capital of the US, then that is important news because you should be asking yourself if there are any in London, just as I am now wondering if there are any in Paris, and how to find out.

Billion-dollar investor tells Facebook: Just Zuck off, already!

But of course the farmer cares . . right up to the slaughterhouse, that is.

Facebook want us to believe banning Putin's troll army safeguards Russian democracy

Re: "a part of the Ukraine where everyone spoke Russian in the first place anyway"

Are you seriously saying that since everyone spoke Russian it's no big deal that Russia annexed that part of Ukraine ?

You do realize that, with that argument, you've just justified Hitler annexing Austria and Poland ?

Why not have Mexico annex southern California, Nevada and a large part of Texas then ? After all, plenty of people speaking Mexican down there.

And claiming that some other countries are "worse" does not justify leaving Russia alone. That's like saying that a rapist should be let go because there are murderers on the loose.

Sorry, but I cannot accept your level of bias for Putin.

Mozilla rejects your reality and substitutes its own … browser for VR and AR goggles

Re: "We largely surf in 2D, but I can see no particular reason it has to be so"

Well, there's the fact that words are kind of difficult to read if they are not presented in a 2D fashion that we can recognize, and there's still a lot more words on the Internet than there are videos. Making them 3D by adding depth to the characters is nice, but not at all useful.

That said, I would also like to see a true 3D interface that does something other than just hovering a 2D interface "in space".

Indian comms satellite gives boffins back home the silent treatment

Re: Failed satellite launches are a normal thing in the satellite industry.

Except that the launch itself went fine, it's the satellite that's on the blink. I don't think they insure that.

What they generally insure is if the launcher goes boom and the satellite is lost in the blast. That didn't happen, so no insurance.

Which? leads decrepit email service behind barn, single shot rings out over valley

Wait a minute

"an IT helpdesk for users is estimated at up to £15,000 a year"

Do you mean to tell me that there is someone willing to do helldesk for less than 15k a year ?

Need a needle in an artery? Move over, doc, there's an app for that

"our study highlights the potential for smartphone-based diagnostics"

Congratulations on finding yet another excuse to shove those abominations into another aspect of our private lives, you pricks.

Now, where's my industrial-strength can of RAID when I need it ?

Hooo boy, Commvault, your activist investor is not a happy chappy

the "activist investor"

Every single time I have read about that type of entity makes me feel like I'm reading about a particularly virulent parasite.

The "activist investor" appears to exist solely to insert itself in an otherwise healthy company and, when it has enough legal influence, to wreak havoc and mayhem to get the company to do what it wants, ie more dividends.

Well, dear "activist investors", why don't you go set up your own manufacture with your own product and see how that goes.

Oh, but you can't do that. You don't have the brains to actually create something. Swooping in and perverting other people's creations is a lot easier, isn't it ?

Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

Cloud providers can now point to a clear obligation

to hand over your data as soon as the NSA twitches.

Seems to me that that is as fine a beacon as any lighthouse in a storm. Keep your data away from US companies, period.

Badmins: Magento shops brute-forced to scrape card deets and install cryptominers

"Not changing the default credentials" . .

. . means you shouldn't have it in the first place.

Harsh, I know, but you set up something to deal with other people's money, so the least you can do is ask around to find out what are the risks and how to mitigate them. Even if it's just contacting support, or Googling the product. Do something for Pete's sake.

Grindr: Yeah, we shared your HIV status info with other companies – but we didn't charge them!

"It’s important to remember that Grindr is a public forum,"

It's important to remember that you can trust no website with details on your personal life. Even if the site you use seems correct, that will only last until the next PHB has a brainstorm and decides to profit from your data.

Expect it to happen, and choose wisely what you publish out there. Even if it is private data registered on a non-public page that the site pinky swears to never, ever reveal - don't trust them.

Tor ‘sunsets’ secure Messenger that never exited beta

"perhaps such cross-platform tools just aren’t needed any more"

I beg to differ. Cross-platform mail security is indispensable, or, at least the ability to send mail securely from any platform to any other platform is.

One must not consider that, because Facebook users might mostly write to other Facebook users, it is not important for them to be able to write and/or receive secure mail to/from other platforms.

Because the alternative is that, to send secure mail, you'd have to be on FB and send to a user on FB.

And having Zuckerberg in charge of secure mail just cannot be acceptable.

Any social media accounts to declare? US wants travelers to tell

It is fundamentally un-American

Yup, but it is very Trump.

Facebook exec extracts foot from mouth: We didn't really mean growth matters more than human life

"I didn't agree with it even when I wrote it"

Um, sorry but no, you cannot use that as an excuse. Nobody ever writes something they disagree with unless they are working for the President or a candidate to the presidency. Even then, if you really disagree, you're supposed to resign your position.

While I am writing something, if I disagree with myself then I correct what I'm writing. When I've posted, I am 100% certain that I wrote what I wanted to say. I fail to see how one can disagree with what one wrote but go ahead and post it anyway. It just never happens.

Oh sure, 12 minutes later I might be slapping my forehead and calling myself names for posting whatever it was I posted, but when I wrote it, I was happy with it.

Magic Leap ships headsets at last, but you'll need a safe

Not so fast

It is no more real than it was before. There are already people who have reportedly tried the thing and gushed about how wonderful the experience was, but are not allowed to say anything specific.

All we're getting now is notice that there will be more people who might be able to say they tried it, but won't be allowed to talk about it.

Given the issues outlined in this article, we're nowhere nearer to seeing this tech on store shelves, so I don't see what has really changed.

Six months on, and let's check in on those 'stuttering' Windows 10 PCs. Yep, still stuttering

So what you're saying is that you never managed to get X Windows working ?

Also, you've never installed Linux in the last 15 years or so, because it's been at least that long that X Windows works automatically from install, no need to go fiddle with the config file.

Re: "We were promised Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever"

It will be.

Because now there is actual pressure to move to Linux.

And Microsoft is doing practically everything it can to increase that pressure.

"Windows is not - and never has been - a gaming platform"

Windows is historically the largest gaming platform that has ever been.

It still is, actually, in hours played and amount of hardware.

Mobile phones are catching up, but you cannot compare a 5-minute session of Angry Birds to an hour-long multiplayer Call of Duty marathon (with teabagging).

The best outsourcers fire themselves

More money to staff is put on the Company Payroll sheet, and that is a nuisance to keep up when you are facing shareholders who want a better ROI.

Outsourcing firms are put on Expenses, which are Tax Deductable and therefor more palatable because they save money - as far as shareholders are concerned.

Because shareholders these days have about as much commitment to the future of the company they invest in as a pimp has commitment to the well-being of the girls he manages - ie a week's worth.

Re: " the final decision is largely on who bid the lowest"

That is not always the case.

I have personally experienced putting in a bid that I knew was lower than that of a very well-known (and expensive) IT Consulting outfit, and I lost to them despite the fact that I was less expensive.

I fully expect the reason to be that I was invited to bid in order to lower the price of that firm.

This happened twice. The third time I was invited to bid, I refused to participate. The company representative pressed me to explain, and I answered "I don't see the use of wasting two days of my time on drawing up a proposal, since you're only going to go with <redacted> anyway".

The conversation ended pretty quickly after that, and I have not been invited to bid since.

It would totally help, EU told, if data we held on migrants was accurate

"National authorities and experts attach a high degree of credibility to biometric data..."

And I still wait to hear what the plan is when that data is compromised.

You can change a password, you can't change your fingers.

As long as there is nothing on how to treat compromised biometric data, I don't want it used.

Cambridge Analytica's daddy biz had 'routine access' to UK secrets

Indeed

It may be that this case is a bit borderline, but the real question is whether or not one should accept that presidential candidates should have the right to analyse and profile citizen's beliefs in the first place. The means to do so come second.

Personally, I think a candidate should run on what he thinks, not on what he thinks people would like him to think.

But that's just me.

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin

Re: "We didn't have any control when we were a member"

Patently wrong : you had as much control as any other member of the EU.

It's called sharing. I understand that it's a concept that can be a tad difficult to grasp, but normally that issue is handled in PreSchool.

Why you shouldn't trust a stranger's VPN: Plenty leak your IP addresses

If I got this correctly

It's not the VPN that is leaking info if I have to lock down my browser to prevent it.

When I started reading this article, I was under the impression that someone could use the weakness to get my IP address. That is not the case.

Apparently, someone can hijack my browser with the proper script and then get my true IP address.

So it's a browser issue, and for that, there's NoScript (or whatever js-blocker you prefer). Or it's a PEBCAK issue, and the solution for that is ye ol' cattle prod to teach not to bloody click on something just because it's a link.

In other words, this article is a tad misleading, at least for me.

Donald Trump jumps on anti-tech bandwagon, gets everything wrong

Re: "supports Trump's arguments that the media is biased against him"

Well duh. After 12 solid months of pointing out his many, many mistakes, calling him out on it and being brushed aside or lied to, I say we and the press are perfectly justified in having a bias against him because he is literally incapable of telling the truth.

Most of the time he is barely able to talk about what he is supposed to talk about, and veers off on tangents that are starting to become perpendicular.

Yes, there is a bias against him, and he is the only person responsible for it. Had he started as President by acting like one, speaking responsibly and making decisions based on facts, I'm sure he would have been given a chance. In fact, I'm pretty sure the press was initially totally ready to listen to him as his position required. But Trump thinks of his position as a clown's act for the gallery. He mocked "being Presidential" as if it were ridiculous. And he's the one who started the whole "fake news" thing.

So yeah, now the press is biased. Big surprise, and just one more point in a sea of low points for this orange buffoon who makes a mockery of intelligence, respectability and Democracy in one brain-farting package.

Mueller, for God's sake wrap up your investigation and get this failure of a human being thrown out.

Re: "Can you still be President if you're in the pen?"

I think it's the other way around : you can't be in the pen if you're still President.

Meaning : to put the President in the pen, you first have to de-President him, in other words : impeachment.

$0.75 – about how much Cambridge Analytica paid per voter in bid to micro-target their minds, internal docs reveal

Um, shouldn't that be filed under 'collusion' as well ?

Trump is under fire for talking with Russia during the campaign, but isn't this the same (from the US point of view) ?

I mean sure, US-UK, allies 'til the end of the world, of course, but still. The UK is a foreign country, and I don't know that you can collude with allies to win an election any better than with . . non-allies.

Did the FBI engineer its iPhone encryption court showdown with Apple to force a precedent? Yes and no, say DoJ auditors

Re: When did the concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' become 'guilty unless proven innocent'?

Well that happened at the latest when Gitmo was established and the US condoned waterboarding suspected terrorists for information.

Might have happened before that, though, the details are a bit hazy given that most of them are classified.

By the time those details are released, History will have been rewritten anyway, so the question becomes useless.

Boffins stalk house-hunting bees, find colony behaves kind of like a human brain

Yeah, but that funding has already been spent.

Privacy activists to UK plod: Wanna slurp folks' phone records? Come back with a warrant

turned devices into "a pocket surveillance tool"

Oh I don't know about that.

Let me ask Siri . . .

Yes, Emergency Service Network will be late and cost more - UK perm sec

Re: I can't remember

Yeah, the real scoop would be a list of UK Gov IT projects that are on time and on budget.

I guess we could have one - on April 1st.

Internet of insecure Things: Software still riddled with security holes

That is, unfortunately, not a joke. It's the truth.

You'll like this: Facebook probed by US watchdog amid privacy storm

"This is not the case"

So, The Zuck is trying to pull a Trump ? Fake news then ? Bollocks.

That's the problem with "dumb fucks", my boy. One day, they wake up.

FCC boss to block 'national security risk' companies (cough, Huawei, ZTE) from US's $8.5bn broadband pot

You may be right, but this is the US worrying about the US. EVERY country can go shaft itself, as per normal US Foreign Policy.

Google lobbies hard to derail new US privacy laws – using dodgy stats

Socially speaking, we are technological infants

Society is still learning and adpting to the Internet and its ramifications, so it is normal that tech companies get a head start in a given direction before society catches up and decides what it needs to do.

But that issue aside, the very basic problem about the US is that companies have the right to lobby. As long as that situation endures, The People will always be fighting an uphill battle for their rights.

How do you make those darn code monkeys do what you want? Just give 'em a little nudge

Re: Another DevOps article

Which, again, manages to rediscover things IT professionals knew 20 years ago.

I'm beginning to believe everything DevOps is just a dictionary renewal exercise for management.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

Re: the post-Brexit relationship

It's easy to find out how that will go : just look at any divorce where the guy walks out on the faithful woman.

First, there will be the shouting about how unfair it all is, with the EU reminding the UK that it's its own fault (current step in progress).

Then there will be petty revenge and pathetic pleas to "let me in just this one time", which will be denied (as they should be).

Over time, there will come the chilling realization that you're on your own now, deal with it.

Whether that realization will come under a bridge with a bottle, or in a new appartment - well, time will tell.

India: Yeah, we would like to 3D-print igloos on the Moon

Re: I've yet to see anything useful come out of nuclear weapons and xenophobia.

Well there is at least one useful thing that came from nuclear weapons : an understanding of meteorite impacts.

It was the study of the first nuclear crater that revealed many common points with what are now called impact craters.

So that's one good thing in a literal sea of horrific consequences. Was it worth it ? I don't know.

I do, however, know that xenophobia has never done any good anywhere at any time.

Uber's disturbing fatal self-driving car crash, a new common sense challenge for AI, and Facebook's evil algorithms

That video has been doctored

I highly doubt that any recent vehicle has such abysmal lighting abilities and I doubt even more that it would be allowed on the road like that.

I think there are way too many shadows on that video and I will not be surprised when analysis shows that the video is a cover-up exercise.

This is Uber we're talking about. It would be right in their ballpark.

Facebook's inflection point: Now everyone knows this greedy mass surveillance operation for what it is

Re: "Dropping FB is suddenly becoming trendy. They may just need the push to join the trend."

The only thing trending is celebrities talking about doing it, or even doing it in some cases. Doesn't matter.

Joe User is not going to frop FB because there is nothing to replace it. MySpace is gone, Yahoo! is dead, there is nothing even in sight of challenging FB on functionality, forget replacing it. Even Google dropped its foray into the arena, despite hipster support that didn't really last all that long.

So no, leaving FB is not going to trend because the mindless idiots have nowhere else to post all the pics of their kids/family/spouse/latest purchase and pretend to be intellectual while posting duckface pics.

Mozilla pulls ads from Facebook after spat over privacy controls

Hitting where it hurts

It's nice to see that some parts of CorporateLand are not completely borgified by the money god, because if there is one thing that has a chance of making a company change, it's hitting it in the bottom line.

Delta and others dropping NRA support was an enormous surprise to me, and now Mozilla and others are not spending ad money on FaceBook.

I feel a slight temperature drop Down Below. Somebody just might be in need of a sweater.

That, or I have a fever and I don't know it.

US watchdog: Scam scammers scamming scammed in scam scam

"The thing to know is that you cannot apply for a refund by email."

Wrong. The thing to know is that you should never, ever trust anything coming into your Inbox without checking first.

Your bank sends you a mail and a link to some great opportunity ? Phone your banker and ask why in hell is he sending you spam. If the bank really did send you that mail, he'll be able to justify it.

You get a note telling you that your PayPal account has been suspended and use this link to get it reinstated ? Log onto your account yourself and check it out - you already have the link, don't you ?

I'm beginning to think that our society is not going to die because zombies, or aliens, or anything awesome like that. No, it'll die of convenience.

That long-awaited Mark Zuckerberg response: Everything's fine! Mostly fixed! Facebook's great! All good in the hoodie!

He didn't have time to get laid in college ; he was too busy stealing other people's code to make FaceBook.

Addicts of Facebook and pals are easy prey for manipulative scumbags – thanks to tech giants' 'extraordinary reach'

Re: bandwagon

It's not pathetic, it's savvy opportunity-grasping.

The opportunity of not risking much by speaking up on a subject everyone recognizes, minus the risk of triggering an unknown opinion mine. If you know how to speak in public without tripping over your own feet, it's hard not to gather some public brownie points.

Might need to re-watch House Of Cards, there.

While you still can, anyway.

Re: "Microsoft owns LinkedIn which is the go to place for your career."

Um, if you're in Marketing, sure.

For the rest of us, I'm a bit in doubt of the efficiency of LinkedIn to find someone a job.

Pretty sure that FaceBook could help in that endeavor, actually.

I scrapped my LinkedIn account anyway. Never found it useful and, when MS slurped it up, well that was that.

No, Sierra Leone did not just run the world's first 'blockchain election'

More blockchain nonsense

First it was touted as guaranteeing anonymity, but that was shot to pieces.

Now it's being touted as secure, but if that were the case then BitCoin Exchanges could not possibly be the hotbed of fraud and theft that they currently are, so that argument goes down the drain as well.

I wonder what blockchain really is all that good for. A distributed ledger ? So what ? It only means that the more people use it, the more heavy it gets, thus the more difficult to use.

It's kind of self-defeating, that way.

US govt's final bid to extradite Lauri Love kicked into touch

@ Florida1920

"the grounding of his plane was a violation of international law"

So basically you acknowledge that I am right about the law.

And I acknowledge that it is entirely possible that the US totally flouts international law when it suits itself to. Which we all know already.

My point is, the law does not acknowledge the right of any country to have anyone arrested in another country simply on request.

Your example does not contradict that.