Posts by Pascal Monett

Breaking up is hard to do: Airbus, new bae Google and clinging on to Microsoft's 'solutions'

"Cloud is highly secure.."

But not secure enough for national-security-sensitive data.

So it's not secure.

Brain, meet wall.

Facebook confirms Cambridge Analytica harvested profile data

"Facebook is peeved"

Because somebody else monetized it's data, and it wasn't Facebook !

Nest reveals the first truly connected home

Re: Soo...

Totally agree. I already have no need to punch noisy keypads, or fiddle with keys, and I don't need my phone. I have one encrypted keyfob to open the garage door and, while the door is opening, I have the encrypted thingamabob to shut down the alarm. Nice, clean, no panick and I do it whilst sitting in the car, so no sweat either.

Oh and, by the way, my alarm keypad has never made a sound since I had the first one installed back in 1998.

What else do I not have ? I don't have an unknown hack opening my house to God only knows who; I don't have the need to sweat about what happens to my lock if the power shuts down 5 minutes after I leave for a 3-day trip and, most importantly, I don't have Google spying on my every action in my own house.

So I'll happily leave this "wonderful" new technology to all the people who think their lives will be better with it, but don't actually need it. And I will also be happy for the physically handicapped who will likely welcome a home system that they can easily control from one point, even if it means someone else might be able to as well.

Birmingham UK to Uber: Want a new licence? Tell us about your operating model

There are a great number of examples where "it would have leaked out eventually one way or another" failed to be an important argument when the decision of covering up the blunder was made.

Because, generally speaking, multinational companies are not very quick in admitting any failure whatsoever.

Maybe the fact that an Uber representative did admit it is a sign of the times.

Maybe.

It would be refreshing to know that those high-level CEOs are finally aware that the Internet is a place where failure is always exposed.

Crooks opt for Monero as crypto of choice to launder ill-gotten gains

Minecraft ?

How on God's green Earth are they using Minecraft to launder money ? Is there some wacky diamond trade that is a front for that ? Or do they actually have a dedicated private Minecraft server where they meet and discuss things ?

I just don't get it. Minecraft has no in-game economy, there is no pseudocurrency value attached to a wooden axe vs a stone axe. The only "economy" is the villagers, and they demand a specific item in a specific quantity to exchange for a specific item - and that is independant of the number of gamers on the server.

Tacking a currency of any kind onto that is a totally arbitrary thing.

World of Warcraft is totally different because you gather gold as currency with which you can purchase in-game items. Cue the gold farmers and the international market for real currency against WoW gold. Minecraft has gold, but no currency. You gather gold because it is a component of things you might want to build, not for any in-game value of it.

On top of that, there is no international market available because Minecraft servers have no connnection between them, so there is no possibility of, say, "farming" (wrong term, I know) gold on a server in the US and sending that gold to another server. Each server is in its own universe, unlike WoW.

I'd really like an explanation on how they made that work for them.

Whois? More like WHOWAS: Domain database on verge of collapse over EU privacy

Well duh

In other words, ICANN made bad decisions based on incomplete information and failed to explain how or why it arrived at those decisions.

In other words, business as usual at ICANN.

Brit retailer Currys PC World says sorry for Know How scam

I'm pretty sure that little oik didn't have the authority to knock 15% off the sales price.

After all, he was just a little oik, blindly repeating his cue card data like he is paid to.

The days you could count on salespeople knowing what they're talking about is over. The only thing they know is that if they don't sell enough stock by next Tuesday, they're fired.

Who knew? Fabric access NVMe arrays can work with Spectrum Scale

"lossless Mellanox Ethernet"

I didn't know regular Ethernet was lossy. Do I need gold-plated cables as well ?

We're Putin our foot down! DHS, FBI blame Russia for ongoing infrastructure hacks

Re: Don't worry, be happy!

Well, it's Friday, so he's on his way to his golf club now.

But he'll be right on it on Monday. Afternoon. After watching his toons all morning.

Hate to add to the wanky jargon – but your digital transformation is actually a bolt-on

"the latter expecting overnight change .."

That's already a reality. Business has no idea that what it asks may be complicated and, worse, when you give an evaluation of who long it will take, they invariably act like you were sitting in you office with nothing to do, so you can start now and be done in exactly that amount of time.

As if all the rest of the things they asked you to regularly do has been magically erased from your schedule.

I cannot count the times I have been asked to do something, answered "it should take about two and half hours" and heard in response : "great, it'll be done by noon then, right ?". And when I explain that no, I don't have time to drop everything and do this new project right away now, about half the time the other guy is pissed off at me.

Google to 'forget me' man: Have you forgotten what you said earlier?

Re: Journalists in court

Yup. Another 50 years like this and Demolition Man will be considered an insightful foreshadowing of our future society.

Uber hopes to butter up Brit transport chiefs with lots of lovely data

"ahead of licensing decision"

Hmm. Seems like Uber is getting a bit anxious and wants to please. Might be fearing a failure in appeal.

After repeated warnings Facebook bans Britain First for 'inciting hatred'

"they branded Muslims as paedophiles and rapists"

Well, looking at their mugs on Google Images, I'd say it takes one to know one.

Bad blood: Theranos CEO charged with massive fraud

Re: the only penalty is 'you can't do that again for 10 years'

Um, no. She is also stripped of "most" of her shares - although that is probably not really important as her shares are worth less than peanuts.

The really important thing is that she won't be able to negociate another golden parachute before 10 years from now. Do you really think anyone will be interested ?

Honestly, they might as well have put her on the electric chair. Her days as a high-flyer are over.

Boffins build 'body-on-a-chip' for drugs tests

"better prediction of human responses at lower financial and ethical costs"

Yes, because no one can hear a cell scream.

I don't like animal tests either, but I like dying a lot less, so I welcome any tech that will allow Humanity to develop new and better treatments whilst not submitting small animals to Mengele-style treatments.

Developers dread Visual Basic 6, IBM Db2, SharePoint - survey

VB6 support will only disappear the day Microsoft is no longer present in banks and Fortune 1000 companies.

The year 2018 is still young, but I am sure that, just like in 2017, I will be called upon to teach bank personnel how to code in VBA.

You guess how many years that is going to have an impact.

Patch LOSE-day: Microsoft secures servers of the world. By disconnecting them

It's a feature !

Come on, this is Microsoft we're talking about.

By the way, Sikorsky78, all the admins who wait a day are thankful for your willingness to debug the patches. Way to go to support the community !

Ex-Equifax exec charged with insider trading after bagging 1 MEEELLION dollars in stock sale

What a moron

So he got himself a million bucks and did not immediately transfer the money to some extradition-free tropical paradise ?

Did he never watch any crime series ?

Sorry bud, but if you know your transaction is going to raise a red flag, and you definitely should have known, you don't stick around to watch the fallout.

Anyhow, I'm glad you're going to have time to reflect on how wrong you were when you though that your shiny new million bucks was going to go totally unnoticed.

Stephen Hawking dies, aged 76

@ Professor Clifton Shallot

Don't waste your time looking for mediocrity, it will find you soon enough.

Unfortunately, the world has now lost a brilliant mind, the light of which sent the darkness of ignorance scurrying away like cockroaches.

We will have to wait a long time before another such light will shine, and Humanity will be poorer in the mean time.

Now I'm just going to go curl up in a ball in a dark room.

China ALTERED its public vuln database to conceal spy agency tinkering – research

Re: "the US is doing it better"

Yeah, right up to the point where the NSA gets hacked and its hoard escapes into the hands of Russian hackers.

CEO of smartmobe outfit Phantom Secure cuffed after cocaine sting, boast of murder-by-GPS

Indeed. We're not talking about VHS home-taping here, we're talking about a phone you can only get if you're in touch with a proven criminal for whom a 6-month subscription costing at leasy $3K is worth it.

These are not your innocent TOR users mixed in with criminal elements, anyone can use TOR. To use this phone, you have to start by knowing, and being known by, a criminal.

So let's not start banging the drum of Individual Freedom just right now, okay ?

Windows Mixed Reality: Windows Mobile deja vu?

They're still in business because their bank account is the size of Texas, and it will take quite a while before that changes, however many blunders Microsoft makes.

Unless, of course, SatNad decides to repeatedly plonk a few dozen billion here and there to buy up promising tech before gutting it. That would likely hasten the process.

But it will still take time. A long time.

Yahoo! Can't! Toss! Hacking! Lawsuit!

I do hope this will go through

Between HP advertising a laptop with Internet access and then removing the access, and countless companies promising secure email and not delivering, I hope this trial will reach judgement and will find that a promise made by a company is BINDING, because I am sick and tired of hearing of companies getting out of plain-text promises simply because they suppose nobody should actually believe them.

Look, I understand that high-level, highly paid executives need to lie all the time, but when you advertise something it is high time that we get back to the days when you're supposed to deliver on your promises.

Yahoo! is dog meat anyway, might as well make an example out of it.

Air gapping PCs won't stop data sharing thanks to sneaky speakers

"air gapping sensitivite computer systems less secure"

Okay, let's envision the scenario :

Sensitive computers, accessing and containing essential company information, used by the few individuals accredited by the company to have access to and manage that information. And you want me to think that those people are going to have the speakers working on those sensitive machines ? Because obviously what they want to do is listen to music all day long. Or some other nonsense explanation.

Look, either we're talking about a mom & pop operation at which point nobody gives a rat's ass what info is on the computer, or we're talking about a company that has dozens of employees in open-space offices all tasked with seperate things. You know what happens in open-space offices ? People do not allow their computer to make sounds. They mute them because there's already enough noise what with the phone calls, the colleagues dropping by to talk and/or barging in because operational issue, not to mention the meeting down the hall with fifteen participants, all standing in the middle of a hallway.

In that kind of environment, if you want some music it is to drown out all the rest of the noise and you're going to do it with a portable music player and earphones, none of which will be attached to the "sensitive" computer.

Kind of reminds me of the spying photocopier drone story, where a drone was theoretically capable of gathering data from a photocopier - at the condition that there was no obstacle between the drone and the photocopier, that everybody at that level was drunk/stoned enough to be oblivious to the drone and that the wind was not strong enough to blow said drone away however briefly.

Sure, in your theoretical dream world, a sensitive computer could be hacked via its speakers. Just like one day you might finally get laid. Theoretically.

Millionaire-backed science fiction church to launch Scientology TV network

Re: "Islam is the only sect"

WRONG.

Go back and relearn what a sect is.

It is not because some misguided islamic extremists have done some YouTube beheading that you should lump all followers of Islam in the same boat.

Scientology is a sect. Jehova's Witnesses is a sect. Any pseudo-religion that attempts to take your money and estrange you from your family is a sect. Any "religion" whose teachings you have to pay to learn is definitely a sect and something to be avoided.

Islam is most definitely NOT a sect. Islam, Judaism and Christianism all hold to the Old Testament. They have that in common.

Now if you want to take only the extremist side of things, you don't need to go as far as Islam. Just visit your nearest abortion clinic and watch the so-called Christians screaming bloody murder threats at the people working there.

Elon Musk invents bus stop, waits for applause, internet LOLs

"it's a [..] electric bus that automatically switches between tunnels and lifts"

I would really like to see such a system IRL, if only to see how long Musk can stand the lift time and how quickly he will jump back into his serial-killer-free helicopter to get to his destination.

Really, Musk, "inventing" a mass-transit system that costs billions more than the existing one, what a brilliant idea. And a tunneling system that is 14 times faster, really ? What does it tunnel with, nuclear-powered lasers ?

Oh well, it's Monday. Bound to be stupid stuff happening on a Monday.

Are you Falcon sure, Elon? Musk vows Big Rocket will go up 2019

Spring is coming, the windbags are starting to blow

Okay, Mr Musk, I know that billionaires have to be outrageously upbeat in everything they say, but you are really pushing things.

The Saturn V already had a payload of 140 metric tons. If you're doubling the thrust and can only add 10 metric tons to that, then I don't see that you're doing all that good.

As for self-driving cars, you're just spouting nonsense. None of them are certified for public use yet, so your percentage is meaningless. In 35 years of driving with over 1.5 million km under my wheels I have never been responsible for an accident, nor have I ever so much as brushed another human with my car. How can you be 200% safer than that ?

Finally, we don't have AI and we won't have that for many decades yet. What we have is Machine Learning, the modern term and spiritual successor to the Expert Systems of yore. I did the Google course on ML and it's all about statistics. Statistics do not Intelligence create, and none of those ML machines can do anything else than that for which they have been configured.

So cool it with the AI rhetoric - you're waay ahead of your time on that one.

UK digi minister Hancock suggests Facebook and pals give your kids a time-out

Re: At least though he is 'thinking of the children (TM)'

And the road to Hell is paved with good intentions . . .

Suspicious cert-sellers give badware a good name for just a few thousand bucks

Re: Or is it theatre?

You might have hit upon something there . . .

Intel ponders Broadcom buy as Qualcomm's exec chair steps away

No architecture is "perfect". The x86 architecture is heavily tied to the PC platform, and that is just not the future anymore. PCs are on the way out, web computing on tablets or phones is in.

Intel wants to make money first. I'm sure that Intel will scrap x86 the day it has to.

"they're morphing into a slow, lazy incumbent, more interested in skewing the market to their advantage and buying other people to eliminate threats, rather than leading by innovation"

Uh, I thought that was done already.

Tim Berners-Lee says regulation of the web may be needed

I have to agree with you, but for one thing : although Google is indeed almost unavoidable, nobody forces anyone to go on FaceBook or Twitter.

I avoid social media like the plague, so I am not subject to any "weaponization" of my Internet experience. Plus I have decades of experience in sorting the spam from legit mails in my Inbox, and I can smell an Internet scam mail from miles away.

Facebook and Twitter are useful to me though, because now all the idiots are over there, so I get a lot less spam. Give it a while, people will tire of it.

As for the next billion users, most of them will not be English speakers, nor will they even be of Western culture. I do not think Facebook or Twitter will be able to brainwash them. On the other hand, they'll certainly have their own versions available, and will have to learn to deal with it in their own way.

Being a global platform does not mean everyone acts the same. Facebook will never have the same importance to a Chinese or an Indian than it does for an American.

Screw everything! French swingers campsite up for sale, owners 'tired'

Lyon a shithole ?

I don't know what part of Lyon you spend your time in, but it is obviously not the right part. Or it's been a while since you went there.

I visited Lyon last year and I much prefer it to Paris. Great architecture, nice people, proper living standards, free bus transport, and generally much cleaner.

I felt at ease in Lyon, which is much more than I can say for Paris.

And I'm French.

Auto manufacturers are asleep at the wheel when it comes to security

It could have been so simple

Entertainment network with USB port to plug in any phone, linked to speakers and everything Internet-facing on its own network. Your in-car webcam has been hacked ? No problem, that's all that is accessible. Just don't shag in the car and you'll be fine (with a bit of black tape on the webcam camera, of course).

Car CAN bus totally seperate, with high-level fob key ciphering to open doors and start engine, and under-the-hood/bonnet USB port for maintenance. Unhackable unless you get physical access (like most non-computer things these days).

Why, why, WHY did they throw everything on the same bus ?

Well, in the end, it doesn't matter. A few hundred deaths and a raft of class-action lawsuits will certainly sort the issue out.

Unfortunately, it seems that that is what it is going to take.

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli to miss 2024 Paris Olympics

Unfortunately, that is not news.

Mum? Dad? Can I have a 3D XPoint disk for my birthday?

@ Jack of Shadows

I've been lucky with my two OCZ's as well. Bought in 2011, right before the company lost wind, I feared the worst, but they're still chugging away, reliable as ever.

Okay, I have all my computer equipment on a UPS with current smoothing (or whatever that tech is called). That may count for something.

Then again, I've seen colleagues with their SSD laptops die suddenly in the span of ten minutes, so maybe I'll look into buying some replacements soon, just in case.

Edit : just checked, can't find any OCZ to buy anymore - so that's one problem gone.

The Java release train is moving faster, but will developers be derailed?

This is the Internet. What it was made for is irrelevant.

WE SHALL MAKE IT WORK AS WE SEE FIT !

Will the defendant please rise? Utah State Bar hunts for sender of topless email

Re: "We used to think you English were the prude ones"

I think you need to watch this.

Bots don't spread fake news on Twitter, people do, say MIT eggheads

"the top 1 per cent of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000"

Well duh. It's hardly new : 20 years ago people were forwarding mails promising that Microsoft would give money to whomever sent it to 20 people (or however many).

I have spent quite a bit of time trying to respond and educate the people sending me the latest fraud mail of the day - because many of those were people I personally knew. Some of them do not speak to me anymore; apparently I dared challenge their worldview and they did not accept that. I do not miss them.

But it would seem that there are precious few people who do even the most basic checks when they get something that appears to be "insider news". They do not check that the originator is from the same domain they claim to represent, they do not check that any names or places mentioned actually exist, they do not check, period. They read, accept, forward and move on, feeling good about themselves when they have only just participated in making the world more stupid.

The silver lining on this dark cloud of dispair is that, sometimes, someone actually accepts to be educated and understand how simple it is to control the verisimilitude of a new post.

Will the stock market drop Dropbox like it's hot? Numbers say no

Better because your customers pay more ?

Okay Box, you're taking the high road and looking down on the riff-raff. Nice clean air where you are, I guess. Unfortunately, targetting Fortune 500 companies means you're limiting your market penetration to a few million max - and you don't have them all.

DropBox may only be getting $100 per paying customer, but DropBox's market is the entire Internet.

Let's make a quick calculation : 2% of a billion users is 20 million - and that's already a heck of a lot more users than there are licenses to get from Fortune 500 companies.

Fortune 500 companies also have a nasty habit of being very demanding for the money they pay - and each Fortune company has its own demands. That's going to be taxing on your Dev department as well.

As far as I see it, Box, you're going to be eating your words soon enough.

British military spends more on computers than weapons and ammo

"where wars of the 21st century will really be fought"

Well I think there's a quick and cheap defense if a cyber war is started : unplug the sea links.

Done.

Who do I send my million dollar research invoice to ?

Too many bricks in the wall? Lego slashes inventory

Re: Lego...

I am personally quite unhappy with what Lego has become.

I got a medieval castle when I was 13. All the walls and towers and even the secret door where made of basic Lego bricks, all reusable in thousands of ways.

Last XMas my godson got a Saturn V rocket. He spent two days putting it together, but all I could see was "and then what ?".

I do not see any reuseability in those specialized, much too complicated pieces. Okay, you get a nice-looking spaceship, but that's all you get.

It's a lie. All og Lego is now a lie. Once upon a time it was about imagination, now it's just about cashing in.

Sorry, Lego, looks like you're just nostalgia now. I won't be sorry to see you go if you don't change your ways.

April Fool: FCC finally bothers with Puerto Rico as chairman visits

Re: No, Mary, it's not Paij's fault

"the FCC does not manage telecommunications on the island of PR"

Okay, lets admit that. If that is the case, then why the big show and tell about some nonexistent money ?

If Pai has nothing to do with the problem, he has no reason to fund its resolution.

I think you need to recheck your facts.

HPE to cut technician jobs as field work outsourced to Unisys

Nice to know for next time some HPE marketer tries to phone me

I'll just answer : "No thanks, I have no intention of working with Unisys".

Sacked saleswoman told to pay Intel £45k after losing discrim case

I feel you are vindicated as well

It's always difficult to know exactly what happened in such cases. Maybe there actually was some sort of discrimination, but one thing feels certain : she's not being objective about it.

So he didn't answer her emails. That in itself is not proof of discrimination. After reading this article, I have the distinct feeling that the bias is on her part, given that she barely recognizes attempts to be balanced and immediately follows by the base statement "but I know it isn't because of what I saw", but without bringing any facts to the table.

In short, she may have been right to feel slighted, but acting like a harpy about it does not make her case.

I think the judge was right on this.

Great, we're going to get DevOps-ed. So, 15 years of planning processes – for the bin?

Re: "no one portion of the system is big enough to break anything"

Sure. Go say that to Azure or AWS guys who've repeatedly seen entire continents go TITSUP because of some lone router change or command feedback issue.

DevOps to me seems like a pit where you throw all the tools, throw in the developers, have the band start up some shrieking version of Hells Bells, and hope for the best in the frenetic activity that ensues.

What I want to see is how this new fad will stand up in ten or twenty years' time. And what new fad will have taken the board by then.

Co-op Bank's shonky IT in spotlight as delayed probe given go-ahead

"banned the bank's disgraced former chairman"

Well finally something concrete for top-level executive. Mind you, he wasn't banned from ever being a chairman again, he was just banned from being chairman of a financial institution. In other words, he might be able to set up a charity that does banking.

So, not exactly the sharp edge of the axe, but still . .

CryptoLurker hacker crew skulk about like cyberspies, earn $$$

"If the user tries to stop the process, the computer system reboots."

Ooh the little bastards. That has to be a Windows weakness, I imagine that a Linux distro would not reboot, but ask confirmation from the user.

Then again, I'm pretty sure this scumware is dedicated to Windows, as usual. Keep going while the going's good, scum. One day, Windows will be just a souvenir, and you'll have to work a lot harder to take over a machine.

News lobsters demand to be let back into the Facebook boiling pot

"...inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically," said Murdoch

And Murdoch knows all about inadequate journalism.

This is an expert talking, people. Listen up.

Brit semiconductor tech ended up in Chinese naval railgun – report

Re: "That... depends... whose fleet"

Yeah, I'm sure the Chinese have hundreds of strategic icebreakers.