Posts by Pascal Monett 19013 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
That moment happened to me a few years ago, when, as a consultant, I responded to a call from a university.
As I reached the double glass door entrance, a student on the other side noticed me coming and casually reached for the door, holding it open for me. What floored me was just how automatic and casual the gesture was, as if it was a given that that was what he had to do. Some people would call it education.
I call it my "now you're old" moment.
Absolutely agree. This has been tried before, as has already been noted here, and it never took off.
It won't now either because people do like to show off, but on their own terms. They post their lives on Facebook because when they're not on the computer, it does not affect them. This is invasive and forces them to be their show-off selves when they're not ready.
You can take a phone call when you're naked, no problem. With this, you're liable to get a bad surprise when you answer and find that your wife is looking at you wondering why the hell you're in the nude at 3 in the afternoon.
Was established by Sir Mortimer Lefancy in 1867, based on approved journalistic reviews of the time. We make it evolve continuously, once per geological epoch.
Come on guys, if you can't be bothered to Google, don't go pulling a "we value our customer's privacy" shit.
You didn't, and you don't have a clue.
End of.
The facts seem to say otherwise.
And I'm not talking about what companies say :
Fact #1 : Bloomberg says an FBI investigation is/was underway
Fact #2 : the FBI denies any investigation
This may be the Trump era of politics, but if the FBI unequivocally denies that there is an investigation, I believe the FBI.
So either Bloomberg reporters decided to try and cook up a story, which does indeed seem out of character to say the least, or somebody conned Bloomberg into publishing this story.
Conspiracy theorists, start your engines !
I am actively trying to wean myself Windows, because 7 is the last Windows I will ever have.
I am not yet strong enough to replace my Win7 machine yet, because it is my gaming rig and I'm sorry, but very few of the games I play run on Linux. And don't tell me about Wine, if I'm leaving Windows, I don't want a nicotine patch. I want to quit cold turkey, no messing around.
The good news is that Steam is doing a bang-up job of getting Linux games into the mix. I'm basically counting on that for my retirement.
Win7 will have to hold until then.
Due to the fact that my wife and daughter are fanatical XMas enthusiasts, I have ruthlessly enforced my own policy in the house - with success - so that, from January to the end of October, the official name is The Holiday That Shall Not Be Named.
Because if I didn't, I'd be hearing XMas carols in June. In my own house. Just. No.
I like XMas very much ; in December.
ONLY in December.
I have a password manager for my home PC - it's a text file. It is there for my convenience, given that nobody but me uses my PC.
Because it is a text file, I think it will fly under the radar if ever my machine is hacked. I imagine hackers are looking for programs in memory, not all the text files on disk (besides, this one is on the NAS, so if I'm not connected, it's game over for finding that).
My wife is an elementary school teacher here in France. If you think the Education Nationale has on-call IT techs for hardware issues, I have news for you my friend.
Nobody cares about the equipment, nobody knows why the WiFi isn't working and if a reboot doesn't do the trick, the computers stay unused until such time as I walk in to check what is (or isn't) going on. If I get the things working again, everyone will be happy until it all goes pear-shaped again a few weeks later.
The younger, new teacher generation isn't all that better because now they've grown up on mobile and skipped the formative years of faffing around on school equipment or a home PC.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel : my wife is planning on retiring in four years. So I have at most four more years of school IT support to bear, and then I'll be done with it.
Well whaddya you know, maybe this time Microsoft will manage to not break something.
Maybe.
In any case, I'm no longer on the sidelines because my wife now has a work laptop with Windows 1 0 that I am desperately trying to find the way to properly lock down. It's a "clean" system, in that it has obviously been wiped and reinstalled, so I am hoping that I can stay ahead of the rot and stop the creep.
Windows Update has been disabled, of course. I'll enable that every now and then, for the security updates, and that will be all.
I've had National Geographic posters on my bedroom walls during all my childhood. The solar system, of course, but also one great map of the local galactic cluster, going from our solar system to the local cluster in a reverse zoom effect.
I always thought the Great Red Spot was eternal and lo, it is shrinking.
I've always thought Saturn and its rings to be eternal and lo, it is draining.
Nothing is eternal, even if the timeframes are measured in millennia instead of years. It is awesome, but sometimes a bit sad. One day, our descendants will look at Saturn they'll just see a second Jupiter.
It's good to be alive now.
"To date, the UK remains the only country to have the dubious honour of developing an orbital launch system and then dumping it."
That is utter bollocks. The USA made the Saturn V for the Apollo landings and then scrapped it. They can't even make one any more.
Then they went and made the very impressive and expensive Shuttle, which also got scrapped for reasons we all know.
So the UK is most definitely not the only country to have developed and scrapped an orbital launch system.
Well it was previously a good thing when access to the hardware was much more limited, the Internet was non-existant and malware was limited to making your computer say hi on boot on a specific day.
Nowadays malware is much more dangerous, and a disgruntled employee with server room access is practically one web search away from downloading code that can hurt your business, so yes, being able to install unsigned hardware code is now insecure.
Possible, but not required.
If you market a secure phone and guarantee that nobody will be able to snoop, you will naturally attract criminals who appreciate that sort of service.
And I think that, at that level, making a difference between high-flyers in criminal activities and high-flyers that don't want to be caught cheating may not be all that easy.
It seems everyone is fixated on that point, when the article clearly indicates that another option is possible : forcing the user to change the default password on setup.
So no, there is no need to have a device-specific manual or anything else. Every manual is the same and printed the same way, it's just the consumer that has to change the password on setup and not forget it. Then curse and snarl six months later when he forgot it and needs to to force a reset on his IoT thingy.
Unless there's a way to force Facebook to use this construct, I don't see any change any time soon.
Apart from the fact that we might soon have to learn to manage our private data in yet another data repository.
Oh, and great idea to make the users manage access - in a world where most of them blindly accept all app permissions, what could possibly go wrong ?
Thanks for the heads-up.
Given that VW is probably just the first to do this, the day I buy a new car I will know that I have to find a means to locally disrupt phone stuff to prevent any proper connection between my car and whatever shite this tech is trying to connect to.
I just hope that it won't affect GPS.
Of course they won't. Targetted ads have only ever shoyn me stuff I have already bought.
Those ad people are completely incapable of showing me stuff I might actually be interested in. The closest they come is when they show me stuff that people have bought after having bought that.
Clueless muppets, the lot of 'em.
"AI is able to learn sensitive information, such as personal preferences, from a vast amount of seemingly insensitive data"
Yeah, but up to now, all that data is made available to the statistical analysis machine that is not AI. The machine does not go look for it itself.
Now, I am sure that it could be possible to surf Facebook and Twitter and glean some info about a specific target, but unless you have your malicious pseudo-AI sitting inside the company you want to attack, or you have compromised its network to extract that data, I don't see how it could capture the vast amount of data it needs to analyse.
Well FaceBook is a huge disincentive. With its history of ignoring the law and any sense of morals as long as it can get away with it (and a bit longer if possible), I am astounded at the number of people who blissfully continue to give Zuck their private life, giftwrapped.
And with all the information easily found on the Internet, with all the proof of its shady behavior, I'm sorry if I consider that people don't really have the right to complain any more. You put your life on FaceBook, you know Zuck is going to aggregate it, mine it and sell as much of it as he can.
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