Posts by Pascal Monett

Who'll guard your personal data post-Brexit?

"Who'll guard your personal data post-Brexit?"

Silly question. The GCHQ will - they've already got all of it after all.

Fedora 24 is here. Go ahead – dive in

"screenshots are problematic"

That's a bit unfortunate. Like buying a Ferrari and being told that the windshield wipers don't always work. I'm sure it'll get fixed, but it is unfortunate.

That said, it looks like I'll be giving this distro a spin in the near future.

Hey cloud lawyer: Can I take my client list with me?

Re: "That creative IP you make subsequently is yours"

Not if you are an employee. If are employed, anything you develop is the company's IP. Even if you develop it on your own time, the company might be able to claim it if it has anything to do with anything that the company has produced or is developing.

Even if you come out with something after contract termination, you had better make sure that nothing can be traced back to your company because, if they sue you, you're going to be in hot water for a good while.

The short of it is ; if you want your work to be your own IP, go freelance.

I have been a consultant developer for nigh two decades now. All of the work I have done for my customers is theirs, I do not for a second consider that I have any right to it. All of the work I have done for my employees is the same, not mine.

However, I have the experience. I have written the code, sweated the bugs, found the solutions. That is my IP and no one can take it from me. And that is why, today, old customers are still calling on me. They know they can count on me to solve their problems.

But the code is theirs.

Tor torpedoed! Tesco Bank app won't run with privacy tool installed

It is indeed none of my business and I don't care what he does with it. It is nonetheless a vector for hackers and scum to access your phone because those kinds of people use Tor as well.

Taking Tor out of the picture therefor increases security.

Actually, taking the mobile phone out of the picture would be a great increase in security, but that isn't really possible these days, so it's a case of choosing the lesser of two evils.

"preventing free speech and internet security"

Once again a stupid Twatter demonstrates his abysmal misunderstanding of the world he lives in.

Free Speech is not guaranteed by Tesco. It is your Constitutionally-guaranteed right to be allowed to have your own political beliefs and not be harassed for having them. Tesco is a supermarket, not a political platform. Their app is for shopping, you do not use it to express your political preferences.

As for Tor, it was a good idea, but it is being used by some of the worst people on the planet to conduct their despicable business. By being part of that, you are just allowing them to continue reaping illegal money or worse.

Rooted phones are much more at risk of being hacked. Tesco has identified the weakness and decided to minimize risk by not letting the app run on a rooted phone.

I agree with that decision completely.

A month to save cryptocurrency Ethereum?

Another virtual toy is broken

Insofar as I couldn't care less, I don't see why - apart from the supposed monetary value, obviously - this thing shouldn't simply be killed. Somebody got hacked, somebody else is taking the money. That means that the system is broken. Tear it down, start over again. Do that until you get it right.

The only interest I find in all these playmoney projects is that someone, somewhere, is going to one day produce something that will be worth it : a secure, reliable fund-trading platform that can actually be used to pay for legal stuff legally.

That will be the day I will look at participating in such a project. Until then, all such projects are just catastrophes like this waiting to happen.

Get-rich quick trick Twitch snitch: Bots sued for fake video views

The sad state of Humanity today

Gotta have more views. Gotta have more views. Can't live if I don't have more views. What can I do ? Make my content more interesting ? I know ! I'll pay someone to make me feel popular ! Or to strike down that bastard who is more popular than me ! Yes, that's the solution !

Sad.

Dad of student slain in Paris terror massacre sues Google, Twitter, Facebook for their 'material support' of ISIS

That is just where their base is. Make no mistake, ISIS is a direct consequence of US meddling, spearheaded by the stupidity of one Dubya puppet of the military-industrial complex.

Apple and Android wearables: What iceberg? It’s full steam ahead!

So that makes two sad losers brilliantly demonstrating how useless the bloody things actually are.

As for me, I am 50 this year and I try very hard to make my life simpler, not more complicated than it already is.

Happy mode, sad mode, DevOps mode: Stop worrying and go bimodal

Re: it was still a pretty tough and violent existence

It was certainly a tough existence. It was, however, far less violent than we generally think.

"Do we try new, agile approaches, or stick to the old, methodical processes?"

JUST SOLVE THE FUCKING PROBLEM ALREADY.

I swear to God all this intellectual masturbation about development procedures is seriously getting on my nerves.

No later than this very afternoon I had a conversation with one of my customers. A shop with 2000+ employees and an IT sysadmin very much on top of his game. He told me that one of the procedures that we put in place to ensure proper transfer of data to the mainframe (yup, that still exists out there IRL) had been reported as not working.

Well guess what ? The mail-in where the info was supposed to be sent wasn't being used because some jackass middle-management wanted the info on the side to do whatever Godawful Access thingy and get some vested-interest statistics out of the data. The fact that Business Intelligence Central no longer had the data was a case of Not My Problem (for said manager, of course).

As a seasoned veteran with complete access to all data streams, what did he do to solve the problem ? Simple, really : he instructed the database receiving the data to send a copy to the one that should have been used. Bam! Problem solved. Data re-inserted back into the proper stream. Code change : minimal. Time used : 5 minutes. Procedure : who the fuck cares ?

People who spend their time spouting nonsense about procedures should be relegated to where they belong : university or retirement homes. Real Life is about solving problems, not deciding who should be named whatever the new name for Scrum Master is.

Now get off my lawn !

'I am not a lizard' Zuckerberg proclaims in public Q&A

'I am not a lizard'

Agreed, you're not a lizard.

You're an asshole. A lying scumbag. A thief and a stupid twat.

But not a lizard.

Admins in outcry as Microsoft fix borks Group Policy

"Microsoft's most recent security update"

Microsoft does not make Security Updates anymore.

It makes GWX updates, and it makes irrelevant little things.

One of the irrelevant little things made a boo-boo this time.

SatNad does not care.

Who shot JR (that great Dallas broadband)?

Re: "[..] ATT will be in a world of hurt"

And not a single tear will be shed.

East Euro crims pwning 'high profile' victims with Flash zero day

"maximise on the amount of time their attacks go unnoticed and unpatched"

It's been noticed now. Time to generalize the use, I guess.

On the other hand, given how many unpatched Flash installations there still are despite regular news of zero days, breaches and new vulnerabilities, there might be a fair bit of time left for these flaws to wreak havoc even once the patch is out.

Japan travel agency fears leak of 7.93 million records, passport deets

"[..] hacking attempts as part of its bid [..]"

And ? You list two successful breaches and tack on a reported attempt without apparent consequence for what ? To bolster the list ?

Come on. When you have a total of three breaches in five years to list you don't need to fluff things out - things are bad enough already.

Forget Game of Thrones as Android ransomware infects TVs

Apparently it is a disaster that is happening now. No waiting needed.

Personally I'm quite happy about all this. IoT is snake oil, made by ignorant companies forcing coders to do insane things without ever thinking about consequences.

The quicker the fecal matter hits the wildly spinning distribution apparatus, the quicker the whole thing will get shot in the leg to hobble off to the landfill where it belongs.

Then, maybe, we'll have a second generation of IoT that will a) actually be useful and b) be carefully thought out, thoroughly tested and tried IRL before getting sold on the open market.

This is not IT. The excuse that people are not savvy enough to understand what admin rights mean does not apply. This is people buying a fridge to replace a fridge, then finding out that it connected wirelessly and ordered a thousand gallons of milk because bug.

Nobody can go to court over an encrypted drive. You cry and eat the loss. But that ? They will be royally pissed about it, and have the goods to go to court. Having an EULA stating that the maker is not responsible for any loss of product will not stand in court, you can bet on that.

This will end in tears, mark my words.

Government regulation will clip coders' wings, says Bruce Schneier

Re: What about your smartphone?

I believe they are covered by that sentence that includes "nor anything but my PC".

I perfectly agree with Schneier

We are witnessing the origin story of the Butlerian Jihad. In real time.

As for me, I am already dead against IoT and I will ensure that neither my fridge nor my toaster nor anything but my PC will ever, ever be connected.

Not without a T-1000 acting as firewall. Emphasis on fire.

The Microsoft-LinkedIn hookup will be the END of DAYS, I tell you

Re: perhaps MS and Yahoo! should have a suicide pact

They do. Ms is doing it by throwing money out the window, while Yahoo! is drowning in the lack of it.

Study of asexually reproducing honeybee ponders: But why the mass murder?

Hang on there

If these parasitic bees infest a hive and lay eggs to overtake from within like some slightly less gruesome face-hugger of renown, do the dirty worker bees still work, or do they just lounge around pretending to be queen bees and quaffing all the royal jelly ?

Because if they don't actually work and cannot do anything more than produce more parasitic offspring, then they are the terminal race for bees since, once all behives have been infested, there will be no more bees to do the actual job and they will then die off.

So they are the Umbrella Corp of bee-land.

NHS e-prescription service goes TITSUP: Problems since Monday

"as famous for managerial excellence and helpfulness as they are for technical expertise"

Brad Pitt is famous. People who have never seen his films (there must be one somewhere - humor me) still know his name because Angelina Jolie. Cegedim is only famous to the circle of people who they invoice, and in this case, I think their "fame" is directly proportional to the amount they invoice.

It will soon become another sort of fame if these cock-ups continue.

France POPs €800k fine on 'illegal taxi service' Uber's windshield

How's that for "disruptive" ?

All the chanting about New Economy and whatnot, and in the end Uber is just a sleaze operation from a pair of tricksters who, in other times, would have been part of the Corleone family.

The fine is not enough, not by a long shot, but at least there is one.

O2 chief techie: Light up dark fibre and unleash the small cell army

"suppliers want to know what the demand will be"

Here's a tip : mobile phones (which everbody has at least one of now) are going to 5G because people want to watch HD films on them tiny screens (yes, tiny compared to my widescreen TV - and get off my lawn).

Lay the damn fibre already. Internet is becoming indispensable to our daily lives, and I'm not talking about Facebook. So invest and ye will reap the rewards when everyone else late to the party. Lay the fibre because there will be no party until that is done.

I want my GBps connection NOW !

The Fog of Cyberwar: Now theft and sabotage instead of just spying

Re: Escalation in cyber BS race

"cyber-computers", "cyber-email", "cyber-URL"

Does the word "redundant" mean anything to you ? If not, here's a tip : try defining email as anything else but "cyber".

And who exactly is Uncle Sam trying to pick a fight with ? They invaded Iraq instead of North Korea because everyone knows that the Norks have WMDs.

Are you suggesting the US is trying to pick on Russia now ?

"This tells us how desperate North Korea is,"

No, Kim-Jong-whatever's haircut fad has already told us that. What this tells us is how little morals the guy has.

Which we knew already.

MtGox collapse victims now picked off by phishing vultures

"Hide extensions for known file types"

That option set to default has by definition ensured that the clueless remain clueless.

It has been more than two decades now that Microsoft foisted itself on the world in a particular set of events. During that time, had the masses grown accustomed to at least seeing entension names, perhaps today a much larger portion of the population would at least have half a clue of what is being said when they heard "do not click on executables".

Instead, thanks to that option, most people probably don't even know what an executable is, much less how to recognize one.

I'm sure spammers all over the globe are blessing Microsoft every day for that blunder.

TeamViewer: So sorry we blamed you after your PC was hacked

Re: Another lesson in password reuse

There are plenty of lessons available for that.

There are also plenty of users who do not heed the message - or maybe even haven't heard the message, ensuring that plenty more examples will undoubtedly be available in the future.

Rinse and repeat for the duration of the human civilization.

"understand what you are setting up, or don't set the fucking thing up"

What, you want us to work ?

This is the Internet Age ! Where's the fun in that ?

Microsoft's Scott Guthrie wrote code live on stage for Azure devs

Why reproduce the tweet verbatim ?

The tweet is reproduced in full in a pic in the article. What is the use of repeating its contents word for word ?

A bit of journalistic interpretation could have been used, instead of making me read the same thing twice and thinking I was already at pub time before 10 A.M.

Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest password was 'dadada'

Extremely lucky - and not bothered one bit about taking other people's code without permission.

Let's not forget that.

Brexit: UK gov would probably lay out tax plans in post-'leave' vote emergency budget

Oh yeah that'll make a change

"Leaving the EU is unlikely to soften the current government's approach to clamping down on tax avoidance by multinationals"

Right. Because governments all over are doing a bang-up job of keeping multinationals in line right now.

Oh yeah, a great job.

Norway might insist on zero-emission vehicles by 2025

Just one problem there

Haven't they watched Occupied ?

Do they really want to live that IRL ?

Wi-Fi hack disables Mitsubishi Outlander's theft alarm – white hats

Yay, Yet Another Vehicle Hijacking By Maker Lazyness

This situation sucks. Now, when buying a car, one is going to have to go through a number of checks to ensure that the car cannot be easily broken into via passersby smartphone, in addition to all the other stuff to evaluate.

And the problem is not that Mitsubishi did not think of implementing security - they established a procedure and implemented it - probably after testing it. The problem is, nobody made a quality check - or even a sanity check - with either security engineers or a simple street thug (the latter may be a bit difficult to locate for a car maker, I agree). So what they designed is trivial to crack and nobody is safe.

I do not want to have to become an engineer to have a secure car. In any case, Mitsubishi is off my buy list until they get this sorted out.

Redmond adds malware, phish warnings to Bing

As a rabid curmudgeon myself, I can only approve.

Tivo's new owner ponders binning its own boxes

As usual

A company having complete control over its presence decides to surrender the hard part thinking things will go better.

Regardless of whether or not Tivo is doing well or why, what makes them think that handing over the hardware to a 3rd party is going to make things better ?

Yes, they will get rid of hardware issues. They could also get rid of that by making a better product, but that is clearly pie-in-the-sky thinking these days.

What they will actually be doing is handing over the platform to someone who will have a vested interest in expanding the platform to other players to increase the footprint. Meaning they will abandon their power to dictate what the platform does and does not. They will be forced to deal with platform changes that, in the long term, may not favor them.

But hey, long term is someone else's bonus, right ?

Cisco drags down the Ethernet switch market, routers grow a little

Yeah, but times change

That image today would have to have a Linux patch over one eye.

Microsoft is not Borging anything any more. The PC market is in decline and MS is royally pissing consumers off with its ultra-aggressive GWX tactics and shoddier-than-usual WU snafus, and concerning the phone market - well let's just say that MS is history in that arena.

Cisco, on the other hand, despite having a tattered reputation, is still there and going strong. So maybe it's time the title be passed on.

100 million credentials from 'Russia's Facebook' go on sale

Might be interesting

It's a common consideration that criminal hackers are Russian these days. Well if that is the case, then they've hit home turf. That would mean that the Russian plod might have a chance at bringing them down.

Not holding my breath over all this though.

Even in remotest Africa, Windows 10 nagware ruins your day: Update burns satellite link cash

I went there as well

And donated.

And noticed that Generosity creams $7.50 for the privilege of you handing money over in an Internet transaction.

That's more than my bank does.

Generosity : generously helping themselves on other people's misery.

On her microphone's secret service: How spies, anyone can grab crypto keys from the air

Indeed

Nothing makes the NSA's work easier than people not believing that it is possible in the first place.

There's a lot I don't know about electronics, and I know nothing about how to sniff out CPU operations, but that doesn't mean I'm blind to the possibility.

On the other hand, it would seem that this paper refers to a phone being left a foot away from my PC for an hour. I don't think that a top-level anybody is going to have an hour-long meeting with anybody else with them nonchalantly placing their mobile next to the laptop.

Once again, a miracle in surveillance tech that is impractical in real life. Keep foreign mobiles away from your PC and you'll be fine. Because if the NSA is interested in you, you're screwed anyway.

SWIFT threatens to give insecure banks a slap if they don't shape up

Re: simple stupidity and laziness

Those two points seem to be the bread and butter of the blackhat community.

If users (banking or otherwise) were always alert and professional, blackhats would have a hell of a harder time getting their objectives fulfilled and social engineering would be a theoretical concept.

Security is hard because IT is immensely complex. Add humans to the mix and breaches are practically inevitable in the long run. SWIFT needs to make the run longer than it is at the moment. Nothing like the one-percenters losing a fraction of a percent of their money to get some motivation into doing that.

Software snafu let EU citizens get referendum vote, says Electoral Commission

“an issue with elections software”

The issue is that the software was badly specced by interested parties, outsourced to cowboy developers through relations and written one-handed in a weekend without any quality control or oversight.

For me to trust any "election" software, I want the entire project to be managed like open-source. I want the specifications to be public, I want the code to be public, and I want millions of eyes on it to ensure that there is no error in processing, security or confidentiality.

Unless I can personally see what has been approved to count my vote, you might as well have it developed in a dungeon by a group of trolls, that is how I will trust it.

Universe's shock rapidly expanding waistline may squash Einstein flat

Re: I think it's time to admit we don't have such a good idea about what's going on

You need to listen to this.

Would YOU start a fire? TRAPPED in a new-build server farm

Did I read that right ?

You went around and randomly yanked on power cables to generate power alerts ?

YOU MONSTER.

TalkTalk scam-scammers still scam-scamming

"the respondent purporting to be a TalkTalk representative hung up"

Apparently, the 56% drop in profits is still not enough for TalkTalk personnel to get the finger out and start redressing the company's image by actually being useful.

Or even polite.

Windows 10 market share jumps two per cent

It's the leap before the deadline

That Win 1 0 is getting a (small) boost in market share is understandable, the deadline for "not free" is fast approaching.

Microsoft needs all the market share it can get now because it'll be the last jump forward it will get on this. After June, it will be incremental steps only. Companies cannot switch easily or quickly, and private people who want 1 0 will have already got it. Any "new" installations will be of the buying-a-new-PC type, or when a company finally gets around to cycling its PC pool again.

'UnaPhone' promises Android privacy by binning Google Play

"scrubs out and falsifies information that [..] would allow carriers to identify the handset"

I'm probably wrong and I certainly don't know what I'm talking about, but if the carrier cannot identify the phone, then how does it know to route your calls to it ?

I applaud anything that will stick it to Scott McNealy, and Google deserves anything that will bring its arrogance down a notch, but mobile tech is what it is and if you're using it, your phone does have to be identifiable to the carrier. I don't see why the carrier should distribute that information without a warrant, but the carrier has to know where your phone is.

Kraftwerk versus a cheesy copycat: How did the copycat win?

Take a small enough part of anything and I'm sure your argument stands.

I don't see why copyright should be restricted to an entire song - it's the individual notes that make up the song. Nobody has copyright on individual notes, but that does not mean that taking out four or five and sequencing that is a Good Thing (TM).

Scrum.org hacked, may have lost crypto keys and some user data

Don't go dissing DevOps

Why ?

I get that the vuln came from a supplier package - but who's to say that said package wasn't developed using DevOps ?

DevOps is just the new name for brainstorming something and implementing it before analyzing all the possible consequences. Sounds like a DevOps package to me.

You don't need no STEEENKING GPU, says Intel

Intel has always tried to pull that one

On-board GPU is good enough to display 2D Windows for work or browser-related purposes, no doubt there.

I don't care what Intel tries to push, if I want to game or do heavy video computing, a discreet board from a specialized company is where I will seek the solution.