Posts by Pascal Monett

Wait, what? The Linux Kernel Mailing List archives lived on ONE PC? One BROKEN PC?

Re: Oh, come on now!

And there was a mirror. No harm done.

Instead of a virtual private server, I really would prefer that he have it hosted with a proper provider. One that has redundancy and guarantees on uptime. But yeah, that costs money.

Junk food meets junk money: KFC starts selling Bitcoin Bucket

Oh the irony

This article is dripping with irony just like the chicken drips with grease.

Delicious to read.

On the other hand, I learned something : it costs $50 to make a Bitcoin transaction. Well if it cost me that much to use my Visa I'd be using cash all the time.

Feds may have to explain knowledge of security holes – if draft law comes into play

The NSA is just like Trump

It will say whatever it thinks gets it off the hook.

Unlike Trump, however, there is no extensive public record that would demonstrate just how much what the NSA says is just a pack of lies.

So we'll just take it as a given.

Infamous Silicon Valley 'sex party' exactly as exciting as it sounds

"if you're looking for a good time, give Silicon Valley a wide berth"

And, apparently, if you're looking for quality products, do the same.

Dear US taxpayers, 4.5 BEEELLION of your dollars were blown on unapproved IT projects

Re: Wow, impressive

Eh, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.

"staff did not think they needed approval for the changes"

That's interesting. Now tell me exactly how is it that "staff" not thinking it needs approval equates to "Accounting" actually paying money.

Are we talking Government here, or are we talking the corner coffee shop ? Isn't there supposed to be some fucking officer in charge of authorizing spending ?

Celebgate latest: Fourth dirtbag 'fesses up to pillaging iCloud for stars' X-rated selfies

"He faces a maximum of five years behind bars "

Sounds like publishing nude pics without authorization is suddenly a lot less fun.

Good.

VMware: New year, new job – you're fired

Re: That's impressive

Yeah. I especially like this one :

Q. How much money will VMware save through this activity?

A. This decision will help to streamline business processes, advance innovation, and deliver better results for the company.

Note how the answer absolutely does not answer the question.

Boffins split on whether Spectre fix needs tweaked hardware

"plugging Spectre holes might become an ongoing process"

Translation : we're all fucked for the duration. Microsoft is going to have years of faulty patch releases due to this, and everyone else is going to have to submit to regular panic attacks every now and then following just how well the media is going to do its follow-up on this subject.

I really would like to think that retirement would get me out of the panic zone, but it seems that even a bear pit won't be enough now.

Intel AMT security locks bypassed on corp laptops – fresh research

Sorry, but i disagree. We're talking corporate user, meaning someone who has the backing of an IT department which is supposed to have done its job learning what kind of kit it purchased.

This has nothing to do with Joe User who doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of understanding what is going on. This is corporate stuff, and corporations are not supposed to be stupid enough to leave admin passwords unchanged.

Ice cliffs found on Mars and NASA says they’re a tap for astronauts

In a nutshell, yup.

Now what I'd like to know is this : if this is actually true, why do we bother sterilizing the equipment we send out ?

Apart from trying to not contaminate our samples, of course. Meaning, if the probe we send is not destined to take samples, then why bother ?

Remember those holy tech wars we used to have? Heh, good times

Re: S**t!

Sounds a bit bitter, but realistic.

Especially in a world where all the marketing hype surfs on an undercurrent of slurping every detail they can find out about you and selling it off to any bidder.

That said, we're all adults here (allegedly), so could we please stop with the auto-censoring ? If you want to say shit, say it.

PowerShell comes to MacOS and Linux. Oh and Windows too

Ah, share price, that's your fall-back argument ? The disappearance of Windows Phone means nothing to you, then ? Cortana shutting down is of no consequence ? Sure.

As for server share, you obviously haven't got a clue.

Keep drinking the Kool-Aid. A numb mind is a pleasant thing.

Oh how the mighty have fallen

"That idea’s fuelled by Redmond’s belief that in a hybrid cloud world there’s every chance you’ll wrangle Windows or Linux servers from a Mac or penguin-powered machines. Or even a Windows PC."

I remember a time when Microsoft refused to even consider that there was anything but Windows. A time when it actively tried to thwart Linux from booting. A time when it crippled it's own Office if it wasn't running on a Windows platform. It was the Microsoft Way, or the highway.

It seems that the continuous string of investment failures has finally bowed the head. Yes Microsoft, you're right ; there is every chance that cloud servers will be administered from something other than a Windows PC and, as time goes by, there is more and more chance that the server won't be Windows either.

Q: How do you get YouTube to stop funneling ads to your vids? A: Make jokes next to a dead body

Re: Who is

Nobody worth knowing.

Of course Uber allegedly had a tool to remotely destroy evidence

Indeed. With all the effort they are putting in stifling competition and thwarting police, one has to wonder what Uber would be if it respected the law and put the effort into making a better product.

Man, they just might have been awesome.

Microsoft finally injects end-to-end chat crypto into Skype – ish...

Question of habit. Microsoft is bungling everything since a while now.

Brace yourselves for the 'terabyte (sic) of death', warns US army IT boss

Re: slang v gospel

"I deal with now 2 to 4 PETABYTES of data"

If they are on your internal network, then they are not coming in on your Internet connection.

Call us back when you have 4 PB of data coming down the wire from outside and tell us how that went.

PC lab in remote leper colony had wrong cables, no licences, and not much hope

Word ?

Why worry about Word ? In that remote kind of environment, get them a copy of Libre Office and get them started on that.

Of course, downloading it on-site might be something of a challenge . . .

1 in 5 STEM bros whinge they can't catch a break in tech world they run

No one's forcing you to stay.

Re: Ignoring the gender element

Agreed on most counts, except for one thing : it's white males that are at the origin of treating people like shit.

So I'm really sorry, but I just can't drum up sympathy for white males who today feel discriminated against in the whitest industry on the planet.

Cortana. Whatever happened to world domination?

"cleverness by Microsoft"

Now THAT is an oxymoron if I've ever heard one.

Cabinet reshuffle leaves UK digital policy and GDS rudderless. And now the news...

Re: What?

Sir Humphry would no doubt indignantly reply that these titles are carefully crafted to represent with the best possible accuracy the intentions of the position - before smiling behind his cup of tea.

Carphone Warehouse cops £400k fine after hack exposed 3 MEEELLION folks’ data

FTFY

"Since the attack in 2015 we have worked extensively with cyber security experts to create and implement our security systems and processes,” it said.

There, that's better.

MPs sceptical of plan for IT to save the day after UK quits customs union

It's all about simplifying The Message. What you're actually doing is irrelevant because the clueless will never check anyway and, even if they are told, will either refuse to believe or not care anyway.

That is why we now live in a civilization where what someone says is more important than what someone does.

Facebook has open-sourced encrypted group chat

"it was “ridiculous” that the Feds have seized nearly 8,000 phones they can't access"

What seems ridiculous to me is that the Feds have seized 8000 phones and have no other clue as to the culpability of the suspects.

Do your job : gather suspicions, follow the suspects, inquire about their lives, and THEN swoop in with reasonable cause and gather all the rest.

If you have nothing but the phones to go on, you're not doing your job and you have no right to complain about it.

No backdoor access for the lazy.

WikiLeave? Assange tipped for Ecuadorian eviction

"From a human point of view, [it] is not sustainable,"

Indeed, being in such proximity to such a massive twat for such a long time is criminal.

Save the Ecuadorian people ! Throw the twat out !

Indian data leak looks to have been an inside job

Corruption should be counted as a capital crime

Managing a country where corruption is rampant is a very messy and frustrating job. Those officials who profited by selling access are holding their country back from proper progress in the name of personal gain - while their situation is likely far from being worthy of pity.

I wish the Indians the best of luck in clearing that up and creating a generation of officials who actually abide by the rules and understand that they are the guardians of their country's progress.

Russia claims it repelled home-grown drone swarm in Syria

Not an AA missile, an AA unit. The Pantsir system can shoot missiles, but it also has good ol' fashion AA guns.

They most likely used the guns.

"highly advanced machines"

Maybe by Russian standards, but they look cobbled together with duct tape and wire.

That said, how they look has very little bearing when the bombs they carry are dropping on your head.

Hold on to your aaSes: Yup, Windows 10 'as a service' is incoming

"sending activity history to Microsoft's servers"

And here we go again. This brave new world in the making obviously considers that everyone wants to sync everything and show it to everyone by default and, to do so, Microsoft is one more in the long line of application writers that wants to store all your data "to better serve your interests".

Timeline. Hmm, where did I already hear about that ? Oh, right, Facebook. That thing that is platform-independent. And not everyone was happy with it at the time.

So, Microsoft, with Meltdown and co on the loose, you want to implement a server-held repository of everything a user does and push it out on whatever thing the user is using at the moment. Brilliant. No security concern there, for sure. No privacy concern either, right ? But, it's nothing important, you say ?

Then why do it ?

You are going to include a shutoff key for that, right ? And not make it on by default ? Yeah, right. And I'm winning the lottery tonight.

Apple, quit milking tech-addicted fruit of our loins – shareholders

Friendliness ?

I'm hoping to read more articles that bite, as the title bar says. If I wanted wimpy articles that pamper companies I'd go and read Newsweek, or almost anything else for that matter.

Facebook gives its 007s license to kill M, its not particularly intelligent AI

Private company, private reasons

It is perfectly reasonable for Facebook to want to keep mum about what it learned and why it is shutting M down. I do think that Facebook did indeed learn quite a lot from the experience and will leverage that in some way in the future.

Probably for yet another privacy-invading functionality that will unfortunately work a lot better than if they hadn't had this trial run.

But Facebook is under no obligation to answer all the questions and go public on anything. For a company dedicated to dragging everyone's life out into the open, Facebook sure knows the importance of keeping its own secrets.

WD My Cloud NAS devices have hard-wired backdoor

Re: "consumer device manufacturers"

I don't care who it is, this is simply not acceptable, ever.

Computer security is hard enough. We just discovered a vulnerability in a raft of CPUs that dates back more than a decade and nobody had a clue.

So we definitely don't need people putting in barn doors that can't be closed.

If you won't use your brain our machine will use it for you, Nissan tells drivers

"an electrode-laden skullcap"

Aaannd there goes the ladies market. What with the hairdresser at $80 a pop, if you think a woman is going to leave the salon and put that thing on you've got another thing coming.

Samsung topples Intel as semiconductor top dog, but lead 'literally built on sand'

@ Steve Todd

Agreed, they do have one. It is fully booked and not ready for another design at this point. They would be daft to stop what they are currently producing there just to try piss off Intel, not to mention the contractual obligations that almost certainly prevent that.

That's why I said they need to have made another one.

"All Samsung need to do now"

Sure. All they need to do now is have spent a few dozen billions on a 10nm chip fab three years ago, and have it start churning out a brand new design in the next month.

Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen.

Nebula spotted with more super-sized bodies than a gym on Jan 2nd

LIGO/VIRGO

It really is fascinating to realize that we have people intelligent enough to not only describe mathematically what happens when black holes collide, but set up instrumentation to detect it.

That said, sooner or later this grav wave detection unit is going to detect something they didn't expect. Given that it concerns black holes, how are they going to pinpoint the location of the event since, by definition, they didn't see that a collision was going to take place ?

UK.gov admits porn age checks could harm small ISPs and encourage risky online behaviour

"reputational damage to the government"

It seems to me the government is doing a fine job on that by itself.

Congratulations for finding yet another way to remove the responsibility of education from the parents. That will not in any way come back to bite you later, oh no.

The nanny society forges boldly ahead . . .

The healing hands of customer support get an acronym: Do YOU have 'tallah-toe-big'?

Brilliant

Glad to see that you've got your mojo back :)

Happy New Year !

US Homeland Security breach compromised personal info of 200,000+ staff

Thank God for Homeland Security

I mean, it has Security right in the name, right ?

Seems like the Paranoid Department isn't paranoid enough. Of course, it's tiring to be paranoid all the time, especially when it's your 9 to 5 day job. Seems that some of these guys are just in it for the paycheck now.

Skynet it ain't: Deep learning will not evolve into true AI, says boffin

Totally agree.

We'll have AI the day we ask a question and it answers it can't be arsed to care.

What we'll do with it then is another issue.

Jocks in shock as Irn-Bru set to slash sugar and girder content

Re: Sadly, I was sober

What ? You were in Scotland and you were sober ??

What were you thinking, lad ?

Cool disk drive actuator pillar, Seagate – how about two of them?

Re: I'm Praying to the Aliens..

Don't worry. Holographic storage will be here in 5 - 10 years.

Just keep repeating that to yourself and all will be well.

@Bahboh

From the article you linked, there is a reference to the heads that indicates that read/write heads are 0.3 mm wide.

That's already damn small.

Logically speaking, you might be able to get the read/write portion of the head down to a tenth of that size, but you still have the arm that carries it - and that thing will remain a lot bigger because of the physical constraints.

And we return to Munich's migration back to Windows – it's going to cost what now?! €100m!

10 years to migrate 16000 PCs and they're going to go back to Windows ?

Looking at the linked list, I remark that it took Valencia, Spain a mere year to migrate 120000 PCs from Windows to Linux. Munich strolled into a full 10 years for their paltry number, and now we learn that their IT can't cope and they want to go back ?

German efficiency isn't looking good in this picture. If they can't cope on one platform, I don't see how it will be better on another. Changing cars is useless if you can't drive.

But I'm guessing that's not the real problem. It's influence. There's obviously a strong pro-Windows faction in Munich and they've been real busy making a nuisance of themselves since the beginning of the migration. Looks like they've worn down the resistance and are going to get their revenge. All that at the citizen's cost, of course. With all the other administrations and entities that have successfully made the switch to Linux, Munich can hardly pretend that Linux is not suitable for them.

Cohesity loses its cohesion: Now chief beancounter unglues self from upstart

"the CFO recruitment process was perhaps flawed"

Maybe they hired a person with integrity when they needed a scumbag who would cover the lies ?

Really, that much movement at the top seems to indicate that there is a major issue at hand that the founder is intent on covering up. What that issue could be, I have no idea.

But something stinks.

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

Re: Genetic Diversity?

And that would change what, exactly ?

We'd be griping about a bug in Motorola processors instead. Whoop-de-doo.

Crap indeed

Here I was, all happy with my i7 6700 that has served me well for the past two years, and now I learn that I'm basically going to have to replace the hardware if I want to stay secure and have good performance. What a nuisance.

Another round of Windows reinstall, with another fracking call to Redmond to justify that I am indeed the owner of this shit. I hate the idea already.

Ah, the day games are made for Linux first . . .

SuperFish cram scandal: Lenovo must now ask nicely before stuffing new PCs with crapware

"the consumer’s affirmative express consent"

While I'm overjoyed at the idea, I believe that, all too soon, we'll see things like : "if you want this laptop, agree to this".

Either that or your express consent will be engineered around a popup with OK/Cancel buttons only. We all know users are trained to click on OK.