Posts by Pascal Monett

FYI: NASA has sent a snatch-and-grab spacecraft to an asteroid to seize some rock and send it back to Earth

Re: If you want to "control" that, you'll have to arrange to kill lots of people.

Not necessarily.

As sales slide, virtual reality fans look to a bright, untethered future

Get with the times, now it's all about 4K.

I'm thinking that'll be about just as successful.

Re: To get something convincingly detailed and smooth takes a fair bit of poke

Exactly that.

I've seen renders of VR games - heck, you can see scores of screens on Steam. If you think you're going to be playing Call Of Duty with all the details on a VR headset, you're dreaming. None of those games have anywhere near the level of detail of last year's triple A games.

You might get to play The Sims - that's about the best level of detail you can get.

And VR porn ? Please. I'm pretty sure that that slab of pink is not going to make me believe it's a woman.

Yet another mega-leak: 100 million Quora accounts compromised by system invaders

Re: A silverish lining

Yes, you're right on all counts.

Unfortunately, we also see that those damn icons (Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn et al) are not only a tool being used to track us, but also a tool for miscreants that can use such links to reverse-engineer your accounts when breaching a seemingly unrelated one.

This whole rigmarole is getting too complicated. Maybe if we slap a dash of "AI" it'd help ? Nah.

Shall we have AI judging UK court cases? Top beak ponders the future

Great ideas there, really.

Let's fully automate administrative and apparently trivial tasks with the magic of our "AI".

That'll give us more time to take to the streets and complain about how machines are taking over our jobs.

You think you're hot bit: Seagate tests 16TB HAMR disk drive

Meanwhile, 8TB is still above €250

Ouch.

I'd really like to put one on my Xmas list, but at that price it's not going to happen.

So bring on the HAMRs and MAMRs, so that the PMRs will drop in price until I can get 4 drives at 8TB size for my NAS.

US Department of Defense to sling an estimated $3.17bn at Microsoft resellers

"this agreement will not obligate funds at the time of award"

Well that would be a bit brain-dead on the part of the DOD. Obviously the funds will be paid out in return for actual acquisitions, otherwise there is a very large window for error, honest or no.

Still, some champagne will obviously be opened in the marketing departments of the six companies, because hey, that counts for this year's bonus !

Surface Book 2 afflicted by mystery Blue Screen Of Death errors

Re: *FACEPALM*

Facepalm indeed. Microsoft is really starting to look ridiculous. First it can't seem to publish updates that don't have problems, now it's actually getting into break-it's-own-hardware territory.

From there to brick it permanently, there's just a short hop and a skip.

So, let's break out the popcorn and see how far this rabbit hole goes !

Thought black holes were donut-shaped? It turns out they're more like deadly fountains

All of those theories appear to be an attempt to do away with the singularity using dark energy as an excuse in order to remove the destruction of information that was supposed to happen in the singularity and is not compatible with the quantum rules of the Universe.

But that destruction has been recognized as wrong by Hawking himself, so these theories have no more object.

Plus, the Event Horizon Telescope has not led to new, Earth-shattering revelations about the Milky Way's central black hole, so it looks like it is indeed just a black hole.

Opinion to be revised if scientific news warrants.

Interesting detail

Incoming gas is labelled "molecular", outgoing fountain gas is labelled "atomic".

I can readily imagine that the maelstrom around a black hole is the absolute worst place to be, but are gas molecules already torn into atoms at that stage ? Or is that just another way of saying "plasma" ?

It's 'nyet' again, yet again, for Kaspersky: Appeal against US govt ban snubbed by Washington DC court

"still the good guys fighting cybercrime all over the world."

and sending all the data to Putin, because he's the Top Good Guy, right ?

Ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch, finance VP Stephen Chamberlain charged with fraud in US

Exactly

Zero pity.

HP has enough lawyers and accountants on board. They paid top dollar for a lemon ? Their problem.

It's nearly 2019, and your network can get pwned through an oscilloscope

Oh, stop being intelligent. They obviously weren't.

See this, Google? Microsoft happy to take a half-billion in sweet, sweet US military money to 'increase lethality'

"its products weren't assisting in the child-separation policy"

Of course not. They will be assisting in the Life-separation policy.

Let us not mix the silverware and the dishrags, shall we ?

Q: If Pesky Pepper had a peek at patient papers, at how many patient papers did Pesky Pepper peek? A: 231

"at times she struggled with the monotony of some of her tasks"

Pinterest is your friend, my dear.

At least there, you will not indulge yourself in the private details of people you know.

Blockchain study finds 0.00% success rate and vendors don't call back when asked for evidence

Re: the tech goes back to being used mostly for its original purpose

Which is : allowing criminals to reap the rewards of encrypting clueless user's data.

Thanks, I think I'll pass.

HPE chief exec Neri: US-China trade spat? Meh, that ain't no thang for us

Hey, it was Madrid

Do you have any idea what the effect of a good Porto is ? Especially after a few of them ?

He was trashed. Of course nothing else will affect him after that.

OneDrive Skype integration goes live aaand... OneDrive falls over in Europe

Abrahams thinks the external view of the company has changed

Yup indeed. Microsoft used to be a company that benefited of a minimum of respect concerning its products. Office in general and Excel in particular have been viewed as top-of-the-line and no business these days functions without Excel.

With all the clueless blundering around Windows 1 0 updates, that respect has now gone down the toilet.

Dog with 'psychotic tendencies' escapes home to poop on his neighbours' pillows

It uses cat doors

Well, there are doors that respond only to RFID chips - meaning that the authorized cat is the only animal to get through.

Don't know about their reliability, but I would get one in a hurry if I lived in that area.

NHS supplier that holds 40 million UK patient records: AWS is our new cloud-based platform

Just a minute there

It starts out by saying "unprecedented levels of protection", and then we get this :

"Clinicians working in any location with any third-party technology will be able to view and share vital patient information safely and ethically"

So you're telling me that any 3rd party app is going to be able to hook into this data container that has "unprecedented levels of protection" ?

Because zero protection is not exactly unprecedented, and anything more is going to be a big hassle for 3rd party apps to be able to use.

Marriott's Starwood hotels mega-hack: Half a BILLION guests' deets exposed over 4 years

"exposed the entire database"

You've got to hand it to Marriot - they don't do things halfway.

Re: Data protection laws of world.

You're absolutely right. This situation is ridiculous - let's create a new standard.

What now, Larry? AWS boss insists Amazon will have dumped Oracle database by end of 2019

"You get in, drive it... and you die"

You go, Larry.

Because Oracle dying is obviously something that can never happen.

Oh, by the way, when are you promising 13 nines on your cloud infrastructure ?

Oh wait, silly me, you don't have a cloud infrastructure. Well, nothing worth noticing . .

Stats model: UK small biz overpays for stealth mobile plans

"This is highly concerning to us and raises further suspicions of the regulator not doing its job"

I'm sorry, this is the Trump era. You really think the regulator is working in your favor ?

GCHQ opens kimono for infosec world to ogle its vuln disclosure process

"If they keep discovered vulns to themselves"

.. they can get hacked, and black hats can get their mitts on juicy zero-days that they can exploit quickly because the spooks will have a devil of a time admitting that they sat on those problems instead of protecting the public - which is their official duty and gives them all their powers.

One day, I would like a Game-Of-Thrones ruler to turn on them and say "You knew this and kept it to yourself ?" - and then a public beheading.

As a lesson to the rest of them.

Never going to happen, because National Security is more important than your security as a member of that Nation.

Healthcare billing biz AccuDoc 'fesses up to breach that blabbed 2.65m people's data

Of course not - it's their first time.

We, on the other hand, have seen it invoked a thousand times. We know that this is the Band-Aid you put on an open wound. When it's too late.

Gartner to wearables biz: Through failure comes success!

Re: Oh come on, stop it.

No ! We need to hear Gartner reports.

We don't get to laugh all that often.

Why is my Windows 10 preview build ticking? Microsoft reminds users that previews have timebombs

Isn't it just wonderful ?

The hardware you paid for, using the OS you paid for (one way or the other*), is going to stop working unless you install the update that doesn't work.

Man am I glad I stayed on Win 7.

Waiting for Linux to do everything I need doing.

* either you updated a Windows that you paid for, or you bought a new computer - so you paid for it

Canuck couple returns home after night on tiles to gaggle of randomers hanging out in their flat

The landlord [..] denied ever passing Mongrain's keys to the group

In other words, they got access to the flat but not because of him ?

So he's basically accepting responsibility for having shit security ?

Either that, or he's a liar.

In both cases, it's time to get the hell out of there.

Huawei gets the Kiwi 'yeah nah'* as NZ joins the Chinese kit-ban club

the power to block "risky" vendors from important networks

As long as they include Cisco in that list, I'll agree with blocking Chinese vendors.

I've heard much too much bad news about Cisco lately to consider that its equipment would not be a major risk in important networks.

OneDrive is broken: Microsoft's cloudy storage drops from the sky for EU users

"a lesson on the consequences of too much dependence on the cloud"

Wrong. Those consequences have been repeatedly and frequently exposed, so that there is no one that works anywhere near IT who can claim that he didn't have a clue.

What this is compares much better to a lesson in sheep herding, with major CEOs and "decision-makers" being the sheep, herded to this position bleating gleefully about how much money would be saved (and counting their additional bonuses on the way).

Well, people, you can now take out your calculators and count the money lost, per hour, for all your employees who cannot do their jobs. You should at least return your bonuses in a token gesture to offset the cost of such short-sightedness.

UKFast mulls putting IPO on ice due to six little letters: BREXIT

forthcoming meetings in the next few weeks "will shed more light on the situation"

Um, no they won't. Not in that time frame. In the next few weeks it'll be Christmas.

I don't think there will be important news about Brexit before next year.

It was a lit CeBIT see, got teeny weeny, world's biggest tech show yearly party... closed its German fest's doors yesterday

Re: Yeah, but it was dead for years

Well now they've officially unplugged life support, so it is definitively dead.

Er, we have 670 staff to feed now: UK's ICO fines 100 firms that failed to pay data protection fee

a "robust collection process"

It seems that the "robust process" would work much better if it was 2.15 meters high and 150 kilos, with extensive prior experience in Russia.

What the Dell? Customer passwords reset after miscreants break into Big Mike's IT emporium

Re: World Class Security

Given that the admin was on the ball and the breach was closed before any data extraction took place, I do not think it is fair to start bashing Dell on having been breached.

They did a far better job at securing their data than many others who have been discussed in these columns this year alone.

Security is not a passive affair. Firewalls and such are not the only answer, you need active surveillance to be able to catch issues before things go bad and data is extracted. That is what happened here, so kudos to the IT people who knew their job and did it well.

Oh my chord! Sennheiser hits bum note with major HTTPS certificate cock-up

Re: Why did Sennheiser [..] do this nonsense?

My question exactly. I've had radio headphones plugged into the TV for years, they didn't need no stinkin' app to work.

My current headphones are a not-too-pricey Sony model that work fine and plug in like every other kind I've ever had. I fail to see what is the point in having an app at all. You have an app for the sound card (or chip these days), that is where the tweaking should take place.

But headphones are for listening to the output, not for fiddling with it.

Forget DeepFakes. This robo-Rembrandt with AI for brains is not bad at knocking off paintings

So they've made a more complicated scanner

Wrap the obligatory "AI" around it, and attach a 3D printer and voilà ! you have a grant and a project.

But there is no AI in there. The color analysis can be done in Photoshop and, unless I've missed that news, I don't think Adobe is crowing about how it crammed AI into Photoshop.

So it's a program that inputs an image, does some pre-programmed fiddling and outputs said image. Don't try impressing me with the mixing of inks, that's something that dumb inkjets do a hundred times a day.

I'm not saying this is a useless project, don't get me wrong, but there's even less AI in this one than usual.

Symantec comes out in swinging in bitter legal battle over security bug audit conspiracy claims

If you say that private tests are private, you don't turn around and publish them

There's a minimum of decency that is supposed to exist between the people who agree to something and that is to stick to what was agreed.

Anybody tries ignoring any part of an agreement with me is going to find a closed door the next time they come knocking.

Angry Googlers demand bosses pull the wings off 'Dragonfly' censored Chinese search engine

Hoouu, burn !

Either it is reassuring to know that there still are idealists working at Google,

or it is terrifying to see how brainwashed some people are with all the Googley stuff. Don't forget to take your dose every morning - for a healthy and productive day !

Tape vendors feel the cold, clammy hand of AWS on their shoulders. Behind them grins the Glacier Deep Archive

"13 nines durability"

Did you hear that rushing water sound ?

That's the sound of millions of Microsoft customers salivating at the prospect of a cloud that actually helps them, instead of keeping them from working.

But hey, Nadella, stay the course ! Nothing like being a living promotion for Open Source tools, right ?

Gigabit? More like, you can gigabet the US will fall behind on super-fast broadband access

Well it seems that fiber optics companies are going to make a killing in offshore revenue

Meanwhile, US telcos will do everything in their - admittedly - immense power to retain the status quo.

Might as well try to stop the winter from coming. Change is inevitable and trying to avert it only means you will fall harder.

Question: How fast is the Windows 10 October 2018 Update rolling out? Answer: Not very

"it had seen higher satisfaction ratings and fewer issues than any previous Windows 10 release"

Yep, and it looks like it's going to stay that way for a while yet.

'Massage parlour' location looks like Amazon stealth-testing secret new wireless network

"Total Body Stretch"

Sounds rather scary to me. I mean, what if they make a mistake ? We're not going to get a new Fantastic 4 member out of that place, now are we ?

Besides, I hate massage parlors because I hate being touched by people I don't know. It doesn't relax me.

WIPO 'temporarily suspends' whistleblower CIO amid allegations of misconduct

This whole story sounds like a bag of poisonous snakes in which I am very glad I don't have to put my hand.

I agree with the above posters, it does indeed seem that, from the top level down, our "institutions" need a serious cleanup.

US told to quit sharing data with human rights-violating surveillance regime. Which one, you ask? That'd be the UK

I am confused

That the US criticizes any other country about human rights obligations is something rich, but saying that "the nation doesn't adhere to human rights obligations and commitments" is, as far as I can see, simply wrong.

The UK has ratified the Bill of Rights, it has ratified all protocols of the Geneva Convention (something the USA has yet to do), and, as far as I can recall, British soldiers have never found themselves accused of torture, neither has Her Majesty approved of such methods - contrary to US soldiers and government.

Yes, there is that spying issue and it is not going away any time soon. Still, I find it quite rich to see USAians accusing the British of being untrustworthy with data !

Azure MFA falls over, Windows 10 struggles with Intel drivers, and Microsoft gives us... more Sticky Notes?

"The vision has an educator running an interactive lesson on a large display [..]"

I envision that that vision will be crudely interrupted by Windows Update asking if you want to reboot Now, or Now ?

Huawei MateBook Pro X: PC makers look out, the phone guys are here

I rather like it, but for one detail

It's a niggle, but for me it is important : the keyboard lacks a dedicated numeric keypad. I am very used to that, and not having one is a miss for me.

Still, I'm sure I've seen USB numpads, so all is not lost. I might look into that more closely when the time comes to replace my current workhorse.

IBM's Ginni Rometty snipes, er, someone for being irresponsible with data, haven't a clue who

"the weakest link should not define the digital economy"

Sorry Ginni, but the weakest link defines the limits of everything you can do.

It's just how it is, and throwing a tantrum or making a speech as CEO is not going to change that.

Doctors join wombats in sh!tting bricks to help parents relax about kids chowing down on Lego

"unless that Lego head is dearly loved"

If that Lego head is so dearly loved, go and buy another copy of the figurine !