Posts by Pascal Monett

Banks told: Look, your systems WILL fail. What is your backup plan?

That is not what should be regulated

I do not see that it should be a regulatory issue that banks have proper procedures and backups in place. If they don't, they pay the costs and if they pay too much, they end up dying.

Sure, there will be a bit of a mess, but in the worst case customers will take their government-guaranteed money elsewhere and that will be that. To Big To Fail is overrated.

What I would like to see is subprimes completely forbidden and no way to recreate them. What I would like to see is a bank that manages my money honestly and doesn't try every single dirty trick to make more money at all costs.

But hey, I'd also like to win the lottery. I know where my chances are better.

Like an everflowing stream: New tech promises remote S3 nearline disk performance

"they appear to have come up with [..] a faster way of streaming files "

They're fiddling the books, storing stuff locally and playing with metadata workarounds.

There's only one true way to stream faster : use a bigger pipe (and make sure the backend can use that increase in bandwidth properly).

At last – a use for AI! Predicting an England World Cup victory

"the predicting goat"

Just one question : the people who feed and take care of this Zabiyaka, I take it they worship Zeus ?

Because any other situation, including being atheists, make them blasphemers to their own convictions.

IBM Cloud’s elasticity stretches and stretches (Big Blue's credibility?)

So IBM is having trouble getting its cloud running properly ?

Maybe it should have not laid off so many people who actually did the work, all in the name of profits.

ICANN't get no respect: Europe throws Whois privacy plan in the trash

Re: Good for regulators

Indeed, it is quite satisfying to see the pricks at ICANN taken down a notch or three.

I just hope the slapping will continue.

US Declaration of Independence labeled hate speech by Facebook bots

Re: Organized religion is the root of all evil

I beg to differ. But I as cannot possibly say it better than Patton Oswalt, I will refer you to his take on Sky Cake.

IBM wins five-year whole-of-government deal with Australia

Quantum ?

So IBM has taken q-bit processors out of the lab and learned how to program them to file and store citizen census data ?

Somehow that smacks of bullshit to me.

Re: “significant savings"

Exactly.

There will be gnashing of teeth before this is over.

Security guard cost bank millions by hitting emergency Off button

Re: most emergency buttons provide [..] no information on what, exactly, they are supposed to stop

Well, the prevailing tradition is that they stop everything in a room by cutting off all electricity that goes in (except for the lights).

Now, if you've found big red buttons marked STOP next to the door of a server room that didn't stop everything but the lights, then indeed you've found some sneaky ones.

As to "very few have been pushed", well <grin>, we've got loads of stories here that prove you wrong ):-D.

Things that make you go hmmm: Do crypto key servers violate GDPR?

Storm in a teacup

So my email user name is associated to my public key. Well my real name is associated to my phone number and that's not something that is going to change, right ?

Let's not get distracted here. There's enough to do to secure our private lives already without going off on wild goose chases like this.

India tells WhatsApp to add filters, ASAP

I seriously disagree with you

Education is indeed the answer and I do not view that education is relative.

Education is teaching a person that things need to be viewed with a critical mind, that people are not to be feared simply because they do not have the same color or culture that you are used to, that diversity is the richness of the human race and that stupidity and greed have no color.

Education is the incessant treadmill of treacle-like progress toward that goal, with all the insufficient budgets and systemic failures due to political cowardice and expedience. Aside from the fact that we know very well how to teach people to read and write, but we still haven't a procedure to teach people how to think independantly - mainly because every government prefers blind obedience.

A fine vintage: Wine has run Microsoft Solitaire on Linux for 25 years

Re: "We live in a *nix world now"

Well, as long as you do your work on a phone or tablet, I guess you're right.

But as far as working on company applications are concerned, we're still squarely a Windows PC world. I've been consulting for companies for a quarter of a century and I have never seen a Linux workstation anywhere. I have spotted a few Linux servers, here and there, but zero workstations. I have also seen a few Apple PCs, mainly in web development.

But the bulk of them are Windows PCs.

And that will stay that way until the *Nix generation becomes Head of IT and/or CEO. Only then will we see the possibility of a switch, because these guys and gals will look at licensing fees for Windows and Office, the backlog of Helpdesk issues and the nightmare of legacy crap still being dragged along and they will choke on their coffee before chucking the whole mess out.

But before that ? Not a chance.

Uh-oh. Boffins say most Android apps can slurp your screen – and you wouldn't even know it

"the permission model is flawed"

Wow, what a cliffhanger. I don't think I've ever heard that before.

</sarcasm>

What a pity that even a group of boffins in real lab coats with an actual study of it will probably not generate a change of the matter.

Bill Clinton's cyber-attack novel: The airport haxploit-blockbuster you knew it would be

"making his way out of the White House through a secret tunnel"

Right, because there is a tunnel in the White House that the Secret Service doesn't know about/hasn't bugged and rigged full of detectors nor have a pair of Marines posted at either end.

I'm all for suspension of belief, but it has to be at least plausible. Give me a traffic jam and a sudden, inspired escape, and I'll go along because, even if dubious, it just might happen.

But a secret tunnel, unknown to an organisation who has been in charge of the White House for almost as long as there have been Presidents ? And this one new guy who has only been there for, at best, three to seven years, knows about it ?

Well that just about sums it up : I'll keep on reading Tom Clancy novels. When he pulls a Deus Ex Machina out of thin air, he's good enough to at least dress it up properly.

Hands up if you didn't lose data in the Typeform breach

"the council will consider ending its relationship"

You'd better not just consider it !

I hope that there will be a massive move against this, to send a strong sign that we the public no longer tolerate this kind of gratuitious data-hoovering, but I doubt it. Tomorrow will likely be business as usual, right Talk Talk ?

Google Chrome update to label HTTP-only sites insecure within WEEKS

Re: "Large company intranets may use those address ranges for all their devices."

And Google is the authority to decide to flag those large company intranets as insecure.

Sure.

'Coding' cockup blamed for NHS cough-up of confidential info against patients' wishes

"unreserved apologies"

How about "immediate resignation" ?

A £1.3m prize for a plunging share price at BT? Not so fast...

Re: If you mean cunts then type cunts

Asolutely. Enough with the self-censorship. If you want to use cusswords, use them. Don't pretend to care about the children, there aren't any here.

The strange tale of an energy biz that suddenly became a blockchain upstart – and $1.4m now forfeited in sold shares

"an unnamed Hong Kong resident"

Now that there is something that intrigues me. Especially the part where this mystery guy not only buys nearly all the shares, but then somehow is able to move the company to another part of the US. Just how did he know to put the company there and for what purpose ?

Where there communications between the pair and that guy to set all this up in the first place ? Because if not, I can't imagine some random guy in Hong Kong buying up a company in the US would care about moving it to some other place he almost certainly doesn't know either.

There's something fishy there.

Feds charge Man after FCC boss Ajit Pai's kids get death threat over net neutrality axe vote

Re: Not sure why Pai wouldn't press charges...

He got a mail threatening his children. With their school location.

Sorry, but if I got a mail like that I would have law enforcement pursue to the end of the Earth. The fact that it is an asshole who got the mail is irrelevant to me. Nobody touches the children.

The real irony is that if the guy had just threatened Pai, he'd likely have all the support of the Twittersphere and social media. But he did the unforgivable and now he's going to pay. Talk like a thug, walk (to prison) like a thug.

Smash-hit game Fortnite is dangerous... for cheaters: Tools found laced with malware

Parents of today's 14 year-olds will remember their own childhood as well, because malware coming with cheats is as old as gaming forums.

That said, please excuse if I couldn't care less that cheaters are getting themselves infected with malware. Serves them right.

Budget hotel chain, UK political party, Monzo Bank, Patreon caught in Typeform database hack

Patreon ?

So that's SciShow users that are impacted also, as well as PBS Eons.

Congratulations on undermining confidence in some of the rare YouTube channels that educate people about science.

DXC execs to investors: It's say-on-pay time. Give us a bump, would you?

Cloud is changing the market landscape

What I gather from this article is that massive service providers (aka consulting companies) are being subject to a sea change in their very livelyhood. Big customers are less inclined to sign big contracts, and smaller customers are going to the fluffy failures of The Cloud.

This can only be temporary, though. The Cloud is far from perfect in itself, and people are starting to wake up (albeit slowly) to the fact that their data is no safer there and they need measures in place when the fluff grows a hole and their data disappears.

It will certainly take a long time before people (and companies) learn how to manage their cloud data properly, but until they do, there is room for consultants and service providers to help them get there.

It's just that the service providers need to adapt to that landscape as well.

Apparently, that adaptation is going to be painful.

When Google's robots give your business the death sentence – who you gonna call?

Personally, I find it difficult to believe that it is a good idea to put company data in a beta product, and Google is always in beta.

I subscribe to the people who think that company data needs to be placed in the control of the company, not on someone else's server.

Flipping 'ell, Dell! IT giant preps to go public again, files its homework

It does seem that Mr Dell is going to have to eat some crow.

I guess that, when you're the head of a multinational, sometimes it pays to shut up.

Sysadmin shut down server, it went ‘Clunk!’ but the app kept running

Apparently, there is at least me.

I crashed a server once, at client site

I was working on client site about 15 years ago, one of a multinational's many branches. I had access to the server room, although I didn't really need it because I'm a developer, not a sysadmin. When the summer was hot, I did sneak in from time to time, to cool off, but I digress.

I knew the product I worked with didn't much like having the client opened locally on the server. I knew it. One day, for some reason I can't even recall, my workstation was doing something time-consuming and I was in a hurry to get another thing done. Those among you with experience will recognize right there a recipe for disaster.

I decided that it was a small thing and I could do it quickly on the server. I knew where it was, so I badged myself into the server room, walked over to the dedicated Solaris server I needed and double-clicked the icon for the client. The client's loader flashed a screen, and the server went down then and there. I was left to facepalm myself while watching nervously the server come back online.

Of course, when a production server goes down in a site that employs over a thousand people, there will be people to notice. I could only go to the head of IT and report my actions. As penance, I asked my access to the server room to be revoked, which the IT manager graciously accepted.

I never did try that again, anywhere.

Surveys-as-a-service outfit Typeform spilled a backup from May

t.co ?

Could companies please refrain from using URL shorteners ? It keeps people from checking that the URL should indeed go to where it is supposed to given the supposed source.

It's hard enough to ensure that spam and malware are avoided, but if you go and obfuscate the URL well that's the end of it. I never click on those things, whenever I see one my paranoia flares up something fierce.

And that's now all three LTE protocol layers with annoying security flaws

"an agent needs to set up a malicious cell tower to tamper with transmissions"

No problem there, apparently those things are being set up all the time in Washington DC and they're only noticed when they've been taken down.

CIMON says: Say hello to your new AI pal-bot, space station 'nauts

"contribute to spacemen's well being and group morale"

I'm thinking that, after a vigorous session with a blunt object, group morale will be much higher.

CIMON will be forever silent though.

Re: Well if...

From what I've heard, it would likely be very frustrating because, apparently, there are no boners in space.

And if you're alone, they wouldn't be much use anyway.

Google weeps as its home state of California passes its own GDPR

Re: Legitimate business interests

Completely agree. I nearly jumped out of my chair when I read that phrase, and I had to force myself to finish reading the entire article (a very interesting read, BTW) before coming here to say the same thing, but in slightly more profane terms.

In any case, it is refreshing to see that, for once, political machinations can be used for good. Hats off to the people who got this law pushed through.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft scolded for tricking people into spilling their private info

"we are committed to GDPR compliance across our cloud services"

Well of course you are, to the letter of the law.

And the law doesn't say that you have to be objective and present all the arguments for/against, now does it ?

So they are committed to being compliant, but they will continue to cajole and harass you to get your consent in any legal way they can.

IEEE joins the ranks of non-backdoored strong cryptography defenders

I would think that the situation is simple

You can pass whatever laws you want about encryption in your country, other countries won't see things the same way and all you need is one competent programmer capable of creating a proper, robust encryption scheme and posting it on the Net and your laws are rendered obsolete.

I do think the most effective argument that the IEEE listed is the one saying that backdoored encryption would render companies less competitive.

We're already seeing that kind of result with the Cloud. Thanks to the NSA's shenanigans and the very public cases of judges ruling that data in another country should be made available to the US courts, we now see companies scrambling to make local centers for countries that are passing laws demanding it.

I cannot imagine that encryption will be different.

Facebook quietly kills its Aquila autonomous internet drone program

Re: "nobody I know now is still using Faecebook"

Given that there has not been a massive exodus and shutdown of FB accounts, I'll wager that the people you know that were using FB still are.

Because FB still has that half billion accounts - even if 80% of that is cats, dogs, hamsters and assimilated.

So you're doing an IoT project. Cute. Let's start with the basics: Security

IoT is going to be the poster child of "self-regulation"

One of the basic tenets of capitalism viewed by right-wing Republicans is that the market is self-regulating and thus, should not be regulated.

As far as IoT is concerned, that means that they view millions of people spending money on products that are not secure, are eminently hackable and can cause major disruption of private life as a perfectly acceptable consequence because the market will just "adjust accordingly".

IoT is the "Unsafe at Any Speed" of the IT industry.

It needs regulation, and it needs a global body to evaluate and approve stuff for selling.

If we don't do that now, untold millions of people will suffer needlessly while crap-sellers stuff their pockets in what is surely a most immoral way.

But it's legal, so Republicans don't care.

@Chris King

Bud, as far as I'm concerned, you can wrap whatever the heck you want around that large brick as long as you only target IoT guys. I suggest a submarine.

I'll even help you. With the wrapping and mostly the smacking.

It's getting more and more Azure'd: For Microsoft, sorry seems to be the hardest word

"There are, however, some catches."

"Schools keen to grab the freebie will need to offer GitHub to all technical departments, allow GitHub to use their logo on its website, receive GitHub announcements and finally place one person per department on GitHub's teacher-training programme."

In other words : it's free for you if you sell us your soul, give us your firstborn and allow us to spam you into oblivion. Oh, and we'll "monetize" all the data you give us, as per standard corporate procedure.

How typical of Microsoft. Acquire something good that works, and turn it into yet another waiting room to Satan's realm.

Thanks, I'll pass.

Uber's London licence appeal off to flying start: No, you cannot do driver eye tests via video link

Re: I'm wondering what sort of job they were doing

The only "job" Uber is doing is keeping itself as far away from an actual job as possible, whilst raking in the dough and driving competition into the dust.

The obvious end game is Uber being a monopoly and suddenly prices are going to hitch a ride on the Saturn V.

Taiwanese tech upstarts stole our RAM secrets and staff, claims Micron

"A presentation at the event used Micron DRAM technology code names"

I think you'd have to be pretty stupid to steal tech when moving to a competitor and not bother to rename everything along the way to muddy the waters. Don't talk about F32, talk about Skeletor. Don't mention F32S, mention Chakram.

Be inventive, for Pete's sake. Word processors have had Find/Replace for more than 3 decades now.

Get a grip, literally: Clumsy robots can't nab humans' jobs just yet

Re: Screw the people this will put out of work then.

I do believe there will be one point where humans will have next to nothing to do anymore, because we will have made robots capable of doing it all.

At that point, we're going to have to get to grips with what kind of economy we'll have, because nobody working means no salaries on company budgets, but it also means no money to buy goods.

While I will admit that our current money-for-work economy is screwy and biased and must be controlled, it is still something that provides for the majority in one way or the other.

What will be the rules in an economy where all manufacturing is done by robots ? Al all repairs and maintenance as well ? You cannot put a price on goods nobody has any money to buy them with. And is there any sense to put a price on stuff made by robots anyway ? Oh, of course, today's billionaires will obviously say yes to that, but today's economy is not based on robots, it's based on men with families to support.

The robot economy will be a world where you work if you want to, but you'll still need to eat, drink and be appropriately dressed for the weather. Today, money is what gives us the ability to do all that, money in exchange for our work.

But tomorrow, when robots do everything, we're going to need an entirely different set of rules. What they will be, I have no idea.

Linus Torvalds tells kernel devs to fix their regressive fixing

@Pete 2 Re: "A more professional approach"

Pete 2, I very much doubt you have any qulification to teach Torvalds what a "professional approach" is in kernel design.

I think he's been at it long enough to have a gist of the general idea.

It would seem that this time the problem did not warrant a full-blown volcanic eruption.

Pity, I always enjoy the colors (from a safe distance).

A volt out of the blue: Phone batteries reveal what you typed and read

Re: chars

Probably because of physical reality, such as position on screen and trivial difference in amount of current needed to draw one character instead of another.

For example, it is quite logical that drawing a T will light up more pixels than an I, and a W will require even more pixels, thus more power. A trifling more, granted, but measurable nontheless.

Re: "Always carry a burner phone when visiting the USA"

Visiting the USA ?

In the Trump era ?

Why on God's Green Earth would you want to do that ?

Outage? No, phones are playing silly buggers, insists Sainsbury's Bank

Fret not though, you are a valued customer.

Because zero is a value.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich quits biz after fling with coworker rumbled

Because to a manager you can say : resign or you will be fired for gross misconduct.

They don't bother giving the choice to the worker because he can't afford to resign.

Please tighten your passwords and assume the brace position, says plane-tracking site

Re: Panic

That must have been a harrowing experience indeed - especially given all the terrible things Hollywood has taught us can happen on a flight (engine fire, hydraulic system failure, etc).

I guess you cannot help but imagining all the possible horrors and wondering which one it is. Getting the call was probably the greatest relief, learning it was "just" the A/C was the cherry on top.

NASA eggheads draw up blueprints for spotting, surviving asteroid hits

Not sure about that. If your only job is to constantly try and get funding for something to be done without actually getting anything done, it doesn't sound so glorious.

Atari accuses El Reg of professional trolling and making stuff up. Welp, here's the interview tape for you to decide...

Re: with love and compassion

Nope.

I have no compassion for a marketing guy who invites a technical journal to an interview without bringing any functional items, instead bringing mock-ups, not being able to answer technical questions and then pretending to be hurt when the ensuing article is not written like a Vogue-magazine fanpiece.

Flaming idiot. And now he's Streisanded himself.

No sympathy.