Posts by Pascal Monett 19394 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
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.
Um, really ? In that case, pray tell, how many users asked for Skype to be terminated ?
You're pulling a Trump there, Microsoft.
Oh, I forgot. You meant to say that you're continuing to work on the most requested features that you like.
Carry on, then.
Try it anyway. You might get a pleasant surprise.
And it is high time that incompetent banks started to smart with people effectiveley "voting with their feet".
If you don't leave, TSB will continue to not give a fuck.
Besides, you are aware that Customer Loyalty means nothing these days, aren't you ? Stick with a bank for twenty years and have a slight overdraw problem and your bank is going come down on you with penalties and fines just as they will for the guy who signed up three weeks ago.
So fuck it, move. And if the next one fucks with you, move again. We need to get mobile, otherwise those doddering fools sleeping on the Boards will not even hear the sirens.
Given what I have read here, the action is hardly unjustified. You have not yet bought the SEC, Elon, so stop listening to your yes-men and face reality : you may be a billionaire with a lot of support, but you still have to behave under the rule of law.
And post-justifying your tweet by having meetings with Goldman Sachs practically proves that the SEC is right.
"If the card reader has wireless NFC support, you can hold your NFC smartphone up to the voting machine, and potentially cast a ballot many times over."
A "malicious voter" may do that on purpose, but I'll bet that many perfectly honest voters might just present their NFC-enabled phones more than once simply because they're not sure their vote was recorded properly. No malice needed.
The whole sorry saga of electronic voting machines paints a vast canvas of clueless PHBs barking orders at harassed coders who couldn't give a shit and just churned out whatever met the specs, with a cursory test to make sure the bloody thing didn't crash on the first try.
Facing such incompetence, I think it is very unlikely that the NSA had anything to do with this - it's just the cherry on top of a mountain-size cake of incompetence and carelessness, frosted with greed.
Blindingly obvious ? Not so sure.
UEFI was a response to a problem that was identified back in 1995, which is quite a bit earlier than the Snowden revelations and surveillance world we live in now.
Sure, you could argue that the NSA has been subverting encryption since 2006, so it's in the same timeframe ballpark and it certainly wouldn't be hard to believe that they had a hand in designing vulnerabilities in UEFI.
There is, however, no conspiracy theory on that as of yet, nor has there been any revelations pointing in that direction. Stay tuned, I guess.
Make sure the BOFH does not have any access to this system, otherwise the whole concept falls apart.
The guy reviewing and querying the security database should not have any admin access, and the network sysadmins should not have any access to the security database.
If you don't have that, you have a large collusion risk. And you can forget detecting admin-level insider stuff if the sysadmins are the ones controlling the security database.
Exactly. Yes, laying fiber is costly, no argument there. But once the fiber is in place it costs next to nothing to have the data flow, yet telecoms are always talking about how expensive everything is to get working.
Not true guys, you're just milking the cow to the fullest. Once your initial investment is recovered, bar any unfortunate backhoe you're sailing in clear seas, money dropping like rain every second.
Besides, the benefits these companies regularly post is proof enough. Comms is a better business than casinos - you're fleecing everyone and it's legal everywhere.
Yes, you've had the chance . . and you are failing as dismally as the orange turnip is.
And you have form in acting like him as well. In the face of withering criticism, you just go ahead and repeat your self-congratulations like nothing happened.
I was going to end with "Muppet", but that would be cruel and unjust to muppets.
I resent the fact that the researchers seem to consider that making a game level is just placing blocks and sprites like you sprinkle powdered sugar on a cake.
Making a game level requires at least two things : having a goal in mind, and planning out how you intend to reach that goal. Statistical analysis machines fail on both of these counts.
A good game level is made knowing the game mechanics, to be able to create areas that are of a specific challenge. Well placed, such areas can be simultaneously very desireable and very difficult to hold or go through. It is that combination of hard and yet unable to resist that crafts the best levels.
No computer will be able to attain that level of craft just by looking at existing maps because no computer can understand either the word "difficulty" or the word "desire".
But hey, they got grant money, so it's all good.
Oh, so you recognize that you're not a giant ? If you were one, I'm sure you'd be quite happy about that rule.
And, IIRC, it seems to me that Oracle has a long history of telling everyone it is the giant in the RDMS space, elbowing everyone else out of the way with gleeful abandon.
But, as usual, some billionnaire doesn't get his way, so the toys get thrown out of the pram before the brain engages. Tsk, tsk.
