Posts by Pascal Monett

Software definer wants you to befriend the 'BFC', do a bit of 'reverse virtualization'

"you can’t really redefine the server you are running in"

No, but I'm guessing you can partition its resources to different tasks - like every other VM system in existence.

Lenovo expects data centre profits in two years, if it can fix China

"needs to rebuild a band of loyal users"

That is going to take time and effort, and salespeople who actually listen to the customer and to the techs. No overselling the product's abilities then pushing the techs to do something unexpected in an impossibly short time frame.

As long as Lenovo does not copy IBM's way of doing things, it has a decent shot at success.

Australian money cops gain powers to regulate cryptocurrency

"digital currencies need the same level of regulation"

It was only a question of time.

That said, it just might calm things down if so-called Exchanges are under regulatory supervision. As long as they all are.

I wonder if we'll start seeing black market, unregulated exchanges ? After all, it's virtual money, and BitCoin showed that it could be forked.

US cops point at cell towers and say: Give us every phone number that's touched that mast

almost 150000 requests over 6 months

That boils down to over 830 per day.

I wonder how the Police still has time to catch petty criminals when they're sifting through mountains of data every day.

Defra recruiting 1,400 policy wonks to pick up the pieces after Brexit

I think we'll make a great team :)

I've already fried an egg. I'm sure that makes me amply qualified.

Comp sci world shock: Bonn boffin proposes P≠NP proof, preps for prestige, plump prize

Well the paper has proved one thing at least

The impressive amount of nerds that visit El Reg.

I say that is the most affectionate way possible :)

Scrutiny? We've heard of it. Dot-UK supremo Nominet goes dark

Transparency = Honesty

Ergo, lack of transparency = opportunity to cheat, lie and steal.

Doesn't mean that every company cheats, lies and steals, but the possibility to do so is there.

It is especially bad in companies that are in charge of portions of Internet accessibility.

I think it is high time that someone writes down a Open-Source Charter of Address Registrators, or OSCAR.

Said charter would define very precisely and specifically how the registrar is suppose to operate, how decisions are to be made and how they can be challenged, the power and duties of the board, the managers, etc.

Any registrar not complying with OSCAR would be boycotted until dead.

And I'd like a double side of fries with that.

I like the way you think.

I think I'd like being a mallet holder. Scratch that, actually I'm sure I'd like it.

Ads regulator raps PC repair biz for massaging malware infection rates

I checked Google Maps

Went hunting for that address, Google Maps transformed it into Athinodorou 3, Dasoupolis, Strovolos, Cyprus.

From the satellite image, it looks like a small individual house, not an office building at all. To have that many references pointing to a simple house clearly means something fishy is going on.

Read IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's letter to staff: Why I walked from Trump's strategy forum

Nice pic for the article

Shame the wrong finger is up

The future of Python: Concurrency devoured, Node.js next on menu

Trivial ?

And which of the 10+ examples that absolutely do not function like Switch do you recommend ?

Months after breach at the 'UnBank' Ffrees, customers complain: No one told us

Re: "you shouldn't worry about the government more than you worry about criminals"

I respectfully disagree.

A criminal can steal your money, eventually your identity. That's bad, of course. You have recourse against that, and, with time and effort, you can prevail in proving your innocence.

A government can destroy your life. Lock you up for years on baseless charges, or simply record the fact that you have been accused of something and therefor remove all possibility of getting a job. You have no recourse.

Which is worse ?

I can tell you why I object :

The fact that I do have nothing to hide does not mean you have permission to rifle through my life without a warrant (implying probably cause, which you don't have since I have nothing to hide).

The fact that so much data is gathered on everyone allows Big Data to find correlations that a human would take thousands of years to spot, meaning that advancements in data mining imply that all that data can conceivably find a way to implicate me personally in something I absolutely had no intention of participating in.

As in, if I somehow go every week at about the same time to the same place as an actual terrorist (think supermarket for food), my bloomin' so-called smartphone localizes me in the same general area at the same times, and I happen to be on camera with said terrorist (in the canned food aisle because he was asking about a specific price), I may get flagged as a potential contact, become a suspect and get my life invaded and overturned to find whatever excuse to jail me or at least ruin my future when I was just frakkin' shopping and so was he (because terrists eat too).

Och. Scottish Parliament under siege from brute-force cyber attack

Holyrood

I always have to read that word twice.

Every time, my brain first reads "Hollywood".

Re: Facepalm....

Yup, but it'll still take years before Manglement recognizes that and changes their stance.

Who knows, it might take a whole generation of manglement to change things. And one can only hope that the new generation, whenever it comes to power, will stop limiting password length to 8 bloody chars.

Loss-making storage survivor Sphere 3D looking at 'strategic alternatives'

"It has also hired Ernst & Young Capital Advisors"

Well that's the end of them, then.

So long and thanks for . . nothing actually.

Not another Linux desktop! Robots cross the Uncanny Valley

Uncanny valley

Reminds of the sequel to Westworld, FutureWorld. The robot that was the most sympathetic was the tech aide that didn't have a face (well, its face was unmounted to reveal the circuits underneath).

It never talked, and its movements were consistent with robotic behavior, but when the hero convinces the tech guy to go with him, leaving the bot alone, you could see how forlorn and lost it felt.

Even without a face.

I do not want robots to be human-looking. I do not feel that it helps in any way.

Not until we have actual AI to put in them, that is, and even then, I want to be able to differentiate them from actual humans.

How to build your own DIY makeshift levitation machine at home

"new applications of acoustic levitation"

As long as you are focused on things that weigh only a couple of grams, I guess it works fine.

I wonder what the settings would be to levitate a car. Actually, I wonder if the car would levitate, or explode.

Batteries that don't burn at the drop of a Galaxy Note 7? We're listening

Yay, Yet Another Battery Tech Article

What fun. Yet another article on future battery tech that we won't see before decades, full of chemistry-heavy references to make it look serious.

Look, guys, I know that there are people working on batteries, but I've got a bit of a case of burnout reading about all that extraordinary stuff they're doing in the labs when the only types of battery I've been able to buy since 1990 is good old Alkaline, Mercury-Cadmium or NiMH.

Been hearing about carbon nanotubes since it seems forever, but nothing on the shelves. Here comes another nothing then.

Who knows, maybe my daughter's children will see something new. Whenever she gets around to having some, that is.

Love cloudy HPC? Microsoft does, slurps Cycle Computing

Well MS bought Skype for 8.5 billion

This will actually be of use, so I'm guessing MS paid way more.

Creepy backdoor found in NetSarang server management software

"a virtual file system inside the registry"

Thanks again, Microsoft, for this abomination of an excuse that you included since Windows 95.

The Registry : the gift that keeps on giving (to DRM makers and hackers).

Azure Stack will need special sysadmins, says Microsoft

"how quickly the certification will expire"

That'll be easy : every quarter.

Because Microsoft is operating on a rolling update framework, and Azure is as constantly updated as can be, after a quarter you're probably going to have to update your cert to prove that you keep up with the times.

Intel's diversity numbers are out – and that 'push' has become more of a 'gentle nudge'

Why "White and Asian" ?

If you're tallying the various origins, I'd think Asian should be separate from White. It's only one more line in the table, and you can't tell me that they don't have the data.

So why did they decide to lump these two very different categories together ?

A glimpse of life under President Zuckerberg? Facebook CEO's boffins censor awkward Q&A

So The Zuck is setting up a "research" company

And he's trying to make it look like a charity when it is clearly a for-profit entity that has zero transparency and no obligation to report anything. Typical.

You'd have to be daft to give him money anyways. I'm sure he'll find some who will, though.

Taken a while but finally here's the first proper smart-home gizmo

Re: I too seek out ever brighter illumination

No, you're actually looking for a vivifying accent in an energetic mood in a solar hue (ie white).

Uber to bend over, take privacy probe every two years for next 20 years

"Uber has a strict policy.."

The only strict policy Uber has to is to screw everyone everywhere for as much as it can.

The rest is at the whim of the manager confronted with the decision to be ethical or not and, as we know, ethics is not even sweeping the floor in Uber offices.

Slurping people's info without a warrant? That's OUR JOB, Google, Facebook et al tell US Supreme Court

"he provided that information to the phone company voluntarily"

I will accept that I provide phone numbers I call to the phone company "voluntarily" the day someone can show me how to make a phone call without giving the phone company the number.

I won't be holding my breath waiting.

Datrium claims its split-provisioning DVX array is 'tomorrow calling'

Disaggregated and converged simultaneously ?

Ah, Marketing, the games you can play.

Looking forward to a "partially unified unassembled disaggregated converged virtually overlayed storage array".

RBS sharpens axe again: 900 IT jobs to go by 2020

They do seem to be doing their best to please you.

Fresh Microsoft Office franken-exploit flops – and you should have patched by now anyway

I'm on LibreOffice for home use.

Goog enough for what I need, and I'm not concerned by Office attacks.

NASA delivers CREAM-y load to ISS to improve cosmic ray detection

90 billion cosmic ray events in 6.25 years

By my calculations, that makes for almost 463 cosmic rays per second.

I had no idea there were that many !

HP Inc vows: We're not walking away from Continuum

"More evidence that MS (And HP) are fiddling while rome burns perhaps?"

Just evidence that Microsoft is a tired behemoth vainly struggling to get out of the tar pit of history. It has never been capable of adapting, much less forecasting change, and is now too entrenched in its own hubris to do anything that would make it change its habits.

Of course, said behemoth is still sleeping on a rug woven from diamond and platinum, so it will be a while before it dies out. Meanwhile, it is quite possible that it may gobble up a newcomer that just happens to have a good idea, which means that Microsoft will have a stay of execution for the time it takes to inevitably stuff it up and abandon that market.

Nevertheless, Microsoft is now a dead man walking.

Are Asimov's laws enough to stop AI stomping humanity?

Yep. They'll invent the perfect reality show and we'll do the rest of the job on our own.

The Constitution of the United States of America is a wonderful document that, unfortunately, has no more bearing on the decisions of the US Government, emasculated as it is by corporate lobbying and gutless politicians.

Police camera inaction? Civil liberties group questions forces' £23m body-cam spend

"the data wasn't collated or held in an accessible format"

Okay, so here we have different police forces that have spent valuable money on recording equipment, then state that said equipment is either not used, records not kept or not accessible, or records even not made.

What the hell is the use of the purchase then ?

Oh, boy! Uber investors behind CEO sueball say Travis Kalanick won't let the company grow up

So, let me count the ways . .

Uber is :

- widely reviled by the public at large

- not trusted by its own drivers

- has a rotten workplace atmosphere

- has no leadership

- is being actively disrupted by ex-leadership

- is burning money without oversight

and it still has investors ?

That is definitely called throwing good money on the bonfire. Let the company crash and burn and pick up the pieces without the rot. THEN put money into something that works and is not a public example of everything you shouldn't do.

Google bins white supremacist site after it tries to host-hop away from GoDaddy

Unfortunately, paedophilia is a sexual issue, while Naziism is a political one.

As disgusting as it may be, Naziism is actually protected under Free Speech. So, while it is definitely not a good political system, one cannot prevent people from entertaining the idea openly.

One can, however, identify the individuals, never speak with them again and warn all of one's friends and relations.

US military spies: We'll capture enemy malware, tweak it, lob it right back at our adversaries

"We must disrupt to exist."

I find quite disturbing that a person with that mentality is in charge of a cyber-warfare division.

It's like putting a sadist in charge of a prison.

US prosecutors demand data to unmask every visitor to anti-Trump protest website

So, Trump now wants to jail the people who don't like him ?

In America ? Seems like that shining beacon has rusted through and through.

On the other hand, he'll have largely enough forced labor to build that wall . . .

If Anonymous 'pwnd' the Daily Stormer, they did a spectacularly awful job

I wonder how many of these "neo-Nazis" play Call of Duty, and don't realize which side they're playing on ?

Dismayed by woeful AI chatbots, boffins hired real people – and went back to square one

"It was hoped by businesses the world over" . . .

. . that they could finally kick out all those smelly, expensive meatbags and replace them by one single, shiny electronic server that they could then shut in a room and ignore for the rest of time while paying a minimal fee on power, air conditioning and replacement parts now and then.

Sorry, Megabuck CEOs, seems like you're first going to have to invest another few hundred billion bucks in R&D before seeing that rosy future.

Toyota, Intel, Ericsson team to get cars talking to the cloud

"From a technical point of view"

It makes no sense to have cars connected to a global network for warning of local problems. Given the security history of car makers, it would be perfectly acceptable to have cars send a warning by radio signal, with other cars arriving on-site getting the warning and displaying the corresponding signal.

It's a local problem. People on the Internet in Singapore have no use knowing that I have a flat tire in the plains of France.

And we are not yet at a point where we need nanosecond reaction times when driving.

This is not pod racing.

Sneaky devs could abuse shared libraries to slurp smartphone data

I cry foul !

Google-analytics is not first ?

Based on that fact alone I say this list is rubbish. Google analytics is everywhere. I just can't believe bloomin' Facebook is first.

Antarctica declared world's most volcanic region as 91 new cones found beneath ice

Time to start looking for ways to cleanse the atmosphere of sulphur dioxide

Before those volcanoes start belching and it's too late.

Yellowstone supervolcano is another risk. We need to have a method to clean our air, just like we need a plan to divert asteroids !

Infosec eggheads rig USB desk lamp to leak passwords via Bluetooth

"It's not a particularly practical or terrifying scenario"

No it isn't, because we're back to the physical access = game over scenario.

I thought I was going to read something exciting about how a lamp had been modified to accept a USB key that could monitor signals from a laptop next to it.

THAT would have been frighteningly exciting, even if we're almost at physical access again.

In short, I feel let down by this article. Much less than I had hoped for.

Firmware update blunder bricks hundreds of home 'smart' locks

A mistake was made.

Instead of faffing around with the usual "only a small number of customers was affected", the company responsibly owned up to the blunder, contacted the affected users (meaning the company knows who was affected), offered two means of repair/replacement and foots the bill in either case.

That points to a seriously well-organized company that is probably intent on keeping its customers and showing how professional it can be in handling issues.

From where I stand, although I have no use for their product, I do appreciate how they are dealing with the situation and wish that more examples of that behavior were available.

Kalanick stations! Ex-Uber CEO sued for fraud by soured sugar daddy

Re: Uber is looking like a seriously toxic company...

This is board level problems. That is where the buck stops.

As far as I'm concerned, given the scumbag approach to everything this company has, the board can have as many issues as it wants to bear.

I'm not shedding a tear for them.

At last! Vivaldi lets you kill looping GIFs

"they evade ad blockers"

They don't evade NoScript.

Nothing evades NoScript.

Brit folk STILL not getting advertised broadband speeds – survey

The widespread understanding in the broadband industry . . .

. . is that saying "up to" means you cannot complain if you're not getting the top tier performance. It'll always be down to your local connection issues and they're in the clear.

Checking the speed you actually get isn't going to change things one iota.