Posts by Pascal Monett

Bitcoin hijackers found at least one sucker for scam Chrome extension

A limit to peoples' folly ?

Nah, it's just that the worm was being too picky, so it did not get exposure to enough idiots.

Firefox to feature sponsored content as of next week

Re: So clarify for me?

Apparently not, because all this ad stuff is going to happen when you create a new tab, not when you start FF.

I can't say I'm very bothered by it all. If I start a new tab it's because I'm going to type a URL to get somewhere, so I'll likely not pay any attention to any clutter below the URL bar.

Bill Gates declined offer to serve as Donald Trump's science advisor

It'd be enough for me.

North will remain North for now, say geo-magnetic boffins

Okay, these are boffins, but still

The scientists have concluded, okay fine. But 780 thousand years since last reversal remains a long time, and a "preparation time" of 250 years means we could be at the start and have no way of knowing it.

Science is pretty good at determining what happened after the fact, but it sucks at forecasting anything outside orbital mechanics.

I'm glad that the scientific view is that a field reversal is not happening now, but I can't help thinking of volcano scientists who say that the mountain is fine, it won't blow tomorrow.

Yeah, well we'll see tomorrow, won't we ?

US citizen sues France over France-dot-com brouhaha

is set to cost him "millions of dollars"

Really ? Okay, so how many millions has he made up to now ?

More Brits have access to 1Gbps speeds than those failing to muster 10Mbps – Ofcom report

You're obviously not watching TV on the same bandwidth.

I've had an SFR line at almost 11Mbps for the past decade. No complaints on downloading or gaming, but as soon as TV was on, everything was hopeless. Not only did TV not work perfectly (image freezing for a second now and then), but downloads were hobbled and gaming was a nuisance.

it was such a nuisance that I reinstated our satellite dishes so I could keep my bandwidth for gaming.

Best idea I've ever had.

Shocker: Cambridge Analytica scandal touch-paper Aleksandr Kogan tapped Twitter data too

"each tweet has more than 65 different metadata elements"

Who thinks that is 65 too many ?

It's a tweet, for fuck's sake. What can you possibly track ?

Probably.

Google founder Sergey Brin promises to protect humanity from AI

So true.

We do not have AI at this point in time. I grow tired of repeating that, but I will endure.

You want to know what AI is today ? Check out Google's own learning course.

You have statistical mathematics galore, but nowhere do you have Artificial Intelligence.

Nowhere is there a silicon mind ready to learn. There's just electronic transistors with calculation rules, and you make up the rules.

That is not AI.

Not by a long shot.

It is, however, largely enough to enslave us all in a world of targeted adverts every minute of the day..

Windows 10 April 2018 Update lands today... ish

@AC

"Not likely - that's why there is still 10% of traffic remaining after doing this - all catalogues, packages and signatures are still checked with Microsoft - its only the binary blobs that are cached."

Your faith in Microsoft is touching. Let me tell what is not likely : discovering a side-channel attack in a CPU caching process allowing to grab RAM data that should not have been available. It took 10 years, but the weakness was found.

That was not likely.

A Microsoft process distributing code to local network computers ? And you honestly think none of the computer wizards out there will find a way to subvert it ?

Excuse me if I do not share your enthusiasm for the security of Redmond code.

Re: "Peer-to-peer patch distribution over the LAN"

There's nothing Redmond won't do to help hackers take over its OS.

Now waiting for news that blackhats have found a 0-day and are plonking malware into the update system that gets distributed far and wide and auto-installed, courtesy of Microsoft's "bandwidth saving" measures.

Europe needs more dosh for AI, Google's TPU2 vs Nvidia's Tesla V100, and more

"ideas for an European research AI hub"

No, it's ideas for a bigger statistical analysis center, which will give Fortune 500 companies even better methods and tools to deep mine Big Data and screw us over.

They use the word AI, but it does not mean what we think it does.

Apple grounds AirPort once and for all. It has departed. Not gonna fly any more. The baggage is dropped off...

New filesystem ?

How many more filesystems do we need ?

The day holographic storage comes out of lab announcements and into the real world, maybe, but until we have a radically new storage paradigm, I think we know how to store our files on magnetic or optical supports well enough.

Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, oi oi oi! Tech zillionaire Ray's backdoor crypto for the Feds is Clipper chip v2

"We know how to make backdoors, we just don't know how to secure them."

And we never will, because the backdoor knowledge is held by humans and humans are the most unsecure part of any security scheme.

Don't forget that, as CTO of Microsoft, he pulled Sharepoint out of a black cauldron.

Now that is damage.

I'll second that. Notes remains the best development platform to this day (despite stuffing it with Eclipse).

I do wish they'd updated the UI, though, because that is a seriously clunky piece of shite.

Maybe for Notes 10 ?

ZX Spectrum reboot firm's shareholders demand current directors go

Re: "between May 8th and 12th"

Of what year ?

Europe fires back at ICANN's delusional plan to overhaul Whois for GDPR by next, er, year

Re: It's always fun when organizations pretend that the law doesn't apply to them

Only when their fairy-tale comes back and smacks them in the teeth, which doesn't happen nearly often enough to ICANN.

In fact, I do believe that this is the very first time ICANN has taken anything in the teeth. So to see it happen so very publicly and without any of the usual "don't care, we decide it doesn't apply to us" attitude is indeed very satisfying.

Re: "Europe is scarcely at the forefront of anything any more"

Yeah, because having the most reliable and most powerful space launcher technology, which demonstrates a wide swath of technological and industrial expertise, counts for peanuts.

Go back to your Fox News now, everything will be all right.

Brit MPs brand Facebook a 'great vampire squid' out for cash

Re: "mostly harmless"

Uh, tell that to the poor creatures it sucks into its beak with its horned tentacles.

Noise from blast of gas destroys Digiplex data depot disk drives

Re: It's hard to not be extremely loud

It's not the loud that is the problem, apparently, it's the whistling.

I'd suggest adding another nozzle size, say 1.43 linguine, or 7.9 inches. Compared to the 0.9, 0.13, 0.18 and 0.27 linguine sizes, that should allow for rapid gas egress without whistling, I would hope.

Facebook: Crisis? What crisis? Look at our revenue, it's fantastic

"you should sell Facebook stock"

Right. A company creates jobs in the US and Wall Street's first reaction is : punish it.

I don't like FaceBook either (far from), but you really should get your ducks in a line. You cannot complain about the level of unemployement and lack of jobs and simultaneously call for selling stock of US companies that create jobs.

Schizophrenic idiots.

Springwatch: Windows 10 spotters May have to wait a few more weeks

Honestly, XP to Win 7 was a piece of cake. Win 7 to Win 10 . . well, let's just say that my servers are now running Mint.

Programmers! Close the StackOverflow tabs. This AI robot will write your source code for you

@ramsare

Objectively, the "rascal hater" has a lot more upvotes than you do.

So maybe next time you keep your insults in the box and provide an objective counter-argument.

If you're capable of more than Slashdot-level trolling, that is.

'Alexa, listen in on my every word and send it all to a shady developer'

Skills ?

Could we please stop affecting human-like attributes to anything in the IT industry ?

Computers don't have skills, they have programs or add-ons with specific functionality.

Stop trying to confuse a lump of plastic and silicon with a thought-enabled being.

Amazon: For every dollar of op. profit going into Bezos' pockets, 73 cents came from AWS

"a cloud provider with a gift shop on the side"

Brilliant. I almost burst out laughing at that one.

I will be re-using that.

Did you guess 2019 for Intel's 10nm chip ramp up? Congratulations

Data-centric ?

Oh, so that explains why you're not churning out the chips, then ? You're not a chip-maker anymore, you're a data center. Is there any area of computing that is not turning into a vast excuse to slurp MY data ?

Oh well, there's AMD that's still a chip-maker. At least somebody is still doing what it is they're supposed to be doing.

GitLab crawling back online after breaking its brain in two

"out of 5 backup/replication [..] deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place"

Um, how can something be deployed if it isn't even set up ? Deploying does not just mean "copy to production server". It means configuring, testing that the config works in production, and activating in production.

I spy with my little eye ... a quantum drum with TRILLIONS of atoms

The real question

If you leave your sandwich on it, does that affect the computation results ?

Chinese boffins on 3D XPoint: If it works like phase-change memory, it's probably phase-change memory

Re: How long ?

To be immediately followed by a lawsuit for IP violation, a DCRM takedown and anything else that can be even collaterally used as an excuse to shut down that info.

Because these days The Truth navigates a legal minefield just to exist.

Who will fix our Internal Banking Mess? TSB hires IBM amid online banking woes

Yeah, but why bother with that hassle when your new bank is falling over itself to help you ?

Especially since it will be the last time that bank will fall over itself to do anything for you.

Astroboffins peep at the largest orgy of galaxies banging into each other

"as it is unlikely that there are more than about 16 such objects across the entire sky"

Cue more research in the coming months revealing that such superclusters are a one-in-a-million chance happening nine times out of ten.

America's states try to restart net neutrality – with very mixed results

Yeah, sure

"Big Cable is fiercely opposed but claiming it will follow net neutrality rules regardless and so there is no need for a new law"

Because Big Cable can be trusted to follow rules it doesn't like. Yeah. Bridge, anyone ?

If they're ready to follow the rules, they should welcome a law that states explicitely how they should follow it.

Pleading against a new law is simply saying "please leave us wiggle room to screw you without you being able to retaliate".

AMD CEO Su: We like GPU crypto-miners but gamers are first priority

Good for AMD, good for all of us

Glad to see AMD raking it in and provisioning for the future.

We all need a strong competitor to Intel, so as to keep everyone on their toes and prices fair.

And we need AMD to be able to push out a new architecture every now and then, to keep innovation from being dicatated by a single company.

AMD was first to have a Ghz processor, and that pushed Intel hard at the time. We need AMD to renew the experience in some way.

So good on AMD. Keep going.

Incredible Euro space agency data leak... just as planned: 1.7bn stars in our galaxy mapped

Re: DARK MATTER IS A FANTASY

Let's not jump to conclusions already.

Space is big. The Universe is complicated.

Yes, there is a new theory about how to explain the matter discrepancy and yes, I have myself a lot of misgivings about a form of matter that does not interact with anything yet still exerts a gravitational effect - not to mention that I would dearly prefer our Universe to not expand endlessly because I like seeing other galaxies.

But let's let the scientists hash it out before taking sides, shall we ?

ISO blocks NSA's latest IoT encryption systems amid murky tales of backdoors and bullying

Re: "Leaving the Standards Authority with no choice but to"

go and create a proper encryption system.

You seriously think that ISO is going to accept a 2nd-rate anything simply because they refused a potential 1st-rate one ? You're thinking bureaucrat.

Think engineer. They're going to go and make another 1st-rate one, because Standards.

"the NSA started attacking the reputations of those experts"

Really. Like trolls on Slashdot, then ?

First they get all their shiny toys stolen from under their noses, now they reveal themselves as the fucking trolls they are.

Well I do hope that this will long be remembered. Nothing proposed by the US should be approved for a very long time.

Don't forget : it takes time to build trust, but only an instant to lose it.

And you just lost, NSA.

Big time.

The tech you're reading these words on – you have two Dundee uni boffins to thank for that

Re: "Except that neither or the inventors in this case were themselves Scottish"

Don't worry ; in a hundred years, they will be.

Patch Drupal now: Yet another critical website bug found – a sequel to 'Drupalgeddon2'

You canna win, can ye ?

Patch and users grumble, don't patch and users grumble.

Come on, people, they're doing something and doing it in a timely manner.

If you don't like patching, go back to Windows XP, you'll be fine there.

You say Halo and I say goodbye: Microsoft has a word with unauthorised mod devs

Release the game on Russian servers

And middle-finger Microsoft.

BTW, anybody know if Putin likes Halo Online ?

World's biggest DDoS-for-hire souk shuttered, masterminds cuffed

Good on the cops

I look forward to hearing how the cops are hunting down the registered scum that subsidized those jackasses.

TSB outage, day 5: What do you mean you can't log in? Our systems are up and running. Up and running, we say!

Re: Still humped

From here it seems to me that they should have added another 2,500 man-years on the project.

Just my 2 cents.

Danish submariner sent down for life for murder of journalist Kim Wall

I have no problem with this guy appealing

Right up to his last dying breath.

Facebook can't admit the truth, says data-slurp boffin Kogan

Yes, but everything is showbusiness these days.

Re: "“The company management are more than happy to deal with, and support, the ICO,” "

Indeed.

This is rewriting history in action.

The Agile and the Continuous: Database Drift ... Neat film title but something to avoid

Re: Fixing up the problems with Continuous Delivery and DevOps

You can mix and change titles as much as you wish, the function of DBA and the function of Dev (Ops or not) are not going to change.

As either one of these functions is quite complex and requires specialization, it is a very rare person who can reliably pretend to be both, therefor each should listen to the other.

Your AI pet project is only as smart as its garbage training set

Well duh, what a surprise

"The techies claim to have experienced a greater rate of accuracy using the game data to train their AI than relying entirely on the real-world stuff from CamVid."

Game data is obviously great for AI training. You have a virtual world created by a computer used as training grounds for another computer. Advantages ? No clutter, no useless noise, and faces are polygons with textures stretched on. No pimples, no puffiness under the eyes, no 5-o'clock beard. The only things shown are the things that have been calculated. No wonder it's easier for a statistical analysis machine (what we currently call AI) to recognize and classify.

Unfortunately, Real Life (TM) is messier than that. Granted, it may be advantageous to train a not-AI on such data before turning it loose on actual, real images, but there's also a chance that we are just fooling ourselves into thinking that we are making this work. It's the Hall of Mirrors effects for the Mentats of Dune.

Yahoo! dismemberment! begins! as! Oath! offloads! Flickr!

"there’s no plan [to] combine the two services or make account-holders do anything differently"

Yet.

There is always a grace period after a purchase during which the buyer pretends to not want to touch anything, to reassure the paying customers - and give themselves time to find out how everything actually works.

Then, one day, out of the blue (once they have properly mapped the existing functionality) they will suddenly have a blinding flash of a brainstorm, and changes will be announced.

Always for good, obviously.

McDonald's tells Atos to burger off: Da da da da da, we're lobbing IT ...

Re: Change for change's sake

Well yes there is : Capgemini whored itself out for cheaper than Atos, and McD's manglement decided to go ahead and screw with something that apparently works fine for the sake of shaving off some more trimmings from the "cost center" that is IT.

Oh, baby! Newborn-care website leaves database of medics wide open

"own up to your mistakes"

That right there is one of the hardest things to do. If you look at the history of humans, I'm sure that you will find many, many more instances of people covering up their goofs rather than admitting them and working on fixing the issue.

I think it is a case of misplaced pride. We act as if we are perfect, we strive to impose that image on people around us, and anything that might tar that image must be suppressed.

Before the Internet, you could maintain the illusion because nobody who didn't know you had any way of finding out. That time is over now. Maybe our species is going to learn ?