Posts by Pascal Monett

China ALTERED its public vuln database to conceal spy agency tinkering – research

Re: "the US is doing it better"

Yeah, right up to the point where the NSA gets hacked and its hoard escapes into the hands of Russian hackers.

CEO of smartmobe outfit Phantom Secure cuffed after cocaine sting, boast of murder-by-GPS

Indeed. We're not talking about VHS home-taping here, we're talking about a phone you can only get if you're in touch with a proven criminal for whom a 6-month subscription costing at leasy $3K is worth it.

These are not your innocent TOR users mixed in with criminal elements, anyone can use TOR. To use this phone, you have to start by knowing, and being known by, a criminal.

So let's not start banging the drum of Individual Freedom just right now, okay ?

Windows Mixed Reality: Windows Mobile deja vu?

They're still in business because their bank account is the size of Texas, and it will take quite a while before that changes, however many blunders Microsoft makes.

Unless, of course, SatNad decides to repeatedly plonk a few dozen billion here and there to buy up promising tech before gutting it. That would likely hasten the process.

But it will still take time. A long time.

Yahoo! Can't! Toss! Hacking! Lawsuit!

I do hope this will go through

Between HP advertising a laptop with Internet access and then removing the access, and countless companies promising secure email and not delivering, I hope this trial will reach judgement and will find that a promise made by a company is BINDING, because I am sick and tired of hearing of companies getting out of plain-text promises simply because they suppose nobody should actually believe them.

Look, I understand that high-level, highly paid executives need to lie all the time, but when you advertise something it is high time that we get back to the days when you're supposed to deliver on your promises.

Yahoo! is dog meat anyway, might as well make an example out of it.

Air gapping PCs won't stop data sharing thanks to sneaky speakers

"air gapping sensitivite computer systems less secure"

Okay, let's envision the scenario :

Sensitive computers, accessing and containing essential company information, used by the few individuals accredited by the company to have access to and manage that information. And you want me to think that those people are going to have the speakers working on those sensitive machines ? Because obviously what they want to do is listen to music all day long. Or some other nonsense explanation.

Look, either we're talking about a mom & pop operation at which point nobody gives a rat's ass what info is on the computer, or we're talking about a company that has dozens of employees in open-space offices all tasked with seperate things. You know what happens in open-space offices ? People do not allow their computer to make sounds. They mute them because there's already enough noise what with the phone calls, the colleagues dropping by to talk and/or barging in because operational issue, not to mention the meeting down the hall with fifteen participants, all standing in the middle of a hallway.

In that kind of environment, if you want some music it is to drown out all the rest of the noise and you're going to do it with a portable music player and earphones, none of which will be attached to the "sensitive" computer.

Kind of reminds me of the spying photocopier drone story, where a drone was theoretically capable of gathering data from a photocopier - at the condition that there was no obstacle between the drone and the photocopier, that everybody at that level was drunk/stoned enough to be oblivious to the drone and that the wind was not strong enough to blow said drone away however briefly.

Sure, in your theoretical dream world, a sensitive computer could be hacked via its speakers. Just like one day you might finally get laid. Theoretically.

Millionaire-backed science fiction church to launch Scientology TV network

Re: "Islam is the only sect"

WRONG.

Go back and relearn what a sect is.

It is not because some misguided islamic extremists have done some YouTube beheading that you should lump all followers of Islam in the same boat.

Scientology is a sect. Jehova's Witnesses is a sect. Any pseudo-religion that attempts to take your money and estrange you from your family is a sect. Any "religion" whose teachings you have to pay to learn is definitely a sect and something to be avoided.

Islam is most definitely NOT a sect. Islam, Judaism and Christianism all hold to the Old Testament. They have that in common.

Now if you want to take only the extremist side of things, you don't need to go as far as Islam. Just visit your nearest abortion clinic and watch the so-called Christians screaming bloody murder threats at the people working there.

Elon Musk invents bus stop, waits for applause, internet LOLs

"it's a [..] electric bus that automatically switches between tunnels and lifts"

I would really like to see such a system IRL, if only to see how long Musk can stand the lift time and how quickly he will jump back into his serial-killer-free helicopter to get to his destination.

Really, Musk, "inventing" a mass-transit system that costs billions more than the existing one, what a brilliant idea. And a tunneling system that is 14 times faster, really ? What does it tunnel with, nuclear-powered lasers ?

Oh well, it's Monday. Bound to be stupid stuff happening on a Monday.

Are you Falcon sure, Elon? Musk vows Big Rocket will go up 2019

Spring is coming, the windbags are starting to blow

Okay, Mr Musk, I know that billionaires have to be outrageously upbeat in everything they say, but you are really pushing things.

The Saturn V already had a payload of 140 metric tons. If you're doubling the thrust and can only add 10 metric tons to that, then I don't see that you're doing all that good.

As for self-driving cars, you're just spouting nonsense. None of them are certified for public use yet, so your percentage is meaningless. In 35 years of driving with over 1.5 million km under my wheels I have never been responsible for an accident, nor have I ever so much as brushed another human with my car. How can you be 200% safer than that ?

Finally, we don't have AI and we won't have that for many decades yet. What we have is Machine Learning, the modern term and spiritual successor to the Expert Systems of yore. I did the Google course on ML and it's all about statistics. Statistics do not Intelligence create, and none of those ML machines can do anything else than that for which they have been configured.

So cool it with the AI rhetoric - you're waay ahead of your time on that one.

UK digi minister Hancock suggests Facebook and pals give your kids a time-out

Re: At least though he is 'thinking of the children (TM)'

And the road to Hell is paved with good intentions . . .

Suspicious cert-sellers give badware a good name for just a few thousand bucks

Re: Or is it theatre?

You might have hit upon something there . . .

Intel ponders Broadcom buy as Qualcomm's exec chair steps away

No architecture is "perfect". The x86 architecture is heavily tied to the PC platform, and that is just not the future anymore. PCs are on the way out, web computing on tablets or phones is in.

Intel wants to make money first. I'm sure that Intel will scrap x86 the day it has to.

"they're morphing into a slow, lazy incumbent, more interested in skewing the market to their advantage and buying other people to eliminate threats, rather than leading by innovation"

Uh, I thought that was done already.

Tim Berners-Lee says regulation of the web may be needed

I have to agree with you, but for one thing : although Google is indeed almost unavoidable, nobody forces anyone to go on FaceBook or Twitter.

I avoid social media like the plague, so I am not subject to any "weaponization" of my Internet experience. Plus I have decades of experience in sorting the spam from legit mails in my Inbox, and I can smell an Internet scam mail from miles away.

Facebook and Twitter are useful to me though, because now all the idiots are over there, so I get a lot less spam. Give it a while, people will tire of it.

As for the next billion users, most of them will not be English speakers, nor will they even be of Western culture. I do not think Facebook or Twitter will be able to brainwash them. On the other hand, they'll certainly have their own versions available, and will have to learn to deal with it in their own way.

Being a global platform does not mean everyone acts the same. Facebook will never have the same importance to a Chinese or an Indian than it does for an American.

Screw everything! French swingers campsite up for sale, owners 'tired'

Lyon a shithole ?

I don't know what part of Lyon you spend your time in, but it is obviously not the right part. Or it's been a while since you went there.

I visited Lyon last year and I much prefer it to Paris. Great architecture, nice people, proper living standards, free bus transport, and generally much cleaner.

I felt at ease in Lyon, which is much more than I can say for Paris.

And I'm French.

Auto manufacturers are asleep at the wheel when it comes to security

It could have been so simple

Entertainment network with USB port to plug in any phone, linked to speakers and everything Internet-facing on its own network. Your in-car webcam has been hacked ? No problem, that's all that is accessible. Just don't shag in the car and you'll be fine (with a bit of black tape on the webcam camera, of course).

Car CAN bus totally seperate, with high-level fob key ciphering to open doors and start engine, and under-the-hood/bonnet USB port for maintenance. Unhackable unless you get physical access (like most non-computer things these days).

Why, why, WHY did they throw everything on the same bus ?

Well, in the end, it doesn't matter. A few hundred deaths and a raft of class-action lawsuits will certainly sort the issue out.

Unfortunately, it seems that that is what it is going to take.

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli to miss 2024 Paris Olympics

Unfortunately, that is not news.

Mum? Dad? Can I have a 3D XPoint disk for my birthday?

@ Jack of Shadows

I've been lucky with my two OCZ's as well. Bought in 2011, right before the company lost wind, I feared the worst, but they're still chugging away, reliable as ever.

Okay, I have all my computer equipment on a UPS with current smoothing (or whatever that tech is called). That may count for something.

Then again, I've seen colleagues with their SSD laptops die suddenly in the span of ten minutes, so maybe I'll look into buying some replacements soon, just in case.

Edit : just checked, can't find any OCZ to buy anymore - so that's one problem gone.

The Java release train is moving faster, but will developers be derailed?

This is the Internet. What it was made for is irrelevant.

WE SHALL MAKE IT WORK AS WE SEE FIT !

Will the defendant please rise? Utah State Bar hunts for sender of topless email

Re: "We used to think you English were the prude ones"

I think you need to watch this.

Bots don't spread fake news on Twitter, people do, say MIT eggheads

"the top 1 per cent of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000"

Well duh. It's hardly new : 20 years ago people were forwarding mails promising that Microsoft would give money to whomever sent it to 20 people (or however many).

I have spent quite a bit of time trying to respond and educate the people sending me the latest fraud mail of the day - because many of those were people I personally knew. Some of them do not speak to me anymore; apparently I dared challenge their worldview and they did not accept that. I do not miss them.

But it would seem that there are precious few people who do even the most basic checks when they get something that appears to be "insider news". They do not check that the originator is from the same domain they claim to represent, they do not check that any names or places mentioned actually exist, they do not check, period. They read, accept, forward and move on, feeling good about themselves when they have only just participated in making the world more stupid.

The silver lining on this dark cloud of dispair is that, sometimes, someone actually accepts to be educated and understand how simple it is to control the verisimilitude of a new post.

Will the stock market drop Dropbox like it's hot? Numbers say no

Better because your customers pay more ?

Okay Box, you're taking the high road and looking down on the riff-raff. Nice clean air where you are, I guess. Unfortunately, targetting Fortune 500 companies means you're limiting your market penetration to a few million max - and you don't have them all.

DropBox may only be getting $100 per paying customer, but DropBox's market is the entire Internet.

Let's make a quick calculation : 2% of a billion users is 20 million - and that's already a heck of a lot more users than there are licenses to get from Fortune 500 companies.

Fortune 500 companies also have a nasty habit of being very demanding for the money they pay - and each Fortune company has its own demands. That's going to be taxing on your Dev department as well.

As far as I see it, Box, you're going to be eating your words soon enough.

British military spends more on computers than weapons and ammo

"where wars of the 21st century will really be fought"

Well I think there's a quick and cheap defense if a cyber war is started : unplug the sea links.

Done.

Who do I send my million dollar research invoice to ?

Too many bricks in the wall? Lego slashes inventory

Re: Lego...

I am personally quite unhappy with what Lego has become.

I got a medieval castle when I was 13. All the walls and towers and even the secret door where made of basic Lego bricks, all reusable in thousands of ways.

Last XMas my godson got a Saturn V rocket. He spent two days putting it together, but all I could see was "and then what ?".

I do not see any reuseability in those specialized, much too complicated pieces. Okay, you get a nice-looking spaceship, but that's all you get.

It's a lie. All og Lego is now a lie. Once upon a time it was about imagination, now it's just about cashing in.

Sorry, Lego, looks like you're just nostalgia now. I won't be sorry to see you go if you don't change your ways.

April Fool: FCC finally bothers with Puerto Rico as chairman visits

Re: No, Mary, it's not Paij's fault

"the FCC does not manage telecommunications on the island of PR"

Okay, lets admit that. If that is the case, then why the big show and tell about some nonexistent money ?

If Pai has nothing to do with the problem, he has no reason to fund its resolution.

I think you need to recheck your facts.

HPE to cut technician jobs as field work outsourced to Unisys

Nice to know for next time some HPE marketer tries to phone me

I'll just answer : "No thanks, I have no intention of working with Unisys".

Sacked saleswoman told to pay Intel £45k after losing discrim case

I feel you are vindicated as well

It's always difficult to know exactly what happened in such cases. Maybe there actually was some sort of discrimination, but one thing feels certain : she's not being objective about it.

So he didn't answer her emails. That in itself is not proof of discrimination. After reading this article, I have the distinct feeling that the bias is on her part, given that she barely recognizes attempts to be balanced and immediately follows by the base statement "but I know it isn't because of what I saw", but without bringing any facts to the table.

In short, she may have been right to feel slighted, but acting like a harpy about it does not make her case.

I think the judge was right on this.

Great, we're going to get DevOps-ed. So, 15 years of planning processes – for the bin?

Re: "no one portion of the system is big enough to break anything"

Sure. Go say that to Azure or AWS guys who've repeatedly seen entire continents go TITSUP because of some lone router change or command feedback issue.

DevOps to me seems like a pit where you throw all the tools, throw in the developers, have the band start up some shrieking version of Hells Bells, and hope for the best in the frenetic activity that ensues.

What I want to see is how this new fad will stand up in ten or twenty years' time. And what new fad will have taken the board by then.

Co-op Bank's shonky IT in spotlight as delayed probe given go-ahead

"banned the bank's disgraced former chairman"

Well finally something concrete for top-level executive. Mind you, he wasn't banned from ever being a chairman again, he was just banned from being chairman of a financial institution. In other words, he might be able to set up a charity that does banking.

So, not exactly the sharp edge of the axe, but still . .

CryptoLurker hacker crew skulk about like cyberspies, earn $$$

"If the user tries to stop the process, the computer system reboots."

Ooh the little bastards. That has to be a Windows weakness, I imagine that a Linux distro would not reboot, but ask confirmation from the user.

Then again, I'm pretty sure this scumware is dedicated to Windows, as usual. Keep going while the going's good, scum. One day, Windows will be just a souvenir, and you'll have to work a lot harder to take over a machine.

News lobsters demand to be let back into the Facebook boiling pot

"...inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically," said Murdoch

And Murdoch knows all about inadequate journalism.

This is an expert talking, people. Listen up.

Brit semiconductor tech ended up in Chinese naval railgun – report

Re: "That... depends... whose fleet"

Yeah, I'm sure the Chinese have hundreds of strategic icebreakers.

Up to 25% of new builds still can't get superfast broadband – study

"95 per cent of the country has access to superfast broadband"

I live in France, and I can smell the bull from here.

Alibaba fires up a cloudy quantum computer

seeking a lowest-energy “ground state”

For me that means sitting in the recliner in front of the telly, a whisky in hand, a cat sleeping in my lap and a bowl of munchies within reach.

Europe plans special tax for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon

Yes, VAT has nothing to do with this tax bill.

The tax bill concerns income, not VAT.

Re: I wonder....

VAT is not being evaded by the companies. They have to pay it, and the paper trail is incontrovertible. No amount of offshore patent invoices will erase VAT.

So the accounting departments will have the usual amount of headache, nothing more.

You can laugh all you want

Here's the choice : waste more time trying to endlessly discuss a universal tax solution that will take a few decades to get to (and not get any tax money at all from anyone during that period), or decide on something now that will have an effect on the four largest tax evaders of the planet (and see billions come in immediately as a result).

The world is not perfect, and imperfect steps are the consequence.

Bitcoin heist with a twist: This time it's servers that were stolen

"The nation also has a low crime rate"

Seems like that rate is on the rise.

Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

All that screen and only 1080 vertical ? In 2018 ? For gaming ?

What a ridiculous choice. A gaming monitor is not an HD video monitor. You can't sell a ridiculously large screen like that, market it for gaming but make it for TV viewing.

I have a true gaming monitor : an Acer XB281HK. I'm sitting pretty on 3840 x 2160. THAT is a gaming monitor, and it stands next to a Prolite with "only" 1920 x 1200 that I bought back in 2011.

In 2011 you already had screens with more than 1080 vertical.

What a shameful waste of screen surface.

It's begun: 'First' IPv6 denial-of-service attack puts IT bods on notice

Re: What about my IoT devices?

No need to ask that : if you have IoT devices, you will have problems.

UK peers: Is this what you call governance of facial recog tech? A 'few scattered papers'!

What a load of official bull

As usual, terrorism is the go-to excuse for justifying all this surveillance.

Sorry, but to catch terrorists you do not need to blanket the country with cameras, just the airports and seaports. If terrorism is really that important to you, then add radars along the coast to catch any incoming boats that do not enter the normal channels, that way you can send a "greeting committee" to make sure they "arrive safely".

That should be enough to deal with terrorism.

Concerning tying the hands of the police behind their backs, well the alternative appears to be give them a blank check. Neither is good. And what do I care that private companies are using the tech ? Private companies cannot arrest me and throw me in jail by mistake. Stupid argument.

Finally, as far as cameras are concerned, don't make me laugh. I cannot count the times I've heard about people wanting to check the images to find the perp who stole their bike only to be told that there were no recordings at that time, or to find that the image was perfectly useless on the rare occasions they actually got an image to check.

Makes me wonder what all the hoopla is really about. Is all this just the PM's private perv channel ?

MIT gives one-star review to Lyft, Uber over abysmal '$3.37/hr' pay

"deeply flawed."

If it takes one to know one, then Uber is unquestionably the gold standard of "deeply flawed" and therefor uniquely qualified in such a determination.

Britain ignores booze guidelines – heads for the pub

Re: "Politics has no place in science,"

No, it does not. That hasn't kept politicians from trying to legislate the value of Pi, or, for a more modern aspect, trying to legislate backdoored encryption.

The problem with politics is that the representatives are elected by idiots and, sooner or later, you'll have a lobbyist full of money who will come in and convince said representative that this suitcase is more important than his constituents. Either that or, just as likely, the politician will start believing in his own importance and convince himself that his opinions are the expression of God's Will and must be brought into being.

There is no politician who will measure his actions against the Constitution and the law. That is so last millennium.

Knock, knock. Whois there? Get ready for anonymized email addresses after domain privacy shake-up

Re: A bit more protection for the black hats

It seems to me your system is a tad too complicated.

As for me, I have a programmed my own spam filter and it follows these rules :

1) If I have already accepted mail from that address, then it passes through (whitelist)

2) if my email is not specifically in the SendTo, it is spam (kills all those generic mails sent to God knows who I couldn't care less about)

3) if the ReplyTo domain does not match the From domain, it is spam (go ahead and pretend to write from Microsoft while sending from GMail, I dare you)

There are a few more criteria.

I don't need the IP address, and I don't need the WhoIs, although I do understand your use of it.

My system uses less bandwidth though.

Oh, and I'm just a private person. My needs are not those of a company, I acknowledge that.

Mayors of America demand net neutrality protections… again

Re: There's a storm brewing

Hope springs eternal. Unfortunately, the current state of the US government and political parties clearly demonstrates that the democratic process has been hijacked by interested parties and taken over by people who have taken essential positions for the wrong reasons.

Until the American People stand up and demand change to a situation that respects The People, nothing will change. The worst of it is people like Pai who are blatantly in violation of the trust of their position and yet, no police officer is marching up to him with a pair of handcuffs to take him in for treason.

Because as far as I'm concerned, he is a traitor to everything his position is supposed to mean.

Woe Canada: Rather than rise from the ashes, IBM-built C$1bn Phoenix payroll system is going down in flames

Nobody's been fired yet.

Re: IBM cop out

Unless IBM started discussing things and was told to shut up and do as the specs said.

It is specified that IBM was not the project manager, and a project's success or failure is largely on the shoulders of the project manager.

So who was the project manager ?

Maker of addictive tech (Google) criticized by chairman of addictive tech maker (Alphabet)

"tech just enables anyone to put their opinions out there"

Yeah, it does. Except opinions are like assholes, everyone has one. That does not mean that everyone's asshole opinion is worthy of being heard.

I blame the first idiot journalist who asked the nearest Joe Nobody what he thought about some event. Ever since then, journalism has been all about getting the opinion of "the people". As if those idiots had a valid opinion. Oh, there has been another school shooting ? Do you really think anyone is going to say that it is not a tragedy ?

Stop trolling the streets pretending to get the "people's" opinion. I don't give a damn about "the people". I want EXPERT opinion. I want to hear from people who have spent decades studying the subject.

I don't have time to listen to the barely-thought-through brain farts of Jersey Shore fans.

Time to pay, Paypal pal Venmo! Oh no, haha, put away that wallet – just promise to be nice

"Venmo did not live up to the promises it made to users about the availability of their money"

Yeah, well, it's the Internet. It's not like it's supposed to be honest and 100% reliable, right ?

Huawei's Not Hot Dog is possibly the Worst Tech Promo Ever

"robotics people don't provide the machine learning people with nice clean data sets"

Yeah, how unfair that life does not provide nice clean data sets.

Work continues on 5G, shame no one's sure what it's for yet

"fail fast and fail safe"

It seems that failing is good now, fashionable even. Certainly relieves the headache of actually planning something, doesn't it ? Go for 80%, bang it out, see what breaks. That's the second article in a few days that I read that mentions those exact words, so apparently the suits deem that it is a proper approach to developing a product.

Somebody phone Her Majesty's Government, we now know what they've been doing wrong with their IT projects all these years : they've been failing slow and hard. Need to pick up the pace.