Posts by Pascal Monett

US military's latest toy set: Record-breaking laser death star, er, truck

Next step

Now all we need to do is install this tech in all international airports and on top of all prisons and we'll be sorted.

As long as they don't target actual planes, that is . . .

Face down in a Shoreditch gutter: Attack of the kickstarting hipster

"Surgically implanted digital enhancement"

You need to go back and watch Johnny Mnemonic again. You know, the documentary on what happens with surgically-implanted digital enhancements ?

It's not pretty, and you end up needing Keeanu Reeves to save the world. I'll give the whole thing a pass.

Barrister fined after idiot husband slings unencrypted client data onto the internet

@ usbac

I hear you.

In 20 years consulting in Luxembourg, I've done a few lawyer establishments in my time. As fancy as the marble floor at the entrance may be, I've always been surprised at how the IT guy would never have a spare PC for me to work on in his office under the roof that you can only get to through rickety stairs that haven't seen a carpenter since 1946.

And of course, he would have to stay right next to me (standing because no additional chair) while I worked on his PC to solve whatever problem it was I had come for.

I was always glad to leave those places. Suits and ties do not mean everything.

Re: Gavel picture in article.

I accept that that is true, but it is also very likely that the English population has been just as brainwashed (if not more) with all the American police shows as the rest of the world, so the gavel remains a pertinent image.

Indeed

This is the exact issue I have with all the "automation" that is being offered willy-nilly.

You have a job dealing with people's personal data. You cannot allow yourself to treat the paltform you're working on as something on which you can just go and install any FaceBook, SnapChat, DropBox or whatever other shiny-shiny you feel like.

With a barrister's revenue, one would think that it would be possible to have one laptop for working and another one for dicking around on Instagram or whatever.

In any case, this fine is a necessary wake-up call to everyone dealing with personal data on their laptops : do things right and, if you're not sure, ask an IT pro what is right. Yes, it will cost money. What you need to ask yourself is how much more would it cost to your reputation to not do things right.

This week's top token gesture: Google Chrome chokes energy-hungry background tabs

"if Google stopped serving ads..."

And if the Earth stopped turning tomorrow the Sun wouldn't rise any more. Let's keep the comparisons in the realm of the possible, shall we ? Google is an ad broker, whatever we use is just a vehicle for those ads. As such, it's ecological stance is a PR stunt, nothing more.

Google's Deepmind NHS deal 'inexcusable', says academic paper

"every trust in the country uses IT systems"

Obviously they use IT systems these days, but between that and being directly linked to the Hive Mind there's one heck of a difference.

Unless there's something we don't know . . .

Euro Patent Office hit with wave of anti-Battistelli letters

"[..] Admin Council chair Jesper Kongstad who is attempting to protect Battistelli .."

I believe that, given the toxicity of this whole affair, anyone putting their support behind Battistelli must be aware that they could very well be caught in the downdraft when the hammer finally falls.

Because the hammer is on its way, now.

UK.gov gears up for IR35 private sector crackdown – say industry folk

"Hopefully the government will have learnt its lesson.."

Given the amount of disastrous failures that have followed one another for almost the same reasons since years, my guess is : no.

Germany to Facebook, Twitter: We are *this* close to fining you €50m unless you delete fake news within 24 hours

Re: "burnt at the stake for criticising religion"

I see, so for you, racially insulting someone is criticizing religion.

No wonder this world is going in circles.

And you need to get with the times : these days stoning is out, beatings are given with baseball bats.

We're modern now.

Re: "which gives strong legal defense to all forms of speech no matter how offensive"

Personally I am sick and tired of hearing that "free speech" means I have to accept someone racially insulting someone else.

Free speech should mean free to bring intelligence to the debate, not hate.

Canonical preps security lifeboat, yells: Ubuntu 12.04 hold-outs, get in

Interesting situation

I'm looking forward to seeing a comparison table between MS XP/Win 7 EOL and public reaction to it, and this.

Somehow, I doubt that there will be as many holdouts, and I doubt even more that the rest will be pointing their fingers and laughing as much.

White-box slingers, Chinese server makers now neck-and-neck with US tech giants

Europe is not the one doing the shafting - you've bloody well done it to yourselves.

Oracle gives FCC a great big sloppy kiss: You're doing a great job axing net neutrality, privacy

Blast from the Past

Shenanigans like that make me feel that I am reading an article from the 80s about some Soviet guy praising the Politburo to get some much-needed brownie points.

Then, the week after, there is a footnote in the news about a regrettable accident in the metro, and the guy disappears from all the official photos.

So, looks like there is still room for "improvement".

Marissa! Mayer! out! as! CEO! of! Yahoo! corpse! post-Verizon! gobble!

You said it yourself

Carly, Gregg and Jack carved out a much larger chunk of flesh, so it is normal that they be rewarded accordingly.

As for The American Way, I think that there will be a revision coming in the next few years. Hopefully.

No need to wish her well

She's got millions in the bank - she'll be well enough off.

Would I have the chance to fail so well.

Thousands of NHS staff details nicked amid IT contractor server hack

"a large global company holding data on individuals in many countries across the world"

Meaning, a company that has the means and resources to ensure that something like this does not happen.

Which, subsequently, makes the breach absolutely inexcusable.

Then, of course, comes the laundry list of technical questions, including the most important : was the data encrypted and, if not, why not ?

Given the number of people affected, it would be proper to see the board resign in its entirety regardless of whether there is a proper explanation or not. That, of course, will never happen.

UK Home Office warns tech staff not to tweet negative Donald Trump posts

Wrong approach

I don't know about England, but in France when you are working for the Government, you have a duty of restraint. The fact that the account is personal makes no difference to the fact that, as a Government worker/contractor, what you say reflects partly on the Government you work for.

It is in that sense that I completely understand the Home Office's action.

May is the cruellest month - especially for these California storage techies

I just wonder if those poor people have been notified, or if they discovered it on the site before being told.

The latter would definitely be a case of adding insult to injury.

MAC randomization: A massive failure that leaves iPhones, Android mobes open to tracking

"if I was on facebook I don't see how my liking marmite, [..] could be used against me"

It's not because you don't see how that it cannot be done.

I just hope nobody will prove me right.

Official: America auto-scanned visitors' social media profiles. Also: It didn't work properly

You're applying logic and rational thought to a subject that completely missed that step from the beginning.

Please suspend that suspicious behavior until the madness has gone down a notch or three.

It does sound rather daft.

On the other hand, never underestimate the power of stupid.

Germany to roll out €100bn gigabit internet network

"The €100bn project will focus on bandwidth, security and response times"

And people still wonder why Germany is an economic powerhouse.

If fast radio bursts really are revving up interstellar sailcraft, here's the maths

"accelerate nano craft to speeds up to 161 million km/h"

Great ! Now we just need a way to transport a person one atom at a time in said nano craft.

That should probably allow the pieces to survive the 28.41 years it should take to get there at that speed.

Oh, and we shouldn't forget to build another laser array on the other side before we get there, to slow the nanocraft down.

Then all we need to do is use a 3D printer to put all the atoms back together.

Childs' play, I tell you.

Western Digital CTO Martin Fink refused El Reg's questions, but did write this sweet essay

"In a world where I might want Exabytes of memory..."

64TB should be enough for everyone.

Oops! 185,000-plus Wi-Fi cameras on the web with insecure admin panels

"pre-configured connections to AWS, Alibaba and Baidu"

Just another highway for TLAs to snoop through your stuff without a warrant.

Oh, and look : things are improving because now Chinese TLAs can participate in the current grab-fest of private details.

And they call that "progress".

FBI boss: 'Memories are not absolutely private in America'

"any communications – be it with your spouse, your priest, or your lawyer"

Um, Mr Comey, I do believe that at least priests are not going to agree with you.

And, as far as blaming Snowden, that is just shooting the messenger.

In a way, it is comical how these types keep trying the same argument, and blaming everyone else for not "playing along". It doesn't matter that you want a backdoor, Comey, what matters is that if we admit that you do get an encryption scheme that has your precious FBI/NSA/CIA/MI5/KGB-enabled backdoor, everyone in the world will migrate to an encryption scheme that does not have one.

Of course, at that point I fully believe that you will shout at everyone to obey US law. Good luck with that.

The good times are over, Peter Thiel tells Silicon Valley's oligarchs

"we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict"

Well you certainly are well-placed to make that prediction come true.

Tesla 'API crashes' after update, angry rich bods complain

Ah, to have the problems of the 1%

Let us sympathize for a second with these poor rich people whose super-expensive status symbol is on the blink.

Okay, enough of that, you may return to snickering.

Your Amazon order is confirmed: Eutelsat via Blue Origin. Estimated delivery date: 2022

@Graham Dawson

Apparently I missed a page, but Wikipedia does not agree with you. It states that Blue Origin made its first test flight in 2015, not 2010.

The article clearly indicates that "the first developmental test flight of the New Shepard occurred on April 29, 2015", and I should have checked that out before firing off my original comment.

So I stand corrected, Bezos has launched a test vehicle, which means that he is a lot farther than I thought he was. I had never heard of Blue Origin before this article. Having brought the launch vehicle back right next to the launch pad obviously means things are under control and progressing well enough to make the Eutelsat statement viable.

So I am now looking forward to seeing yet another launch vehicle in space in 2022.

Absolutely. Building rockets that work is just about the hardest engineering challenge there is. So I'm a bit dubious that this announcement will actually result in a successful launch in 2022.

SpaceX was founded in 2002, and has only managed a successful launch since last year. That's 15 years of (intense) work.

Bezos thinks he can do the same in less than 6 years ? Nope. Even if he poaches NASA scientists and SpaceX personnel, 2022 will not be a launch year for Blue Origin.

On the other hand, it is interesting to note that there is now another billionaire intent on reaching orbit. I guess that means that space is getting less expensive, which should be a Good Thing (TM).

Where in the world is Fast.co.uk web hosting?

Obviously. Since they're already going down, there is no more need to be all serviceable and polite.

If they were that to begin with.

MP brands 1,600 CSC layoffs as the 'worst excesses of capitalism'

"no less than 5% of the workforce"

You certainly meant no more than 5% can come from abroad, unless you are actually endorsing a massive influx of 95% of the workforce being hired from India, China, Hong-Kong or South Korea.

Given the beginning of your post, I doubt that is the case.

UK's Virgin Media subscribers suffer fresh email blocking misery

From what I've heard, greylisting only hits the first mail that arrives from an unknown address. It dynamically adjusts when it recieved the mail again and that address becomes basically whitelisted.

So the marketing department will gnash its teeth the first time, not afterwards. And they should be happy about it, because it's that much less of a chance they'll click on a bad link.

Mars orbiter FLOORS IT to avoid hitting MOON

Well, if your face hits the sidewalk after having jumped from the top of the Empire State Building, then yeah, it's a bit like that.

I'm guessing that any collision in space is going to have rather disastrous consequences, and a collision with a moon is more likely to be called "pancaking" than simply "colliding".

America halts fast processing of H-1B skilled worker visas

"New Delhi pressed, without success, for a fair and rational approach"

Fair and rational in this case being "keep our privileges active". Talk about having blinkers . .

The whole visa thing is going the way of the patent office. Suspending options that allow abuse can only be a good thing. Unfortunately, there's a good chance that said options will be reactivated.

COP BLOCKED: Uber app thwarted arrests of its drivers by fooling police with 'ghost cars'

Re: All hail Uber!!

"here Uber came to solve a big problem"

Yeah, and Pablo Escobar funded hospitals and nurseries. Swell guy, except for the hundreds of people he murdered, right ?

CloudPets' woes worsen: Webpages can turn kids' stuffed toys into creepy audio bugs

And the irony is that even after the company goes down, the vulnerability will still be there to eavesdrop on unsuspecting kids.

"given up after hitting silence"

Those are the golden words that instantly make me put a company on my personal black list.

Congratulations, CloudPets, I will now and forevermore not only not purchase any of your products but I will additionally express my opinion of your shoddy handling of this issue to everyone within earshot.

Remember : mistakes can be forgiven, we are all human, but sweeping mistakes under the rug of silence cannot. That is a sign of a specific behavior : the inability to own up to one's mistakes. And if you can't own up, you'll never correct them.

Polls? How very 2016. Now Google Street View AI scanner can predict how people will vote

@ Steve the Cynic

I completely respect the fact that you have an average vehicle ownership time of "a bit over four years". Obviously, in your particular case, my analysis does indeed fall down.

Now, for my analysis to "fall down" globally, you'd have to decide that most people have the same average ownership time. You will allow me to doubt that, if only for the fact that I know people who change vehicle every two years. In my particular case, I have owned an Open Kadett for 11 years, a BMW 330d for six and a half, and my latest is an Audi A5 which I bought in 2012 and I am nowhere near thinking about selling it. That is among a few other cars that have passed in my hands more briefly, I freely admit. So my average is significantly higher than yours, even considering the Laguna 2 I only had for 3 years.

I will not, however, consider that my ownership times are common either. I base my opinion on the fact that are more poor people that own cars than there are rich ones, and if the rich people do indeed have the means to change cars regularly, poor people don't. Rich people can choose how long they want to own their car(s), poor people make do with theirs until they don't have the choice any more.

I do believe that that tends to bring ownership times to significantly over a presidential mandate. I will be quite happy to be directed to some actual statistics drawn from a population study that demonstrate that this belief is wrong.

An interesting study

People in a given socio-economic are show their preferences by their lifestyle and vote accordingly. Last year's presidential election was thus correlated by the study. Interesting.

Now explain how the government changes sides every few elections and how to predict that despite the fact that people generally change cars less often than they vote for president.

Prisoners' 'innovative' anti-IMSI catcher defence was ... er, tinfoil

Screw downvotes

It's prison, there is no justification for functioning mobile phones. Guards have their radios, prisoners have a wall phone in the dedicated area they can get to when they're authorized to. Blanket the area with jamming, no reason not to. No rights are being infringed thanks to the presence of the wall phones.

As for theaters/cinemas, I'd agree but apparently there, there is a question of rights, namely the right to annoy everyone with a phone complaining about how much it costs to be there trumps the right to benefit from the play/film you paid the same bloody amount to see in peace.

Uber: Please don't give our London drivers English tests. You can work out the reason why

@Prst. V.Jeltz

Um, sorry but putting car sharing in the same basket as taxi driver is not, in my opinion, justified. Car sharing is something you organize with people who have a common destination and, upon arrival, everyone disembarks until it is time to go back. It is generally a round-trip affair. A taxi is there is take a few people to a specific place and then take another fare to somewhere else (in ideal conditions). It is a series of single-trip drives by a driver who has no specific interest in going to any of those places outside of the money he makes.

Personally I think it is blindingly obvious that a taxi driver, being in a professional capacity, should bloody well be able to speak the language of the country he's working in, if only for safety reasons. How is he going to call for an ambulance in case of accident where he's the only one conscious ? Not to mention the more common understanding-your-customer day-to-day stuff that does make things go better, generally speaking.

That Uber is against it is not a surprise ; Uber is against anything that costs it money, including paying their taxi drivers - but they have trouble wiggling out of that one (not that don't try). Taxi companies everywhere need a bit of competition, but backstabbing Uber is not that.

Salesforce: Brex-pensive mistake, guys. Your little referendum dented our brilliant results

There's pressure on the Great British Pound ?

I think I see a price hike looming on the other side of the Channel.

AWS's S3 outage was so bad Amazon couldn't get into its own dashboard to warn the world

I love the future

This is great : a cloud service falls down so hard it can't even notify customers it is down. And, way down the line, thermostats can no longer be changed, mouse settings are frozen and God knows what else.

This is absolutely perfect and should happen a lot more often until people finally get fed up and demand things that work ALL THE DAMN TIME, like they used to before this happy-happy age of sharing everything with the NSA whether you want to or not.

IoT ? Not while I still have a functioning brain, thank you very much. My light switch does not depend on the Internet and never will.

Google Chrome 56's crypto tweak 'borked thousands of computers' using Blue Coat security

"That these products broke is an indication of defects in their TLS implementations,"

So it is totally their fault, no reason to rollback at all, nosiree.Yes, it is quite obviously their fault, but maybe you could offer a rollback option anyway, just to show how l33t and magnanimous you are while letting over 16000 people get on with their lives ?

Just an idea.

Softbank gros fromage: ARM will knock out a trillion IoT chips by 2040

"a trillion chips"

And just how much security is baked into those chips ?

None, of course. I'm sure excuses will be legion. Solutions, as usual, are a much rarer breed.

Tech contractors begin mass UK.gov exodus in wake of HMRC's IR35 income tax clampdown

"whether or not the rules apply"

That is not the question. Obviously, the rules should apply.

The real issue is why haven't the rules been applied properly up to now ? Why is it that suddenly there is a flurry of activity around actually applying rules ?

If these rules had been applied from the start with proper oversight, then this situation would simply never have happened. One more case of government failure causing more pain than usefulness.

I think that laws should have the same shelf life as stuff you keep around the house : if you haven't used it in the past three years, you never will and you should throw it out.

Git fscked by SHA-1 collision? Not so fast, says Linus Torvalds

"nasty people will teach him the threat model"

That may indeed happen.

I totally trust Torvalds to quickly learn from the experience and do the right thing. Actually, I'm certain he is already considering alternatives. For all his outbursts and temperamental postings, Torvalds is unquestionably intelligent and reasoned. You might fool him once, but you won't get a second chance.

Engineer who blew lid on Uber's toxic sexist culture now menaced by creepy 'smear campaign'

Ah, Uber

Is there anything you cannot do wrong ?