Posts by Pascal Monett

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.

Neil Young slams Google, after you log in to read his rant with Google or Facebook

Re: Anti-GMO

Not fair. You cannot blame a medical treatment for being contrary to a person's views.

I'm generally against GMOs as well (on the basis that I'm not convinced we really know the long-term consequences of what we're doing), but I am dead against dying. I will thus eat GMO food as happily as any other food (not that we have much of a choice these days anyway).

Oi, drag this creaking, 217-year-old UK census into the data-driven age

It's a fundamentally bad idea to use administrative data

One of the primary uses of a census is as a reality check : this is the actual state of the country.

You cannot have that reality check if you are just scraping databases for info. In that case, you're just compiling existing data and you'll miss the possibility of including pointed questions to uncover some specific behavioural or societal change.

Do it online, by all means, supplement the census with administrative data if you wish, but do not reduce the census to just perusing databases.

IPv6 and 5G will make life hell for spooks and cops say Australia's spooks and cops

Legislation if necessary ?

Well go ahead and legislate. That'll be just about as useful as existing laws that criminalize gun use for robbing banks. Sure, it's forbidden, but if thieves want to rob a bank, that law is not what is going to stop them from having guns when they go in.

For encryption it is the same thing. Legislate all you want, if a group of terrorists is intent on striking in your country, a law is not going to stop them from using "illegal" encryption and then what are you going to do ?

You get a criminal record! And you get a criminal record! Peach state goes bananas with expanded anti-hack law

No, but everyone is somebody's criminal.

Smartphones to be inescapable, even at 40,000 feet

Re: "no extra disturbance in cattle class"

But it's the cattle who like to moo !

Sony Xperia XZ2: High-res audio but no headphone jack

Don't encourage them !

It's a bloody phone. Anything above €200 is expensive.

Mobile industry wants less regulation, mooooar radio spectrum

"use of data is happening to them or with them?"

Well duh, it's happening to them. Especially since, when opt exists, it's always opt-out, never opt-in.

That isn't even the real problem. The real problem is they DON'T CARE.

The panopticon is happening because the inmates think it is shiny.

Hubris, thy name is Oracle: So, cloud is still totally for nerds, right?

"completely transforming the way all companies buy and use cloud [..]"

When you have less than 10% of a market, you are not transforming anything, you are following.

Seems like Ellison is the new Kodak.

Data science before algorithms, declares Bosch's new top techie

"operate it in a more agile way"

Yeah, bang up some shitty code and let the customers debug it.

Congratulations, Bosch, you've just made my "Never Buy Version 1.0" list.

And you're not far from my "Never Buy At All" list either.

As for your stance on security, I think I'll be hearing a lot more about Bosch in the future in these columns.

IBM gives Services staff until 2019 to get agile

Re: What !!!

I think you missed the part where it is stated that agile is supposed to not use email, thus hinting that IBM itself is flushing Notes down the toilet.

You should be happy.

Samsung's Galaxy 9s debut, with not much other than new cameras

"you can only capture 0.2 seconds in each burst"

And they'll never be the 0.2 seconds you wanted.

Seems like mobile phone makers are coming close to the point where nobody will care any more what model they put out. Just make 'em reliable and cheap and we'll be happy enough.

Oh, and stop trying to make them into PCs. We have tablets for that.

Hubble Space Telescope one of 16 suffering data-scrambling sensor error

Re: Expanding Universe

Well, if it has more impact on bright objects such as a supernova, it very well might since a certain type of supernova are used as standard candles and we specifically take those to measure distances.

On the other hand, we've been using them for a while already, so even though there might be an error in the actual distance, the same error is present at each measure so the difference remains reliable (I think ?).

In other words, maybe, maybe not.

Voice assistants are always listening. So why won't they call police if they hear a crime?

Indeed

How is Siri going to make the difference between a child being assaulted by a pedophile and one who stubbed his/her toe and is expressing justifiable but innocent pain ?

Siri won't.

So then the argument will become "put a 911 operator on the line to listen and decide", and then we have two issues : violation of a person's property by forcing it to dial 911 without consent (plus all the people in the vicinity - great use of resources there, no possibility of confusion at all) and shoving the responsibility to a harassed phone operator. Sounds like kicking into the sidelines to me.

This whole article is a brilliant demonstration of the stupidity of the "think of the children" mentality. Oh, so phones can do this now ? Well enroll them into the police force and have them tell on everything all the time, because that is the only thing that can protect the children.

No thought of any consequences, or even of the practical issues that can be encountered.

In short, useless and dangerous.

Private browsing isn't: Boffins say smut-mode can't hide your tracks

A pretty high bar

Sounds impressive, and demonstrates the cost of true, paranoid-level security.

I'll be surprised if it becomes widely used by the Facebook generation, though. Maybe criminals will have an interest, and I'm sure Putin's hackers will be checking it out.

Elon Musk blasts off from OpenAI to focus on cars, how to make smart code fair, and more

Smart code ?

So now we have smart code.

Well, given how everything with "smart" attached to it is a steaming pile of bollocks, I guess we've had smart code for a few decades already, but please.

Take note : this is the official point where the adjective smart jumped the shark.

Stunning infosec tips from Uncle Sam, furries exposed, Chase bank web leak, and more

Moxie Marlinspike

Now that seems to be a name worthy of being put on my personal whitelist of people to pay attention to.

Encryption is a complicated affair and my own pathetic dabbling in that area has taught me that you need a solid mathematical mind to go about it properly - which I sorely lack. That's one good point for him, but an even better one is that he seems to have principles and is not afraid of standing up for them.

And for us at the same time.

Thanks for that, Moxie.

Software shortcuts: Pay down your tech debt. It's time to fix a price

Fail fast and fix it

"Agile development makes the idea of rapid failure much more acceptable because you’re looking at continuous improvement as a way to fail fast and fix it"

I can't help but think that this sentence contradicts the one later on that says that devs should say what they need from day one.

That said, I have worked on a few large projects myself, and no amount of planning can cover all the bumps you encounter during development. So, in a way, I concur with both statements in as much as you plan all you can beforhand, then you fix whatever potholes you encounter during development.

Still, all the articles I read about DevOps, this one included, make a lot more noise about developing, fixing, developing and fixing fast, rather than writing proper specs and having an execution plan that doesn't involve regular week-end marathon sessions.

Hey, you. App dev. You like secure software? Let's learn from Tinder, Facebook's blunders

Seems to me the initial premise was flawed

If all you need was a phone number, then there is no other information to tie a number to an account.

So duh, give any phone number and you're in. Yup, sounds obvious.

Ah, hindsight.

The point is, when cooking up a security mechanism, always check that simply replacing one element does not entail logging into another account. All elements must be present to log into the specific account they point to - if one is absent or wrong, you shouldn't be able to log into anything at all.

Bosch and Daimler jump in together on driverless vehicle tech

"No single company can build the Internet of Things itself"

No, but they can royally screw it up perfectly well on their own.

Bright idea: Make H when the Sun shines, and H when it doesn't

Re: "probably deter potential thieves"

Nope. It's called a challenge.

The YouTube crackdown on fake news: Promoting bonkers Florida school shooting conspiracies

Re: "that premise has actually been debunked by none other than the VP of Facebook"

And that is such an authority on such matters.

On any matter, actually.

Use ad blockers? Mine some Monero to get access to news, says US site

Given that rooftop installations typically generate 5-10KW, I think he made a typo.

I his installation is indeed generating 4MW, his roof must cover a few hectares, in which case : Hi Bill G, nice of you to be posting here !

*Wakes up in Chrome's post-adblockalyptic landscape* Wow, hardly anything's changed!

If you have paid a subscription and you're still getting ads, you're going to the wrong sites.

Google's robo-CTRL-ALT-DEL failed, hung networks and Compute Engine for 90 minutes

Deeper we go down the rabbit hole

Finding out, bit by bit, another new failure point that does not act as we thought it would due to error conditions that were visibly not expected.

And it's pretty hard to expect that an automated process shutdown should not shut down the process - unless you use Windows and experience a process not shutting down even manually until you go to the Task Manager to kill it off. Once I had to power down the computer at the PSU in order to get rid of a pesky thingamabob that just wouldn't go away.

In other words, these things do happen, and the consequence here was a lot more important than could have been foreseen.

Makes me wonder if we ever will get a truly reliable cloud.

Microsoft reveals 'limitations of apps and experiences on Arm' – then deletes from view

Microsoft has altered a document

Pray it doesn't alter it further

Oi! Verizon leaked my fiancée's nude pix to her ex-coworker, says bloke

Besides, what kind of numbskull takes pics of the fugly parts ?

Topless pic ? No problem there.

Nude pic ? Why not.

Pussy pic ? Why ? Are you a dog ?

Oh sh-itcoin! Crypto-dosh swap-shop Coinbase empties punters' bank accounts

I'm sorry, are you talking about actually planning something ? In the Internet age ?

What a concept.

Astro-boffinry world rocked to its very core: Shock as Andromeda found to be not much bigger than Milky Way

"By measuring the escape velocity, scientists have recalculated the galaxy’s mass and size."

Um, I don't get it. How can they get a proper escape velocity measure if they've gotten the mass wrong in the first place ? Seems to me that those two things are related in a specific way. It's like throwing a ball four feet and then saying it was a bowling ball.

Doesn't make sense.

If this laptop is so portable, where's the keyboard, huh? HUH?

Re: classic!

What's a 710 cap ?

Bloke sues Microsoft: Give me $600m – or my copy of Windows 7 back

Re: "you could go back for 30 day"

Um, kinda hard to go anywhere if the machine is bricked.

Look out, Wiki-geeks. Now Google trains AI to write Wikipedia articles

Change in article category title

Please rename the "Artificial Intelligence" category to "Pseudo-Artificial Intelligence".

That will make things more realistic, thank you.

PCI Council and X9 Committee to combine PIN security standards

Re: Obligatory XKCD

Exactly what I was thinking of.

Magic Leap's staggering VR goggle technology just got even better!

"evolved for millions of years into something that is many billions of years old"

With logic like that, I would definitely not give that man my money until cold, hard product is available.

Promises are nice, but when you start making too many, you undermine your credibility. And he has hit rock and is still digging.