Posts by Pascal Monett

Artificial intelligence 'will save wearables'!

Artificial intelligence 'will save wearables'

I can believe that - as soon as we have AI, that is.

So not this century, then. And that confirms in my mind that wearables are shite and will be for a looong time.

Symbolic IO reveals tech bound to give server old guard the willies

Re: WTF?

Agreed. When I read that I thought "ZIP file" immediately.

I'm always happy for anything that speeds up rust storage, and it's a good sign that the people involved seem serious, but there's got to be something more than a basic encoding of that kind, otherwise Windows would be a damn sight faster than it is.

Here's to the future of SIO anyways !

Amid new push to make Pluto a planet again... Get over it, ice-world's assassin tells El Reg

Re: Sorry Prof'

Thank you for that link. I learned that I had totally belonged to the group that imagined that the Moon orbited Earth, but it actually orbits the Sun with a bit of gravitational perturbation from that ol' ball of Earth.

A disturbing perspective. I might, with the good help of my friend Jack, be able to drink that away and consider that lizard men are once again trying to conspiracy-theory influence reality, but that will take some time.

In any case, I cannot shake the belief that the discussion around the planetary status of Pluto is more down to the fact that it is the only planetary body discovered by an American than any truly scientific discussion. Typical New World nuisances that have to have something important to their name since they only have a quarter of a millennium to show History.

Personally, I find it much more logical to imagine that Pluto belongs to the undoubtedly large Kuiper Belt Objects group rather than consider it a Planet. Maybe adding another rule, something along the lines of "a planet cannot have a moon larger than one-half its mass" would quell the discussion (yeah, right).

All of this will not keep Planet X from being called a Planet, though, as soon as we find where the bloomin' dale it is.

Netflix treats security ills with Stethoscope: Open-source self-probing tool

Employee devices, yes - for now.

Now that the code has been released, it will hopefully be adapted to a host of things and overall security will improve.

Because it's not a question of if a user will fall for some malware thingy, it's just a question of when.

Hopping the flash stepping stones to DIMM future

"it will be here in a flash"

I can believe that ; unlike any claims about cabon-nanotube whatevers that have been trumpeted for the past decade at least and there's still nothing on the horizon.

I'm sure that there are just as many billions involved and the potential is just as enormous, but somehow the entire storage industry seems to have a rocket strapped to its R&D, whereas energy is putting along in a golf cart.

Neuromorphic progress: And we for one welcome our new single artificial synapse overlords

500 states

A bit represents 2 states : 0 or 1. So, one neural bit represents 500 different values. That makes for a whole new way to compute information, not to mention understanding it.

Do neurons in our brain also function like that ? I always thought that a "reinforced connection" just meant that the neuron was more regularly solicited for information, now it would seem that the neuron actually gets beefier the more its information is "important". Or something.

In any case, it works in our brains, so if that is how we get positronic brains, then on with the show. I always thought that binary gates were a poor support to replicate brain function with anyway.

Dying for Windows 10 Creators Update? But wait, there's more!

Re: Greybeards not happy!

I think you missed reading this article in you happy-happy 'evergreen' land.

Besides the fact that if there are "so many" people ranting, the color of their beard may not be the significant factor.

"they may be asked to consider a pre-Christmas upgrade"

Be asked ?

I'm sorry, has Windows 1 0 suddenly stopped dumping updates on you whether you want them or not ?

Did I miss that memo ?

How's your online bank security looking? The Dutch studied theirs and... yeah, not great

"doing much better than IPv6"

Maybe that's because 1) it is actually useful and 2) it hasn't been created with brain-dead specifications because responding to actual, real-world issues.

Big Blue's big blunder: IBM accidentally hands over root access to its data science servers

"Had the flaw been exploited"

Um, sorry but how can they be sure it hasn't ? If the only way to be sure is to re-image the servers, then it sounds like they won't really have any way to be sure.

Also ; two weeks ?!? Why wasn't shutting everything down immediately until the issue was corrected not an option ? It's not like this environment is heavily used by . . oh, I get it. Non-critical, maybe even a let-it-run-so-we-see-if-anyone-tries-something test. Okay, as long as no personal data is lost, I'm fine with that.

'Hey, Homeland Security. Don't you dare demand Twitter, Facebook passwords at the border'

"only block those [..] who have never entered the country previously"

Oh, you mean like those terrorists who scout the target area months or years in advance ?

So you'll let those guys through because they've already been here. Well done. Way to Keep America Safe.

$350m! shaved! off! sale! price! as! Verizon! swallows! Yahoo!

"widely reported successful cyber-attacks"

are apparently not worth more than a mere 10% off.

No wonder nobody gives a flying fig about security.

Love lambda, love Microsoft's Graph Engine. But you fly alone

No problem, you'll have to find a way to do what he thinks he wants and is actually impossible to do anyway.

After all, he's paid 5 times more than you, so he knows 5 times better </sarcasm>.

Connected car in the second-hand lot? Don't buy it if you're not hack-savvy

Re: "I cannot see why this is such a complex task"

It is not a complex task, it is a task the IoT makers DO NOT WANT TO DO.

Watson can't cure cancer ... or all the stuff that breaks IT projects

"the auditor dismissed her expertise"

Sorry, but an auditor is not there to check on expertise, he's there to check that everything has a trail and the trails all match up to the expenses.

Her complaining about her expertise being dismissed just means that she's pissed that the auditor did not melt before her batting eyelashes and remained steadfast in demanding the paper trail. One would think that, with her level of "expertise", she should have known better.

What this really means is that this project was a vanity project for her, a buddy project for the contractor, and proper controls were deemed "unnecessary" because obviously everything would go fine. Until, of course, it didn't because the controls to prevent that had not been used.

Zuckerberg thinks he's cyber-Jesus – and publishes a 6,000-word world-saving manifesto

He is not "offering ideas" and nothing in his delusional prose is of any use in the actual world.

Stop drinking the KoolAid - that is also part of the problem.

Don’t panic over cyber-terrorism: Daesh-bags still at script kiddie level

"saner heads should prevail"

Unfortunately at this point in time, there are no more sane heads in the White House.

I guess it's time to panic.

Google yanks workers from ISP outfit, it's THE FIBER COUNTDOWN

"it's not totally giving up"

Yes it is. It's gone from fiber to building-to-building wifi. As far as Google Fiber is concerned, it is giving up.

If I would subscribe to Google Fiber only to hear that I'll get a wifi hotspot on my roof that'll chat with the one my neighbor would have, I don't think I'd be very impressed with Google Fiber.

Yes, laying fiber is expensive. But fiber bandwidth and reliability is second to none. I want fiber, I don't want WiFi.

Corpse of US anti-spying law unearthed, reanimated, pushed blinking into the sunlight

"prohibit [..] sharing customers' geolocation data without customer consent"

If this law actually makes it this time, I foresee another clause added to page 43 of the EULA nobody ever reads stipulating that by using the product, you give your consent.

Problem solved (for the companies).

Look, I'm happy you're at least trying to do something, I really am. But you do need to take a look beyond your limousines and bulletproof glass windows and look at how the world actually works. Demanding user consent is a step forward - but you cannot allow it to be embedded in the EULA. It must be an in-your-face question, clearly labelled YOUR SECURITY IS AT STAKE, with a button YES and a button NO. And clicking NO does NOT prevent using the product.

Then we might be able to accept that something is actually being done about this whole mess.

THE SCHMIDT HITS THE BAN: Keep your gloves off AI, military top brass

Obvious double-speak is obvious

The rhetoric about balkanization and all the rest is just wind. What the Head Google is worried about is his company's ability to slurp data the world over.

As for balkanization, well guess what : language already does that fine. I can access all the Chinese websites I want at the moment, but I don't read Chinese so what good does it do me ? If I couldn't access all those sites, it wouldn't devastate my life. My wife was looking for a given product no later than yesterday, and she was all happy to have found a store selling it. Alas, the store was in Russian, no language choice. So she couldn't buy the thing because she had no idea where to click and what the conditions were.

As far as I'm concerned, a bit of balkanization will do some good in that it will hobble the megacorps and their ever-extending reach, and I applaud that.

Analyse this: IBM moves Watson machine learning to mainframes

"develop insights instantly and dramatically grow the[ir] business"

As usual these days, for anything to be positive it has to be instantaneous.

Contrast with reality : this week I put in place some stat reporting agents on the size of a customer's databases and the number of new/changed records. The code works fine, the results are gathered daily.

Insights, however, will only be available (at best) beginning of March.

You can have the fastest, most intelligently-programmed platform in the world, you still have to wait for the data points.

That said, as the articles mentions, there is certainly room to improve data analysis. But let's cut the instant gratification crap, shall we ?

Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies

@ Updraft102

You are eminently right, obviously.

I suppose you also use a flamethrower to redecorate your living room ?

Pwnd Android conference phone exposes risk of spies in the boardroom

"The integrity of our customer systems and data is a high priority for Mitel"

A high priority that apparently ranks below actually making sure the product is secure before shipping it.

Dear Microsoft – a sysadmin's wishlist

It's no longer YOUR computer

And MS has a long history of fudging about with Windows settings because it knows better than you do what it is you need - except that before, the impact was not so big since you could control and roll back any updates you didn't want.

But you no longer have control, and MS has decided that every Windows install is its own little playground to do with as it pleases - never mind that you paid for the hardware.

It's kind of like inviting someone over for dinner and five weeks later he's still there with his hand constantly in the fridge. He's eating your food, paying for nothing and you can't get rid of him.

Windows 7 is my last MS OS. I am currently contemplating Debian for my home server. That move will happen this year.

Thanks, MS - you've managed to finally push me out of my comfort zone.

Two words, Mozilla: SPEED! NOW! Quit fiddling and get serious

NoScript is my #1 priority

Firefox is the only browser I trust to run what I authorize to run, that makes it my #1 choice.

I have eliminated Chrome from my personal desktop because of Google's malware tactics when it comes to trying to remove it.

And IE is only used when I don't have the choice.

I also use Pale Moon and Seamonkey (with NoScript), but for specific things and to compartmentalize my data.

So I'm all for alternatives, but Firefox remains the only one I trust to do what I want. I pray that the devs aren't going to screw around with that, but if they do, then Seamonkey will take the slack (because NoScript).

Welcome to my world of The Unexplained – yes, you're welcome to it

What ?

"I sold my old car after 13 years to a dealer. Several years later a knock at the door announced a subsequent owner . . ."

So, you sold your car to a professional, who then sold it to a customer and told him/her who you were ?

Isn't that grounds for a lawsuit for breach of trust and violation of privacy ?

Want to come to the US? Be prepared to hand over your passwords if you're on Trump's hit list

@ Aodhhan

Congratulations, you managed a pretty good troll without any capital shouting. Well done.

First, you admirably redirected the issue about immigration, when the article actually mentions "tourists, travelers and visa holders". Brilliant reduction to your personal arena, masterfully done.

Then, having thus set the piece in your complete control, you take the mantel of authority to admonish The People about things they don't know. Of course, you follow by a pseudo-attack on the legitimacy of The People questioning government authority. A must, obviously.

But the end is a bit disappointing, really. A little half-hearted rally on lefties and parrots, no, that's just weak. And repeating "left wing" twice in the same paragraph, tsk, tsk. That ending is a letdown, really. Not half as a good as the paragraph before.

I'll give you a B -.

Carry on.

"g-men can log into Twitter, Facebook, online banking accounts, and so on, and rummage around"

With that kind of criteria, my guess is that around 75% of US citizens under the age of 30 would likely not be able to fly either if this search was applied to them.

In any case, if I had any inclination of wanting to spend money in the US (which I don't under the current Administration), given that I have no social media accounts and my webbanking account needs an OTP key which I will certainly leave at home, I guess those eagle-eyed intellectual wizards at the border control desks will just have to repeal me if I tried.

Somehow, I am almost wishing to see this go through just for the fun of watching (from afar) the meltdown that will undoubtedly ensure. Looks like The Donald is going to wreak more havoc on the US itself than anywhere else.

Can we have a popcorn icon ?

Cattle that fail, not pets that purr – the future of servers

"the ability to change services in a way that you may not like, and have no control over"

Thank you for putting that down in black and white. It is high time some PHBs start reading that more often.

More tech companies join anti-Trump battle, but why did some pay for his inauguration?

Of course it is. The best way to weaken an enemy is from the inside:

Eee by gum! Aye up, Microsoft, what's tha y' got? Cloud for accents?

"the technology is improving"

Undoubtedly, but it still fails with way too much regularity on anything that is not the simplest of soundbytes.

One day, we will undoubtedly have speech recognition capability that can actually recognize what a person is saying with a 95% or better success factor, but expert systems have to be fine-tuned and it has already taken years to get them where they are. I'm not holding my breath for this.

Honeypots: Free psy-ops weapons that can protect your network before defences fail

"a great experiment to analyze the adversary's moral limits"

If you're counting on the moral limits of your opponents, you have nothing to do managing security.

This is the Internet, the Wild West of human nature. Anything goes and there are no limits. Expect the worst and you'll never be surprised (maybe dismayed from time to time).

IBM's Marissa Mayer moment: Staff ordered to work in one of 6 main offices – or face the axe

So IBM wants to make its money in the Cloud now

Great idea.

Then I happen on this article, telling me that an IBM BlueMix cloud thingy is now free.

I'm sure IBM is going to have a roaring success if they manage their cloud like that.

Chinese pirates are facing lifelong 'social credit' downgrade

Re: "Nobody buying the fakes would pay for the real thing"

Um, does that mean that if I will never buy a given film, it's OK to torrent it ?

Don't think so.

Now, I do agree that the copycats are indeed giving publicity to the brands, I can imagine that the brands are somehow semi-tolerant of that because of that, and we all know that the flattery is the sincerest yada yada, but those arguments won't save you in court if you're caught selling fake branded merchandise.

Mixed bag of emotions right now

On the one hand, obviously it is a good thing that China be cracking down on all the fake Vuitton and the rest, no denying that.

On the other hand though, China is now going to be courted by the likes of RIAA and MPAA, who will no doubt "educate" the Chinese on "proper" DRM measures, trying to continue spreading their infectious influence and brain-dead ideas to the far reaches of the globe. That I appreciate a lot less.

Microsoft's DRM can expose Windows-on-Tor users' IP address

And that is indeed the only reason I still use Windows, of which 7 will be the last Windows I will ever have at home.

By the time the hardware requires 10, I'm guessing between Steam and some others that will surely crop up, I'll be able to kiss that infested swamp good bye without (too much) regret.

I just hope Blizzard will grow up about it all, because Diablo III is great fun a half hour at a time.

Re: So MS lost the keys already

Absolutely. As with all DRM, once again it is demonstrated that, where security is concerned, a closed-source "solution" is just a disaster waiting to happen.

What this means is that there are people out there who could conceivably wrap a film with the proper DRM security (without MS' knowledge) and serve that up to unsuspecting victims in order to grab their IP address. For Tor, which is specifically a platform supposedly enabling you to hide it, it is nothing less than a targeted attack.

I suppose this could also blow through most anon proxies as well, though I may be wrong.

And, given that the people who have this capability are not any open-source advocates or geeky teenagers wanting bragging rights, there's a good chance that they are blackhats, which means that once they have the IP address, mayhem will ensue.

Not good news in any case.

NASA's Curiosity puts cat among the climate pigeons: Lack of CO2 sinks water theory

Re: "which was supposedly a lot thicker"

And that is the entire question : what was in it ? Because apparently it wasn't carbon dioxide.

So the situation is :

1) there has been liquid water on Mars

2) for water to become liquid, there has to be a certain amount of atmospheric pressure and a certain temperature

3) the Sun was never hot enough to provide the temperature component, so there had to be greenhouse gas involved

4) evidence suggests that carbon dioxide is not that gas

It is a conundrum, no doubt about that.

Hello? Police? My darknet drug market was just hacked by criminals

I think the legal situation is very much a no for that kind of thing, not to mention that I do not believe that the police have the necessary chops to do it in the first place. The brightest minds do not look at a police salary and think "yes ! this is my ideal career path".

Unfortunately, some very bright minds do look at the dark side, see the money involved and think "yup, I'm going there".

Update or shut up: Microsoft's choice for desktop Skypers

There's a good run-down of Skype alternatives here. Most of them are basically free, but I don't think any of them are FOSS.

FYI: Ticking time-bomb fault will brick Cisco gear after 18 months

Re: Planned obsolescence

Generally that plan is set for five years. 18 months seems a bit ambitious to me, and some people just might notice. Oh, wait . . .

Chinese hackers switch tactics for spying on Russian jet makers

An impressive list

China basically has every important weapon type the rest of the world has. Including nukes, but not aircraft carriers (unless I'm mistaken).

Chinese weapons not battle-tested ? If the jets fly, they'll reach a target. I have no doubt the Chinese are as intent on testing and training as any other Air Force, and nobody has ever said that Chinese are dumb.

But all this is rhetoric. We've passed the stage where a major country could declare war on another major country - we all know that such a war will be devastating, maybe to the point of annihilation. China, like Russia, will continue to be treated with the utmost caution so as to not push them too far.

As for the US, who knows what the Orange One will consider is "too far" ?

2016: Snapchat loses $515m... 2017: Snapchat rips veil off $3bn IPO

Not only that

What money it makes is based on advertisement, it already doesn't make enough and specifically plans to not make enough in the future.

A company that "may eventually break into the black" is not a company I'm interested in, and I can't see how anyone who wants to make money will be.

A $3 billion IPO ? We'll see how that crashes and burns (unless, of course, the Internet proves once again how stupid the collective can get).

Hard numbers: The mathematical architectures of Artificial Intelligence

Congratulations. Thanks to you everything seems so much more simple. You should go and teach all those scientists who have dedicated their career to this field.

Unfortunately, I am a more literal person. Artificial Intelligence, for me, means that we can "make" a construct that, when activated, is capable of learning and deciding on it's own. Like a teenager, if you will.

At this point in time, you can spout weighted phrases all you want, but there is no AI that will decide it wants a cigarette despite all the medical data that weighs against that.

A true AI would be capable of going beyond the data, because it would decide that it wanted to know what it was like to smoke. So maybe intelligence is partly defined by emotion - in which case AI is even farther away than we imagine it to be.

Is it the beginning of the end for Visual Basic? Microsoft to focus on 'core scenarios'

"the writing has been on the wall"

That may be the case, but there's a lot of people not looking at the wall. I know a fair number of financial organizations that are still heavily invested in VB - not to mention a few governmental ones I have visited in the last few years.

Microsoft may eventually state that it is stopping development and/or maintenance on VB, but just like Window XP, it doesn't decide when people finally stop using the damn thing.

US tech giants take brave immigration stand that has nothing to do with profit whatsoever

"welcome the changes your administration has made in recent days."

Well, there must be some mighty brown noses today.

And I love the mention of "American values". Funny they never mention those when it's time to actually make something.

Fear not, Europe's Privacy Shield is Trump-proof – ex-FTC bigwig

"[..] fire any Attorney General who does not agree to his executive orders"

So much for the constitutional separation of judicial and executive powers. Well at least the AG won't get shot, which is just about the only difference between Trump and your run-of-the-mill tinpot dictator.

Brill can say whatever she wants, and she can even believe it, but nothing is safe from Trump at this point in time.

Oculus gift: VR biz to cough up half a billion dollars for ripping off software copyright

@Klatern

"GPU's are catching up fast, and should allow the resolutions needed which are the only key problem right now"

I beg to differ. VR has a certain number of issues, not the least being weight and freedom of movement. I have cognitive dissonance when told about how immersive it is - you're immobile in a chair and tethered by a cord. A good friend of mine told me it was pretty good though, so I have to think that there is a future for it beyond medical applications.

For gaming, however, I think that VR will only really be immersive when you have a sphere around you in which you can walk, run, roll and jump. That, along with whatever headset tech exists at that time, and then you can talk about immersive. Until then, my 26" Iiyama is plenty immersive to me when sitting at my desk.

That said, I am keeping tabs on this newfangled toy. I'm sure that, one day, the tech will advance enough to win me over. Not yet there, though.

"Oculus products are built with Oculus technology"

and ZeniMax employees.

Honestly, Oculus would not be where it is today if Carmak hadn't gone over to Oculus with a group of colleagues. If I were the CEO of ZeniMax, I'd be seething. Half a billion wouldn't seem exaggerated to me.

Dido queen of carnage steps down from TalkTalk

Yup, that's definitely a grade A whitewash right there. And everyone is saying the words with a straight face. There comes a time where you think there just might be a bit too much education in some circles.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go wash my monocle . . .