Posts by Pascal Monett

Microsoft's Cloud UI brings Windows full circle

For the love of God, get your bearings straight

You insist on shoveling the Start button into a phone UI, then you turn around and insist on taking it away from a full-fledged PC ?

Is the MS design department based in Colorado, by any chance ? Or was it the MS design department that managed to lobby hard enough to have their weed decriminalized ?

Which schizophrenic idiot approved all this ?

Of course, silly me, there must have been hundreds of idiots on the managerial merry-go-round. No way you can so totally lose the plot with a single, coherent corporate vision. This just proves that MS never, ever had any vision whatsoever. It started by stealing someone else's code, and continued blindly flailing about the two sole products that ever brought in the money.

Success is overrated.

H0LiCOW! Hubble's constant update paves way for 'new physics'

Yes! Another "hang on, that's wierd" moment

Science is advancing again !

And it is important, since the slightest microscopic change in value could have an immense impact when multiplied by the billions of light-years we're already looking at.

Machine-learning boffins 'summon demons' in AI to find exploitable bugs

@ Smooth Newt

"Which would seem to be a bit of a showstopper [..] for, like self-drive cars"

I think we're going to see about that in the years to come. Then again, I'm against calling that AI. It's just reams of code developed for a specific purpose. Highly complex code to be sure, with a boatload of requirements such as we have never seen before, but specialized code nonetheless. You won't be able to put it up against Kasparov in a game of chess, which is something a true AI could do.

Nuclear power station sensors are literally shouting their readings at each other

Encrypted Morse code transmitted via sound

This is the definition of an elegant solution. Using Titanic-era communications to monitor nuclear power stations is just magnificent. Well done to that company and the engineers it employs.

HummingBad malware returns in new, more annoying variant

"the authors have added better ad fraud capabilities to the code"

It uses VMs, downloads malware by the dozen, and doesn't even have to root the phone.

And you still want us to not install adblockers ?

Thank goodness those Play stores are so severely scrutinized and controlled to avoid letting a copy of something Google wants to keep for itself piece of malware through.

(yes, I did read that they removed the offending apps - it still means that had to remove them instead of blocking them at submission, which is what a proper control should have done)

How Lexmark's patent fight to crush an ink reseller will affect us all

"patent exhaustion doesn't apply when patented goods are sold outside the US"

Isn't that wonderful ? Finally US law acknowledges that there is an "outside". Well, in some cases. When money is to be won by an American company (duh).

Oh well, baby steps, I guess.

Cisco's WebEx Chrome plugin will execute evil code, install malware via secret 'magic URL'

It could be called the Flash Awards.

Samsung Electronics is on fire! In a good way as profits leap

Trillions of Won

I've always wondered about countries that keep a financial count that requires their banking statements to be a foot wide. I understand that it is quite pleasant to see that one's salary is in the million range, but I would personally prefer the currency to be at least dollar in that case.

What is it that keeps countries with a currency that you need to count in hundreds just for a loaf of bread ? Is there an economic justification to all those zeros, or is it just social pressure ?

Furby Rickroll demo: What fresh hell is this?

"with a suitable proxy"

Yes, because 99% of Furby buyers will obviously have the suitable proxy already waiting and configured . . .

Oracle lied: Database giant is axing hundreds of staff – at least 450 in its hardware div

"[..] politically motivated, based on false allegations, and wholly without merit."

And you won't be laying anyone off either, right ? Oh wait, I get it, that was true for 2016.

Now that we're in 2017, they can axe away with a clear . . nope, doesn't apply either.

Ah, to live in the lofty spheres of existence where other lives are just numbers on a spreadsheet to be jumbled about while sipping a drink until the desired result is obtained . . .

Government to sling extra £4.7bn at R&D in bid to Brexit-proof Britain

Re: "identify those athletes that will probably succeed"

Although I generally agree with your point, there is the issue of identifying said research "athletes". Not an easy thing to do because research is, by definition, a domain where nobody really knows where they'll end up.

It's not because you say that you're looking for room-temperature superconductive materials that that's what you'll find. You can just as easily find nothing, or something completely different.

That is why funding has to be less selective - you never know which horse to bet on to finish the race, nor do you know if the money you spend on one thing isn't going to show results in a totally different area a few years (or decades) later.

We've found a ‘vaccine’ for fake news. Wait! No, we really are Cambridge researchers

I'm willing to submit to a test to find out.

Symantec carpeted over dodgy certificates, again

Certificates are indeed expensive

Not having them can be more expensive. Think lost business because not trustworthy.

It's about building a chain of trust and showing that you are among those who make the effort. Of course, the fact that there are self-signed certificates kinda defeats the point, but then again, it can be argued that self-signed are just as valid as CA-signed, especially when CAs goof up and do stupid things. Errare humanum est and all that. For Joe User it must be impossibly confusing.

The fact remains that we are in dire need of knowing who to trust and who to be cautious about in the Wild Wild Intertubes. This certificate thing could help in the long run.

Protected US military server poked via army recruitment website

Money well spent

Anything that makes a nation's communication infrastructure more reliable is a Good Thing (TM). Maybe this will help the shoddy image the military has when it comes to IT security.

Are they going to do the same for the US Government ? Ha ha, just kidding.

Samsung set a fire under battery-makers to make the Galaxy Note 7 flaming brilliant

Taking responsibility for doing too god a job

Well that's a new one, for sure. A refreshing change from "almost nobody was impacted", but given the importance of the impact on the people affected, it would have apparently been too callous even for a multinational conglomerate to say that. And it would probably have cost a lot in yet a bit more negative publicity.

Which is what this whole PR exercise is about - drowning the negative in positive, reponsible, taking-all-blame spin. That's because the whole fiasco was prohibitively expensive in both money and reputation, and Samsung is desperate to get some brownie points in Public Opinion.

Everything in here has been carefully crafted to make people believe that the investigation was thorough, the cause forgivable, the motive noble. Honor is preserved by taking the blame yet saying that Samsung equipment was absolutely not responsible. A brilliant exercise.

Well I'm against monopolies, so I hope Samsung will stay in the game for a while longer, but I don't buy the whitewash. A battery that is not of the specified size (how can they possible make something bigger than expected these days ?), that lacks insulation and has a slew of other manufacturing defects is not something that should have made its way on to the market, period. With the amount of defects listed, the fact that it did get to the market demonstrates an appalling lack of QA in every part of the manufacturing chain.

I'm guessing that this situation has been a long time in the making. Such absence of control didn't happen overnight, it is the result of complacency and the immense pressure of the market.

Maybe it is time to get off the wheel for a bit and take a breather ? Nobody will die if a new model takes a year and a half to get done instead of twelve months.

It's 2017 and 200,000 services still have unpatched Heartbleeds

Word macro virii

Seems that targeting the end user is a never-ending fountain of fun for black hats. Hardly surprising given that most end users haven't got a clue until it's too late (if even then).

What is surprising is the fact that this avenue of attack was almost abandoned for a period. I guess it wasn't so easy to implement in Facebook. Small mercies and all that.

Oh well, it's coming back now. Retro is the new in !

IBM is letting storage hardware revenues slip gently off into the night

@AC

So I mention putting an SSD in my laptop and you equate that with me throwing away all my backups, photos and "important documents".

Wow, quite a leap of logic there.

Flash is up, spinning rust is down

Okay, thanks for the official report. I think only Gartner will be surprised, if even they stoop that low.

I like SSDs. Since I banged a 500GB one in my laptop last month, I feel like the whole thing got a major upgrade. It's a different laptop. Startup is 25 seconds, from button ON to full desktop availability. Frak me but I like that.

So it seems clear to me that flash IS the future. Most people don't splurge for more than one hard disk on their PC, and Joe User's laptops are never upgraded, so if they can get them with an SSD it makes everyone happier.

15 years ago I was telling everyone they needed a second hard disk to put the swap file and make Windows faster. With SSDs, that is no longer a requirement.

Viva progress.

Assange reverse-ferrets on promise to fly to US post-Manning clemency

Re: Sweden

No, no, no.

You're assigning logic to his actions and words, when the only only logic that applies is that he'll say and do whatever it takes to keep him in the limelight as much as possible.

Nothing he says is actually important, nor does it reflect in any way what his next actions will be, nor should his words be in any way considered truthful. He is a lying cowardly scumbag and will use anything and anyone to make us think otherwise.

He can stay in the Embassy for the rest of his miserable life. At least there, he can't rape anyone.

Uber coughs up $20m after 'lying about how much its drivers make'

"slash their funding"

And how would he do that ? Does Uber have some government funding we are not aware of ?

Because the President of the US does not have the power to tell private individuals in a capitalist economy to not put money into something.

But I acknowledge that it is typically American to expect the US President to wave a hand and do something about whatever it is that irks them at that specific point in time.

Re: "anyone" is singular

That may be the case, but saying "for anyone looking to earn money on anyone's own schedule" does not imply the same thing.

This is a failure of English to assign a proper word for this grammatical case. As for me, I don't think there is an error in the original sentence and I understood the meaning perfectly well.

Operator of DDoS protection service named as Mirai author

Whoever the culprits are

They deserve having their life DDOSed in punishment.

Mozillans call for new moz://a logo to actually work in browsers

Great idea, guys

Yeah, let's add logos to things to put in a URL bar. As if URLs aren't complicated enough what with the Unicode stuff that is supposed to be put in. And we really need another functionality for crims to exploit endlessly on the masses.

Well done, really. Not.

Facebook bans Russia's RT ahead of Trump's Inauguration Day (then changes its mind)

"active countermeasures."

Looks like we're heading towards another Cold War-type environment, this time on the Internet.

Looking forward to hearing the why of this event. And don't try telling me that it was a bug - this was clearly targeted, thus decided.

Euro space agency's Galileo satellites stricken by mystery clock failures

"halt launches until the problem has been traced and cured"

There is no other way, since Humanity has lost the possibility of going up to fix the damn things ever since the Shuttle program was canned.

So top launching them until you find the solution - there's enough space trash up there already.

IPv6 vulnerable to fragmentation attacks that threaten core internet routers

What ?

But I was told that IPv6 was the must-have, Internet-will-die-otherwise option for the 3rd millennium. How can this happen ?

HPE gobbles SimpliVity for US$650m – well below recent valuations

Ah, but the corporate heart has reasons that Reason cannot fathom.

What's big and red and needs 270 security patches?

Re: "in practice, that proprietary approach does work reasonably well"

Spot on. Always has worked fine for Windows, hasn't it ?

Oh, wait . . .

Did Oculus swipe blueprints from rival? Zuck takes the stand

"a $2bn deal that was actually closer to $3bn after expenses"

Only in billionaire-land can you push a major deal that costs 150% of the initial figure without getting fired.

In every other case, there are people analyzing, evaluating, reporting and checking that the deal goes through for the amount initially forecast, otherwise there is hell to pay to explain why there is difference and who is the dimwit that didn't have the experience to plan for it.

But hey, in this case the dimwit is the owner, so what can you say ?

Blockchain: A digital 'golden section' that's the 'gestalt of its pieces'

"the next phase in the evolution of our brand"

Every single company or entity that has enough money to devote to such shenanigans is, by definition, getting too much money in the first place.

Be useful or get lost. When you're touting the redefinition of your logo as a major advancement, it is high time to get lost.

Well, that sucks: China's Tencent so sorry after vid emerges of faux blowjob office game

"it will only drag society to a level where no one can do or say anything..."

I thought we landed on that beach last millennium already.

We've taken vast swathes of territory since.

Personally, I would never have approved such "entertainment". This, however, is China. Let's try and stop imposing our views of what's moral to other countries/cultures. It's really starting to cost a lot in military invasions.

El Reg drills into chatbot hype: The AIs that want to be your web butlers

"It’s a trillion-dollar industry"

Right off the bat that sounds suspiciously like the evaluations of the cost of virii or hacking, or pirate downloads.

Did someone ask RIAA for their evaluation on the subject ?

That said, I can imagine that getting into this industry, when it forms, will cost a pretty penny, but come on, AI doesn't exist and it didn't cost a trillion dollars (or bring that much money in) to launch Siri or Cortana or even both at the same time.

Tired of the hyperbole. Time to retire to the mountains and dig that gorram bear pit.

Irish flash extender startup goes 3D

Aviator

Just goes to prove how much better everything is when you strap wings to it.

Right, I'm going - don't push.

Chelsea Manning sentence slashed by Prez Obama: She'll be sprung in the spring

Re: Hardly related

The only way that would be possible would be to consider the pronunciation as "julienne à singe". Une julienne is a dish based on sliced veggies, adding monkey to it is an easy step.

Personally, I think that would be pushing it, as the man's name (as written) would logically be pronounced "à s-ange" in French, "ange" meaning "angel".

In this case, however, I fully subscribe to the initial interpretation since I am extremely loath to assign any "ange" quality to that monkey's ass.

Re: "if it's cancer [..] there's seldom a peep"

Hint : it's because cancer has nothing to do with . . <whisper>SEX</whisper> . . in a "puritan" country which just happens to be the world's #1 porn video maker.

Re: "or he's deluded"

Is there any doubt on that on point ?

Solaris 12 disappears from Oracle's roadmap

Re: "If you don’t have a [..] boundary between the OS and applications, you don’t really have an OS"

So, you're talking about Windows 1 0 then, right ?

You know how online shops love to keep tabs on you? Now it's coming to the offline world

Re: "Always another choice of retailer."

For now.

Enjoy while you can.

In the meantime, forget Faraday cages - it is high time to invent the Local-Radius, Zero Fallout EMP Generator.

Boffins link ALIEN STRUCTURE ON VENUS to Solar System's biggest ever grav wave

It's simple

They Are Watching Now.

They have lifted their UltraPlanetWatch Mk VII telescope from the depths of storage and are now in full preparation mode for the invasion, gathering all the information on us that they can.

Before that they were a bit fixated on I Love Lucy reruns, but Trump's election demonstrated that we weren't as harmless as they thought. They're gearing up to correct that oversight.

Doctor AI: Good news, I'm better at predicting when you'll die of a heart attack. Bad news is...

Please remain still

The marketroid GetWithTheProgram rehabilitation bot will shortly be around to pick you up and take to you the Mind Remodeling facility where you will be properly reconditioned to appreciate Your Overlord's benevolence.

All hail the A.I. !

French spies warn politicians of hack risk as election draws near

@tom dial

I am not assuming that paper ballots are "secure". They are, however, immune from "hacking", and France does not have "optically scanned ballots". The only optics used are Eyeball v1.0.

I specifically stated that ALL cases of attempted tampering have been found and corrected. I stand by my statement. If you think that we haven't had our set of dead people voting and such nonsense, I regretfully inform you that you are mistaken - it has happened and it has been rooted out.

Senior officials exist, and there are attempts at changing votes. French democracy is good enough to root those things out, is all. Again, it's because of the number of different politically-oriented eyeballs that are on the lookout, not because of any specific French-based privilege.

That's all I'm saying.

Hacking French politics ? Not worth it.

First of all, a reminder : in France the election is held with paper ballots. There is a pretty good procedural trail for it all and the instances of tinkering are traditionally ALL found and dealt with. No hacking possible there.

Second, political party websites do not have the same impact in the land of Baguette and Cheese (and red wine) as they do in NSA-land. There are too many political parties, and there are too many eyes of different types looking at them for anything untoward to go unnoticed for a long time.

For any hacking to be influential, it would have to be across too many political convictions to be feasibly successful.

Finally, nobody I know gives half a flying one about this election. There is nothing but bad choices on the list, so meh.

Hey Putin ! Give it miss here, waste of your time. If you do try, it'll only make us feel (even more) important.

And nobody wants that, right ?

Google reveals its servers all contain custom security silicon

What I find interesting is that this opens the possibility that, in future, in-house chips to validate hardware could well become readily available to every company. I don't think end users will get any because that's not the market, but Fortune 1000 companies could well invest in that kind of scheme, as well as important web site companies that are not (yet) in the Fortune 1000 list.

That's potentially a lot of money available to push this kind of tech forward. I wonder what the ripple effect would be.

Re: "You think you can [..] limit the javascript that runs on your PC?"

Um, in a word : yes. NoScript does just that.

Of course, that means using a different browser than any made in Redmond.

You should try that one day.

Peace-sign selfie fools menaced by fingerprint-harvesting tech

"using yet-to-be built technology"

So basically these "researchers" are saying that someone might, in the future, make something that could, hypothetically, get your fingerprints from a pic.

I will repress the urge to panic until someone actually does build a thing that can do that.

Microsoft sued by staff traumatized by child sex abuse vids stashed on OneDrive accounts

It would still keep them off the streets . . .

I hiccuped at that part as well, but then I doubled back and re-read the paragraph more carefully. It states that the employees check on all things posted to Bing and stored on OneDrive - in effect, making their activities totally legit since they are checking on "publicly available" data.

So nothing to get all angsty about there. But I did do a double-take on that.

MIT brainiacs wrangle 2D graphene into super-strong 3D art homework

So, still playing with their lab toy

Graphene, carbon nanotubes, magic batteries, super cables and the list goes on.

Well done boffins, making a new thingamabob and getting publishing credits.

Could we finally get a real-life implementation of this wondrous technology, or will we have to wait another 100 years ?

Weaky-leaks: Furious fans roast Assange in web interview from hell

Yep, he wants full disclosure all right - for everyone else.

Dieselgate: VW pleads guilty, will cough up $4.3bn, throws 6 staff under its cheatware bus

"investigation and prosecution of individuals responsible for these crimes"

That would be "investigation and prosecution of scapegoats responsible for these crimes", because the individuals responsible are all sitting way above the kerfluffle and the only thing they risk is a smaller bonus this year.

It is disgusting to see the continued immunity from prosecution of all high-level CxOs that have not outright murdered someone in public in front of a camera. It is high time the notion of judicial responsibility be applied to those raking in the money and touting their "management" as the reason for the financial success of their company.

If you take credit (and bonuses) for exceeding expectations, you should also be liable for the bumps caused by your "management".