Posts by Pascal Monett

Japan investigating defence network break-in

Why do Defense networks insist on being accessible via Internet ?

The need for security being what it is, I think that any Secure Defense network should only be accessible via dialup.

Speeds today are quite reasonable and should be adequate, and having to phone in to a defense server means that you are eminently traceable, virtually eliminating any outsider attempt because of the very real risk of the door being beaten down in minutes and your ass being hauled off for a possibly very long time.

In addition, you could seal off international calls, thus ensuring only people physically in your country could attempt the call, therefor ensuring that your police forces are fully capable of putting down any spurious attempts.

It would indeed have to be one hell of a state actor to attempt anything at that level without insider knowledge.

So why does super-important defense information keep being under threat from any pimply-faced miscreant with an Ethernet port ?

The future often starts as a toy, so don't shun toy VR this Christmas

"Toys frame our capacity to dream about the future"

When I was a kid, I played with Lego. As I grew up, I often found myself lacking enough blocks of a given type to complete my projects properly, but I made do with what I had.

Nowadays, I fool around in Minecraft, and the number of blocks is no longer an issue. I introduced my nephew to the game, and it's all he wants to do any more. His constructions are that of the 9-year-old he is, but he is building stuff and that is what is important (in my view).

I do believe I have an active imagination, but VR is a miss for me. I cannot see the advantage of having to move one's head to move the field of view when you're still virtually tied to the chair in front of the PC. Moving the mouse seems a lot easier, and I'm used to that.

On the other hand, the day VR is a full-body suit encased in a sphere where you actually experience walking around endlessly (or frantically running from enemies) because you don't move in the sphere, then yes, I can totally see the interest of the VR and I will be right there, waiting for my next exercise session with my heart beating with anticipation. That kind of VR system will undoubtedly transform geeks and computer nerds into the spitting image of muscular Greek statues, with hormones, better than any gym room could possibly hope to.

So, for the good of couch-potatoes everywhere, please bring on the VR Sphere. It's a question of national health, after all.

Trust me, they're working on it.

Microsoft update servers left all Azure RHEL instances hackable

$3500 for having found a risk of that magnitude ?

Risk that MS was entirely responsible for due to shoddy security implementation ?

For shame, Microsoft. He should get ten times that to start with, because if a blackhat had found that out and used it, the damage to your reputation would have been orders of magnitude higher.

Three certainties in life: Death, taxes and the speed of light – wait no, maybe not that last one

Re: "wouldn't the charges involved modify the trajectory"

The only thing that can modify the trajectory of a photon is what is called gravitational lensing, and apparently you need a cluster of galaxies to obtain that effect.

So no, I don't think individual plasma ions are going to have an effect on the trajectory of photons.

Interestingly though, we are taught that light (ie photons) "bounce off" of objects, which is what allows us to see them. So you need entire galaxies to bend their trajectory, but a grain of sand can send the off in an entirely different direction. I still have trouble wrapping my head around that one.

Re: "could lead to a young universe with a young Earth and a young fossil record"

The currently-accepted age of the Universe is 13.7 billion years. The age of the Earth is given to be 4.5 billion years. The Earth thus came about in the last third of this Universe's current existence.

If the speed of light was different in the early days of the Universe, it might indeed mean that the Universe could be younger than is currently accepted, but I doubt that would change its age by 50%. It would likely be a lot less than that, if we can find a way to prove anything.

As far as the age of the Earth is concerned, nothing about the speed of light will change anything because the age of Earth's crust is not determined by light but by the degradation of uranium into lead which is a fixed constant. So no, whatever happens to the age of the Universe, the Creationists are not going to be able to twist that into a 6,000-year-old Earth.

"the speed of light could have been faster during the early universe"

I'm an idiot.

If it were me, I would look at that idea and say : "okay, so it might have been different. No way to prove it, why bother ?".

But these guys went on and not only wrote out their theory but claim to have a test that can prove it. And they're putting that up in front of a community of people who are very capable of putting said theory to the test and either thoroughly trashing it or conclusively proving it, or somewhere in the middle where proof is not definite but could be possible if some more intelligent people could be found to find out.

And I, the caveman, can only look on and wonder who will bring an answer to these questions while all I'm capable of doing is wash the dishes.

Kudos to these enlightened people who have questions that I couldn't even begin to ask myself. Whatever the answer, you will have improved Humanity's understanding of the Universe, and that's more than I will ever be capable of.

Poison .JPG spreading ransomware through Facebook Messenger

Re: Garbage, nobody has to use Facebook, I don't.

You probably don't smoke crack either, I gather. Unfortunately, that does not prevent crack addicts from existing.

Drops the mic... Hang on, hackers could be listening through my headphones?

"take advantage of the physical properties of the connected equipment"

Too often do we forget what it is we actually use, so deep is the habit of just considering what it does.

This is truly what is called thinking out of the box. Kudos to the team that put this experiment together.

I have no idea what the impact could be though. Granted, there is some pretty intelligent scum out there, and the NSA must be paying great attention, but I can't see that this is going to be a risk to the general public. Your run-of-the-mill scammer is not going to waste time setting up an entire software chain and phone-home capability just to hear traffic, crowds or people burping and farting.

Sysadmin denies boss's request to whitelist smut talk site of which he was a very happy member

Yup, that definitely sounds like the proper response to such a situation.

An underling, of course, would have just been sacked.

Hacker dishes advanced phishing kit to hook clever staff in 10 mins

"unless they are "dumb""

Yep. That's where all security stops : at the idiot who will repeatedly click OK/Yes without looking, who will answer all information requests without thinking, who will do whatever is written on the screen.

I believe the only solution to that is to keep those people away from computers. Of course, then we there is a host of new problems to take care of. I know ! Raise them to Management - with secretaries who take care of the typing and the clicking.

Re: Corporate email server should send such emails with look-alike links to the bit bucket.

Love the idea.

Just tell me how the server is going to be able to properly distinguish between the two without error.

LinkedIn competitor offers to drop Russians into same legal trap that caught LinkedIn

If their idea is get me to know they exist, yes, it works.

If their idea is to get me to sign up to their data-slurp, no, it doesn't.

Linux 4.9 has 'issues that just shouldn't be issues'. Or might not

What, no swearing ?

No hearty blast of heated words culminating in a drop-kick judgement ?

Well then things are entirely fine. Move along.

Hyperloop One settles hangman lawsuit

"neither side came out coated in glory"

Indeed not. One side is apparently a Neanderthal relic that can't hold his liquor, and the other is a group of high-level management types that hired a drunken Neanderthal relic and didn't fire his ass the first time he started getting drunk on the job.

Oh well, participation trophies for everyone, I guess.

Microsoft's cmd.exe deposed by PowerShell in Windows 10 preview

It does seem a bit schizophrenic

On the one hand, MS implements a PlaySkool interface despite howls of innumerable Windows users content with what they had, and on the other it replaces a simple command-line tool with a much more powerful scripting environment.

Personally, I can't wait to hear what new vulnerabilities will spring from this new fountain that is being laid at the feet of malware developers. Their fav OS is not changing any time soon.

@ Flocke Kroes : oh come on

You compare a 2-ton car to a 360-ton dump truck and you only use engine power to validate your argument ?

Let me break it down for you :

Bugatti Veyron : 2.53kg / kW

BelAZ 75710 : 109.09kg / kW

It's pretty damn obvious that 3300kW isn't going to turn that monster into a dragster.

Mozilla launches 'privacy edition' Firefox... that phones home

Re: Not surprised.... More settings hidden away each release....

Don't worry. NoScript is never far away.

KCL staff offered emotional support, clergy chat to help get over data loss

Re: No personal backups permitted?

Effin A.

Nobody is going to tell me I can't back up my own data, and nobody is going to keep me from doing so. Anybody with a brain at KCL should have a stack of optical discs at the ready, because completely losing data when you have an IT department with dedicated staff and adequate funding is just proof of total incompetence from the top down.

Experts to Congress: You must act on IoT security. Congress: Encourage industry to develop best practices, you say?

Re: You see, these IT security experts approached this testimony in the wrong way...

Absolutely. Congress has a deaf ear because no Congresscritter has been negatively impacted by the problem.

Just wait for one of them to have their IoT fridge order 5 tons of milk and have the driveway blocked due to the 10 delivery trucks, plus the bill.

THEN legislation will get pushed through faster than the result of a Taco Bell lunch two hours later.

Antivirus tools are a useless box-ticking exercise says Google security chap

Re: Until the world all has a working OS and well designed software...

I think there is malware out there that is particularly well designed, moreso than some "professional" products I have already used.

Microsoft, Slack et al will 'laugh their asses off' at IBM's biz messaging tool

Re: "In the world of enterprise software, there is no lower bound on quality."

Well, it does have to actually start . . .

I don't get it

IBM, for Pete's sake. There are chat clients all over the Internet with every license imaginable, and IBM has to jump into the fray with a bleak, barebone excuse that would get squashed by what some college kids could have done in a week-end.

This is friggin' IBM. That product should have been a polished, almost-saleable demo. It's not like IBM hasn't already dabbled in this market. Someone mentioned Notes, which means they know about Sametime. God knows that IBM has had long enough to play with that to know what features are required in a chat client.

Somebody reassure me : this is an intern's summer project that finally got the green light, right ? Or did they allocate resources to it last week and two guys looked at the spec sheet, then checked the delivery date, and said "right, we'll just get a connection working then we'll see how it goes" ?

Because this is obviously not a project that has actually been worked on by a team, with proper milestones and so on and so forth.

Low-end notebook, rocking horse shit or hen's teeth

"demand outstripping supply was a good sign for the market"

Um, did anybody tell him that the PC market is shrinking ? A crash in supply does not mean that the PC market is getting better, it just means that what consumers are left are going to have to pay a bit more a wait a bit longer.

To hear this guy you'd think he's expecting the market to take off again. Sorry, bud, that market had its glory days; now you're in Aisle 12, right before the dog food.

Re: "mainly due to racketeering"

Yeah, that tsunami was totally in on that. Got 10% if I remember correctly.

Google and Facebook pledge to stop their ads reaching fake news websites

Well if you can do that . . .

"Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content, or the primary purpose of the web property."

I'm waiting for the next announcement in this vein :

"We will now implement restrictions on ad serving by ads that misrepresent, mistate or conceal information about the developer's intent to subvert and/or take control of a hapless viewer's computer."

Not holding my breath though.

GSMA: 5G at risk if governments don't get their acts together

What else is new ?

So, speeds won't be as promised and roaming could be compromised if governments don't play nice.

Why would governments play nice ? Communication means surveillance these days, and each country has made its own choices for that. It would be astonishing that every country would decide on the same surveillance hardware, so I suppose that there are at least two incompatible types in service.

I would be even more surprised if any country would be willing to change that hardware in order to "play nice".

So I am fully expecting governments to churn out lengthy explanations as to why The People would prefer one choice of roaming options over another, when The People would certainly prefer that It Just Works and couldn't care less about why.

Wait and see, I guess.

Virgin Media users report ongoing problems delivering legit emails. Again

"utilising several specialist third parties to deliver various elements of the solution,"

Well, it sounds like the CEO's nephew is finally going to be replaced.

Hopefully by a company that actually knows what it's doing.

'Pavement power' - The bad idea that never seems to die

Let's not complain too much : now there will be a real-life example of the tech. In a year or so, we'll be able to ask : so, how's those pads working at the generating energy part ? What are the exact figures ?

One way or another, those figures will be published, then compared to the amount of energy required.

Then we'll be able to have a hearty guffaw and that will be the end of it.

Because the only reason we're still hearing about this nonsense is that nobody is publishing actual figures, everything is just marketing. If we could harness marketing energy, we'd already be exploring the stars.

Adult FriendFinder users get their privates exposed... again – reports

Re: you can buy everything you need to keep your private thoughts to yourself

But then how do you get likes ???

GitLab to dump cloud for its own bare metal Ceph boxen

So, the Cloud is starting to leak

I'd love to go on a sarcastic rant about how Manglement is Doing It Wrong Again, but the simple reality is that the Cloud can benefit if one knows exactly why one is intending to use it.

With GitLab, the pros and cons have clearly been extensively studied and the decision made on facts, not marketspeak - which is hardly surprising from a group of computer nerds for whom I'm betting marketspeak does not impress.

So this is not really a failure of the Cloud, just a victory for Reason Over Marketing.

I do find the conclusion very interesting though : paying for sub-par performance because time-share.

That's a point I'm going to have to add to my list of arguments against.

The sharks of AI will attack expensive and scarce workers faster than they eat drivers

Ever heard of WebMD ? Any idea of how many people go there before/in place of seeing a real doctor ?

I don't, but I Google anything I don't know in most other domains, so I wouldn't be surprised if a fair proportion of people consider WebMD to be their doctor.

Now, how about someone creates WebLawyer ? How long do you think it will be before people are logged in by the millions to search how to divorce (continuously trending topic), how to write their will, etc ?

That is what actual lawyers have to fear. Obviously, court cases will continue to exist, but there's a chance that they will be less frequent when the population uses a rather reliable tool to do the gruntwork for them.

And I'm guessing WebLawyer will probably be more accurate than WebMD, because the margin of subjectivity is much, much smaller when it comes to law.

Google BigQuery TITSUP caused by failure to scale-yer workloads

"the premise of cloud is that it will just scale as demand increases"

Cloud theory is like military strategy : as soon as the battle starts, you can throw the plans out the window.

2016 in a nutshell: Boffins break monkeys' backs to turn them into tragic shuffling cyborgs

Feel sorry for the monkeys

These little guys were all ready to live their life and suddenly they are crippled and probably can't figure out why. Although they might be able to understand who is responsible (ie white coats).

It's cruel, but medical research often is. The only justification is that the goal is to improve Man's understanding of biology to better help in the future.

As cruel as this is, I'm pretty sure that the people who will be saved by whatever technology this experimentation gives birth to will be mighty happy that they can walk again.

But damn, those poor monkeys.

Boffins find Galaxy making killer radiation, rule out Samsung phone as source

"All of these would ruin your day if you happened to live in the same galaxy"

Um, I do believe that, if you are not specifically in the path of the GRB, you can be a few dozen light-years away from a supernova with nothing to fear. Not immediately anyway.

If, on the other hand, you are smack in the middle of the GRB cone, tens of thousands of light-years are not going to save you.

Now, if this gamma radiation is spherical and not targeted, then I'm guessing that the minimum safe distance can be more than a few dozen light-years. Personally, I would prefer being at least a thousand light-years from any such phenomena. Vela's supernova was 800 LY away, and we're fine.

Angry user demands three site visits to fix email address typos

Re: So you didn't fix root cause

Let's be clear on one thing : fixing the user is impossible. Either the user can learn, or he can't.

If you disagree, you obviously have not encountered enough users.

Oh yeah, loads of fun. Especially when you're the one getting blamed for the cock-up.

Happened to me a few times, but thankfully every time the boss above the nitwit actually had a brain and could understand the situation, so I never got too roasted about it. Had that not been the case . . I prefer not to think about it.

Microsoft: Don't worry about the CRM cloud price hike... think of the features

Ah, the wonderful future we are going toward

The Cloud appears to be an environment where the provider can change the conditions of use and the entire environment whenever the provider wants.

I can accept such an attitude for a free, open-source product destined for individual use. I cannot accept such arbitrary changes for professional, paying customers.

A business needs to be reactive to its clients needs, not to its own tools for running the business. No company can survive when its internal management software switches gears and changes everything without notice. Internal gears need to be well-adjusted, properly oiled and completely reactive. Disruption of smooth operations is something that should be planned, approved, explained ahead of time, set to a calendar that everyone knows and respects that calendar.

Microsoft obviously has the right to make any changes it wants, no discussion there, but I have trouble believing that companies are going to put up with such upheavals at unexpected intervals in the long term.

Trump's torture support could mean the end of GCHQ-NSA relationship

Re: "if we step to that level"

I do believe that ship has sailed a long time ago. Abu Ghraib ring a bell ?

You've stepped to that level. Then you built a condominium complex and a parking zone on it. Apparently there are now plans to extend the zone with a golf course. No use doing government-approved torture in dismal conditions for the interrogators, right ?

World-leading heart hospital 'very, very lucky' to dodge ransomware hit

Still better than the nothing they have now.

Okay, somebody tell me why Internet access is not properly locked down

As a consultant, I often work in banking environments.

In one of those, Internet access was not allowed from the desktop, but you could launch an Internet Explorer session which connected to a VM that allowed to go on the Internet - except you could download nothing because the VM had no access to your PC. It seems to me that this is the solution to that problem.

This solution is probably not easy to implement, I have no idea since I'm just a lowly programmer and not a sysadmin, but dammit somebody has found the solution, so it is possible. And knowing the bank in question, it likely did not cost an arm and a leg to set up.

So let's get cracking. Forbid everything from the Internet, create a sandbox environment that can access Internet, and this kind of problem is gone.

Windows Insiders are so passé, Microsoft now has Skype Insiders

That's going to help

"taking it away from its peer-to-peer roots in the name of a browser-based client and in the hope it can add more services

and more bloat, and more useless "features", and some CPU-cycle eater that MS seems to have an endless supply of. Then, of course, it will be "integrated" with Office and IE (in the kernel, obviously), and end up in a WU mandatory high-priority patch that will tie everything in with your MS profile.

Thank God I'm on my way to Linux.

Turn off remote admin, SOHOpeless D-Link owners

Re: Still vulnerable to exploit from inside the LAN.

Protecting a Home LAN from outside attack is difficult enough. Protecting from inside malicious attack seems to me to be next to impossible.

'Extra-supermoon' to appear next week

Because now the Twitterati have taken notice.

After looking up from their keyboard for once.

European F-35 avionics to be overhauled at Sealand, says UK.gov

Yeah, but what you don't have is the friend who knows the guy who can call his buddy who can change the decision in your favor.

Nonsense. It's a great piece of equipment - for keeping contractors busy and government pork flowing, that is.

Five-a-day energy drink habit turned chap's eyes yellow, urine dark, caused anorexia

@boltar

until you were 48 and became diabetic

You're jumping to conclusions. I never said I was diabetic, I said I wanted to react before getting to that point.

But hey, squashing people without actually understanding what they say is a regular Internet passtime.

Carry on !

Build your own IMSI slurping, phone-stalking Stingray-lite box – using bog-standard Wi-Fi

@Dave Roberts

I totally agree with you, but my response was to a poster that said "computer", not mobile phone.

The PC will not self-2FA any time soon.

Mobile phones are a walking security disaster case, so who knows ?

We're great, you don't understand competition law, Google tells Europe

Google is just being disruptive

As its immense money pile allows it to. Like every Internet-based company these days, it believes that it can redefine the law of any land by virtue of simply saying that things are like it wants, not like they actually are. Uber is starting to learn the limits of such behavior.

Contrary to most, jurists are experts at listening to arguments to better destroy them, and the law is not defined by an Internet company.

Still, Google (and others) have deep coffers and know how to use that to lobby and get the laws they want. So Google may be right one day, but I am personally pining for the judge who would take such declarations and slap a $10 billion fine for contempt of court.

Never going to happen, of course.

Accessories to crime: Facial recog defeated by wacky paper glasses

Alternatively the facial recognition neural nets will be trained to totally ignore glasses

I don't think that is possible. Glasses, by definition, cover the eyes and impact the shape of the nose, and that entire region seems to be critical in recognizing someone. Disregarding glasses means not analyzing that zone and that will likely render recognition basically impossible.

Until the day we have AI that can guess how someone looks without glasses, that is. Then we're toast.