Posts by Pascal Monett

The Google Home Mini: Great, right up until you want to smash it in fury

Why does everyone always link to YouTube ? Can't anyone read any more ?

That is what they want us to think.

Release the KRACKen patches: The good, the bad, and the ugly on this WPA2 Wi-Fi drama

Re: Has to be within range

I believe that startup incubators have a bunch of companies that are in range of each other without much choice in the matter.

I know one which actually only has one WiFi access point for all the freelancers in the vicinity. No cables available.

Would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Here's a timeless headline: Adobe rushes out emergency Flash fix after hacker exploits bug

"Adobe, [..] proudly trumpeting"

Um, no Adobe. Just no.

You have no right to be proud of anything. Not of the ham-fisted way you bullied your Photoshop customers to the cloud, and certainly not of the historical catastrophe that is Flash.

Aviation industry hits turbulence as Airbus buys into Bombardier’s new jetplanes

"if carriers are willing to install Sardine Class on A380s"

If ?

I'm pretty sure that, if I ever decide to take a flight again, I'll have to buy a 1st-class ticket just to have enough room to breathe.

I'm pretty sure it's coming along like everything else Trump promises : straight to /DEV/NULL.

Neutron stars shower gold on universe in big bang, felt on Earth as 100-second grav wave

"large amounts of gold and platinum were produced in the merger"

Having scoured the Internet for more information, this article cleared up a number of things for me.

Indeed, in my original opinion, neutron stars are made of neutrons. Gold and platinum are not, so how could a merger of neutrons produce anything else but neutrons ?

Obviously, the energy involved has something to do with it. As the neutron stars collide, the residue of the explosion and the inconceivable energies involved create and eject the matter that is detected.

It is absolutely mind-blowing to imagine the sequence of events that conducted to the presence of gold on Earth. First, not too far away from our future Sun, two supermassive stars orbiting each other went supernova in the very early days of the Universe, leaving two neutron stars in the wake of the unbelievable cataclysm. These neutron stars managed to stay in orbit, then gradually came close enough to merge, causing the creation of an Earth-sized amount of gold that was spewed into the local interstellar medium.

Meanwhile, our Sun formed and its solar system followed, and was showered by the gold and platinum from the merger, some time in our past.

Then the Earth formed, capturing some meager proportion of that gold, and now we are digging the deepest tunnels ever made by Man to recover said gold.

Mind. Blown.

Edit : This video is very informative as well.

Ethereum blockchain is sailing to Byzantium – hard fork up and running

2.5 million Ether is $2 ?

Looks like Ethereum ain't gonna cause BitCoin any problem any time soon.

Huge power imbalance between firms and users whose info they grab

"huge effects on things like competition between companies"

Silly me, here I was thinking that companies competed by making a better product. Now, in the 3rd millennium, they will just compete by having better customer details.

After all, who cares about the product, right ?

Keep your voice down in the data centre, the HDDs have ears! I SAID, KEEP...

So, the next '007 evil genius plan will be . .

to stop the London Stock Exchange by blasting a rock concert in the server room ?

Well, we've had worse.

Customers cheesed off after card details nicked in Pizza Hut data breach

Yeah, because BitCoin is so widely used by brick-and-mortar shop websites already.

Remember how you said it was cool if your mobe network sold your name, number and location?

Re: Now Americans can see

Of course they can see. They just choose to ignore because - hey look, shiny !

Elon Musk says Harry Potter and Bob the Builder will get SpaceX flying to Mars

Re: Colonist motivation

"What's really needed is an economic reason to go"

Nonsense. Humans do not care about economics, otherwise our global economy would be in quite a different state. There are people who are willing to go simply to be there, on another planet, and damn the cost.

Heck, there are any number of valid reasons to go :

- hipsterism (you lamers are still back on Earth, pah!)

- get away from the in-laws (okay, it's expensive, but it's foolproof)

- see a Martian sunrise

- die on a different planet than the one you were born on

- have a job (those buildings aren't going to erect themselves)

- be able to call oneself a space colonist

I'm sure you can find lots of other equally valid reasons from the human point of view.

As such, any company that can offer the trip is sure to have hundreds, if not thousands of customers lining up at the launch pad, begging to have their cash accepted. All any company has to do is make sure that it can actually survive financially and economically feasible is done.

Especially since you're not getting any right to complain if the trip isn't perfect - because you'll be dead.

Re: "The Moon is harder because it has no atmosphere"

Having an atmosphere is not going to make Mars any easier. Yes, it does have one, but a thin one. It is not, however, a breathable atmosphere. As such, I fail to see just how that makes things any easier.

On Mars or on the Moon, a hole in your suit means you die if you can't get to safety quick enough.

On either, you're lacking running water and have to extract it from the soil. On either, you have dust that will get into everything (okay, bonus for Mars on that one because Moon dust is extremely abrasive).

Nope, can't see that Mars is any easier to colonize than the Moon.

And it's a lot farther away (given current technology).

'Open sesame'... Subaru key fobs vulnerable, says engineer

Re: "a locked car with no trace of tampering"

Would also not figure very high on the list of important things to investigate from a Police Dept. point of view.

Not to mention that every single insurance company would point to absence of break-in and leave you up the creek without a paddle.

So not good in any sense of the word.

Twitter to be 'aggressive' enforcer of new, stronger rules

Go for it.

Please.

Re: "these guys are entirely serious about actually killing people and taking pride in what they do"

On the other hand, it is their job.

They risk being killed whatever happens. Might as well take pride in being competent.

I'm sure you are.

My wife, against my counsel, signed up to Facebook a few years ago. She used it for over two years until one day, out of the blue, she told me she was shutting it down because "it made her aggressive" and she decided that she didn't like that.

I was so happy and relieved that day.

Pulitzer-winning website Politifact hacked to mine crypto-coins in browsers

Re: "suspect I'll get complaints about it"

Be open. Make a poll. Put a page explaining what and why. Gather the results and then you can decide and be confident that your decision is good.

If it were me, I would basically say that if visitors agree to cryptomining, then I will take away the ads. From what I read about ad revenue, it's a hassle finding out what is legit and what isn't in the money you are paid. Better to skip the nuisance and go to a system that is clear and fair.

With readership approval, of course.

It's Patch Blues-day: Bad October Windows updates trigger BSODs

Re: "sue Slurp over breach of contract"

What breach ?

The EULA specifically absolves Microsoft of everything that can happen to your machine.

The only way anyone could sue over Microsoft's repeated failures is to attack the EULA and get the part that absolves MS of any problem off the EULA.

THEN we get to sit back, grab a jumbo popcorn and watch the dogpile.

Top of the radio charts: Jodrell Bank goes for UNESCO World Heritage status

960,000,000GB of data per day

Well that's another exabyte storage house planned then. Maybe they should go directly to Yottabyte ?

They've only gone and made a chemical-threat-detecting ring

"after three hours in open air [..] the agarose gel dried"

Well guys, it was a nice idea, but implementation will not be for mass consumption.

Chuck the ring format, make it a pendant. Give it to hazmat workers evolving in unknown conditions, working in 2-hour shifts, and you'll be on to something.

As it is ? I don't think a kleptomaniac would want to be caught dead with that thing.

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

Re: "What if decrypting that message is the KEY to getting or supporting all the other evidence?"

In other words, what if the message is the only proof ?

In that case, I'd argue that the suspect hasn't done anything yet, in which case why is he suspect ?

Oh, and before you go on about preventing terrorism, the 9/11 guys were known by the CIA and that prevented fuck all.

"encryption isn't protected by the American Constitution"

It doesn't have to be.

Encryption is protected by encryption. And that's the best protection there is.

For the rest, if all law enforcement agencies have is an encrypted message, then I demand they show what proof they have that that message is so important. If they have done their job, then they have suspect location and time, witnesses and DNA evidence (flawed as that may be) and a host of other clues that point to guilt. In that case, the message is supplementary evidence and they should be able to do without it to obtain a conviction.

Re: "if the fate of the world depends on breaking an unbreakable message"

Um, theoretically the issue is about crime and terrorism, not James Bond-level evil geniuses.

For that level, you have James Bond and his unbreakable-encrypted-message cracker : the spanner on the kneecap.

Indeed. There's no constitutional right to sell bread either. What kind of effing argument is that ?

Dell makes $1bn bet that IoT at the edge can kill cloud computing takeover

As usual, security was mentioned nowhere

A large list of partnerships, covering a raft of areas, but not a peep about keeping things secure.

Business as usual then !

Don't fear the reap... er, automation: Puppet hopes to make IT boring, says that's a good thing

"There's a lot of drama around deployments because they aren't fully tested."

Not to mention that they might not even have been fully thought-through.

I have the feeling these days that sysadmins do not have the time to project and plan, they have to put out fires all the time because management pushes things through that always have to be done yesterday.

The IT department that has a comprehensive list of all applications, servers and functionalities, up to date and with dependencies, probably doesn't exist.

As such, when it is time to deploy something, the approach is very much "do it and see what breaks". Oh sure, they'll have had meetings and they'll have defined what the end result needs to be, but nobody will have listed everything that can break and what needs to be done beforehand to avoid the issue.

Just recently I was at a site that had just deployed a new domain for a company that had been acquired. I was called in to help re-stitch the relevant links in their applications. It was a process of check, control, correct. Meaning that I had to go through all the apps I knew of in their existing domain, and check that the configurations and code were properly modified to include the new domain and function with it.

I was not given a checklist, nor was I aware that they knew what needed to be fixed. Thankfully, I knew what apps I was in charge of there, and I also knew a bit about a few others, so things were under control rather quickly.

I can't say that things were very well planned, though.

Apple's iPhone X won't experience the joy of 6...

Re: Numbers

"Will Apple's share price really be affected by only selling 245 million iPhone-Xs?"

Of course it will be. You're talking about the Stock Market, where you only increase share value if you exceed expectations. Merely matching expectations means only a slight dip in share value.

This stems from the same mentality that wants marketing guys to increase their revenue by 20% each year - never mind if the market has reached saturation.

Our society does not know how to handle just surviving. Every one of those multi-billion dollar multinational companies that rake in revenue by the boatload cannot just continue to manage their portfolio, that is stagnation and thus death. No, they are all judged by how much more revenue they generate, even if there is no room left to increase market share. It's the nature of an economy that pushes everything towards monopoly status. If you're not on top, you're not worth it.

Concerns raised about privacy, GDPR as Lords peer over Data Protection Bill

"The intelligence services already comply with robust data-handling obligations"

Yeah, as in "send everything to the NSA".

As for the rest, I can't help of thinking about this particular episode of Yes Minister.

IT admins hate this one trick: 'Having something look like it’s on storage, when it is not'

"any time you rely on humans/users to do something it never works"

On that point, I have to agree.

I cannot count the number of companies I worked in or consulted to who struggle to get users to archive mail. The mailbox is the number one critical application in many companies, and network disk sizes are always on the verge of overflowing.

In order to get things under control, often the only solution is to arbitrarily impose a cutoff date and archive anything older than that. Then you get grumbling in the ranks, although curiously most of the time the impact on actual work is minimal.

European Patent Office staff rep blames prez for 'slipping quality'

Re: why don't you fight to acquire some new rights ?

I am self-employed, so I am fighting for my rights every damn day, thank you very much.

@druck

Wrong argument. Home leave is not for people who have yet to relocate, it is for people who already have relocated.

For people who have yet to relocate, there is the Installation Allowance, ie one month salary bonus. Then there is the Expatriate Allowance, from 16% to 20% of the basic monthly allowance.

Then there is the possibility of Rent Allowance, meaning that you get your pay plus bonuses and don't have to pay your rent either.

And there's all the rest, which you obviously have not read.

Nice job if you can it, any way you look at it. Well, it'll be nice as soon as Batistelli moves out.

Home leave ?

I despise Batestelli and want his pension revoked, but 10 days extra leave every two years because you've moved far from mommy ?

I have to admit, if the EPO has money for all those advantages, it might be time to review the amount of money the EPO has.

Equifax: About those 400,000 UK records we lost? It's now 15.2M. Yes, M for MEELLLION

My mother's maiden name is Spongebob.

I've just checked that link and I'm incensed and somewhat frightened at the same time. Just by opening an account in the UK, you are automatically included in one or more credit reference agency's files. Is there any mention of that in your Ts & Cs when you open the account ? I'm guessing maybe, but maybe not. Can you opt out if there is ? Hah !

That takes me to wondering how things are managed in France. Banks lend money (sometimes), so they have a customer history. Do they share it and how ? I know that there is a national register of people that are forbidden from having a checkbook or credit/debit card, but that is not managed by a private company.

Questions, questions.

'Israel hacked Kaspersky and caught Russian spies using AV tool to harvest NSA exploits'

Re: "Duqu is Israeli"

Citation please ?

Because the wiki page makes no mention of country of origin.

Google: This may shock you, but we also banked thousands of dollars to run Russian propaganda

"a formal and strict policy of only accepting political ads from organizations within the country"

Yeah, because it is so difficult to register a non-profit organization in any given country. Or set up an account that fakes an organization.

Wow, what a barrier. Democracy is safe with that. Not.

Apple's iOS password prompts prime punters for phishing: Too easy now for apps to swipe secrets, dev warns

You don't need to fake flawlessly - 90% of users will just go through and input a password, the same way PC users have been trained to click OK on any popup that keeps them from what they intended to do.

Alerts, checks and information mean nothing when the user doesn't care anyway.

Et tu Accenture? Then fall S3er: Consultancy giant leaks private keys, emails and more online

"We have a multi-layered security model"

Yeah. Shame that apparently none of those layers include not publishing passwords in unsecured repositories (cloud or not).

I don't give a damn about your security model. What just happened is a clear breach of security and if I were a customer I would be raising holy hell right now.

Cortana, please finish my sentences in Skype texts for me

Another good excuse

to get your location details. Apparently it's for restaurant suggestions. Yeah, sure, 90% of Skype interaction is obviously just people wondering where to go to eat.

Here's a suggestion, Cortana : it's the 3rd Millennium - how's about you make location data an option and let people add it when they feel like getting restaurant suggestions ? It's not like that kind of data is not already available on Google Maps anyway.

Video games used to be an escape. Now not even they are safe from ads

Re: Battlefield 2142

I remember when that game came out all the BF2 fans were up in arms about it (aka torches and pitchforks). The amount of discussion was really impressive in the forums.

I didn't like the idea at all, but BF2142 was just too interesting to pass on. Then the interesting thing happened : I cannot for the life of me remember any of the billboards. When you're in that game, you don't have time to check them out, you're looking for targets or trying to avoid being one.

So, all in all, if they do adgaming like in BF2142, I say bring it on, I can easily ignore them.

However, the day they make an ad mandatory viewing for whatever reason is the day I stop playing that game. In-game awards ala TF2* ? Please. I'm past 50, I know what grinding is. If you have skewed your game so that awards are the only way to progress, I'm out anyway.

* that said, the awards in TF2 are cosmetic only, so I quickly ignored all that because the game is fun.

Calm down, Elon. Deep learning won't make AI generally intelligent

"AI is more artificial idiot than artificial intelligence"

AI is Artificial Intelligence.

Just because journalists insist on continuing to abuse the term does not mean that AI has lost its meaning.

Journalists need to learn to not spaff headlines with "AI" as soon as some new computer tech shows the end of its nose. Of course, "New Tech Might Help Sub-Process Which Could Result In Getting Closer To AI" does not sell as well as "New Tech Set To Bring Us AI Next Year".

And that is the whole problem with AI.

Stealthy storage startup wants to fly read-write heads closer to disks

I'd heard that HDD heads are about as close to the disk as a Boeing 747 flying a few inches above the runway. And I second the gliding on turbulence bit.

I wish these guys all the luck, but I'm a wee bit skeptical on their chances of success.

That said, whatever they try can just as well bring benefits down the line, so go for it !

Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it

Microsoft is suffering from a desperate mind-set of locking people in

As stated in the article, we already have two lock-in vendors who remain steadfastly incompatible with each other. The difference with Microsoft is that Apple and Android are actually useful and, generally speaking, perform adequately.

If a new ecosystem is to rise, it will have to be open. Not necessarily open-source, but open. That is the strength of Linux, and the reason why it endures. If another closed-source OS maker tried to enter the market today, it would be a doomed effort from the start.

Microsoft, with its many, many billions in the bank, could have been the sugar daddy for this kind of phone, but it couldn't imagine not locking people in and Windows-ing the whole thing. Microsoft has the money, but not the intelligence. On this, Nadella was right to scrap the whole thing.

Moon trumps Mars in new US space policy

Re: Law of averages...

That is not actually a joke ;)

Seriously though : whaddya know ? Trump can finally honestly say that he has accomplished something !

Re: "neither the moon, nor Mars are of any LONG TERM space-political value"

I beg to differ. Either one allows us to have members of the human species elsewhere than on a single planet, which has the long term interest of keeping our species alive in case Earth gets wiped out by a major asteroid strike.

As for the Lagrange points, they only cover Earth access. When we finally become a space-faring species, that will have zero effect on colonies situated in the Outer Planet area. Assuming we get some people over there, of course.

It's 4PM on Friday, almost time to log off and, oh look, Disqus says it's been hacked

Maybe, but El Reg has yet to have its user list hacked.

Let's go live now to Magic Leap and... Ah, still making millions from made-up tech

"The startup I'm waiting to see is the specialist Law Firm dedicated to locating, debunking and financially eviscerating these farcical scams and the credulous VCs who fuel them."

Never going to happen because this is private capital and you have the right to piss off your money any way you feel like it. It's up to the VCs to not get taken in by bogus claims or overbearing personalities.

No, because when you launder money you want to get it back.

In this case, the VCs are losing money and the one spending it won't have anything to give back.