Posts by Pascal Monett

Here's a gentle guide to building JavaScript AI in web browsers. Totally not a scary thing

Well, it's Deep Learning, so it sends everything back to them.

The image recognition processing is not done on the PC, I'll wager.

DeepMind now has an ethics unit – which may have helped when it ate 1.6m NHS patient details

Re: "why is this not being developed [..] for the benefit of the people"

Because there's not enough money to develop anything for the benefit of people who won't be paying for the service.

The real question is why does NHS not have the expertise to do this in-house, to which the answer is obvious : not enough budget to retain staff that are competent enough.

The day NHS has the budget to advertise for a Big Data technician with top qualifications that pays more than private industry is the day you are loudly complaining to your MP that healthcare is costing you way too much on your monthly salary.

There's really no way out of this.

Amazon told to repay €250m in 'unfair state aid' from Luxembourg

Amazon said: "We believe..."

Well duh. What an indispensable statement. Really, I was on the verge of thinking that Amazon thought it didn't pay enough tax and was forced by Luxembourg to reduce the amount. Thank you for the clarification, Amazon.

This PR bullshit is really starting to get on my nerves. The fact that the state of Luxembourg says they believe Amazon did not benefit is actually news. The fact that Amazon thinks so is just obvious because they'd say so even if they knew it was not the case.

Li-quid hot mag-ma: There's a Martian meteorite in your backyard. How'd it get there?

"an asteroid hit the volcano, leaving a crater and sending the materials rocketing to Earth"

Given that an atmosphere would likely have slowed down the ejecta by a significant margin, would that mean that, at that time, Mars already had no atmosphere ?

We know that it lost its magnetic field billions of years ago, could that not help determine when ?

What is the probability of being drunk at work and also being tested? Let's find out! Correctly

Not a beer drinker, so ..

Wasn't aware that beer could have that kind of effect.

So I have to amend my position on alcohol in the morning, since it could simply mean that you had "too much" the night before. I'm okay with that, although I will be encouraging you to drink lots of water during the day.

A certain bias, there

"It assumes [..] that an employee is coming in with alcohol in their system (drunk) 12 times in a working year."

If you have one glass of wine with your noon meal, you do have alcohol in your system. You are not necessarily drunk, though.

What this means is that it is apparently considered that 0% is the only acceptable percentage of alcohol in the blood in a working environment. Seems a tad draconian to me, but I'm French, so . .

On the other hand, any level of alcohol when coming in to work in the morning is obviously unacceptable because it means that the person has been drinking on the way to work, which is a clear sign that they need professional help and cannot function normally.

Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049

"Never got Bladerunner either"

No one is obliged to like any film.

For Bladerunner, take it as visual and audio poetry. That might help with the mindset.

Just a suggestion.

I saw the film before reading the book.

I fell in love with the film, but the book left me disappointed.

Must have been the absence of Vangelis background music in the book at the time.

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

Re: If (When?) they get their way...

I'm almost of an opinion that we should do something about creating a backdoored encryption scheme and, of course, make it mandatory to use with all government officials and communications.

That to see just how fast they backpedal when the inevitable cracked account spills horrendous details on their personal lives that they would have preferred kept secret.

Either that or to see how they squirm to avoid having such a scheme applied to them because they full well know that they could get hacked in the first place. Cue endless arguments about how it is "not needed" at high levels and somesuch, which would just demonstrate their hypocrisy to the world.

But it can't happen and that's a good thing. I'll just have to fantasize about them getting ridiculed that way. Or I could just wait for them to ridicule themselves. Won't be long.

Never is.

Russian bot-herder and election-fiddling suspect closer to US trial

"I will die within a year"

He's a Tom Clancy fan, then ?

Seriously though, although I am ready to believe that CIA agents are perfectly capable of killing a high-profile, wanted individual of any nationality if there is a need, if he was in such danger from US spymasters he might have wanted to avoid going to a US-extradition-friendly country in the first place ?

When you play the game, you play it all the way. If you are aware that you have information that is so badly wanted by a given country, you plan your life around avoiding getting caught by that country.

The fact that he did not do so signifies that his claims are rather on the bogus side, or at least that he is not the professional spy he thinks he is.

Dropbox thinks outside the … we can't go there, not when a box becomes a 'collection of surfaces'

"juxtaposes colours in bold, unexpected ways"

Sorry, looks all blue to me. And I don't know their logo well enough to remember any difference with the previous version.

As for bold, unexpected ways, I would expect piss-yellow next to turd-brown, with some lime green on top. That would certainly be unexpected and quite bold. Maybe not very successful, though.

Oracle VP: 'We want the next decade to be Java first, Java always'

"Java [..] is the number-one programming language"

His argument, apparently, is because of the number of thingys that run it, essentially. Number which is respectable indeed, except that I will never forgive whoever thought it was a good idea to put Java in a Blu-Ray player.

But if he can use his metrics to justify his position, then I can propose another number one programming language as well : COBOL. Because without COBOL, VISA, MasterCard and American Express, not to mention PayPal, all grind to a sudden halt and the world's economy collapses in the hour.

Java, with all its faults, doesn't hold a candle to that.

ISIS and Jack Daniel's: One of these things is not like the other

I wonder

How drunk do you have to be to confuse the two ?

And how much more drunk do you have to be to forget that you live in Switzerland, next to a bar ?

Azure fell over for 7 hours in Europe because someone accidentally set off the fire extinguishers

From the looks of it, cogs were falling off all over the place

So, let's countdown the failures :

-VMs were axed

- Backup vaults were not available

- Azure Site Recovery lost failover ability

- Azure Scheduler and Functions dropped jobs

- Azure Monitor and Data Factory experienced pipeline errors

- Azure Stream Analytics went on the fritz

- Azure Stream Analytics had a stroke

Apart from that, the Cloud is marvelous, never fails you and you can always access your data.

Except when it FUBARs and no backup is working any more, but the salespeople will never tell you that.

Nailing a cloud project without killing Bob boils down to not being a tool

All valid points, with one caveat

If the management cannot stick to the plan, all your points are moot.

So basically the success of any complex project is based on whether not management can cope with not interfering all the time. The rest is par for the course, but you can have the most brilliant team in the world and the project can still fail if manglement can't stay away long enough for stuff to get done.

HPE coughed up source code for Pentagon's IT defenses to ... Russia

"the code was revealed at one of its offices outside Russia"

Let me get this straight : a private company responsible for National-Security-level software actually let a foreign power (who is actually irrelevant) view the source code for that software and nobody is in jail for treason ?!?

So the rules only apply for lone sysadmins, then ?

Sheesh.

Open World? More like closed world: Women sue Oracle for 'paying them less' than blokes

"doing away entirely with the need to decide who to pay"

So, updates and backups are being automated, now it's employee pay.

Hey, Larry, why don't you just automate the CEO ? Then you can go off and play in your jet or your yacht.

Because automating employee pay is in no way ever going to come back and bite your ass. Sure.

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

"To model just a few hundred electrons needs a computer bigger than the universe"

Okay, I know I'm the village idiot next to these guys and I'm sure they know what they're talking about, but that sentence really bugs me. It is probably due to the sentence further down that says that adding another particle doubles the size of the model, so they just did an exponential of 2 to the 100th power and yeah, for sure that's big, but is that really how the simulator would work ?

What if it was a quantum simulator and each particle was thus analyzed by a quantum dot that considered all of its possible positions simultaneously ? Isn't that how it should work ?

I don't know. It's way too early for this anyway. I'm quitting this before the headaches start.

Life began after meteorites splashed into warm ponds of water, say astronomers

Re: Why highlight meteorites?

You might say that it is science, and science needs to quantify everything. As such, they are basically highlighting the fact that meteorites are, in their scenario, an almost insignificant factor in the accumulation of carbon compounds on Earth. They just don't say so explicitly.

Nobel Prize for boffins who figured out why you feel like crap after long-haul flights

Even Fozzie got his revenge.

Java security plagued by crappy docs, complex APIs, bad advice

@David 55

Yes, IBM Notes developer. Domino is still supported until 2022+.

But I do agree that my list of clients is on a very straight downward incline.

1.12.2 now. I totally agree and understand your point of view.

it is the very reason why I have abandoned adding mods and community upgrades to my Minecraft server. It's useless, mods are never updated as fast as the core game changes. My little group sticks to vanilla Minecraft and things work out fine like that.

Going back to the original subject though, I can hardly believe that programmers these days still don't know that MD5 and SHA-1 are not reliable. I'm a Notes developer and don't use either of those functionalities but even I have heard about SHA-1 and how badly it has held up to modern hacking techniques. With all the news that we are bombarded with describing how major companies and been pwned because they did not update their tech to SHA-3. Who am I kidding ? Most of them need to simply stop storing passwords in plaintext and start hashing and salting them in the first place.

Oracle promises ‘highly automated’ security in self-driving database

Re: "Ellison said it would automatically provision, patch,..."

and "automatically backup".

That in itself sounds like a bold claim to make. Backups need to be managed, if only to ensure that someone can find out when the backup crapped itself and failed.

Humans are not just there to make mistakes, they also serve as monitoring equipment and pick-up-the-pieces equipment. Automating everyone away is not going to do much good when you need to restore from yesterday's backup only to find out that the backup has failed for the past week and no one knew anything about it.

You never hear of automated restores, now do you ?

BYOD might be a hipster honeypot but it's rarely worth the extra hassle

Re: Never saw the Attraction

Don't forget that BYOD was a Silicon Valley invention, and in typical Sillycon Valley mentality they only thought of what it could theoretically bring in cost reduction, not what it could actually cause in terms of trouble. The fact that Gartner was totally incapable of properly analyzing the situation and didn't even ask any question about the legality issues alone is just typical of an organization that whores itself out to whoever is paying at that time.

I always hated the notion that, as an employee, I was supposed to provide the hardware I was supposed to work with. I have not seen very many employees embrace the idea either. Where I have seen BYOD implemented was with manager-level types who were initially overjoyed that they could get the latest iThing and bully IT into supporting it. On the other hand, let's not get confused : management will always get their way in the end. BYOD was just a new excuse for it.

Playboy founder and dressing-gown wearer Hugh Hefner dead at 91

R.I.P. Hugh

I spent my fair share of money on his mags, and I am still of the opinion that Playboy has the classiest style of pictures - although class is going out of style in that particular market.

See you on the other side, Hugh !

EasyJet: We'll have electric airliners within the next decade

I never said it was impossible. I specifically stated that with a major overhaul of battery capacity, it would be doable.

So we agree.

Except for the fact that an A300 is not even going to get to lift-off on batteries at this point in time.

But one day, it might. Say 50 years from now. Like when we have AI.

"In 10 years it is possible that some very short-haul aircraft might be flying"

No, it is not.

Batteries are heavy, and they store way less energy than petrol for the same volume.

Getting a plane off the ground, especially a commercial transport, costs a huge amount of energy. Without discussing any figures, lets just take this page as a reference. It concerns the A300-600. That plane has a range of 7500km and a maximum fuel load of 68150 litres.

The energy contained in 68150 litres of fuel is apparently in the order of 48MJ * 68150 = 3 271 200 MJ.

This page indicates that the best battery (as far as energy density is concerned) is the Lithium-Ion battery with 460000 J/Kg. So 0.46MJ/kg.

That means that we'd need 3271200 * 0.46 = 1 504 752 kg of Li-Io batteries to achieve the same energy availability. That's 1500 tons of battery and you don't have the plane, the passengers or the suitcases.

Oh, just FYI, the max takeoff load of the A300-600 is 171 tons.

P.S. : I'm sure I've made calculation mistakes, but I'm also pretty sure that I'm still right. Batteries are not going to be used to power planes any time soon. At least not until those famous carbon nanotube thingies with 80% solar panel efficiency wings are invented. And they won't fly at night.

Deloitte is a sitting duck: Key systems with RDP open, VPN and proxy 'login details leaked'

Had an interesting experience not so long ago

It was during a handover on a client site, I was there to recover essential admin information from the previous company handling network administration.

During talks with the soon-to-be-ex admin, we agreed that he would give me the list of passwords for administering the network - you know, as per normal.

He handed me a USB stick. I plugged it in and had it scanned, as per normal. Then I asked him which file I was supposed to copy. Under his instructions, I copied an xlsx file that he stated had the relevant data.

We parted ways not long after that and I went back to the office. While writing up my report, I looked at the file.

Now, just to be clear, this was a file given to me by a senior admin from a major local consultancy firm that has scores of big companies on its customer list, not a beginner. It just so happened that, yes, the file was an xlsx file, and it just so happens that he had a filter on his formatted table.

Guess what happened when I removed the filter ?

Yes, all the passwords for all the clients he was responsible for.

This is the level of intelligence we are dealing with these days. I blame Facebook.

Helium's for balloons and squeaky voices, not this 10TB Toshiba beast

10TB for €600, 3TB for €133

Price is a bit steep for individuals at the moment. Actually, in 2015 I bought some 3TB HDDs for €130, so the price has eked up a bit, but is still reasonable.

Oh well, with these new 10TB beauties coming on the market, it means that I will be able to buy a few 8TBs in a few years when I need them for less than the €370 they are currently going for.

UK third worst in Europe for fibre-to-the-premises – report

Re: @Pascal

You really don't get it, Ledswinger. It's not about being spoon-fed, it's about checking that the source justifies what the article mentions.

If I google it on my own, I can very well find an article on the subject, but I have no guarantee that it is the same article the author is referencing.

@Ledswinger

This article is not a forum post made by a clueless Netizen, it is written by a professional and posted in a professional business online publication.

Therefor, as per Internet Protocol since the dawn of professional publication arose, you source your articles with links so as to provide fact-checking to your readers.

As such, I maintain that it is a shame that this was overlooked here, especially since it is not the usual practice in these hallowed pages. Oh well, mistakes can be made.

You didn't miss it

It's just not there.

Such a shame.

UK Home Office re-bans cheap call gateways because 'terrorism'

Just a quick correction . . .

"This direction is necessary to ensure that those charged with keeping families and communities safe have the NSA has access to relevant and accurate information when they need it it wants it"

There, FTFY.

Mobile stock trading apps riddled with security holes

An interesting development

Here we are at the apex of money and IT, and they still don't put in the money to ensure things are secure.

I'm guessing it's because time is money, so it is better to risk being hacked rather than take longer to get an app that can get your entire portfolio hacked ? Um, somehow that doesn't sound so good at second reading.

No, things will carry on until some golden boys get ruined because of poor security. That will be the call to 1) have a few class-action lawsuits (hey, the lawyers aren't going to miss a golden opportunity like that, now will they ?) and 2) have other golden boys invest serious money in doing it right.

Because there's never enough money to do it right the first time, but always enough to do it over again.

Twitter reckons Trump's Nork-baiting tweet was 'newsworthy'

"We hold all accounts to the same Rules"

Twitter, I think it is time you add a new rule :

Presidents in office don't tweet

And the sooner you add it, the better for everyone.

Yup. The US has a goldfish for President. Let no one say that they don't innovate.

Baidu puts open source deep learning into smartphones

"MDL can recognise a smartphone in less than half a second"

Well that there is a performance, especially when you remember that there have been experts paid $80,000 that couldn't tell between an Android and an iPhone !

Seriously though, I'm no more comfortable having Baidu hoard all my data than Google. I don't the like the idea of any government listening in to my life, not China any more than the NSA.

Boffins take biometric logins to heart, literally: Cardiac radar IDs users to unlock their PCs

"If [..] a different person standing in front of the computer screen, the PC will not operate."

Careful there. In professional or even private environments, someone coming over to see what's on your screen for whatever reason is very common. If the scanner can't cope with two hearts in the same vicinity, things will get ugly quickly. Not to mention that sometimes the helpdesk guy just has to sit in the chair and do stuff. I hope the scanner will be up to that as well.

And if it can, then the burglar doesn't care about the scanner - he can just tie the victim up, drag him to the PC and then do whatever he wants.

This tech may be fine to control access to physical areas, but I'm not convinced PC access is the right area to apply it.

CBS's Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers' web browsers

Don't worry, download.com still does. And it is still in business.

Thank God for NoScript.

Web devs griping about iPhone X notch: You're rendering it wrong

"there's nothing wrong with Apple introducing new technology"

Of course not. There's already two different names for the same CSS functionality. What could possibly go wrong ?

Docs ran a simulation of what would happen if really nasty malware hit a city's hospitals. RIP :(

The lessons will be costly in money and lives

I can understand that medical equipment was not created with security in mind. Who in their right mind would want to hack a pacemaker ?

The problem is that there are many people who are not in their right mind, for whatever reason. So now we're going to have to add security to our medical environment and we're going to have to do it right, because when you're having a heart attack the last thing you want is the doctor having mistyped his password wrong for the third time and locking his account.

Sensitive client emails, usernames, passwords exposed in Deloitte hack

Yeah, "deeply committed"

Not deeply enough to put the money where their mouth is, though.

Actual security is a nuisance, and it is expensive. Humans don't like nuisances, beancounters don't like expensive. Ergo, security is an uphill battle. Both ways.

Sigfox doesn't do IP and is therefore secure, says UK IoT network operator

"Sigfox's proprietary protocol"

Cue the argument of "security through obscurity" . . .

That said, it seems to me that SigFox's security is mainly based on firewalls and VPNs. It's all very nice to say that you don't use IP, if you use VPNs, you're still riding the same bus for part of the trip.

There are two things in this article that bug me. One is this invitation to hackers on the subject of IoT (lack of) security. Asking for trouble, in my opinion. The other, more serious, is what is going to be the impact of this so-called non-IP proprietary protocol on the regular IP traffic that is happening alongside ? Is there going to be interference, or worse, outright clashing ? I hope that these things have been considered with great attention.

And if they have, then the argument about not using IP is even weaker.

On the other hand, anything that improves IoT security is welcome in my book : it'll shave off that many more botnets that trouble the world.

Doesn't mean I'll buy any of that shite though.

Aw, not you too, Verizon: US telco joins list of leaky AWS S3 buckets

This is exactly why I don't like the Cloud

An engineer had made a storage space and put confidential data in it without bothering to secure the vault. Was it company-mandated ? Apparently not.

It is simply beyond me that anyone can consider storing data that is considered critical (like the client list, invoicing history, etc) or confidential (access passwords of any kind) on a server that you do not control.

That is obviously not an issue to many people though, including people who 1) should know better and 2) have the required technical level to do things right, yet visibly still don't.

And it's going to get worse before it gets better.

IT plonker stuffed 'destructive' logic bomb into US Army servers in contract revenge attack

48 years old

Stupid enough to plant malware, and abysmally stupid enough to have it trigger mere days after the handover.

With that level of intellectual performance, I think that it's a good thing the Army changed provider.

Sysadmin tells user CSI-style password guessing never w– wait WTF?! It's 'PASSWORD1'!

"They looked for the password on the CD . . ."

Dear God. Look, I understand that it was a Friday evening but come on, if you send a password-protected file and the password in the same package, it really totally defeats the purpose of the password.

The last time I had to send protected data I arranged with the recipient to send said data via email, and the password via SMS. Might not be a perfect solution, but it fits the purpose. I'm sure most people would do the same.

Of course, the password I chose was a tad more complex - which means that, had the data been sent by me, this story would have ended quite differently.

First big Privacy Shield review has ended – and yep, it's great! Just don't ask about mass spying

Everything is going fine

They will continue to publish reports saying so for a few years, then they will reference those same reports to say that all is well and always has been.

And that is how you write History.

Equifax fooled again! Blundering credit biz directs hack attack victims to parody site

From where I sit, it looks like a full-scale investigation is exactly what is needed.

Quebec takes mature approach to 'grilled cheese' ban

Looks like it's party time !

Rarely has articles been subject to much punning. I almost felt swamped before getting to the end. The surprise was great in any case.

Well done !

Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time

Brilliant idea

Oh yeah. Windows' stability until 7 was flaky at the best of times. Single-key rebooting would have made the experience that much more miserable due to user error.

There is history enough around the disposition of existing keys and why they were changed to explain that a 3-key combo requiring both hands was actually a good idea because you really can't do that by accident.

This comment from Gates simply demonstrates that it is high time people stop asking him questions about the PC era of his life.