Posts by Pascal Monett

F-35 firmware patches to be rolled out 'like iPhone updates'

"download: yes or no’?"

Not over the Internet, no. No way. Not in a million years.

I do hope this download functionality means from a secure site to a local, secure server, then control and validation of the package and then distribution to the planes via sneakernet.

The last thing you want for multi-million dollar jets is to let them open to man-in-the-middle attacks and all the other joys of Internet insecurity. The only way to be sure that these very expensive tools are not vulnerable is to not have them link up.

Period.

How alien civilizations deal with climate is a measure of how smart they are. Just sayin'...

Re: "if the planet is not under any known threat"

There is always at least one known threat : planet-killer asteroids from the Oort cloud.

I'm guessing that practically all stars have an Oort cloud. Astronomy is in the process of finding out that apparently most stars have planets. It would be very surprising if those planets did not have asteroid strikes every know and then.

Our specific situation is that Jupiter is shielding us, but that doesn't keep asteroids from slipping past it and being a menace. One day, one of them will not miss us. We need to have a self-sustaining colony somewhere if the human race is to endure.

The aliens, wherever they are, are most likely under the exact same menace. The only problem with this menace is that, as long as you don't have proof that an asteroid is on its way now, you don't have any real sense of urgency to get colonizing.

The problem, of course, is that if you dawdle until the asteroid shows up, it's too late to start a colony and your race is screwed.

Scottish pensioners rage at Virgin cabinet blocking their view

Procedures are everything

""In the case of the cabinets in Lowndes Court, the council was notified prior to Virgin Media installing the cabinets and the correct procedures were followed.""

And now all we have to do is wait a bit and the problem will go away by itself . . .

Smart cities? Tell it like it is, they're surveillance cities

My dear sir, if taxes are your biggest issue I have a solution for you. There is place where you pay no taxes, are fed and clothed and bedded every day.

It's called prison.

I'm sure you can find your way there.

@strum

The problem is never what technology comes in to fix. That is generally clearly established and controlled, and generates clear benefits.

The problem is how the technology can be perverted to fulfill a paranoiacs' dream.

The telephone is the best example. It allowed people to communicate over vast distances in the blink of an eye, bringing families together in ways a piece of paper (aka letter) could never hope to achieve.

That was good.

Then the government came along and hooked into all that, then computers came into the picture and the NSA was born. That is the perversion of a perfectly good piece of tech that nobody could have foreseen.

That is exactly the problem that awaits us with "smart" cities, and the fact that these structures will be able to collect data on each of us in ways that Google would give its left nut to obtain should be a major warning to all of us.

Not to mention the fact that anything with "smart" in the name these days is a piece of shit tech that calls the mothership with your life's details, whether you like it or not.

Achtung! German election tabulation software 'insecure'

Just a sec

"Software used in Germany for vote counting is insecure"

There, that's better.

Show me one product that has been independently verified as secure, contains Open Source code that has been vetted and is regularly pitted against white hats to ensure safety, and I might eventually come around to thinking that it could be used.

Until that day, I will remain steadfast in my belief that paper ballots and a time-tested procedure will beat a frakkin' database any day. As far as voters are concerned, that is. For scumbags, multinational corporations and corrupt officials, the database is clearly a better bet.

Heard the one about the two landmark EU data rights' rulings? These countries haven't

That's wierd

I seem to recall repeatedly reading how the EU was so overbearing on individual countries - I even think I read that Brexit was (in part) to get away from such legal pressure . . .

Facebook ran $100k of deliberately divisive Russian ads ahead of 2016 US election

"how we can [..] better detect inauthentic Pages and the ads they may run"

I note that nowhere in their efforts to they even hint at vetting ads. No, it's all pseudo-AI code just trying to find out if the ad comes from the right place.

So, next time, the Russians will VPN in to US accounts and start from there. Simple.

As Hurricane Irma grows, Earth now lashed by SOLAR storms

Re: "Humans are supposed to be capable of detecting magnetic fields"

Um, no, we're not. We need a compass, pigeons do not.

Now, it may be that we can be more or less sensitive to magnetic fields, like dogs who turn North/South to pee, but they don't know why they're doing it, just as we don't feel magnetism like pigeons who actively use that sense to orient their flight.

Violent moon mishap will tear Uranus a new ring or two

"in a few million years"

Well, that gives us a bit of time to gather the proper funding then . . .

Facebook's music plans mean you'll never leave Facebook

Re: Copied the idea?

Of course they did. The russian mafia doesn't pay royalties, now does it ?

France to tack weapons onto spy drones – reports

"though she did not specify precisely what weapons"

Well, it's France, so obviously it'll be tactical nukes.

Mo' money mo' mobile payments... Security risks? Whatever!

"Applications can incorporate their own security protections"

In a word : fragmentation.

Security on a mobile phone must be at the OS layer, maybe even baked into the hardware if you wish to have any hope of making things difficult to crack. Anything else is just a game for blackhats to win.

As for fraud and European banks, I was a victim of fraud once and my French bank made absolutely zero trouble when I asked for reimbursement. I do not know that any bank in France has a reputation for not behaving in the same way.

Whoosh, there it is: Toshiba bods say 14TB helium-filled disk is coming soon

But not all of it - not by a long shot !

Thousands of hornets swarm over innocent fire service drone

"drone was attacked by the hornets while being used [..] to locate the creatures' nest"

Found it, I'd say.

1 meter long + 200 queens ? Forget the firemen, bring in the flamethrowers !

Leaky S3 bucket sloshes deets of thousands with US security clearance

Well it was called TalentPen, not IntelligencePen

Okay, I get it : your minions make a mistake and, if you're shortsighted, you have two options : alert whomever should be alerted and clean up, risking the loss of the contract or worse, or cover up the situation and make like a hole in the water hoping nobody will notice and everything will go fine.

Except an unsecured server is not a "mistake" these days, it is literally dereliction of duty. Somebody noticed, and the consequence is that TalentPen is "dissolved". With a swift kick, I should hope.

In any case, I'll wager the managers of that particular company are not going to get anywhere near contracts with veterans any more. They must be blacklisted and their names nailed to the wall.

Argentina eyes up laser death cannon testbed warship

Re: It is surprising they have anything at all...

Hardly. History has numerous examples of countries who's citizens are eating dirt yet there is a strong military force - needed to keep the citizenry from revolting outright.

Don't know if the situation is similar in Argentina, but if you don't have enough money to replace your old car and you desperately have to have a car, you'll keep your existing junk pile running for as long as you can, right ?

Crushed Juicero now officially a fruitless endeavor

"disgruntled investors" ?

I'm sorry, you decided to put money into a souped-up juicer that 1) brought nothing more to the table than the humble $2 plastic kind you use manually and 2) tried to create (and lock users into) a Nespresso-like ecosystem for juicing fruit with expensive written all over it.

Nespresso works because people cannot easily grind coffee beans manually. Plus there's Clooney.

Anybody can juice fruit by hand for next to nothing.

If you're a disgruntled investor in this completely-foreseeable fiasco you only have yourself to blame.

We experienced Windows Mixed Reality. Results: Well, mixed

Re: Doomed to fail (again)

Where Microsoft is surely shooting itself in the foot (again) is requiring brand new PCs on Windows 10 for VR to work.

That said, I checked the VR systems on Microsoft's own site and they do have quite a few that are 6th-gen i7s, so my PC could likely be a viable platform if I were to allow that bastardized abomination of an OS near my hardware (which I will not).

If I ever decide to invest in VR, it will be when Linux can run the thing and there is some compelling use for me. At this point in time, there may be a way to run VR on Linux, but there is nothing that I find interesting enough to try, let alone put money in.

So let Microsoft and the others faff about with that. The more money they put into it, the closer down the line there might just be the possibility that it could be of use to me under my own conditions. Not that I care anyway.

Mega VR roundup: Lots happening in the virtual and real worlds

Twitter is pointless as well, but it's hanging around just fine.

I am starting to think that VR now has a decent chance at becoming something used, instead of the geek gimmick it has been up to this point. Of course, it's the hardware that is making that possible - and using smartphones to push it is a good, though obvious, idea.

I still hate it though.

Hubble Space Telescope spies possibility of liquid water in TRAPPIST-1

8 billion years

I know that there are very intelligent people working on these things, but honestly : who can possibly imagine what has happened to a planet after that amount of time ?

I seriously doubt that we have enough knowledge to declare whether or not some specific exoplanet still has enough water to harbor life.

It's a miracle that we can detect water from x billion billion miles away anyway.

Keep on it, boffins ! You're doin' good.

Prejudiced humans = prejudiced algorithms, and it's not an easy fix

"Target identified [..] a teen girl" being pregnant

Sorry, but to me that is clearly an invasion of privacy and way out of bounds.

It just shows that marketing has no barriers or moral. It's all about making money at any cost.

Of course, it would be a lot harder to code all those ad algorithms with somebody continually asking what the consequences are, but the fact is they have been coded without anyone asking what the consequences are.

So the consequences are just showing up on their own. And real people are bearing the cost of that, not companies who are foisting their impersonal bots on us.

Oracle finally decides to stop prolonging the inevitable, begins hardware layoffs

"House Larry has maintained that it still very much cares about the hardware and server lines"

Sure he does. He would just prefer them to bring in money without costing salaries.

Samsung keeps the smartwatch alive. Just

"Tizen-powered"

That's where I stopped reading about this thing.

I think the word Tizen is to me what garlic is supposed to be to vampires. I have an acute allergic reaction to anything that is so badly mucked up.

SanDisk's little microSD card sucks up 400GB

Egads

Can you imagine just how much data 007 could smuggle right under the noses of just about any police force in the world and he wouldn't even have to do anything more than hide it in his socks ?

I'm guessing not even a TSA metal detector would pick that up.

When uploading comments to the FCC, you can now include malware

What ? A comment system that allows for uploading anything ?

Who on God's green Earth thought that it was a good idea to allow any Internet netizen, meaning any number of effin' trolls, to upload up to 25MB of almost anything ?

I mean, my grandmother might have thought it was a good idea, but she died before the PC was a thing. She would not have had the slightest idea of what that implied.

So it seems to me that the FCC is chaired by my grandmother's knitting club.

Good luck explaining this world to them.

Dell's flagship XPS13 – a 2-in-1 that may fatally frustrate your fingers

Agreed

Enough with "designer". A laptop is a tool, not a toy (well at least it should be). As such, I want to see HDD activity, I want a volume slider and I want a brightness slider.

I remember having those things on my Thinkpad in 1996. Now I look at my HP and all I have is a power button.

I guess I should count myself lucky to have at least that.

Another dimension, new galaxy. Intergalactic planar-tary: Join us on our 3D NAND journey

"back it up to a second HDD"

Magnetic is not backup, it is storage.

Optical or tape is the only true backup medium.

Backup to a blu-ray for large files, and store it in a dry, dark place. It's the only way to be sure.

Boffins bust AI with corrupted training data

Really ?

You think a 15 year old is adequately trained ?

At that age they're barely just capable of avoiding walls when walking.

Of course, it would help if they looked up from the handhelds grafted to their digits . . .

Chrome wants to remember which Websites to silence

Thanks for the tip !

Google routing blunder sent Japan's Internet dark on Friday

Ah, the good old "I had no issue, so there was no problem".

NSA ramps up PR campaign to keep its mass spying powers

Yadda yadda Section 702 yadda WE SAVED LIVES

Pity that such positive news about how sodomizing everyone's privacy saves lives doesn't get published more often.

Actually, that doesn't matter.

What matters is that putting a ball & chain on everyone, taking away cars and guns and placing them all on direct video surveillance 24/7 would also certainly save lives. It would catch wifebeaters red-handed, it would catch store thugs before they even got to the store, it would catch a junkie trying to overdose before the needle was filled, it would catch child predators, rapists in the act, etc.

So what are you waiting for ?

Node.js forks again – this time it's a war of words over anti-sex-pest codes of conduct

"there are downsides to codes of conduct"

Not being able to harass is a downside ?

That's news to me.

I have no knowledge of the entire picture here, but it does strike me as weird that someone is advocating the ability to harass other people.

Come harass me, I'll show you my code of conduct - right in your face.

Nasty firmware update butchers Samsung smart TVs so bad, they have to be repaired

A blessing in disguise

I hope this will "educate" the market properly. A TV does not need to be "smart". A TV is a window that is supposed to show what is sent its way, that's all. You want anything "smart" ? Buy an extension to hook up to it. If the extension gets borked, your TV still does its job. This maddening trend to integrate everything and the kitchen sink is driving me crazy.

As far as I'm concerned, this issue was fatal. TV makers know nothing about how to write code, how to debug it, much less about how to update it properly. A cock-up like this was inevitable and I do hope the lesson will be harsh.

Biometrics watchdog breaks cover, slams UK cops over facial recog

Re: in a few years

I totally agree with you and am quite incensed by the situation. Whe I am given a report to write it is invariably for next Monday regardless of whether or not I have time to do it. And if I don't hand it in in time, there's hell to pay.

To calm both of us down, may I suggest a gander at this ?

So what's in the new Windows Insider build? Bug fixes, an AR goof-around, and a font

Re: Windows 10 Updates? What's that?

Keep quiet and be happy with your lot lest Redmond find out how to change things to get you back on the treadmill.

75 years ago, one Allied radar techie changed the course of WW2

Hats off

War is terrible, and it does terrible things to people. However, it also makes some people shine beyond what they could have achieved in a normal, peaceful life.

I have only respect for anyone who has been under fire in battle, and I have the utmost respect for anyone who, under such conditions, manages to rise above the gut-wrenching fear and risk their own life to do the right thing.

Mr Nissenthal, today I bow to your memory, and to your "bodyguards" who gave their lives for some information.

HPE memory options rising by double digits... from today

Memory price history

Out of curiosity, I searched for a history of RAM pricing. Didn't find much that is freely available, but I did stumble upon this.

The number of data points is less than I would have liked, but the downloadable Excel workbook contains a lot more stuff.

If you're curious, it may be worth a gander. Enjoy.

NVMe fabrics could shuffle traditional arrays off to the graveyard

Is this a case of having your cake and eating it too ?

From what I gather, there is a move to use hardware to make data transfer requests quicker. I get that, but if I'm not mistaken there is a global move to have network supervising and management via software - and that includes actually defining the network via software.

Seems to me that these two movements are in opposition with each other. You can't have a software-defined network that relies on hardware-coded optimizations.

Or can you ?

Fujitsu's Australian cloud suffers storage crash, outage

"a major Australian financial institution", "the VMs cannot be recovered"

Well as far as I'm concerned, that test was quite successful and the conclusions are obvious : do not trust the cloud. Not if you're a financial institution with an obligation of 100% accuracy in managing your customers' accounts.

The cloud is still about as solid as its name. It must be great fun spinning up VMs and chucking all that load balancing in an environment that one does not have to manage, but it's a lot less fun being advised that all your data is lost and cannot be recovered.

Companies will go down because of this.

Voyager antenna operator: 'I was the first human to see images from Neptune'

Sounds like a dream job

First in line for seeing what other planets/moons/comets are like, seeing Saturn's rings or Io's volcanoes up close before anyone else, and all that in a beautiful country environment. What's not to like ?

Facebook won't change React.js license despite Apache developer pain

So there's a better license, but FaceBook won't budge

I am shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

Foxit PDF Reader is well and truly foxed up, but vendor won't patch

Yes, SumatraPDF

I second that. Still using it. It is sleek, light and efficient. Doesn't get in the way, doesn't nag.

I hope it stays that way.

Elon Musk among 116 AI types calling on UN to nobble robo-weapons before they go all Skynet

Re: The US didn't even ratify the Geneva Convention

Yes, the US signed and ratified the Geneva Conventions in 1955. Additional Protocols I and II were signed, but not ratified. Protocol III was signed and ratified in 2007.

Your point on the efficiency of the ban remains valid, though. And now that the US has a history of disregarding human rights when it deems it has the right to, the effect of any treaty or ban on AI weapons is dubious at best.

Qualcomm slurps Uni of Amsterdam AI spinoff Scyfer

"function even when the host is offline"

I wonder how many generations of hardware will have to pass before that is actually possible.

In the meantime, we have Cortana and Siri, and both of these phone home with requests that are analyzed and treated on vast platforms with huge data banks before getting a possible response that is sent back.

They won't be able to shrink that down to a phone, so there's going to have to be some very, very clever programming.

I wish them luck.

Wisconsin advances $3bn bribe incentives package for Foxconn

Indeed

I really cannot see how Foxconn is going to set up a plant for anything when even illegal aliens in the US will cost it twice as much as what it pays where it is now.

Either that or my next screen is going to cost me €7000. If that's the case, it'll have to wait for me to have saved up the money first.

Sorry, but those huge walls of terms and conditions you never read are legally binding

Re: "we have unfair contracts protection"

Well there you have it : forced arbitration is therefor not unfair, following this decision.

Now you know what needs to be changed in the law.

Except you're not signing something when you just click an OK button.

No, the cops can't get a search warrant to just seize all devices in sight – US appeals court

Re: Mess

Yes, it is a bother. On the other hand, you can't repeatedly state that you have the best legal system in the world (citation needed) and then take shortcuts when it suits you.

I do believe this guy is a criminal. I do believe that it sucks that positive evidence is being thrown out. I also believe that it sucks more that police are just pawing through everyone's lives without respecting that little niggle called "due process".

That being said, phones these days are obvious targets for data. I don't understand how the police didn't get their warrant properly because obviously kids these days do everything with their bloomin' phones and if I found an illegal firearm in a suspects' house I would obviously think of checking their phones.

Apparently something was a bit too obvious to the police officers and they blew it.

Dura lex, sed lex. It's the only thing that protects innocent people from wrongful judiciary action, and God knows there's enough of that already.

Atari shoots sueball at KitKat maker over use of 'Breakout' in ad

Arkanoid was legally made

You cannot prevent people from being inspired by a concept, only from making a blatant copy of your product.

AFAIK Arkanoid was a perfectly legal brick-breaker. If Arkanoid was not, then you have 90% of Steam's catalogue of JRPGs, RTSs and recreations of 1970s games that need to be removed, stat.