Posts by Pascal Monett

Simply not credible: The extraordinary verdict against the body that hopes to run the internet

Re: Umm, some balance please

Yes, let's balance. I don't give two hoots about corruption in the Olympic Committee or FIFA - they do not and will never affect me in any way.

I damn well care about my Internet and I am incensed every time I hear about how ICANN in general just doesn't give a flying monkey's about respecting anything so mundane as rules and regulations when it is the fucking global Internet that they've got in their hands.

It is literally criminal how they get away with blatantly saying "F U" to everyone's face and nobody lifts a finger in retaliation. I would send in the Marines and have them all shot for treason on site, no delay and no discussion.

$67M in bitcoin stolen as hacking typhoon lashes Hong Kong's Bitfinex

@Alan Brown

That attack was against the SWIFT system, diverting funds from where they should go. It was not an attack on funds in accounts. The system will be patched.

It also took advantage of a security hole, with an unprotected switch being exploited. That bank should have known better.

But okay, a hacker did get away with millions. Duly noted. I hope he knows how to run, because he'll be on the run for the rest of his life.

Yes, today money is virtual until you get some from the ATM. The difference between BitCoin and "normal" money is that banks are under a charter that has been hundreds of years in the making, and must respect financial obligations that have been polished and tweaked by law for centuries.

BitCoin, on the other hand, thrust itself into existence and, as its very first act, declared itself to be immune from all that legacy law and experience.

That is why you'll never hear of a bank hacker getting away with millions. There are breaches targeting user credentials, there are isolated thefts on one user account now and then due to insecurities with online banking, but there are no mainframe attacks on central databases. With BitCoin, there are.

Now that a judge has declared that BitCoin is not funny money, I'm just waiting for all the BitCoin trading to be force-folded into signing up for a proper banking statute world-wide and getting up to speed with what it actually means to be a responsible trader.

My guess is that all current BitCoin trading places will fold because none of them have any actual finance experience and actual banks will pick up where they left off.

Time will tell.

Post-Brexit spending freeze in UK is real, says enterprise distie titan

A market hiccup

Gonna be one looooong hiccup.

Reminder: IE, Edge, Outlook etc still cough up your Windows, VPN credentials to strangers

"Microsoft released guidance to help protect customers and if needed, we’ll take additional steps"

Microsoft released guidance - yeah, because all 350 million Win 1 0 users know about your guidance.

if needed, we’ll take additional steps - hint : it's needed !!

Foot meets bullet - again. This is karma for having stupidly decided to graft a browser into the OS for no technical reason whatsoever and not paying attention to the impact of internet-related bright ideas on core OS functionality.

Swede suffers shrinking penis after dentist fits mouthguard

"the plastic used in the mouthguard"

Keep that plastic for pool-based todger mishaps.

Make mouthguards out of ceramic.

If that fails, call in a psychiatrist.

Going! going! pwned? 200! million! Yahoo! logins! leaked! allegedly!

Re: Meanwhile....

Sure, mention it.

Standard Corporate Procedure, these days. She's far from the first CEO to bilk millions out of driving a company to the ground, and she certainly won't be the last.

It's private money. If the shareholders are stupid enough to give it away, it is literally in every sense their problem.

That said, I'll drive a company to the ground for a tenth of the price. Just saying.

Hitachi's Americas CEO resigns

"Jack Domme has resigned, with Ryuichi Otsuki already in place"

Well at least Hitachi didn't take months to find a new CEO, eh HP ?

Chinese Android smartphone firm: It packs a dedicated crypto chip

Shhh.

You're tech, they're Marketing.

Not the same universe.

300 million pelicans? Pah. What 6 billion plastic bags really weigh

Re: Enviromentalists are extrapolating

Right. Because the the Pacific trash vortex is just a tiny collection of a few bits of plastic debris. Nothing to worry about. Move along.

Windows 10: Happy with Anniversary Update?

Re: Bashing a machine with a spinning disk in it is definitely not a good cause of action

Yeah, but bashing a Windows machine with a spinning disc is highly cathartic and greatly reduces your stress levels.

Re: They can't win.

No, they can't. On the other hand, they did everything to put themselves in this situation in the first place. The guiding light has always been revenue, never proper protocols. As such, if MS had actually cut the cruft with XP, back when nobody had any other choice, and set down proper API rules and respected accepted browser specifications, the situation today would be a lot cleaner and programmers would have a decade's training in Good Programming.

They chose short-term money instead.

No sympathy.

Re: Windows 10 is good if you don't care about controlling your own computer or your privacy

Spot on.

An Operating System used to be the layer that could launch applications and manage the hardware.

Today it is an excuse to push ads, monitor users and create salable statistics.

I'm checking out of all this nonsense.

Liberata in £43m buyout by Japanese firm OUTSOURCING Inc

"The buyer is has spread"

There is absolutely no grammatical checker today that would let that pass.

No editor worth the name would miss such a thing.

That is the nature of journalism today.

If only it were Friday, dammit. I need a drink.

Australian spooks' email guide banishes MS Word macros, JavaScript

Re: We didn't take any risks, we just took the PC off that user

And that's all ?

You didn't take the servers offline to scour them for virii ? No in-depth analysis of all network shares ? Just re-image the affected PC ?

And you think you didn't take any risks ?

Ignorance really is bliss.

Australia to spend a billion bucks and seven years on SAP project

Re: only if they signed up to follow the above

And only if you have a fully-equipped dungeon to deal with the people who still stray from the path.

US state sues Comcast for $100m in row over 'worthless' repair plans

Re: if they're decent people

That seems to be the whole problem.

FBI electronics nerd confesses: I fed spy tech blueprints to China

Re: Veteran technician...

Veteran tech and he uses absolutely every single electronically under-surveillance tool known to Man ?

And working with inside knowledge of the NSA ?

He should go to jail just for that.

You think Donald Trump is insecure? Check out his online store

Nah, Mexico.

Re: Everything he ever built someone else paid for.

Everything he ever conned someone else into paying for.

FTFY

Google-backed Thread, OCF form alliance for Internet of Things sanity

But it will unfortunately rebound thanks to all the friggin' idiots who would die for a chance to control their lighting and heating from the slab grafted to their hand.

F-35 targeting system laser will be 'almost impossible' to use in UK

Re: ISD$400,000

Wow, a helmet costing four hundred thousand Imperial Star Destroyer dollars.

That's what you call a sky-high bill !

In other news . . .

US restrictions on the F-35 fighter jet's flight authorization process will make it “almost impossible” for any country to launch them without per-flight White House approval.

But keep paying monthly to maintain hope.

All roads lead to Rome as Irish seminary gripped by Grindr scandal

It's nice to hear that, whatever the orientation, there are still some people able to treat serious matters seriously.

EE roaming outage hits Brits basking abroad

No can do. Phone grafted to hand. Signal keeps blood flowing. Without signal, world is dim and grey. Can't enjoy holidays if can't see it through phone screen while streaming to Facebook.

Think of all the selfies that are lost ! Won't somebody think of the selfies ?

Floods hit India's IT hubs, wash away some credibility

Re: what they've outsourced is completely out of their control

When the cloud gets wobbly, what exactly is it that you control ?

Re: what they've outsourced is completely out of their control

Time is going to teach companies the harsh reality of that statement. The Cloud is still bright and shiny new, and yet I cannot count the number of times that I've heard "all you need is to set your SLAs properly" as a response to anyone questioning the value of handing over control of your data to a 3rd party.

As if SLAs are going to get to Azure back up in less than 15 minutes after an admin put in a wrong DNS command. Or, in this case, drain all the roads and get everybody back to work on time.

SLAs work when everything is all right. When things go down, all you have is a phone number that might not even answer. You can rant and rave and shout over the phone about your SLAs all you want, your service will be down until it goes back up and you can do nothing about it.

You’ve left too many VMs lying about. You’re a very naughty boy

On the other hand, if you're serious about redundancy, it seems to me that you have to have a solution ready if/when you need to switch from one to the other.

Mirror, mirror on the wall: Is Acronis backup truly the fastest of them all?

"It only takes 35.6 minutes to back up a 180GB virtual machine with Acronis"

Great ! I'm going to set it up on my Pentium with a 10MB LAN connection to my NAS. I now know that my 250GB will be backed up in no more than 48.6 minutes !

Can I sue if takes longer ?

Juno turns around and heads off to graze Jupiter's clouds

I understand what you are saying, but where is the logic in giving a planet-specific name to the same mathematical position ?

Are we going to end up reading about apoton, apoturn, apocure, apomede, apores, apoDA14 etc, in other words one apo- for every single planet/dwarf/moon/asteroid we have a satellite orbiting ?

That'll get tiresome rather quickly, I think.

Windows 10 still free, even the Anniversary Update, if you're crass

Re: the same people who where complaining about eol on Windows XP

Not all of them.

I was happy to move to Windows 7, and very happy with the 64-bit version. So many things are a lot better on 7 than on XP that you'd really have to be stuck on XP to stay there.

I have no desire to surrender my PC to Microsoft. It works the way I want it to, and I really, really do not want MS to fiddle about with it because I just know that they'll stuff something up at one point or another.

And I do not trust any company with access to my disks, especially not US-based ones.

Give .gay to the gays, roars exiting ombudsman

"the ICANN board is not obliged to follow its governance committee's recommendations"

Well duh. The ICANN board has no obligations and, when it does, it just decides that it doesn't.

And somehow, nobody has arrested these assholes.

No need to panic, says SwiftKey, as email addresses, phone numbers appear on strangers' screens

"The vast majority of SwiftKey users are not affected by this issue"

Oh good, nothing important then. Not to worry. Carry on.

Sorry, but if only one user is affected by this issue it is still important to get it solved.

Go on trying to PR your way out ; anyone with a brain has already marked you down as an outfit to avoid.

Of course, given the number of people who don't have a brain, your future is still bright.

Dem-owned-crats: Now its congressional committee is hacked

"the attacks are likely the work of a Russian-based group"

Sure. And the Sony hack was from North Korea.

Ah, Americans. Always blaming somebody far away for all their troubles. Because it absolutely couldn't be a home-grown group using a Russian-based VPN anonymizing service, oh noooo.

Google and Microsoft are playing catchup with AWS's cloudy power

"Google took 7.4 per cent of the market but grew 80 per cent."

Once again we witness the use of percentages to try to make something more important than it is.

If you had written "Google took 7.4% of the market, going from a little bit to a little bit more", it wouldn't have seemed so impressive, would it? But that's what actually happened.

I sell an apple today, tomorrow I sell 2 apples. Wow ! I've increased sales by 100% !

It's only 2 apples.

Try not to repeat the hyperbole, ok ? Canalys is the marketing company, not El Reg. Get back to biting, please.

Capita was always going to axe staff under Project Vincent – sources

Let us all give thanks

Let us all give thanks to Neo-Liberalism, that wonderful theory of economics that has removed the power of decision from governments to place it in the hands of multinationals.

Free flow of goods ? Check. Governments have to let everything in because nothing is made locally anymore anyways.

Free flow of the workforce ? Check. The workforce is now flowing to South Africa.

Free flow of capital ? Check. Revenue is now everywhere except where governments can tax it.

A better world for all ? Check. It's a much better world for all 1%ers.

For the rest of us, it's seriously starting to suck though.

Windows 10 Pro Anniversary Update tweaked to stop you disabling app promos

And so disappears the Personal Computer from Microsoft history

"a feature which allows Microsoft to install "recommended" third-party apps and links on the Windows 10 Start menu. In the past this has included apps like Candy Crush Soda Saga, Flipboard and Twitter"

Sorry ? An OS vendor that decides to install commercial 3rd-party products on MY computer ? And no lawsuit is coming out to put a stop to this nonsense ?

From a country whose citizens file a suit if their coffee is too hot, I find that a bit rich on both sides. But really, I think it is high time to file a class-action suit defining what an Operating System is and is allowed to do.

Because installing Candy Crush without my permission is the last straw. Now it's pitchfork time !

It's time for a discussion about malvertising

"The ad networks see no percentage in ensuring clean ads"

And soon they will see next to no percentage regardless.

Someday someone will come up with the concept of Trusted Ads, and that one will take the market.

Then we will be able to turn off our adblockers.

But not before.

WD disk revenues spin slower as its flash fireworks go off

"Unless Seagate gets seriously into the flash business"

Because there are HDD vendors out there that are not planning to get seriously in the flash business ?

Come on, Seagate is not planning to die, now is it ?

Someone (cough, cough VeriSign) just gave ICANN $135m for the rights to .web

And the added benefit is the large drop in stupid emails trying to get me interested in something ridiculous because all that inane activity is being posted on walls which I don't have.

I like Facebook for the fact that it has drawn all the idiots together and keeps them mostly in their own little ball pen. It's like having a soundproofed kids area in a restaurant. You can enjoy the food and the service without being annoyed by all the shrieking.

Argos changes 150 easily guessed drop-off system passwords

Wait a minute

A customer found a weakness in employee password use and protection, signaled it and was not immediately blamed and brought shrieking into a ridiculous lawsuit ?

What is the world coming to ?

China decrees it will grow world-class enterprise vendors by the year 2025

"who would bet against the Council's edict becoming reality?"

Anyone betting against China in the long-term is a fool.

Twenty years ago every was calling them copiers. We were laughing at the quality of their products. Sometimes we still do. There will be nothing to laugh at the day China is dictating international commercial treaties instead of the US - and that will happen.

It'll be interesting to see the influence of the Middle-Kingdom's growing power on those commercial agreements. One can only wonder what they will do with the concept of privacy, for example.

Today, it is still the US calling the shots in international treaties of all kinds. Soon, it will be China. Get ready for it.

Church organist nabbed for playing glory hole in excelsis

Dear. God.

I can't imagine the number of Hail Mary's this guy is going to have to go through.

Not to mention being the leper of the congregation for the rest of his life.

Such a sad way to ruin one's reputation in exchange for what, a one-minute thrill ?

He certainly won't be playing any organ in public any more.

Oh deer.io: Cyber criminals* using one-stop DIY web biz shops

Anonymity has nothing to do with legitimate web sites

If you're running a legitimate business, there is no place for anonymity. You want to get known.

Anonymity is a protection that should be allowed only for individuals, and only within the scope of the law.

An anonymous business is, by definition, something the law should investigate thoroughly and without mercy.

Saved from ransomware thugs... by rival ransomware thug

Ah, the ultimate irony

I seem to recall a comic strip pic of a thief slowly leaving a room where an empty treasure chest and the body of an other thief with a knife in his back lay.

Don't know why this would dredge up that memory. </sarcasm>

Microsoft adds useful feature to PowerPoint. Seriously

"a single paper [..] plant starts by burning down 5k+ square miles of forest"

??

The process of making paper includes steam or chemicals.

Burning entire forests is listed nowhere in the requirements.

Typical PowerPoint presentation material.

Gullible Essex Police are now using junk science lie detectors

"submit further investigative divination practices to Essex Police"

I have a proven process derived from extensive viewing of The Mentalist that I would be willing to offer training on. It's only an eight-week course and I'll only bill a paltry $250,000 for the service.

Heart Internet goes TITSUP again

Hosting is done on one server

Cloud is still in its infancy, obviously. It would seem that some cloud services are more pared to the bone than others.

The only good thing about all this is that the great unwashed will learn, by trial and painful error, that price is not the only thing to take into account when signing up for a cloud service.

Like the automotive industry, the only good thing in this evolution is that, in the end, cloud services will perform better, because those that don't will wither and die. The only question is : how long will it take ? With the amount of people who pay and find shoddy performance good enough, it might take a while.

Now, if you're basing your business on it, I'm sorry but it seems to me that you should reevaluate your ROI criteria on this one.

Explo-Xen! Bunker buster bug breaks out guests from hypervisor

Has Xen been written by competent developers?

Bit of a cheeky one there, IMO.

Given that I couldn't write a VM to save my life, I think that Xen has some pretty damn good programmers.

Nobody's perfect, of course, but VM programming seems to me to be especially difficult. With any application, new security holes are regularly discovered. Some of them are trivial. With VMs there have been, to my knowledge, no trivial exploits.

That's not bad right there, in my book.

Why Agile is like flossing and regular sex

"no team should be so large that it needs more than two pizzas for dinner"

Given the eating habits of every coder I know, that rule means teams of two, maybe three.

Certainly not twelve.

But no matter, there is only one way to develop : ensuring that you have the input of all people that matter to the project.

Mind you, that doesn't mean all the people listed in the project manifest. It means all the people that matter to the project's success. The key users who can express what they need and how they can use it, the db admin for access and optimizations, the network engineers for traffic analysis and routing solving, and on the side, the manager for specifications and for knowing who to keep away from the grunt work in order to prevent stupid ideas.