Posts by Pascal Monett

Next big thing after containers? Amazon CTO talks up serverless computing

Paperless, serverless, pah.

I'll be impressed when they manage computerless.

FBI arrests satellite engineer on charges of espionage

"his own interests of greed"

There was a film (with Sean Connery and Nick Cage) in which a general was prepared to turn traitor to get the men who died in his platoon proper care and recognition.

If I cite that film (the Rock), it is because said general gave a speech to his men promising them a million dollars each for their services, because, in his words, they would never again be able to set feet on any soil that had an extradition agreement with the US. In essence, they were traitors going into exile and they knew it.

It seems to me that if you are setting yourself up to be such a traitor purely for monetary purposes, as apparently in this case, you should be smart enough to realize that you're in the same spot. You should therefor make sure that each transaction has the possibility of giving you the means to vacate the country ASAP and, at the very least, set yourself up to get some form of revenue somewhere else. $1,000 is not going to do that.

So this guy sells state secrets at a thousand a pop. He must have thought himself very smart and able to do so for years without getting caught. He apparently thought he was just supplementing his income or something.

Smacks of unbelievable stupidity to me.

HPE dumps software biz into the bargain bin

Akin to weight loss by amputation

I'm sure that every single acquisition was lavishly examined, amply powerpointed and endlessly discussed, before beaming management gave the OK to spend the funds, then took a nice bonus for having managed things so well.

Now, all those acquisitions are good for the chopping block, meaning that either manglement did not properly analyze the data beforehand, or they did not properly manage the acquisition after.

There is no case where management cannot be held responsible for this, but there is no case where they won't get a bonus out of it.

Please stop working and abuse your expense account at the beach

Well rested ?

I think I'd be bouncing off the walls after a month at the beach. All that time wasted when I could have played LotRO at home instead.

At least there would be margharitas . . .

Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments

For someone who is obsessively anal, it does make a difference.

For those who want absolute control over every single part of what they see and do, it must be quite irksome to have other people do things slightly differently.

For my part, if you want to box your comments, it's your time to spend. As long as the comment itself is useful, I fail to see why that is important.

I'm obviously not obsessively anal enough.

SETI mulls reboot: Believing the strangest things, loving the alien

Re: if we were seeded from extra terrestrial (unlikely)

Um, but we were seeded.

Not by extraterrestrials, but by asteroids.

Kim Dotcom pregnant with Bitcoin's mutant offspring

Reminds me of the definition of insanity

So he's trying to recreate what he's already lost - again ?

Some people don't know when to quit.

IoT puts assembly language back on the charts

Re: run-anywhere processor/platform independence

That is a concept dedicated to full-blown computers with powerful CPUs at 3GHz or more, gobs of RAM and a fair amount of storage space. And even there, it's not guaranteed.

IoT is a world of microprocessors that run in the Khz, next-to-no RAM and zero storage space. There is no possibility of platform independance here, unless you're ready to buy a toothbrush that is connected to your PC.

So, you're right, there is no relevance to run-anywhere in IoT. IoT is just-run-there-and-be-happy-you-can.

Re: In fact, all IOT should be coded in Java. At least there would no security issues.

Right, because it's the language that decides if there can be security issues, not coders writing sloppy code.

I can't agree with that. In my opinion, coders the world over have demonstrated a disturbing knack of being able to create security issues in any language.

Bad blood: US govt bans bio-test biz Theranos' CEO for two years

Re: The VCs who did back her were Silicon Valley types

It says here that Theranos received funding to the tune of $690 million from 6 investors, in 8 rounds.

That's 6 guys who likely knew that the specialized investors had refused to back this project, but decided that they would give it a go anyways. Probably cautiously at first, but as Holmes put up her smokescreen of "success", they became more generous (the last round of funding is half the total).

So she totally played everyone, and now she's getting what for.

No sympathy.

Farewell to Microsoft's Sun Tzu: Thanks for all the cheese, Kevin Turner

Feeling sorry ?

Who the hell is feeling sorry for Microsoft ?

Microsoft built its fortune by screwing customers over and locking them into Office at every turn using every single underhanded tactic available.

It continued by undermining every standard it could get its claws into, repeatedly launching new products/functionalities, getting people to invest in them, then dropping the whole thing, missing entire markets through hubris then wasting billions trying to play catch up, and topping it all off by burying its own rulebook on UI functionality and fisting the new version down everyone's throats.

Feel sorry for Microsoft ?

There's no way I can get drunk enough for that.

Rolls-Royce reckons robot cargo ships are the future of the seas

"unmanned vessels would be cheaper to operate and would have more space for cargo"

And zero personnel for on-site maintenance and repairs when things go wrong.

Brilliant piece of analysis from people who haven't a clue how harsh reality is compared to management projections.

Yes, a vessel with every single container properly secured and every inch properly maintained and verified before launch will likely perform admirably in calm weather.

Add two months of salt water drenching the deck, zero eyes on the lookout for weakened or snapped restraints and a nice bit of storm and you can kiss goodbye to your fully automated ship and its cargo.

Go explain to the insurance company that everything "should have been fine". I'm sure they'll be quite interested in your opinion, while denying any claim for faulty oversight.

No ship has ever needed more than 5 people to steer it. Most ships have always needed many times that to keep it working order. Come back with your fully autonomous ships the day we have robot butlers capable of clearing the bilges on their own.

New ISS crew will spend their time bombarding computers with radiation

"Bombarding computers with radiation"

All they have to do is put the computer outside, right ?

You can’t sit there, my IoT desk tells me

I see how this is shaping up

All this IoT stuff is being extensively engineered to replace our own thought processes in the idea that computers can take of day-to-day repetitive stuff without our thinking about it.

The only result of all that is that we will be trained to do as the computer says without thinking about it, because some numpty programmed it that way. Computer says jump, and we will jump.

All this taking care of us is just going to turn us into an entire planet of drooling idiots incapable of critical thought.

Oh, wait, now I get it . . .

Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom thinks all websites should be rated – just like movies

Rating websites - think of the children !

Because that is what Great Britain really needs to do in this economic crises : focus on controlling access to websites that might be showing a bit of skin.

Congratulations on having solved all your other problems : poverty, homelessness, illegal immigration, unemployment, failing education standards, all that is now over !

Now you can officially take care of the real problem : ensuring that no parent has to actually lift a finger in the upbringing of their offspring, it will all be handled by the Government and the rating system.

Because there is obviously no way a child can possibly use his daddy's computer to surf the web and see things that are rated above his age, no sir. Won't ever happen.

£8 BILLION is locked into UK.gov's failing IT schemes, El Reg analysis reveals

Re: Thank god we're leaving the EU

Not so fast : you just voted to leave.

The actual leaving will be decided on by your admirable government, the ifs and when being totally out of your control.

Facebook ‘glitch’ that deleted the Philando Castile shooting vid: It was the police – sources

Re: Wow

"This one they can't sweep under the rug"

Watch them try.

In this, it must be said that social apps have finally provided the public with the way to efficiently counter official behavior that is not in line with what is expected from a police officer. Facebook and Twitter have granted us this power, and that is a Good Thing (tm). Thanks to these apps, the Police are now effectively accountable before the law, because there is no way that anyone will forget that those videos exist, thus there is no way a judge can ignore them.

That is what is going to put law enforcement back under control. And it is the right solution : the Law has been voted by The People, so The People have the right to control the application of the Law. Rodney King demonstrated that what was needed was individual means of recording police action. In his time, it was rare, expensive, and you had to hand over the film to a newspaper.

Today, it's so cheap everyone has a camera phone, and anyone can have a profile on a social app that allows for video uploading. The Public must start hunting down bad police behavior and the Law must be changed to ensure that no cop can confiscate evidence, legally that is.

It's a shame that yet another innocent victim needs to die, but make his death worth something. Get the Law to recognize citizen surveillance of the Police, and it will mean something.

Ad agency swipes 'unnamed bloggers' for calling out its cynically fake 'save a refugee' app

There is certainly no more question of their integrity : they have none to question.

Gartner: Brexit cluster-fsck has ballsed up our spending forecast

Please don't report like all the others

"At the start of this year, the crystal ball stroker estimated the industry would grow 0.5 per cent in 2016, then flip flopped and reduced this prediction by a full percentage point to $3.49 trillion, blaming the negative affect of forex rates."

That's exactly what I would expect to read in an article anywhere else. Meaningless comparisons between numbers and values that have no immediate significance or relation. It's what everyone does, so nobody gets any blame for bad reporting.

If you start giving out figures in percentages, keep with percentages. No reader can possibly understand what $3.49 trillion is compared to 0.5%, so spell it out when you do things like that. Give us a correlation point. Tell us how many trillion are in the 0.5%, then give us the trillion that result from the percentage point drop.

Otherwise you're just spouting impressive-sounding noise. Do not copy how all other news outlets do the job : they do it specifically so nobody can understand.

Just the facts, STT-MRAM: Your DRAM replacement's on its way

"(STT-MRAM) is a future DRAM replacement candidate"

Oooh, yet another fantastic achievement with enormous promise and mouth-watering performance !

I am so happy for it.

Call me when the future has arrived, I'll see about getting excited about it then.

Microsoft's cringey 'Hey bae <3' recruiter email translated by El Reg

Re: What could go wrong?

I was sooo disappointed in that video. A washed-out, blue-glare image with nothing interesting to actually see.

Did they film that with a Windows Phone ?

Re: All this just to get

some interns who will likely be paid more than you.

FTFY.

Re: "Big turds for whoever shared this email"

Whoever shared ?

There must be over a hundred people who got this, young people hard-wired into Twitter and Facebook and maybe even LinkedIn, and you're wondering about whoever shared ?

Choose 50, you're bound to be right 90% of the time.

NASA curious about Curiosity's fourth 'safe mode' event

It says here that it takes between 1.5 and 5 hours to transfer 60MB.

Windows 1 0 download size is anywhere between 1.6GB and over 6GB. To be nice, let's say 1.6. That means 28 chunks of 60MB. Best-case scenario is 41 hours, worst case is 137 (all figures rounded up).

Now, if we go for the 6.07GB size, it means 104 chunks, and 156 to 518 hours of transfer time.

Unfortunately, all this is moot since it would appear that the Rover does not have enough storage to do anything with the file, not to mention incompatible hardware which would require additional drivers and thus, more space.

Plus the 20GB swap disk would not be available, meaning Win 1 0 would be the death of the Rover.

UK.gov rolls out 10 years' chokey for industrial scale copyright pirates

And let us not forget that journalist that got treated with the terror act for having talked with Snowden.

You can tell me what you want about the intent of the law, what I want to know is what is the intent of the interrogator ?

UK.gov's hated Care.data project binned

"all the other overreaching, privacy compromising projects will go perfectly"

Well look at it this way : all the ones we don't know about are likely a splendid success.

UK patients should have greater data slurp opt-out powers – report

Still faffing about on patient control of data ?

Funny that, I seem to recall a Yes Minister episode on that exact subject. I clearly remember a quote about access being subject to "the right to know and the need to know", and that people "shall have complete control over the data that concerns them".

Yes Minister ; so actual that, apparently, it is still ahead of its time.

'Double speak' squawk users as Silent Circle kills warrant canary

I may have not made myself perfectly clear : by having yanked the canary without any prior notice, the public has no choice but to consider that the canary is indeed dead and warrants have been served.

By mumbling something about a "business decision", these guys are trying to make it sound like they had decided to do it for other reasons. If that were true, they should have made an announcement that they were retiring the canary on a given date, then retired said canary on said date.

They didn't, ergo one must consider a dead canary no matter what they say.

Funny how tax evasion is way easier than acknowledging a simple warrant.

It was a business decision

Of course it was, nobody is expecting the janitor to go and do it on his own. The issue is that, if it were a proper decision, there should have been publication of the intent.

It's really unbelievable that, in the 3rd Millennium, we have Internet-facing companies that have still not understood that when you're dealing with the public, you make public-impacting decisions publicly.

If you display something that the public gets used to, you can't yank it out on a whim (hey, Yahoo!, you hear that ?). The list of companies that have gotten grief from doing just that is longer than I care to type here so it's not news, yet these guys didn't get the frakkin memo.

The Internet remains a wonderful education tool. I hope these clowns get all the schooling they deserve.

Australian Information Industries Association*: you're not the future of democracy, so please shut up

I refuse electronic voting on principle

There isn't an argument for e-voting that holds up to scrutiny at the moment. None of the affirmations of companies pushing e-voting products are objectively substantiated.

* "[e-voting] could also potentially deliver significant cost savings" - how ? By magic ?

A national e-voting system is going to be bespoke because no two countries do it exactly the same way. That means that there is no product that can handle the specifics in an easy-to-understand, idiot-proof manner, which means that there is room for obscure configuration settings that can easily be set/removed to give some unknown advantage to the party that knows exactly how to (ab)use them.

And not to forget, not everyone has Internet access these days - so e-voting is not going to be a universal solution until Internet access is as basic as running water.

* “If we had it in place today, we’d already have certainty regarding the results of the federal election"

Oh really ? In France the vote is paper-based, and we only have to wait until 8 p.m. to get the metropolitan results. Overseas French territories give their results in the following 12 hours, by law. If your paper-based system does not do that, you might look into improving the system instead of replacing it with an untested/untrusted one.

* "on the issue of proof of identity"

Nice dig at ID cards, but please excuse me if I rofl. Proven ID on the Internet ? That won't happen without a serious overhaul of ID management in general. Whatever is chosen, the costs are going to be high and, again, each country is going to have its own specifications as to what is pertinent, so each implementation will have to take into account specific things that prevent one-solution-for-all and thus, no economies of scale.

* "votes can still be miscounted, misread, or even simply misplaced"

Nothing is perfect, but I have yet to see a democratic country with widespread voting corruption. There have obviously been instances, but we know about them because they were discovered, generally quickly discovered. E-voting opens the prospect of vote-rigging in such a way that it will remain undiscovered until a smarter genie finds out, or a disgruntled participant speaks up. That could take years, or more.

Sorry, but there isn't an ounce of worth to any of those arguments in favour of e-voting and there are currently iron-clad arguments against.

I've said it before and I'll repeat it as long as it takes : the only e-voting scheme worth it is the one where the specifications are open-source, the code is open-source, and everyone knows exactly what is happening and how.

Obscurity is not security.

Australia's ABC suspends presenter over 'Wi-Fi is dangerous' claims

I doubt very much that it was "duped" into showing that information.

That Demasi woman (what gives her the right to put "Dr" in front of her name ?) quite obviously intentionally chose to present things like she did. She is clearly either convinced she's done right (which only demonstrates feeble intelligence), or she did it on purpose for ratings (no such thing as bad publicity, right ?).

As far as I'm concerned, her name is now prominently featured in my personal black list of people I will never listen to.

HPE rushes out patch for more than a year of OpenSSL vulns

"OpenSSL bugs dating back to 2014"

Well, better late than never I guess, although all those who were pwned by hackers because of those vulns would probably say it's too late for them.

Paper wasps that lie to their mates get a right kicking, research finds

The cost of cheating

They didn't cheat. The poor little buggers were modified against their own judgement and forced into a combat they hadn't decided. They then found themselves on the wrong end of anti-cheating enforcement. It may have been done in the name of science, but I don't see that the issue was properly thought through.

Neither do I see that the conclusion is correct. There are animals that cheat. Find some of those and examine what the cheating does to them, instead of taking living beings that don't and forcing an unnatural situation on them.

Who's to say that cheaters are being punished ? Why not say that victorious paper wasp queens decide to go the extra mile when beating on an opponent that they thought was tougher, but actually isn't ? What about the euphoria of victory ?

I do not approve of this study. I do not feel that it was justified, and I do not agree on the conclusion.

TP-Link abandons 'forgotten' router config domains

It's foreshadowing

The quote represents the value the dollar will be at when Trump gets elected.

Humans and bees share the same sociability genes

"a banana-smelling pheromone"

Does that mean that bees are more aggressive around bananas ?

Klepto Zepto could steal millions in looming ransomware wave

"look at their 'requested' documentation"

I just cannot understand why people open such mail. It is almost as if whatever the computer screen tells them to do becomes compulsory.

Engage brain, people ! If you haven't asked for anything, it's a trap. If you have asked for something but the mail doesn't come from the entity you asked to, it's a trap. If it says Microsoft needs some information from you but the email comes from Gmail, it's a trap.

Basically put : if it comes from someone you don't know, it's a trap. If it comes from someone you do know, it could still be a trap.

This is going to get uglier before it gets better.

Forget YouTube – meet ChewTube: Strangers watching millennials eat

Torn between horror and thankfulness

"a dedicated channel for live videos of people eating"

Dear God, that is just the summit of uselessness. It is so abysmally stupid as to drop the collective IQ of Humanity by a full point. I cannot believe we, as a species, can wallow so low.

On the other hand, thank God we have reached such a height in our global level of well-being that we can waste time in such trivialities instead of having to kill one other to ensure we have enough to eat tomorrow.

It's the only good side I can think of, though.

BAM! Astroboffins now have a second way of picking up black holes' collision super kicks

Remnants ?

Since I was a kid I have been reading about black holes, the most awesome vacuum cleaner in the Universe. I have been repeatedly told that nothing, not even light, can escape the Singularity.

Now I am being told that, in a collision between two black holes, "remnants" are being flung out. Remnants? From a Singularity ? That infinitely compressed zone of matter that has compressed itself out of our Universe ?

DIV / 0 - DOES NOT COMPUTE

<shutdown>

NRA guns down 38,000 Surge.sh sites in anti-parody spray-and-pray

Tsk, tsk

Basic mistake : never make fun of The Man on his own territory. Many a court jester learned that the hard way. Today's environment is no different, it's just that the kings wear different kinds of crowns.

Should've hosted the video on some hosting site in Switzerland or somesuch. No takedown notice works there.

Ah right, you actually have to manage the web site, the bandwidth, etc.. what a hassle.

Oh well.

Honey, why are porno apps on your Android?! Er, um, malware did it!

"even a factory reset may not fully wipe up after a Hummer infection"

And next to that, we have companies pushing selfie-logins by touting that the mobile is a "trusted platform".

<shakes head>

Never-never chip tech Memristor shuffles closer to death row

Re: WTFingF?

Satan has preceeded you and his marketroids have done their best to nullify your argument by taking control of the Cambridge dictionary.

Once he controls the Oxford dictionary, his dominion will be complete, the portal will open and we will all be doomed.

Trans-Pacific FASTER fibre fires first photons, finally

Google takes 10 Tbps for cloudy ad-slinging

I wonder how much the NSA signed on for ?

Zero-interaction remote wormable hijack hole blasts Symantec kit

Symantec has officially hit the bottom

For years, Symantec's reputation has been going down. Norton has ballooned ever more with bloat, impossible features and what clearly seems to be inefficient/bad coding.

Now just having Norton installed means you are at risk of being pwned without being able to do anything about it, and practically through no fault of your own.

You had a waterproof submarine, but Symantec installed a screen door in the back.

Well, this news won't do anything to Symantec's reputation for me, it was already rock bottom. I'm just wondering if they'll start digging now.

Those Xbox Fitness vids you 'bought'? Look up the meaning of the word 'rent'

Re: "problem is that Microsoft has billions still to burn before they finally fold"

All the more reason to start now.

This is just another nail in the coffin of online content purchasing. I am sorry, but if I see that I have to be connected to actually use the content I put money into, that is an enormous warning sign telling me "this is NOT yours and you WILL lose it one day". Then I evaluate whether or not the price is acceptable for something I will pay to have temporarily. If it is too high, then I do not "buy".

My preferred choice for online purchase is : I pay for something, download it and IT IS MINE FOREVER MORE. If that is not how it works, then my money is most likely staying in my pocket.

Visiting America? US border agents want your Twitter, Facebook URLs

My definition of useless is simple : an organization is created for a specific goal, if none of that organization's activity goes toward effectively accomplishing that goal, then that organization is useless.

It may be making money (something I doubt the TSA is doing much of, given that it is a governmental organization), but it is still useless.

No means no: Windows 10 nagware's red X will stop update – Microsoft

Yup, and what a timely coincidence.

I'm sure the two are absolutely not, in any way whatsoever, related.

Re: "according to Microsoft's own UI design rules"

Indeed, but those rules were not top priority when deciding the functionality of the dialog box.

The only way to explain the decision to make the 'X' actually accept the upgrade is to consider that, when discussing that point, it was decided to ignore the UI rules in favor of a higher priority - getting Windows 1 0 out on another machine.

Because after a full year of free upgrade availability, this latest version has still not even hit 20% market share (as of this writing).

There is no way to explain that away other than with the words "dismal failure".

You know how that data breach happened? Three words: eBay, hard drives

@Nigel 11

"if you are able to command the head to offset to various normally non-commandable positions left or right of nominal centre, and pick up the analogue signal from the head for nonstandard processing rather than feeding it into the standard disk-read signal processor code"

So you mean to say that I would have to have a disk reading apparatus specifically made for budging a disk head a (gnat's) hair's width further than it should on either side of the normal track, and have bespoke software ready to read and interpret weak signals that normal software would treat as noise. Failing that, I'd need to reprogram the firmware (or replace the command chip with something physically compatible that contains the proper code to do the job). Okay, to me that sounds like much more of a bother than what it can be worth.

On the other hand, if you know that the disk contains data that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars on the market, then yes, somebody will obviously have done that (not counting the various spy agencies for which access to such material seems to be a basic requirement).

All in all, not something your basic mom & pop operation really needs to worry about, right ?

Formatting has two options

The quick one just erases the index, the full one is supposed to overwrite all sectors with 0s and check the result for bad sectors.

Now, I know nothing about data recovery, but I do seem to recall that so-called "secure erasers" do nothing more than write random 1s and 0s over all the file or disc contents multiple times. From what I've heard, those that do 10 rewrites are more secure than those that do 1 rewrite.

Something to do with border magnetism or other.

Fine.

Could someone point me to a web page that gives a layman's view of what the risk is ? Because if you overwrite a byte with a 0, then a 1, I fail to understand how some genius hacker can possible find out that the proper data was initially 0.

I'm stupid like that, but willing to learn.

Tesco Mobile does what? Hahahahahahaha. Sorry customers

£140 million over 5 years for 800 staff

That works out to £35000/year per staffer.

Hey Calldesk guys ! Any of you making anywhere near that ? You might want to strike until you get it !

Optionally : call those guys in India/wherever and tell them what their salary should be. That'll be sure to help ):D.