Posts by Pascal Monett

Microsoft to spooks: WannaCrypt was inevitable, quit hoarding

Re: Its like the Millennium Bug all over again

I think we should call it the Era of Insecurity.

Somebody check with Nostradamus to find out if it ever stops . . .

Dell EMC's Azure Stack: Get thee behind me, Microsoft subscriptions

"public clouds are a means, not an end"

Amen to that ! Thank God there is still at least one person capable of speaking with the voice of sanity in this cloud-boggled world.

Now, if only manglement could realize . . .

Ransomware scum have already unleashed kill-switch-free WannaCry‬pt‪ variant

Re: Inevitable

And, of course, there isn't a single politician that will derive any parallel with backdoored encryption. Can't be, it's backdoored for The Good Guys (TM) !

Samsung was just Tizen – homegrown Linux again pitched at n00bs

That is terrifying

Never mind custody decisions, let's AI up our police cars

Re: "those that have nothing to hide so nothing to fear"

This technology is going to make those with nothing to hide have something to fear : false positives.

This being the US, imagine a black person walking down the street. This person has no criminal record, but a passing patrol car gets a false positive that he is a criminal wanted by the FBI. Do you really think it will end well for the black guy ?

The car could stop, the officers get out and question the guy and clear the issue by simply controlling his papers or checking the picture of the wanted guy, but somehow I doubt that it will always happen in such a fashion. Some form of brutality is more than likely, and a fatal issue is unfortunately not at all impossible.

A dead innocent because of a false positive - that's not what I call nothing to fear.

NASA nixes Trump's moonshot plan

Re: "copy the technology used in the apollo missions"

We don't have that technology any more.

The Apollo program used the Saturn V lifter which had a cargo capability of 120 tons. That rocket is not available any more.

As you can see here, nothing currently available has that capacity. One or two lifters are slated to have comparable or better abilities, but they are in the planning stages and not available before 2020 in any case.

If you printed out this week's storage news and laid it end to end, it would stretch to the end of, er, your desk

"I think for sure, we have grown at a higher rate if we spent more money."

You think ?

You're the CEO and you don't have the figures that measure growth ? You have to think ?

And your measure is how much you've spent ?

No wonder this economy is going straight to the sewers. With that kind of attitude, I understand why Facebook, Microsoft et al spend billions on (failed) acquisitions - they think they prove growth that way.

Amazon's Alexa is worst receptionist ever: Crazy exes, stalkers' calls put through automatically

Re: "Every single element is designed before any developer comes near it"

And it would seem that those designing the elements have totally failed List Maintenance 101. If you give the user the ability to access a list, the option to delete or modify an element of said list is part of the basic requirements since before I went to Uni in 1991.

Of course, respecting said basic requirements takes time and money - which are two things that were obviously not important enough to squander next to the ability of touting yet another chat interface. I would say "Congrats, Amazon, you're now on my blacklist" - except that they've been on my blacklist ever since they demonstrated their willingness to go and erase customer purchases on their Kindle without customer approval.

Comey was loathed by the left, reviled by the right – must have been doing something right

Interesting idea

Let's imagine one moment that such a scheme is indeed implemented. You say yourself that a key is to be created "at manufacture" - ie in a private company.

Private companies are hacked all the time - sometimes from the inside. If this scheme was implemented, the incentive to hack them would be multiplied a hundred-fold. They already have trouble coping now, so add 100x the pressure and it won't be good.

You go on to say that the file system holding the records would "hardly be kept in one place anyway". I read that to mean "there will be multiple points to gain access to it", and we know about how solid a chain is. Sorry, but you're not reassuring me there. In addition, let's just imagine that this "file system" existed ; do you really think that countries like Russia or China would not have a copy ? Given the current blackhat climate, add the corruption that exists in those countries and I think we're headed straight for publication of that list on the dark web with regular updates.

And that's how such a system would virtually allow blackhat egress into everything.

Beside that, there's the fact that blackhats are hardly the only threat, in today's security landscape. The NSA is one humongous effing threat on its own, has been for decades apparently, and I'm not okay with the idea that one NSA goon can tap into my phone calls at will today without a warrant and without my being notified (you see, I don't live in the US and I'm not of US nationality).

This key scheme would multiply that by every single country that had access to such files - whether official or not (you know what spies do for a living, right ?).

I do not subscribe to your optimism, and that is the understatement of the week at least.

74 countries hit by NSA-powered WannaCrypt ransomware backdoor: Emergency fixes emitted by Microsoft for WinXP+

Re: Dear Donald & Theresa

I'm sorry, you're asking The Donald to get a clue ?

Talk about doomed to fail . . .

Re: "how does it drop it and execute it without a by-your-leave"

I never would have known until one day I was surfing with Firefox as I usually do, save that this was way back in last millennium. I followed some URL to a web page and was greeted with a dialog box that stated something that made me do a double-take. I don't remember the wording exactly, but Firefox was warning me that this web site was trying to force a download to my machine and did I want to accept that.

Note that I had not yet clicked any link on the page I had reached.

I refused the file, obviously, and then an idea struck me. I started IE and went to the same page and, sure enough, found the file on my hard disk as soon as I looked. So IE blindly accepted whatever HTML instruction there was to download a file to my disk. Add some Javascript to that page that would try launching said file and you have a perfect malware portal. Obviously I scoured the computer afterwards with a full AV scan (found nothing).

That was the day I vowed to never, ever use IE again if I did not absolutely have to. Of course, that was IE 6, back in the day, but excuse me if I am not entirely trusting of MS to not pull that kind of trick again today.

Space upstart plans public cloud in low Earth orbit

Re: Call me skeptical but...

I'm just wondering what's the use of a VM that is only active for the minute or two it is circling above you. I don't think there's any communication between satellites, so it's all sat-to-ground and back. I can imagine they'll have several ground stations (and I doubt individuals will be setting up dishes to communicate directly - that does not sound like a good commercial pitch) and they'll be able to manage it all and monitor the fleet continuously, but I still can't find a use case for computing power that regularly disappears.

Anyone care to enlighten me on that ?

A bleary-eyed Microsoft wakes up after its cloud, IoT party, clears throat: 'Oh yeah, so Windows...'

Re: Too little too late.

Just too late, as far as I'm concerned. My home server is now Linux Mint, with the Cinnamon desktop (not that I've noticed a real difference with Xcfe, but I'm not looking at my server's screen all day long). Everything I need server-side runs on it and now I'm out of the Windows world for that.

The next step is going to be fooling around with my other desktop to see how my gaming world fits in Linux these days, but the end game is definitely to get rid of Windows altogether.

Sorry, Microsoft, I've put up with your shenanigans as long as I could, but Windows 1 0 is the last straw. I do not trust you any more and I cannot trust a company that confuses the notion of OS and ad platform. It's MY computer and I'm tired of having to pass through services with a fine-toothed comb to ensure it stays that way.

Goodbye and good riddance.

America 'will ban carry-on laptops on flights from UK, Europe to US'

Re: "arguments with TSA officials"

You'd best avoid those, you never win them and can end up wasting more time being questioned than anything else.

Plus they don't give a rat's ass if you miss your flight - it's not on them and the airline won't reimburse your fare because TSA locked you up too long.

Bot you see is what you get: The cold reality of Microsoft's chat 'AI'

"Headless apps"

I like that term, it applies to so many things I already see on mobile phones, it's uncanny.

Months after it ordered a review into allegations of mismanagement, how's that ICANN accountability drive?

"The review will complete as soon as practicable"

Anyone who knows ICANN-speak knows that this means : NEVER.

ICANN is specialized in using common words that mean something to Joe Public, but the intended meaning is anything but. Here is a lexicon :

under review : we are thinking about starting to look into it

addressing uncertainty : we'll invent something that sounds serious

as soon as practicable : when everyone involved has gotten Alzheimer's

will promptly consider : as soon as you're all dead

US Air Force networks F-15 and F-22 fighters – in flight!

One step closer to Copperheads

Looks like Timothy Zahn was right (if you follow the link, check the Augmented Reality paragraph).

Facebook is abusive. It's time to divorce it

Re: "Did you get burgled while you were away"

No, because my wife might have had an FB profile, but she was not stupid enough to put her name on it, not did she put any readily-identifiable information in it. There were the photos, of course, but they were of us in the US, not of us in front of our house.

Finally, there's also the fact that we have a burglar alarm which is linked to an APSAD P3-level central (has the authority to call the police).

With the difference that this article is actually important.

My wife recently put an end to her FB page, which she had started against my counsel because she decided that she wanted a way to keep our friends informed while we were on our vacation to the US in 2014. It was useful for that, and the experiment should have ended there, but my wife continued using Facebook after that, despite my telling her that it was over.

She spent more and more time on it, until, in February this year, she told me that she had realized that FB was basically making her angry and annoyed with people. She had realized that she had started getting into the habit of angrily responding to stupid comments and that is when she decided that things had gone far enough and she closed down her profile.

Now she spends her time on Pinterest, where there is a wealth of interesting content. She's also taken the decision to never read the comments.

All in all, a useful experience. Now I am sure that FB will never enter our house again.

Sorry, Dave, I can't code that: AI's prejudice problem

Can we stop using the term AI please ?

This is not AI, this is machine learning. It is an algorythm that takes input data, correlates it with existing data sets and measures a response based on imposed criteria. Theoretically, you could design a Babbage computer to do the same thing.

AI, as in Artificial Intelligence, would take the input data, evaluate it to decide whether or not additional data was needed, go fetch any Personnel info available, muse a bit about how numbers could not actually measure a human being's worth, and put a note in the final evaluation saying "Check next semester's results", or something like that.

If it were truly intelligent, it might also request an interview with the teacher in order to better evaluate that person on an individual level. It might require watching videos of her class, in order to better evaluate her teaching skills in situ. In other words, an actual AI would evaluate her, not just a bunch of numbers.

We don't have AI. Stop using the word.

IBM: Remote working is great! ... For everyone except us

You'll still be spending billions on highways and rail because all those goods that we are told need to be sold have to be moved from A to B regardless of whether or not people are moving as well.

That said, I would love to be able to work from home and I don't see why we can't, given the availability of tools like Skype and environments like the Cloud. It's only the managers that are frustrated here because they can't call for useless hour-long meetings where nothing is actually decided except the date of the next meeting.

Of mice and migrations: How a rodent's DNA maps to architectural complexity

Brilliantly put

"The demand placed on IT is that we attempt to hack systems more complex than the genome of a mouse and do so blind, doing it randomly and with minimum expenditure.

The hope is you’ll obtain a hamster, but don’t be surprised if you get a rat that bits you in the apps."

I do think that that is a brilliant summary of the state of IT today.

'A-Team'-style tactics: Legit tool welded to kitchen sink to make off-the-shelf snoop kit

Had to happen someday, right ?

Professionals need network investigation tools, and proper investigation tools are just like surgeon's scalpels : they can cut off the cancer cells just as easily as they can cut through an artery.

It has long been said that if your encryption scheme is correct, it doesn't matter if everyone knows how it works because that knowledge gives you no leverage in discovering what was encrypted without having the keys that were used.

It would be nice if network security could get up to that level, but I don't think it can ever manage that and remain usable, easily manageable and remain fast.

Cybercrook spared jail after copping to FIFA video game mega-hack

Not complete idiots then

"The group began running the scam through a modified video game console before graduating to use of a cloud computing-based system"

Well, at last someone has found a way to make money in The Cloud !

Male escort forgot pregnancy protection, scores data protection instead

Re: "as part of the service"

The issue is : we don't know what "service" was requested.

She rented services of one "entertainer" for "a three night sojourn". This is not a one-time mistake. You'd think that she'd realize if or not he had a condom during that time and would be capable of putting a stop to things if she did not agree.

Pen-tester gets past Microsoft VB macro barriers

Perfect Microsoft bloatware

And one of them allows you to bypass security restrictions

Net neutrality blowback: Cities say no. Court says whoa. Trumpster blames Canada for not going slow

"Do not expect much thought or effort to be given to any other perspectives"

I think this phrase totally characterizes the Trump administration.

Apache OpenOffice: Not dead yet, you'll just have to wait until mid-May for mystery security fixes

Re: Impressive doubletalk

And completely wrong. Altering posted records without justifying oneself openly is very much being secretive. It's also being dishonest.

We see a lot of that nowadays, so I guess it's normal then.

BOFH: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back

Re: More murders than...

While there is often only one murder, there are certain episodes where people are dropping like flies.

Admittedly, the impact of the 4th, then 5th cadaver is all the greater when it's generally one or two bodies per episode.

Have you seen the list of counties though ?

If this series goes on much longer, they're going to have to edit a special atlas just for Midsomer.

Need the toilet? Wanna watch a video ad about erectile dysfunction?

Judge of quality ?

Screw the marble floors. My only yardstick when it comes to judging a company's true quality is its toilet paper.

I cannot count the number of fancy office areas I have been in where it all looks expensive and upper-class, but they have rolls of sandpaper waiting for you in the single-access rooms.

I have, on occasion, been pleasantly surprised by soft tissue of obviously upper quality, but it would seem that most companies above a certain size are perfectly content to have their employees sit on a rash all day long.

Of course, I cannot judge the quality of the tissue in the Manager's section - as a consultant I never get access to those areas. Somehow I doubt they'll be wiping with the same sandpaper as their underlings. Can't imagine why, but I just don't see it.

Who needs fuel ? One block of C4 should be enough to expel everything from the room.

Facebook decides fake news isn't crazy after all. It's now a real problem

99% authentic ?

Really ?

So all those dog/cat profiles are real animals posting in English ?

Wow, who'd a thunk it ?

Re: "The web used to be about freedom of expression. Remember those days?"

And the USA used to be about Freedom and Justice (for all). Who remembers those days ?

The real issue, I think, is that we adopted the Internet and used it in the same way we used to go to village squares. Everyone talked, some people said outrageous things, some people said intelligent things (allegedly). Those people who said things that were offensive could only offend those within earshot and, by the end of the week, much was forgotten that was not truly despicable.

We do the same on the Internet, but we still cannot grasp the fact that, years later, our posts can still be searched for and found, analyzed in or out of context and reacted upon. The Internet Village Square is a hall of echoes, and everyone can get offended about something at any point in time, even when the poster is no longer around to defend his point of view.

I don't think we can change the Internet on that point - we're just going to have to learn to live with it.

And maybe stop reflex-posting by engaging brain a bit more before hitting that keyboard.

TalkTalk HackHack DuoDuo PleadPlead GuiltyGuiltyGuiltyGuilty

So he controls his local data but forgets to control his blabbing about it

Of course, as the seller he does have to make it known that he is selling, and therein lies the rub. Maybe he didn't use TOR, maybe he posted on the wrong site, or maybe he just forgot to use private sessions or wipe his browser history.

In any case, this just goes to show that the Internet is a dangerous place when you are being searched for by the law - there's no telling what tracks you leave that will lead back to you and bust your ass.

Netgear says sorry four weeks after losing customer backups

"the outage lost all of his photographs"

Slowly but surely, people will start to get the message : cloud is NOT backup, despite all the assurances to the contrary.

The ONLY backup you can be sure of is the one you can hold in your hand and have tested to be sure.

If you're not storing your backups offline yourself, you're just the next victim waiting to learn how it happened.

Victory! The smell of skunkworks in your office in the morning

"so long as management actually does their job"

Management always does their job.

It's only that, in some cases, sometimes, that job is not managing but back-stabbing, under-the-rug sweeping, and whatever else comes to their enlightened mind. Until they get fired for it, of course, which doesn't happen often enough in some cases (Uber, looking squarely at you).

TVs are now tablet computers without a touchscreen

Re: All I want is the screen

Totally agree. A TV should just be the screen. You want something more ? Buy a piece of kit to attach to it and you're done.

It is ridiculous to imagine that an enormous screen is obsolete in any way. In fact, it should be ridiculous to have to ditch a TV screen for anything else than pure hardware failure.

Now, I've heard that the reason for all this integration that is busting our collective nuts and will do so for the foreseeable future is that Joe Public doesn't like to have to choose, he wants everything in the box. Funny that cars have lists of options and TVs cannot, but fine then, put all the external kit in the box with the screen, just don't solder it to the frame and force me to dump the screen when one piece gets out of whack.

What should be done is the screen should have a plug-in board at the rear. Kit to attach could be modules that slot in at any available point on the board. Kit that fails gets its module taken out, to be or not replaced when the owner chooses to do so. When Joe Public comes to buy a new TV, all available modules are attached. If/when a module fails, Joe Public can replace it when he wants.

Sure, the screen itself will one day become obsolete, but come on. We had 4/3 TVs for decades before that fancy Widescreen came along. Now we have HDTV screens and you want me to think that they're going to change in 5 years ? Nope. The failure of 3D is a good indicator that we'll have HDTV screens in 2050 yet. And even if everything has 3D support by that time, HDTV will still be the standard for non-3D broadcasts (which will exist until we have holographic TV at least).

So get cracking on modular frames. Then I'm ready to bet that we'll find out that Joe Public is quite happy with the idea of buying a frame and choosing the modules he wants - especially when he can add more any time.

WD pulls cash-strapped Toshiba to one side, whispers: 'All right, pal, how much you want?'

$17bn here, $20bn there . . .

At what point does one sit back and ask oneself "hmm, can anyone else really put umpteen billion on the table ? Can we not wait a bit for the cost to go down ?"

Billions have flown and burned in the past decade, and Microsoft alone has written off more money than a small country's GDP.

Take a step back and calm down, Golden Boys. You're driving the entire world into a wall and this is one case where betting on failure will not pay off because there will be nothing left to pay with.

Ex-NSA techies launch data governance tool for future algorithm-slavery

"presenting manipulated data as correct"

Why do you mention politics ? Oh, right . . .

Uber sued by ex-Lyft driver tormented by app maker's 'Hell' spyware

Re: I wonder if the likes of Uber really care about retention

Well if they don't know, they will soon.

I think that a turnover of 97% means a lot of people that say negative things about the company. If one unhappy customer drives away 10 potential ones, this is a tsunami of dissatisfaction in the making.

And I can't wait for that tsunami to hit Uber's shores.

Lyrebird steals your voice to make you say things you didn't – and we hate this future

"Our technology questions the validity of such evidence"

Don't think so. You're tech may be able to fool Joe Public (not a really difficult task), but proper scientists will carve the inconsistencies and aberrations of your pathetic attempts to fool them before they've even finished their morning coffee.

I read somewhere (a good while ago) that scientists had determined that the human voice has some form of signal that can be recognized whether or not the person has a cold, is sick or not. I am quite sure that, if science is capable of determining that unique quality in a person's voice, no amount of computer trickery will be able to pass that check.

Wait and see, I guess.

Uber cloaked its spying and all it got from Apple was a slap on the wrist

Re: RICO act

Fine, but let's be honest here : if you have developed functionality to specifically lie to law enforcement agents, well I take that as an open invitation to a SWAT team and legal shutdown.

And if I were an Evil Overlord, I very much guarantee that your days, nay your minutes, would be numbered as soon as I learned that you are actively trying to avoid the scrutiny of my enforcers.

(You can't) buy one now! The flying car makes its perennial return

In France, you have to fly a dozen or so times (not hours) a year at a rate of over €100 (depending on your club, apparently) per flight in order to validate that you can renew you license. If you don't have sufficient recorded flights, you cannot renew the license.

Don't how how much renewal costs though. Still, the whole process is an order of magnitude above just £150. And you're certified to fly an actual plane that can cross all of France in just a few hours. This joke of PR stunt will do all of 200km in the air, if that, at the cost of half a million and a pilot's license.

Anyone with a pilot's license will not even consider putting money in that stupidity even if they have it, is what I'm saying.

"The first commercial flying car in the world is now a fact,"

And they haven't started pre-production. Can anyone say lawsuit for wrongful advertising ?

"The easiest way to become a pilot" says the web page. Easiest way to become a smear on a wall, cliffside or tree trunk, I say - and that's when you manage to avoid embedding yourself in someone else's vehicle. At least you have to have a license to pilot - tends to keep things under control, what with annual pilot license fees in the thousands of euros and dozens of hours of actual flight time. At that expense level the dumbbells tend to drop out naturally.

Honestly, if I have an actual pilot license I wouldn't want to bother with this hybrid monstrosity. As a car its aerodynamics must be ridiculous, as a plane its range is ridiculous. You get the worst of both worlds and you pay large annual fees for the privilege.

I don't see this ever taking off. Real pilots will want a real plane to go places with, and rent a real car when they get there. Half a million bucks will get them plenty of travel destinations without the hassle this monstrosity must be.

We're spying on you for your own protection, says NSA, FBI

Government witnesses do not need to lie - they can just follow Sir Humphrey's example.

Script kiddies pwn 1000s of Windows boxes using leaked NSA hack tools

Yup. Looks like it's time to airgap. Permanently.

Q. Why is Baidu sharing its secret self-driving sauce? A. To help China corner the market

"exploiting cloud services as much as possible"

Well that's not a surprise these days, everyone is doing that and customer convenience comes second in the list of reasons why.

On the other hand, in this particular arena it is rather justified. It makes sense to have a central server be aware of where everyone is and what direction they are going - makes for better traffic flow regulation if nothing else. We'll just have to find out the hard way what other data they are skimming at the same time.

Drunk user blow-dried laptop after dog lifted its leg over the keyboard

Good on Jim

He was perfectly right to dump the whole sorry mess. Being a manager does not entitle you to making a godawful mess and then expecting everyone else to clean up after you - except that, obviously, that does tend to happen quite a lot.

In any case, a melted keyboard is certainly to be interpreted as a dead laptop. Even without the aroma and hygiene issue, it was most likely dead as a doorknob anyway.

Once I had a work laptop (a Thinkpad) which, due to a mistaken movement which I very much regretted, some Coke spilled onto the keyboard. I immediately turned over the laptop and tried to shake all the liquid out, finishing the job with tissues to dry everything as best I could. The laptop continued working for the rest of the evening, seemingly without trouble. I backed up everything important before shutting down, just in case. Turns out in case was the case, and the laptop never started up again. I got a replacement with an admonishment to keep the Coke away from the keyboard and that was that.

So yeah, dog pee all over, no attempt to dry it up with paper towels and applying hair dryer until the keyboard melts ? That thing was completely dead. No use wasting time on it and so much for that moron's budget and "important files".

Google's 'adblocker' is all about taking back control

Firefox, NoScript and uBlock Origin.

FTFY

What a To-Do! Microsoft snuffs out Wunderlist

"You have to wonder how a company like MS, that really did produce some of the best (and certainly popular) software around has turned into the total insane asylum it appears to be nowadays"

Easy : mountains and mountains of money that insulate MS from the cost of failure.

Any normal company that pours $200 million into something does so with the firm intent of recovering the cost and making money from the investment because its survival is at stake. Microsoft, on the other hand, has money coming in whatever happens, so the fact that it can afford to lose $200 million basically means it has no clear incentive to monetize said $200 million to survive.

Oh, of course, high-level managers are around implying that the investment had better bear fruit, but then they run off to pay attention to the next billion-dollar investment and everything is lost in the maelstrom of day-to-day business. Then, at some point later on, somebody stumbles on the file and takes a look, brings it to some high-level manglement's attention and gets told "eh, that thing ? Didn't you follow last week's management session ? It's out-of-date, no longer part of our new outlook. Get rid of it."

Because Microsoft can still afford to change outlook every week. Companies that fight for survival cannot - they have to stick to their guns because they can't afford new ones. Not until the investment has paid for itself, that is.