Posts by Pascal Monett 19394 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Surely you do not think that the International Red Cross is as bad as this ?
The Wikimedia Foundation is not a charity - it is a money-hoovering operation that poses as a charity. This article just reveals some of the squalor that the WMF is desperately trying to hide, but the truth is that when we hear that the WMF has a ten year reserve and keeps asking for more money, well that is already a sure sign that a charity it is not.
I give money to the Red Cross - whatever evils lay within, they still save lives. The WMF will never see a cent from me because I refuse to fund money-grubbing liars and thieves.
That might be true, but as far as big rocks in space are concerned, all of humanity is playing peek-a-boo like a toddler : can't see it = not there. That is not good and it likely means that we will wake up to this threat only when half a continent has been erased from existence.
That will be a very expensive wake-up call and I approve any measure that will keep the funding going on this subject.
Most people don't. Most new users don't even know what a file type is. Oh, they recognize a PDF, all right - by the icon. Just like the icon will tell them if it's an Excel file or whatever else they use on a daily basis.
Hiding the extension has been a Microsoft default since Windows 98, if I'm not mistaken, and that abysmally stupid decision has given malware writers years of fun and years more are to come.
It is good to know that there is actually a viable market for this kind of product.
I am glad that it can help the elderly and, by extension, the more fragile part of the human population.
Now excuse me while I still value my personal privacy more and still do not consider the Cloud as a reliable, or safe part of my life.
Would you care to provide a list of Linux servers and PCs that have been hacked; pwned and encrypted from their users/owners ?
Do you really think that list is, in any way, going to even approach just 0.01% of Windows PCs that have been zombified ?
Compared to Windows -any version- Linux is fucking Alcatraz. Deal with it.
Posting the pic was indeed stupid, but coherent.
Removing the pic after it had attained the global Internet conscience is an order of magnitude more stupid because it demonstrates just how out of touch those responsible for this whole mess are. It shows that they have no idea of what the Streisand effect is, of what Facebook/Twitter/Instagram are or how people use them, nor indeed of how the Internet never forgets.
Now, instead of Ginni being forever referred to as the CEO who cuts underlings' expenses from a helicopter, she will now be referred to as the CEO who tried and failed to hide her public use of a helicopter whilst cutting underlings' expenses.
Some people can learn from the past, some must have the lessons bashed repeatedly in their face to get through their thick skulls. Seems like those who made this dismally stupid decision are of the latter group.
I can imagine a hacker being interested in being able to do so. There is, however, a big difference between hacking some PC on the Internet and hacking into a car - namely responsibility.
Not saying that those WannaCry guys having made a virus that stopped hospitals from working is a good thing, but they risk less than if they actively took over a car and caused mayhem. If a hacker does try that, he's looking at a lot more police effort (and international cooperation) to be found and a certain - lengthy - jail sentence for manslaughter, with all the consequences that entails.
Not the same risk territory, I think.
As for sleepwalking into disaster - we've arrived there already.
Bollocks.
The removal of geo-blocking will allow people who want to follow something to subscribe to it (and pay their dues) whatever the origin country is.
Are you trying to make me believe that you prefer the hassle of translating and localizing what people are ready to sign up for without ? Since when does that happen in a "capitalist" society ?
The Internet is here, now. Stop trying to keep us in the last millennium with your profoundly stupid "zones" that only serve to force people to buy movies from their own zone or pirate their optical readers because you willingly delay publication following arbitrary rules that have no more meaning today.
Who cares where a subscriber is as long as he is paying his subscription ?
Once again, thank God for the EU. It has its faults, but they are regularly outweighed by consumer-protecting acts like this one.
Yup, I remember 911. None of the planes were hijacked by laptop. It is possible to take control of a plane via laptop, but that was done by a professional security tester - somehow I doubt terrorists will bother when a simple knife is enough to give them control of a plane.
"The inception and creation of bitcoin is a bit of a mystery, and that should raise your suspicion of it."
Bitcoin is open source. If you have suspicions concerning how it works, you can check the code.
Personally my problem with Bitcoin is not its creation or even how it works, it has much more to do with how little I trust private exchanges to manage wallets properly and professionally.
Yes, objectively they are.
However, those being systems built on a strong foundation that includes security from the get-go, I seriously doubt that they will be submitted to the same havoc Windows systems have been in the past.
Of course, there is no defense against a user who knows the root password and blindly clicks YES on everything . . .
How can we possibly answer that question when we have no idea of the processing ability of R2 ? Or of any other droid, for that matter ?
C3PO is capable of recognizing a face in the same timeframe a human can, something that our sprawling computer installations are just starting to become able to do and certainly not within the confines of a humanoid robot frame for which facial recognition is but a tiny percentage of its duties.
I disapprove of these throwaway comparisons that acknowledge that some sci-fi universe has robots and other sci-fi tech, then proceeds to draw computing comparisons that assume the same amount of processing power we have.
Even Star Trek's ship computer has far greater processing power than we have today, because it can understand when its crew is not actually giving it orders. Siri still has a ways to go on that front.
Here we were, idly postulating about how evil our governments could become, when it was actually private companies that were working on perfecting the most invasive day-to-day violation of our privacy.
Sure, the NSA has the ability to look into me, but I will never be greeted at a shop by someone I don't know who will ask me specific questions on how my family is going. Google, on the other hand, will one day have the means to prompt the sales clerk to ask if I like whatever it was that I bought yesterday, or if I'm still using whatever it is I bought last month.
That is a whole new level of surveillance and I am certain that I will like that even less.
That is no reason to leave the front door open.
Who am I kidding ? Where IoT is concerned, the front door is not only open, it is absent. The back door has no lock, the garage door is blocked open and the windows have no panes. The roof might be missing as well.
Now is not the time to find excuses for how threats might get in.
When Uber started up, it was not immediately clear what laws Uber was not respecting.
If Uber had been respectful and paid its taxes, it just might have gotten away with it, but the condescending, then insulting attitude of its management just incensed the wrong people (along with the seemingly endless list of in-house shenanigans), and now the law is very much being enforced.
On the other hand, there does need to be a bit of breathing space for innovations to appear and prove their usefulness. If the law cracked immediately down on everything that wasn't crystal clear, many things we have today would not exist (i.e. aspartame - which may or may not have been a good thing).
On the one hand, I can imagine that it may be good to educate an AI about egregiously violating neutral text conventions, as far as intellectual exercises go, but on the other hand I'm not sure I'm comfortable with an AI that knows about egregiously violating anything.
But of course it does, as long as we're talking about it's intellectual property.
Just like Hollywood is hell-bent on having its copyrights respected even though it built itself on stealing ideas when it started up, back in the days before the USA existed.
Business as usual.
"We have mirroring capability, which means things are backed up instantly. We also have daily backup on top of mirroring. The issue was that the bug affected the mirroring system as well. Hence, we had to go back to daily backups. These types of database bugs are not like computer crashes. They build up over time. So we had to go back to a time where the database was free of this bug."
Translation : We thought we had ALL the safeguards, but it's complicated.
And it very likely is complicated. Hopefully, this experience will have taught them to root out that bug for the future. If no data was lost and nothing was breached, then there's no real harm done, right ? We can chalk it up to a learning experience and go from there.
One cannot complain that the letter of the law is being respected and that is a good thing.
It is nonetheless quite useful to have some legal framework around the usage of drones in order to not have them wreak havoc when it comes to flight hazards, respect of privacy and so on.
So, although this is not the solution, a solution still has to be found.
Back to the grindstone, people.
That has already been tried and it failed. The only good thing about that experience is that now most on-line shops give you an OS option when you hunt for a new PC - but that option is most often Windows, Mac or No OS - you'll have to put Linux on there yourself.
There are a few online vendors that actually offer laptops and desktops with Linux, but then you generally don't get to choose the distro you want.
So the pressure is not really really on the vendors - you can get a PC without Windows if you really want one. The pressure is on the buyers and they're not buying Linux. Even for free.
To become Google. And Apple. Goopple ?
MS always has been late to the party, and has only ever caught up because of its oodles of moolah that it throws around in mostly doomed endeavors. Of late, MS has noticed that its entrenched money makers, Office and Windows, are at risk of being swept aside by the combined threat of Google Docs and mobile phones.
Because Google is making money every second just by people searching for stuff, MS has frantically put together Bing, at ginormous cost, hoping to cash in on that particular kind of cow. It's not working very well because Google has years more experience which no amount of money can catch up to.
Then MS tried attacking the mobile phone sector in its usual ham-fisted way by trying to buy into the market, but as usual again it made bad choices from day 1 and that effort is now stillborn.
MS simultaneously lobbed tankerloads of money to get into the tablet arena that Apple had opened, but are far from recovering the costs on that front as well, although I've heard that the Surface 3 ain't that shabby. For that, of course, MS had to have a touch-enabled interface. Fair enough, but then, in true MS fashion, it decided that ALL Windows should be touch-enabled. Cue the fiasco that is the Windows 1 0 interface, because if there is one thing that MS will never truly understand, it is that different machines need different interfaces.
Finally, the Store is the last thing that MS will let go of because it sees how much money Apple makes on doing next to nothing and it wants its share of that sweet pie as well. Legacy Windows mean that MS is a while away from having a perfectly walled garden, but that is their end game : that every click, every interaction, every purchase bring in the money that MS fears Google and Apple are taking away with their better ideas implemented way before MS woke up to smell the coffee.
I think I found a bit more information on that remark thanks to Stephen Colbert. I should have guessed that this goes deeper than I thought when I read that line.
I note with great interest that The Donald has taken to preemptively justify his actions. Here he is warning everyone that he has the right to share data with Russia in an open conference.
A far cry from his behavior a month ago, where he would have just gone and done it, then when being called out for it, treated everyone like shit and ignored them.
Might The Donald be able to learn, or is there a dangerously exhausted intern in there with the sole job of continuously warning one carrot-topped nitwit that he "might want to word that differently" ? If the latter, I hope that that poor person has excellent medical coverage, 'cause it'll be needed !
Bollocks to that. Give me one example where this rule was properly applied - just one.
I know the guy has a terrist beard and I can imagine that he is a lot more suspicious-looking to paranoid racists because, gasp he's not Caucasian, but those elements on their own do not legally constitute proof of terrist intent - yet.
So good on him for standing up for his rights because this circus has been going on for long enough already. I hope that he gets that law struck from the books.
So that means that all operating systems have a "virtual on-screen keyboard" ?
I just checked and it is indicated that Linux has a few that are downloadable, but it does not state that there is any installed by default. I did find that Ubuntu has one by default, so there may well be other distros that have one as well, but apparently it is not certain.
Windows, of course, is the golden goose for this attack since the virtual keyboard is integrated into the kernel and there are very few ways outside of editing the Registry which will not disable it - and you won't go doing that without intent.
