Posts by Pascal Monett

Microsoft's chaps slap Slack chat brats with yackety-yak app

"since before the great y2k hoax"

Agreed, Doctor Syntax. Y2K was absolutely not a hoax. I was just one of the thousands upon thousands of people who poured days and months of time over more than two years combing over code with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that business operations would continue after that day.

And I am certainly not the one who had the hardest customers or the most difficult code base to handle.

If Y2K was not a catastrophe it is because of that effort, the first ever made on such a scale.

I am proud to have been a tiny cog in that massive project that was definitely no hoax.

@JDX

Office and Windows are the only Microsoft products that have had any such influence. Nothing else that MS has put on the market has survived anywhere near half as long.

So yes, MS does indeed screw up everything it touches.

Facebook chokes off car insurance slurp because – get this – it has privacy concerns

Re: Dreadful idea anyway...

The logical endpoint of Admiral's idea is that if anyone doesn't have a "social media" profile* then they don't get car insurance....

Um, no. The logic, if you re-read the parts you missed in the article, is that first-time drivers can opt in to having their FB posts analyzed in the hope that their first-time premium will be lowered.

Nothing in this scheme has anything to do with established drivers because those already have a cast-iron reputation with the insurance companies (either good or bad, they have their reputation).

Leaks password, check. Leaks Wi-Fi password, check. Can be spoofed, check. Ding! We have an Internet of S**t winner

Let me get this straight

"Every time it starts and at regular intervals, the device sends an UDP message to the authentication server, containing device data, an ID number represented by the MAC address and a 36-character code. However, the cloud server does not verify the code, it trusts the device’s MAC address to perform the authentication."

They went through all that trouble to include a 36-character code generation program in the camera software, program the server app to recognize and accept it, then they decided not to use it ?

Could someone please explain the rationale behind that decision ?

"Here, we spent this much money on creating a somewhat secure dialogue between our server and our products, but nah, let's just accept the MAC address that can be spoofed and consider everything okay."

"Brilliant ! We can call it a day."

This is why IoT security is hopeless. Even when they make a half-hearted attempt at it, they just bungle it royally.

Five-a-day energy drink habit turned chap's eyes yellow, urine dark, caused anorexia

Far be it from me to throw the first rock

I've never been interested in any soft drinks except Coke (the original - with sugar please). Since I was fifteen I'd been drinking more than a 1.5 liter bottle per day. Right up until my 48th birthday I thought everything was fine and I'd never have to change - a carryover from teenage invincibility, I guess.

Except invincibility does not last. I did a blood exam that year and my doctor called me back a few weeks later to explain that I had to change my died because of cholesterol and elevated acid in the blood (that was the Coke). That was a mean surprise, not because I had to abandon Coke, bacon and pork in general, but because I'd never had anything wrong before in my life. My blood tests at 35 were perfect - I still have the results.

But here I am, 50, and avoiding pork and Coke like the plague. My blood tests are better, but I need to lose some more weight.

This just to serve as a cautionary tale. 33 years of not drinking water will create issues.

Drink more water, kids.

Dark matter? More like diet matter: Super-light axions may solve universe's mass riddle

"Topological quantum fluctuations in quantum chromodynamics"

Inverse the polarity now !

Um, sorry, for a minute there I thought I was reading an excerpt from a ST:TNG episode.

Quest celebrates first day of independence from Dell with layoffs

Yeah but that's how you spin it.

NetApp gives Data Fabric a little nip, tuck and some filler

"think digital botox"

Funny that, it's what comes to mind each time I see an Android or Iphone thingy.

And the way the expressions in users' faces kind of melts away to a fixed, stony gaze just reinforces that impression.

Capita STILL hasn't delivered usable Army recruitment IT system

"I want to see it next year"

And I want to win the lottery next week.

Let's see which of us gets theirs first. Any bets ?

ESMA urges companies to disclose potential Brexit impact

"two thirds do not know how the change will affect their balance sheets"

That, in itself, is not entirely surprising. The future is difficult to predict.

What they should know, however, is how the change can affect them. Banks should definitely have previsions for that.

Except that, these days, banks are just money-counters. They have lost the ability to forecast anything because they are blinded by the short-term, just like politicians.

Microsoft ends OEM sales of Windows 7 Pro and Windows 8.1

It has, and it will continue to do so because 90% of the user base is hopelessly borged into the Windows environment.

But that is changing. Not because Linux is getting better (it is, constantly), but because the user base is shifting. Today's younguns are growing up with smartphones grafted to their hands, and Microsoft is nowhere in sight there. They will enter the job market with next to zero influence from Microsoft, and when they occupy the IT managing spots, they will throw that shit out and get something familiar that just works - which will be some version of Linux.

They'll just need to hire some bearded guy to get it running, but they will not care about that. Microsoft is adapting to the future, and the future is Open Source. Linux is its prophet.

Arch Linux: In a world of polish, DIY never felt so good

How odd

I really see no reason for this article other than to unveil Yet Another Linux Distro.

Touting the expertise needed as a bonus for a Linux distro ? Since when was that necessary, or even useful ?

I like Linux, always have. I like the independence, the stability, the solid architecture. But if Linux is only a few percentage points in the desktop market it is because of how hard it is to grasp to the basic Windows user. Some distros are attempting to bridge that difficulty and bring Linux to the forefront of market share, and they are doing a good job of it.

But please, let's not start panicking. Linux will always have distros that true experts will be the only ones to use, while basic users will have other distros to use. That is the beauty of this OS - there is a version for everyone.

Hm, is that a minefield? Let me just throw my magic bomb-sniffing spinach over there

"using plants as chemical sensors"

I do believe they had great use for that on Giedi Prime. Sounds exactly like the kind of thing that universe would use all the time.

Chalk up one more step to our bold, dystopian future.

Stiff upper lips and sun glasses: the Chancellor bets on Brexit feeling

"the UK is already a technology world leader"

Of course it is ! That's why all major international technology firms, like Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, etc were created in the UK and then went international. And that will be immensely helped by draconian immigration measures.

Oh wait . .

Which job is AI going to eat next? Step forward, CCTV operators

One could eventually hope that these surveillance powers (need to re-watch that cracking documentary called Person Of Interest) will be used as they should, meaning to detect hoodie-wearing individuals loitering near a store for a while, then darting in and out and running away. For me, that is suspicious behavior. Actually, running away from a store is suspicious in itself, hoodie or not.

The reality of this world, and the continued demonstration that police forces everywhere abuse the tools at their disposal with depressing regularity, means that these surveillance abilities will be used to allow a cop to follow his wife while she shops, along with anyone she appears to talk to. Alternately, some cops will certainly prefer to go crowd-surfing, picking some good-looking girl and following her just for visual gratification. In short, the system will mostly be used for anything except catching actual suspects - unless a draconian usage surveillance system is put in place around it. A system that would, for example, require a request form including a picture of the person to watch - form which would need approval in the system before the cop would be able to launch surveillance on that picture and that one only. During the procedure, other individuals could be tagged and additional requests made, each one having to await approval before being followed.

But, of course, all that would create unacceptable delays for the one time in the year when the system will actually be used to follow a would-be terrorist, so no usage surveillance will ever be implemented.

When I retire I will stay at home and get everything delivered.

Windows 10 market share stalls after free upgrade offer ends

"Windows 10's impressive rise"

The only thing that is impressive about Windows 1 0 is how it did not reach 70% market share in the first six months of its release.

Every single version of Windows has been trumpeted as the fastest-selling version ever (except Vista*, which was the mongrel dog right from the start).

This free (for a year) version has not even managed to capture a quarter of the total market and that is being touted as a success ? It took SIX MONTHS for it to take over XP, for Pete's sake.

There is nothing about Windows 1 0 that can be touted as a success. Not its bloody interface, not its shameful, ham-fisted-down-our-throats, borderline malware-type distribution, and certainly not its "rise".

* no, I haven't forgotten ME. Nobody mentions ME. It is being erased from all family pictures as we speak and will, in time, be erased from all web pages as well.

NASA's asteroid orbit calculator spots a hot rock zipping past

@ Vikingforties

More like "puny carbon-based life form killer".

Planet Earth is not going to be bothered by anything less than a stellar body barreling through and sucking it up or head-on smashing into it. A wandering black hole sucking it up would obviously destroy it without trace. The Sun, in a few billion years when it enters its Red Giant phase, just might engulf it in its atmosphere and melt it down. Otherwise, Planet Earth laughs at your puny asteroids. It will shrug off any impact, wait a few million years and spawn another bunch of life forms.

Current carbon-based life forms are much, much less resilient. And the threats do not come only from space, as this article points out.

Of course, space-based threats are not negligible either.

How fun, eh ?

Good to know that we're improving our prediction speed

I perfectly agree that a five day notice is much better than a "oh my God there it is !" notice, and I fully support any and all efforts to improve our species' awareness of any and all threats to this planet we call home.

In a totally different register (heh), buzzed ? It passes outside the orbit of the Moon and you call that buzzed ? Call me when it passes at an altitude of 60,000 brontosauri. THAT's buzzed.

F-35 'sovereign data gateway' will stop US reading pilots' personal data? Yeah right

"sovereign data gateway"

Sovereign ?

I believe Merkel has a good idea of just how important that is to the US Government.

Iceland's Pirate Party wins 10 seats, will need unlikely coalition to rule

I totally agree with you. Democracy can only exist when citizens are directly engaged by what is happening around them.

The current situation is that a government exists in the stratosphere of the country, where ordinary citizens have no access because "national security" or some other excuse for secret negotiations. To save appearances, citizens are fed the fairy tale of elections and that their vote matters when, in truth, everything is arranged to ensure that citizens vote the way a very small group intend them to. The distancing of the citizenry from the meetings where actual, important decisions are being made ensures that the ruling class can go about their business without answering to much anybody that isn't in the know.

There should be no secrecy in a truly democratic regime. Everything the President says should be on YouTube, streamed live and saved for free access by anyone who wishes to see it.

It would throw a humongous monkey wrench in the current backstabbing diplomatic affairs and private enterprise lobbying, but it would do a world of good as far as actual Democracy is concerned.

Obviously it will never happen. Wayyy too much money/influence at stake.

Boffins one step closer to solving nanoscale computer challenge

It's just as relevant as stating that hyperspace travel is possible but hyperdrives that would allow it are not commercially available yet.

In other words, we're one step closer to the solution, but no one can tell how many steps remain for us to actually get there.

Although I must admit that I feel confident that memristors will be available before hyperdrives.

Obey Google, web-masters, or it will say you can't be trusted

Re: Conflicted emotions

Damn right. I had buried Do No Evil a long time ago and now I'm looking at the grave and feeling quite annoyed actually. Couldn't evil companies just stay evil and be done with it ?

Okay, I will console myself by thinking that Google has a vested interest in this scheme since . . ummm . . . scammers don't use Google Ads. Yeah, that must be it.

What a relief, I almost thought I was going to regret something.

Schneider Electric plugs gaping hole in industrial control kit

What has caused problems is the failure of those building industrial control systems to realise how quickly hackers work to develop exploits.

I see your point and agree with you fully. I would just like to append to this by saying that it was not a failure on the industrial control systems maker's part to not foresee the impact of the Internet on the security of their components.

The Internet has revolutionized our entire society in less time than it takes to reach voting age. Every part of our society needs to adapt, and this is just a normal consequence of things.

"nothing specific to cybersecurity was inherently built within them"

Systems built 20 years ago did not need cybersecurity because there was no such thing.

Industrial equipment takes time to update, no surprise there.

Coming to an SSL library near you? AI learns how to craft crude crypto all by itself

"Although impressive, the cryptographic algorithms aren’t yet practical"

Um, are we sure it's all that impressive ? It specifically says that "the magic" is "locked in a black box". How can you say it's impressive if you can't take a gander to find out ?

Look, I'm sure there are very intelligent people working on this, but even if they do devise a successful method to train an AI on the wonders of encryption, what good will it do if they cannot extract a procedure to implement the AI encryption scheme in the boring old rest of the world ?

In other news, I've just been given a pamphlet from a guy calling himself a time-traveling freedom fighter. The pamphlet is dated 2065 and it says that some Lord Abadi is dead and now is the time to strike against Dictator Andersen and his army of robots.

Geohot gone geocold on georides: Comma.ai self-driving car kit cancelled

"Would much rather [be] building amazing tech than dealing with regulators and lawyers"

If you are serious about "building amazing tech" then you should be fully aware of the requirements of security and the notion of responsibility when selling to the general public.

You should have approached the NHTSA yourself with a description of the project and requested a meeting where you could defend the project and get information on how to proceed to have it approved.

Instead you act like a teenager whose pet concert project got a harsh question from his parents and you shut everything down.

Well I'm glad you shut it down. If you are that thin-skinned when confronted with a minor administrative issue, then I shudder to think of how you would react when faced with hundreds of actually angry people.

Continue playing in your garage, at least there your lack of maturity will be limited to only hurting the people in your own house.

Internet of S**t things claims another scalp: DNS DDoS smashes StarHub

Oh, right, cars. Perfect comparison. The wild west of IoT is totally comparable to vehicles which are regulated, drivers licenses which are only given with government authorization, and let's not forget police which have radars and helicopters and can even just stop you to randomly control your papers.

I do agree that the day that IoT is as heavily controlled and regulated as vehicles, such DDoS attacks will undoubtedly be a thing of the past.

"by compromised kit owned by its customers"

It's called karma, bitch.

Serves them bloody right.

Possible reprieve for the venerable A-10 Warthog

"keep the A-10 flying indefinitely"

That's what happens when you design properly and create a great product - shit has a hard time time replacing truly useful things.

Kudos to the designers of that great airplane.

And so we enter day seven of King's College London major IT outage

Definitely agree. Unfortunately, that also means you need to stagger the acquisitions, which means planning ahead which is becoming something of an exotic science these days.

When I decided to go for a home NAS, I first spent four months buying one 3TB every month, to make as sure as I could that not all disks would be from the same batch. On the last month, I bought the 4th disk and the Synology station that would make them all useful.

I do not see that most management types would be able to have that much patience.

Spoiler alert: We'll bet boffins still haven't spotted aliens

The controversy doesn't matter

I agree that the guy is most likely wrong, for whatever reason we'll likely never hear of in mainstream news because nobody will be able to insert "aliens" in the headline, but it doesn't really matter.

That the guy published something that is very likely to be totally debunked is not a surprise either. He probably needs to garner some attention to show his department exists in order to secure some funding for next year. This is as good an opportunity as any other, and if debunked he has a gold-plated reason to say "see, I need more money for better equipment".

Whatever the reason why this study will be debunked is going to be just one more pebble on the beach of knowledge that Science is creating. The information will be consigned to History and future scientists will benefit from it either way.

That's the beauty of Science : even inaccuracy makes it stronger.

Existing security standards are fine for IoT gizmos in electrical grids

"existing security standards are adequate, for now"

They always are. Right up until the moment they get hauled into a dark alley and beaten to a pulp. That's when we find out they were not sufficient.

So this guy is basically saying we need to wait until something blows up before worrying. He may be right, he should be an expert, so good.

Could we have a demonstration of how right he is ? Security through obscurity and all that.

Accountant falls for sexy Nigerian email scammer, gives her £150k he cheated out of pal

Re: "Can't have been a very good one"

Yeah, because all accountants worth anything only drive expensive European cars, live in luxurious mansions and have dozens of employees at hand to boss around.

It has to be true, I saw Law & Order !

DARPA hands space junk spotting scope to US Air Force

"objects the size of a softball"

So apparently it costs $150 million to detect a softball 36,000 km away.

I wonder how much it will cost to detect objects the size of a bolt ? Because there are a lot more of those up there, and they can be quite dangerous as well. Although it is possible they are less common in geostationary orbit, I don't know.

Is Google using YouTube to put one over on Samsung?

Coincidence ?

With the billions of dollars that are implied in this market, I doubt very much that coincidence has anything to do with it.

At this level, we are talking board meetings, highly paid specialists and very intelligent people that are also likely to be ruthless. Samsung has very much dropped the ball, and such people are not likely to miss out on the opportunity.

When there's blood in the water, the sudden appearance of a shark is hardly a coincidence.

Smoking hole found on Mars where Schiaparelli lander, er, 'landed'

Well it is hell-bent on not breaking its 100% efficiency record.

Tesla's big news today:
sudo killall -9 Autopilot

Re: "losing out because the lawyers got scared"

Well Death does have a tendency to be scary.

The Internet of Things is 'dangerous' but UK.gov won't ride to the rescue

"research what successes have already been achieved"

Very interesting. Could you provide a list, perhaps ? If you can find any, that is ?

I'm sure the one or two won't be too taxing for an email.

Microsoft tries, fails to crush 'gender bias' lawsuit brought by its own women engineers

What ? Didn't SatNad say they should wait to be noticed in due time ?

And not only are they complaining, but they're bringing in a lawyer. Way to demonstrate how little faith you have in His Clairvoyant Vision And Impartial Justice. </sarcasm>

Then again, I would hardly be surprised if they were right.

Think virtual reality is just about games? Think again, friend

"if you are just creating the same experience [..] it makes no sense"

Finally a voice of sanity in an ocean of madness.

We've seen what a disaster 3D has become - the first time you see a 3D film you may be amazed, the 10th you're bored out of your mind. Why ? Because all they do at the moment is tack 3D cheap thrills onto a 2D story - nobody is making 3D mean something.

This is finally someone who is looking through the right end of the looking glass and searching for something that can be done with the technology, not just how to shoehorn it into yet another stupid film.

I now have hope that future entertainment will actually be different in some ways, instead of being a bunch of gimmicks bolted onto an archaic frame. Majestic, to be sure, but archaic nonetheless.

Then again, the steering wheel isn't getting any younger, now is it ?

You work so hard on coding improvements... and it's all undone by a buggy component

DevSecOps ? We're really going there ?

If you have to create a special lingo for including security into your development process, I think you're just highlighting the problem right there.

There should be no DevSecOps. It should be just plain old DevOps, because security shouldn't be anything special to the process - it should be right in the middle of the process. At all times.

Google has unleashed Factivism to smite the untruthy

Interesting approach, just one problem

It's the Presidential Elections. Since when have facts ever mattered during this period ?

Cisco president: One 'hiccup' and 'boom' – AWS is 'gone'

I take that as a rather good sign, overall

If the only thing to worry about is company financials, then the technical side is looking rather good.

Of course, I'm not saying there is no problem. If Amazon folds, there will be major chaos in many companies and that will translate into losing money - probably a lot of money.

On the other hand, with that risk in mind, if Cloudageddon does happen, I think there will be a linup of companies at Amazon's door with checkbook in hand to tide things over until stability can be found again - or at least until they can extract their data and move to (gulp) Azure.

After all, from a business standpoint, what is worse : upping the IT cost by a factor of two or three, or closing shop ?

The only thing I see that is really a risk here is that, if the financials fail, it will likely be sudden. I'm not sure that Accounting is all that Agile.

Euro politicians are hyping the terror threat to steal your privacy

Public opinion will swing

The whole problem with this issue is that, as I have already said, the politicians will always cater to public whim, and if the public is unaware, the politician will drum up the interest - but only if he is paid for it (by lobbying, of course).

The issue with security in general, and encryption in particular, is that the public is completely apathetic at this point in time, and the lobbyists are working hard to keep it that way - meaning that politicians have no incentive to step up to the plate.

It is going to take a series of hardships directly impacting masses of people for "the masses" to wake up and demand a change in sufficient numbers to override the current lobby efforts of companies for whom security is a direct hit to their current slurp policy.

A robot kitchen? Whatever. Are you stupid enough to fall for this?

Re: How do they deal with this little problem?

They don't and they never will.

This whole thing is a scam and the CEO is going to disappear with all the money as soon as he's met his personal target of however many millions he wants to bilk.

The company started three weeks ago, and it give it nine more before it folds. Any more than that, and the scam risks becoming too blatant even for the gullible.

Email security: We CAN fix the tech, but what about the humans?

Educating is not a target, it's a journey.

A never-ending one.

Roboats hunt 'mines' and 'submarines' on Ex Unmanned Warrior

Re: "The bad guys will have 1000's of automated sub killers"

Given that the only countries in the world that are conducting these trials happen to be the ones with the biggest overall military budget, I think that the "bad guys" are going to have a bit of trouble fielding thousands of automated anythings.

Unless we're talking about Russia or China, in which case, maybe.

But North Korea ain't gonna be automating anything any time soon, that's or sure.

Linus Torvalds says ARM just doesn't look like beating Intel

Re: "probably to avoid litigation with IBM"

Um, if I remember correctly, there was no chance of litigation since IBM did not bother to protect anything via copyright. It was a truly open market.

That's why IBM attempted a market takeover with the PS/2 when it realized how the market was shifting - except that it didn't work for various reasons, but mainly because there was no point, technically speaking.

Avoiding litigation with IBM concerning the PS/2 was definitely a concern, though, which is why the PS/2 is dead and the PC lives on.

Boffins eschew silicon to build tiniest-ever transistor, just 1nm long

in which electrons as “heavier” and therefore able to be controlled ion shorter gates

I'm not a scientist, but I am somehow pretty sure that that phrase makes no sense.

Stickers emerge as EU's weapon against dud IoT security

Stickers OK, education, not so much

I am warming to the idea that the layperson, to use the OA's qualifier, is not the person to explain security to. If an entire generation of people could not learn to set the time on their VCRs (slightly exaggerated, I know), it is unreasonable to expect their offspring to understand the stakes in our security-lacking world of today.

Security needs a major shift into companies baking the security into their products and making it easy to use despite the user's cluelessness. Not an easy task given the lack of security awareness in companies at this point in time, but one that will become feasible after enough finger-pointing and IoT-based DDoS attacks.

So we're basically going towards a more security-friendly world one DDoS at a time.