Posts by Pascal Monett

It's nuts but 'shared' is still shorthand for 'worthless'

Re: All well and good

I think that the basis of this article's comment on education is that school is a place where things are learned by rote. From my experience, I do not think that we are doing nearly enough to teach children to think for themselves. What we are doing is cramming a large pile of data concerning various domains down student's throats and hoping that all that data will sift through the brains and somehow result in intelligent people.

There are times when it is good to test knowledge in isolation. If everyone just becomes a terminal for a Google search, we're just moving the issue to another slot.

I do believe we need to modify the scholarship curriculum to make our young, upcoming adults have a better grasp on the realities of life in general, and business in particular. One thing I strongly believe we should put some emphasis on is the notion of patience. It takes time to get good at anything, and when I look at people around me, at all ages I see people wanting results immediately and, if none are forthcoming, they just drop it and move to something else. That is not an attitude that brings results, it is an attitude that brings frustration and worse when people are stuck in a situation they cannot escape.

The first thing that needs to be done is re-educate our youth to understand that Dancing With The Stars, The Voice and other shenanigans are not a path to success. It takes years to become proficient in any domain, anything that makes you think otherwise is a lie. Once we have re-established that basic truth, we can get them back on grinding their intelligence because they will understand that they have no other choice if they wish to succeed.

Then we can start working on accepting difference, and the right to disagree. Hammering that home will inescapably create people who are able to exchange and thus learn from one another in a much more efficient manner and that will benefit all of us in the long term.

Finally, we need to instil the notion of the right to fail. Nobody succeeds on their first try, therefor one should not make fun of someone who fails. Failure is the best learning process, because the result is unavoidable. Teaching children to not be ashamed of failure will help them concentrate on why they failed instead of just brooding over the fact that they didn't succeed, which will speed up solving the problem and turning failure into success.

Learning how to Google search is something students pick up on their own, no problem there. Learning how to interact with people better than a caveman is something some people never learn. Let's start there and work our way up.

Gov to take axe to big IT contracts soon, will hand chunks to SMEs

I understand now. God save us from a viciously efficient government indeed. The blundering, drunken, corrupt powerfests of governments we have now are bad enough.

"No one knows exactly how much money is spent on IT across the public sectors"

And how exactly is that justified ? It's the PUBLIC sector. Amounts should be known to the cent.

This is really just one sign of how badly this whole thing is managed.

Champagne supernova in the sky: Shockwaves seen breaking star

@MT Field

Rule of thumb : if it's outside our solar system and not a galaxy, it's generally an artists impression.

Spotting a wave from 1 billion light-years away

Well that's it for today's high score. Nobody's going to do better than that.

Well done Kepler & team !

Azure's wobbly day as three services glitch around the world

That is a stain that is going to take a loooong time to fade.

And rightly so.

But Microsoft doesn't need to actively forget maintenance to sabotage things. That happens pretty regularly regardless.

Apple Macs, iPhones, iPads, Watches, TVs can be hijacked by evil Wi-Fi, PDFs – update now

Reality check

Because you think the Feds are going to trouble themselves with updating that phone ?

That said, if they do manage to update the phone before cracking it, I'll stop making fun of government firewall administrators ever again.

Promise.

Re: perhaps some people just have a really really slow internet connection

Sir, you are apparently under the impression that some people choose to not update their Androids. Although I am sure that there are people who do so, I do believe that there is a fair amount of people who do not have the choice because their phone is locked by their carrier.

So what you are actually saying is "perhaps some carriers should take the finger out and get patching".

PC World's cloudy backup failed when exposed to ransomware

"years of work and important documents"

If your stuff is important, then the onus is on you to make sure it is available. Need to send your Tax Returns ? You photocopy the document, or scan it, and send the original. The copy is to be properly filed so you can find it back if necessary. It is that mechanism that people just completely forget about when they sit in front of a keyboard. The Cloud is NOT a replacement for that procedure, it is an additional precaution. One that is only as good as the service offered.

Until this kind of thing happens. The lesson, unfortunately, can be very painful.

As for PC World's so-called "backup", it never failed - it was never useful in the first place. That is also something she should have checked once in a while. The dates of the latest backup. If she had done so, she would have noticed that PC World does not offer a backup service, but a copy service. That might have tipped her off sooner that she needed a proper backup solution.

Swedish sysadmins reach for the hex key, reassemble services after weekend DDoS

"the weekend attackers were more coordinated"

So they're perfecting their procedures and getting better at being a bloody nuisance.

Bad news for the rest of us.

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove dies, aged 79

Salutations

Mr. Grove is basically responsible for a number of joys - and frustrations - in my life. Not to mention the hours wasted in leisure. And the fact that he was a major force in creating my entire career - without him I'd have probably ended up an accountant.

So thank you, Mr Grove. Thanks to you I was able to make my life something I appreciate very much.

One in five PCs will be a tablet with detachable keyboard by 2020

Re: To have and have not

"NSA will get a cut in funding"

Nope, won't happen. Ever.

At least not until there's been a revolution - and even then, no guarantee.

Buhtrap hacks whack Russian bank chaps; phish bait works great

Re: "privileges on their PC's"

That happens because most companies do not take the time to properly audit their procedures and do not set the proper policies.

Not to mention that most companies rarely have personnel competent enough to do the job in the first place.

Banks, however, do not have the luxury of such an excuse. Not having PCs locked down and proper policies in place in simply shoddy IT practice for financial institutions in general. It's not like they don't have the money for it.

Steve Jobs, MS Office, Israel, and a basic feature Microsoft took 13 years to install

There are many reasons. The real reason is a dark story of whoopie cushion, rigged mike and a bottle of Soy Sauce made to look like Worcester Sauce.

Or so I've heard.

Allegedly.

Attackers packing malware into PowerShell

Re: "most computers in an enterprise setting, even smbs, won't execute macros"

Dear God in Heaven, do I wish that were true.

Security in SMBs is only as good as the technical know-how of the CEO. If he fancies himself a programmer, or if one of his buddies showed him a Word macro that reveals the picture of a flying pig and he found that funny, you can kiss that notion adieu.

Who watches over your data – and how do you know it won't go AWOL?

The first rule of security procedures

No one talks about security procedures.

F-me! Couchbase yoinks $30m in yet another fundraising round

"should be our last round prior to an IPO"

What I thought when I read "a series-F funding round".

The "F" stands for "you're fucked if you don't".

Millions menaced as ransomware-smuggling ads pollute top websites

"accidentally pushing out booby-trapped adverts via ad networks"

Yeah. Accidentally. Sure.

They are accidentally absolutely not virus-checking the ads they push. They are accidentally not vetting the ads they accept because they accidentally didn't want anything to do with the notion called "responsibility" and made the whole ad chain deliberately obfuscated so as to be able to say, at each step, "I had no idea !"

Accidentally my ass. They don't give a rats ass, that's what. Well I'm actually happy about all this because it means bad headlines and damaged reputations and we all know that that means risk to the ever-so-important bottom line. And only when it hits there do companies decide that Something Must Be Done.

Looks like decision time is getting closer.

Watch six tiny robo-ants weighing 100g in total pull a 1,769-kg family car

"they form into long chains and synchronize their footsteps"

Wuh ? How ? Is there a tiny ant with a tinier whip to keep time ?

Seriously though, I can't wrap my head around that one. How on Earth do dozens of ants in a chain synchronize their footsteps ? They can't talk, so . . . how did Mother Nature evolve a method of transmitting time signals to and by creatures with a brain the size of a grain of sand ?

<mind blown>

Yahoo! kills! search! APIs!, games! and! Astrology! site!

Well they didn't say a billion unique visitors a day.

Feds tell court: Apple 'deliberately raised technological barriers' to thwart iPhone warrant

@Charles 9

"how do you arrest someone who's protected by sovereignty?"

Thank you for revealing that you work for the NSA.

Because only the NSA thinks about arresting people in other countries.

The rest of the world writes an extradition request - because the "suspect" is PROTECTED BY SOVEREIGNTY. Way to demonstrate that you forgot to engage your brain when posting. Which explains how you could think of having his phone when he's in another country.

You must live in Colorado. Go on smoking, it's apparently good stuff.

It does seem rather obvious that, had it been Mexicans (or any other non-white group), it most likely wouldn't have stayed in the news so long.

On the other hand, the Masters must keep the plebs scared, so that's a reason to keep it on the air.

Re: Single case Today --- ?? tomorrow...

Absolutely. And saying things like "the order does not compel it to unlock other iPhones" as if it is a valid point for Apple to comply is just insulting our intelligence.

I find it hilarious that the FBI is accusing Apple of "raising barriers deliberately" to "thwart the law".

It's called progress, you asshole. And it's the law that will have to adapt, because encryption ain't going away any more.

Maybe if you hadn't been so greedy about data collection, maybe if you'd thought about it a bit and only took what you could use, maybe then this world would still be surfing in blissful ignorance.

But you didn't do that. You acted like a hog at a buffet and now you're pissed that there's a guard at the door that won't let you in any more.

Well tough if up, Suit Man. Go back to tailing actual suspects, like you're supposed to. Maybe some criminals will escape you, for a while, but there will be a lot less innocents that will be harassed, and that is a Good Thing (tm).

Obama puts down his encrypted phone long enough to tell us: Knock it off with the encryption

And to think that this is the guy who got a Nobel Peace Prize simply for being elected.

He has finally shown what he actually is : a puppet in the hands of the true power in America - the men who have the money.

Those men are white, old and paranoid. They are the 1%ers who need to keep the money flowing (towards them), and the only way they to do that is to keep people scared and under control.

Breaking encryption is not going to help against terrorists. The CIA knew all about the men who committed the atrocities of 9/11 and they did nothing to stop it. Had they had access to encrypted data, nothing would have changed.

No, breaking encryption is just another feather in the cap of the fascists who are now running this once great country. One more means of tapping into the lives of people in order to break the ones who risk being a nuisance - the people who want to stand up for their rights.

But that is the one great thing that America still is - a country that can. I'm hoping that, when it comes to doing, the solution will not be too bloody.

I beg you, please don't back up that secret directory full of photos!

I have to say I'm a bit frustrated here

All those years of IT support for mates and some acquaintances and I have never, ever found anything even remotely racy on any of them.

And I know none of them have ever had anything as technical as an external disk.

I must have very boring friends.

Microsoft adds 'non-security updates' to security patches

Re: Reverse class action lawsuit

Sorry ?

You mean for Microsoft to sue all its customers ?

Nope, I'm not really with you on that one.

I think the real point is that, with Vista and 8, Microsoft learned the hard way that users who have the choice risk exercising that choice. And that risk cost Microsoft money.

Knowing that Microsoft, despite all its money, still doesn't actually own the government, and knowing that goon squads are generally frowned on, Microsoft could not actually, physically force everyone to go to Windows 1 0. So how could Microsoft eliminate the risk ?

It's like micropayments in the pseudo "free"-to-play games. When everything is based on micropayments, you end up paying. Well Microsoft took that idea and turned it into micro-updates. Every little update is now an opportunity to shovel another way of getting the user to install Windows 1 0. And with the price point at $0, most users should logically make the jump. Except they're not, not in massive numbers anyway.

What really surprises me is that Microsoft is still so candid about it in its KB articles. I suppose that, at one point, there will be a security patch where Microsoft just says "Fuck it, Windows 1 0 is the security patch".

I'm already watching this from the side lines. Windows Update is disabled on my machine, so I can learn about the surprises like this beforehand instead of blindly walking into it and having to clean up after the fact.

How a Brexit could stop UK biz and Europe swapping personal data

But that is the beauty of the wording

"Sir, an ISIS faction is planning an attack on us !"

"Oh yeah ? Are you sure ?"

"Yes sir, we have intercepts that Youssouf Benterrorist is in contact with several other elements for an upcoming action:"

"And are you sure it is him that is implicated ?"

"Well, the intercepts . ."

"But are you sure of the validity of the intercepts ?"

"Ah, I see. No sir, not 100%"

"Good man. Go for global collection, then."

"Right away, sir."

Web servers should give browsers a leg-up, say MIT boffins

"Those dependencies are why pages load so slow"

Those dependencies are why I use NoScript and UBlock Origin.

I rarely have page loading issues.

Behold, Microsoft SQL Server on Linux – and a firm screw-you to Oracle

Re: "No one does demos on anything that isn’t ironclad,"

If there is anything that History has taught us techies, it is that no demo is ironclad.

I'm fairly sure that every single person posting in Reg forums has been in the situation where they wanted to show a perfectly functional product, but something went wrong and the product chose that exact time to bug.

I know it has happened to me.

But hey, another sweeping declaration from a Gartner guy. That's what they specialize in after all.

Microsoft's Technet article on telemetry

Microsoft has a rather complete article on Windows 1 0 telemetry here.

In the second paragraph, it is stated that "You can configure telemetry at the lowest level for your edition of Windows" - note "lowest level" and not "off".

It does say in the following paragraphs that you can turn off the services that do the phoning home, but that deprives you of the services instead of just stopping the telemetry, so I'd say that saying you can't turn off all telemetry is rather true.

Heartless hackers break into Florida cancer clinic network – 2.2 million records exposed

Well would you look at that

Seems our daily quota has been reached for the day.

Time for a cold one, then.

Ad-slinger Opera adds ad-blocking tech to its browser

History shows that young, sleek and efficient add-ons are never chosen for deals with any platform.

It's always the bloated, way-past-their-prime, drowning-in-useless-gimmicks add-ons that are preferred.

With the added advantage of having sold out to Google, APB was a shoe-in for the contract. Nothing else had a chance.

Data protection: Don't be an emotional knee jerk. When it comes to the law, RTFM

The NSA knows all about your safe list.

And it is barely amused.

Cisco says CLI becoming interface of last resort

I doubt the CLI will ever disappear

The CLI is indispensable as a surgical tool to quickly and efficiently cut through the layers of GUI obfuscation and deal with the issue at hand.

But I do think that all the virtualization and hypervisor-level management means that it is likely to be less used in the future.

"Interface of last resort" is a perfectly apt name. Sometimes the CLI is the last line of defence.

Airbus' Mars plane precursor survives pressure test

Re: How do you deploy them at Mars?

On Mars, you'll apparently be expecting two pilots to do the job. That is feasible.

The biggest question for the moment is indeed how to get the plane to Mars. 1800 pounds of mass is within the limits of what a rocket can lift into orbit, but the bigger issue is the wingspan. 84 feet translates to around 25 meters, half of that is thus around 12 meters (taking the width of the fuselage into account). I don't have any figures on the length of the fuselage, but the available drawings seem to indicate that one wing is longer than the fuselage itself, so I'm taking wing length as principal constraint.

I don't think a rocket can house a 12-meter structure at its top safely. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it would be better to have that plane as blueprints for the trip, and have it built locally with on-site materials.

Which, obviously, requires that the materials be available on Mars, which is probably not going to happen anytime this century, but hey, next century's colony will have a plane.

That's still cool.

UK Ministry of Justice secure email system browns out

Indeed, one wonders how the system is monitored. Is the admin just getting to his desk in the morning and waiting for calls to tell him there's a problem ?

Or is it more like the admin has been screaming for additional capacity for the past year, and now that the whole things is falling under its own weight, somebody is grudgingly accepting to sign the check ?

Because replacing the whole system sounds like they seriously underestimated the workload initially and, now that they have the usage figures, they realize that the existing infrastructure was hopelessly lacking in scaling ability, thus the wholesale replacement.

Whatever the reason, this is just another example of non-existent foresight and total lack of planning.

Approved: Master plan to end US gov control of internet's highest level

The Internet is made to route around blockage

If ICANN becomes a blocking point, I am certain the Internet WILL find a way around it.

That is why I find all this posturing totally ridiculous. ICANN does not own the Internet, nor does it have the power to impose anything on people that do not work for it and do not need it to attain their goals. The only reason ICANN still has any sort of position in the matter is imply due to the professionalism of all the rest of the Internet which, for some reason that is beyond me, accept this farce of an organisation as the lesser of two evils (the other being what, I wonder ?).

I can perfectly envisage the day that DNS operators will simply get together and say "okay, enough is enough - from now on WE decide what we're doing and we're setting up an independent committee to handle that".

And there is eff all ICANN, or anybody else for that matter, will be able to do about it.

Don't fear PC-pocalypse, Chromebooks, two-in-ones 'will save us'

"Industry experts greatly exaggerated the death of the PC,"

But of course, the PC is going to live on forever. Except it will no longer be a heavy tower requiring a desk to make use of it, it will be a sleek, inch-thick screen you can hold on your lap wherever you are. In the future it might be an ocular implant, with the CPU being powered by oxygen in your blood. Still a PC though.

So we are all still driving horse carriages then, except that there are no more actual horses and the carriage has a top and a steering wheel and, instead of smelling of horse dung, it smells of gas.

But still totally a horse carriage.

Microsoft has crafted a switch OS on Debian Linux. Repeat, a switch OS on Debian Linux

WinPhone 10 will miss the public.

By at least a farthing.

Beware the E E E effect

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

It is the Microsoft Way.

Granted, extinguishing Open Source is pretty much out of the picture, but Microsoft will stop at nothing to pervert what it touches.

So let's accept, but verify, ok ?

Go No! Google cyber-brain bests top-ranked human in ancient game

Congratulations to the team of DeepMind

I am thrilled that a machine was able to outwit the best human player in one of the hardest games with predetermined rules. It is truly an achievement in data analysis.

Now I'd like to see that same machine, without any modifications whatsoever, play a game of whist. Or poker. Or try shooting a 9mm at a firing range. Then take it fishing and see how many it can catch in an hour. Then ask it if it can remember one of the coders that left ten years ago and recognize his face in less than a second. From a photo it had never seen before. Taken in questionable lighting.

Without any additions to its code.

If it can learn to do all these things with what it already knows, then we might actually be progressing towards AI.

If not, it is just a great achievement in specialized data analysis.

Knackered Euro server turns Panasonic smart TVs into dumb TVs

TVs are supposed to be dumb

I am thrilled to see this complete failure of an inane system. There should be no such thing as a "smart" TV.

A TV is a portal, nothing more. What is on its screen, however, can very well be controlled by an external item connected to it. Thus, instead of trying to put all the hardware into the TV set, which carries risk of increased obsolescence and uncorrectable bugs, keep the TV the dumb screen it's supposed to be, and put the "smart" into the peripherals where they can be maintained, replaced or junked as need be, and will not impact the function of other peripherals if that one doesn't work.

But of course, doing so means the risk of losing valuable marketing data to people who want the screen and not the phoning home, so it looks like we'll all just have to wait for the vendors to lose money on this shite technology before realizing that nobody wants it implemented like that.

Home Ebola testing with a Tricorder? There's an app for that

This might prove scientifically valuable

Massive data points concerning an entire aspect of our biology that we have next to no knowledge of. I think this is guaranteed to bring some insights into how our individual biome is changed by outside factors, and at what point that change becomes dangerous for us.

For science, this can only be a good thing. If the information is handled responsibly, of course.

And that's the major stumbling block.

What are you doing to spot a breach?

Re:phishers are now sending pixel-perfect copy of legitimate emails and faking senders

That they are, but they are still including links to URLs that have nothing to do with the purported origin of the mail.

If I get a mail posing as being from my bank, asking me to click a link to validate something or another, and said link goes to http:\\mybank.com.cn, well sorry, but that is a spoof. When somebody sends me an attachment and the return address domain does not correspond to the domain it should come from, I know it's a scam. And they may be making pixel-perfect images of legitimate mails, but they're still mangling the language.

Of course, one has to pay attention to those things.

Don't snoop on staff via wearables, says Dutch privacy agency

100 is generous

I deal with a number of small companies of less than 10 people and I can assure you that some sort of ID is used in every case to identify who wrote what and when.

Besides, you are already stamped, indexed, filed and numbered since you were born, and moreso when you get paid a salary. Do you think your local Tax Office is using your picture to know who you are ?

Boffins bust biometrics with inkjet printer

Of course there is an urgent need to secure things properly

The need would have been less urgent if the whole thing had been properly researched beforehand, instead of being rushed through with marketing people having more say than the engineers.

If the research had been correctly conducted, it would have concluded that using fingerprints was not a 100% secure solution, and the whole thing would never have made it to the market.

Instead, we got teams who had to rush to put the thing on the market because nobody stopped to think if it actually answered the issue properly, so now somebody has to find a way to make a 3-legged horse gallop.

The whole things is just a waste of time and resources, but hey, terrism.

Is there anything left to ask Bill Gates? (Other than gissus a million?)

I cannot agree with this

"Eventually the software will understand what you should pay attention to by knowing the context and learning about your preferences."

It is wrong to expect software to "learn our preferences" in order to manage our lives. Doing so means expecting human intelligence to abandon the concept of oversight, responsibility and planning, and just handing the decision-making to somebody's code.

Instead, humans should learn to manage their stuff properly, to not frantically dive for the phone when they are already in face-to-face conversation with another human, and to LEAVE THE BLOODY THING ALONE when driving. That last point will, of course, be solved by self-driving cars - which means self-driving cars will become a reality given the massive amount of morons that simply cannot let go of their sexting tool.

Strike! European Patent Office staff vote in their thousands for walkout

Wrong man for a hard job

Getting any group of people used to progress by seniority to accept that now they'll have to accept to have their progress impeded by actual performance is not an easy task. It requires patience, diplomacy, tact, strength but not bull-headedness, and a whole lot of scheming plus the ability to compromise.

Apparently, Battistelli has none of those qualities. He went with the bulldozer, and now everything is a shambles.

Somebody will have to get the message across, though.

Microsoft has made SQL Server for Linux. Repeat, Microsoft has made SQL Server 2016 for Linux

The arrival ?

For a new spec only announced in 2015 and the spec only published last month ?

Call me when it has arrived, we'll talk about then.