Posts by Pascal Monett

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.

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

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.

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.

Re: "It's about time governments got involved and forced the market open."

But . . . but . . the market auto-corrects itself !

Doesn't it ?

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.

Command line coffee machine: Hacker shuns app so he can stay at the keyboard for longer

And people still ask my why I don't want any IoT.

<sigh>

Yahoo! spymasters! patent! biometric! online! ad! tracking! IRL!

Re: go ahead and trac drivers

I do fully expect someone to sue because offended by the dildo ad he or somebody else got tracked into.

You know it's gonna happen.

NIST: People have given up on cybersecurity – it's too much hassle

"this overwhelming sense of not being able to keep up"

Not a surprise.

I started my computer experience in 1986, with MS-DOS 1.0. Folders didn't exist until 2.1.

I have had time to ease into each new functionality, learn its interest and how it works. I worked with Windows 1.0 and every iteration after until 7.

At the same time, I witnessed the rise of Internet connectivity and, in parallel, malware and spam. Learning how to manage mail, and avoid virus traps is an ongoing process.

I truly pity those who have to learn it all in one go today.

Is Apple's software getting worse or what?

Re: What are people expecting it to do?

Behave consistently between versions ?

OK Google, Alexa, why can't I choose my own safe, er, wake word?

Re: And if one's hands are busy or it's not in an easy to reach location?

Right. Because we can't live our lives any more if our digital assistants cannot assist us at all times.

WALL-E is a documentary after all - and I'm not talking about plant life.

Re: "they cased the place [..] and trained themselves"

I know Sean Connery has made some interesting films on that subject, but I think you're giving thieves waayy too much credit.

Most likely scenario when they get in and trip the alarm is they run like hell away from the place and set their sights on a "softer" targer - one without an alarm system.

Because thieves are not in it for the thrill, they just want easy money without hassle. It's a business, and you don't take uneccessary risks. Why bother with a well-protected house when there are so many that are so much easier to get into ?

Windows 10 market share fell in September

"Windows 10 has done very well at home"

Well duh. Malware is also doing very well at home, and that's exactly how MS got its system installed.

It takes a company with an IT department and dedicated staff to keep MS in check these days.

Stripped of its galaxy, this black hole is wandering naked in the cosmos

What is its speed ?

Can we measure that ?

Because every simulation I have made in the Universe Simulator tells me that, when stellar objects get ejected from their orbits, they get ejected hard.

If this thing lost a whole galaxy, it must be going at mind-boggling speeds.

Internet handover is go-go-go! ICANN to take IANA from US govt

"it will be the internet's users [..] who will ultimately decide"

Nope, wrong. It's going to be a very small group of people who have the habit of making arbitrary decisions without any regard for transparency, disclosure or even their own procedures who will decide.

And when you tell them just how wrong their decision is, they just look at you as if you are crazy and declare that the decision is right because they decide it is. And the absolutely unbelievable thing is that they are still not in jail for contempt of the Human race.

What could possibly go wrong ?

Blighty's telly, radio watchdog Ofcom does a swear

The watershed [..] still has wide support among those surveyed

An interesting bit of information, given that a fair proportion of parents I know take absolutely no care to put their children to bed before that time.

So basically, most people agree that swearing on the telly is bad before a given time, then let their kids up late enough so that they can hear it anyway.

<sigh>

Ladies in tech, have you considered not letting us know you're female?

Re: Get someone else to strip the personal information you don't want to see

That would be my first step if I had 50 employees and an HR department.

Unfortunately, I'm working with one associate and one employee who are on other projects and mostly not present, so that is not really an option.

Re: I'm a dude, he's a dude, she's a dude

The point you're not getting, Tim, is that saying "all they need to do" is exactly like saying "if she got raped it's her fault for being dressed like that".

Women should not need to do anything to get a job other than present their CV and competence, just like guys.

And it's up to us guys to make it so that happens, not up to women to pretend to be guys to get a job.

Re: You can say its ok because he apologized...

He didn't say it was ok, he just acknowledged that the article's author realized what a dipwad he had been.

I had the same burning rage to post a scathing comment on how women shouldn't have to hide their gender in any way to get a job and that was not what equality was about. I also deflated somewhat when I read his apology in the last part.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and here I think someone has realized that he may have been talking with the best of intentions, but he blew it in a major way.

The point now is to get men to focus on what matters : the competence of the person their are interviewing, not the presence or absence of curves just below the collar line.

Coincidentally, I am currently conducting interviews for a training position for a customer. The job is to train people in Windows and MS Office. My criteria for getting an interview is : you have experience training people in Windows and Office. I have received dozens of CVs from people who do not have that experience on their CV. I don't care which gender they are, they're not getting the job. I try to avoid looking at the personal details until I have gone through the experience section in order to avoid bias. When I have an opinion on the CV, then I check who it is and where they live (because someone on another continent won't be available to start mid-October - and yes, this has happened more than once).

Termination fees for terminated people now against the law

It is a sad thing

when basic human decency has to be enforced by law.

A telecoms contract is not a debt, it is a service. If the person is dead, it is blindingly obvious that the service can no longer be used and the contract is null and void as of the date of death.

But basic human decency and Capitalism are two entirely different things.

User couldn't open documents or turn on PC, still asked for reference as IT expert

Either that, or she had other, very supporting arguments.

Re: her fault for being impatient

Um, she did what she was told to do.

If all my users did what they were told, my life would be easier because all I would have to do would be take care in how I told them to do something. Instead, like everyone here I suppose, I tell them to do one thing, they do something entirely different, then they come back and complain that what I told them didn't work.

Human rights orgs take Five Eyes nations to court

Re: In other news

If you have nothing to hide . . .

So I publicly declare that I prefer black stockings and high heels. And as for cell phone pics, please - I want my pics in 1980 x 1600 on a 42" widescreen.

Now, let's talk about curious coincidences in timing . . .