Posts by Pascal Monett 19252 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
There is a high-speed standard that works wonderfully well and has done so for years. It can handle up to Gbps speeds, which should be largely enough for TV resolutions for quite a while longer. It is already ubiquitous and cheap.
So can we do away with all this stupid connector issues and just plonk in Ethernet already ?
Oh, right, it doesn't do DRM. Damn.
But I thought Windows 1 0 had finally reached 25% market share ?
Shouldn't that mean Edge should be at 25% market share as well ? Or am I supposed to believe that 90% of Windows 1 0 users are tripping over themselves to install Chrome/Firefox/whatever and NOT use the vaunted Microsoft solution ?
I've said this before, but I can't help repeating myself :
Not long ago, wife and I were at a friends' house for dinner. Good time all around, but one point really woke me up on this Cortana/Siri business.
At one point in the conversation, my friend said the word "Sarah", because we were talking about someone called Sarah. At that point, his phone next to him (because he is part of those people who can't live without their phone within arm's reach) piped up, asking if Sarah needed to be called.
We all had a good laugh about that, but it started me thinking. What if you're in a heated argument with your jealous (with reason) other, and you start swearing to high Heaven that you're not in relation with "Sarah" anymore, then your phone pipes up "Do you wish to call Sarah ?" ?
Go ahead and explain that it's not the same one. See how well that works.
I think this whole connected malarky is going to bite more than one arse before people chill about how "cool" those pseudo AI-bots are.
Every time the word "smart" has been associated to something, in the end it's all about sending as much personal info about you to whoever owns the design of the object. Smartphone apps often try to control everything about the phone to send to the app developer, smart TVs send your viewing data back to the TV maker, and now smart cities want to know where you are all the time.
I don't care what "better" ads you have in store for me. Stop spying on my life !
Let it not be forgotten that Intel has lovingly baked DRM into said 7th gen chips - for the ease of use and reliability that all users crave, right ?
Not compatible with Win 7 ? Not a problem here - I'm in the process of transitioning to Linux anyway.
And without DRM if at all possible.
I don't know if you are aware, but there is this thing about security going on. Mainly, it means that, nowadays, banks can give you a one-time transaction code, so when you buy something online, you're not actually giving out your credit card details.
I know this is very difficult to comprehend for a US citizen, but elsewhere in the world, there actually are banks that are devoting resources to ensure proper transaction security.
Call me when the US has caught up with current technology.
Just give me an option to chuck a few dollars to sites I like. I don't mind using my VISA, and I certainly prefer they know that I have given them the dough.
That way, when I log in, they can say "oh, here's our sponsor coming to see us, get rid of those ads on his page".
If I pay money I generally see no benefit in being anonymous to those who get it.
Well, Coldfusion has apparently gone from Version 11 to Version 2016.
That is an immense help when trying to determine version history. When will vendors decide upon a version numbering scheme and bloody stick to it ?
Is that a Marketing idea ? Shoot them, please.
And that means the technology is maturing. That's supposed to be a Good Thing (TM). It means that standards are easier to put in place, which in turn allows for more ubiquitous usage of said tech.
Let's put it this way : when gravity modulators can be had for a dime a dozen, it will be sad for all those rockets we won't need anymore, but we'll be regretting them in space.
It's a bit ironic. Progress has transformed our PCs from towering, heat-belching monsters to cool, near-silent and immensely more powerful tools, only to give us handheld scorchers that sometimes even catch fire.
I really do hope that we'll get room-temperature superconductors some day. It will be a blessing in more ways than one.
Can only agree. Trusting one's backups to a startup would be the worst possible business continuity choice one can make.
Then again, it's probably only slightly worse than the backup choices most companies seem to make these days. It might even actually work - until they fold, that is. Or until something screws up and they lose data.
After all, all clouds have lost data up to today. Some only a bit, some have lost everything. Do you really want to roll those dice ?
Since Windows 1 0, Microsoft has added to the malware attack vector list with QR codes in BSODs, stuffed up their own update system, stuffed thousands upon thousands of users' PCs with flaky updates, and now this.
Congratulations, SatNad, you're really pulling all the stops out to keep the hackers happy !
Win 1 0 : nowhere on my PCs ever.
"multiple keys, one held by each of the branches of government"
My dear sir, do you realize just how daft such a proposition is from a security point of view ? Do you really think that one key per branch of government is not going to leak from at least one of them, by stupidity, oversight, forgetfulness or any combination thereof, in less time than a hacker needs to code a Hello World hack ?
Looks like it's a dream, all right. Go to the US, work your ass off for a dozen years or more, and get chopped like so much dead wood.
Thank goodness there are all those unions to keep employers in check . . oh wait, silly me, unions have been emasculated under Regan. Nothing is defending the worker any more. It's just capitalism all the way down.
Is IBM becoming the next HP ?
Or the change imposed by a close fly-by of Earth could send it careening too close to the Sun and get it ejected from the solar system entirely.
Don't know, not an astronomer, but theoretically it should be possible.
The much more likely outcome is that it will just smack into our home planet someday. Maybe over the ocean, so as not to harm anyone, but within sight of some camera or satellite, so we can get high-resolution footing out of the explosion. That might focus some minds on the issue before it is too late.
And we're supposed to believe that all banks have low-security, 3rd-party routers with default passwords connected directly to the Internet that are responsible for all this.
Well grab the popcorn because if some brilliant hackers have finally found a way to milk the millions in serial attacks, then saying "it ain't us" won't do for long.
Security is a journey, and part of that journey is going to be SWIFT upping its game to not accept transfers from insufficiently-secured banks. Have encrypted keys that are regularly changed and so on and so forth. Do something.
Because right now money leak this is starting to look like the Las Vegas Lottery counter - always climbing.
What it will destroy is your mile-high revenue generated by the difference between slave wages and the obscene prices you sell your stuff at.
Right now, the little people - you know, those serfs you expect to walk upon - could do with a little less bad news and a bit more local funding for stuff that actually needs to get done. You whine about destroying Europe, but you never hear "no" from your banker, now do you ?
What is destroying the economy of this world is the unjust pooling of money in the hands of the few who already have way more than enough, and their subsequent influence on law and political policy that ensures the status quo is not changed.
Pay your taxes - they fund roads, hospitals and schools and I doubt very much that that will destroy Europe.
If that is the case, isn't that "fog" also made of baryonic matter ?
If not, it would mean that dark matter is undetectable but can act on electromagnetic emissions.
Between quantum stuff and this, science is seriously starting to err into dark magic territory.
Side note : a million degrees ? Yikes.
Well I have a root string, a website-dependant string and I tack on the year I created the account.
So, if we say that my root is "golf" (duh, it isn't), then my password for El Reg could be golfEL2016 if I had created my account this year.
I have a password manager as well, I use it for sites which I prefer having extended security on. Sites like these, with only forum activity, are not sites which I feel need to have a 32-bit salted cipher.
And I will not buy that chip on that basis. I am certain they will muck it up, it will be hijacked by hackers, used as a malware insertion point, prevent me from viewing my legitimate content locally, and so on and so forth.
DRM is not only evil, it is inherently stupid because it never considers all the use cases and defaults to "NO" if there is a doubt - meaning people can be cheated from their own content.
My house is my castle. What I do in it is nobody's business but mine, and I will not condone surveillance imposed by anyone, especially not Hollywood & Co.
This DRM malarky never ceases to annoy me to no end. I buy my films, and I have to put up with imposed trailers (that are laughable five years later) and those bloody FBI warnings I shouldn't even see since I BOUGHT THE DAMN DISK.
So I buy my content, thank you very much, and then I rip the hell out of it, put it on my NAS and watch it the way I want to see it.
They can stuff their DRM where the sun don't shine.
"how many sysadmins have found rogue Wi-Fi access points in the businesses they work for?"
Not comparable issues in my mind. Bringing in a Wi-Fi thingy and hooking it in to the network is easy enough - they're cheap, rather easy to set up and also easy to keep inconspicuous. If the network admin is not whitelisting connected equipment, then anything goes anyway.
Climbing up to the ceiling to replace a light is not inconspicuous, and the hardware is less easy to get (won't stop a determined attacker, though). Obviously, once in place it'll be a devil to notice, but it still falls under whitelist control (if that is in place).
With a minimum of attention, network access shouldn't be possible, which would reduce the attack to DoS-levels - still a nuisance, but not really a security issue.
I avoid it like the plague, but in all honesty it is rather useful in keeping all that stupidity in its own little pen.
There was a time when it would be my mailbox getting spammed with chain letters, so-called inspiring nonsense, bullshit warnings, stupid permutations on urban myths and all that moronic shite, and I would have to wade through it all and delete, delete, delete. Now it's all on Facebook, which I can just never go to.
So thanks for that, I guess.
"2,000 requests per second in a single TLS connection. In our experiment, we were lucky to detect the first collision after only 25 minutes (220.1 requests)"
2,000 requests per second is 120,000 per minute, meaning 3 million in 25 minutes.
Could someone explain what 220.1 requests is supposed to be ?
Because if they managed to get their collision in only 220 requests, or even 220 100 requests, then this thing is more dangerous than they say.
And that is what needs to change before Apple (or anyone else) can stop cutting prices even more.
China is on its way to wealth similar to ours. They are fast-tracking everything we did before : pollution, work conditions, the works. Check out a film about our Industrial Revolution if you wish to learn more - in those days workers who got their hands crushed, mangled or cut off by unsafe machinery were just fired, no compensation.
We did those things. Now Chinese workers are experiencing the same. They will rise against it as well. Then it will be India's turn, then whatever else comes next.
Ultimately, as in everything international, it is up to the local population to decide if they accept a given set of conditions or not. We can tell them about what we think they should do, but only they can decide to actually go about doing it.
I'm all for Chinese workers to tell Apple & Co to stuff it and lock prices, but I know that then, Apple & Co will just take their business elsewhere (yay Capitalism!), so the workers will end up out of a job instead of having kept the little they had.
What I really wish to know is how exactly is Apple going about getting its cost cuts. Is it calling them up and saying "How much further can you diminish costs next quarter ?", or is it - more likely I guess - "Cut costs by 5% next quarter or we move to India" ?
It's the latter I would find disgusting - but not surprising.
They see everything going through their pipes, they can do what they will with it and you have no idea what they are up to, nor much of a recourse if you don't like it.
The least they can do is provide proper network security and functionality, and doing so for the customer means keeping the house in order.
The fact that an Australian ISP has government-issued surveillance equipment is not surprising these days, even if it is a bit disappointing. I'm sure it is just one of the many - although I'd be interested in a per-country comparison of how many ISPs do have such government surveillance on-premise. Maybe that could be one point of a Freedom Index chart ?
Is that some local specialty ? When you're summoned to court, aren't you (or your lawyer) generally supposed to be there ?
Daft as it sounds to me, I note that the general rule of self-representation has been respected (ie you lose). The phoning it in must really have tickled the judge's funny bone (in a "Ah so that's what you think of my court ?" way).
Personally, I wouldn't wait for the guy to "hand over" the relevant papers justifying how much he sold. With behavior like that, I'd send in the plods and have them tear the place apart to bring back every slip of proof they can get. I wouldn't trust that guy not to doctor the evidence (not that he seems smart enough to do it right in the first place).
But maybe that's the thing - the judge is handing him another length of rope, waiting to see just how he'll try to hang himself with it. Hmm, yup, sounds much more satisfactory in the long run.
And that there is specifically the problem : confusing having a drink with getting smashed.
For fuck's sake, if you can't have a drink without getting full-blown tanked then by all means, don't drink. It is already socially frowned upon to be unable to speak coherently, piss one's pants and act like a bloody fool. That point is already a given, as is lying in a drunken stupor on the sidewalk. You're flogging a dead horse, is what I'm saying.
Responsible adults are talking about having a drink, with friends, in a pleasant, cultivated atmosphere of détente and cordiality.
Take your raving drunkenness elsewhere. You are not welcome here.
No safe level of smoking either. And now we are being told that bacon sammies are even worse.
Shall we just lay down and die now ? Oh, silly me, of course not. That would deprive government of years of tax income. No, we should obviously live our lives in religious ascetism and die the day of our retirement - that way Gov gets all the revenue and pays none of the costs.
Well you can forget that idea. We're humans, not robots, and all the shit we take daily means we need to smoke and drink to not effing snap and murder the a-hole next door on a weekly basis.
Maybe if you eased up on the scare announcements we'd not need to drink so much ?
Bah, just kidding. We'd drink anyway.
From the results of the study, it seems the participants went "so that's all it is ?" and went off to have a real one twice as often.
In other words, it was a training simulator that built their confidence that they could deal with it.
Well done, I guess.
In other news : teenagers still hormonally attracted to sex despite puritans' best effort.
