Posts by Pascal Monett

Northrop wins $55bn contract for next-gen bomber – as America says bye-bye to B-52

Re: some asshole in Iraq

Obviously, were he an American tapping into Russian drones, he'd be a hero instead.

It's official: Tor's .onion domains must be kept off the public internet

Yes, but the NSA needs to watch everything you do to ensure that your privacy is safeguarded !

Otherwise the terrorists will win !

We're getting kick-ass at seeing through walls using just Wi-Fi – MIT

Yeah, but that only told you if someone was there or not.

This will allow you to determine exactly where to release the knockout gas so you can plunder with impunity.

Get James Bond in here: 13 million account passwords plundered from 000webhost

Ah, PR disaster handling

Cyprus-headquartered 000webhost admitted: "A hacker used an exploit in old PHP version to upload some files, gaining access to our systems. Although the whole database has been compromised, we are mostly concerned about the leaked client information.

"We removed all illegally uploaded pages as soon as we became aware of the breach. Next, we changed all the passwords and increased their encryption to avoid such mishaps in the future. A thorough investigation to make sure the breach does not exist anymore is in progress."

What they actually said is that they made their website ages ago and never updated it, so they were thoroughly pwned. Now, they are pretending to do something to cover the issue.

The investigation is simple : an old PHP exploit should not be allowed to exist on an ISP's website. An ISP should be well aware of best practices and apply them rigorously.

Safe Harbor 2.0: Judges to keep NSA spying in check – EU justice boss

Judicial oversight. But of course.

I'm quite sure judges will be able to totally control everything the NSA . . lets them know they're doing.

Voice, data, help desk: Meet the Syrian refugees' IT infrastructure chief

The ETC

Demonstrating the better part of humanity, apparently.

Good on them.

WD stirs green and blue into pot, comes out with Blue HDDs

SSDs don't win anything

When they fail, they actually fail harder then HDDs because recovery is exponentially more difficult, and you have even less warning.

For the moment, I have two SSDs on my desktop that are doing their job properly, so no complaints. But a colleague of mine had an SSD in his laptop that he was very happy about until the day it stopped working. He lost nothing of significance because backups, but the disk basically bricked itself and getting a replacement shipped in cost him two days.

He has stopped ribbing me for preferring my slower, 500GB HDD in my laptop.

Online daters swindled out of £33m last year – police

That's because that dating thing you're using is a game made in Japan, not a dating site.

'Govt will not pass laws to ban encryption' – Baroness Shields

Very happy to see all those Thomas Jefferson quotes and I feel that they should be repeated often.

I also think that, were he to be alive today, he would be actively preparing the next revolution.

Chinese popped-box VPN crims screamed hacker booty in cleartext

Agreed

Then you have this gem :

Most of the 1500-odd nodes are in China, with about 600 in the US

So, is it 1500 nodes in total, with 600 in the US (meaning 900 in China), or is it 1500 in China and 600 others in the US ?

Finally, with W10, Microsoft’s device strategy makes sense

"110 million people using Windows 10 right now"

If that is true, it still is not the success Microsoft was expecting. Apparently, the Windows share of the market is sliding, and has been for 5 quarters in a row now.

What I would like to know is how many of those installs were pushed to people who didn't actually want them, and got reverted to some prior version of Windows. We know 1 0 is being very aggressively pushed out, the question is : how long does it stay when in place ?

ICO 'making enquiries' into bizarre shopper data spill at M&S

Really ?

So "old location bar URL history" is enough to access other people's details on a banking site ?!?

Chalk up another one for the inevitable robot revolt. A purge is starting to seem necessary.

New DMCA rules mean you can fiddle with your tablets, routers, cars (as if you weren't anyway)

Or, more likely, a new Mercedes in his driveway.

Oracle Java 'no longer the greatest risk' to US Windows PC users

Windows requires rebooting when updating Windows components.

I've had Microsoft Security Essentials, Firefox, Windows Defender, Notepad++ and a host of other programs update themselves and the worst that happens is that the program restarts.

Dad who shot 'snooping vid drone' out of the sky is cleared of charges

David Boggs - A name that will live in infamy.

To think that this guy was hovering his drone over two little girls and has the guts to go public about it.

In the US, of all places.

How is it his name hasn't already been put on the paedo register ?

@Robert Helpmann??

Sorry Robert, but you cannot deny that the USA is the only country in the world where so many people die from gunshot wounds every year. And that in a country that is not even at war.

The simple fact is that having less guns lying around would certainly solve the issue. Another simple fact is that that is never going to happen.

Ransomware victims: Just pay up, grin, and bear it – says the FBI

@1980s_coder

Yes but that is exactly the problem : many computer users are new to the environment and have barely enough knowledge of IT to do their work correctly, let alone prepare and execute contingency plans for things they have never even heard of.

Computers are a great tool, but they are also a world of risk that few users are even aware of. People who just work with them don't even know what they risk until it happens - and most of them don't even bother with the backups people who do know keep telling them about.

I think most people view computers like their car : bring it to the garage when it breaks. Only then do they learn that, unlike a car, repairing can well mean losing everything they stored in it.

By 2019, vendors will have sucked out your ID along with your cash 5 billion times

Biometric payment systems, pah !

My fingerprints are like my privacy : I have nothing to hide and it's nobody's business but mine.

My biometrics on a smartphone ? Those things are already a prime target for malware and now you want to add more interest to the things ?

No thanks, I'll stick to VISA and cash. Pin and chip is way better than fingerprints : if your card is compromised, just ask for another one.

Deutsche Bank's creaking IT systems nervously eyeing bins

"The shift to cloud services is happening now"

This from a bank official ? A German bank official ?

So banks are now putting data in The Cloud.

Ok, it's official : this is the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it.

Work from home when the next big Windows 10 installation arrives

"it should be a completely sucessful and flawless update"

Yup, just like SatNad told us that Windows 10 was a successful launch.

Personally, I think it's going to be an enormous cock-up. Hundreds of thousands of XBones all downloading and installing and updating at more or less the same time, what could possibly go wrong ?

Hint : ask any company how a major launch went on Day 1. There are more examples than I care to list.

Or a deadbox.

Toss of the coin these days.

Microsoft's Big Data-driven improvement efforts flounder

Nothing really surprising in those results

Trust of the data requires knowledge of how it is gathered and filtered.

Understanding the data requires knowing what it represents.

You cannot have meaningful data and put it into a form anybody can understand. The "consumers" of the data need to know the significance of what they are looking at.

The only thing this research tells us is that Microsoft is having the same trouble managing data than everyone else does. There is no magic wand to solve data management issues. It requires expertise, knowledge and, most often, experience. No program can replace that.

Malware menaces Merkel's minion, says Spiegel

20,000 systems from Merkel's computer ?

It will be interesting to see the fallout on that.

On the one hand, goverment wants to be able to check what we are doing with ease (our current situation).

On the other hand, government wants its IT, based on the same tech as ours, to be secure even from state-funded actors.

That is one heck of a clash of interest.

Preparing for IoT? Ask some old questions and plenty of new ones

As far as I'm concerned I don't need to read a book to know that IoT is basically handing over my house to the nearest miscreant.

Not gonna happen.

Feds in America very excited about new global privacy alert system

"Today, data is increasingly crossing borders"

Indeed, and that is a situation that we are trying to reverse.

Nothing to get excited about.

Oracle's Hurd mentality: We (and one other) will own all of cloud by 2025

"If the US government came calling [..] he would refuse to hand it over without a court order"

Are we supposed to be impressed ? That's a bit like a driver promising to never drive on the sidewalk.

Of course you wait for a court order, that is the normal thing to do. But if the US Gov has reason to knock on his door, it will be with a court order - or even an NSA security letter. And then you comply, citizen.

What would be impressive is if Hurd promised that regional data centers outside of the US would never hand over data to the US Government even with a court order.

Then I would take my hat off to him. As it stands ? He's just promising to do what he should be doing anyway. My hat stays on.

QLogic looks like it's running on empty

"QLogic is ready for a merger or an acquisition"

That must be true, because it certainly isn't ready to continue working the market.

If I were a customer at this point, I would freeze all spending with QLogic and wouldn't be planning anything new with it until the management situation is resolved - one way or another.

Without a CEO there is no telling what the future of a company is. There is no sense in giving money to such a company when there is no guarantee that they will be around to support the sales in six month's time.

Further confusion at TalkTalk claims it was hit by 'sequential attack'

Impossible. Had that been the case, said PR spiels would be delightfully incomprehensible and wonderfully wrong, and we would be spending hours outlining the ways that they made no sense or contradicted themselves.

Instead, we just got rubbish.

US Army bug hunters in 'state of fear' that sees flaws go unreported

Disclosure could lead to revocation of access ?

Wow, talk about shooting the messenger. No wonder the military network is in such a sorry state. If nobody can raise the issue, it obviously won't ever get fixed.

But having one's career negatively impacted for doing one's job ? That things got to that point is simply incredible. I wonder how the second invasion of Iraq would have gone in the media if the locals had been able to override the tanks' network and stopped them all in their tracks. In front of the media. That would have been one hell of a show.

Bacon can kill: Official

Re: why not actually say 365 days in a year

Because there are days I eat beef ? Or chicken, or duck, or maybe even fish ?

18% per 50 grams ?

So let me see. At an average of 200g/day for, let's say 360 days/year starting at (simplify) age 10, now age 49.

39 * 360 * 4 * 18 = 1,010,880 % chance increase of bowel cancer.

And if you consider the equation this way :

39 * 360 * 4 * 0.18 = 10,108.8 %

Something tells me this study is baloney.

You own the software, Feds tell Apple: you can unlock it

US surveillance, destroying Internet commerce one lawsuit at a time

"users have no rights under the EULA "

Well thank you for making that official, Mr. FBI Agent.

Now we know that, after having to change our habits to incorporate encryption everwhere, we're also going to have to totally review the bog-standard EULA and change the way we do commerce all over the world.

All that because of the paranoid behavior of a scant few thousands of people in one country.

Joining the illuminati? Just how bright can a smart bulb really be?

"burglars are far less likely to try to break into a house that has lights on"

And they are far, far less likely to try breaking into a house with an alarm system. Especially when all the other houses on the block don't have any.

You're worried about burglars ? Get an alarm system. You'll be secure.

As for controlling my lights with my phone from outside my front door, please. I have no inclination of managing anything in my house with such an insecure platform as a smartphone.

Northamber: Windows 10 killed our sales momentum

People aren't asking anything

People are still blindly buying whatever is in the shops. And blindly clicking on whatever popup says "install this!". And then turning to us to get themselves out of the shithole they put themselves in.

The only good thing is that the PC is indeed dying - and Windows with it. The vast majority of tablets and phones being sold and used do not run Windows and, hopefully, never will.

But people are not making the choice, the vendors are doing that for them.

Future civilisations won't know how the universe formed

Yup, pretty cool.

Unless we "enlighten" them with the very latest Obliteray 40,000 to take all their Unobtanium.

I have no problem being told that I live in a computer simulation.

Just give me the cheat code to my flying car already !

Whatever senses they have, they will still not be able to detect electromagnetic energy that is not reaching them.

That is why these scientists are having a heartache about the poor, poor civilizations that will attain sentience after the expansion rate of the Universe exceeds the speed at which information reaches them.

"Fields which will be diluted the intensity weakening in accordance with the divergence of a vector field at a rate inversely proportional to the square of the distance to the source"

Thanks, now I've got a headache again.

Official: WD buys SanDisk

Iomega Zip drives

Yeah, very impressive they were. Until the Click Of Death hit them, that is.

Then they became expensive trash. And your data was lost, too.

Don't Panic: Even if asteroid showers cause mass extinctions ...

Re: Energy

Absolutely. Every single major advance of human civilization is directly tied to the amount of energy available to the average human being.

Before agriculture, we were hunter-gatherers. Not much time to build when everyone is following herds of wild animals to be able to eat.

Agriculture came along, and that made us sedentary, but agriculture only really took off when we domesticated animals, allowing one man and a pair of oxen to do in one day what many would take several days to do. This freed some people to pursue other activities, notably construction.

Things pretty much stayed the same until steam came about, which launched the Industrial Revolution. Followed closely by electricity, and that was really the thing that set the ball rolling.

With electricity and the internal combustion engine, the average person in our civilization acquired the ability to till entire fields with a tractor in a day, or cover hundreds of miles in a car. This expansion of available energy is why one farmer today can feed thousands of people, who are free to go do all the rest of things our society needs.

Most importantly, our society needs to research other energetic sources. The greatest challenge we face today is energy storage. We still cannot reliably store the excess energy produced by our power plants, which is why they have to be able to vary their power output.

The other issue is, of course, escaping our planetary gravity well. I'm convinced that some form of fusion will, in the future, allow humanity to build ships that can, like in Star Wars or any other sci-fi universe, take off from a planetary surface and reach orbit without losing any significant amount of mass.

When we have achieved that, the colonization of our solar system will be a given, and we will embark upon that path until we find a way to span the unimaginable distances between stars in a hyperspace-like time frame.

So let's get cracking on that fusion thing !

Israel joins EU in spiking Safe Harbour

Re: Wording

The United States certainly can guarantee the privacy of Israeli citizens' data on NSA servers in the U.S

FTFY

Millions of people forget to cancel Apple Music subscription

Re: it's application was completely different to floppy disks

Okay, I get your point.

Nonetheless, floppies disappeared in software boxes and were replaced by CDs due to the practical side of Windows on 1 CD instead of 48 floppies.

And the industry liked the idea of locking content on CD, which they did more or less successfully, and which was all but impossible on floppy disks.

USB keys, ultimately, replaced the floppy in everyday data transfers, I agree. But the CD set the floppy disk on the path to oblivion.

Re: Nobody knows...

Objectively of course, you are right. There is no way of telling how long the optical disk format will last.

However, there is good reason to believe that CDs will be around for quite a long time. The medium is cheap and reliable, and stores enough data for an album. Nobody is going to want to put more than 80 minutes of music in one album. I'm guessing that many albums are in the 40 minutes mark or thereabouts. So the CD is good enough.

The CD came into existence as an extension of the floppy disk and pretty much obliterated it in a rather short time. When more data needed to be stored, we got the DVD. Now, the DVD has been extended to BluRay. I'm sure that, if need be, we'll get another extension that will take us into terabyte optical storage territory.

But I really don't see what tech could replace optical storage as cheaply and reliably. It can't be magnetic, because that is not a reliable long-term storage medium. Holographic is an eventuality, but labs are still tinkering with that and nothing is in view yet. Even if holographic tech does appear, it will most likely look like another DVD format.

So I don't think we have to worry about CD tech disappearing any time soon. But yes, who knows what we'll have in a hundred years ? Even so, if it looks like a DVD, there's a good chance the reader will still know about that old CD format from the previous millenium.

Oh, OK then: Ireland will probe Max Schrems' Facebook complaints

He should already be able to request asylum in Europe (Russia is not part of Europe). He is not a criminal by any European law, so there shouldn't be an issue there.

What is blocking any move in that direction is much more likely to be the extradition agreements Euro countries have with the US. In Russia, the US cannot ask for extradition as there is no agreement in place. If Snowden were to apply for asylum in Europe, then the US would be at the door the next day with an extradition request, accompanied by a certain amount of heavy arguments hinting very, very hard that the request would best be granted.

There are not many Euro countries that currently have the balls to stand up to the US on anything, so I think Snowden is not at all interested in trying that.

Microsoft's top lawyer: I have a cunning plan ... to rescue sunk safe harbor agreement

"the dangers of a Balkanized internet"

Dangers ? What dangers ?

I see no problem in Euro TCP-IP traffic staying in Europe instead of being routed through California (or wherever) and coming back. Nor do I have any issue with Euro citizen data being stored in Europe and not being sent anywhere without consent.

Of course, today the situation is that everything is sent to the US and the US is taking advantage of that to liberally peruse anything they want. So yeah, the US is in danger of not having such easy access to other people's private lives, but that ship actually sailed with Snowden and won't be coming back, so it's no use complaining about it now.

I see no danger to people with a "balkanized" Internet security scheme. I do understand that the US government doesn't like the idea, but I couldn't care less about that. As far as I'm concerned, the White House has no right to look at me when I'm not on American soil or declaring my intention to go there.

'10-second' theoretical hack could jog Fitbits into malware-spreading mode

"the company considers it a bug which will be squashed at some point"

One question : is that point when sales have hit the floor because nobody trusts the product any more, or some time before that ?

The ability to mod the numbers or something is amusing (for us anyway, for companies paying out based on false numbers, not so much), this is not a critical piece of equipment after all. But the ability to root a computer with it is not amusing at all. Technically, even people that don't have a FitBit could be at risk. That is not good.

Made you jump! Space to give Earth an asteroid Halloween scare

Re: Suspiciously exact

Well, they do have computers these days, and I've heard that NASA does have a few people who know their job.

We'll see how exact they are when they tell us exactly how close it did fly by at then end of this month.

Oracle plugs flaw used in attacks on NATO and the White House

"If Java was still in widespread use today"

Uh, am I supposed to understand that it isn't ? Funny that, when you run the installer it says that it is being used on billions of PCs - and now it's even on phones.

Java use may be decreasing, but I do believe it's usage can still be qualified as "widespread".

Yahoo! boss! Mayer! promises! shake-up! in! bid! to! save! her! job!

Hey, don't be so hard. She did personally redesign the exclamation mark.

We SC what you did there, Mikey: Dell emits top-end array, hyper-converged boxes

Re: 5Ghz x86?

It's in the pic titled "SC8000 and SC9000 comparison points".

The CPU cores are noted 2 x 5GHz 6 core and 8 core x86.

So yeah, that's wierd. I thought 4GHz was the current max CPU frequency.

Edit : Ok, AMD has some 5GHz enthusiast models with 8 cores. I doubt anybody would put that in a blade server, though.