Posts by Pascal Monett

Woz says wearables – even Apple Watch – aren't 'compelling'

I really appreciated that Wozniak clearly stated that requiring a network connection makes things less useful.

At this point in time we are apparently trying to tie ourselves to the Internet for everything we do, and that means that anytime the Internet is not available, we cannot do anything.

In the future, at some point, I am convinced that the Internet will be available everywhere and all the time, with ample bandwidth for all, but right now that is simply not the case. So, while it may be nice when it works, you still need a backup plan for when it doesn't.

I prefer to skip the hassle and go straight to what works all the time, every time.

Chilling evidence emerges of Kilocat weapon

Brilliant investigative journalism at its Friday finest

A hearty congratulations, El Reg, for a very in-depth article on yet more DARPA shenanigans. I do hope that, when the cat is finally let out of the bag, people will remember that it was revealed here first.

Well done. Very well done.

P.S. need a cat icon - or maybe a kilocat one.

Web backup biz Monster Cloud monstered after monster price hike

Re: This is quite missleading

"costs of running our services have risen"

Risen is, in this case, a mild euphemism. Tell you what, what would you say if your landlord switched your lease from £200 a month to £180 daily ? Because that is just about what you did.

I do believe you'd tell him to get stuffed and go straight to the beak.

If your costs well and truly have been multiplied by a factor of 10 or more, it only demonstrates very poor planning on your part. Telecoms companies invest billions and raise cents. You may have invested millions, but you are raising fistfuls.

Still, points for wading in and trying to explain without coming off as totally patronizing. I'll check you guys out in a year or so - maybe you'll have learned a few lessons that make you a worthwhile partner by then. For now, I'll pass.

Another dot com manager is going to bite the bullet

You have to be a dot com idiot to go tout unlimited anything for a fixed, yearly price and expect to generate profit.

This is a company that clearly abused its customers to get the ball rolling and is now turning the screws to Frighteningly Tight in one go to get profits flowing. From 50 a year to 30 a month ? If that is not called skyrocketing I don't know what is.

Except that this is the Internet; they are not the sole provider of their type of service and they are not an incumbent behemoth that customers cannot avoid using.

I hope that karma is going to burn this company as badly as it deserves to be.

BOFH: If you liked it then you should've put the internet in it

Re: the messy end

You need to be more specific. I've seen quite a few messy ends in the pub and they were nowhere near a belt buckle.

Well, not initially, that is.

Music's value gap? Follow the money trail back to Google

"the record company would eat the losses if the album stiffed"

That would have been nice, but history shows that the record company would bill everything to the musicians anyway thanks to contractual clauses concerning advances. I urge you to take a look at the linked article, specifically the paragraph concerning said advances.

Then remember one thing : the majors are not in it for the music, they're in it for the money. Anything they can do to avoid paying, they will.

Admin fishes dirty office chat from mistyped-email bin and then ...?

False moral issue, and bad functionality setup

Correcting recipient addresses does in no way imply that you can read the contents.

What he should have done is set up an application that only shows the recipient list and hides the content. Anyone asking could therefor be shown the application and rest easy that their smutty secrets remain hidden. And he could have lived his life blissfully unaware of the rampant beast lurking below.

Cinema boss gives up making kids turn off phones: 'That's not how they live their life'

Until they start working, that is, and the heavy cluebat of reality hits them in face with rent, taxes and debt. That's when they start down the path of understanding that nothing is actually free in this life and all work deserves remuneration.

Not to mention the fun it will be with all those Siri/Cortana-enabled phones waking up at various times because some sound in the film triggered a response.

Because obviously nobody is going to think to put them on mute any better than they do today.

I used to be a cinema-goer. I had a subscription at my local multiplex, and wife and I would go almost every week. Before the mobile phone swamped the world, when the film started you could expect the most excited blabbermouths to calm down and actually watch the film after a few minutes. Nowadays ? Hopeless.

So I've abandoned going to the cinema. I prefer waiting for the DVD, even if it means I'm four months behind. Don't care about that - that is how much I hate the "cinema experience" today. This move has zero impact on that decision.

FOUR Avatar sequels

"so you go to the multiplex"

I don't do that anymore. I can't stand the obnoxiousness, the talking, the phoning, the munching and all the other stuff "moviegoers" are doing instead of actually watching the bloody film they complain about paying the price for.

So I let other people do that, I listen to their comments about it then I buy the DVD when it comes out if I'm really interested. I don't mind the waiting time, I prefer to watch a film in the peace of my own home with a drink in hand. And I can have popcorn if I want as well.

Microsoft explains which cloud security problems are your problem

Not bad, but something is still missing

I see no explanation concerning security against NSA snooping and National Security Letters for non-US companies.

So, Microsoft, care to clarify on that point ?

US anti-encryption law is so 'braindead' it will outlaw file compression

Re: Technocrat vs Bureaucrat

To summarize then :

Impossible for a bureaucrat simply means the opposition has better funding.

Impossible for a technocrat means Science needs better funding.

ExoMars works! 2 Mbit/s link established and camera snapping

Astounding !

A 2MBPS connection in space between planets ? While it is hundreds of thousands of kilometres away ?

Great news for Science.

But, pray tell, if the black blotchy bits are stars, then the white blotchy bit is . . . a black hole ?

Nah, just kidding. But it had to be said.

You won't believe this, but… nothing useful found on Farook iPhone

Re: "A square cm of platter would still contain huge chunks of data"

I'd really be interested in knowing how one would arrange reading just one square centimetre of a broken HDD platter when all you have is that piece of it.

Electron microscope, maybe ?

Um, you might want to turn your TV back on. Apparently many US politicians are still screaming for encryption to be broken - and most of them are the candidates.

Flying Spaghetti Monster is not God, rules mortal judge

@Symon

I said that satire is a modern affliction. I did not say that it didn't exist before 1950.

I am well aware of satire used as social commentary in ancient Greece, although I do thank you for providing that link, and I've learned something about the scribes of Ancient Egypt.

However, your comment basically does not contradict my intent, which is to say that it is only today that everything is satire and that religions in those days hardly knew the meaning of the word.

Not to mention the dangers of being a Court Jester.

Re: Apologies in advance to all Christians......

The book never made the claim to December. I think the word didn't even exist when the book was written.

It is the Roman Catholic Church which took to parasiting local customs to replace them with Vatican-approved versions that made that decision. So the RCC was the first organization to uphold the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish method that another modern company made so prevalent.

As for Adam & Eve, you're the one inferring that they found wives outside. The Bible never says that, so it infers implicitly to huge amounts of incest. And, if Mitochondrial Eve is anything to go by, well, there just may be a grain of truth to it.

I think the origin of Christianity is rather well-known

The big difference with today is that today we have the Internet and 99% of the population knows how to read. That is rather the reverse of those times where the Internet was the passing minstrel and less than 1% of the population knew how to read.

Jesus was a Jewish Arab. He did not call himself Christian, obviously. Christianity was brought about in the following 300+ years after his death. I think that, for a movement that started so long ago, it's history is pretty well documented - mainly the fact the early Christians were basically considered a splinter sect from the Jews.

If we keep our Internet intact, I think that, 2,000 years from know we'll still be able to look up Scientology and Christianity and anyone with a brain will see that there is a very, very big difference between the two.

In any case, satire is a modern affliction. No religious movement of the time was started for the sake of satire, I'm pretty sure of that.

Hey, Atlantis Computing. What the heck is this in your EULA?

Isn't that basically already banned ?

I thought that abusive contractual clauses were always struck down by a judge.

That clause is clearly abusive and in contradiction with Free Speech (enjoy it while you still have it), so I doubt very much that Atlantis Computing would have a snowball's proverbial to win such a case.

And there is precedent on this kind of manoeuver, those wacky voting machine nutcases at Diebold were shot down for exactly that, if I'm not mistaken.

Of course, it does mean going to trial, which companies have a general tendency to not like (except Microsoft), unless the judge throws the case out altogether before accepting the case. I think they can do that, can they ?

Google broke its own cloud AGAIN, with TWO software bugs

You get genuine resilience if you can manage the nightmare of getting two different Cloud providers to handle the same data without bungling things.

Apparently, Cloud is hard enough as it is with ONE provider. Put another one the mix and you just might become the poster child for a How Not To Do Cloud article.

But yeah, in theory redundancy is based on two of a thing.

Apparently there are at least 5 DevOps Managers that disagree with you.

I bless the reins down on .africa ... Dot-word injunction hits ICANN

What is that going to change ?

ICANN is specialized in pretending that nothing anyone else decides concerns it, has relevance, is pertinent or conforms to its internal decisions.

Any external attempt to influence it has forever been met with "Nope, not required" or "Well, we'll give it a thought", whilst ICANN continues on its merry way to do whatever it wants.

I seriously see no hope for change until the entire Board is thrown directly into the slammer and a new one brought in that is determined to set things right.

Line by line, how the US anti-encryption bill will kill our privacy, security

Heretic !

How dare you bring reality to the debate ! You informed anarchist, you !

This is not about particular occurences, this is about furthering the domination of Government over The People by using handwaving, strawman arguments and religiously chanting the magic password (ie terrism).

You're ruining everything they're fighting for !

Name me a US-based cloud service that the US government cannot access "at will".

Just one.

Those National Security letters don't take all that long to print, you know.

Re: I fired off a Nasty-Gram to Feinstein

Kudos to you for doing the one thing that is really necessary in this case : showing your politician that his aides and yes-men are out of touch with his political base.

Because nothing sends a politician scurrying the other way like the perspective of losing votes. Remember Minister Hacker ? "You're not asking me to make a courageous decision, are you ?"

Make sure that hack knows the decision is courageous.

Grab your Hammer pants – it's the '90s again: Facebook brings Virtual Reality back

All that about what VR is and how it works, not a word about what it does

VR is immersive, yeah, I think I got that. And it is on its way, I definitely got that. Even here people are talking about it like it's inevitable. But what can you do with it now ?

Well, on Steam for the past month I've been presented with an endless list of games and stuff that purport to be VR-friendly. What kind of things have I seen ? Well just last night there was a VR browsing application, where you surf the 2D Internet without removing your precious, eye-destroying facehugger. I found that one particularly ironic.

Otherwise, there's a boatload of Frogger-quality gamelets, it seems that everyone and his brother are dragging out the 80s and chucking it in a VR world. Wonderful, we're going to have a bunch of fugly immersive games to justify $1000 of expense.

There is not a single VR title on Steam that would even slightly incite me to go to the trouble of finding out if it is actually worth it. There isn't a single attempt to create even a lowly Minecraft clone that works in VR (not yet anyway), and that would be worth a look.

But hey, by the time something worthwhile does come out, I'm sure the hardware will be dirt cheap.

Euro watchdogs give America's data-sharing Privacy Shield an 'F'

So the "Privacy Shield" is basically on hold

Sounds like a Good Thing (tm) to me, especially when it apparently fails to properly account for Ombudsman authority, fails to give the Ombudsman the tools to do his work, and fails to mention massive data hovering in any way.

Talk about a lipstick operation. This Swiss-Cheese Shield was basically a copy of the previous version with a few cogs bolted on the side to make it look better.

Well it doesn't look better. Go back and do something worthy of the name of the bill.

Universal Credit at high risk of cyber-attack, fraud from the outset

One question : are those "responsible" still in place ?

The number of fails in this single project is amazing. From declaring the use of a methodology in order to get the project finished quicker, then not using said methodology, to totally forgetting that there might be risks to the proper safeguarding of data - the list goes on and on.

Had this monstrosity gone live, the personal data of tens of thousands would have been freely available to any hacker who would have a passing interest and five minutes to spare.

Those who have their names on this shame of a shambles should lose their position and their pension and be either fired or degraded to serving tea with the corresponding salary.

How to not get pwned on Windows: Don't run any virtual machines, open any web pages, Office docs, hyperlinks ...

Re: "MS are closing in on more vulns quicker"

Really ? If that were the case I would expect that faults in Secondary Logon would have been found and corrected last decade. It was introduced with 98, if I'm not mistaken, it's about time they ironed out the issues there.

Seriously, I have the impression that I've been reading more or less the same patch notes since Y2K. A "remote execution vulnerability" in IE and Edge, wow, what a surprise. The exact same wording in two different patches on the same day for both Microsoft browsers - thank goodness Edge does not support ActiveX, I might have been made to think that Edge is just a rebadge of IE.

It's nice that MS is patching obviously, but it would be nicer if I didn't have the impression that, whatever the version, they're always patching the same issues from last decade.

Hey, tech industry, have you noticed Amazon in the rearview?

Spot on

Not to mention that, in the ease of setting up new, business-critical bits and bobs, absolutely no forethought is given to general data architecture, nor is security even mentioned at all.

Hey, doesn't that make a solid basis for DevOps ? Hoo boy, it sure does.

Russian boffins want to nuke asteroids

You missed the part where it is stated that the nuking would happen after the body passes Earth - therefor sending the pieces every which way toward Mars and Mercury.

So Earth escapes intact - but this plan does not bode well for future Martian colonists.

I thought nukes were not a solution ?

We've already had this discussion, and it was said at the time that most of a nukes' force in space is dissipated via radiation because there is no atmosphere to push around. It is our atmosphere that gives a nuke it's deadly, destructive power.

Even the slop trap Armageddon made the misfits drill into the asteroid in order to explain why the nuke would work.

I am therefor sceptical when reading that shooting off a few nukes to have them blow up on a large asteroid's surface would "turn most of the asteroid into liquid and gas". What have they changed in their simulations to get this result ? Or is this the result of our newfound knowledge on asteroids in general ?

Cash, fear and uncertainty: The Holy Trinity of Bitcoin and blockchain

"systems where trust cannot be exploited"

I wonder if it is possible to create such a system when based on digital data.

Encryption seems not to be a solution - if the solution has a part of it encrypted, someone has to have the key and that someone is therefor a weak link.

America's Intelligence Transparency Council to meet for the first time … behind closed doors

New definition of transparency

Oh that one's easy : Transparency = opacity < 100%.

So opacity = 99% is acceptable, and that's what we'll get.

Swedish military unwittingly helped hose US banks in 2012/2013

And turned on the Windows Firewall

PC market shambling towards an unquiet grave

"businesses aren't going to be running Windows 10 upgrades in quantity"

Can someone please take that turkey behind the shed and finally shoot it ?

We are told by literally everyone that Win 1 0 runs better than Win7/Vista/8.x - if that is the case, PC sales will absolutely not be impacted by Win 1 0 "upgrades" because businesses, and everyone else, are going to install it on an existing computer, not a new one.

Except the businesses that have a global maintenance contract that includes machine replacement, obviously - but the OS version has no impact on that. Businesses can perfectly state they want the new machine with Win7 if they want, it would make no difference on the number of PCs sold.

Gartner : copy/pasting last decade's reasons into next year's report without ever checking that reality has changed in between. There's an economic crisis going on Gartner, you might want to factor that in some time.

The future of Firefox is … Chrome

BURN THE HERETICS !!

Another great piece of computing history has gone to the dogs.

Oh well, Seamonkey and PaleMoon will replace it.

That's the nice thing about the Internet - there's always someone willing to cut through the bull who has the skills and determination to make it happen for the rest of us.

Ames boffins mix metals to boost electron velocity

A topological quantum material

Yikes. Tried looking into that and now I feel a headache coming on.

Nevertheless,it is fascinating to see how our global available knowledge is bubbling every which way. It is even more fascinating to see how we are capable of describing in excruciating detail how matter is defined by the way its atoms are structured, yet we still don't have room-temperature superconductors. So there are still things we don't know, even though what we do know already fills entire collections of books.

Windows 10 debuts Blue QR Code of Death – and why malware will love it

For whome the Fail tolls

2 problems with your thinking :

1) Clues on the screen ? Please, we're talking about Joe User here, if he had a clue he wouldn't have clicked that attachment in the first place. Press ESC ? My God man, you're actually attributing a thought process to a user ? Tsk, tsk.

2) Malware is made based on things users are used to. Now that Microsoft has included this functionality, malware authors can take advantage of it. It would be pretty stupid of them to go and put in an unknown, highly-visible tag with no prior user experience for it. Doing that would only make it easy for everyone and their dog to say "See that QR code ? That means its a trap." and only the truly clueless would get caught. Now that Microsoft is including it, it becomes a viable target.

Oh, and congratulations, Microsoft, you have clearly outdone yourself this time. For 20 years we have been battling the insecurities and baffling decisions of your swiss-cheese platform, and you have just gone and added a whole new attack vector for criminals to take advantage of. Way to go to keep the AV vendors afloat.

Half of people plug in USB drives they find in the parking lot

And that is the problem

What exactly can you do with a USB drive you find if not plug it in to find out who lost and return if to the person ?

The issue is not really that people are going to plug them in - of course they are. Curiosity is human nature.

The real issue is that people can only plug them into their PC/laptop, which is generally woefully under-prepared for such a task.

What we should have is a peripheral, a USB Sanitizer, something into which you can plug in a stick you found and be sure that nothing evil is on it.

With that peripheral, you can then bang on about how users are 1D10Ts and should plug it into the sanitizer first. But until we have such a tool for Joe Public, the problem will persist.

Baddies' brilliant plan to get mobile malware whitelisted: Bribery

Bribery ? Ah, in China. Move along.

That path is rather well-trodden if I'm not mistaken.

The only newsworthy part about it is that they got caught which, given that we're talking about malware, is not all that surprising since legitimate users would logically complain about an app that does dodgy things and that complaint would be handled by people other than the guy (or two) responsible for getting it on the store in the first place.

So it was kind of a stupid idea in the first place ; the kind of idea a low-level hacker incapable of defeating the AV would think of. Then again, it takes real smarts to defeat a proper AV system these days (when they're not shooting themselves in the foot that is), so I guess I'm not throwing him the book, just a handful of gravel.

If only hackers could stop slurping test and dev databases. Wait, our phone is ringing ...

Agreed.

Production data is quite difficult to mimic. Although I applaud anyone who can generate a proper set of test data, in practice I find that test data only works for testing what has been specified. Production data includes all the errors, quick fixes and workarounds users employ to "get work done" and that represents scenarios that, by definition, cannot be reproduced in test data.

So, by all means, put some production data in to the test system to fully validate the application.

But if you allow Internet access to/from the dev environment, I will fire your ass in a second.

FBI, Apple continue cat-and-mouse game over iPhones in New York

@Deltics

It isn't the tool they wanted, it was the possibility to force Apple to break a phone model.

Once they obtain that right, they will then work to enlarge it to all models now and in future.

Picture this: An exabyte of cat pix in the space of a sugar cube of DNA

Re: A writeable CD left on window sill

is dead.

An optical disk properly stored away from sunlight in a room with a low level of humidity should logically outlast tape and HDD, probably by a few decades.

My first DVD backup disk was done in 2005, it is still perfectly readable. I don't actually have the date of my first CD backup, but I'm pretty sure it was done around 2000-ish, and it is also perfectly readable. Music CDs I bought in the 90s are also still perfectly readable.

Optical storage is the best thing for personal use. Obviously, I've migrated to BluRay discs now, 25GB size. I'm confident that they'll all be good until the day I die, and then some.

Of course, to be of any use, you have to make the backups first. Joe Public has some issues with that.

Britain is sending a huge nuclear waste shipment to America. Why?

@ HieronymusBloggs

Thanks for the info, I'm happy to have learned something more. I'll remember that the next time I need to do something "in anger".

Obviously, my post is therefor rather over-the-top as a response. Sorry about that everyone, but since there are a few British customs I am aware of, let's have pint ! This round is on me.

Re: "the only nation who has actually used atomic bombs in anger"

In anger ?

Because you think that, when President Truman ordered the bombs to be dropped, he did so while shouting on the phone and cussing the Japs ?

I take it you missed the part where the UK and Canada had a part in the decision ?

All those meetings, draft reports, report approvals and after-meeting cocktails took a bit of time, I think. Enough so that no one can say the decision was taken in anger and be taken seriously.

No, it was coldly, rationally, decided as the best course.

Whether or not that is true is another matter entirely.

Google to admins: We'll tell you when your network is pwned

I was hoping to sign up

I thought this was an email list sort of thing, but no, you need to have a registered ASN to sign up to this service.

Understandable, I guess, but I am disappointed that Google has not seen fit to share threat information with everyone.

Still, every step against malware is a good one.

Neighbour sick of you parking in his driveway? You'd better hack-proof your car

Karamba !

A value to check on the stock market.

Because they're going to make a mint, that's for sure.

Bavarian town rescinds Hitler's honorary citizenship

The right is on the move again

Not only in Germany, although it is understandable that Germany is somewhat more of a focal point on that subject.

So I applaud the motion, even though I still think it's about 50 years too late. Hitler has been tried by the court of Public Opinion and, despite the Holocaust deniers, has been declared guilty, and the Nazis with him.

So it is not a matter of "rewriting" History, it is most certainly a matter of trying, at all costs, to not repeat it.

Because we're damn capable of doing much, much worse now.

1,000 cats await stadium-sized sandwich bag launch

By the time you're done rounding up 10 cats, you'll be almost retired. Despite indications to the contrary, they don't come in herds.

So yeah, all will be well.

I will remember the "kilocat mission". I like that.