Posts by Pascal Monett

Saved from ransomware thugs... by rival ransomware thug

Ah, the ultimate irony

I seem to recall a comic strip pic of a thief slowly leaving a room where an empty treasure chest and the body of an other thief with a knife in his back lay.

Don't know why this would dredge up that memory. </sarcasm>

Microsoft adds useful feature to PowerPoint. Seriously

"a single paper [..] plant starts by burning down 5k+ square miles of forest"

??

The process of making paper includes steam or chemicals.

Burning entire forests is listed nowhere in the requirements.

Typical PowerPoint presentation material.

Gullible Essex Police are now using junk science lie detectors

"submit further investigative divination practices to Essex Police"

I have a proven process derived from extensive viewing of The Mentalist that I would be willing to offer training on. It's only an eight-week course and I'll only bill a paltry $250,000 for the service.

Heart Internet goes TITSUP again

Hosting is done on one server

Cloud is still in its infancy, obviously. It would seem that some cloud services are more pared to the bone than others.

The only good thing about all this is that the great unwashed will learn, by trial and painful error, that price is not the only thing to take into account when signing up for a cloud service.

Like the automotive industry, the only good thing in this evolution is that, in the end, cloud services will perform better, because those that don't will wither and die. The only question is : how long will it take ? With the amount of people who pay and find shoddy performance good enough, it might take a while.

Now, if you're basing your business on it, I'm sorry but it seems to me that you should reevaluate your ROI criteria on this one.

Explo-Xen! Bunker buster bug breaks out guests from hypervisor

Has Xen been written by competent developers?

Bit of a cheeky one there, IMO.

Given that I couldn't write a VM to save my life, I think that Xen has some pretty damn good programmers.

Nobody's perfect, of course, but VM programming seems to me to be especially difficult. With any application, new security holes are regularly discovered. Some of them are trivial. With VMs there have been, to my knowledge, no trivial exploits.

That's not bad right there, in my book.

Why Agile is like flossing and regular sex

"no team should be so large that it needs more than two pizzas for dinner"

Given the eating habits of every coder I know, that rule means teams of two, maybe three.

Certainly not twelve.

But no matter, there is only one way to develop : ensuring that you have the input of all people that matter to the project.

Mind you, that doesn't mean all the people listed in the project manifest. It means all the people that matter to the project's success. The key users who can express what they need and how they can use it, the db admin for access and optimizations, the network engineers for traffic analysis and routing solving, and on the side, the manager for specifications and for knowing who to keep away from the grunt work in order to prevent stupid ideas.

It's 2016 and your passwords can still be sniffed from wireless keyboards

Re: Not my biggest concern!

The possible insecurity of your keyboard is indeed not something that most of us should be concerned about. Especially when scientists have the ability to ghost your keypresses from listening into the electromagnetic fluctuations that they generate.

The real issue is : how many people are actually at risk outside of a wifi café ? Not many, I'll wager.

I'll stick to wired keyboards though, because I see no reason to make things easier for the bastards.

Verizon blames striking workers for dent in sales

So Verizon is hoovering up the dredges of the Internet ?

Nice to know that somebody is taking care of the cleaning around here. Not that I think that Verizon actually knows what it is going to do with YahAOL when it has it, but that has never stopped a merger before.

Now the wait starts for news of the write-down Verizon will publish because YahAOL has suffered loss.

Did the Russians really hack the DNC or is this another Sony Pictures moment? You decide

You mean a country ruled by one man and a an organization based on fear and surveillance (the ex-KGB) is outing a country ruled by a few rich men and an organization based on fear and misinformation (the media). Doesn't sound so ironic to me.

Captain Piccard's planet-orbiting solar aircraft in warped drive drama

"I'm sure that within 10 years we'll see electric airplanes transporting 50 passengers"

No we won't.

This experiment requires a 2.3-ton plane with the wingspan of an Airbus A380 to transport 2 guys and 633 kilos of lithium batteries at a speed of max 90km/h. During the night it goes slower to save on energy.

Add 50 passengers with their luggage, stewardesses and in-flight entertainment, not to mention active radar, ILS and autopilot (with the assorted computers and black boxes) and you'll need a football stadium-sized wing to just keep it in the air, to say nothing about taking off.

I salute the accomplishment. It demonstrates improvements in solar cells and is certainly a feat of engineering. But let's not get carried away, this toy is not the future.

Cisco busts ransomware rodent targeting bitcoin, cryptocoin subreddits

Re: dodgy online oubliettes

Agreed. Unfortunately, contrary to real life, on the Internet you can't look ahead to see that the alley on the left is dark and foreboding, while the street ahead is well-lit and inviting.

On the Internet you go into the alley without noticing, then find out you shouldn't have after being clobbered and pwned. Sometimes a while after.

It takes a bit of experience to know that that link is not one you want to click on. Would be nice if links would have a security notice attached to them - something Google is more or less trying to do.

Zero-day hole can pwn millions of LastPass users, all that's needed is a malicious site

Beware the true geek with a keyboard

This guy is the quintessential geek. He doesn't look like much, in his pic he seems the shy, quiet kind of guy, but give him a PC and Internet access and hang on to your hat 'cause there will be a storm.

And he even gets to work with cute geekettes !

Hats off to such mastery.

Osram's Lightify smart bulbs blow a security fuse – isn't anything code audited anymore?

"what kind of security review the products go through"

That's easy :

"Did you put in all that security stuff ?"

"Yup."

"Okay, ship it then."

As far as security is concerned, IoT makers are still in the process of finding out which book to read.

There is no IoT security standard, there is no International IoT Security Review Board, there is no joint effort, no announcement of intent, no nothing.

At this point in time, security has nothing to do with IoT and IoT wishes nothing more than things stay that way.

I wish I could upvote that a hundred times.

UK membership of Council of Europe has implications for data protection after Brexit

something as “flexible” as PrivacyShield

aka a piece of paper, a rubber rod, a silk plank.

PrivacyShield is about as good a shield as a paper boat would make a good Dover ferry.

And it's replacement, from what I understand, is still made of paper, but just reinforced with some glue.

It's all a vast joke, and we're the butt of it.

Microsoft offers admins free Win 10 upgrade lube

"leverages telemetry"

Kudos, SatNad. No really : brilliant idea to justify your excuse for Windows Slurp. Now nobody can complain, because it's for a "good cause" that you hoover up our data like the NSA's little brother.

Well done, you've earned your week's thirty silvers.

Florida Man cleared of money laundering after selling Bitcoins to Agent Ponzi

"Like, you know, going after criminals. As in 'people who are committing actual crimes' as opposed to setting up people who might do something that might be illegal."

Setting people up is an American specialty. Like the guy at a bar asking nothing to no one, not thinking about sex and just tired from his day, who gets chatted up by a cute (cop) girl who pushes him to accept a bit of nooky for money, then gets cuffed on the premise that he accepted, so he's the one who is guilty. That's called fabricating a crime in my book, and ruining a man's life like that is a shameful thing to do. It happens all the time over there.

Funnily enough, you don't hear about sting operations where a person was caught accepting an offer to off their spouse without having asked for it. You do hear about the stupid ones posting a request for an assassin, but never the other way around. Somehow it seems that US cops are fine with pimping their female officers to create a case, but not at ease with offering murder to a disgruntled spouse for the same result.

By 2040, computers will need more electricity than the world can generate

Re: take any lump of matter doing whatever it is it is doing

What any lump of matter is doing is being held together by the strong nuclear interaction - no computing needed.

The brain is a much more interesting example - we still don't entirely understand how memory works or thoughts are processed, but progress is being made.

Once we know how the brain works, there will be another leap ahead in processing capacity and, probably, the ever-elusive field of artificial intelligence.

Then we'll end up with a prissy golden robot telling us to shove off and leave his pint of cinnamon-flavored lubricant alone.

Oops: Bounty-hunter found Vine's source code in plain sight

"the problem was fixed in March"

So they were notified and fixed the issue really fast.

Good.

Now can we have the assurance that no unauthorized access took place before it was outed ?

Mobile broadband now cheaper than wired, for 95 per cent of humanity

"digital divides persist across economic and gender lines"

Across gender lines ?

Can someone please tell me what gender has to do with the speed of copper or fiber ?

What's Brexit? How Tech UK tore up its plans after June 23

Re: The US has also hinted at a deal

Poppycock. The US no longer offers deals, it offers economic and political subservience.

Security firms team to take down rudimentary ransomware

"The decryption is possible thanks to poor coding and implementation of encryption schemes"

Which means we have until the skiddies get a tool that implements encryption properly, then such workarounds will dry up and there will be no more easy way out.

The clock is ticking.

IT boss 'set up fake companies to charge his employers $2.4m'

Re: why the accused didn't simply hire an out of work character actor

Hint : it may have something to do with not wanting to bring anyone in on the racket in order to not share the spoils.

Plus : another person involved is another mouth that might blabber. Tying up loose ends is always a messy job.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Brexit, weak pound. A price hike is coming

"HPE always carefully considers any price changes for our products and adjusts prices based on exchange rates and currency fluctuations"

Let me correct that : HPE always carefully considers any price changes for our products and rises prices based on whatever excuse can be found in exchange rates and currency fluctuations.

That's more like it.

She wants it. She needs it. Shall I give it to her or keep doing it by myself?

"As he made his way over, he casually picked up the electronic stapler…"

And thus the legend of the BOFH was born to the eternal delight of all us lowly peons.

A joy to read.

UK employers still reluctant to hire recent CompSci grads

Re: unable to write a "for" loop in C/C++/Java

After graduating with a degree in computing ? I agree that nobody can know everything, but come on. A loop is part of the basic, simple things one does all the time when programming. If you can't do that with a diploma in hand, the basics are simply not being covered.

Now, if the degree concerns network infrastructure and communication, then you're not supposed to be a programmer. You are destined to become those upon whom the Internet relies the most : the exalted Network Engineer, the guy who knows how a packet goes from A to B and why. The guy who knows what an MX entry is and what it's for. The guy who digs all the thrilling stuff they're doing in them thar Clouds. I don't mind you not knowing how to code a loop, you are the other side of IT - the one that supports the data flow that programmers create.

The curriculum might need a bit more clarity in that aspect.

Is there anyone that still thinks that a degree makes you perfect for the job ?

The only thing any diploma can prove is that you have the intellectual level to comprehend the difficulties in a certain area, and hopefully the baggage to understand what data you lack, how to find it and the ability to learn it.

Once on the job, you still have to confront the real world with the academics version and learn to compose with the demands of the situation. It is an entirely new training session for some, which is why it is interesting for companies to get at them young and unbent by years of doing things the wrong way. Get 'em young and you can easily bend them to doing things wrong your way.

Salesforce slurps uptime startup Coolan for global infrastructure scale-out

Once upon a time, companies were created to make a product and sell it

It seems that, nowadays, companies are created to be bought by other companies. Is anyone still interested in actually running a company ?

I think it's a shame that this startup got bought - it had an interesting idea. Now that idea is folded into Salesforce, which means that not many people will benefit from whatever it was because Salesforce is not likely to develop the idea and open-source it.

And I also wonder how Salesforce is going to advance on infrastructure management when AWS is tasked for that job. On the other hand, Salesforce now has a great development environment - entire warehouses of kit that will be shut down after the switch. So maybe it is a good thing and we will see some progress on the matter of data loss in distributed environments.

We're not looking for MH370 in the wrong place say investigators

Re: everyone [..] wants [..] a better chance of it not happening again

Spot on. I am certainly very curious to know what could happen on a plane that could incapacitate hundreds of people before anyone could hit an emergency button of any sort, and do that without blowing the plane out of the sky immediately.

Explosive decompression is out of the question, because even if it happened in the pilot area, someone would have been able to get in and radio a mayday.

Fire on board would take too long to avoid a mayday.

No structural damage would have killed everyone without also making the plane fall from the sky.

The only practical possibility I see is a gas of some sort, or gradual lack of oxygen, that made everyone fall asleep without noticing. How to explain its presence is beyond me, but there has been a prior case of an airplane that crashed because the pilots hadn't seen that the oxygen system was not activated so they did not have any oxygen renewal at 15000 feet and all fell asleep, then into a coma. They were dead before the plane crashed. So there is a precedent of sorts to this kind of situation, but outside of terrorist attack, which would have been claimed, I can't see how something like it could have happened.

Apple, Facebook and Coinbase coughed data to finger alleged pirate king

Interesting part about a Bitcoin exchange giving up transaction details

I wonder how the Bitcoin aficionados are going to react to that. It is obviously the end of the vaunted anonymity of Bitcoin transactions.

I'm going to keep this article bookmarked. Every time I read someone spouting on about how Bitcoins are anonymous, I'll link it.

Yeah, but the San Bernardino killer was a high-profile, public case.

This is a piracy facilitator, not worth protecting because nobody will blame them.

Scality CEO says French startup scene is booming

"The French startup ecosystem is booming"

But leave it as soon as you can !

Um, I have a problem here : how can advising people to move their companies to Silicon Valley, which is already stuffed to the gills with startups, be consistent with recognizing that the French startup situation is roaring ahead ?

I get that VCs in California have more experience, but might it not pay off to actually stay in France and create a new version of startup culture ? Especially if things are starting to ramp up, as they seem to be doing ?

Silicon Valley is certainly a beacon, but it is located in a socially broken country in a region that has enormous energy and climate difficulties with a corrupt government to boot. I think it would be good to stay away from that nest of trouble and favor the fruition of a new startup-friendly environment.

Be it in Germany, France, or heck, even the UK.

There is no rule that says that Silicon Valley is the only place to build a startup. Let's not continue to blindly follow the USA everywhere it goes. Especially these days.

Gartner's hype cycle turned upside down to assess Brexit

Hold your nerve and do not overreact

Words to apply in every situation.

Microsoft ordered to fix 'excessively intrusive, insecure' Windows 10

@soulrideruk

You see, that is what I find supremely annoying with just about any fanbois community. You make a valid point, you're experiencing difficulty, and the only thing they come back with is insults, demeaning words and contempt. Then they complain about how small their market is.

That kind of attitude is a plague for computing in general. It keeps new people from getting interested and locks everything down to only the saintly original group that understands everything and never has any problem whatsoever.

A 6th-level black belt in any martial art is never going to have that kind of attitude. He will seek to give you examples and help you until you figure out what you're doing wrong. We need people with that mentality in IT.

Microsoft to rip up P2P Skype, killing native Mac, Linux apps

"new or enhanced features"

better file sharing, video messaging, mobile group calling, translation and bots

I can't wait to hear about the security issues and failures that will come to light from all these new malware support areas Microsoft is creating.

BT customers hit by broadband outage ... again

Nope, it's about electricity here

Specifically, the lack of it. Bandwidth is not the solution here, BT is dark in that region because the lights are out as well.

The cloud ain't making it rain for Intel right now: Tech giants pause server chip sales

Re: Don't make beancounters the decision-makers

It's unfortunately way too late for that. Beancounters have taken over everything including NASA, a place where I would have expected engineers to hold the top positions.

BT internet outage was our fault, says Equinix

Well, yes, in the sense that the rest of the world routed its packets around the dark area;

As for those in the dark area, they had nothing to route, to the saying stays true.

How's this for irony? US Navy hit with $600m software piracy claim

Re: LMFAO!

Indeed. What the hell were they thinking ?

"Hello, could you please deactivate your protection for the trial ?"

"But of course, right away" replied no salesperson ever. Deactivate protection ? WHY ? Pay the licenses, you'll have the app and it will be legally protected.

I would have liked to be a fly on the wall of that meeting.

Microsoft tweaks TCP stack in Windows Server and Windows 10

Re: Particularly on very high bandwidth / low latency connections like say 40 Gbit

Yeah, because we all have sooo much experience of 40GB connections

An anniversary to remember: The world's only air-to-air nuke was fired on 19 July, 1957

I had actually reviewed the list before posting my reply, and had been surprised at not finding it - but didn't follow up on that. I was always convinced that the operator at the station had died of radiation poisoning. My recollection is that I had read that somewhere.

Following your comment, I reviewed the article on Wikipedia.

Thank you for giving me the incentive to correct that mistake.

Re: its hard to find anyone who has died from radiation, anywhere in the world.

No it isn't.

First of all, you can just google "lethal radiation event" and you get, in 4th place, this list. Of course, that means you have to actually search instead of just spouting a comfortable ignorance.

Second, you might remember a little event called Three Mile Island ? The one that started the whole "nukular is BAAAD" craze ? There again, Google is your friend.

More recently, you have to have heard of Chernobyl. They even made a video game based on the environment. Thousands died from exposure on-site, the number of cancers influenced by the worldwide fallout is, of course, unknown.

So no, it is not difficult to find people who have died from radiation. You just have to look.

Hacker shows Reg how one leaked home address can lead to ruin

Re: It's happened to me twice

Given the outcome, I think you can count yourself lucky.

There are a growing number of perfectly innocent people who's lives have been thoroughly trashed by Internet vigilantism.

Re: I am too smart for my information to get out

That attitude is a one-way ticket to a very nasty surprise down the line.

I hate "social" sites and I always have. Starting with the pseudo-relationship enablers (Meetic & Co), and right up to, of course, Facebook. The need that most people apparently have to self-divulge their every living moment to everyone is, in my view, a sickness that needs to be cured.

I have real friends, with whom I have face-to-face or phone/Internet conversations. That is social enough for me. I am smart enough to know that, if you don't want your information to get out, don't post it online. Especially not on a site that is specifically tailored to correlate and sell it.

Microbe drives tropical butterfly species to a male-killing frenzy

I don't get it

How can an almost exclusively female population of butterflies survive over a decade ?

I understood that males from other regions come in to bang to exhaustion, but it seems weird that it should be enough to generate another generation of almost-only females.

Nature is one hell of a complicated thing.

Schrödinger's cat explained with neutrinos

"And even then, we can't stop using quantum mechanics"

Translation : even wizards can get addicted.

And you have to be a wizard to even begin understanding this field.

I bow to our new superposed neutrino-wielding overlords.

Handover of US internet control to ICANN officially blocked in Republican policy

"legislatively impeded his plans to turn over the Information Freedom Highway to regulators"

Hang on, let me check something, ah yes :

Regulator : a person or thing that regulates

Umm, just for clarification : the IANA is what, if not a regulator ?

These people are so used to spouting nonsense they don't even realize when they contradict their own statement. In the same sentence at that.

Microsoft Azure doubles up to $800m a quarter – and is wiped out by dying phone sales

"This fiscal year we invested in innovation"

As opposed to last year, where you just wasted money on Windows Phone that you have now all but killed ?

"Invested in innovation" : the new CxO-speak for wrapping useless words around non-existent information.

Brilliant waste of breath.

WordPress admin? Thinking of spending time with the family? Think again

Re: Not quite Adobe Flash long

From what I hear about WordPress, they're at least trying to fix things. Adobe gives rather the reverse impression.

IoT baby monitor style hacks still a threat

Well that was interesting. I got a bit scared reading about this Shodan portal. I went off to find it, read the Ts & Cs, went about checking it out. As a search portal, it does not seem dangerous (meaning it doesn't look like a blackhat is on the other side, waiting to infect me with malware).

So I signed in, authenticated my account, and went about discovering how to use it. At first, I was a bit unprepared - I'm not used to searching for IoT stuff, I usually google normal stuff. I used the Explore button and got page upon page of TCP IP addresses. Clicked on one, got a login page. Didn't want to go there.

Then I got an idea : I would search my own IP address. If I discover a problem, all I have to do is shut down my router for a minute and I'll get a new IP, so not much risk there. I dared it, wondering if the security cameras installed by the firm I subscribed to would show up.

Relief, they do not. On top of that, when the result page displayed it showed a city location that has nothing to do with where I live, but is most likely the local ISP hub for my connection. So not only can no one find me like that, but it would appear that my ISP is on the ball concerning security, because there was nothing else on the page besides the TCP address and the city name.

I actually feel a bit safer now.