Posts by Pascal Monett

Exercise apps track you after you stop exercising

You forgot the sarcasm tag

Flash zero day phished phoolish Microsoft Office users

Tempting to say : 'Good'

It is absolutely unbelievable how, after decades of being patched, this festering pile of poisonous dung is still capable of offering zero-days for hackers.

Beezlebub himself must be one of the programmers of this abomination.

We can't get rid of it fast enough.

Smut apps infecting Androids with long-gestation nasties

"plunder older Android devices through infected porn apps"

I do believe porn is the most dangerous category of stuff you can try to get on the web. It has been the first center of attention for malware authors since the first grainy GIFs appeared on the intertubes.

Porn apps/games/whatever is THE category of things I never, ever download on any platform.

Way to risky.

Curiosity find Mars' icecaps suck up its atmosphere

It is also extremely unlikely to win the lottery, yet people do that all the time. The lottery happens more often than killer asteroids, granted, but all you need is to win once.

The problem with your point of view is that you'd have us avoid pointlessly "wasting our time" until it was far too late to do avoid the issue - which means we could all thank you when the killer rock shows its nose and we find that we're fucked.

So I thank the scientists that are actively trying to save Humanity as a whole, you included, so that you can keep spouting such nonsense.

US work visas for international tech talent? 'If Donald Trump is elected all bets are off'

“It's very bad for business, [..] unfair for our workers. We should end it.”

I think he's absolutely right.

Let America show what its educational system can do. Stop importing intelligence from abroad, use your own.

We'll see how well that goes.

P.S. : couldn't include a sarcasm tag large enough

Salesforce.com crash caused DATA LOSS

Re: "a failure like this if a on their in-house managed IT systems"

Again with this flawed comparison. Apples and oranges, my good sir.

If your in-house IT fails, it only bothers YOU and YOUR customers.

If the cloud fails, it bothers EVERY SINGLE COMPANY RELYING ON IT.

It's a question of scale : to fuck things up you need a computer, but to really fuck things up you need a cloud.

Yes, but that is the theology of things, the religious principle.

When you get down to the gritty realities of practice is where you find out that your genie has a cop-out clause.

A cracked window on the International Space Station? That's not good

@Black Betty

I agree with your idea, intellectually speaking, but basic principle of staged rockets is to shed the dead weight to get into orbit using less fuel. Keeping the dead weight kinda defeats the purpose.

Until we find some other way of lifting mass into space, we're probably stuck with the current status quo.

Spying on you using fake social media profiles: One Scots council could

"East Lothian Council [..] is highly unlikely to do so"

"Highly unlikely" does not cut it. Government has no right to do spy on citizens, period.

Take whatever lines concerning this practice out and clean up the practice.

Change "is highly unlikely to" to "is legally obliged NOT to" and things will be slightly better.

Lie back and think of cybersecurity: IBM lets students loose on Watson

Agreed, but Watson is some helluva new-fangled computer thingy.

Check out this video. If you're not scared of the possibilities hinted at after viewing this, you have nerves of steel.

First successful Hyperloop test module hits 100mph in four seconds

@Known Hero

The fact that 50% of all drivers have not died in a fiery crash tends to somewhat invalidate your argument.

Boffins flip the unflippable: Meet the latest storage extender contender

"it'll take years"

No, at this point it will take decades.

Spintronics ? Purely lab-based. I'm impressed that they've found another way to store digital information. I'm happy that an EM blast cannot erase it. I am however too old to be taken in by the hype.

Maybe, just maybe, a copper-whatever-arsenide SDD thingy will be commercially available before I die.

I won't hold my breath. Not until I start seeing those wonderful nano-carbon-tube batteries I've already been promised a decade ago.

How to make a fortune in space? Start with one here on Earth…

"space is the latest frontier for business"

I am quite impressed. Apparently there has been a warp in space-time, and someone has managed to get access to lectures of the year 2185. That surely is a remarkable feat, if only because the universe has not imploded through the sheer weight of all the paradoxes that will be generated.

Meanwhile, in good old 2016, a pound of cargo still costs upwards of $10,000 to get into orbit.

Call me when that cost is down to a dollar. Then we'll be able to talk about the "latest frontier for business".

Oh, I'm sorry, you meant "the latest frontier for billionaires" ? Nothing to say there. Carry on !

Blocking ads? Smaller digital publishers are smacked the hardest

"not winning a contract surely hurts, but it's not a loss"

I don't think you understand the situation.

In order to bid for a contract, time is spent evaluating and writing the specifications, and more time is spent evaluating at what price the prospect will accept your bid.

That time spent cannot be spent on other things, or other bids, or other projects. So, not winning a bid is indeed a loss. Not only do you lose the opportunity, but all the time you spent on the bid is gone.

There is no company that can survive without getting contracts. Something must cover the operational expenses. So yes, not winning a bid IS a loss - it just doesn't show up in accounting.

Not so simple. I am regularly in competition to win contracts. If I get the contract, I've won the money. If I don't, I have indeed lost the ability to earn it - and it hurts just as much.

Re: they'll happily settle for a small percentage of what they're getting now

So you're an advertiser. Well the article says that next year's income is already going to be sizeably smaller whether you like it or not. And given the issues of security that are cropping up with alarming regularity, it seems this trend is not going to go away.

The question you need to ask yourself is : are you ready to try a different way of doing things, or are you just going to carry on driving over the cliff ?

UK.gov pays four fellows £35k to do nothing for three months

Of course not. That would be theft of Government property, court-martial and prison.

Better to just blow it all. That is just waste, not theft.

Big difference.

Re: everybody else has to do what they say or they don't get any money

That is my principal beef with accounting. Accounting is NOT there to authorize things, it is there to count where the money goes and provide a realistic picture of what the company is earning and how it is spending it to the Higher Ups.

It is Production that knows what it needs, when it needs it and why. I honestly cannot fathom why Production needs to explain itself to Accounting. Production should only need Executive permission. Obviously, Production would very much like to blow x millions on the new shiny as well, but a proper ROI study should be enough to decide what to authorize or not.

But of course, Executive likes to delegate, so it makes the budget rules and leaves Accounting to enforce it. That is why we have this stupid system, with the assorted waste it produces.

Laser-zapping scientists will save the Earth from meteorite destruction

Re: The local neighbourhood has cleared

You might want to take a look here.

Methinks that there are enough items on that page to invalidate your notion of "clear".

IBM's Internet of Things brainbox foresees 'clean clothes as a service'

"they could actually carry out real world testing in the field"

And there we have it : the true nature of IoT.

It is not to make your life easier, it is to allow corporations to freely spy on your habits, gather data on you and sell that to some advertising agency to make more money off your back.

Oh, of course, it will be said that they are doing that "to propose products better suited for the customer". Sorry, I don't buy it. The current products are sufficiently suited for customers ; we like having the choice.

My laundry machine has 7 programs. I always use the same one. The others don't bother me, they're there if I need them - which happens once or twice a year. Do they want me to believe that they will make a laundry machine with only 2 settings ? Nonsense.

I'm sure of one thing : this article is just reinforcing the IoT ban field that is around my house. Not only do I find IoT rather gimmicky if not outright useless, but now I know to look out for yet more spying features.

I really need to dig that bear pit around my house someday.

Italians rattle little tin for smartmobe mini lenses

Agreed. The macro image seems interesting and good enough, but the micro image doesn't really impress me.

I didn't know they made USB microscopes. I'll have to look into that.

Siri's maker finally unveils dev-tastic universal AI interface Viv

Let's just say that I view the Reality Distortion Field from the outside.

"an intelligent, conversational interface" to "distribute products"

That sounds like taking away the salesperson who cold-calls you right before dinner and replacing him with a salesperson that hounds you all day long from your pocket.

I'm sure it'll be a great product, after all, it's on Apple - but I am much too wary of the marketing possibilities to buy into that.

Investigatory Powers Bill: As supported by world's most controlling men

You may be unfit for running for office - but you are at least aware of the fact.

That, in my opinion, makes you more fit than any of those clowns.

So all political parties are for it

It's just the citizens that are against it.

If I were a British citizen, I think I would be having a long, hard look at why I bother voting at all.

Experian Audience Engine knows almost as much about you as Google

"The company claims that it is privacy compliant"

Of course it is - it only sells your data to those who pay.

What is Hybrid Infrastructure? Glad you asked...

Sysadmin ancien d'hier

There's a bit of redundancy there, Mr Pott - kinda like saying an ancient old-timer sysadmin. He's an old-timer already, how much more do you want his back to be bent ? ;)

I am emphatically not a sysadmin, but I am clearly on the old-timer side of the path (and retirement is now barely perceptible in the haze of time), so I will jauntily assume the mantel of ye old mountain yokel and defend that "just someone else's server" position that you seem to dismiss out-of-hand.

Yes, I understand that IT is once again undergoing a sea change, what with broadband being more prevalent and data centers being something everyone apparently has these days. Someone might point out that this was inevitable. Fine.

I also readily accept that there are SLAs and contractual obligations and so on and so forth. Great.

Finally, I will not bring in to the debate the issues of security and governmental snooping. I will accept to put those aside to focus on the issue of in-house, or not in-house, which is the question (and yes, I know the article is about hybrid ; that just means that you're managing both sets of issues).

Now, for starters, don't bother me with the cost argument. It has been said in these very hallowed articles that going cloud is just displacing the cost center, there is no diminution of costs. With that out of the way, we can concentrate on five nines, functionality and performance.

When you go to the cloud, you get a rosy picture, a nice contract with a bunch of promises, and then you start finding out what actually works and how well. You might be able to do some special things, but if the Cloud is not compatible, you won't be able to do it, however much you ask and plead for it to happen. That's because you're just a drop in the cloud, and only if there are many, many more drops asking the same thing will the cloud change to you. So, in this configuration, it is you who are tied to the cloud, not the reverse.

When you go in-house, it's up to you to get the expertise and it's your money that is invested in the infrastructure. That can get quite expensive, I agree. Especially if, like RBS, you get rid of the expertise and hand over daily management to some external company that proceeds to royally screw everything up. Companies need to learn to keep expertise at hand - sometimes high salaries are worth paying.

Of course, in-house failures can and will happen. The cloud goes down for various reasons, in-house can go down as well. The difference being that you can, when in-house, identify issues beforehand, prepare mitigation procedures and, hopefully, implement them quickly when things go pear-shaped.

And if things really go pear-shaped, well you have your personnel at hand and are also there to "encourage" them to get it working again.

When things go bad in the cloud, your mitigation procedure is store the data until the connection comes back. You have only one course of action : call and find out when things will be coming back. Then you just might find out that they won't, because the cloud has been zapped by hackers, or because there were no backups, or because the datacenter is under water, etc. At that point, supposing you do have backups, you're still stuck with having to find another cloud provider, then having to set everything up there, then finding out just how hard it is to get your data on that new cloud.

You will note I have not made mention of connectivity. If your connection goes down, it doesn't matter where the servers are, you're disconnected and you'll have to wait until the connection returns.

So what I'm saying is that the cloud is not a better solution than in-house. It is just a solution with a different set of constraints. Use your server, you get one set of problems. Use someone else's server, you get another set of problems.

The real issue is understanding why you choose which set.

But it's still someone else's server.

Linux Mint to go DIY for multimedia

UI changes

Personally, I cannot abide OSes that force a UI upon me and leave me no choice (which is why I stick to Win7).

The many distros of Linux have amply demonstrated that the UI is easily configurable and has no real ties with any background process. We have today computers that are a million times more powerful than what we had last millenium, but Linux has had configurable UIs since way before Y2K.

There should never be any "change in the UI". There should only be "new options for the UI" that I can enable or not. That is a lesson that Microsoft still has great pain to comprehend.

Re: Er... NO!!!!

Well, unfortunately, yes. If we are to generalize a robust, stable OS for most people to use, it would be good if said OS had the user-friendly features of Windows without the abysmal collection of cheese holes in security that go with the original.

But that doesn't mean that everyone would have to use it. Linux is the paradise of choice, so you could go on using the Iron Penguin version while Joe User would use Fluffy Ballmer (for example).

Don't split Openreach, says BT, and we'll splash BEELLIONS on broadband and 4G

I would give them "regulatory certainty"

I would tell them that they are going to spend those billions - because if they don't, then they'll have no chance of surviving the competition that I will unleash on them.

Monopoly generates complacency. BT is obviously the fat Jabba who, being pseudo-threatened, waves a pudgy hand and mumbles something of a promise before turning his attention back to his bikini-clad slave girl.

Time to put a lightsaber through that.

Facebook image-tagging to be tested in Californian court

That is, on everyone who automatically accepts cookies and runs Javascript without control.

Which is most people, admittedly.

Google-backed Yieldify has acquired IP from ‘world’s biggest patent troll’

That sounds suspiciously like a convoluted way of saying "displaying ads".

Ransomware grifters offer to donate proceeds of crime to charity

Um, that is irrelevant

Hijacking people's computers, encrypting their data and blackmailing them is still a crime, even if you promise to share the proceeds with organizations that care for children.

You could claim that all the money will go to search for a cure for cancer, you are still a criminal.

Hey, YouTube: Pay your 'workers' properly and get with the times

"it pays out something far more valuable than money: attention"

Riiiight.

So Google, you'll be accepting attention in lieu of actual money for your ad impressions, right ?

Yeah, sure.

That fails the smell test from a mile away.

Brit polar vessel christened RRS Sir David Attenborough

Glad to see that proper British values and common sense won the day

Too bad proper British values and common sense couldn't keep this nonsense from happening in the first place.

I wonder what Admiral Nelson would have thought of such a scheme. I'm sure his reaction would have been quite educational - once he'd managed to stop sputtering indignantly.

The 'new' Microsoft? I still wouldn't touch them with a barge pole

Re: "software had become powerful enough to serve users well enough for years"

Just a nitpick, but it's the hardware that became good enough to serve users well for years.

Once upon a time, each year brought hardware advances that improved performance by 20% or more. In those days, you upgraded because not upgrading meant not reaping the benefits, and the ROI was indisputable.

Today, you get 5% performance improvement - if that.

Software has just reached a point where the bloat is not entirely capable of drowning the hardware anymore.

IBM's POWER cloud powers up almost a year later than promised

You know the old saying

Pecunia non olet

Have Microsoft-hosted email? Love using Live Mail 2012? Bad news

Oh, right now I'd say around three months.

Learn a scripting language and play nicely: How to get a DevOps job

Indeed. This whole article is just an official announcement to learn the lingo and what the dance steps are.

Sysadmin who is supposed to be able to code ? I don't know one who doesn't, personally. Nor do I know any sysadmin worth a damn who isn't fully aware of what is running on his network and how it works - well enough to fix issues most of the time, that is.

For me this article is a confirmation : DevOps is just the new moniker for what competent people have been doing since IT was birthed.

Windows 10 free upgrade offer ends on July 29th

Re: If I upgrade to windows 10 and I don't like it

Microsoft cannot invalidate your license key. You paid for it, it is yours forever.

I still have my Genuine XP disc and the license key that goes with it. That means that I can install XP if I wish - and have hardware that can run it.

Windows 7 is, of course, the same. I've paid for it, so I have the right to install and use it - as long as the hardware is compatible with it.

The day PC hardware will tell me to get something else is the day I fear. That day I will truly have no choice but to go Linux all the way, because Microsoft has burned all the bridges now and Windows 7 will be the last MS OS I will ever use at home.

Um, couldn't you have stopped at "Windows update disabled" ?

I did.

"The program's been a success"

No, it hasn't.

20% market share for one entire year of free download is NOT a success.

If Windows 1 0 was indeed the bee's knees as we have been repeatedly told, then everyone should have downloaded it. Win 1 0 market share should be in the upper 70%.

The program has demonstrated that Microsoft cannot capture more than one-fifth of the market with a free upgrade.

I count that as a failure.

'I thought my daughter clicked on ransomware – it was the damn Windows 10 installer'

And the cherry on the cake is that your OS is not going to go change its settings behind your back.

Microsoft : the best reason to go to Linux that ever existed.

'Bitcoin creator' Craig Yeah Wright in meltdown

Let's make sure of that :

Craig Wright : fraud and douche nozzle

Trump is a billionaire - being an asshole comes with the territory.

This numpty is nobody. Comparing him to Trump in any way is actually an insult to Trump because when Trump manipulates people his victims don't notice until they get the bill. Trump is actually far more shrewd than this looser, he knows when not to go claiming something that he might actually have to prove. Trump makes claims that are just vague enough and, when you challenge them, he takes you court and cleans you out.

This idiot, on the other hand, did go to court, all the way to the supreme court, and he lost all the way.

Looser.

Cops deploy StingRay anti-terror tech against $50 chicken-wing thief

Not any more. PoI is now considered a documentary. It was just filmed before the actual events.

Surely the police should see that the more they abuse these powers on minor crimes, the more they risk having them restricted or more tightly controlled

We would like to think that that is indeed what will happen. Unfortunately, mix a dose of reality with a helping of cynicism and what will more likely happen will be that the "abuse" of powers will quietly slip into the "regular use" category by virtue of wearing down resistance to the concept.

The article clearly states that this abuse has already taken place thousands of times - it is therefor most certainly not a mistake. The police got the tool with the use cases, saw what it could do and immediately started applying it to everything regardless of how it should be used.

And for all of you who say "I don't see what the problem is with the NSA slurping all the data" - THIS is exactly the problem. If regular police regularly abuse their powers even when they know they will be caught at it, how much more do the secret police abuse powers when they fully know that nobody will ever know about it ?

We obviously cannot trust the police, the CIA/NSA/FBI, or the government to abide by the rules. They must be checked, there must be oversight.

Or you can just admit right now that Democracy has nothing to do with your country anymore and publicly acknowledge that you live in a police state. That way you'll stop living a lie.

EU set to bin €500 note

Re: hoarding gold

But I thought Putin had already bought all the gold after tricking those high-rolling Wall Street types into panic-selling for fear of a crash like a bunch of newbs.

Server-jacking exploits for ImageMagick are so trivial, you'll scream

Developer forum is murdering ImageMagick

From the first few lines on that forum, I clearly get the sense that nobody is very impressed with ImageMagick's way of doing things.

My favorite comment thread :

It's really a command-line tool at its heart. The library is essentially just a wrapper around this command-line tool.

That sounds bass ackwards if you ask me. A command line tool is usually a thin wrapper around a library, for a reason.

and the beautiful conclusion :

And yes, it's a mess. That's why the much saner GraphicsMagick was forked off it… in 2002. People just never migrated.

In other words, ImageMagick is something that should have died at the turn of the millennium.

A Brit cloud biz and an angry customer wanting a refund: A Love Story

"We are the engineers"

Well let's see now :

- godlike opinion of one's own status - check

- inherent contempt for bog-level "lusers" - check

- expressing said contempt while still thinking oneself immaculate - check

- demonstrating abysmal social skills by spending 80% of the email exchange on everything but the problem at hand - check

Yup, you obviously are engineers. If you were in Marketing the company would have closed shop a month after starting.