Posts by Pascal Monett 19002 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Of course, major corporation says there is nothing to worry about so we shouldn't worry. It's not like major corporations have ever lied to us before, now is it ? Nor has any major corporation ever been proven wrong about something as sensitive and critical as security, right ?
Riiight.
So first you take the site down "for maintenance", then a few days later you admit that there was a breach, and now you want me to trust your word that I am not at risk ?
I would have been inclined to trust you if you been straightforward about admitting the issue instead of trying to hide it before being forced to come clean. Such shenanigans inspire the reverse of trust because you have demonstrated that you're willing to lie if you think you can cover up the issue.
So I will be checking my details and so on and, if I have the slightest suspicion of foul play at work, I guarantee you are going to hear from me.
Because the perps were absolutely not known by police forces, no sir. Their whereabouts could absolutely not have been discerned with a bit of eyeball surveillance, not at all. There is no way anyone could have known what the perps were up to if they had simply gone out the bloody door to find out.
Yep, linking databases is the solution. Yessirreeee.
So much for political promises and official declarations.
It's like talking to a drunk addict. They never stop drinking. Tell them to stop drinking and they go "Yup", then turn around and take an alcohol enema to get drunk again.
Can't trust them, period.
It's time to bring in the ghosts of the Founding Fathers.
Therefor the OP is correct, since all this data collecting didn't change the result one iota.
What is the use of invading everyone's privacy all the time if things like this still slip through ? If you're invading, then at least make it do the bloody job right.
I don't want to learn that some things are caught. If you're invading everyone's life then I want all things to be caught.
Otherwise it's just not worth it.
If the call concerned spouse battery of drunken idiot, you would be right. However swatting is a call that specifically directs police to a hostage situation.
The police are therefor going in under the presumption that lives are at risk, and one or more perps are armed (this is the US, remember ?) and ready to respond.
It is normal for them to charge in, because that is supposed to give them the element of surprise. It is also, unfortunately, understandable that in such a tense moment, otherwise innocent acts from totally surprised innocent people can be wrongly interpreted as dangerous. If you're going in expecting bad guys and being told to respond with lethal force, it takes superhuman calm, Buddha levels of self-control and split-second observation abilities to not fire a shot if a threat you expect seems to crop up.
I think 20 years to life is a perfectly reasonable outcome for some asshat who is sooo unhappy about losing that he unleashes lethal weaponry upon the family of his opponent. If someone dies because of this, they won't be coming back.
I swear to God I have a very special "education" program for ICANN that covers all aspects of managing with transparency. It is seconded by key therapeutic sessions of a new technique I am reviewing called percussive chanting. It goes like this : the board members get tied to a log, then the galley drummers start a slow rythm while the personnel impress the notion of transparency on their bare backs with leathery implements.
With a good tempo, the board will be chanting transparency in no time.
Repeat the session when motivation is no longer sufficient.
I had a BMW 330d for several years. I do remember changing the battery once. I don't remember having to go to BMW to get a special one, I'm pretty sure I bought it on a shelf in a supermarket, like all the others I've had to buy in my life.
There may be some special battery requirement for hybrid vehicles, but I can vouch that the bog-standard BMW diesel engine will accomodate your supermarket battery of the proper voltage without issue.
If you're talking about software running on a PC, there is zero reason for a special keypad and there is no software for which a bog-standard, 100+ key keyboard cannot suffice. You could replace the keyboard with only a number pad, but there is no reason to require a keyboard and another input device with keys.
This reeks of snake oil and it would seem that their autolaunch tasks prove it.
Personally, I would never accept being told that software running on a PC need any input deevice beyond mouse + keyboard. Not for my needs anyway.
Every company has founders, each founder has shares in the company. As long as the company is private, each founder can decide what he wants to do with his own shares and, unless the statutes of the company demand a specific process, nobody has the right to call him on it.
For example, I am in business with an associate. Together we head a small company. I have a certain amount of shares, he has the rest (the majority actually, I joined his company). We are not and never will be publicly traded, but I still have a share of the company. If we are very successful, when I retire I will be able to sell those shares at the best price I can get, and there is no law that says otherwise.
Which kind of justice exactly ?
The kind that bursts through the door, trashes your appartment/house in search of weapons/drugs/illegal-substance-of-the-day then gives you a full cavity search to be sure they missed nothing, leaving empty-handed with nary an excuse for having violated your life, your body and your privacy under the pretense of "securing the Nation" ?
Or the kind that gathers intel, checks it out, asks for warrant to place under surveillance, gathers direct observational data and, when all indications are you do actually have a bomb lab in your basement, then comes crashing into your life at 6 A.M. sharp to ruin your evil plans ?
Once again encryption is being paraded as the tool terrorists use. Terrorists may indeed use it, but in Paris they did not. As a French national, I am particularly looking forward to the explanations of how these nutjobs got through on plaintext SMS. But in any case, I feel that we, as a society, must absolutely stop relying on computers to discover and gather information on suspects. SigInt has its limits, and they appear to be rather drastic.
I would much rather have all entryways to major cities equipped with metal detectors able to sniff out weapons-grade metals and sending an automated alert and license plate pic to Police HQ(*). I think that would honestly be a lot more efficient because, however long the scum takes to plan, whatever the encryption they use (or don't, as the case may be), they still have to show up physically, all geared up, to accomplish their despicable mission.
If you can catch them while they're still in their car, you can very much limit the damage they can do - contrary to the situation today where we have a few officers sifting through petabytes of useless data and not getting the intel they could actually use.
Alert from the Porte d'Auteuil ? It's a black Seat with four bearded guys dressed in black ? Time for the rapid intervention RAID team. Start the roadblocks and we'll get them !
* - of course, maybe a better alternative would be an automated 80cm-thick steel plate that pops up in front of said vehicle. Vehicle crashes into it, everyone inside seriously injured, cops and medical services just need to mop up. YMMV.
It obviously can't hurt. Personally, even if the exercise is a shambles, it still will result in better awareness for all involved.
Fire drills are an accepted nuisance for a risk that is actually not all that common. This should become a regular occurence because, if I am not mistaken, the risk is far larger.
My company car is a Peugeot 207. The window buttons are on the door, in front of the handle.
I had a Laguna 2 a few years ago, window buttons were on the door handle as well. Renault Scenic models are the same. The Renault 5 my mother had decades ago was the same. So I would say that the traditional window button position in France is on the interior door handle.
On the other hand, I had a BMW 330d, it had all window button controls behind the gearshift on the central column. I found that quite practical. Curiously, the Audi A5 I have now has the buttons . . on the door handle.
Concerning the DS5, I am quite happy to know that they have removed the Citroën name from it. A Citroën car has hydropneumatic suspension. It is the defining characteristic of Citroën, and the main reason that all Citroën lovers have stuck with the brand.
A car that does not have hydropneumatic suspension does not deserve the Citroën moniker.
The Internet is not what Oracle is used to. Oracle gets you to its platform then proceeds to bleed you dry with every option and doodad as a surplus.
On the Internet you can't do that. The Internet is a world of fixed budget. People are generally not going to pay more for more functionality, but they will drop you if a competitor comes along with a better product. So everyone is putting more functionality just to stay relevant or get ahead of the competition.
That means that Oracle is simply going to price itself out of the market.
Smart meters, hmm. Where have I heard about those things already ?
Ah, right : the UK energy meters that have been rolled out almost by force in the UK.
Well, looking forward to hearing about how some blackhats turned SAP around on that. Should be an interesting read.
If it ever happens, that is.
Don't you just love it when a company tries to tell the government how the law should work ?
In any case, I'm almost into encouraging Uber to go on with such shenanigans. Keep it up and you'll be the landmark case to describe why the creation of an Internet Tax Board was necessary.
And honestly, I think we'll get there. With the Internet, you can sell anywhere. Well anywhere's government is going to want their share of tax, because that sale happened in their country. It is useless to try and say that you base your revenue in another country when the issue is VAT or suchlike.
Foreign goods arrive in port and are subject to local VAT rates. Heck, even inside the USA sales are subject to each State's sales tax.
Uber is going to bite the bullet on this big time, because there is no government on this planet that is going to think they are exempt from sales tax. Not gonna happen.
That's like saying cars are useful because you can put up billboards and the drivers will see them.
No. Web browsers are an attractive target because that's the one platform everyone is using for a majority of their Internet interactions. The fact that you can spaff ads on them is a side effect, not a purpose.
Clear explanation on why the higher frequency is important : "A low-resolution system will have a higher rate of false alarms and will miss a small object that is in front of a big one".
That is kind of important if you wish to avoid crashing into the kid crossing behind the SUV in front of you.
Good things all around.
goldcd: I agree entirely with your point on remote access. I was in no way referring to that, only commenting on the LAN side of the equation. My upstream bandwidth is currently sitting at less than 1mpbs, so I would even dream of going via VPN to watch anything on my DiskStation.
AnonC : I understand your point and that your use case is different from mine. I have no use for files that over 10GB let alone 1TB, so 16TB is the Moon for me. But I agree that XFS might have been a better choice. That said, Synology apparently bases its hard drive format on EXT4, not EXT3. Not nerd enough to know if that's better.
Sure, because everyone has a full-duplex gigabyte link to the Internet, meaning that downloading the same data again and again is not a problem. Really ?
Sorry, but no. If I'm on a LAN, then I want my data to be accessible at GB speed, not at 10Mbps. And I don't want to burden my Internet bandwidth with the data.
I just bought a Synology 414DS this year, and I'm very happy with it. You are not going to convince me that I should instead upload all my DVD rips (store-bought) to some unicorn service and use my Internet connection to watch them.
And as for security, please. My Synology is firewalled from the web. Not visible, period. How is Dropbox more secure than that ?
Ah, you mean to ensure me that any judge will have access to all my data because biometric data is "out in the open" ?
And that is supposed to enhance my privacy how again ?
Actually, color me impressed. In just one year, Nadella has convinced me that he is just as much a jerk as Ballmer was.
Going to uni does not make you more intelligent, just more knowledgeable.
I've heard that there are Creationists who went to uni in geology in order to debunk the scientific basis of study concerning the Grand Canyon. Now they act as tour guides in the Grand Canyon, saying things like "this valley might have been created by water erosion over millions of years" and other such sentences designed to hint to the fact that it could also have been created a mere 6 thousand years ago.
Now that may be an urban myth, I don't know, but given that there are people who are ready to kill nurses and doctors in abortion clinics to uphold the "right to life", it is not beyond the realm of the possible.
The possibilities for mayhem are absolutely stupendous.
Didn't get the memo ? Cortana didn't send it to the right person, or at all. Wrong figures in the spreadsheet ? Cortana didn't use the latest version. Used the latest figures on a report concerning last year ? Cortana made the mistake. Powerpoint slide looks ugly ? Cortana made the choices.
I really look forward to the Helpdesk receiving a call in the lines of "Cortana didn't send my mail, you need to fix it."
Yep, that'll be fun to watch.
Indeed, that plus the invasion of privacy makes Google a no-show on my desktop.
I am not a fan of having my privacy rectally examined by an nebulous, all-encompassing ad-slinging organization.
And I really, really do not appreciate the malware-level approach Google has in installing itself in every single nook and cranny of a PC as soon as it gets a foothold, making it very bothersome to actually permanently remove all Google-related services and products.
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