Posts by Pascal Monett

Work from home when the next big Windows 10 installation arrives

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.

Western Digital's hard drive encryption is useless. Totally useless

Re: "if you have incentive enough"

Of course, objectively speaking, no security can be absolute, but if you have to resort to dynamite or bulldozing your way through a wall, you're sitting pretty in criminal territory and the consequences will be counted in years.

As far as these disks are concerned, I don't expect a commercial product to resist to a determined NSA probe, but I do expect my data to be sufficiently encrypted so that raw data cannot be read and decrypted from it without using the password. And I do expect that the encrytion seed not be derived from a list of predetermined values.

My company bought a few WD portable drives on the express basis that the data was *securely* encrypted. I now find that WD's security is indeed a fragile illusion that can be broken with a trivial program that will probably soon be available to download for free.

We have confidential company data on those drives, and now we are going to have to consider that they are at risk from trivial break-in attempts. Of course, one will still have to get their hands on it first, but still, this situation is not pleasant.

I will be following what WD does on this with great interest.

Microsoft boss Satya Nadella is paid $18m – and would trouser $20m if sacked

"Windows 10 was successfully launched"

Oh really ?

Let me remember : no PCs available on launch date because image not available in time, first downloadable version made a complete pigs breakfast of many installs, first patch update to correct the mess made other things break, and in the first week of "deployment" Windows Update completely borked a good number of PCs that had to be reinstalled. And that was a successful launch ?

#Deity preserve us from a failed one.

Online pharmacy slapped with £130,000 fine for flogging customer data

Oh really ?

“This is a regrettable incident for which we sincerely apologise," said Daniel Lee, managing director, Pharmacy2U, in a statement. "While we are grateful that the ICO recognise that our breach was not deliberate, we appreciate this was a serious matter.

"As soon as the issue was brought to our attention, we stopped the trial selling of customer data and made sure that the information that had been passed on was securely destroyed," he added. "We have also confirmed that we will no longer sell customer data."

A regrettable incident ? Oh, getting caught you mean, of course. Yes, quite unfortunate.

The ICO recognise that the breach was not deliberate ? How nice of your pal over there. So, golf still on next Sunday ?

You stopped the trial selling of customer data ? You mean, there was a trial ? That had specifically been set up to sell customer data ? And you can say with a straight face that it wasn't deliberate ?

Somebody call the press, we've found the next PM.

openSUSE Leap: Middle ground between cutting edge and conservative

"the first version of Leap is openSUSE Leap 42.1"

When we get to Leap 42.42, the HHGTTG will implode.

And now for a flock of Mint comments. Then again, this is not a Windows article, so maybe not.

BBC shuts off iPlayer to UK VPNs, cutting access to overseas fans

I don't get it

People accessing BBC content are only people who pay their license fee. As such, where they watch it from is neither here nor there.

You can't tell me that companies can evade tax by setting up their HQ in a tax-friendly country, then tell me that the BBC can't stream to its paying customers abroad because of local licensing issues.

Either it is the location of the company that counts, or it is the country where the activity is taking place.

Sort this nonsense out forthwith.

Pluto flashes its unusual pits

Re: the sun light is coming from the upper right quadrant

Unless they are not snowballs but actual pits, and the sunlight is coming from the left, which would explain why all pits are shaded on the left side and have a brightness on the right.

Plus there's the fact that NASA scientists are talking about pits. I tend to give them a bit of credence on interpreting interstellar pictures.

Ooh, you'll be going to the pits for sure when they get here.

Terror, terror everywhere: Call the filter police, there's a madman (or two) in town

Filtering and removing

In other words, the Public is not able to handle the issue and must be protected from it.

Doing so is not going to help the situation, it will only keep it under wraps. That is how you get rabid conspiracy theorists.

Let them splash their hate on their websites. Educate your people properly and teach them the values of civilization and democracy. Maybe even teach them to think critically (ah, I know, anathema for a proper gubbermint official).

That is the only way people will recognize barbary when it is visible.

But yeah, that's probably the long run. Maybe even for after the next election. So it'll never happen.

How swearing at your coworker via WhatsApp could cost you $68,000

Deportation for using profanity ?

Well fuck.

Re: Ye Gads...

Plaster trolls never use profanity.

Your one-minute guide to IBM's financial future – or just imagine a skier tumbling down a slope

Of course he doesn't know. For any true, red-blooded American the entire world uses the dollar and speaks American, or English in some of those really wierd places.

Our intuitive AI outperforms (most) puny humans, claims MIT

"what they've done is going to become the standard quickly"

As soon as it can be monetized, that is.

And if Big Data is anything to go by, it will be by this time next year.

Accidental homicide: how VoLTE kills old style call accounting

Interesting article

So voice calls are (badly) handled with an outdated model for accounting purposes.

In Luxembourg (where I work), I have a company phone with a 15GB data plan. Any call to any Luxembourg number is free. I have the option of declaring a favorite country (fyi : in Luxembourg, border workers are ten times the amount of national workers). Obviously, living in France, I declared that as my favorite country. Calls made to French numbers are thus free as well. I do pay a small amount for international SMS.

Basically, the only thing I see making money for my telco is the monthly allowance (and, at €40, it's not so much compared to what I've seen elsewhere), and the international calls I have to make from time to time (other than France). Oh, and premium numbers, obviously.

Seems it is possible for a telco to make a living without scrounging every last cent from its customers after all.

Sites cling to a million flawed, fading SHA-1 certificates: Netcraft

"a band of tech companies"

The following motion has been proposed by Rick Andrews of Symantec and

endorsed by Bruce Morton of Entrust, Jody Cloutier of Microsoft, and Kirk

Hall of Trend Micro.

Symantec, Microsot and Trend Micro. I expected Microsoft to be in the list, and am not very surprised by Symantec. As for Trend Micro, well they have to get their name in the limelight somehow, I guess.

All in all, the usual suspects in favor of status quo, even if it means less security for the consumer.

Zombie iOS APIs used to slurp private data

Well done, Apple

One API the Youmi developers couldn't get past is Apple's block on reading a device's serial number, so to create a unique identifier for the data they were gathering, the SDK slurped numbers from peripherals like the battery system and used those as the index.

So, you lock down reading the phone's serial number, but you solder in batteries with a unique ID and leave that available.

Brilliant reasoning there. Way to apply the logic all the way to the end. And what a wonderful example of actually checking the stuff you say you check. This absolutely cannot be proof that you use your rules arbitrarily to shut down apps that bother you rather than checking all apps thoroughly and binning all that do not adhere to the rules.

Nope. No lax security here. Oh wait . .

I wouldn't know

I never listen to advertisers anyway.

Microsoft flicks switch for three Azure bit barns in India

"there's a few nanoseconds to be saved on the sub-continent"

Maybe, but it is also within reach of a US judge and the NSA via National Security Letter.

But hey, don't take that to mean that Indians (and everone else) won't be using the facilities. The public doesn't know the first thing about security, and companies haven't been bitten hard enough yet to care.

CIA boss uses AOL email – and I hacked it, claims stoner teen

Maybe, just maybe, some day (like next millenium) people who are responsible will be the only ones nominated to positions of responsbility.

Nah. That would ruin the buddy network.

Some like it hot ... very hot: How to use heat to your advantage in your data center

Sounds like another brilliant example of cooperation between government and private industry then.

I've watched too much Yes Minister, I think.

US senators lean on ICANN, tell it to quit squirming and open up

Nice letter, very well written, will have no impact

Contrary to the title of this article, I read the PDF expecting to find thinly-veiled threats of fire and brimstone.

Instead, I found a very civil letter outlining the beliefs of the senators and the expectation that ICANN will adhere to them.

That's all very nice, but when you write such a letter to the chair of an organisation that can be officially told to accept community governance and reply that it would be a bad idea because he thinks so, then I doubt anything in this letter will have a snowflake's chance in Hell to do any better.

I think that a right flogging in the middle of Times Square is the only thing that could concievably bring some sense to the entire ICANN board.