Posts by Pascal Monett

WHAT did GOOGLE do SO WRONG to get a slapping from the EU?

Poseurs will pose.

Nuclear fusion simulator among boffinry tools picked for monster Summit supercomputer

"Models seismic wave propagation through"

Um, through what exactly ?

And, pray tell, but what source other than thermonuclear power drives supernovae ?

Come now, you didn't really think that you could slip that by unnoticed on this site, now did you ?

There's TOO MANY data-leaking healthcare firms, growls Symantec

Almost lookes like hospital staff do not know IT

And, on the face of it, I think I rather prefer it that way.

Okay, sure, patient data should be safeguarded and all that, I agree. But you can't really blame the staff for taking more care of patients than of their computers.

Yes, the situation has to change. I'm sure the orderly who is on his second 24-hour shift in a row would agree. I'm also sure that hospital management could do a lot better.

But let's face it, a hospital is a leaky dam at best, and everybody is running around trying to plug all the holes at once most of the time.

I'm not surprised that IT issues find themselves at the bottom of the stack.

However, people who integrate hospitals to abuse the system and sell off patient data should be jailed.

For a long time.

Google’s plan for WORLD DOMINATION takes shape. And it begins with a patent

That is true today, but what about tomorrow ?

Android lands on Microsoft's money-machine island fortress

Uh, we're talking ATM's here, not PCs.

The software better fucking be able to use the hardware, else there's a lawsuit for unfit-for-purpose in the wings that's just begging to fly.

AC is just trolling, ignore him.

COME BACK – I never said we were quitting public cloud, says HP bigwig Bill Hilf

It's HP

Who cares what their strategy is ?

They're dying anyway.

EU says dominant Google illegally alters search results

People can use other search engines

That's Google's response. And it is true, people can use other search engines.

The fact is, most of them don't.

So just because there are other search engines does not excuse Google from a bit of fairness in the market.

On the other hand, I'd be interested in learning how exactly a search result can favor Google (or not). Google has its paid adverts on the top, which I accept because it is their site and they can do as they wish, but I always skip those. The normal results are never sites belonging to Google anyway, so how can Google be "favored" by a particular result ?

Dwarf planet Ceres has TEN bright spots, astroboffins say

Which means it had to happen !

It's 2015 and a RICH TEXT FILE or a HTTP request can own your Windows machine

LibreOffice does everything I need it to, and it's free.

Incomprehensible boffins bring quantum computers a step closer

We are now one step closer

to the positronic brain.

But really, influencing atoms with local electric charges, turning the knob by modulating the voltage, this all sounds more Star Trekky than Star Trek itself.

I just hope nobody's going to reverse the polarity....

Verizon to world: STOP opening dodgy phishing emails, FOOLS

One thing is very interesting

"Around one in four (23 per cent) of recipients opened phishing messages, while more than one in 10 (11 per cent) of recipients clicked on attachments. Half (50 per cent) of successful phishing attacks involved emails that were opened in the first hour after their receipt."

With all this email activity in the corporate sector, you'd think Microsoft would include a security feature in Outlook/Exchange. Maybe something like Open Untrusted Email which would sandbox the thing internally until the user decides to trust it. Or maybe establish a list of trusted contacts and any email from anyone else would be automatically treated by Outlook as potentially having a virus, instead of just going and executing every single bit of code that anyone sends anybody else.

And please, please, could we have an automatic detection of when the sender and the Reply To names/domains are different and instantly class that as Criminally Suspect ? With a popup when clicking on such a message that reads something like "The address of the sender and that of the reply to are not the same. This is generally a sign that the message is spam or may originate from a criminal source. Are you sure you want to open this mail ?"

Microsoft ? Is that too much to ask ?

Cloud DNS, VPN, HTTPS load balancing ... Google looks at rivals, thinks: Yeah, we'll do all that

Google now has more than 70 points of presence across 33 countries

Google. Tightening the total surveillance noose one ad at a time.

Facebook does fling COOKIES around, but privacy is assured

"privacy is assured", with Facebook ?

Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor.

The day I trust anything Facebook says is the day I need to be put in a straightjacket.

+5 ROOTKIT OF VENGEANCE defeats forces of gaming good

What a lot of effort for what is supposed to just be amusement.

RELICS of the Earth's long lost TWIN planet FOUND ON MOON

Re: Front row seat

I propose a scale for such things. Planetary collisions should be 1 Michael Bay.

Meteors are thus only a milli-Bay.

A large asteroid could be a centi-Bay.

Not Earth's twin

If the Moon was Earth's twin formed by accretion, you would expect the Moon to be made of pretty much the same stuff as Earth and in the same ratios.

That is not the case. The Moon's composition has different proportions of nickel, iron and other significant things, ergo it cannot be our twin.

Game changing ?

As far as planetary physics are concerned, I think we have passed the point where anything game-changing can occur.

Like you, I was living under the impression that the sister planet theory was pretty much the most valid theory for a while now. This paper is just another proof that that is the case.

Good to have, and good to know, but indeed, not anywhere near game-changing.

Microsoft uses Windows Update to force Windows 10 ads onto older PCs

Nonsense. People who know better already have no goodwill left for Microsoft, they just realize that they have to suffer it because workplace. Or gamer.

Beyond that, people who know better and can do without it are either on Apple or some version of Linux.

Re: Confused author

You should go back and read the other half of the article.

Specifically the part where it says that most users never look at the Windows Update screen, much less check stuff out. Some even have everything installing automatically.

How's that for English ?

Bad news everyone: Cybercrime is getting even easier

Re: "it should not be possible for data to subvert the application"

Friggin' A for that !

But that is the marvel of modern tech : there's always someone to find a way to do something you hadn't even thought was related to the code you wrote.

ALIENS ARE COMING: Chief NASA boffin in shock warning

Not digits.

Suction cups.

The Internet of Stuff is a gigantic ultra-perv robbery network – study

Re: My fridge

During your ride home, you get an angry call from the girl you just dumped who is furious about the chocolates she just received and assures you in no uncertain terms that there isn't a snowball's chance in Hell that you'll get her back.

After that call, you get a notification from your landlord about a problem in your kitchen that made him call for security and a repairman. The smart cat feeder had a blockage which caused a freak current feedback that sparked your smart coffee maker which just happened to overload and cause a loopback to your smart cupboard which went haywire and filled its order queue for cat food, billing it automatically to your account. You now have a year's worth of cat food to be delivered tomorrow, order non-rescindable due to contract clause about encryption keys and digital signatures perfectly in order. You also have a $7500 bill for the repairs, payable by next Monday.

Also, there is cat food all over the kitchen floor.

You get home to find a patrol car waiting for you. The investigation will demonstrate that it is the electrical surcharge from your smart coffee maker and the subsequent order activity from your smart cupboard that triggered an obscure unpatched bug in your social profile's agenda organizer which caused an inordinate amount of meeting emails to be resent with today's date. In all, seven of your previous girlfriends, and some of your mates, have received invitations and messages from your stored message archive - some of which have salacious content that was, at the time, perfectly understood. Five of your exes have filed a complaint for harassment and are pressing charges.

The policeman tiredly listens to your explanations for a minute, then cuts it short with a curt "You'll tell us that at the station, sir" before moving you to the rear of the patrol car.

Finally, you realize that the cat will gorge itself during the night, meaning that when you get back there will not only be the remaining cat food to clean up, but probably also an unknown amount of cat vomit and maybe worse.

IoT - what's not to like?

It's all got complicated: The costs of data recovery

I would agree with you but for one thing : if management has no clue, then the "solution" employed doesn't matter ; whatever it is, it'll get screwed up.

So forget the clueless management, they're doomed anyway. We're talking about backup solutions that work, which implies management know how it works and, more importantly, why.

And for those cases, cloud simply does not cut it.

However, I fully expect future disasters to be laid squarely at the feet of incompetent management, so saving the bacon of cloud providers despite the fact that they cannot possibly deliver on the bandwidth and availability they promise because they do not control what happens between their cloudy servers and the client's door.

Boffins: Large Hadron Collider NOW movin', we're getting down and crush groovin'

Oh no, not more sushi !

Are you sure there are servers in this cold, dark basement?

He's obviously fizzy, though.

Microsoft drops Do Not Track default from Internet Explorer

Re: Yahoo sez:

As far as I'm concerned, one size does fit all. Privacy IS, or IS NOT.

But I'm not expecting a marketing department to understand that.

Tsk, tsk

Typical confusion there. You think the "users" are the people.

That definition is now obsolete and has been superseded by "the entities who give us money", i.e. the advertisers.

The people are no longer users, they are targets to be hunted down as efficiently as possible for the good of the users (i.e. their bank account).

Please update your dictionary accordingly.

Streaming tears of laughter as Jay-Z (Tidal) waves goodbye to $56m

Re: they may get the "idiot market" too

Now you know why they are rich.

The idiot market is by far the biggest one.

Crack security team finishes TrueCrypt audit – and the results are in

Re: Bitlocker CAN work without TPM

McAffee is not saying the contrary. The specific phrase I believe you are referring to states :

"To use Bitlocker without adding additional authentication, you need an enabled, owned TPM1.2+ hardware chip"

That clearly indicates that BitLocker CAN function without a TPM 1.2+ chip, but if you do that, you need additional authentication.

As for Smartcards, could you source your affirmation ?

EU Commission looking for ways to DECLARE WAR on Google

Yeah, that and a few dozen billions in datacenters.

Newly merged Chinese taxi-hailing app now valued at $9 BEEELLION

$9 billion ?

Hey Zuck ! Got any left over cash ? Compared to your last "acquisition", this seems to be at least useful.

Pumping billions into data centres won't guarantee you an empire

Economics is a difficult question

If it wasn't, we'd be able to forecast it properly, instead of only being able to sometimes find a reason after the fact.

I find this article quite interesting, but I can't help having a bit of an issue with the premise of billions not guaranteeing a return.

Amazon, Google and others have thrown billions into making data centers and the result is showing : Amazon is apparently better off than Microsoft when it comes to cloud services.

Cloud services are not summarized by the services you offer to your customers. You can have the greatest list of features on the market, if your cloud is down regularly, people will go for alternatives that may offer less features, but are more stable.

Stability is what costs billions. The backend requirements for ensuring proper response times and failover is something that is quite beyond me, but I'm quite sure that, in terms of hardware, bandwidth and server monitoring, it must absolutely mind-boggling. Experience in this domain is capitalized upon, and cannot be just bought.

So I do not see newcomers having the slightest chance at upsetting the establishment. Very, very deep pockets are required to enter this market, and when you're in, you still have to learn how to make it work the hard way - meaning losing customers every time you fail to maintain stability.

There are three big names in the enterprise cloud space at this time : Amazon, Microsoft and IBM. I'm pretty sure we won't be adding many more to that list.

Smart meters are a ‘costly mistake’ that'll add BILLIONS to bills

"the fuel poor are effectively subsidising the fuel profligate."

Well, it's business as usual then, right ?

Right.

Atomic clocks' ticks tamed by 3,000 entangled atoms

For a ho ?

About $50, I'd say.

Apple is like HITLER says Chinese billionaire

Honestly, you might want to replace those totals into their time frames for a proper comparison.

Hitler (as Führer) : 1934 - 1945, or 11 years

Stalin : 1925 - 1953, or 28 years

Mao : 1949 - 1976, or 27 years

So Hitler reigned the least, and his "genocide impact" is reduced further when you consider that his Final Solution was not actually implemented before 1942. Beyond that, his Final Solution did not only concern Jews (something that way too many people do not know). You must therefor include up to 1.5 million Romani people, nearly 2 million Poles and up to 3 million assorted other victims (Soviet prisoners of war, intellectuals, homosexuals, Jehova's witnesses and other undesirables). Not counting the almost 20 million people who did indirectly because of his politics of deliberate starvation of "undesirable races".

So Hitler's direct "genocide total" is actually much closer to 12.5 than 6, and that in a time span of, at most, 4 years.

If Stalin had had that kind of behavior, he would have killed 116.6 million people instead of your quoted 62, and Mao would have killed 112.5.

Mao may appear to have done a bit less, but one must not forget that the population of China has always dwarfed the population of the Soviet block by a ration of around 10 to 1. In that light, Mao was positively benign.

In the end, let us not forget that all of these numbers represent the lives of millions upon millions of innocent people sacrificed on the alter of ignorance.

Too much red there, blood or otherwise.

'If people can encrypt their cell phones, what's stopping them encrypting their PCs?'

Well that's Texas for you. From what I've read, they've got all sorts of exceptions, especially to intelligence.

Surface Pro 3 update has so much new stuff for sysadmins, we can't fit it all in one headline

"Along with these new enterprise features..."

Which will delight the evil scum who will rush to take them over and screw basic users out of their hardware with the promise to stop the malware or give a decrypt code in exchange for money.

The "enterprise features" have already been hijacked by malware to block a user from accessing his desktop and doing anything but restarting his machine.

I'm glad to know that Microsoft is giving yet more tools for evil hackers to push more misery on unsuspecting users. When the hardware is locked down without any means of loading an anti-virus from USB or digital media - not to mention the Internet itself, what is Microsoft going to do ? Refund ?

Don't think so.

And don't try to explain that this is "Pro" stuff and will not be sold to end users. I know plenty of people with Win 7 Professional on their home PCs.

Make up your mind: Microsoft puts a bullet in Internet Explorer after all

Re: Feet to the fire, please

And all the Fortune 1000 companies will give "fair warning" to Microsoft that, if MS shreds IE, they will shred MS in court.

Will never happen, buddy.

Unfortunately.

This is what happens when a judge in New York orders an e-hit on a Chinese software biz

Effin' A

My disk, my player, my time and none of anybody's business.

I will not ask for permission to enjoy something I have paid for. I certainly don't want some corporation to get a heads-up on the fact that I started watching some film.

I call that an invasion of my privacy. Your "license" stops at my door. After that, you have no legal right to know anything about me or what I'm doing.

Re: that assumes that European courts have no jurisdiction of US companies

Um, sorry but what example do you have of a European court having jurisdiction over a US company, or even pretending it did ?

Has there been a judge in Europe deciding that Microsoft had to hand over all emails on its servers because it has a subsidiary in the judges country ?

I'm curious, please enlighten me.

Philae's either screening Rosetta's calls or isn't home

Hey ! This is the internet. Where's the fun in that ?

US states vow to fight Google after the FTC meekly rolls over

Interesting

A politician who is not yet bought up by Corporate America and actually has the balls to stand up to the money man.

Is this a sign that Google is nearing the end of its public welcome ? Or a sign that Google is going to start hiring ex-military types ?

Dear departed Internet Explorer, how I will miss you ... NOT

a heavyweight, lard-arsed, fat bastard of a program for searching Bing

Thank you for that, I'll be keeping it for reserving at appropriate times :).

Apple: Those security holes we fixed last week? You're going to need to repatch

Yeah, security is hard - not going to say the contrary on that.

But buffer overflows ? Really ?

Sheesh.

Rosetta SNIFFS molecular nitrogen on Comet 67P

Ah, Science

Even when the news is bad, it's still good to have.

Cloud music streams outpace CD sales for the first time, says recording industry ass. of America

I'm sorry, did I get that right ?

Is RIAA actually saying that digital is saving their bacon now ?

So which level of Hell has frozen over ?

Noobs can pwn world's most popular BIOSes in two minutes

Re: Physical access is not God Mode

Sorry, but it pretty much is.

With physical access I can take out the hard disk, put it on an external USB reader and have my way with anything that is not encrypted. And anything that is I can copy and do what I want with later while the user finds his disk back in his PC and is none the wiser.

Zombie SCO shuffles back into court seeking IBM Linux cash

Hey, Dracula !

I know, kids have to have their fun.

But isn't it time you called this one back to its coffin ? Come on, it wasn't funny last millennia already.