Posts by Pascal Monett

Vanished global warming may not return – UK Met Office

Article based on report from a government agency

Is this going to prevent Lewis Page bashers from indulging in their favorite activity ?

Don't think so.

How did jihadists hack into top UK ministerial emails if no security breach took place?

Didn't have to break into him, they just waved a chocolate bar.

'I promise you I will win', says completely sane presidential candidate John McAfee

"requiring users to actively install unsupported 3rd-party software into Messenger"

Oh, right. Obviously, that has never happened before.

Pro tip: Servers belong in dry server rooms, not wet cloakrooms

Backup

How is it possible to not know that there is only one backup tape, and not be aware of what that means ?

Not knowing IT is not an excuse here, you don't need to be a mechanic to know that your car needs refueling. People know tapes, we've had VCR technology for more than a decade (okay, that was a decade ago now, but still). So people should know that a backup is done on a tape, then you put in another tape. It's not rocket science.

This is a clear case of "It's all magic and I don't understand anything anyways, so nothing can go wrong". Well that only works as long as you're lucky, and these idiots were extremely lucky.

Japan 'charges MtGox baron Mark Karpeles with BTC embezzlement'

So, 3 countries, 3 court cases

This guy is apparently a real bastard. When you've got a police file in 3 different countries (not counting speeding tickets, obviously), you shouldn't be allowed to be responsible for anything more than your car, to say nothing of a company.

Hollywood takes a beating in Oscar cybersquatting battle

Millions in damages, eh ?

This case is a brilliant landmark in how much MPAA/RIAA etc are pushing the envelope to claim horrifying damages due to piracy, whereas the real figures have nothing to do with their hysterical claims.

Good on GoDaddy to have had the balls not to bend over and settle. That is the kind of behavior which encourages those bastards to go ahead with the hype. Now we finally have a proper case where the claims have been laid bare and found lacking. This will hopefully throw some water on the whole process, and it is not a bad thing either to demonstrate that just because you're Hollywood doesn't mean that you can parade around the courts and pocket millions by extorting your victims out of the judge's view.

Excellus healthcare hack puts 10m Americans at risk of identity theft

2015 is bumper crop for personal details market

I wonder how soon we'll have investment portfolios in it ?

Former Ashley Madison CTO 'threatens security blogger with libel action'

He "linked to a sample of the Nerve.com database"

Seems like this case is already over.

Krebs said Bhatia hacked them based on published data. Bhatia is trying to pussyfoot around and redefine terms, which is something judges rarely like.

This paragraph is particularly damning :

The authenticity of the database portion of the dump seems at this point beyond doubt, thanks to the widespread confirmations by users of the site. The letter from the lawyer implicitly confirms that the leaked e-mails are authentic, as it makes reference to parts of the quoted e-mail that Krebs didn't include in his report.

The letter from the lawyer implicitly confirms that the leaked e-mails are authentic.

Bhatia is screwed. Twice.

And that's a good thing.

Monsters defeated in quest to free .onion from clutches of DNS-snooping demons

Will it still be possible to Google the web then ?

Not necessarily using Google of course, I'm describing the search, not the engine.

If I understand correctly, .onion domain names are, in effect, public/private key definitions. Any search engine will have to have all the keys to access the domains it wants to search.

Kind of defeats the purpose then, doesn't it ?

Watchdogs roughed up for picking Morocco (of all places) for next privacy 'World Cup'

"it met the criteria laid out"

The criteria obviously left out anything about the track record in security of the host country.

Either that or the criteria specifically included the ability to shut journalists up about after-conference hijinks (or maybe even during-conference hijinks).

Batteries on wheels are about to reshape our cities and lives

France's taxi drivers will totally ignore this development and go right on offering you the elite sensation of being unwanted baggage just like they always have and like an autonomous car never will be able to.

Re: not using energy (unless heater or AC) when stationary saves a lot

You're probably correct where the engine is concerned, but you've overlooked one point : the people, who will be wanting to view their cat videos during the trip, or play their games or whatever.

If autonomous cars become a reality, I'm convinced that they will be viewed and sold as mobile entertainment rooms. After all, you're not driving, and you know the road on most of the trips, so why not play ?

Or work, if you're that kind of person ?

And that entertainment is going to drain some portion of power, to be sure. Less than the engine, obviously, but not insignificant, I think.

Re: Typical...

I get held up by a traffic jam

Theoretically, autonomous cars should eliminate traffic jams because they should be able to drive at speeds that bring them to their destination smoothly. Any ability for those vehicles to talk to each other, tell each other which way they're turning etc, will only be a bonus in removing slow downs.

We have traffic jams today mainly because everybody rushes forword, often in disregard of speed limits, to try to get ahead of everyone else, then they all come to the next choke point and brake wildly, sometimes causing accidents.

Autonomous cars will be more measured, won't change lanes for nothing, won't "think" the other lane goes faster, and thus things will move along more leisurely, but more regularly.

At least, I hope so.

@dotdavid

I guess it would depend on how widespread that ends up being.

Given the current insistence of grafting wifi and online entertainment to the same bus on which travel system commands, I'd say that it's likely to become pretty widespread before it gets corrected.

And I don't like the idea.

Beardy Branson says own OneWeb sats can replace Australia's birds

Many such mega-projects, e.g. Chunnel or Iridium, fiscally-require a multibillion dollar bankruptcy as part of the commissioning phase

Well, seems that this Branson guy is lining himself up to fill that spot.

Australia builds facial recognition as a service for plod, spookhaüses

"strong privacy safeguards"

We already know what they are : "no unauthorised individual will have access to the data".

They'll just forget to mention that they are authorising everyone sitting behind a government desk, and anyone who is working with someone sitting behind a government desk.

And you will never be able to ask for a list of the people who have accessed your records, not to mention when.

Survival skill number 1

Ungraft the phone from your hand.

When the IT department is 'just another supplier'

Re: Complexity

Exactly that.

Every single article I read singing the praises of the Cloud totally skirts even the notion of the word.

Company email in the cloud ? Well of course, all emails from and to all of your customers sitting like ducks in the cloud. How can that possibly go wrong ?

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

EU-US data sharing deal for cops edges closer as usual suspects moan

“I fear it will be pushed through and not meet with much resistance.”

That is the problem.

Individual rights are in the same conundrum as IoT security. Everybody agrees they are essential, but as long as all the actors don't step up to bat when it's their turn, nothing will happen.

To ensure our right to freedom and privacy, we need to push ALL of our representatives, wherever and whoever they are, to do what is right.

Cash-bleeding Monitise waves goodbye to chief exec

Ah, the ol' "personal reasons" excuse

Come on, everybody knows the CEO was fired during a board meeting. And for tripling losses instead of turning things around, it is understandable, although I wonder how it would have been possible to not incur losses after losing a major customer.

It may be the CEO handled things badly, but it may also be that she's just being handed the blame as a convenient excuse, or to reassure the market.

State cyberspies wriggle into satellites for super-duper sneaky ops

That is crazy smart

Piggybacking a satellite transmission on unused ports to get data to compromised PCs.

Somebody in that group is an evil genius.

HP and Dell flogging Surface Pro direct? No issues THERE. NONE AT ALL

Re: you need to go watch the film 'Her'

Thanks for the heads-up. I will avoid that like the plague.

And I thought Hollywood was only scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's clear that they've started digging. Oh, but it's with Scarlette Johanssen and it's rated R ? A success, then.

Only too right

"loving Windows" ?

Not gonna happen.

You can eventually particularly appreciate one or more programs that you use regularly on any platform, to the extent of qualifying your appreciation with the adjective of love, but to extend that to the OS - whatever it is, makes no sense.

You can love your car, but you're not going to say you love the road infrastructure.

Tech, telcos, and digital crusties gang up against the EU's Digital Single Market

Hang on there

“Only 20 per cent of our customers have a high demand for portability, and fewer than one third have any demand at all,"

I take that to mean that either you really need it, or you have no use for it.

Fine. Is that a reason to ignore 20% of your customers ? Not so sure.

Roll up, roll up: Microsoft, those Irish emails and angry Feds

Ah but it is a living language that we speak (or massacre, as may be the case), and shoehorning expressions into entirely improper grammatical constructs is what the Internet is made for.

This is further extended to anything and everything that can be proven to have as much as a toehold in the USA too

Indeed, and it is high time for that interpretation to get smacked down on the basis that the USA certainly wouldn't like a Chinese judge to reciprocate and order a Chinese subsidiary in the US to hand over sensitive email data. At least, I doubt the USA would agree.

I do hope that the EU is going to find the balls somewhere to stop this nonsense. The Internet is a game-changer because of its globality. Local rules cannot be imposed over the Internet.

"Microsoft maintains that the data is secured under EU data protection laws"

And for once, Microsoft is unequivocally right.

The fact that Ireland deemed fit to alert a US judge that she has no right to disregard its sovereignty will figure as a reference in US Justice dickery.

Hacker mag 2600 laughs off Getty Images inkspots copyright claim

Oh I think of them . . . being slowly lowered into the shark tank.

Heigh ho, oh no! Politically correct panto dumps Snow White’s dwarfs

The PC term for dwarf is dwarf.

Anything else and you're just being insulting.

There is no shame to be had by height or color since there's nothing anyone can do about either, and neither has anything to do with intelligence or usefulness to society.

US cop goes war-driving to find stolen gear by MAC address

patent L8NT

Not such a stretch actually, given that the USPTO is rubber-stamping everything that falls on their desk these days.

TorrentLocker scum have better email lists than legit devs, telcos

Malware using CAPTCHA

And they have a robust encryption scheme.

The mind boggles.

Ah, the good ol' days of script kiddies . . .

Google drops app prices to 15 cents for Indian users

"get access to the apps and games they love"

Typical PR speak, total absence of logic. If they don't have access to the stuff, how can they "love" it ?

Of course, saying "get them on the spending treadmill so we can milk them as well" would, admittedly, come off rather worse.

ICANN has $60m burning a hole in its pocket – and it needs your help blowing it all

Re: Easy

Let's not and screw a functioning process in order to appear to solve a totally different issue.

W3C may be slow, but ICANN it sure ain't.

I am beginning to think that there is only one way to solve the ICANN issue, and it involves a .44 and a very determined person.

Microsoft: Thanks, Google, we'll have your media codec for Edge

MPEG-LA is a group of 31 businesses, and Microsoft is part of it.

So there will be no charging of MP4 licenses - at least, not for Microsoft.

Windows 10 to grow up, turn extra enterprise-y beginning this month

"employees can buy company-owned apps"

What drunken idiot thought that scheme was viable ?

Employees do not buy company-owned applications, they are installed on their computers by IT so they can do their job.

Or are we going to witness BYOWorkplace as the follow-up to BYOD ? And pigs will have wings next year.

Everything in this piece tells me that I'm going to be hearing a lot about Win10 update-related failures in the coming months.

Dell CEO: Very few will survive the PC bloodbath

Re: boring, non-sexy business notebooks

I much prefer a boring, non-sexy business notebook that has a powerful CPU, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of spinning rust, over a sexy, exciting notebook with a lame CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 180GB SSD.

But I have to program on the damn things.

Just WHO is hiring a 'Cloud Transformation Director' for £162,000? Actually YOU are

Reminds me of . . .

. . the Transport Muggins.

He will be the lightning rod to take all the blame for whoever else never agrees on anything or changes their mind every Friday after lunch.

URRGH! Evil app WATCHES YOU WATCHING PORN, snaps your grimace

@ Lost all faith

There is a big difference between a Windows platform and Android - on the Android platform the user is not admin.

In Windows, historically speaking, the user has always had all rights to the OS and hardware access because Microsoft took two decades to start understanding that that was not a good idea. So yeah, on a PC a lot of malware is there because of Microsoft, not always because of the user.

Boffins feud over Indian PM's Silicon Valley visit

Wow, now that's what I call a slapdown. And deserved as well, it appears.

TCP is a wire-centric protocol being forced to cut the cord, painfully

Given the scale of the issue, and the fact that they work on a Linux platform and would apparently like the code in the kernel, I have the feeling that they will be giving back, as soon as they are sure that they have a viable solution.

At least I hope so. Anything that can improve mobile phone performance in calls or data is a godsend.

‘Dumb pipe’ Twitter should sell up and quit, says tech banking chap

Why people like and use Twitter

For the same reason people talk endlessly about themselves and other people, with the added bonus that Twitter makes you feel like you talk to the world and the world reads your words and talks back.

It's the ultimate self-aggrandizer. Even when you know yourself that what you're posting is abysmally useless, somebody, somewhere will react, thereby justifying your post.

I think Twitter is actually a psychology test, for the members AND its management.

Gloves on as Googler deposits foul zero-day on Kaspersky lawn

Re: Dear Google....

Android phone updates are a mess. In many cases, Google patches, but the carriers don't push the update because they have to go and rebuild their messy, bloatware-filled version every time and carriers don't want to spend money on that.

ICANN descends into farce as bigwigs try to cling to power

Just DISSOLVE it already

Expunge it, erase it, eradicate it.

Ask the SWAT teams to go in there and frogmarch everybody out and take them all to jail.

Then bring in a NEW team, recreate a new ICANN on the latest board-refused proposal.

Since the board is so adamantly against it, it has to be good.

EU digi bloke: Come ON Europe, you're not TRYING ENOUGH

"mobile tech, social media, cloud and Big Data"

I am part of an IT outfit. We do code and consulting. We use mobile tech for email and rapid communication, like everybody else. But how exactly are we supposed to use "social media" ?

Tweet every morning that we're getting to work ? Post my latest code snippit on that "wall" thingy ? Tell everyone (well, 2 people) how this project sucks on Google+ ?

Social media is for socializing (well, showing off or getting attention, really), not for business.

Businesses have websites of their own. They don't need "social media", unless they're in the business of social stuff (like party planning or travel).

And as for Big Data, well you've gotta be Big to need that, and the big companies are already on that bandwagon.

Stupid remark.

Dog walkers, the San Andreas fault ... and the storage industry

Re: is moving your data once in a couple years really that big of a deal?

And from what I see, it's a big deal every time, everyone is stressed out and downtime inevitably occurs.

But they keep doing it because, after the hassle, things are generally perceptively better.

Sunk by 'patent troll': Iron Speed director asks 'anyone want to buy us?'

I've been saying for years

If you want to get rid of patent trolls, tie the damages they can claim to the amount of product sales they generate. After all, only those actually selling product are "damaged" by infringement.

Patent trolls sell nothing, they just sit on their patents and wait for a juicy target. Since they sell nothing, the damages awarded will be a multiple of . . zero.

Poof ! Instant disappearance of the issue.

SPACE WHISKY: Astro malt pongs of 'rubber and smoked fish'

"how this groundbreaking research will help advance humanity" ?

It will help because months and months of tedius transit in pitch dark to lug Unobtanium from Ganymede back to Earth will not be bearable without a proper shot of ol' mellow to take the edge off of extreme boredom.

And a local Diablo III server (ranked) would help immensely as well.

Is 'MetaPod': a) a Pokemon; b) servers running OpenStack?

The only thing I know about Pokemon is that you had to catch them all. I didn't catch any, nor did I even look around for some.

With this renaming, I think Cisco may just have given enough impetus to create a whole new crowd of MetaPodians exchanging entirely new, non-Pokemon related jokes. And maybe some network-related horror stories as well.

Time will tell.

Class action launched against Facebook over biometric slurpage

ZuckerBorg

Good one.

But we're still screwed.

Layabout, sun-blushed techies have pick of IT job market, says survey

Beefy benefits packages ?

Where are those ?

The offers I see most of the time ask for a single person to manage three different server environments, know the intricacies of five different database environments, plan, execute and manage backup strategies, project planning and execution, people interaction and oversight, and be able to remap the network and recable the building as well, all for the princely sum of minimum wage or thereabouts.

If you want a person to do the job of ten people, you damn well better be ready to pay him the salary of ten people, otherwise you can get stuffed.