Posts by Pascal Monett 18221 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Hang on - it's only "plans" at this point.
If the legislation does pass, either these "plans" will have been entirely forgotten, or there will be so many loopholes around the wording that they may as well not have been included at all.
We're talking about Big Money. Nothing gets in the way of Big Money, especially not the Law.
No it is not. The entire reasoning for our society is based on the notion of civil rights - taking them away voids everything we believe in and everything we fought two World Wars for. Our way of life is ours to decide and should not be influenced by social or religious considerations from people who don't live with us.
Of course, that also means that we have no right to go abroad and impose our views on how other people should live. Maybe if we didn't do that so quickly, we'd not have this problem in the first place - but it's too late to change that. We do need to stop doing that, though.
In any case, I strongly encourage you to publicly respond to your MP and remind him that he was voted in his position as a representative of the People, not as tool for the Government.
An internal review ? No.
Given the documentary "Yes Minister", we now know that an internal review is just to bury the problem, not solve it.
What is needed is a fully open external review of security procedures. That is the only way we will know what the buggers are doing, what they're doing wrong and have a chance to correct it.
But, National Security, so it'll never happen anyway.
I highly doubt that companies are going to agree to migrate their work base every 7 years just because MS says so.
Desktops are going out of fashion, and with them is going MS's influence. MS will have to resolve itself to being just an OS provider, and the OS is going to have to resign itself to the back seat. Where companies are concerned, what is important is the applications, not the OS.
We are at the end of the upgrade treadmill, but MS apparently hasn't got the memo. The days when upgrading last year's hardware was justified by performance increase are gone and with them, the need to have a new OS for the new hardware.
MS : you need to make an Operating System, not a Consumer Experience. Get the bells & whistles out of the OS, so that upgrading one does not impact the other. Make your code able to update the kernel as the hardware evolves without endangering the apps that are needed. And, while you're at it, make the UI fully configurable.
We want to USE our computers, not watch your installation screens.
Sorry, but if a man is to be denied his birthright to freedom, I prefer it to be because there is incontrovertible proof, not because some official from a 3-letter agency declares he is highly confident that said man should be put in jail.
And the fact that the FBI states that IP addresses are a strong basis for its opinion does nothing to reassure me that he actually knows what he is talking about. He would need to demonstrate that he had proof that said IP addresses had not been spoofed before I even started to begin to give credit to this White House mouthpiece' drivel.
And its distances are totally incomprehensible to the regular human being.
Consider that astronomers are regularly talking about our "galactic neighborhood" - meaning the group of galaxies that are closest to us.
This has nothing to do with understatement, and everything to do with you not being used to the distances and concepts. Not a slur on your knowledge or intelligence, far from, but when one's job is to look at data coming from the nearest galaxies who happen to be up to a trillion light-years away, I guess that one does end up considering them in a different light and talking about them in such a way.
So, considering that a group of stellar systems less than 2000 light-years away are in "our neighborhood" seems perfectly reasonable, when you realize that that distance is less than 1.7% the diameter of our galaxy.
There is no legitimate excuse for a company to create fake certs that act like other companies. That is a breach or morale, pure and simple. If you don't want customers to do something on your network, be honest and block it (with a redirect to a page explaining why).
Anything else is a hypocritical cop-out.
Well may I just say how happy I am to not have a console.
I game on PC. Seems that that is becoming an advantage these days.
Oh, and before you insist that EA Games was down as well, I don't care. First of all I stopped playing the Battlefield series after they butchered BF3 and second, if I cannot play my online games, a PC has this marvelous technology where I can play local games that do not depend on an Internet connection.
If I am not mistaken, that is something that today's "modern" consoles have lost.
Seems like typical management learning process.
1) Make a bad decision based on non-technical criteria (convenience), not taking into account any possible risks
2) Get caught when bad decision leads to millions in lost money
3) Finally make the right decision when the risks previously ignored are now deemed too serious to continue ignoring
Being French myself, I well know that my people are very interested in American fads and adopt them all with gay abandon (whether they are good or not).
We had Halloween stomp its way into our stores a decade ago, but that seems to be wearing thin now (this year no costumed kids were ringing doorbells any more in my village).
<cynical rate="maximum">
It is only natural that we see this new and exciting Internet Surveillance thing and wish to adopt it in our own way, and our Government, knowing just how enamored we are with all things American, has gone above and beyond itself to please us for XMas.
</cynical>
I cannot agree with you.
Incomplete knowledge of regulation from an employee of the NSA is a frightful thought in itself.
As for "random errors of execution" (nice euphemism for personal vendetta, by the way), the problem is not the error in itself, but that the error is possible in the first place.
As redacted as they are, these documents demonstrate that the NSA has next to no internal security which would serve to prevent these "errors" happening.
What should exist is a system that monitors all file access, checking to see that the person accessing the file is authorized to do so, forbidding access and logging the act for disciplinary measures if not.
Count my gast as flabbered as well. I always thought that, in such organizations, every file access was logged, every action taken by anyone was controlled and logged, and everything had to be done by the book or you had the book thrown at you.
The reality is that the NSA appears to be a vast group of buddies all aware of what they shouldn't do but without any active measures preventing malfeasance. The employees have their access to something terminated only when somebody finds out that they've been using something they shouldn't have.
Sorry ? If they shouldn't be using something they why the bloody hell can they access it in the first place ? I seem to remember, in the many Clancy novels (and others) that I've read, that the CIA had security so tight that if the Director himself made a mistake entering his password, security agents would come barging in, guns drawn, to make sure things were all right. Accessing the wrong file would not get you terminated, it would get you a personal session with the interrogation chair - then you'd be terminated.
I can see where I was wrong. I thought I was reading fantasy stories based on realistic people and organizations. I see now that I was reading fantasy stories based on realistic people and fantasy organizations.
No wonder the US military is easy to hack. If the CIA/NSA/Homeland Security use the best people and can't set up proper internal security worth beans, then obviously the military won't be able to.
Got to say that I unfortunately agree.
20 years from now we'll be seeing zilch based on this tech. Maybe, some time in the next 50 years, we'll hear of some new tech "soon to be put into production" that will base itself on some variant of this discovery, but it's in the lab right now and there's no guarantee that it'll ever be getting out in any form we can easily associate with this tech in its current form.
There are literally hundreds of stumbling blocks before this gets into a finished product, the least of them being strictly technical in nature. There will be power plays, there will be infighting, influence wars and outright patent buying with the risk that the buyer has no intent of actually producing because it harms an existing production line.
So, yeah, this sounds interesting, but there's a whole forest of knives to walk barefoot through before ever seeing a price tag on something using it.
Yeah, do that. You haven't been paying attention this year, have you ?
The NSA officially has jurisdiction over the whole world now, from Washington's point of view at least (other countries tend to disagree, but the White House doesn't even pretend to give a flying one over that anymore).
It's only inside the USA that the NSA officially still needs a warrant, but the NSA does whatever it wants anyway since there is no serious oversight of its activity.
No, it's an advertisement tool using sheeple as fodder to make its money.
MY expectations are set clearly. Unfortunately, way too many people are not conscious of this sorry state of affairs, and one can only hope that this lawsuit will bring enlightenment to some of them.
And I still find totally immoral that a company can, as you say, clearly state its nefarious, privacy-invading procedures and yet still be allowed to function. But hey, it's making money, so . . .
I don't care that Facebook notified people in the T&Cs - private email is not to be trawled through by administrative decision, period.
It is high time major websites - especially the so-called "social" ones, stop thinking that they have the right to do whatever they want as long as its mentioned in some mind-numbing paragraph on an ever-changing document that nobody with a sane mind reads.
1) A promise made is a promise to be kept
2) A promise made on Kickstarter is not an exception
3) The Eliter-Than-Thou don't care that you care about a promise (and that's not just the developers of the game)
4) OoLite keeps its promises, has NPC AI in the latest update, and apparently makes a mockery of this whole dangerous business and the excuses made to justify it
In any case, I would like to thank the developers of Elite:Dangerous. They have taught me that they are not reliable and don't care about their backers, and it didn't cost me a penny to find out.
More importantly, I have discovered OoLite.
No, safer to update manually, when all the lemmings have gone and reported broken features and fixes have been made.
Of course, it's still a risk, because you never know if Yet Another Bug is going to crop up in reports while you're patching, or if you're a special case and some new bug rears its head.
But it is still better than rushing to patch a running system, running headfirst into problems and having to wait for MS to do a rush job only to find that either it doesn't fix the problem and/or it breaks something else.
I was about to add "because done too quickly" but MS has already failed patches it had ample time to create, so best leave it out.
I'm sure Twitter must be quaking in its boots. I wonder if they will have any difficulty proving to a judge that any losses incurred by Sony are Sony's fault entirely, and Twitter should counter-attack with a libel charge for being accused of having a hand in Sony's abysmal stupidity.
Bring it on, Sony. You have a bigger lawsuit warchest than you have for security, so go and prove that you are indeed as stupid as you look now.
Frankly I'd like a lawsuit to be filed, just to be able to read how a judge punted it out of the courtroom and fined Sony for contempt of court.
Man I wish that could happen.
For certain values of "instant", obviously.
With current technology, even if a missile reacts in milliseconds, when it is going at Mach 4 (1 361.16 m / s) it still covers 1.36m (0.1475 double-decker bus) every millisecond.
A missile will certainly turn faster than a human pilot can due to its far greater resistance to G-force, but current tech does not allow it to u-turn on a dime.
So this whole thing is to keep local money local, yet they're using a Norwegian company and French hardware to do it ?
My irony meter is approaching the red zone.
By the way, "you must use the Brixton Pound in Brixton" - I take that to mean that you cannot use Her Majesty's currency. Isn't that illegal ? I'm sure they can use the Brixton Pound alongside the national currency, but if they are actively refusing the national currency, how is it they aren't in jail yet ?
Good question. What about DuckDuckGo ?
It's Wiki page states :
"DuckDuckGo [..] generating its search results from key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing, Wolfram Alpha, and Yummly."
Digging further, it would appear that Yandex is Russian, Wolfram Alpha pretends to compute an answer "from externally sourced "curated data"" (no reference provided), and Yummly is a cooking recipe search engine. As for Yahoo!, if it was any good it would not be wallowing at less than 7% of the search market share. So the one source that has a snowball's proverbial is, once again, Bing, which has been available for a lot less longer than Yahoo! but is almost as important - and will become more important since it is backed by Microsoft resources (which are much more plentiful than Yahoo! coffers).
This question is, nontheless, interesting because it taught me that Baidu is a much more actual contender for Google (given the previous link) than Bing, being 2nd in order before Bing but after Google.
If Baidu was not censored by the Chinese government, I might just use it.
Of course you did, Jimbo.
And we plan to believe you just as sincerely as this declaration sounds.
Is there something about being in the spotlight that makes declaring untrue things hoping that we'll buy it a conditioned reflex ? Couldn't he just have bowed his head, said sorry and pledged to do right ?
Oh wait, it's Jimbo we're talking about. Right. Forget it then.
No, but because unless you really are a criminal/terrorist trying to protect your nefarious activities from Men In Black, it's a level of hassle to implement proper security that goes way beyond what Average Joe needs.
Not that I'm advocating doing nothing, far from it, but if I told all my friends they have to learn and implement PGP if they want to email me the latest joke or get my latest musings about where to go for dinner, I'm pretty sure my mailbox will be suddenly barren of anything but spam.
As for data encryption, well I don't see that my personal data is worth it. I have firewalls and AV that have protected it up to now, if The Man wants to see it, not much I'll do will keep him from it for long.
I don't like the idea that the NSA considers my communications free range for its harvesters, but I'm not about to act like a crime lord to keep them from it. I'd rather they stop doing it, but I'd also like to win the lottery. I think I have a better chance at the latter, even without playing.
Linking two individuals from electronic communication is something any agency can do (with a warrant) since ages. All any agency needs to do is call the telephone/ISP provider, show the warrant and request a list of all phone numbers/IP addresses that the suspect contacted/connected to. Telephone/ISP is legally bound to comply.
So you can put whatever encryption you want on your data, unless you only communicate face-to-face (without a smartphone on your person or in your car) there will be a government-available trace of your comms that can and will be mined if need be.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
