Posts by Pascal Monett

Etsy security rule #1: Don't be a jerk to devs

"If you're continuously updating & releasing code"

Then your application is not ready for production.

Take it offline, finish the bloody thing, THEN put it into production and survey the security of the app.

Facebook apologizes for binning accounts of drag queens

Re: I don't enroll in a local sport club under a fake nam

So that's your problem : you're confusing real life with the Internet.

No wonder you're so confused about things.

A moment of brilliance? UPnP for Internet of Stuff lightbulbs

Making things simple

Let us not forget to make things secure.

I do not want this stuff at all until I have reasonably good proof that my neighbors kid (who thinks he's a hacker) will not be able to turn my lights on or off at his leisure (because he'll have the time to try and the temptation will certainly be much too great).

And even when I have this kind of proof, I'm likely to not buy into it anyway.

I like manual controls.

Microsoft outspends world's tech firms with '€5m' EU lobby bill

Tracing the bribery is exactly what it is all about.

Personally, after having heard some stand-up comic say that politicians should have sponsor stickers on their vests so we know why they say what they do, I wholeheartedly support this kind of move.

As long as we don't know who pays who, we are not living in a true democracy.

On the other hand, human nature is such that I very much doubt the lobbying waters are going to get clearer any time soon. Changing anything in politics via normal, legal routes is just a heavy, slow freight train taking forever to reach its destination - time during which the hyenas can leisurely plan how to route around this new legislation to continue their back alley ways.

Doing things the right way can be so frustrating...

Ice, ice maybe: Evidence of 'Grand Canyon' glacier FOUND ON MARS

Re: "they just recently found it and no else noticed it before"

They have just published their findings. That does not necessarily mean they have just noticed it. The fact that the article continues to state "It has long been speculated ..." might be a clue in that regard. Scientists have been looking for quite a while.

People need to stop considering Science reporting like sports or people reporting. In Science one does not notice something and immediately start broadcasting the fact. In Science, one notices something, checks it, rechecks it to be sure, talks to someone of confidence who checks it independently, THEN, when it has been determined that it is something worth reporting, one publishes the information expecting other people to check it as well.

When one is doing Science, that is.

Mine Bitcoins with PENCIL and PAPER

Re: How long till a someone makes a Babbage type Bitcoin mining rig for fun?

Well I don't know about Bitcoin mining, but somebody has made a calculator, and you can find loads of various hard drive projects, so I'd say it's only a question of time until we get a Bitcoin miner on a mining game.

Stanford Uni: Google cash leaves us entirely impartial and unbiased

It can be voted down. So ?

It's not like they can kneecap you, now is it ?

We're not on Slashdot, there's no karma here. Go on and say it.

After all, concerning Google, in El Reg forums the general attitude is Google is Evil.

Google hits back at 'Dear Rupert' over search dominance claims

Um, no link ?

Why is there no link to this rebuttal that has apparently been published ?

We'd like to judge the prose ourselves. Well, I would in any case.

Update : finally found it

Let it go, Steve: Ballmer bans iPads from his LA Clippers b-ball team

I have a feeling

that the uptime stats on basketball IT departments are going to become a lot more interesting all of a sudden...

Yahoo! Slurps! Indian! Google! Docs! Lookalike!

"strengthening the Yahoo! Mail service"

God knows they need some of that.

Even Yahoo! employees don't like using it.

MOM: CHEAP Mars ship got it right first time. Nice one, India

Par for the course. It already takes 20 minutes to get to talk to someone in the first place !

Le whoops! Microsoft France boss blows lid off 'Windows 9' event

Re: what made you do it in the first place

What a stupid argument.

You know you will die at some point, why not do that now ?

I think that 2020 is too soon for that. WinXP lasted more than a decade because it was good enough. Windows 7 is good enough, and familiar.

Companies have other things to do than constantly upgrade their workstations - the Vista fiasco was a wake-up call, and Win8 was the confirmation that they do not have to.

Since WinXP was only retired when it could no longer run current hardware, there is no reason to think that Win7 will be retired before that point either. Corporations will stick with it as long as it works.

Microsoft can make as many new failures of Windows as it wants in the interval.

Game pirates 'donate' compute power to Bitcoin miners

Re: "running most game CPU usage sits at < 20%"

Um, if I'm not mistaken mining takes place on the GPU, and GPU usage during gaming is largely pegged at 100%, so mining is going to take a chunk out of the FPS if it runs during the game.

If the virus writer is at all intelligent, he will know that gamers tend to notice when their game doesn't run smoothly, and will have written his virus to use the GPU when no game is running - in other words, the rest of the time.

And given that it is a virus, it only requires the game to be launched to get itself installed. Once it is installed, it shouldn't need the game anymore, so it can very well run when the PC starts.

Consoles have become a joke

Consoles were good when they could not be updated. Back then, there was a clear argument for consoles over PCs because the games had to run and could not be updated, while PCs were notorious for system incompatibilities and driver nuisances.

Then they went and fucked it all up with a hard disk. Ever since then, a console is nothing more than a locked-down PC in a walled garden with update issues.

Thank you, but I prefer Steam on PC any day over those kind of nuisances. Plus my PC is more powerful than any console.

Oz carrier Tiger Air takes terror alerts to new heights

But we have given up.

The governments of all the countries that use to fight against the Axis Of Evil in WWII have gone and adopted whole sections of the very things that they were telling our fathers to fight against, and we have sat and taken it as the price of our TV programs and the choice in our supermarkets.

We have not stood up for Freedom because we, as a population, are much more interested in Facebook, Twitter and the latest results of our favourite sports club. But as long as we have those, the government can force ID cards and "biometric" passports down our throats and we don't complain because we don't travel all that often.

And we will continue to sit and let our freedoms be eroded because they are less important to us than seeing the latest nude pic of some twit that will be forgotten in three months.

We get the country we deserve.

Your location info is too revealing: data boffins

Re: Anyone [..] can be found by the authorities

It's not about the authorities being able to find you, it's about the authorities banging on your door demanding to know why you spent 35 minutes last week in the same general space-time vicinity as some guy they decided yesterday was a terrrist and you never even knew existed.

Home Depot ignored staff warnings of security fail laundry list

@Ledswinger

What is this "accountability" that you refer to ?

I understand "responsible", it means a CxO gets a big paycheck. But "accountable" ? Nobody has ever held a CxO accountable for anything since before Y2K.

As for the "there is no way out", that is plain wishful thinking. Of course there is a way out : it's called a Golden Parachute.

I will now hang back up my cynical hat and retire for the evening with a glass of single malt.

iPhone 6: The final straw for Android makers eaten alive by the data parasite?

"a parasite that's so successful it's killing its host"

So, Google is the Ebola of mobile marketing then ?

I rather like that image.

TOR users become FBI's No.1 hacking target after legal power grab

Isn't that China's (pre-emptive) interpretation as well ?

Who's that at the door, storage box flingers? It's the hard drive makers. No, they are not smiling

Storage software

Funny, in a way those two words don't actually go together.

Stray positrons caught on ISS hint at DARK MATTER source

I think

that the Universe's IT department noticed that there was interest in this "dark matter" thingy and have just published an update to the bin/erg/obsc/sources library.

Monitors monitor's monitoring finds touch screens have 0.4% market share

Bad metric

"Windows 8 [...] racked up plenty of sales"

Technically that may be true, but we all know how Microsoft gets to count its "sales". If Windows was not the de facto universal OS pre-installed on every PC, but had to be bought in addition to the PC, then those sales numbers would be drastically inferior.

There has always been enormous effort deployed in trying to find out which OSes are actually used, and that gives us market share of IE figures and such.

Yet we are still given sales figures in any piece that tries to expound on how important the latest version of Windows is. That is not the proper reference, and we should only hear about it when reading about Microsoft share price.

BitTorrent's peer-to-peer chat app Bleep goes live as public alpha

Ah, but our feline lords are already pretty much untraceable. They don't come when you call them, they couldn't care less that you're looking for them and they sleep anytime and anywhere they damn well please - including the clothes basket (but only the washed clothes, not the dirty ones).

The only time you're pretty sure to see them is feeding time, because they KNOW what time that is and they're ALWAYS on time for that.

Wanna keep your data for 1,000 YEARS? No? Hard luck, HDS wants you to anyway

What, they're not ?

UK.gov lobs another fistful of change at SME infosec nightmares

Re: "Getting their computers seized as evidence"

How would you get that done with skiddies in other countries, pray tell ?

Not to rain on your parade, I would dearly like to see such an initiative, but the fact remains that it is currently impossible to legally attain a miscreant if he is not operating in your own country - and that is not typically the case since it would appear that about 75% of such activity is managed either from the US or from China (I'm sure you can throw Russia in the pot too).

So you'll be doing all that hard detective work and, nine times out of ten, you'll hit the brick wall of "oh, he's operating from outside the country, well that's it then, next case...".

It's quite discouraging, really.

Credit card cutting flaw could have killed EVERY AD on Twitter

So this is the situation

Flaw implicating flow of money to company : fixed in weeks or less

Flaw implicating security of personal information of many thousands of users : might be fixed in months or years

Yup, that sounds like capitalism all right.

Hate Facebook? Hate it enough to spend $9k fleeing it? Web 'country club' built for the rich

Agreed.

The rich don't need a social network on a computer, they already have one in Real Life (tm).

It's the poor schlebs who use one, because they can pretend they have a life on it.

DUCKCROCZILLA 'alien' dinosaur could emerge from THE SEA

Well, September is the start of the school year . . .

Food for grant-funding discussions, maybe ?

Boffins: Behold the SILICON CHEAPNESS of our tiny, radio-signal-munching IoT sensor

Your "farmer" already has all the sheeple-tracking tech he needs. All the sheeple are carrying this thing called a smartphone, that continually broadcasts its position.

All the farmer needs is to know which signal corresponds to which sheeple.

Leak of '5 MEELLLION Gmail passwords' creates security flap

You might want to recheck that isleaked.com site

I went to that site and, when it showed up in Russian by default, I did a whois check on it.

Google returned this link, which states that the site was registered 2 days before the leak was published.

I wouldn't go there if I were you.

Apple's Watch is basically electric perfume

Re: you're not required to know what kind of gas goes in your tank

Um, if you don't want to ruin your diesel engine by pouring in regular gas, or vice-versa, then you pretty damn well need to know what gas to put in your car.

You need to climb down and take a breather, the air you breath seems pretty thin there.

Cloud? Nah, we're not bothering with that, say HALF of enterprises

Private cloud

What a load of cobblers. Either the servers are yours and maintained, secured and backed up by you, or you're in the Cloud, at the mercy of a DDOS you're not even aware of, a server maintenance schedule that falls right smack at the wrong time (if you've even been notified), a random twitch of finger over the wrong setting by a an admin you'll never meet, haven't vetted and know nothing about, or the NSA firing a National Security (hah!) letter that may or may not target you but they'll still reap your data "just to be sure". Not to mention any network update that shouldn't really have had anything to do with you, but just happened to bork your Cloudy provider over half a continent.

The IT industry has spent the last 30 years creating an entire army of highly-qualified sysadmins (ok, some are not that qualified, but still). Does anyone really think that companies are going to sack them and rush to a platform that has so many gaping security holes it's not even funny any more (not that it ever has been) ?

The NSA is one tanker-sized hole that is more than difficult to ignore, the fact that US judges are apparently of the opinion that even foreign subsidiaries are fair game for data plundering is another. The fact that not a single non-US cloud provider is saying anything about securing your data against US-government meddling is highly significant. The fact that none of them is even muttering about protection from local government is too.

Company data is sacred. Once upon a time, you couldn't even take a customer list out without the heavy hand of the Law falling on you if you were found out. That's a hard habit to break, and I've seen nothing for the moment that justifies trying to break it.

Go store your personal backups on the Cloud if you want, it's your risk. Companies are thinking twice about it ? Good. Let them think a third time. And a fourth.

What the BLOCK? Microsoft to gobble Minecraft-maker 'for $2bn'

Indeed he hasn't.

But there's Blockstorm, Robocraft, Creativerse, Murder Miners . . . I think I'll stop looking there now.

I don't think it's ever late to trouser $2 billion.

I'm even willing to wait until next week.

Hawking: Higgs boson in a BIG particle punisher could DESTROY UNIVERSE

"A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth"

Um, far be it from me to cast the eminent Professor's words in a disparaging light, but I do believe that his words should be amended to read:

"A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, with current technology"

Indeed, fusion reactors will exist, and nobody knows what performance fusion reactors will attain, so this declaration must be bound by the current limitations in energy generation, notwithstanding future improvements.

Sorry, Professor.

BONEHEAD FANBOIS encamp outside Apple Stores

Hang on,

People who have been paid to take a queue take pay from other people to leave it ?

Isn't that the very definition of mercenary ?

In any case, it is not the definition of honorable.

Facebook, Google and Instagram 'worse than drugs' says Miley Cyrus

Sorry, that may be the case in the US, but in Europe a "social profile" is not - yet - a requirement for finding a job.

Everyone taking part in Patch Tuesday step forward. NOT SO FAST, Adobe!

Unfortunately, yes.

China is now 99.8% sure you're you, thanks to world's-best facial recognition wares

One question

Can we smile again in our ID photos then ?

Microsoft's Office Delve wants work to be more like being on Facebook

Machine learning

Let's make one thing clear : if your employees are not the ones who do the thinking, your company is up Shit Creek without a paddle.

For fuck's sake enough with the Magical Computer thing. Computers do NOT fix problems, they are not a substitute for people who know what they are doing.

Please take a cluebat to all idiots who think that a computer can think for them.

Especially managers.

Snowden shouldn't be extradited to US if he testifies about NSA spying, says Swiss gov

Re: Silicon Valley would lose its ability to sell to EU clients overnight

Um, the business world already knows that any data that is held by a US company or any of its subsidiaries is fair game to the US government, and that has not lost Silicon Valley any sales yet.

Confirmation from Snowden in front of a Swiss court would not change that fact.

Straight to video: Facebook to add 'view counts' to autoplay newsfeed vids

Fake bomb ?

That is so sad.

A real one is such a blast !

Dodgy Norton update borks UNDEAD XP systems

Whoa there !

BSA made something ?

And it was GOOD ?

I think I need to lie down....

Is there life on Mars? Cloud-gazing Curiosity accused of lacking scientific focus

Curiosity

To boldly drill where no one has drilled before.

Ballmer PERSONALLY wrote Windows 3.1's blue screen text

Re: Maybe I was just lucky

Yup, that sounds about right.

Jimbo tells Wikipedians: You CAN'T vote to disable 'key software features'

sheer unmitigated bullshit

Said by a man who definitely knows what he's talking about.

An expert in the matter, if you will.

The fact is that Wales does not know how to manage a discussion. He confuses the money he is managing with the feeling of importance it brings him, acts like Wiki editors are his to command, and then is all surprised and wounded when they don't really feel like he is their boss.

He's not, of course. He is nobody but a figurehead to attract donations. That is something he does well, apparently, and good on him for it. But he would do good to remember that Wikipedia may have been his creation, now it is a creature of itself, leading its own life.

And Wikipedia's life depends on its editors, not on Wales, so he really should be tuned out and just keep to the charity floor.

He won't, of course, so all this is just another notch in his personal downward journey to irrelevance.

The fact that the engineers paid by their employer are required to work with company tools is perfectly normal. Those engineers are not editors, they're the people who try to make the software that the Illustrious Leader is thinking of.

It is the unpaid editors who create the wealth of Wikipedia who are the ones who refuse to work with subpar software, and nobody is saying they are wrong to do so (well, nobody except Wales).

NUDE SELFIE CLOUD PERV menace: Apple 2FA? Sweet FA, more like

Re: "if you forget your password [..] all your iTunes purchases are gone, forever

Well that's everything settled then, right ?

I mean, what could possibly go wrong ?

Are you a HOT CELEB? Think your SEXY PICS are safe? Maybe NOT

Sell-outs and friend betrayers

Such a nice society some people have.

I know what the word "friend" means. I may not have 100+ "friends", but my friends would never do that to me. Nor I to they.