Posts by Pascal Monett

Microsoft Azure goes TITSUP (Total Inability To Support Usual Performance)

Of course there is redundancy. And the redundant one goes TITSUP too, to maintain service consistency.

The Return of BSOD: Does ANYONE trust Microsoft patches?

Let us not forget that Microsoft itself helped foster this mentality by withholding API documentation for the functions it considered critical to its own performance.

So some vendors had to go and guess things, or call "less efficient" API functions, and tried routing around that, all because Microsoft wanted to make their software work less well than Microsoft's own.

Then, when application lock-in installed, Microsoft was stuck with trying to make its own APIs account for all the variations that had happened, because it simply couldn't break with the past given the amount of uproar that would cause.

But it DOES concern Microsoft. A PC with Windows belongs to Microsoft, and it wants you to know that.

Because Microsoft is there to help you (you poor user, you) and, in case you have a problem with your PC, it will gladly aid you in reformatting the entire disk and installing Windows 9.

As soon as that is out.

Chromebook fans are out in strength today

Funny how some people cannot stand that their favourite product is no more exceptional than everyone else's.

Chromebook has other advantages, crow about them and be different. Spouting nonsense about something everyone does and trying to make it unique to your favourite toy is just silly.

Re: until the sheeple move to LINUX

Right. That's scheduled for about 'round when the Sun enters its red giant phase.

So don't worry, it'll only take a few more billion years.

Germany 'accidentally' snooped on John Kerry and Hillary Clinton

Aliens ?

I've gotta see that movie again.

Tonight.

Twitter displays our 'Favorites'. That is, like, PRIVATE, huff naive users

Well done !

Way to go, Twitter. Your users thought they had a private area on your site ? Nada. You showed 'em, and good.

Keep up the good work. When you have disturbed them enough, maybe - just maybe, one day twatterers will finally understand that all their activity is just to grease someone else's wheels (yours and your customers, of course).

Top money men face up to 2 YEARS in slammer for neglecting to spot crim-cash activity

Ah, but Senior Management does not go to prison, ergo had no need for the training.

Rupert Murdoch says Google is worse than the NSA

No problem, we'll get the content from elsewhere.

The NSA has users ?

I thought it had victims.

Redmond stall means IE Java axe won't swing till September

Re: "go back to to cgi-bin and Geocities pages"

Now there's an idea. Have web pages that are once again using text to pass information on, instead of a bad 8 minute video on a subject that could be described in two or three paragraphs - if one could be arsed to actually write. Much easier to flip on the microphone and mumble, ummm and ahh for six minutes until speaking the one or two sentences that are actually useful.

Go back to the days when company web sites were not a mess of Flash pages unaccessible via URL, when restaurant menus were not a flippin' 10MB PDF file containing 2KB of text and a truckload of uncompressed photos.

Actually, I think I would like to go back to that time.

The way things are going now, in a decade or two all company websites will just be an interactive HD video. To check a product listing, you'll have to download a gigabyte of corporate presentation nonsense and wait ten minutes to get to the part where you can see what the company sells.

God I hope I'll be retired by then.

Spin doctors crack 'impossible' asteroid hurtling towards Earth

Something I don't get here

How is it worse to break up a weakly-cohesive assembly of material rather than a solid chunk of rock ? In either case, you get pieces - not only when the material sticks together because of gecko feet.

I've never heard that NASA favoured exploding asteroids. What NASA has always favoured has been pushing the threat to another orbit that does not risk impacting us.

Five Totally Believable Things Car Makers Must Do To Thwart Hackers

Re: "A good hack attack would leave no log entries anyway"

A properly designed system would log everything that happened, with parameters explaining why. Disrupting that trace would be demonstration enough that a hack took place.

The real challenge, I think, is putting all that log data somewhere that is not much at risk of getting wet or damaged in the event of a crash.

Silly me, here I am talking about a properly designed system in this day and age. I forgot all about marketing deadlines and managerial mismanagement.

Marvell: NO WAY should we have to pay jumbo $1.54bn patent judgment

Dilly-dallying lawyers should be disbarred

One side says infringement, the other side says prior art, nobody shows any proof of anything.

If there is prior art, SERVE IT UP then ! And get the patent erased from USPTO by legal order.

What ? Not possible ? The USPTO is only a rubber-stamp organisation serving the interests of wealthy patent holders ?

Pfff.

Snowden on NSA's MonsterMind TERROR: It may trigger cyberwar

"it depends on your definition"

Fine, the definition of lying is not telling the truth. Anything more to say ?

People in positions of responsibility should be accountable for their actions and it is not up to them to serve an excuse not to be. The day accountability went out the window is the day democracy went down the creek without a paddle.

I get that National Security is important, I get that good people are doing dangerous jobs abroad and I get that threats do indeed exist and must be found. Unfortunately, the US government and all its departments have lost the trust of The People they are supposed to be (theoretically) working for, and telling more lies is just digging the hole deeper.

But no matter, the Government actively demonstrates utter contempt for the very notion of democracy at every point - and gets away with it due to public apathy.

Dolby Atmos is coming home and it sounds amazing

Wonderful. Brilliant. Absolutely fabulous.

So we've gone from mono, to 2.0, to 2.1, to 5.1, and now 10.1

I'm glad that the six guys who get a hard-on for this kind of thing will be able to blow their wads (of money) on corresponding equipment.

Meanwhile, could we finally get better stereo speakers on our bloody flatscreen HD TV sets ?

Don't bother - I'll just keep the TV hooked up to my 2.0 stereo.

And if you think I'm going to spend a car's worth of cash to hear Dances With Stars on 22.3 Atmos Ultima Freak sound, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Stanford boffin is first woman to bag 'math Nobel Prize'

She wanted to be a writer ?

Well done on advancing human knowledge. It is a gift not given to everyone.

Naughty NSA was so drunk on data it forgot collection rules

But, ... they were just following orders !

</sarcasm mode>

Sir, sir, my cloud ate my homework: Google touts grading tool to teachers

Re: "the pay is generally quite good, [..], good career advancement, holidays, ..."

Would you mind sourcing that ? You must be talking about university, or college at least. In elementary schools, the picture is quite different.

My wife is teacher, and I have had the opportunity to be in a class of 26 young children for 2 hours at a time.

Never again.

Anyone who thinks that those holidays are a bonus, I challenge them to spend a week in a class, let alone a school year.

As for career advancement, excuse me ? Your career is to be surrounded with screeching younglings all day long, for the entirety of your career. There are precious little positions that take you to a quiet office managing reports or computer files, and those are mostly obtained by judicious relations, rarely by any actual merit.

And the pay rises, now you're simply delirious. In any case, you're not talking about any country I know of.

Japanese boffins invent 4.4 TREEELLION frames per second camera

Re: What's a billion?

There's a Wiki page for that.

And yes, I had to check as well.

Trans-Pacific: Google spaffs cash on FAST undersea packet-flinging

Not even a question - of course they will.

Microsoft: Just what the world needs – a $25 Nokia dumbphone

I like the concept

Finally a phone that responds to my needs - making and receiving calls, and doesn't need to be recharged every single day.

I hate smartphones with a passion, but I have to use one for business purposes.

Once I retire, that is the kind of phone I want. Just give it a contact list that has more than 12 slots and I'll be happy.

DIME for your TOP SECRET thoughts? Son of Snowden's crypto-chatter client here soon

Re: keeping the channel full at all times

Good God, my dear sir, have you the slightest idea what that would do to Verizon's network speed ?

Such a move would turn every second of the day into peak time, and people would use up their monthly quota of "unlimited" GBs in a day.

On the other hand, the chaos generated would hopefully lay the foundation of a law-backed definition of "unlimited" that would finally resemble something realistic.

One can always dream...

Can't touch this! Microsoft joins OpenGL 3D graphics group

Re: Bad News

I agree, bad news. Microsoft does not use open standards, it subverts them.

MS has been attacking Open Source since it was conceived. This gesture only means one thing : MS has come to the conclusion that its attacks have failed.

So now it is Plan B : Destroy From The Inside. And this time, MS didn't even need to hijack a voting process.

Yosemite Siri? Apple might plonk chatty assistant on your desktop - report

Re: Dragon Naturally Speaking

In all honesty, Dragon Naturally Speaking on a mobile would be something rather impressive - even at PC levels of understanding.

CryptoWall! crooks! 'turn! to! Yahoo! ads! to! spread! ransomware!'

servers hidden in the Tor network, eh ?

It feels inevitable that the growing complexity of the communication tools that we have (not to mention those we will get) is going to become a nightmare to secure without destroying their usefulness.

Another step forward for diamond-based quantum computers

You'll understand that by 1 PM ?

Lucky guy.

Anonymous wifi the latest casualty of Russia net neurosis

Enough with the nothing to hide bullshit

If you have nothing to hide that doesn't mean you should bare it all for everyone to see.

Especially if you're over 50 years old, like me. People do NOT need to see that.

That may sound like a loophole, but I don't know if many Russians can easily get their hands on foreign-sourced SIM thingys.

And let's not worry about the crims, shall we ? They'll get their illegally-imported thingamajigs whatever law is in place.

ANU boffins demo 'tractor beam' in water

So, the Empire starts in Australia

We are now on the first step of tractor beam technology. We just might be on the verge of fuel-less propulsion drives for space travel. All we need active shields to complete the picture, and Future Space here we come* !

*served with loads and loads of optimism

US 911 service needs emergency upgrade and some basic security against scumbags

"financially more viable to arrest everyone and let half of them go"

Um, here's a novel idea : instead of arresting a whole family and sifting their trash to find a reason to be there, how's about the officers realize that it was a hoax and transport their unit to the origin of the call to find the dipwad that made the call and treat him to the live-3D version of "these are your new bracelets, feel how tight they are" ?

Or is that too intelligent ?

Yeah, probably is.

Crypto Daddy Phil Zimmerman says surveillance society is DOOMED

I had not really realized that. Thank you for the clarification. I will keep that in mind for future arguments.

Spot on !

I do take his words as a bit of a dreamer. Believing that people will not stand for government encroaching further on their privacy looks a bit optimistic when people have gladly accepted it from businesses that had no right to do it in the first place (yes, Google and Facebook, I'm looking at you both).

And the issue I have with that is that once you have gotten used to being spied on under the excuse of serving better ads, what use it is to complain about being spied on for the overwhelming excuse of National Security ? I mean, I know that the general population has no problem with hypocrisy when applied to their own lives (like white people who don't like colored people but readily employ them because they can pay them cheaply), but I think that even the personal hypocrisy meter would be a bit blown by complaining now on Facebook or Twitter.

The saddest fact is simply that too many people don't care, or are even aware of, what they give up in order to continue farmvilling or twitterating or wall-posting what they had for breakfast.

And that's why it works.

As for editing EXIF data, please. Do you file your carburator intake to improve its efficiency too ? If you have that level of expertise and believe that everyone else does it too, you clearly don't go outside enough.

Well right up to the moment I read your post, you might well have been.

But now I can't get that image out of my head anymore !

Re: Italy

I fail to see why the fact that legal communications controlled by government servers and accessible to the government at any time should send a shiver down anyone's spine. The fact that you own a piece of land, a house or a car are government record anyway - this is just putting the government in modern times.

Of course, there is the caveat that it is Italy we're talking about, but in the absolute, technically speaking, all legal documents of a country are accessible by the government of that country, be they digital or not. Accessing its own records is thus not an issue when it comes to documents.

On the other hand, citizens using government-controlled email for their own private communications is another matter entirely. In France (where I live), I have an email account with LaPoste.net, which is the government-controlled postal service of the country. I use it for all official and government-related web sites, and sometimes I use it when a company (like the power company) asks for an email contact address. But my private email and the one all my friends contact me on is a different one, and I do not use the government-controlled address for anything private.

It used to be that I viewed the LaPoste email as a nice thing to have, a normal gesture from a government that is transiting to the digital age and doing its best to get rid of paper. Since Snowden, obviously, I have come to understand that the law forcing LaPoste to grant an email to every citizen upon demand is one that was pushed through to ensure that the government would have ready access to as many private lives as possible first and foremost, then do an effort to get rid of paper mail second.

Oh well, just like Germany's highways, something may have been built for not a very nice reason, but it does not mean that it cannot later be used the right way. So I'm hoping that LaPoste will transition into something more respectful of my privacy - but in what way I do not know. Meanwhile, I keep my private correspondence on other mailboxes.

Why hackers won't be able to hijack your next flight - the facts

You've been watching Die Harder again, haven't you ?

Beware WarKitteh, the connected cat that sniffs your Wi-Fi privates

Re: Aren't we jumping to conclusions a bit too quickly?

This is an Internet Forum - it's what we do.

Apple, Intel, Google told to stop being tightwads and pay out MORE in wage-fix settlement

Who ever said they would be sent to pick up litter at retirement homes ?

Send them to clean up the sewers. Let's see the TV crews report on that.

New twist in China Apple hardware ban riddle: THE TRUTH at last?

Yes, but that is the point. Normally it's the Americans putting up the hurdles, they're not used to having to jump over them.

Multiple user accounts coming to Android phones 'n' slabs

Interesting

Does that mean that I will finally be able to control what an app has access to in my vanilla Android install ?

I hope so.

DON'T PANIC! Satellite comms hacking won't be able to crash an aircraft

Re: Park a bunch of ILS marker beacons a few hundred metres short of a runway

I seem to recall hearing that security is a lot tighter around airports than one would suspect.

I doubt very much that one would have time to install any kind of hardware just down from the runway without receiving a visit from armed police before being finished.

Then again, maybe I'm being overly optimistic on the subject.

On the other hand, I very much doubt that taking over a plane via Wi-Fi is at all possible, even knowing some backdoors. The equipment is wired, the cockpit does not control the flaps via Wi-Fi. Or anything else, for that matter. And as far as physical presence is concerned, if you are standing in the technical compartment of a commercial liner, the plane has other issues than you taking over the Wi-Fi.

Network hijacker steals $83,000 in Bitcoin ... and enough Dogecoin for a cup of coffee

"a former employee was able to compromise a router using an old password"

It is frightening to realise that networks are too complicated to have a proper password renewal scheme that has any relevance.

I've worked in companies that force employees to change password every month. I can only imagine the chaos that such a measure would create in an ISP. Unfortunately, whereas in a private company I do not see the use of such measures, in an ISP there is a definite use case for it.

Microsoft throws old versions of Internet Explorer under the bus

"support websites that are coded using the competition's nonstandard features"

The competition's non-standard features ? From MICROSOFT ?

That is so rich, Croesus is spinning in his grave.

Americans to be guinea pigs in vast chip-and-PIN security experiment

Re: The reason Americans don't like it..

Funny how, when it comes to money, you guys can find a whole lot of reasons to not do it, but when it comes to guns, thousands of deaths per year are not reason enough to change.

Hey guys. We've got 1.2 BILLION stolen accounts here. Send us your passwords, 'cos safety

How is that supposed to work ?

They're asking for my password so that they can check if they need my encrypted password to find out if it has been compromised, is that really it ? And I have to pay for the privilege ?

Do they really think I'm that stupid ?

London cops cuff 20-year-old man for unblocking blocked websites

Well, given the available historical, the Police would have been called to quell a riot, a terrorist uprising would have been found and any coloured person would have been shot first then questioned after.

As has been pointed out above, the Police were not involved. It is the Copyright Goons of London that went in, having been given the right to harass private citizens by some law voted right after some politician got a hefty bonus for changing his mind.

If it had been about kiddie porn, or some other something actually serious, you bet it would have been the Police, but since it is corporate law that has been ruffled, our society has not yet decayed to the point where proper Officers of the Law need be involved.

"You do realise that not everyone in the media industries are on million dollar incomes yeah..?"

You do realise that these operations are put in place by the ones that are on million-dollar incomes, and they're NOT doing it for those who aren't ?

Snowden is FREE to ESCAPE FROM RUSSIA, say officials

The proper term is whistleblower

And the fact that the USA, long-standing champion of Justice and Freedom has, for the past quarter century, trampled over everything it used to stand for is reason enough to flee.

Ask yourself one thing : if Snowden's name had been Snowdenskiya and he had fled from Moscow with such a collection of documents outlining Putin's secret organizations activities, would you still be throwing the book at him ? I don't think so.

Well the fact is that Snowden had just as much to fear from his government spooks than a Russian version would have had to fear from Putin's gorillas.

You do not publish such information and sit back counting on Justice when your country has denounced the Bill of Rights, rejected the Geneva Convention on specious terms and has secret tribunals deciding things without proper oversight. To do so would be simply stupid in the extreme.

True fact: Hubble telescope spots ZOMBIES in SPACE

Wow

A supernova can blow the outer layers of a dwarf star off.

Now that is food for thought !