Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Except I refuse to pay such a price for something that only has a 20% efficiency rating, and doesn't last a decade at that rating.
I went to a few solar panel vendors, and listened to the spiel but was not really impressed. Except by one guy who had the guts to state very clearly that solar was for rich people because if you want to do anything else than heat water, you'll be spending more on hardware then you'll get back from it.
I like that kind of honesty. I'm looking forward to becoming rich so I can vindicate his words.
In any case, I'll consider solar when they get their efficiency up to at least 45% for a price I can justify to myself. And I want the reliability to go up a lot too. And while I'm at it, I want a chest full of gold doubloons.
I'm guessing that, in a majority of those 400k+ cases, the website is for a small company and the developer is also responsible for procurement, storage, sales and maybe even marketing, because he's alone or with maybe an associate.
Also, they probably operate under the assumption that they're too small to interest anybody.
Perfectly right, this street should absolutely go both ways.
The given tariff is for a certain bandwidth, say 10mbps. So my monthly payment is for 24/7 access at that bandwidth. Any time my bandwidth drops for any reason, my monthly payment should drop by the proportional amount of bandwidth I have lost.
So if my connection drops to 2mbps every evening for 4 hours, that means that 4 out of 24 hours I am losing 80% of my bandwidth. So, I should have 24 hours at 10mbps, meaning 240mbps total, but I have 200+8 = 208mbps instead, meaning 86.7% of my so-called unlimited bandwidth.
Therefor I should pay 86.7% of the agreed price.
Maybe that would incite telcos to go and lay more fiber to ensure 100% availability.
It would seem that anything interesting gets cancelled, so it looks like it's time to cancel BlackHat.
Publicly at least.
I expect BlackHat to go underground if they ever want to get on with things properly. Right now there are way too many people overseeing their activities and imposing restrictions under cover of perfectly defendable reasons.
I suggest that BlackHatters should no longer communicate publicly either the location, time or program of their activities. Keep a list of interested people, only accept newcomers based on referrals, encrypt email with a 4096-bit key from a one-time pad, etc.
It's time to go dark, gentlemen. The limelight is obviously not suited to your conferences.
Which is why you always check the MD5 hash and the size of the file to the reference size, which any serious website is going to post alongside the MD5.
If either one do not concord, you bin the file.
So MD5 is not really broken, it's just not secure enough on its own.
So, now it is official : the land of Justice and Freedom has already shed the Freedom part and has now dispensed with Justice as well.
Now it'll all be National Security Letters, secret tribunals and kangaroo courts. When is Congress going to be dissolved ? It's not like anybody would object to sending them all to Guantanamo anyway, no ?
And all that for a commercial company that does not want to be known. Well I think that a commercial company that does not want to be known is a company that deals in shady business and should be shut down.
But for the fact that the USA is being run by companies now, so it's all par for the course.
Indeed. I am just back from a holiday trip to the US. I had booked and prepaid a hotel room in Los Angeles via a web site that I supposed was a US entity - since it was the hotel site. I was very surprised when a charge showed up on my credit card details for a certain sum in dollars from an entity based in Hungary.
I was able to match that line with the hotel room cost, but only after I had found an obscure reference to the bank name on my confirmation email. Nothing explicitly said my transaction would be handled in yet another country, and the total was not exactly the same.
This is not good customer service. People should know exactly how their online transactions are being handled, and ideally the receiving bank should be clearly labelled.
I am fast becoming a devoted follower of the IBAN transaction method. Seems much safer to send the money via bank transfer than to use credit card details that can be scammed.
So, the registry is finally unveiled to be the ultimate tool in the virus writer's arsenal.
Well done, Microsoft. You alone, of all the OS vendors, have thrust this abomination of an excuse on its end users in replacement of the trusty .ini file, and now we get to see it's ultimate defilement.
Maybe we can hope to get back to text file configuration now ? I mean, apart from DRM, copyright enforcement and embedding our OS configuration with endless amounts of hidden keys that can be used for God only knows what, there's nothing the registry does that an .ini file could not do, right ?
So, can we finally declare the registry to be a security liability and get rid of it ?
Nah, won't ever happen.
Good luck with those AV tools !
And as soon as Apple decides this little project is infringing on their shiny, shiny image, you can bet that this Kickstarter will be punted to a judges' feet to be squashed.
After all, even officially-recognized Apple fan sites have been squashed before, and they didn't even try to make money off it. This project not only attempts to make money, but does so by destroying the purity of Apple product and, in the process, making it look like a Microsoft product.
I just cannot see Apple stand by and let that happen.
Doesn't that mean that the fibre is actually seven fibres bundled together ?
Sounds like it does, and this website all but confirms it.
So they're doing the transmission over a bundle of seven fibres, not just one. Which does not detract from the impressive success, but it does mean that it is not a test that has a hope of being replicated in the real world unless the fibres that are currently in the ground are also seven-core ones.
Somehow I doubt that they are.
My own.
Web site hosting + email does not cost all that much, in the end, and you don't even have to bother with the web site if you don't want to.
I have my own web site hosted by a company in Switzerland, ironically enough. My web host guarantees email hosting and anti-spam/anti-virus measures in the basic package, for free.
No, I am not totally paranoid, and I took up this website pseudo-hobby years ago before all the hoopla about Snowden and the NSA. It just so happens that now, in the post-Snowden era that we all live in, I am quite happy that I made that choice.
Oh - and I don't leave my mail on the servers, I download it all and keep it locally.
Eat that, NSA/GCHQ goons !
Um, Microsoft has been selling new OSes to people who already them for decades, so I fail to see your point.
Selling a tablet to a household full of PCs works quite well. Madame will enjoy a less cumbersome machine on the sofa instead of sitting at a desk to consult her favourite shopping sites, Junior will enjoy surfing in his room instead of the living room and Julie will adore spending hours lying on her bed in private with Facebook instead of enduring Junior watching over her shoulders in said living room.
Because 95% of users don't actually need a PC - it's just that until tablets came out, it was all they had.
No it is not, not anymore.
The PC has lost its crown, and most analysts acknowledge that.
It will not disappear, keyboard+mouse is still the best interface there is for actual work, but the heady days where the PC commanded all the attention is gone and will never come back.
And, of course, you can connect a keyboard and mouse to something other than a PC anyway, so the PC is going to end up relegated to the back office/content creation role it was destined for.
Tablets and phones are good enough for 95% of users anyway. As long as they can Like that kitty video, they're good.
Sorry, but that is simply untrue. Every single country entering the EU had the possibility of asking its citizens if they agreed, many did - some with negative results (ie Norway, of course).
Since that time, there have been a few referendums to have citizens decide on key points. You can find a comprehensive list here.
But your opinion is nevertheless quite interesting, it demonstrates exactly how you consider the EU. Maybe that is the reason your government wants to leave it.
It seems we agree that someone has to do it.
It also seems that if one is not willing to hand over his private life to potentially dodgy security systems without any guarantee that it works, then one is "outdated" and only good to be put out to pasture. It's the new version of "if you're not with me...".
Well put me out to pasture then, neither of us will miss the other.
However, you will have to agree that things are not getting better on the Internet. We saw Google go from benign to worse than Microsoft. We saw Facebook blatantly and publicly make every possible move to invade user privacy and the sheeple keep using it. Now we are witnessing the creation of a new invasion path that is going to put Internet surveillance inside our very real life.
Excuse me if I am not 100% confident that marketers or insurance companies are not going to get their grubby mitts on that data and use it extract yet another pound of flesh from me.
I'm done believing that the Internet is a benevolent entity only preoccupied with my well-being. The Internet is now a digital slum. The only people I trust are the ones I know personally. The only sites I have a modicum of trust in are the ones I have been visiting for ages already. Everyone and everything else is the enemy until proven otherwise.
Especially corporations and their marketing.
You had hoped for a more positive attitude ? On the forums of a site that says it bites IT ?
If we are not positive (generally speaking), it is because a lot of us work in IT and we see how it is done, especially at the decision-making level. Then we run this fad against our reality-checking process and the result we see sends us to our nuclear fallout shelter.
But hey, go and be part of the live bug testers. Somebody has to do it, after all.
Dear God, man, do you really think it is a good idea to have volatile substances or pressurized water released in your absence ? Do you really think that nothing can ever go wrong ? Or that it is a good idea to leave food out of the fridge all day long just you can start cooking it a quarter of an hour before you get back ? What if you forgot to prepare the cooker before you left ?
Not to mention the fact that, if you can do it from your car, there's a good chance that Mr Hacker can as well, whether or not you're going to get home.
I prefer buttons and switches, thank you, and I am absolutely not interested in having a Microsoft house that attempts to set fire to my kitchen because it thinks I'm on my way.
Obviously not, they are designed to rip any CD that is placed in the unit.
That means that you pick up your friend who brought one of his CDs with him, he places it in the unit and bang! copyright piracy takes place.
Or worse, the nefarious criminal organization buys a car with this functionality, rips out the unit and uses that in a vast underground piracy ring thing like the criminals they are. The American Way (tm) is insulted that that can be even possible, therefor many lawyers must buy new cars with these units in order to verify the claims and devise the lawsuits that can bring back American Freedom, and more cocaine.
Really, Amazon ?
Well I believe 70% should go to the author. You and the publisher can argue about the 30% that is left.
As far as I'm concerned, Amazon should not get more than 5% for simply storing a digital package and selling it over and over and over again.
So you see, Amazon, if you really care about those poor authors, you can do something about it.
Those are National Security letters, not some court injunction which companies routinely ignore behind the safety of their legal departments. You do what they say, because if you don't, the consequences won't be another letter and a phone call. The consequences will be a couple of black vans in your parking lot and you being dragged away in handcuffs while desperately trying to convince some sour NSA goons that you were, what, only joking ?
It's National Security, man. They don't need a warrant, the letter is their warrant.
This attack lasted an entire week and it takes a Kaspersky to find out about it ?
What were the analysts doing in the bank, twiddling their thumbs ? Weren't there any red flags raised about suspicious or unusual activity ?
Or is a loss of half a million euros too little to worry about for a bank ?
I'm sure the customers of Code Spaces will be happy to remember that.
I am documenting this cloud business as it goes, with all the failures and stark, dank reality, not the hype.
I will be referring quite a few people to your article, for which I would like to thank you.
But you know management types, if it's not in a PDF, it's not serious.
So, could you bang that into a PDF that we can download, with references and copyright and all ? Because then I can mail that package to a list of numpties who will not be able to say that they haven't been warned.
Thanks in advance,
Pascal.
No, Trevor, that would be the ghost of some musty old parchment from late 1700s.
The US of A is no longer the land that the Founding Fathers had envisioned, not by a long shot. Basic human rights are now something to be brushed aside when they become inconvenient. Democracy has been subverted, an oligarchy is now in place and freedom is just a word when the NSA is listening to everything.
I'm sorry, but I cannot bring myself to worry about how what I have on my phone will look to a cop. Nothing to hide, I can justify everything that's there if the need arises. So I refuse to live my life thinking about how I might be viewed like criminal. That doesn't feel like freedom to me.
However, I do believe that caution must be exercised with all the geegaws that we lug around without thought. The caution I'm thinking of is reminding oneself what you'd lose if that phone or USB were to drop into the gutter, under a truck tire or somesuch. In other words, what if your phone breaks or is lost ? What have you lost ?
These days, you lose a lot more than a phone. If you had bank access on it, you'd better pray that it got dunked in some liquid and is unusable because if it falls into the wrong hands . . .
That is my guiding light concerning how I treat these technological terrors. Not what a cop might think, but what I am actually losing if that thingy goes missing.
Would-be terrorist tries to become operational and blow up children and families at a XMas event, gets caught by surveillance and sting operation.
That is what is supposed to happen. That should be the result of targeted surveillance, and in this case the surveillance was warranted and acceptable.
This is not the kind of thing people are getting riled up about. This guy got what he deserved, and the judge rightly upheld the judgement.
"We are only interested in data in the aggregate form"
Sure, you can say so. Maybe you even are.
Unfortunately, you work hand in hand with The Google, which is very much interested in data in every form, aggregate or not. Whatever data you get, Google most likely gets as well, and you cannot vouch for what happens after.
And, concerning anonymized strings, I seem to recall a very large customer data file that had those as well get nicked and be put online, where someone obviously more intelligent than average demonstrated how to reverse-engineer said anonymization with the application of deep analysis of the data. In other words, you might have anonymized your data line per line, but as a whole there's a good chance that recoupments may be made and your anonymization is moot.
Have you thought of that, Mr Buzzfeed ?
Somehow, I doubt it.
A few comments here, and indeed the actual speech that is referred to in the article, make it seem like this snooping is happening despite the law.
If Snowden's revelations on the NSA have taught us two things it was 1) that we were indeed being snooped upon in vast numbers with means and processes that go way beyond what a judge would issue a warrant for, and 2) that it is all perfectly legal.
So, the fact that some government official promises to play by the rules is doubly insulting since a) it suggests that said official could not play by the rules and b) is demonstrating how much of an idiot said official is taking us for by making us think that such words actually hold a promise.
Sorry, government official, but it is your sworn duty to play by the rules since you took office. Playing by the rules is a given that should not even be worthy of mention.
So, promising to play by the rules just means "we promise to keep on doing what we're doing right now" since that is exactly what they're already doing.
The issue at hand is that more and more _citizens_ are rising against these rules and for the respect of their private lives. It's a good thing J Edgar Hoover is dead, otherwise said individuals would all be summarily carted off to Guantanamo under the label "Dirty Commie Terrrist".
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