Posts by Pascal Monett

NSA's TURBINE robot can pump 'malware into MILLIONS of PCs'

In theory, a democracy is supposed to prevent that.

This just demonstrates that nobody is actually living in a democracy today.

QuantumCopper, QuantumSky, QuantumHand . . .

Is there any chance that there's a Dr Who fan choosing the code names ?

New fear: Worm that ransacked US military PCs was blueprint for spies' super-malware

No ! Don't encourage it ! It might actually become sentient at some point, and where would we be then ?

Candy Crush King plans IPO valuing it at $7.6 BEEELLION

Who said it wasn't a real drug ?

EU Parliament rubber-stamps 'irreversible' data protection reforms

"data protection is more than ever a competitive advantage"

Bless the EU once again.

Now I only have one question : is this going to protect EU citizens from US and EU snooping, or just US snooping ?

Five unbelievable headlines that claim Tim Berners-Lee 'INVENTED the INTERNET'

Re: Protocol breakdown by traffic

What, no mention of <gasp!> porn ?

What is the world coming to ?

UK's CASH POINTS to MISS Windows XP withdrawal date

"realised the capital cost of paying for the existing ATMs"

Who the fuck are they joking with ?

Do they really think we're going to believe that those ATMs haven't already paid for themselves a hundred times over ?

An ATM is one less bank teller to employ, is open 24/7, in all weather, all year 'round, especially when the bank tellers are not available. If banks had to employ an actual person for that, it would cost them a lot more.

That investment got its return the year after its installation.

Not a valid excuse. An habitual one, to be sure, since banks are always whining about costly their operation is, but once again the bonuses of top management tell the true story : they're rolling in dough and don't know what to do with it.

They do know what they won't do with it though : use it wisely.

Boffins build bendy screen using LEDs just THREE atoms thick

Re: a surface sturdy enough to stop your toddler licking the pixels off your telly

I know that one ! It's called "glass", and there's a new model with holes in it.

Protect data by deleting it: Ground Labs

Ground Labs

Sponsored by the NSA ?

We all owe our EXISTENCE to lovely VOLCANOES, say boffins

Don't feed the troll.

Especially one this delusional.

What did you see, Elder Galaxies? What made you age so quickly?

What if ..

Those galaxies might be just 1.2 million years from spawning a whole new constellation of stars ?

Are we sure they are not ?

Honest question, I have no idea either way.

MtGox gets its sorry assets frozen amid US class-action lawsuit

Re: anymore money is just 1's and 0's on some bank's computer also

That is true, technically speaking.

And the recent washout the banks are responsible for doesn't help keep ideas straight on the matter either.

But in the end, there is one big difference : the 1s and 0s that define your bank account are managed by an institution that has two legal requirements - a) to manage your account with full accounting transparency and accountability and b) to grant you all access to your money unless a court says otherwise.

So the major difference between the bits managed by a bank and the bits (mis)managed by Gox is that you do have legal recourse against a bank and the bank is legally obliged to justify itself if it "loses" your money, whereas Gox is legally liable for not much and, not being a bank, doesn't have the same accountability requirement.

Plus there's the fact that the bits managed by your bank have a source that is way more based in reality than the ones "mined" by a graphics card.

So please do not give in to the Matrix conspiracy theorists that are foaming at the mouth around this issue. The failure of Gox has nothing to do with banks. Gox failed purely on grounds of incompetence and ignorance.

Banks, on the other hand, knew full what they were getting into, and were just playing the field until the other shoe dropped. Their only problem is that it dropped a bit too soon compared to their weekly forecasts.

Q. Can your Linux PC run Crysis? OK, it can. But will it run natively? A. Soon, very soon

Re: The one remaining unique strength Windows has, is gaming

Being a gamer, I have Windows 7/64. It works well, better than any Windows before it.

But ever since Valve announced the Steam OS, well let's just say that Microsoft's days are now officially numbered in my house.

Of the four games I play the most, CS:GO, Minecraft, Diablo III and LotRO, there are now two that have official, native Linux versions, and the other two can be installed on a Linux system with a bit of help.

When I look at my game purchasing habits, it has been years since I have bought a DVD with the crap DRM that comes with it. I no longer need plastic to play, I only buy through Steam.

Not all titles in the Steam catalogue work on Linux, and I will no doubt need a Windows partition for a few years to come. But when the Steam OS comes out, I will be installing it and trying everything out asap and I guarantee that anything not working under Steam OS will be something I am not playing with for a while.

So I agree, the Steam OS is a sign that Windows is finished, and this piece of news is strongly in support of that.

And that can only make me happy.

My work-from-home setup's better than the office. It's GLORIOUS

Re: the world is full of new-school devvies, knocking up stonking apps and interfaces for mobiles

You mean farting apps, don't you ?

Oh, and the random bird-throwing app too, I forgot.

But you're right on one thing : all will change soon - when you lot who don't know how to code are confronted with real-life situations and have to spend your nights desperately divining why your "stonking" app doesn't work in basic situations.

Then you'll learn to appreciate application execution logging and proper coding procedures.

But by then the Son of Stuxnet will have morphed into SkyNet anyway.

The only thing that is shocking is how you missed getting dragged to court over charges of wilful destruction of company property.

And yes, in my days we had to walk uphill both ways. Now get off my lawn !

Re: I think I'm one of the lucky few

If you carefully reread the posts, you'll notice that you will most likely be part of the department that is designated "Marketing", which is the department that can bloody well do what it wants, order what it wants, and everybody else can cry.

So yeah, you're one of the lucky few.

Hey IBM – Lenovo here. Sort your server factory strike out, will you?

"to gain the tremendous talent and experience of its workforce, strong from top to bottom"

That is so going to come back to haunt them when the inevitable "restructuration" starts laying off workers by the thousands.

'Hacked docs' prove MtGox has 1 MILLION Bitcoins, claim blog-snatchers

@Turtle : Thank you !

Thank you for educating me on another culture. It is always refreshing to learn something about other cultures, and it is always humbling to realize that one projects one's own way of thinking into the wrong context.

I will keep that in mind for future reference.

"I am just a humble handsome Asian man ..."

Am I the only one who thinks there's something inherently contradictory in that sentence ?

As for anything said by a MtGoX spokesmouth, I'm sorry but your credibility has been shot to pieces by your own PR work. You don't know how to write, you don't know how to manage and I'm quite sure you don't have a clue what the blazes happened to you. You are thus incompetent and clueless.

And that's what happens when amateurs think they can be bankers on the Internet. Being a responsible banker is hard, making applications secure while being accessed via Internet is doubly hard, and I would say that being a responsible banker whose transaction engine is securely accessible via Internet is one to the power of the other hard.

The VirtualCoin community is learning that the hard way, and I feel sorry for them.

Maybe some good will come from this. Somehow, I doubt it. MtGoX-style exchanges will continue, hackers and crims will continue fleecing them, and shady vCoin hardware vendors will keep leading them by the nose, laughing all the way to very real banks.

The whole vCoin adventure is sailing on a sea of manure at the moment, and the storm is not abating any time soon.

Foxconn preps for Peak Apple with FIFTEEN THOUSAND new hires

Re: "the UK or U.S. where Apple is selling the largest volume of their products"

Largely contradicted for the UK here.

It would seem that it is not because you have something that everybody else does too.

Does that make you feel cooler ?

By the way, it is also contradicted for the US here.

So your post is wrong on both counts.

But hey, at least you have one !

NASA to programmers: Save the Earth and fatten your wallet

"It isn't asteroids we should be worried about, it's the slow death of the Sun."

Just one remark : it's the slow death of the Sun, versus the 100% chance that a "planet-killer" asteroid will hit us in the next million years.

So, not to be picky, but statistically speaking you're better off fixing the problem that is going to hit you tomorrow before worrying about the problem that will hit your grandchildren's grand-grand-grandchildren.

But yeah, I agree we need to get into space.

Because space, dammit.

X marks the... They SAID there was a mystery planet there – NASA

We don't know our own Sun's backyard...

I seem to recall something about the circumference of ignorance, said by someone whose words were worth listening to.

In any case, I feel that scientific progress in astronomy is an exciting field these days. In 2000, we thought planetary systems were rather scarce. Since then, we've had confirmation that at least one-third of the systems that we have surveyed have planets in them. We've gone from hypothesizing Earth-like planets to actually finding planets in the Goldilocks zone.

Now we realize that our "backyard" is bigger than we thought it was ? No problem, we'll work that out too. It should provide a good learning experience as well, teach us how to survey and map a system for when we arrive at a new solar system - sometime in this millennia or the next.

Exciting times !

Fee fie Firefox: Mozilla's lawyers probe Dell over browser install charge

Great move, Mozilla

You're totally right to call Dell out on charging for installing your browser.

I should wish that you win this tussle, and Dell will be obliged to no longer install your browser. I'm sure that will help your market share immensely.

What is that you said ? That is not what you wanted ? Well that is what you're going to get if you push this a lot further; Dell is going to stop installing Firefox.

Again, congratulations. That is a well-thought move.

Euro cops on free Wi-Fi not-so-hotspots: For pity's sake, don't use them for email

Actually no, a driver has no need to know about basic car maintenance. The only thing he's going to want to know is how to fill the wiper fluid. The rest is handled by his mechanic, unless he doesn't have the means to pay for one. If that is the case, then he'll learn to do everything he can on his own, forced to do so by his own budget. That will be his deciding criteria. As for driving safely, you're likely to get as many opinions on that as people you ask. In the end, people drive the way they want until one day something bad happens and a judge tells them they were wrong.

People act the same with computers, because computers are tools, nothing more. And when you know how to hammer a nail, you know enough about hammers. That is how people think.

Using a computer is not like driving a car, computers are way more complex - but the computer industry as a whole (with Microsoft proudly leading the way) has been trying for decades to make people forget that they are using a complex bit of kit. They have largely succeeded, which is why Joe User knows nothing about computers in general, or his smartphone in particular.

Joe User just fires up his personal computing platform, goes to his trusted social site and TRUSTS THEM to manage stuff properly. I know, it's unbelievable that anyone would actually trust The Zuck (bitch!), but there you have it, people do that.

As for your "they deserve" comment, I am quite sure that if you ever need a lawyer and get one with that attitude, you'll be part of the whiners and bitchers as well.

Or are you going to say that you know your Civil Law code down to the last article ?

PM Cameron leaps aboard Internet of Thingies

Re: A fridge that can order you milk when it notices you are getting low

.. will be the first fridge I will take an axe to. No fridge will ever boss me around.

Seriously, what on God's Green Earth is a Prime Minister of a country doing at a tech trade show that isn't even in his own country ? Doesn't he have anything better to do with his time ? Shouldn't he have sent a Secretary or somesuch ?

As for asking the Germans to do the engineering, well with all the IT successes of UK government these past years, I think that is the best idea he has had yet.

Beware Abe Lincoln-looking code pros trying to sell you on LOBDOPs

Is there anything left for the NSA to hack ?

"It’s all basically about analytics insight that goes on behind the firewall"

Seems to me that NSA guys are in overdose mode now, foaming at the mouth and just twitching sporadically with all the data they are getting access to.

Oh, and when are they going to slot the "cloud" word in there ? I couldn't find it anywhere in the article.

Come on, you know it's going to happen.

Plod foils drone drug drop down under

Given that the drone did not deliver, I think the service should be requalified as "in field testing phase".

Delhi police forget passwords to corruption portal, ignore 600 crimes

Hey! Don't knock Japan !

It's a question of basic prudence. Either Japan is so safe that they can spend time chasing cats, or Japanese cats are so intelligent they are responsible for online hacking.

If it's the second choice, then we're screwed because cats then have a worldwide organisation that beats everything the most harcore NSA spy could dream of. They have informants in every village, speaking the local language, watching YOU right now and reporting back on your activities. They don't need to decrypt anything, they're ON YOUR KEYBOARD, WATCHING YOU TYPE.

I bow before our feline overlords. May there always be tuna.

WHOA: Get a load of Asteroid DX110 JUST MISSING planet EARTH

Agreed. The time-lapse may be significant for some, but for me it was just ever-changing black splotches on a white background with a small grey streak in the middle.

No sense of impending doom, no perspective, not even an idea of where the Moon is.

Totally, utterly useless.

But hey, even that must be rather tricky to get a pic of, so kudos to whoever took the snaps. Next time, could you have a few arrows added to it, pointing to relevant celestial bodies ? Like, the Sun is this way <-, the Moon is that way -> ? Thanks in advance !

Voracious alien flatworm hits French in the escargots

Re: of all the non-IT stories on this site..

Being French, and an amateur of snails, I am interested in this story.

And I agree, nuke Caen from orbit. C'est la seule façon d'être sûr.

Bitcoin ban row latest: 'Unstable, loved by criminals' Yup, that's the US dollar – Colorado rep

Re: History is on Bitcoins side

In a word : bollocks.

Bitcoin barely has a history, and what little it has is rife with scams, thefts and shady deals.

The fact that the US dollar was, at one point in time, emitted individually by states is irrelevant. Today, the US dollar is a strong international currency and everyone is using it - that is what is important.

Bitcoin might be a nice idea, but micropayments is a mechanism that is already helping people today, right now, whereas Bitcoin is just a pipe dream being abused by crims and hacks.

I dare say we don't need yet another currency, virtual or not. I don't see what it is that Bitcoin purports to solve - the only thing it is actually doing is demonstrating how easy it is to subvert the system.

The only way Bitcoin is going to become anything actually useful is if all Bitcoin exchanges become certified - and that means regulation, laws and enforcement. These laws will have to be implemented world-wide, even in countries that are rife with corruption - countries which will obviously become havens for criminal organizations.

When you want to reinvent the wheel, you had better reinvent it better. Bitcoin is just forcing us to go through exactly the same set of issues to resolve a problem nobody asked for.

Just die already, Bitcoin.

Google! and! Facebook! IDs! face! Yahoo! login! BAN!

And so Yahoo! continues

it's slide into oblivion

Come on, Marissa, you should know better than to become a pale copy of Google.

You cannot survive on copying Google. You just can't.

Hundreds of folks ready to sue Bitcoin exchange MtGox

Re: replace "strings of numbers" with "pieces of paper" and you describe any modern currency

Try saying that to the barrels of the SWAT team when you nick a sack of banknotes (paper).

BitCoin is a currency the same way bottles of Vodka are a currency : there are rare places that accept to deal with them.

The places accepting bottles of vodka also accept dollars, like everywhere else in the world.

So the difference between any VirtCoin and dollars is that if you steal 400 million dollars, you can be 100% certain that there is someone, somewhere, who's sole mission is to capture you - alive or dead won't really matter - whereas if you steal 400 million VTC, you'll get a lawsuit from another country.

Now tell me which currency is more real than the other again ?

You have because they were actual, real objects that are now in someone else's possession.

These VirtCoins may be unique strings of bits (for a given value of unique), but their value is less than the hard drive platters they are stored on (much less).

Besides, if you had a hundred grand of family heirlooms worth nicking, you should also have insurance on them and a valid basis for judicial action.

Oh, and if you haven't paid Inheritance Tax on that then Her Majesty's Revenue Service would like a word with you . . .

No it isn't.

Gold is real. It is rather difficult to mine, and somewhat dangerous to purify.

Mining VirtCoin is just having the hardware and waiting for the ones and zeros to align properly.

Nothing real, nothing difficult, just a program chugging away wasting time. The only reason people are complaining is because some (enough) have been stupid enough to think that money could actually be made out of this scheme.

Ironically, money will now be made. By lawyers.

Windows XP market share GROWS AGAIN, outstrips Win 8.1 surge

Re: why is it okay to be running a 12 year old OS?

Uh, because it works ?

You people banging on and on about how Microsoft has alerted people for years and so on really should get a reality check.

Rule #1 : The Customer Is Always Right

Rule #2 : Getting Money From The Customer Is Hard To Do

Most importantly :

Rule #3 : A Customer Will Not Replace Something That Works Fine

The vast majority of customers are not PC fans, OS adulators of any side, or actually care about PC stuff in any way. They are much more involved with their personal lives/hobbies/problems which can be in activities ranging from caring for actual, living people to going fishing or watching football with friends and a beer (or three).

There is only a tiny percentage of PC users (of which I am part) who truly care what the OS they run is doing on their hardware and ensure that the thing is optimized and running properly.

Now turn the problem the other way around : how many of you who berate users for not moving to at least Win7 are out every weekend polishing their car ? Because car polish is essential for the proper preservation of the paint color and general durability. And you should use <insert brand name> products only, because they have a proven history and have never used <insert chemical product> at any point in their production history since it is proven that <insert given adverse effect>.

So all you XP-demonizers out there need to pull your own heads out and realize that a PC is not the most important thing in most other people's lives.

The customer is always right. Deal with it.

Facebook: We want a solar sky cruiser comms net that DARPA couldn't build

Re: it will be nice to hear from them first hand.

Sure will - as soon as they get electricity to power all those shiny Ipads they must have.

I do hope Mr Zuck gets this done. It will be hilarious watching him try to pass himself off for a humanitarian (bitch!), and it will be even more fun watching the whole financial debacle that will ensue.

11 thousand drones in the air 24/7/365 for years on end ? Won't happen.

But hey, at least some doctors will be able to post fund/material requests faster (I hope).

Apple finance overlord Oppenheimer: I love Apple, but I gotta get this pilot licence. See ya

Happy that he is "taking time for himself and his family"

Yeah. That sounds sincere.

Come on, you're fooling nobody. He's being put out to pasture, end of. He's done his job, time to put a younger wolf to the task.

Icahn and I will: Carl's war on eBay goes NUCLEAR over Skype

Re: The guy [...] will stop at nothing to achieve his goals

Good on him, at least he has determination, I guess.

The thing I don't like is that he's always dragging his money-grubbing mouth into the media like a shrill housewife and making everybody take a side.

Icahn : I don't give a flying monkey's about your money issues. It's all private money, nothing to do with me and nothing I can do about it even if you are right. And given that whenever I hear your name it is about you screaming about something you just bought into, I have the gut feeling that either you're an ass, or you're an incompetent ass with too much money. So go wash your dirty laundry in private and keep it away from my ears.

SYSTEM ERROR DOWN: Twitter twits silenced by hack attack 'false alarm'

I am so disappointed

I was rather hoping to read that users had been locked out of their Twitter thingy and couldn't use it all.

The only thing this actually did was increase the usage of that moronic platform as users flocked to it even more in an effort to tell everybody and their dog what everybody already knew - as usual.

What a waste of bandwidth.

Cloud buyers: Why it makes sense to think local

Re: A bit like highways

It costs millions to lay one mile of highway.

It costs millions to build a data center, for sure, but providing the bandwidth is going to be a side-issue compared to scaleability, reliability and redundancy costs.

The comparison is not entirely wrong, but I doubt that the scale is comparable.

Good point.

And I'm thinking that, if you are using 200TB of data per user, you are not going to want to have to wait for Internet speeds to get to them. Locally you can have fibre for accessing all that data at GigaByte speeds, but the Internet is going to knock you down to 100Mbps in the very best of cases. Don't argue ; if you have the money to get a GB Internet connection, then you have the money to lay a 100Gbps line in your own company, with all the infrastructure around it.

Plus I doubt very much that having a petabyte of data available is going to cost you "millions". A few hundred thousand for sure, purchasing the various bits and bobs that make a petabyte of data available (NAS and RAID), redundancy and cooling and whatnot, plus an admin to make sure everything putts along nicely. That will take you into the five-digit range for sure, but six ?

Hey doc, what's the PC's prognosis? A. Long-term growth below zero

"8.1 makes Windows usable with a mouse again (at least if you have a touch enabled mouse). "

And that is the final link in the chain that damns Microsoft to the circles of Hell for all eternity.

There will be no ghosts visiting you this XMas, Scrooge McBallmer - you're doomed.

Good question :)

Didn't catch that. My bad.

"I think PCs will be effected by those changes and react to the extent that they can."

No.

PC's might be affected by the change (and I hope they will, actually), but they will certainly not be effected by change.

Please do not fall into the same potholes that affect the common commenter. When you pen an article, you're supposed to set an example. Set the right one.

MtGox: Yup, we're pretty sure your Bitcoin were stolen. Sorry about that.

Brilliant PR piece

I think this communiqué from MtGoX delivers absolutely everything anyone could want to know about the "company".

First of all, the rambling, incoherent mess of words evoking a thought process but one that is too drunk to realize itself, then the random capitalisation and punctuation (demonstrating a clear lack of knowing how to convey information) and finally the total absence of anything concrete to base a conclusion on.

If I were a Venture Capitalist and had been handed a business plan written like this, I would not have gone further than the second sentence before deciding that this guy didn't have a clue and certainly was not managerial material.

Managing a business requires focus and attention, and this "paper" clearly demonstrates that nobody at MtGoX has either, much less an understanding of what the word "managing" means.

MtGoX never should have gotten off the ground. It never was anything more than a bunch a schoolkid-mentality types who bungled together some software they downloaded and then let things flow thinking they had achieved something.

Now that reality is intruding, their illusions are being shattered big time.

Thanks a lot, Facebook: Microsoft turns Office 365 into social network

@ Willie T

" if I am about to begin work on a new project I can scan the internal social sites or put out a query to see if anyone else has done something similar"

Because you think someone will have posted something in that line ? If you are about to begin a new project; it is either because someone has told you to do it, or because you think it will make you look good to your manager.

In the first case, you won't go waste time on the social, you're going to start working on the project in order to not look like you're wasting time or risk getting late. In the other case, you won't want to know if someone else has already done it because you want to be able to say that you did it from A to Z.

Social networks in the company space always end up with a case of the lepers. When they arrive, everyone is told to use them for all the usual, marketingly-enthusiastic reasons. Then people notice that it does not help them do their work which they have already been doing properly for the past x years, and the one or two colleagues they need to talk to to get their work done are either not on the social thingy because not part of the local office, or are more comfortably contacted via other means (walking to the office next door comes to mind). From that point, the social thingy spirales into uselessness, then contempt when the workers realize that the only ones using it are the ones actively pining to look good to management, even at the cost of their productivity (or their productivity doesn't matter to the daily business).

What irks me with this "social" trend is the way its apologists totally forget that all they are doing is trying to force people to replace actual social contact with a computer screen. When you've been working for some years in a company, you have social contact with all the people you need to get your work done - either that on you're fired because you don't talk to the people you need to talk to.

So, except for the people who hate the other people they have to talk to and will gladly take a computer screen instead (it certainly does exist), all the people who are happy interacting in a human way with the people they need to keep in touch with will feel that using this social tool will simply tell the other people that they prefer using a computer to talk to them - in other words it is insulting. And normal people prefer not to insult people that they are happy to interact with.

So if we really are in this happy world where everyone is pleased with all of their other colleagues, then nobody will need to use this social thing because they already talk to their colleagues and prefer doing so the human way. If, on the other hand, everybody hates everybody else, well putting a social thing in the middle will just put a glaring point on how much everyone prefers being somewhere else.

Facebook works because people can pick and choose who they want to stay in contact with and it is done on a private level.

The corporate environment is a place where people have to put up with people they appreciate to varying degrees. Socializing with those other people, especially when forced by managerial fiat, is something that is going to be automatically and intrinsically resisted in every way possible.

Failure by design, in other words.

Re: It really isn't...worth it - or free (unless your time is of no value)

Yes it is free and worth it.

Go get your check already, we can see the logo now.

Not to worry, this is going to be another bust on the (increasingly large) list of Microsoft failures.

Work is to do work, not to pitter-patter around "social" tools. The only ones who think this is good are the people who earn money doing Powerpoint charts. They will be happy with it, for sure.

The rest of the grunts don't have time for social tools. They have a mountain of things to actually get done before the end of the day and if that doesn't happen, no amount of "social tooling" will avoid getting their ass fired.

So for once this is a Microsoft product that will clearly define its users : it will be the ones who consider themselves "deciders" and spend their time crowing about how good they are at it.

The rest of us will just suffer with Office in our dank cubicles and be grateful we get a check at the end of the month instead of a pink slip.

Re: Every large corp. I have worked at (a fair number) makes very extensive use of SharePoint

So you're saying that, since 2001, you have worked at a "fair number" of very large corporations ?

That either means that your notion of a "fair number" is rather limited, or your CV is creatively describing good reasons for several abrupt departures that are commonly described as "getting fired".

And if you've had that many hasty exits in the past 14 years, then you are not well-placed for criticising other people's companies.

In truth though, your attitude is much more of a troll than anything else. So I doubt very much that you have ever set foot in a very large corporation. Unless it's to do the cleaning.