Posts by Pascal Monett

Mighty multi-scope snaps stunning STARBIRTH image

Greenland - was

You know, before all that global warming.

Palestinian Facebook flaw-finder getting $10,000 payday in online appeal

I've got news for you too

This case can be righteously denounced on its technical aspects alone.

Continuously bringing racism in to the picture is not the adult thing to do. It only fuels the fire.

Yes, a lot of people do not like each other. As an adult, however, one simply looks at facts to discuss a matter.

Besides, the Zuck may be a Jew, but he is not involved in this issue. And I doubt very much that the chief of security took time to get him on the phone and ask about the case.

Now, if the chief of security was also Jewish, this entire argument might have a leg to stand on, but it would still be immature and petty.

Re: "very expensive to look this bad"

I agree with your comment, and with your sentiment as well.

However, I have to ask : just exactly how does Facebook look worse now ? I mean, on its bottom line, of course.

Yes Facebook has been shamed, but is that going to change anything in its monthly revenue ? Yes, people are up in arms, but are those people who contribute to Facebook's bottom line in a meaningful manner ?

Facebook has looked very bad before (bitch!), but that has not prevented it from becoming a billion dollar industrial behemoth.

So, regretfully, I must admit that the Zuck probably doesn't give a flying monkey's about this issue.

And that's too bad.

Firefox takes top marks in browser stability tests

Re: "doesn't spy on you for the NSA or GCHQ"

I think you may be confused there.

The NSA doesn't give a flying monkey's what browser you use. It's recording your traffic, and that happens despite any precaution you may take.

Guardian lets UK spooks trash 'Snowden files' PCs to make them feel better

OK, let's sum things up

A whistleblower escapes to another country after revealing publicly damning evidence that world society is under a total surveillance scheme without any regard for individual privacy, contrary to the very legal foundations of said country.

After the initial shock period, spook centers around the world work in concert to lock down the leak, find the whistleblower and silence him.

In order to do so, authorities have demonstrated that they are now willing to :

1) force ambassadorial entities to stop and prove that the whistleblower is not on board

2) harass and intimidate people related to the whistleblower, or that are in professional relations with him, using clearly abusive pretexts

3) abuse state powers and proceed to destroy private equipment without any justification

What is next ? Night visits to anyone who has contacted the whistleblower, with complementary beatings ? Some "unfortunate" accidents ? Waterboarding people who have read about this whole affair on the Web ?

I have the very unfunny feeling that, for the first time in recent history, Goodwin's Law should be invoked.

Because it is starting to look like the Gestapo have not disappeared at all. They have become Gestapo Incorporated, and they are watching you from your local Beating Center.

You will behave, Citizen.

Windows NT: Remember Microsoft's almost perfect 20-year-old?

Re: "everyone bets on Linux today"

You need to get out more.

Linux is taking a bigger piece of the server room, unquestionably, but in offices it is still Windows and only Windows.

I have been a consultant for nigh on twenty years now, and I have still to spot a Linux desktop in the hands of an end-user of any kind. For some engineers, yes, for graphics designers, of course, for some specialist applications, sometimes. But in regular, day-to-day office use ? Windows, obviously.

And that will continue until Outlook runs on Linux boxen. Natively. Which is not going to happen any time soon, apparently.

Okay Bill, we know it's you.

And as for the "scalable database", the inventor of that abomination should take Sysiph's place on the rock. But, in its defence, I will admit that a single point of failure has never been more completely integrated than the Registry has.

Re: "there was no spam"

On the PC, no, but on the fax machine . . .

Re: "they got rid of that login method later on"

Really ? When ? In Win8 ?

Because I'm using W7 right now and I have to use the famous trio every single time my workstation goes into screensaver lock.

Green German gov battles to keep fossil powerplants running

Re: nuclear is not an option

All the better for France, which is making money selling "nuclear" electricity to Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy, Spain and probably Switzerland as well.

I find the current green arguments in Germany quite hypocritical. If they really don't want anything to do with nuclear, then they should not purchase electricity from a country they know produces it via the process they denounce.

Instead, they just pass off as airhead NIMBYs.

Personally, I am pro-ecology. I do not like seeing useless damage to nature and I would prefer that humans in general treat their only home with a bit more respect.

However, I do not expect our society to exist on anything but nuclear energy in the future. We require much to much power to rely only on solar and wind. Fusion will be the savior, when it comes. In the meantime, instead of grumbling about how nuclear is a danger to future generations, let's find a solution. Thorium reactors, for example.

Assange washes hands in election row

Breanna Manning ??

Is that Private Bradley Manning's sister ? Mother ? Cousin ?

Why is she in jail ? Are you sure it has something to do with what her bother/son/cousin did ?

Somehow I think you are confused about some details of the Manning issue.

Snowden journalist's partner gave Brit spooks passwords to seized files

I'm sure it was legally and procedurally sound, but it was not justified.

Depriving a person of his liberty for nine hours just to ask what flavor tea they had is, in my view, a blatant abuse of power. The fact that terrorism was used as an excuse for this is an intolerable abuse of the system.

I think it is high time a major shuffle happened at the top. We need to pink slip every high-level official who was in on this, without benefits of any kind.

The whole thing is a disgrace for justice and democracy.

Screw you, Brits, says Google: We are ABOVE UK privacy law

I seem to remember...

Multiple declarations from some Google understaffer, a certain E. Schmit, or Schmidt, saying that Google always complies with local law.

Of course, this was concerning China and Google's presence in that fledgling digital nation, and it was also about surveillance laws and handing over information concerning traitors who disagreed with the Glorious People's government position.

Most likely that this E. Schmidt or whatever was just an intern and not actually representative of Google management, then.

Sorry, what was that you said ? He is executive chairman of the company and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin ?

Oh, well in that case it's because we're talking about a country where Google's presence is massively monopolistic, permeating into more and more layers of society, and it doesn't have to pretend to care anymore.

Yeah, that must be it.

Vodafone 'settled SECRET £57m Irish tax wrangle' back in 2009

"fully compliant with existing tax laws"

Yeah, and the NSA says it is fully compliant with the law too.

Doesn't mean it's right.

Google proposes eye-tracking ad-tracking

The Total Surveillance Society

It is coming, and you will not be able to opt out.

I'm not saying that Google is planning it, but the NSA has brilliantly demonstrated that it will happily hijack any existing infrastructure to acquire the data it craves, whether that is illegal or not.

The fact that Google is thinking of doing this means that the NSA is thinking of ways to mine it.

And that is where we hit the Total Surveillance Society.

And the sheeple will go on munching...

Re: "But I don't think anyone [..] cares what *you* do or why you do it."

Aww, now you've gone and hurt some poor NSA employees' feelings, you nasty man, you.

Court throws out Icahn's demand to stall Dell shareholder vote

using "the corporate machinery to rig the election,"

He forgot to add : "better than I could".

That would at least have been honest.

Oh wait, we're talking about Icahn. Silly me.

Facebook's flush Sheryl Sandberg savaged over unpaid intern advert

It is nice to see that public companies can actually be shamed into putting their money where their mouth is.

+1 to the Internet for a positive result.

AREA 51 - THE TRUTH by the CIA: Official dossier blows lid off US secrets

Mandatory xkcd reference

http://xkcd.com/1235/

Attention, addicts: LEGO meth lab pays homage to Breaking Bad

Not all that impressive

It seems to me that the Bricking Bad version is better.

Boffins claim Voyager has already left the Solar System

Quiet ! Science is progressing.

Concerning the heliosphere, we know nothing, for the time being we only have educated guesses.

Now we are learning about it while going through it - it is going to take some time and there will be heated debate before a consensus is reached. So let us just note that new theories about the heliosphere are forming, which is a good thing, and monitor scientific progress for the next five years without worrying too much about it.

In the next decade, scientists will have worked it out. In the meantime, it's just too soon to comment.

KABOOOM! Space-faring dwarf's galactic pile-up snapped by X-ray boffins

So the Farenheit scale is basically based on a physics constant on one end, and on the point-in-time physiological state of a single human specimen at an unspecified stage of its evolution on the other ?

Why thank you, that remark has just nailed the entire Farenheit scale to the Pointless folder as far as I'm concerned.

'Database failure ate my data' – Salesforce customer

Re: "running in multiple AWS zones and everything just moved when the one zone went down"

Interesting. Can Salesforce do that ?

Twee...THUD: Boffins build 'The Classifier' to seek out, kill millions of Twitter fakes

Re: "It's unmatched as a source of near real-time reliable information"

If that is really what you think about Twitter, then what the fuck are you doing here ?

Google: Cloud users have 'no legitimate expectation of privacy'

"The entire climate of surveillance and government access will force most of these transactions out of the hands of those mucking it up today."

One can only hope.

Re: "Google used to stand for "white hat" tactics all the way"

Yeah, they used to hide their true nature very well, but since then Eric Schmidt has done his darndest to educate people concerning the true nature of the Chocolate Factory, so that chicken has flown the coop a while ago now.

You call a flash drive a backup ?

Man are you in for a brutal wake-up if you need it five years from now !

Zombie PCs are for crimelord chumps: Fear clusters, says infosec ace

Big Iron Improves Badware shocker

Next in the news : crooks using rocket launchers gain entry quicker than with crowbars.

Yes, except that rocket launchers make a heck of lot more noise than the lowly crowbar, and when you're in the illegal entry business, it pays to be discreet.

I always thought that was one of the prime qualities of a botnet : you're not conducting the attack itself from a traceable IP, you're just giving instructions to a mass of addresses that are conducting the attack on your behalf.

With attacks conducted from a commercial cloud service, it will be easy as pie to trace the attack back to you. I don't think that's all that smart from a crims' point of view. And even if you create your own cluster, you still own the IPs used - so not any better.

I honestly don't see how this is actually going to change things, but hey, I'm not very knowledgeable in such matters.

Rate-my-boink app scores frisky fanbois, fangurlz' SCREAMS, VIBRATIONS

"so a man has evidence that he's actually managed to do the deed"

If you need an app to tell you that, you're "skills" are nothing to boast about.

Keep Landsat flying forever, says US Academy of Sciences

"other nations are now developing systems whose capability rivals or exceeds US systems"

And that's it for the Landsat project.

No reason to waste valuable NSA money on something others are doing better.

Especially when NSA can just go and slurp it when the job is done.

Philips' smart lights left in the dark by dumb security

Allow me to add :

Double shotgun barrel to the face of any prick who wants to plug my fridge into the Web.

Seagate: Storage industry ill-prepared for onrushing big data tsunami

So, storage is going to get even cheaper ?

Good news. I just have to wait a few more years to get my first petabyte disk.

Don't know if it'll be magnetic, hybrid SSD or magneto-optical, but it will be a petabyte.

Cool.

Peak Apple? HOGWASH! Apple is 'extremely undervalued,' says Icahn

Carl Icahn sees opportunity

Of course he does, an opportunity to pump up the stock price, get his payout, and sell higher than he bought.

That's what he's doing, nothing more, nothing less. He doesn't believe in Apple - if he did he'd have bought stock in it decades ago. I can't say he didn't, but the billion he just plunked on the table does not mean he believes in the company, it means he's lining himself up for more.

Because that is what he does and everyone knows it.

What I don't get is why that kind of person gets press time. Who cares what he says ? He's lying anyway.

The headline should have been "Notorious corporate raider lining up Apple as next victim".

DARPA calls Big Data boffins: Help us lock up everyone's privates

Wait a minute

I see all these posts about how DARPA is going to use any of this new tech to better get the squeeze on our privacy, and I understand very well where that is coming from and I blame nobody.

But let's take a step back just one second.

Look at cryptography. I've always heard that a secure cryptographic system is a system where everyone knows exactly how it works, because knowing how it works does not mean you can break it.

So, if we apply that rule to data anonymisation, I think we could very well design something where data is effectively anonymous and could not be recombined to something that would break anonymity.

I don't think it will be easy though.

Facebook to gobble voice-recog outfit, not so chatty on price tag

My kid doesn't use Facebook because I have taught her the fallacy of such "connections".

As a kid, if you have a friend, then you TALK to that person, you don't type words into a computer. Because, as a kid, the only friends you have are RIGHT WITH YOU, EVERY DAY, in the biggest social connection tool since the dawn of Mankind - school.

Once you have grown up and become a teenager, the rules do tend to change. There are some old friends that have moved, and you use the Internet therefor can make contact with interesting people you will probably never see face-to-face. At that time, one can start using social sites cautiously, but tools like NSA Messenger (aka Skype) will be much more profitable to stay in contact.

The thing is just to always remember : whatever you put on the Internet will ALWAYS remain available. So don't put anything you'd rather not be remembered of (or have anyone else find out) in twenty years.

Yeah, that's the hard part.

NSA-proof email encryption? Cobblers, sniff German hackers

Re: "just have to email the instructions to the recipient"

So, you encrypt your mail, print it on paper, have to go deliver it yourself to be secure, BUT you send the instructions to the secret via email, in clear. Or, you encrypt the instructions and . . . print them on a printer and get another set of instructions in clear.

In other words, you're in a crowded public area, handing a conspicuous brown envelope to some highly-visible person, loudly saying "TOMORROW'S PASSWORD IS . . . ".

Hmm. Somehow I think PGP is a better idea.

And if you really want secure, just go see the person face-to-face.

PayPal's fizzog-based payments app rubbished over reliability worries

Re: "the transaction comes from an identifiable device "

Oh, you mean "identifiable" like that "expert" who was confused between an Ipod and a Galaxy II S ?

Remember that one ?

Magnets too slow for disk writes? Use lasers

Lasers

Is there anything they can't do ?

The secure mail dilemma: If it's useable, it's probably insecure

Whatever happened to your Constitutional Rights ?

I do not think that discussing technical details is the solution - it acknowledges that the State has the right to snoop and tries working around that.

Instead, walk right up to your representatives and put your foot down concerning your right to privacy.

What is the excuse for all this snooping ? The modern boogey man : terrorism. Yes, 9/11 was horrible. Yes, it should never happen again. But it is the fact that known terrorists were not signalled to proper police forces that allowed them to act. Snooping is not the solution, and would not have helped.

So go to Congress and tear down RIPA and the so-called PATRIOT act. They are unconstitutional and therefor illegal, and it is high time that all this terrorism malarkey be put back where it belongs.

If you live in constant fear of terrorism, then you have given the terrorists the victory they wanted in the first place.

Notorious Mexican drug kingpin nabbed thanks to drones and spyware

Hang on

So this guy was caught because his GPS was tracked with spyware, right ?

So, the NSA had nothing to do with it then, right ?

So, if the NSA is useless in catching this clearly dangerous type of criminal, and it served jack shit in capturing Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, then what on God's green Earth is all this "surveillance" good for ?

Catching Pirate Bay users ?

I mean come on, now is the time to tell us that the NSA can actually have a use for good. This would be the perfect opportunity to brush off some complaints and say "See ? We got this bastard because WE WERE LISTENING IN ON HIM ! Trust us now ?".

I still wouldn't trust them, but I'll be damned if this wasn't the perfect time to polish the image.

Mother of Chelyabinsk spotted

Wait a minute

How can they possibly know that the original object got whacked between 20 and 40 thousand years ago ?

I'm curious. These objects are in space, and we haven't gotten near them. The one object that we did get near to got scorched by reentry. Is there enough data left to determine that interval in a single, earth-atmosphere-burned chunk of space rock ?

Obama proposes four-point plan to investigate US data spooks

Re: "The real problem is not that the government is spying on just about everyone"

That seems like a pretty real problem to me.

That said, you are right on one point : the real problem is indeed not that the US gov is spying on everyone, it is that it is spying on everyone behind secret courts and gagging orders instead of doing so within the blinding light of democracy and justice, with oversight and due process every step of the way.

Which means that the US has just placed the final nail in the coffin that was built the day a previous US President openly stated that the Geneva Convention did not concern the US government when it came to retribution against people suspected of terrorism.

Today the US of A has removed itself from its lofty position as beacon of Freedom and Justice, and has placed itself at the same as a certain Cuban dictator, or any tinpot South American leader for that manner.

The only difference is that I still believe that Americans can reestablish actual Justice and Liberty for all within their own country. It will, however, involve quite a lot of pulling fingers out of arses.

Don't trust us? Try these Office 365 stats, says Microsoft

I'd be interested to know exactly how they define "uptime,"

-

Easy, the operator turns around and checks that the green light is flashing for disk activity. If it is, everything is A-OK.

What was that you said ? You still can't connect to your storage space ? Have you tried rebooting the Internet ?

Brits give thumbs-up to shale gas slurping in university-run poll

"whether they used any filtering mechanism to determine what, if anything, the respondents knew about fracking before being surveyed"

They used to do that, but they got tired of always getting "nothing" as response and figured that it won't change any time soon, so they stopped checking.

The day Joe Public actually knows something on the subject he's been quizzed about it will snow in Hell. And we'll have better politicians.

Don't worry, they're working on a solution. It's called the Great Puritan Firewall, supposed to be opt-in, and it'll be coming near you to "protect the children" real soon.

They do it with mirrors: Nasuni reveals new cloudy protection plan

And as far as uptime is concerned, it's not very smart to point and laugh at other's failures.

When they hit a snag, they'll get theirs big time.

Because it's never if, just when.

That is a dangerous move

Saying that your data is protected, but it could be more protected, is stupid.

It implies that the initial level of protection may not be enough, although they have marketed it as sufficient.

It also creates client tiers, with some having better protection than others.

I fear it can only end in tears.

Doom guy teleports into VR startup Oculus Rift

I always thought VR was a gimmick

If Carmack is on the job, there is every chance that it will indeed become something useful.

Obama cancels meeting Putin in Russia, says Snowden 'a factor'

I don't like what you said, but I have to agree that you are most probably right.

@asdf

So you think you have an empire ? How typical. You see that your currency has become a global one and you think you own the planet.

The fact that you need a dozen carrier strike groups to keep your troops from being slaughtered abroad is what, a minor discrepancy ?