Posts by Pascal Monett

Anonymity ZUCKS: Facebook's Instagram to switch on face tagging

Thanks for the heads-up

It's good to know beforehand just what Facebook is going to bork this time.

Want to know what CIA spooks really think of spy movies and books?

Granted, on the hacking you're right, it's beggars belief.

But hell does the explosion scene at the beginning make up for it !

Re: Err, hang on a minute ...

Yeah, hang on. All those Wikipedia references and you still missed how Ian Fleming was part of Churchill's "Ungentlemanly Warfare Group" ?

And you fail to reference this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming ?

Not to mention this : http://www.cracked.com/article/152_5-authors-more-badass-than-badass-character-they-created/ ?

Really, one might think that you have some sort of bias.

'Chinese' attack sucks secrets from US defence contractor

And the answer is, apparently, everything.

QinetiQ : a study in failure.

If only it were the only one.

Crap computers in a crap box: Smart-meter blackouts risk to UK

Very few vendors of such equipment will give this type of assurance

And those who do ensure that their equipment has been hardened against attack are certainly not in the group of vendors who will be considered for procurement, due to the fact that their products are more expensive than those of vendors who do not insure against attacks.

In other words, yeah, smartmeters are dumb, open and unprotected. What a surprise. Security is always a cost, and these "smart" meters were not conceived with security in mind, but with remotely controlling the availability of power on a site (house, appartment, restaurant, industry, . . .).

You get what you pay for.

British biz walking around with 'Hack Me' sign taped to its back

RF jamming ?

Since when is that supposed to be an issue ? Sure, it'll work the first day or two, if the company was stupid enough to use a WiFi router for all its networking needs, but somebody's bound to notice that the jamming starts when a given van is parked not far away and when they do, the cops will be bringing down that attack venue pretty quick.

Internet vulnerabilities are dangerous because they are (almost) anonymous, overwhelming, are hard to block when they start and can come from any point in the world, which (in most cases) immunizes the attacker from judicial oversight. So it's easy, carries almost no risk and requires next to no physical effort.

RF jamming needs physical proximity to the target, which then forces the attacker to contend with real-life covert activity requirements. Not to mention that a van has somewhat more complicated temperature-control issues, and an idling vehicle staying in place for hours at a time is going to garner attention.

I file that the Unlikely Attack Venue folder. Especially since a simple Ethernet cable is all it takes to thwart the attack completely.

Another negative climate feedback: Warmer plants cool the planet

Science marches on

It's good to see that scientists are still working to improve our comprehension of the Real World (tm) and thus our models of it.

The dogs bark, the caravan of science passes.

Climate is difficult, based on thermodynamics which is a very difficult subject. Anything that forwards our knowledge in the subject is good to take, regardless of the changes in our conclusions it can bring. We need to finally understand how our climate works sooner rather than later, in order to shut up the zealots (on both sides) and get on with doing what is really necessary.

Pirates scoff at games dev sim's in-game piracy lesson

"an experiment in education of pirates"

And he's whinging because it failed ?

Well duh.

Here's a counterpoint : it's called Minecraft. That game is all over the place. The graphics are horrible, blocky abominations. The principle is, as far as I can tell, just digging and building stuff. The maker of the game has declared to never, ever include any sort of DRM or protection in it. Minecraft can be bought for 20 bucks, or torrented six ways to Sunday.

The guy (oh, yeah, forgot to add : the ONE guy) who made Minecraft is a millionaire. Hundreds of thousands of people have shelled out for his game. He's so rich he sold his game to a company because he (probably) got tired of the concept of working.

So how does that situate your product ? Firmly in the pile of shit, I'd say. A good game sells, with or without protection.

So go take your righteousness and sit on it. Prick.

What work? Tablet owners prefer to slack off with their slabs

Remember the good ol' days when 14" laptops weighed in at 15kg ? And it took eons to get them started, not to mention they crawled along like asthmatic slugs ?

You remember those days, don't you ? And if you do, you do realize that you're complaining about 17" laptops that weigh only 3kg ?

Pff. Never happy, are we ?

CURSE you, EINSTEIN! Humanity still chained in relativistic PRISON

Please continue.

Your posts are among the most informative and interesting of this site. If you stop, it will be much harder to actually learn something here.

Zynga banks fluke profit - won't happen again, says CEO

Beautiful example of PR-speak here

"[This year] remains a transition year" - yeah, you're transitioning into loss.

"This reflects the challenging environment on the web " - yeah, people are still not dumb enough to pay you real money for your cloning efforts ; what a shame.

"We’re excited about the entire category of the social casino" - man, there are SO many people yet to con ! And so many ways to con them !

"regulatory obstacles that we can't predict or control" - whassatyousay ? gambling is illegal in most states ? Chucks ! Now what do we do ?

Climate-cooling effect 'stronger than volcanoes' is looking solid

The climate certainly did not "balance itself back"

Earth's atmosphere today has nothing to do with its content a few hundred million years ago.

The reason that changed was not any Gaia-induced "balance" mode, it was the evolution of algae, then plant life that reconfigured the levels of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen (in my simplified, unscientific understanding of the matter).

If there was supposed to be a "balance", then we'd be gasping in an atmosphere with only 10% of today's oxygen.

Not the point

The point is that there is new data to put into the models, and in order to do so that data must be evaluated and calibrated.

More data is always a good thing to have in climate models.

Not at all.

Try, by all means.

Just don't get religious about what you believe your results show.

At least not until we can accurately forecast whether or not you need a raincoat next month.

Looks like the warmers are on the warpath.

Beware non-believers ! You will be downvoted to the lowest pits of Hell !

Got a Windows XP end-of-life plan? Neither does anyone else

Re: "I will be able to find a way to install it on whatever hardware is on the market"

I sincerely hope you do, but I don't think you will.

My original, holographed XP Windows cannot install on today's hardware, it refuses to complete the install process and blue screens every time I try.

If I do want to install on modern hardware, I need an XP SP2 image. That will probably last a few more years, at which point only an XP SP3 image will be able to install on hardware after, say, 2020, for a few more years.

So I'm guessing that, after 2025, you will be forced to install something else whether you like it or not.

Of course, you should probably be able to get XP running in a VM far longer than that - but users don't have to stay in a VM, now do they ?

"business critical applications at risk today, from those that have operated under the radar of IT"

That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, whatever OS is used.

Running a business-critical app without proper backups and support . . . no, I can't believe it can be done by any sane organization.

Sorry, does not compute here.

UK gov's troll-finder general says he's hanging up his axe

It's not only that the Internet let's anyone insult anyone else, it's much more the fact that the Internet is millions upon millions of anyone insulting anyone else.

It's purely a problem of scale.

Libel laws were effective up to the first http connection because before that, the only guy to slander you was a neighbor or someone in your rather immediate surroundings. And you would drag him to court over it because the slandering happened in your surroundings.

Now, your immediate surroundings has been artificially expanded to include countless faceless people you don't know, don't know you and will never meet you, but have no fear of commenting on what they read on Twitter or wherever. And since they have the understanding of a goldfish, their reactions are knee-jerk level at best. Unfortunately, their attention span is longer than that of the goldfish, and some can be quite boneheaded about it.

On top of that, it's a lot easier to be relentless when all it takes is sitting behind a keyboard. The Internet has birthed a whole new generation of stalkers of all kinds, and that is a sad fact.

In all this, the law is now swamped and totally overrun by this potential. Libel laws were designed when one person could be found guilty of slandering another. Today, millions can potentially be found guilty of slandering the same person. How to manage that without locking courts up with slander cases until the end of time, excluding more important things like criminal assault, homicide and kidnapping ?

And you can't really say that people are just going to have to thicken their skin - sadly there have been suicides due to this online behavior. Even though that would be the best solution.

I have no idea what the solution is, but it seems to me that the law is not going to help here. This is a social issue that will just have to find a social solution, not a legal one. And, as much as I don't really like the idea, it seems to me that online anonymity is going to be the casualty of this situation.

After all, the evil slanderers and stalkers do their deeds mostly because they think they cannot be traced - until the cops show up at their door with a warrant. So maybe if they knew beforehand that everything they do and say on the Internet can be immediately pinned to their name and address, maybe then they would think twice before gratuitously insulting and harassing someone.

Privacy crusaders: ISPs in 'conspiracy of silence' over Snoop Charter

"we would only ever act in response to legislation"

Sounds a bit two-faced to me. They're being consulted on the content of a bill proposal and they want to keep it secret so nobody knows what advantages they get out of it. So, when the bill passes, they really won't have anything to complain about, since they'll have already negociated their advantages.

But I do agree with one thing : it is indeed up to the people to demand public negociations and discussions on any matter pertaining to individual privacy and freedom.

So, when do YOU start the posters and the street signs ?

German watchdog whacks Google with PIDDLING FINE over Street View slurp

So, if I understand correctly

"one of the most serious cases of violation of data protection regulations" is only worth a piddling €150K fine ?

No wonder multinational companies do what they like. It's not like they have much to be scared of. The only real goof is the court of public opinion, and Google has manipulated that like a charm (yes it did, it's only us geeks who are all up in arms about this - Joe Public has already forgotten even hearing about it).

Securing the Internet of Things - or how light bulbs can spy on you

Re: Where did we lose it?

We lost it when we saw RIAA suing grandmothers and underage children for ridiculous charges and didn't take the torches and pitchforks to their headquarters to hang the fucker in charge as a warning to other CEOs.

From that point on, companies have opened their eyes to the fact that they can implement any privacy-invasive measure they please and, as long as Joe Public can still post pics on his Wall, he's good.

I blame the increasing selfishness of society, coupled with the apathy of those who only want (for example) their next football fix and couldn't care less what it might cost others to get it.

Re: ahem

Sorry ? Are you suggesting that the next washing machine I buy I have to pay for a 3/4G phone line as well ?

That's going to float as well as a brick in the current market for sure.

Ready for the car 2.0? Nvidia preps UPGRADABLE car system

No! No! No!

THIS : "all with fondle-happy touchscreen navigation"

Violates the Prime Directive of Driving : Eyes On The Road, Hands On The Wheel.

As such, the ONLY control features that are acceptable are ones we don't need to look at to use (i.e. steering wheel buttons).

Anything else, especially touchscreen (which MANDATES that you look at which point of the screen you are touching) is nothing but a danger to safe driving and should be banned outright, or at the very least only allowed when the vehicle is stationary.

Bad Microsoft patch trapped you in a boot loop? Here's your fix

Re: the registry as a single point of failure

We all know that the only reason it is actually there at all is for DRM and RIAA/MPAA-placating purposes.

There is no other excuse for this abomination against Logic, and the Registry doesn't hold a candle to a simple text file in terms of stability and backup/restore ease and confidence.

Boffins: Tireless star spurted deadly jets for half an hour at a time

So, Mother Nature is actually a guy then ?

Entangled matter the next big thing in qubits

Let me get this straight

A 0.1% improvement yielding 100,000 times better performance is worth a paper ?

Honey ? You know my drinking habit ? Well I just reduced my consumption by 0.1% !

<thwack!> Ow ! Why aren't you happy ? <bash!> Ouch ! But this is scientific progress ! <boink!> Ahh! (etc...)

Steve Jobs' 'spaceship' threatened by massive cost overruns

It's Apple's money

Frankly I don't see why people are getting all worked up over it - it's not their money after all.

A private company is welcome to build the stupidest things it wants to, and with well over $100 billion to play with, Apple can spare $5 billion on nonsense like this.

Yes, I do think it's useless to build a round building. I suspect either a lot of space will be wasted, or a lot of money will be (to buy expensive rounded furniture). No, I am not particularly impressed with the "eco-friendly" claim that is being made. It's a massive building, there will be massive amounts of trucks and Caterpillars and such gas-guzzlers buzzing around there for years, and only time will tell if the build quality is worth it and the temperature-control methods envisioned are really all that efficient. In any case, it is the project of a private company, with private money, that is not going to cause oil spills or massive ecological damage. It's a building, and it's Apple's building. If Apple's shareholders want it, they get it, end of.

It is no use criticizing billionaire projects - those people don't live in the same world we do. We can, however, point and laugh at shareholders who prefer squandering money instead of getting dividends. Those shareholders being billionairs, it won't be much use either (except to make ourselves feel good).

Re: Round buildings don't work

That's why it's over-budget : they suddenly realized they needed curved furniture !

Building the actual real internet simply doesn't pay

Re: "Only people who "Can Do" get to make the rules"

Great idea.

I'm sure the Mafia (Russian or other) and the Yakuza (not to mention the Triads) will wholeheartedly agree.

<sarcasm>Actually, one must wonder if placing authority in the hands of criminals would not be more beneficial than leaving it in the hands of professional liars, sorry, politicians.</sarcasm>

<cynism>One thing is sure, if your mayor is a hardened criminal, there will be much greater respect for his "laws" since everyone knows that the penalty for transgressing them is a lump of lead between the eyes.</cynism>

How the iPad ruined the lives of IT architects

Re: "They have millions of servers and thousands of staff constantly"...

retweaking your privacy settings.

Oops, wrong thread.

Yet, with all those support people, Facebook is still not online 100% of the time, there have been failures.

Makes you step back and ponder that famous "cloud" wonderworld where everyone and his dog is offering to harbor your data.

Seems like it actually takes competence to maintain a cloud operation. Does every cloud provider have that competence ?

IBM socialises Notes mail to stop your yammering

Speaking as a Notes consultant and developer . . .

I hate IBM. Mostly I hate how IBM has buried Notes and forgot to ever mention it since it bought Lotus.

Oh sure, IBM made Domino R5 become a real server, robust and all, with real admin tools. Sure, IBM has made Notes/Domino evolve tremendously since the last R4 "Lotus" release, to the point that the R8.5.3 version I am working with actually has next to nothing to do with the good ol' R4.6 client I started doing LotusScript with.

But where are the commercials for this great (from a dev point of view) product ? Where were the seminars to bring in management and make them understand the power of this product ?

What little was done is now gone, companies are moving en masse to Outlook/Sharepoint because IBM wanted to push Websphere, of which they sold 20 copies (give or take a few). So not only IBM has lost a vast installed user base on a great product, but IBM has practically actively pushed them into the arms of MS who is only now offering a similar product with inferior capabilities.

Where I'm working now I hear the Sharepoint team (5 guys) quoting a dev time of no less than three months to do a library booking app. I took a look at the specs and I could do that by myself in Notes in about a week, tops, including user meetings with the inevitable "can we have this button here instead ?".

So I'm honing my Sharepoint skills now, and considering the definition of the term "job security".

No thanks to you, IBM.

"the sort of enormous corporation that upgrades software as infrequently as possible"

Notes/Domino upgrades are free for licensed users.

Historically speaking, it is a proven thing that upgrading is beneficial to performance and has minimal impact on application functionality.

In short, there is very little reason not to upgrade, and cost has next to nothing to do with it.

Of course, in a complex network environment, there may be more things to control in the prep stage, but in "enormous corporations", I don't think that is an issue in itself.

Speaking for me, I know of no company in my economic area that is using less than R7. All companies I deal with are on R8.5.2 at least, which means practically the latest build pre-R9.

But hey, Notes-bashing is a sport, ain't it ?

I've got a super free multi-petabyte storage box for you: /dev/null

So I've seen it now. Impressive collection of personal data, to be sure, what with the number of keystrokes, mails and steps taken. It's also an impressive show of analytical power that Mathematica demonstrates.

And ?

Apart from giving this guy a chart saying that he's worked a lot, what does one get out of it ?

I don't see much use in a chart telling me that I send more mail now than I did ten years ago. Does that mean I'm wasting time sending mail, or does it mean that I'm more occupied and doing more efficient things with email ? I know the answer already, and I didn't need to saddle my life with a bunch of stat collectors to tell me.

I salute the performance in monitoring, but frankly I don't see what it can tell me about what I might need to do in the future, and forecasting future needs is the only reason to collect all that data in the first place.

So no, I don't see that "everybody" will be doing that in the future. Actually, I don't see that anyone will be doing that in the future. Having a good beer is so much more fun.

Experts agree: Your next car will be smarter than you

"direct a driver where there is an open parking spot"

And that "open" spot is open because the timer ran out ?

No thanks. An open spot is a spot where there is no car, not a spot where the meter has reached the end of the alloted time.

There is a rather big difference there, and it's the difference between being able to park and calling the machine names whilst searching for another spot and ignoring the stupid computer telling us we just passed another "open" spot that was full of car.

Cue a bunch of enraged drivers madly competing for an inexistent spot in the same area, situation degenerating into fisticuffs when the inevitable collision ensues . . .

I can see this as a perfect scenario for totally decredibilizing the whole idea and ridiculing the company that markets it - and that is even without the Big Brother connotations.

As for the whole assisted driving concept, in my opinion it will only work when the vast majority of cars are of that type. Personally, I will adamantly refuse to drive a car that tells me what to do and actively keeps me from driving as I see fit. I will, however, gladly get in to a vehicle where I can say where I want to go, then have a snack and read something on the way without bothering with the whole "driving" concept.

And yes, I know I can call a cab, but most cabbies don't like food in the car (and rightly so). Besides, I don't like waiting for cab either. If my car could drive me around automagically, then the crumbs are my problem and my choice.

The battle for control at the firm that brought SSD to the enterprise

"the company's future is at risk"

Love that kind of argument. We can't change now, we'd look weak !

Yeah, like you look strong now.

And name me one company who's future is not at risk (for a relative value of future).

No, really: Austrians develop hi-tech jewellery made out of concrete

A bit disappointed, actually

I was expecting to see concrete jewellery, not regular jewellery with sprayed-on mumbo-jumbo-make-it-sound-special rebar.

Japan's rare earth discovery bad news for China's monopoly plans

I'm willing to bet that a fleet of "fishing" junks is already on its way.

NORKS says USA attack took it offline ... as if anyone could tell

"despicable and base acts"

Dear $deity, I shudder to think of the poor router's ports and how sore they must be.

Because obviously there was no KY in sight, I'll wager.

Outages plague Hotmail and Outlook users

Re: Stop moaning it's free

It's a service. Even if it is a free service, even if there is no SLA and no guarantee of service, it is still something that the company is offering that is supposed to be useful.

The fact that the service is not available is a valid cause for complaint, even if the service is free. The only thing that users cannot ask for is compensation for lost time or messages. But they are perfectly entitled and justified to complain about the service not being available.

Visa to devs: Please take contents of our wallet

"PayPal [...] has “laid a path for us to follow""

Oh but of course, which banking company would not like to be able to freeze user accounts without a court order, ignore or refuse to answer questions (or send cookie-cutter answers that answer nothing), add operating expenses at a whim and change the rules (ever more) in their favor when they feel like it ?

Given that the banking industry has now found a method for getting regular government injections without any effective oversight or obligation to put that money down to help the little guys, I understand clearly what that means when they refer to PayPal as a reference.

If banks decide that PayPal is a reference, it is time to go back to stuffing mattresses.

RIAA: Google failing on anti-piracy push

Yup.-, and it's unhappy with the ever-increasing power of the hardware, power that fosters ever more powerful-but-easy-to-use audio and video editing software (some of it free and not all of it bad), and the totally ubiquitous availability of optical burners, not to mention digital players of all kinds.

Heck, in a few more technical generations, you'll probably have a version of Goldwave on smartphones (if we don't already - I haven't checked that).

So yeah, they're unhappy. I understand them, but I can't say I care for them.

Nvidia plans new 'reptile HQ' to match its IT aggressiveness

Congratulations

I have rarely seen a post have so little to do with anything in the article or even in the forum posts.

Looking forward to your next post about baby milk on an article about servers.

We've slashed account hijackings by 99.7% - Google

Spot on

Not to worry though, it's 99.7% of a number nobody knows.

In the best of worlds, it means that they have cut down attacks that they can detect by 99.7%. Those they cannot detect . . .

Business as usual then.

Re: " I doubt they really give a stuff about our privacy"

No reason to doubt. The Great Schmidt declared publicly that we HAVE no privacy, and get over it. So he certainly couldn't care less.

There is no doubt. This is not about privacy (at least not ours, Schmidt's privacy - and that of the Google Board - is something else entirely), this is about CYA and staying away from Facebook-level headlines.

Jerry Yang hired as fly on the wall at Lenovo

Time's up then

If you want a Lenovo laptop, get it now, before this numbnut has had a chance to screw it all up.

Pirate Bay reports pirating anti-piracy group to police

Re: Do you actually know what a shill is?

From Wikipedia :

"A shill, also called a plant or a stooge, is a person who publicly helps a person or organization without disclosing that he has a close relationship with that person or organization.

"Shill" typically refers to someone who purposely gives onlookers the impression that he is an enthusiastic independent customer of a seller (or marketer of ideas) for whom he is secretly working."

As such, the word was used in a perfectly justifiable manner given that definition.

Therefor, I must ask : what exactly is your point ?

Hard Man of Facebook: We might just eat those cheap TLC flash chips

Arrggh! What happened to the Edit function ?

"you'll need techies . . ."

Sorry ?

"you wouldn't need techies swarming all over the data centre replacing broken disk drives from the tens of thousands that would be needed"

No, instead you'll techies swarming all over the data centre replacing used TLC chips.

I don't see the difference.

Brand-new black hole found in supernova remnant

I do not understand why people downvoted the question, it is a perfectly legitimate one for a person who does not have the knowledge of how a star works and how it dies.

I am not an astronomer either, but I have always been interested in how the universe functions and our understanding of it.

Therefor, I can safely say that a star's life is based on two things : the incredibly high pressures (generated by all that mass pushing down on the core) that make thermonuclear fusion possible, and the resultant fusion energy that, in effect, pushes away that mass and prevents gravity from collapsing it all into a black hole.

A star is thus perpetually walking a tightrope between collapsing in on itself and blowing its mass away. Stable stars, such as our Sun, have found a balance. That balance can last billions of years (generally the case for yellow dwarfs, of which our Sun is part), or only a few million (the case of humongously gigantic stars that end up as supernovas), but in the end, it always ends badly, though not always spectacularly.

Our Sun is most likely going to go the red giant path, bloating itself until its volume encompasses the orbit of our very own planet, then, at the very end, go nova by shedding the outer layers, leaving a small dwarf remnant that will radiate for eons upon eons until it just cools down.

A supernova, on the other hand, will not shed its outer layers, it will expel them violently. However, in most cases, the core remains. And, without the mass of the external layers to ensure the necessary pressure that allows for continuous thermonuclear reaction, the intense gravitational attraction of all that mass will win over the diminishing thermonuclear reaction that subsists, and it will collapse upon itself, creating the black hole of legend.

It is, in any case, a truly fascinating subject, and I can only encourage one and all to read up about it on the very many Internet sites that deal with the subject.

Microsoft still reviving Azure SQL Reporting after Monday FAIL

"The issue here is [...] that its taken them over a week to fix it"

And they're still not done fixing it.

Now you can generalize all you want, saying that cloud structures are all at risk etc. etc. You're not inherently wrong, you're just forgetting that Amazon and Google are managing much larger volumes of data and are doing so much more efficiently than Azure is apparently capable of.

Microsoft is building itself a history of failing major products in an embarrassingly public way. Some failures can be explained by market conditions, but this Azure failure is a technical one, and that is a stain that will simply not go away.

We all know how this is going to end. The service will be restored, Microsoft will triumphantly tout the excellence of its platform that lost no data, and the weeks it took to get to that point will be smothered under a pile of pillows. For Microsoft, this will be a success story.

For everyone else, this will be the baseline for Azure reliability : when it fails (and it will), it takes X weeks to get back online. As said in previous comments, Azure is already at a reliability rating of one 9, and that is a failure in any administrator's book.