Posts by Pascal Monett

Dolby Atmos is coming home and it sounds amazing

Wonderful. Brilliant. Absolutely fabulous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wanted to be a writer ?

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

Naughty NSA was so drunk on data it forgot collection rules

But, ... they were just following orders !

</sarcasm mode>

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

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

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

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

Never again.

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

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

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

Japanese boffins invent 4.4 TREEELLION frames per second camera

Re: What's a billion?

There's a Wiki page for that.

And yes, I had to check as well.

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

Not even a question - of course they will.

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

I like the concept

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

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

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

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

Re: keeping the channel full at all times

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

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

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

One can always dream...

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

Re: Bad News

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

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

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

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

Re: Dragon Naturally Speaking

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

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

servers hidden in the Tor network, eh ?

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

Another step forward for diamond-based quantum computers

You'll understand that by 1 PM ?

Lucky guy.

Anonymous wifi the latest casualty of Russia net neurosis

Enough with the nothing to hide bullshit

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

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

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

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

ANU boffins demo 'tractor beam' in water

So, the Empire starts in Australia

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

*served with loads and loads of optimism

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

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

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

Or is that too intelligent ?

Yeah, probably is.

Crypto Daddy Phil Zimmerman says surveillance society is DOOMED

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

Spot on !

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

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

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

And that's why it works.

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

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

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

Re: Italy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multiple user accounts coming to Android phones 'n' slabs

Interesting

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

I hope so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft throws old versions of Internet Explorer under the bus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How is that supposed to work ?

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

Do they really think I'm that stupid ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snowden is FREE to ESCAPE FROM RUSSIA, say officials

The proper term is whistleblower

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

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

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

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

True fact: Hubble telescope spots ZOMBIES in SPACE

Wow

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

Now that is food for thought !

Now even Internet Explorer will throw lousy old Java into the abyss

Re: The folks who have problems are the ones downloading pirated music, movies and warez

Bullshit.

The folks who have trouble are the many, many people who have computers and don't know how to avoid those problems.

They are folks for who a computer is a calculator with a screen, and they already have trouble with calculators.

They are people who have had this clunky, noisy thing plopped on their home desk by relatives telling them that they can see their grandchildren with it, and it works - more or less, but it is really confusing.

Not everyone is an IT engineer and you shouldn't have to be one to use a PC. Unfortunately, these days you do if you want to avoid trouble. And most people just don't have either the time or the inclination to do that.

Reducing the world to a bunch of pirates or saintly YOU reflects very poorly on your level of humanity.

Help Australia's PM and attorney-general to define metadata

They know exactly what they want, but they don't want to make it public before it's too late to do anything about it.

Passing themselves for idiots is a brilliant scheme - you don't expect an idiot to do anything really serious. Meanwhile they can go about drawing up plans for a new panopticon without being hindered by revealing questions.

SCORE: Rosetta probe hits orbit of duck-shaped comet

Awesome

That is all.

(icon in honor of those involved, obviously)

Edward Snowden's not a one-off: US.gov hunts new secret doc leaker

It means that the data is kept secure in an extreme fashion, requiring two people to input passwords simultaneously (think Golden-Eye two-key access to the arming mechanism), and people who do access can only access the data that their authorizations subset allows them to, access being monitored automatically with red flags sent to monitoring personnel when out-of-line access requests are made, monitoring personnel who will then investigate the demand and compare with previous out-of-line demands - make too many mistakes and you're fired.

A V.I.P. watch list, perhaps ?

With a golden membership card ?

Whoops, my cloud's just gone titsup. Now what?

Comparing a cloud outage to a power cut ? Really ?

That's like comparing theft to copyright infringement.

If your problem is power, then what you need is a backup diesel generator (or however many are required to cover your needs). Insert it into the grid, fill it up, put it on standby and you're done, apart from the regular maintenance and trial runs. Frankly, apart from the cost, this is a no-brainer operation (and yet, some still manage to fudge it up anyway).

That is peanuts in price and hassle compared to a cloud outage. Even if you do go for a backup cloud operator (and we're talking big budget operations right there), there will be a boatload of problems to deal with on the spot when (not if) it happens.

There are internal procedures to devise, which will need to be amended after the first live-fire event (because there's always some difficulty that was not taken into account).

There is (company) user training, because said procedures need to be understood and implemented in an urgent situation. There is proper warning and communications, because the switch cannot be made before it can be, and (company) users switching manually on their own willy-nilly is going to create its own special brand of havoc.

There is monitoring that the switch has taken place and that operations are once again in a working state. What are the metrics ? How to measure them in a time of crisis ? How to ensure that all required functions have been taken into account ?

Finally, there is recovering from the outage, and the decisions that need to be taken - mainly do we switch back again, or do we only switch when this cloud fails ? After the first live-fire event, maybe previous policy decisions will be reviewed in light of performance before and after the switch.

Then there will be the accounting fallout, because all of this hoopla will be quantified and cost-assigned, and the next board meeting will be a live-fire event of its own.

No, comparing with a power cut doesn't even begin to do this kind of thing justice. It is a very poor comparison.

IBM can't give away its chip business: report

Normal

Making things is so last millennium.

This millennium it's all about thinking up something slightly different than before (on a mobile!), patenting it and then suing the pants off anybody making anything like it.

Watch this Aussie infosec bod open car doors from afar

Oh, bother

All these things we had to make our lives easier have now become potential security holes that put us at risk.

Plugging those holes is going to take years and oodles of money. I have to buy an Audi A8 if I want to have a secure car ? Ouch !

African samba queen: Don't cut off pirates' net connections – cut off their FINGERS

Nah, throw them into an arena with a pointy stick - last one out only gets his head chopped off. Televise it, of course.

I'm sure it would blow all records of audience, too.

Who will kill power companies? TESLA, says Morgan Stanley

I would love to use solar panels

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.

Six MEEELLION gigabytes-a-year space 'scope wins funding

Of course, no other telescope before it has ever been used for real astronomy, just for taking pretty pictures.

Nice to know that. With all we've learned with the pretty pictures up to now, I can't wait to see what we'll learn when we finally start doing real astronomy !

Hacker crew nicks '1.2 billion passwords' – but WHERE did they all come from?

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.

Verizon to FCC: What ya looking at? Everyone throttles internet traffic

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.

White Hats splat Black Hat chats: Talks on home alarm flaws and Russian spy tools axed

It's time to cancel and bury BlackHat conferences

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.

Google on Gmail child abuse trawl: We're NOT looking for other crimes

Re: "append additional strings onto a modified executable "

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.