Posts by Pascal Monett

Let white-hat hackers stick a probe in those voting machines, say senators

A good step forward, but not enough

As long as the code is not open source, I won't trust it.

RSA encryption is open source and that works fine. It's not because you know how the code works that you can break the system.

So why isn't the foundational process of Democracy not open source ?

Because greedy companies want to make a fortune out of it, and closed source is the direct path to achieving that.

Unfortunately, closed source is also the direct path to shady deals and unknown agreements that might very well undermine Democracy.

That is not acceptable.

VA's Cerner EHR platform fails to deliver medications to veterans

Yeah, but, it's Agile !

Although apparently not enough to actually make a working product.

Once again we hear of a medical project gone wrong. What is it with the mentality these days ? Hours to review a chart ? How many out-of-touch admins and managers have added their "ideas" to the workload of people who have better things to do, all in the name of "improving administration" ?

I do not see that it is the job of point-of-sale personnel to review charts. That's a job for managers. They can put down their coffee and doughnut and get to work.

So much for Pakistan’s plan for digital economy – it’s turned off the internet

"neither necessary nor proportionate, and can never be justified"

Oh but it can be justified, when you are a military junta. It is absolutely necessary when you want to prevent protests from organizing (well, easily at least).

Just like in France, where Macron managed to pass a law against pots and pans used in protests on the basis of, wait for it, anti-terrorist laws. The poor wittle pwesident couldn't stand not hearing his bweutiful voice over the din, apparently.

Needless to say, democratic reaction was swift and lawsuits quickly quashed that rancid demonstration of dicklessness, but France is a democratic country - for now. Even so, the attempt was made.

It's pretty obvious that, in a country where democracy is just a faint hope for the future, such shenanigans - and worse - are a daily occurence.

Nvidia CEO pay falls ten percent in FY23 on missed sales targets

Because they're staff, i.e. peons. They agreed to their meager salary, they shall be content with it. It's not Huang's fault that they did not have the clout to negociate better terms. After all, he's the one that can distribute the pink slips.

You really need to read Being a CEO 101.

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

The hamburger menu

It's made for desktop PCs - which more and more sport at least two 24" ultra high resolution screens - and they still can't stick a true hamburger icon on it ?

Do they fear a lawsuit from McDonalds,or what ?

Microsoft puts the freeze on employee salaries, CEO pay still as hot as ever

"While we will have salary increases for certain hourly or equivalent roles . . ."

Equivalent roles.

Like CEO ?

He's paid by the hour, isn't he ?

Or is it by the minute ?

EU-US Privacy Framework could make life easier for a data biz, if it survives

Re: Delusional Description: GDPR Is Still A Joke....

You misunderstand politics, my good sir.

It's not about following through, it's all about the noise you make.

When campaigning, it is good form to invoke privacy, respect, the law and anything else on top of hugging babies. If ever something doesn't pan out, it's not your fault, it's the lawmakers who didn't do their jobs.

And when you reach the lofty position of Prime Minister, you have more important things to occupy you than a piddling privacy agreement.

But when you're campaigning, it's all gravy in the poll booth . . .

Open source AI makes modern PCs relevant, and subscriptions seem shabby

"ChatGPT looks to be losing another race"

Doesn't matter though. Borkzilla has managed to graft ChatGPT into Office and, soon, everything else it makes.

And that will be paid for by user subscriptions.

So it's just the Board of the Fortune 500 that will suddenly be asking themselves why they're paying for an inferior . . no, wait, it's from Borkzilla so they won't ask themselves anything.

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

Ah, feature phones

Those useful little things that could go a week without needing to recharge.

So, there's still a country in this world where the ability to phone someone is more important than the ability to tweet to nobody.

Nice to know.

Microsoft can't stop injecting Copilot AI into every corner of its app empire

Essentially

This "new" "AI" is essentially Borkzilla plugging into corporate data with the blessing of Boards everywhere.

At this point, I have one question : all that juicy data that is being "analyzed" is being sent where, exactly ?

Because I think there is this little thing called GDPR waiting in the wings . . .

Microsoft Azure CTO believes confidential computing is the future of targeted advertising

They keep on trying, don't they ?

Lipstick on a pig is what it is.

You can shuffle it in as many ways as you want, we still see the end result : we're getting profiled in ever more precise ways.

Well we don't like it, and we'll vote the laws that are needed to keep our privacy.

As soon as we find out how to write them.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

"I think it's reasonable to declare victory and move on"

Yes, please move on. The Woke is satisfied, for now. The poor itty bitty processes will never hang again, justice is done, amen, hallelujia.

So, what's the new designation for black holes ?

Meta CEO doesn't Zuck at Brazilian jiu-jitsu, apparently

So it's got a few medals in martial arts

Looks like the robot is branching out.

In any case, it still hasn't understood the basic notion of martial arts, which is honor.

The Zuck has none.

AI still fails at being human.

Microsoft disarms push notification bombers with number matching in Authenticator

Human weakness at work again

"eventually accept the login to stop the harassment"

What ? No.

The fact that there is harassment is a clear sign that a takeover attempt is active. That is not the time to just click Yes so that you can make another post on Twitter.

That is the time to contact your provider and warn them that a takeover is occuring.

Of course, it would help if you have another platform than your smartphone to do so . . . so basically only only anyone over 40 can hope to be able to respond properly.

Musk decides to bury dead Twitter accounts, warns users follower counts could sink

"but it's important to free up abandoned handles."

0h really ?

Is this an IPv4 issue ?

Is there a dearth of available handles in twatland ?

Don't think so.

This is just another load of bull. Maybe a PR stunt ?

FBI-led Op Medusa slays NATO-bothering Russian military malware network

"almost two decades"

Was that the time it took to train FBI agents ?

Two decades to stop spyware. Wow.

No medals will be awarded here.

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

He has doubts

Well then, how about pointing a telescope to the landing site and checking out for the laser reflector that is used to know where the Moon is to a sliver of a micrometer ?

Oh, silly me, that would mean that you admit that there is one . . .

India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck

"banned 14 messaging apps on national security grounds"

Yes, citizens talking to each other is obviously bad for national security.

But India should take a leaf out of the NSA surveillance handbook. Let them talk, and monitor everything.

Or, for something more repressive, go to China, who monitors everything and suppresses, including by arrests, anything that Xi Pooh doesn't find palatable.

Four out of five Uranus moons likely to have ocean under crust

Seafloor volcano vents ?

Zoho creates browser with 'Open Season Mode' for when you don't care about privacy

Wrong order

Following this website, the proper order is Chrome, Safari, Firefox. Edge comes after, somewhat bundled with Internet Explorer which doesn't deserve it, then you find Opera (which has .28% better share than IE).

Of course, if you go to a different site, the figures will be entirely different, and the order can change as well.

The one thing that doesn't change is that Chrome is always on top.

Ex-Uber CSO gets probation for covering up theft of data on millions of people

"having to work for some credit monitoring outfit"

I would personally prefer that he not gain additional information on how to manipulate the situation in the future. He is now tainted with not only with cover-up, but with failure to cover up.

Let him do work in an entirely different branch that has nothing to do with security.

Beware of geeks bearing gifts, so check the fine print on Cisco's latest financing deal

Well, apparently the DNA Advantage Cloud license is over $256K for the 2G 5Y version, so yeah, crazy prices are possible.

Also, you pay a quarter of a million bucks and you only get 20G ? Twenty gigabits ? I can't be reading that right.

Seems to me that, for a quarter million, I can buy myself two super-pro NAS units (€11000 each) with 12 8TB SSDs for €1000 apiece, store each one in a datacenter a thousand kilometers apart and securely connect to them both via Internet.

All that for a total of €46000, plus connection costs. Leaves more than enough to pay for years of bandwidth.

Could somebody remind me why this cloud stuff is supposed to be so useful ?

I mean, for me.

Strike three: FTC says Meta still failing to protect user privacy

"This is the third time"

And the only answer will be "We're sorry, we goofed. Won't do it again. No need to fine us."

Of course The Zuck is going to fight. Selling access to data is what made his fortune, and that is more important to him than anything else.

Slap him in prison for five years, that might shake some sense into his thick skull.

Microsoft cries foul over UK gaming deal blocker but it's hard to feel sorry for them

I think it must be said that Activision is at fault here - never should have accepted the deal in the first place.

But obviously, it's the shareholders that were ready to accept the deal. They're not gamers, they're in it for the money.

And Borkzilla promised plenty of that.

Biden proposes 30% tax on cryptominers' power bills

"compared crypto's electricity usage to that of video games"

Specious argument.

Video games are useful. They are a hobby and a pasttime, just like watching TV. Nobody is going to ban TV either.

Funny money is just a burden that does not help society in any way, and gives scum a lot of ammo to actively harm society.

It is a bad thing, and the quicker it disappears, the better.

Go ahead, forget that password. Use a passkey instead, says Google

So, the smartphone is the password now

Biometric, schmiometric. All this is just trading a biological weakness for a hardware weakness.

The passkey is tied to the device ? Great. Lose or break your smartphone and you've just lost all your accesses permanently.

I can create a passkey on my non-laptop PC ? Great, as soon as I upgrade it that passkey is toast. And installing such a thing on a Windows system is madness in the first place. Or are you actually expecting Borkzilla to handle that 100% efficiently ?

Oh well, passwords still work, they say. Good, because I'm sticking to that. And good luck to the phishing attempt that tries to get my password. Yes, I'm a savvy user but, more importantly, I know that there is nobody that needs any of my passwords, so there should be nobody who asks. And if they do ask, the answer is chocolate.

The answer is always chocolate.

A lone Nvidia GPU speeds past the physics-straining might of a quantum computer – in these apps at least

"no more than two weeks to solve"

Um, sorry, but isn't quantum computing supposed to be instantaneous ?

With all possible results instead of just one ?

We've been told that (current) encryption would be literally destroyed by a quantum computer. The NSA would be swimming in decrypted SMSs and emails.

And now it takes two weeks ?

The more time goes by, the less I understand quantum computing.

And now it's useless anyway.

Feds rethink warrantless search stats and – oh look, a huge drop in numbers

"an indispensable tool when it comes to fighting terrorism"

What terrorism ?

You have had one terrorist attack in your entire history, and the only reason it succeeded was because the CIA didn't do its fucking job, not because of the FBI pulling an NSA and illegally surveilling everyone.

The end of Microsoft-brand peripherals is only Surface deep

Re: Was the Strategic Commander...

Let's just say that I think you missed out.

Microsoft's peripheral business

There is another rarely mentioned Microsoft peripheral : the Strategic Commander.

It's a gaming complement, a secondary keyboard that is also a mouse (or you can configure WASD if you prefer), which is unbelievably useful. It is so useful that I just can't understand why nobody else has taken up the idea.

In a world where many of today's top-selling titles are of the 1st-person shooter variety, the ability to have your movement and essential commands under your left hand, and your targetting and firing in your right hand gives you the freedom to concentrate on gaming without cramping your W finger one bit. You play better for longer, and you don't really need to learn the game keys since your Commander profiles do the job for you. You just know that, to jump, it's the middle top button - what the game actually needs has been configured and you don't have to worry about it. That makes it easier to switch games as well, but that is true for any configurable gaming keyboard. It's the mouse ability that really sets this peripheral apart from the rest.

And yet, Microsoft has dropped it and nobody else has taken it up after all these years. Surely the copyright has lapsed now, given that it has been abandoned ?

I really would like to be able to buy a new one. The one I have is now more than 20 years old, still running fine but one fine day, the keys will wear out or something. I'm afraid of that day, because gaming will no longer be the same without it.

UK emergency services take DIY approach amid 12-year wait for comms upgrade

Hint : if you cannot readily agree on what the thing is, it seems pretty obvious that a bunch of civil servants are not going to be particularly efficient in defining what the upgrade should be.

Here's how the data we feed AI determines the results

"A more complete understanding of bias"

And there you go going all sciency again. We don't want science, we want an Oracle ! (no, not the red one) We want easy answers we can repeat to make ourselves look intelligent and informed without all the hassle of actually understanding what we're talking about !

That's what Cliff Notes were invented for.

Tencent Cloud announces Deepfakes-as-a-Service for $145

Okay, now I'm waiting for one thing : DeepFake Xi Pooh

At some point, Tencent is certainly going to have to make the human avatar more customizeable. It is an inevitable evolution.

So, some day, we will be seeing a Xi Pooh bear hosted on Tencent's servers.

And mayhem will ensue . . .

Dropbox drops 16% of staff, points finger at hard-up customers and AI

Cloudy file storage app

If I subscribed to Dropbox it was for one reason : an easy way to share large (non-confidential) files with my friends.

It was a simple and practical idea, and the free storage was enough.

Then the Board got caught up in its own success and started hallucinating that Dropbox could be much, much more than just online storage.

Well, to put it bluntly, it can't. Dropbox is trying to shove the kitchen sink into something nobody wants a sink in, much less a kitchen.

But hey, I get it : the only thing you wanted to do was monetize, and monetizing storage has dismal returns. Well I'm sorry, but for me Dropbox will always be online storage and nothing more. Just like I don't have my insurance at my bank, despite every bank getting into the act in the past twenty years.

I like things simple. My bank is there, my insurance is (a different) there, my online storage is there (and there), my email is in many places (but not Outlook) and my LibreOffice is here, locally stored, just the way I like it.

Now get off my lawn.

China again signals desire to shape global IPv6 standards

Re: they have the UK sewn up

Buddy, COVID has demonstrated that China has sewn up that game for a lot more countries than just the UK.

iPhones hook up with Windows as Microsoft’s Phone Link dials up Apple's iOS

"tucked away during a presentation or focus time"

Kudos to Borkzilla for finding yet another form of distraction specifically during times when there should be none.

Eric Idle tells infosec world to always look on the bright side of life

Re: If...

Unfortunately for Herr Twitler, being upper class is not just about money.

Given that money is all he has (and he's having less of that day after day), his transition to official lower-class-drug-addict will be officialized soon enough.

Scrooge McDuck will reign supreme once again, just you watch . . .

Just what the universe needs right now: A black hole with wind

Even with what we know now, that is not the only possible end.

A new theory has come to light : black holes just might be dark energy. In that case, who knows what will happen when they have all evaporated ? Maybe our Universe will stop expanding, stabilize over untold trillenia, then start to contract again, going right back to the Great Collapse, and then everything starts again. Who knows ?

I don't think we ever will for sure. But that should definitely not stop us from trying to find out.

Singapore tells its people: Go forth and block those ads

Ads and Javascript

Creating Javascript was already a bad idea, but giving it to ad pushers was the worst idea of all.

There is only one solution : create a new ad-oriented script language that all reputable ad agencies subscribe to.

This AdScript would not allow manipulating window size, taking over control or preventing the user from closing the window or going back. It would only allow displaying a static image and some static text, with a URL at the bottom. Nothing moving, no flashing, no hidden controls, and no way to do anything else than display the text and image.

Personally I would prefer no image either, but no ad agency would agree to that so . . .

If that subset of JavaScript was created and all ads submitted to it and all ad agencies forced its use, I think ad blockers would become useless.

Not holding my breath though.

Re: what else can you do

Use Brave.

And no, don't ever give DoubleClick another chance.

Re: what else can you do

Use Brave.

Re: Question

UBlock Origin on Firefox with NoScript. No need to wonder, it works 100% of the time.

On my mobile phone I use Brave, and that thing has saved me gigabytes of mobile bandwidth.

It's nice to have some people capable of doing things right and making it freely available.

Tokyo has millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points that should be shared with blockchain, says NTT

So now we're going to see blockchain in WiFi access points

I hope these access points have an upgradeable hard disk, 'cause that ledger ain't going to be gettin' smaller.

Future of warfare is AI, retired US Army general warns

Re: it's control is going to be entirely beyond the ability of a human to manage in the first place

Not so sure about that. I can do pretty crazy things with a helo in Battlefield 2, although I will admit to using a Logitech joystick. And that's nothing when you look at what some players in Quake Online are capable of.

An operator sitting in a stable, air-conditioned room with video of a drone can flip and turn 360° in a second if he wants, it's all just pixels on the screen to him (or her).

If the drone can do it, I see no reason a human couldn't follow it.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

I would think we are past questioning his judgement at this point in time.

We know his judgement is bad.

The Weather Channel settles another case claiming mobile app privacy violations

"With the class certification denied" . .

. . lawyers will not be able to get their mitts on 20+ percent of the payout.

Do I feel sorry for them ? Nope.

Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment

Nah, it's much better this way.

She's desperately trying to not go to prison, but she knows she'll end up there like the turd circling the drain.

I very much prefer her to be in panick mode now so that, when she is finally sent to jail, she feels the full weight of her guilt.

UK watchdog blocks Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition

"the decision appears to reflect a flawed understanding of this market"

AKA : they don't get it the way we do.

Yeah, well I'm not disappointed in the least. The only cloud service I trust in gaming is Steam, and nobody else, neither Borkzilla nor Activision, is up to Steam's level in the matter.

Apache Superset: A story of insecure default keys, thousands of vulnerable systems, few paying attention

"this episode illustrates that users do not read documentation and don't read logs"

Which is a basic truth anyone who ever had to write a user manual has known for ages.

What this "episode" really illustrates is that, when making a product that uses an encryption key, make sure that right at the beginning the product does not start when using the default key and make an error message that makes it clear that it won't start until said default key has been changed.

You can cross 'Quantum computers to smash crypto' off your list of existential fears for 30 years

Thank goodness for sanity

Kudos to Shamir for getting things back to Earth where quantum computing is concerned.

Indeed, most of us have nothing to fear from having our lunch meetings decrypted - which is also why all the hoopla around child abuse is a very poor excuse for backdooring encryption.

That said, I don't think quantum computers decrypting messages will be useless, it's just that those who have one will be using it on messages coming from very specific sources.

Moscow will try to capture and decrypt everything it can from the US embassy, the NSA will do the same to Russia and China, and China will be throwing massive numbers of quantum computers to get a hold on as much embassy traffic as it can.

Qauntum computing is still very much a threat to encrypted messages, it's just that the sphere where it will apply has now been publicly restricted to very high levels only.