Posts by Pascal Monett

Forget these apps and AI, where's my flying car? Ah, here's one with an FAA license

Re: Speed and Weight

Good point. If I were to buy one, it'd take me and my cat (yes, I'm a bit overweight).

On top of that, I wonder how high the thing goes.

No, wait. For the moment, the real question is : can it actually take off ?

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

Re: an advertising free option

Yes, but the 12 bucks is not for you to not see ads, it is for Google to get the ad revenue it won't get by (pretending to) showing you ads.

It's 2023 and memory overwrite bugs are not just a thing, they're still number one

Well, there's also the boss who's not interested in safety now, he wants something working and the peon can make it safe on unpaid overtime.

Chinese balloon that US shot down was 'crammed' with American hardware

"tarnish US credibility"

Sorry, but Republicans are doing the top job there.

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

"lower corporate real estate prices seen at the tail end of COVID"

Interesting. So, basically, corporations sent everyone home because pandemic, then noticed that office space rent was dropping like lead weights, snapped up a bunch because some beancounter was still in the "buy low, sell high" mindset, and now they've got all this office space and the pandemic is last year's news so let's fill up the desks, shall we ?

I'm pretty sure that that is only part of the explanation. The other part is the severe peon-withdrawal that many managers are experiencing. Not being able to call one of your underlings to your office at a whim to lord over her/him and make 'em know who's boss must be an incredibly painful experience. Teams is just not adequate for that.

Maybe Meta and whimpering dog avatars could help ?

Europe's largest city council runs parallel systems to cover Oracle rollout mess

The right question

"whether to change business processes to fit the new software or modify the software to fit business processes"

If you have to ask yourself the question, it's the wrong software.

Software is supposed to help you, not force you into an existential crisis.

And Oracle is going to be in big trouble if an ad-hoc band-aid can do better than its software.

I know who I'm rooting for . . .

UK's dream of fusion power by 2040s will need GPUs

What a coincidence

"there just isn't enough time to build everything using a traditional iterative process of designing and then testing all the subsystems"

We've just had a striking example of what happens when you don't design then test all subsystems. I wonder what that forbodes for this ?

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

So, we're back to square one again

We've already had this discussion, we've heard all the arguments, we've seen all the rebuttals.

And UK Gov is starting it all over again.

Is this insanity, or are they just suckers for punishment ?

Samsung to start mass producing 2nm silicon in 2025, first for mobile devices

2nm

And 1.4nm to come. Alledgedly.

How large is an atom already ? Because there will be a point where we have to stop this, right ?

To think that I started in computing with the 3 µm process. Nobody even thought about TDP ! Now chips are engraved a thousand times smaller, but they still consume anywhere from 50 to 200W.

It's a miracle we can cool them down enough.

Metaverses are flopping – hard – says Gartner

Ah but Apple's new toy is AR, not VR, and the article specifically says that AR is getting a positive vibe from the market.

California man jailed after manure-to-methane scheme revealed as bull

"Brewer moved to Montana under a new identity"

And bam!, just like that it is now a Federal crime and the FBI gets involved.

Bad move.

Network security guy in extradition tug of war between US and Russia

"social networking service Formspring"

Never heard of it. So I go looking.

It says here that "Formspring was an anonymous Q&A forum. [..] It allowed people to anonymously ask questions and send messages to other users without having to sign up."

The article states Kislitsin is accused of : "stealing usernames, email addresses, and passwords". How is that possible if users didn't need to sign up ?

Or is it that users had to give a username and email when they posted, being able to change anytime they wanted ? That's just like signing up, then.

I don't get it.

Microsoft, OpenAI sued for $3B after allegedly trampling privacy with ChatGPT

Making good points, but

When I see they filed for $3 billion in damages, it tells me that they've found an excuse to hit the jackpot.

I'll be very interested in learning what proof they have for the judge, because their complaint is quite technical. They're going to have to prove those points, and I wonder if they have the means to do so.

Guess who's quietly bankrolling a legal fight against Montana's TikTok ban. Why yes, it's TikTok

"claims it broke its promises over the location of US data"

That's interesting. So I understand that some people are complaining that data concerning US citizens is not held in the US.

But it doesn't bother any US citizen that data concerning European citizens is not held in Europe.

Funny, that.

Miscreants leak texts and info siphoned by Android stalkerware app LetMeSpy

"a tool for parental and employee control"

Parental control ?

If you're a parent and you use this "tool", you fail at parenting.

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

Re: I... don't think so

Agreed.

Besides, how can they say such bollocks when we were locked in during Covid and the work continued just as well ?

Hello ? We were there, we know.

The only difference here is that it is state government. I do acknowledge that WFH is not going to take care of citizens showing up at Reception for an administrative problem. For that you obviously need a meatbag (or more) at the desk. But I doubt that there are that many government workers who are in direct contact with citizens. Those who are not can very likely be dispensed from going to the office.

Yeah, the bigwigs are having an existential crises, we get it. They don't see their peons any more, poor things.

You may have heard about AI defeating voice authentication. This research kinda proves it

"need to have access to their target's voice"

With all the audio data available from all sorts of sources on the Internet, that doesn't seem to be much of a barrier if you're seeking to spoof the voice of anyone who is known. Celebrities, politicians, major CEOs, all of them have their voice on publicly-available sources somewhere.

Now, if you're targetting someone for specific reasons that is not a social media aficionado, it makes things a lot more complicated, especially if you do not know the person socially. You're going to have to find a way to meet the person, get the person talking and put your mobile phone down to record the conversation. That will mean cleaning up the recording afterwards, which is never an easy task.

So, the basic question really is just how well recorded does the target's voice need to be ? Will a few dozen seconds in the street suffice, or do you need a few minutes of sound booth recording ?

Five billion phones are dead in drawers – carriers want to mine them

If they were serious about recoving all those resources, the solution is obvious : offer money for the unused phones.

But yeah, that costs money.

Microsoft's Activision fight with FTC turned up a Blizzard of docs: Here's your summary

"The EU competition authorities said they would allow the deal, subject to certain guarantees"

The only guarantee they have is that Borkzilla will, in the end, do whatever it damn well pleases and it will see them in Court if they have the gall to disagree.

Also, some Borkzillasuit declares no idea for mobile gaming and the decision is to buy Activision ? Does Activision have an extensive mobile gale catalogue ?

How about making games for mobiles ? Is that not an idea ?

Oh, right, that's work. You're not too good at that.

Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries work permits

Re: if enough of them had spoken up

Sorry but I have to disagree with that statement.

It's easy to blame them for not speaking up but you acknowledge that they can disappear, yet you do not seem to take that into account.

So what would you do if you knew that voicing your discontent in the morning could very well have you shipped to a camp in Siberia in the afternoon (or worse) ?

Oh, and just a reminder : torture is still very much a thing in Russian prisons.

If you want a big brain, make a habit out of daytime naps

Re: Doesn't work

Set your smartphone alarm for five minutes and close your eyes.

Except you need to to get up when it rings, not just shut it off and stay there.

Correction : Isn’t Bootnotes the Internet exactly the place for idle speculation and complete bollocks?

FTFY

'Joan Is Awful' Black Mirror episode rebounds on Netflix

"it is so easy to forget that terms and conditions are, in fact, a contract"

No, they are not.

A contract is a legally-binding accord by which two parties agree to a set of clauses that, in theory, should provide some sort of benefit to both. The importance of the words "legally-binding" is that one of the two parties cannot modify the terms of the contract without the other party's consent.

Ts&Cs throw that last bit out the window. When you agree to the Ts&Cs, you have no right to modify them, nor do you have any right to refuse that the website, sole proprietor and manager of their content, modifies them as it suits the website.

Ergo, Ts&Cs are most certainly not a contract. We need to find a better, more suitable qualifier. An extortion, parhaps ?

Way out in deep space, astronomers spot precursor of carbon based life

Hey, they've got meth, what's the risk ?

Alphabet, Bharti Airtel to bridge India's digital divide with frickin' laser beams

"the notoriously foggy San Francisco Bay area"

Fog. Millions upon millions of tiny droplets of water floating in the air.

Does that mean that heavy rain can also potentially cut, or severely diminish, performance of the laser beam ? Because if so, then any place that has a monsoon season is going to need a backup plan, as in a fiber link.

Google asks websites to kindly not break its shiny new targeted-advertising API

"Topics are kept for only three weeks and old topics are deleted"

The countdown has started to the revelation that this is just another false declaration.

Old topics deleted ? No. They will be marked as deprecated, with the date of deprecation carefully stored for future reference.

You don't fool us, Google. Ad data is never deleted anymore, it just piles up higher and higher.

Supreme Court says Genius' song lyric copying claim against Google wasn't smart

"the results were often character-for-character copies of song texts it hosts"

Um, they were the lyric, right ?

The words don't change simply because someone else posts them.

And it's not because you are trying to get money out of other people's work that you have any copyright claim worth a damn.

I must admit that this Supreme Court baffles me. On the one hand, it does make a lot of right decisions, like here. On the other, Roe vs Wade.

I don't get it.

NASA and miners face off over lithium deposits at satellite calibration site

[3PL] "will not degrade the playa or disturb the surface in any way"

And, a few paragraphs later : "we're a brine salt mining company".

Seems to me that brine is liquid, and IIRC, on this planet liquids flow down. So 3PL could very well set up shop in the non-preserved area and start extracting brine, the brine in the preserved area is not going to magically not flow to the extraction area.

Let 3PL come back with tech that they can demonstrate won't disturb the surface, then talks can start.

But who am I kidding ? There's money to be made, and the party that reversed Roe vs Wade wants it. NASA's going to have to find some other solution.

Mega-data platform worth half a billion will suck in info from family doctors

"NHS patient details will only be available locally"

Sure. Locally.

Locally to Palantir, you mean.

And from there to God only knows.

US cyber ambassador says China knows how to steal its way to dominance of cloud and AI

Re: They certainly know how to steal

True that.

And let's not forget that the USA practically invented IP theft.

Chinese malware intended to infect USB drives accidentally infects networked storage too

"a conspicuous activity that can draw additional, unfavorable attention"

Only if the IT department is up to snuff, which doesn't happen very often where hospitals are concerned because, whatever the technical level of the people in the department, it's practically a given that they don't have the budget to do everything they need to do.

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

Re: Titanium and compression cycles

So, once again it's a question of someone who didn't do his homework.

Well, I'm glad that, in this case, he was on site to see the results.

Yes, it's nasty to say that, but he is at least guilty of manslaughter by prioritizing profit negligence.

Google has blocked in its in-car software rivals, claims German watchdog

What ?

But, Google, didn't you just complain about Borkzilla locking customers into Azure ?

How could you ?

I am soo . . . not surprised.

Existential dread time: One day Earth's oceans will boil. This exoplanet might reveal when

Well, Humanity could plausibly have built a swarm of space umbrellas to control the amount of radiation that reaches Earth, and could plausibly have built an asteroid deflection facility on the Moon by then, so if we can avoid scorching the Earth ourselves in the meantime, we might have a fighting chance to still be on Earth.

Not to mention that, in half a billion years, there's plenty of time for scores of generation ships to carry excess population to viable destinations while they slowly go crazy and forget why they're in space in the first place . . .

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

Man-in-the-middle

I'd argue that Man in this context is supposed to be the general human being and not the human male, but first I'm sure that if they were intelligent enough to infer that they wouldn't have put that in a replacement list and second, it seems that Humanity is going to the dogs anyway, so why bother ?

Maybe it shouldn't be white US males handling this project. I think there should be some European, South American, Asian and African input as well. I don't feel part of the KKK when I say that a process is hung, or that I'm killing it.

Japan's digital ID card gets emergency review amid data leaks

Just one question

Was Crapita involved ?

Google formally accuses monopolist Microsoft of trapping people in its cloud

The leopard can't change its spots

"Microsoft is using its market power and restrictive and discriminatory licensing terms"

Always has, always will.

Time to break it up !

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Re: They pay vastly more. Incredibly more

Oh you're soo right. Those poor rich people. Their lives are soo difficult !

Anybody gonna start a GOFundMe for billionnaires ?

So the sub has not been certified

But they still offer commercial trips.

Am I supposed to be surprised that something may have gone wrong ?

I would have thought that offering a commercial service would be surrounded by guarantees that are a bit beyond "We designed the sub with NASA". I would have supposed that there would be a clear trail of paperwork pointing to all the tests that have been done and approved by some authority that is not an employee of the company.

Apparently not.

And if the answer is "nobody would be foolish enough to certify", then the response should be "Well I'm not going".

They went, and I'm guessing they'll stay.

Frankly, throwing yourself out of a plane with just a few meters of cloth to keep you alive seems positively reasonable in comparison.

'We hate what you’ve done with the place – especially the hate' Australia tells Twitter

"then stared down the tech giants as they threatened to withdraw some services"

Well done.

Shame that you can't have the same attitude towards the dinofuel industry.

Or maybe Musk should buy a few politicians, like they did ? Ah no, there's the whole "cutting costs" thing.

Oh well, nothing lasts forever.

SAP admits HANA Cloud makes for multicurrency messes

"lengthy and complex workarounds"

All required because someone, at the specification stage, wrote "local currency" when discussing currencies and everybody just went along with it.

After all, you're only setting up a cloudy thingy on a communications network that goes around the world, it's not like you should actually take into account any specific financial considerations, such as accounting departments in multinational corporations having to deal with multiple currencies, right ?

Right.

Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes

So, Reddit is a democracy now ?

Where's the voting booth on the position of CEO, then ?

Whose line is it anyway, GitHub? Innovation, not litigation, should answer

As long as they're making money there are no issues.

Singapore to roll out (literally) more Robocops

"Singapore has decided the additional eyes remain relevant"

Because of course it has. The police state always has a fuzzy, feel-good vibe to it, doesn't it ? When you're the one policing, that is.

Looks like Singapore is on track for Utopia.

I wish its citizens the best of luck.

FTC pulls emergency brake on Microsoft's marriage to Activision Blizzard

Thank you for your responses

Pretty much confirmed what I thought : there is no legal possibility of preventing Big Money to merge. However, there is definitely the legal possibility of making a company split in two, if you're willing to go the distance, spend decades in legal wrangling and make hay for scores of lawyers.

In the meantime, apparently the only thing possible is basically banning the results of the merger in the countries that don't like it, which will do squat as far as consumer interest is concerned.

Yay capitalism.

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Testing ?

Pray tell, what is this strange notion of which you speak ?

Bad times are just starting for India's IT outsourcers, says JP Morgan

Re: Why do we have more scams originating from offshore?

Come now, you don't think the UK has more scammers than the entire rest of the world, now do you ?

"After 34 years with the firm"

34 years is certainly a highly commendable amount, but gee, how lucky it is for him to get out right before the crunch.

Microsoft remembers it was going to bring Windows 11 to HoloLens

"increased engineering velocity"

Oh, so you're putting your engineers in catapults, then ?

WTF ? Is there any domain whatsoever where PR bullshit cannot go ?

Megaupload programmers cop a plea in New Zealand to avoid extradition

The guy changed his name to DotCom, for Pete's sake

And he's apparently got a rap sheet longer than some drug traffickers.

As far as I'm concerned, he can spend the rest of his life in various Courts, fighting all the charges he's got sticking to him.

He's a crook, and that's that.