Posts by Potemkine!

There's a black hole lurking within 1,000 light years of Earth – and you can see stars circling it with the naked eye

Many blackholes to discover

There's one in the head of the guy sitting in the Oval office and it wasn't discovered yet

Quick Q: Er, why is the Moon emitting carbon? And does this mean it wasn't formed from Theia hitting Earth?

Saying that the "Theia hypothesis" is invalidated because of this discovery seems a little bit far-fetched to me. As said also in the article there may be many reasons why carbon would have been brought back to the Moon after its formation.

Contact-tracing or contact sport? Defections and accusations emerge among European COVID-chasing app efforts

Re: Generalised testing

99% accuracy

Make twice the test and the false negative ratio falls.

There's no perfect solution and there won't be. 1% of error is better than no detection at all.

Good point from the INRIA paper

"We underline the importance of this debate and encourage to compare technical solutions based on privacy risk assessment rather than on ill-defined catchwords such as ”centralised” vs ”decentralised"

Something can be decentralized but by horrible in term of privacy. Let's focus on risk assessment rather than on dogmatic approaches.

After 20-year battle, Channel island Sark finally earns the right to exist on the internet with its own top-level domain

Sercq indépendente!

Re: Glad they didn't overthink the process....

The current Duke of Normandy is the Queen

No, despite what the Islanders say. The title of Duke of Normandy left the Plantagenet family in 1204 when the land was confiscated by Jean the First King of France, who became also Duke. The British Royals kept pretending being Duke of Normandy as they pretended to be King of France till 1801.

Appareils électroniques: Right to repair gets European Commission backing

Re: What about updates

Nobody sells a car that needs to be updated every month

This is changing quick, and expect 'patch tuedays' for cars too in a very near future, unless you want your car be hacked.

Sadly, the web has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'

Don't shoot the messenger

This article is right, but it didn't start with the Web. Lies, deceits and scams are nothing new!

It is 50 years since Blighty began a homegrown and all-too-brief foray into space

Re: Black arrow is red and silver?

"Red Dildo" would have been a more obvious name, but politically more difficult to impose.

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

Welcome to the Fist Fuck Playa Club

Loyalty.... blablabla...... Reward.... blablabla.... Engagement....blablabla.... Trust ...blablabla

[ insert other PR BS here ]

Starliner: Boeing, Boeing... it's back! Borked capsule makes a successful return to Earth

Want to transform a failure in success? Call PR! Whenever you need somebody to lie, PR is ready

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise, politicians will philander... And US voting machines will be physically insecure

Why do some push so hard for voting machines if not to more easily manipulate election results?

Pompey boffin bags €1.3m off EU for dark matter research – shame a no-deal Brexit looks more and more likely

Re: Great example.....

CERN *did* produce some amazing science last century. But it hasn't done so for thirty years.

19,032 publications, 3,646 PhD completed under partial supervision of CERN in the last 10 years, it isn't that bad, is it?

https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2019/engineering-technology

Ranking made by Quacquarelli Symonds, a British company based in London....

Black Kettle? Pot's calling.

"I want my money back!"

Bus pass or bus ass? Hackers peeved about public transport claim to have reverse engineered ticket app for free rides

"Magic hand" at work ^^

Our view is that this is symptomatic of the deprofessionalisation of the development community over the last ten years but, but, but... it makes applications much less expensive, and it makes more cash available for the C-suite and shareholders! Isn't that the most important?

Despite billions in spending, your 'military grade' network will still be leaking data

Re: Convenience will always win

Knowing how to knock down usb ports is not enough, when half of the Board nails you down for 'making business impossible'... We are aware of the risks, but many outside the server room do realize it only after a catastrophe has occurred

most vulns lies in layer 8

aka PEBCAK.

In IT we spend a lot of time in patching systems, deploying tools and examining logs

This has to be done of course, but it will be less profitable than educating users... Something which is a challenge for the IT crowd, known for its sociopathic tendencies ^^

Google security crew sheds light on long-running super-stealthy iOS spyware operation

Re: Entire populations: State sponsored?

I'm not that sure. If mafias see a particular ethnic group as more interesting than other's to attack because of cultural habits can use, they will.

Ok, the probability for that to be true is less lower than your hypothesis ^^

Harvard freshman kicked out of US over OTHER people's posts on his social media

What's the USA kicking out illegals and visitors got to do with the UK going down in flames??

UK (or what will be left of it) is likely to become the 51st state.First step was to put a clone of the orange insane clown as prime minister, the rest will follow.

Do you know why the Statue of Liberty is in the US?

Because Liberty is buried there.

GDPR...rrrse! Mass-mail fail as German biz asks UK resellers for consent to use their dealer data

Don't worry

After Oct, 31, GDPR won't apply anymore in UK will it?

Biz forked out $115k to tout 'Time AI' crypto at Black Hat. Now it sues organizers because hackers heckled it

"Disruptive"? Checked. "AI". Checked.

OMG, they forgot "blockchain"!

Trump attacks and appeals 'fundamentally misconceived' Twitter block decision

Insanity

UK had George III, France had Charles VI, now the US has Trump the First.

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

Re: Hydrogen? Seriously?

Making electricity from coal, petrol or gas isn't the solution either.

There are many ways to produce hydrogen. Using something else than methane will be economically interesting when there will be more cars/lorries/trains using it.

For instance, look at this article: Better Energy and Nilsson Energy develop world’s first self-sufficient hydrogen housing complex .

Stuff like sophisticated government spyware is scary and all – but don't forget, a single .wmv file can pwn you via VLC

Did we really need another reason to avoid wmv files?

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Her Master's Voice

Thanks to the Tories, UK (or what will be left of it) is going to become a US dominion. Patel just does the job by parroting Barr.

If you could forget the $125 from Equifax and just take the free credit monitoring, that would be great – FTC

Reading this, can we say FCC's real role is to shield rogue companies from customers?

As many as 100,000 IBM staff axed in recent years as Big Blue battles to reinvent itself from IT's 'old fuddy duddy'

Immoral Bastards Mafia

What's the last piece of software you'd expect to spy on you? Maybe your enterprise security suite? Bad news

Re: Stop spying on me!

What rights does an employee have over the data slurped from their company laptop?

A company should publish the 'IT bill of rights' to warn the employees. Once that done, most of the time an employee has no rights. If this is a company laptop, then the company has any right over the data inside. There are few limitations if the data are explicitly marked as private/personnal in some countries but that's it.

Be smart, don't do personal business on a company laptop. Everyone has a smartphone now.

Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…

Re: Insanity

When you have to send a SEAL-like team to arrest a non-violent offender because there could be weapons in the house is also a proof the US is totally fucked-up. May the means used to arrest her be legitimate or not, in both case it shows the insanity running through this country.

Insanity

Sending a SEAL-like team to arrest a 30yo woman accused of hacking is a clear demonstration the US is a totally fucked-up country.

Official: Microsoft will take an axe to Skype for Business Online. Teams is your new normal

I love when MS pushes new applications to users they will start to use, just to have these applications deprecated a little bit later. Installed by default, these new apps appear surreptitiously, users discover them and use them, and it's up to the IT to find a solution when the apps are discontinued. Thank you MS for making our life so miserable, and we pay for that :sigh:

Capital One gets Capital Done: Hacker swipes personal info on 106 million US, Canadian credit card applicants

Said friend tipped off Capital One

With friends like that, who needs enemy?

UK taxpayers funded Grand Theft Auto V maker to tune of £42m – while biz paid no corp tax and made billions

Re: Woo

If you did then your answer to your question is yes they are a nice bunch of arseholes.

I have no doubt about it, the writers of this piece of junk are definitively ones.

Re: Woo

From Continentaltelegraph.com: "Nazi Medals Should Be Legal Holocaust Or Not" - A nice bunch of assholes, aren't they?

Lawmakers prefer to have rich friends than poor ones

I read some believe the tax system is broken... on the contrary, it works perfectly, it was made to create these loopholes the richest ones will use to avoid paying their fair share. In that case, the legal scam is quiet perfect, because honest taxpayers will in the end give money to these Nation's burglars. The ones who designed it were clever, it took years before the scandal is made public.

Satellites with lasers and machine guns coming! China's new plans? Trump's Space Force? Nope, the French

Are you so ingenuous to believe there's no weapon already in space embedded in Russian, American and Chinese satellites?

Summer vacations put an end to rampant desktop crimewave

'- you've got a tampon behind the ear

- Woops, but where is my pen?

When a company begins to count pens, it's time to see if grass is greener elsewhere

Disclaimer: both sentences are unrelated

Meet the super-speedy white dwarf binary system that's going to grav-wave our world

What is the distance between the two stars?

It's Prime Minister Boris Johnson: Tech industry speaks its brains on Brexit-monger's victory

The show promises to be spectacular...grabbing popcorn

Equifax to world+dog: If we give you this $700m, can you pleeeeease stop suing us about that mega-hack thing?

"In a just world, these executives would be going to jail"

In a just World, Equifax would not exist.

Marketing biz bares folks' data in the act of asking for their GDPR comms preferences

"we are an organisation that takes data protection and privacy with the utmost seriousness"

We are serious, be sure we'll sell these data to anyone ready to pay for them.

Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? Oh, it's just 6Mbps? And you're unhappy? Can't imagine why

In France, I pay 40€ / month for a "triple play" offer (TV, phone, Internet) with a maximum bandwidth of 1Gb/s (fiber) and I live in a small town in the countryside.

Israel's NSO Group: Our malware? Slurp your cloud backups plus phone data? They've misunderstood

"Our products are licensed in small scale to legitimate government intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the sole purpose of preventing or investigating serious crime including terrorism.

Pure BS. This company is willing to work with any rogue government if it pays enough.

Look for instance Uganda: (https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/africa/uganda/): "The rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly were restricted. Journalists and others who criticized the President or his family were arrested, detained and harassed." - Thank you NSO!

Oh, lovely, a bipartisan election hack alert law bill for Mitch McConnell to feed into the shredder

Voting machines are useful

They enable to rig elections much more easily. No surprise some want them to be used.

Loose tongues and oily seamen: Lost in machine translation yet again

Brian is listening to music on Radio Blackpool

At least that's what we were told when we were beginning to learn English.. We also learnt that Brian was often in the kitchen, when Jenny was in the bathroom. Go figure....

Google Translate is not that bad. Every day we have many lorries coming from all over Europe to pick or deliver merchandise. Lorry drivers come often from eastern Europe and don't speak a word neither in French nor in English. So we equipped our logistics team with an android tablet with Google Translate on it. After several months, experience shows that it quite efficient to make communication possible between our team and the drivers, and the logistics team is delighted.

Queen Elizabeth has a soggy bottom: No, the £3.1bn aircraft carrier, what the hell did you think we meant?

Re: RN waives the rules!

We're an island nation (even my wife cannot understand why our Navy is so small when we're surrounded by water), if anything we should have a military prioritised around the navy and amphibious forces

This was true before the introduction of nuclear weapons. The Navy isn't here to protect the coasts anymore. Nuclear deterrence is here to make an invasion too costly to try.

Navy is used to protect sea lanes and to project power. An aircraft carrier can be used only against third world nation, of she will end as an artificial reef. Does UK such projections? The last example in mind is the Falklands/Las Malvinas war 40 years ago, is a carrier still needed? It may be. However, building a carrier unable to launch a non VTOL-plane seems to be a huge mistake. For instance, how to do early warning and control? A Sea King cannot be compared to a Hawkeye.

Re: There it is...!

French hangar-queen nuclear carriers

There's only one french nuclear carrier. which was involved in a lot of missions, so 'hangar-queen' doesn't really fit.

Not all heroes wear capes: Contractor grills DXC globo veep on pay rises, offshoring, and cuts to healthcare help

Translations

"engaging vibrant morale is not only a great thing for our clients, for DXC and our shareholders, but it is a great thing for us as people."

=> engaging vibrant morale is a great thing for 1) shareholders, 2) DXC , 3) clients, we're also told it would be a great thing for us as people. Ahah, just kidding.

"being brave and courageous and for asking the questions you asked".

I'll dance over your dead body.

"I think we are going to constantly be repositioning, retraining our workforce for the foreseeable future"

We are going to continue to exploit wage slaves and extract anything valuable from them before throwing them in the bin.

"In order for us to be competitive, we are going to have to take advantage of a global workforce."

Our motto: exploit misery worldwide.

the "transformation going on inside DXC can feel chaotic" and "feel built and steeped in pressure".

You're not paid to think. A mindless worker is a happy worker! Shut up and do your job!