* Posts by Pascal Monett

16645 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

India, UK strike tech co-operation pact and plot deeper links once Brexit's done

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: if they make it a priority

They have made it a priority.

Whoa, humans have been hanging out and doing science stuff in freaking space aboard the ISS for 20 years

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So the ISS will be decommissioned in 2030

What are the plans to replace it ?

Or are we all just going to accept that we don't have the money to do that and leave space entirely to private entrepreneurs ?

We reached the Moon because of a pissing contest between two governments. As soon as we got there, we basically turned back and forgot about it.

We put space stations in orbit and now we can't be arsed to continue that either.

It's all very nice to have lofty opinions about ourselves, but acts count more than opinions.

We need a space station for science and experimentation in micro-gravity. If the only one we have left is going to shut down in a decade, we need to start planning its replacement now, because it'll take a decade to get something functional up there again.

Criticalstudies.org sounds pretty important, right? Wrong: USA says it’s an Iranian fake news front

Pascal Monett Silver badge

The FBI missed a site

Should have seized Fox News as well.

Those 20+ Iranian sites didn't do 1% of what Fox News is doing as far as damage is concerned.

City of Edinburgh Council selects services-slinger CGI for £102m contract despite abandoned Unit4 ERP project

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Anyone for Bingo?

I'm missing synergizing resources, disruptive, proactive, paradigm, moving forward and the all-important blockchain.

Dang.

Apple on the hook for another $503m in decade-long VirnetX patent rip-off legal marathon

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

Apple will appeal - again

At this point I think it is high time that the courts decide that, if yet another appeal is to take place, the final fine of the previous appeal is automatically doubled.

Appeal again ? Double the fine again.

Frankly, it is unfortunate that there is no point where the court has said : enough, pay the fine, and Apple had to pay.

I know nothing about Virnetx, but I do know that Apple has lost multiple times. It is high time it looses permanently.

Russian jailed for eight years in the US for writing code that sifted botnet logs for web banking creds for fraudsters

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Thumb Down

"couldn’t find another job that paid as well"

I'm quite ready to believe that working in crime pays pretty well.

That's not a reason for me to start being a criminal.

There are a number of other options, he should have tried some of them.

We did NAT see that coming: How malicious JavaScript can open holes in your firewall for miscreants to slip through

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Flame

"visit a website containing malicious JavaScript"

Which will be blocked by NoScript.

Honestly, what is it going to take for all browsers to block JavaScript by default and implement whitelisting of web sites that can use it ?

99% of all malicious activity starts with a piece of JavaScript. Block it, and it's over.

It's time to confine that code.

US govt ups minimum H-1B tech salaries to $208,000 a year, more than startups can hope to afford, say VCs

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: But wasn't that the point of the H1B?

I'm guessing that what happened is 25 years of lobbying from billion-dollar conglomerates to weaken the system and get cheap labor at a minimal price.

Labor they can then pressure into slave wages and working overtime for nothing because, if you don't, you go back to your country.

Alibaba trying to take China’s Singles Day shopping frenzy global to make Bezos & Co look like sales small fry

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"280 million HTTP requests per minute"

Wow. I wonder how many servers you need to manage that volume of connections.

I'm guessing Alibaba's fiber connection is somewhat better than mine, as well ;).

CERT/CC: 'Sensational' bug names spark fear, hype – so we'll give flaws our own labels... like Suggestive Bunny

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FAIL

"there's a simple process to remove offensive names"

And it should start by not drawing random words from a 3rd-party website.

Create your vetted list in-house, do not include those scary words you have become so afraid of, avoid including potentially offensive words, and you won't have to have a process to remove anything afterwards.

Of course, that requires a bit more work than just randomly calling on Wiktionary, but if you think about it, it would remove a lot of hassle in the long run.

Google reCAPTCHA service under the microscope: Questions raised over privacy promises, cookie use

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"I'm classifying Google's Recaptcha service as an *Advertising Network* "

He's only noticed now ?

Anything Google does is for advertising.

Always has been, always will.

TikTok wins right to stay in America past current Art of the Deal deadline on November 12th

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Really ? They actually earn their living on TikTok ?

If I could be arsed to go check that out, I'd be curious to know what they do to earn money on that platform.

Plus, they could obviously transfer their videos to YouTube. Plenty of people earning a living there.

But hey, they convinced a judge and that's good enough for me.

It's amazing what the Internet is up to these days.

Doxxing nixed by Hong Kong courts, again

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Doxxing is evil, no question there

Unfortunately, it is apparently becoming a way to resist China's hold on what used to be a free country.

And, if it is the only way to point blame to someone abusing their power and/or authority, well it remains evil but becomes understandable.

The real issue is that China wants control, the Chinese way, and Hong Kong wants the freedom it was used to.

It can only end in tears.

The Russians are at it again: Zebrocy backdoor malware is evolving, Uncle Sam warns close to eve of presidential election

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I beg to differ

The biggest threat to US democracy obviously lies in the Republican party, and all those fucking liars that spew on Fox News.

No need for more asteroid-blasting attempts, NASA's OSIRIS-REx has more than enough space dirt

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Thumb Up

NASA

Shooting for 60 grams, actually collecting 2 kilos.

What a bunch of overachievers.

Remember, remember, the 14th of November (if you're an astronaut): NASA names the date for Crew-1 mission to ISS

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Thumb Up

So, a smidgen of nail polish is enough to abort a launch

That has to be the absolute best proof that rocket science is awesome.

We, as a race, are at the point where we can build things that are so complex, so precise, that an insignificant amount of some compound is enough to require a shutdown on a launch procedure.

And the fact that we have the technology to detect that is, again, awesome.

Rocket science. It's in the title.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

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Devil

No croissant ?

Now that is a cruel and inhuman punishment.

Indian government labels itself ‘evasive’ over privacy details of national COVID-19 contact-tracing app

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Flame

At least they're testing

There may be some imperfections in the app, but if they are actually doing the follow-up of testing people who have been in contact, then India is doing way better than France, who has an app but doesn't bother with contact tracing or testing in any managed way.

No, we just get locked down because the infection rate is too high. Well guess what ? If we had bothered to do proper contact tracing and testing, maybe we wouldn't need to be locked down again.

Brave browser first to nix CNAME deception, the sneaky DNS trick used by marketers to duck privacy controls

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"the page also makes four requests via a script"

And that script is blocked by NoScript.

NoScript and uBlock Origin, the two stalwart champions of security and privacy.

NSA: We've learned our lesson after foreign spies used one of our crypto backdoors – but we can't say how exactly

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Thumb Up

I see we have another Yes Minister fan.

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Valve ? Why are you dragging Valve into this ?

Do you seriously think that Steam is watching you ?

Steam is the best game-selling platform there is. If you don't have a connection, you can still play your games. If you do have a connection you can play them online.

Yes, Valve checks when you log on to verify that you have the right login and password, and that's all. You tell me how Valve can do less and still maintain a business.

Steam is the only game-selling platform I know that doesn't care where you run it from. I can upgrade my PC, change my disks, change computer ; the only thing Steam wants is my login/password combination. That is a far cry from EA Games or any of the others, who basically consider that any change in hardware is proof that you are filthy thief and you have to re-download your entire collection.

With EA Games, that even happens when you update your video driver !

So please, leave Valve out of your otherwise quite plausible list of surveillance entities.

Cambodia launches blockchain-powered peer-to-peer payments, hopes it crushes cash

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Except that firewalls do not grow to be GB-sized to be useful.

It has been repeatedly said that blockchain does not scale well. I'm interested in seeing how this is going to evolve, because I doubt that many people have phones that hold a multi-GB ledger in the first place.

Sure, the ledger won't be big now, but if hundreds of thousands of people are adding to it every day, it will get there. So I look forward to an article next year telling us what is happening to this scheme.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: In Ha Noi the city government often simply takes the land and pays compensation

That happens in every country. Each country has its own legal procedure, and maybe in Vietnam it is slightly easier or appears to be more of a one-sided decision, but there is no country that does not give itself the right to appropriate private property.

The only question is how justified does that right need to be. Given that you mention that some Vietnamese can block such a decision, that tells me that the procedure in Vietnam is not so different than in many other countries.

French services outfit Atos told to pay $855m in trade secret pinching case

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Atos should have waited

Hindsight is 20/20, I know, but in this case Atos jumped the gun and will now be bitten. Somebody did not properly estimate the risks associated with the trial, or perhaps it was deemed preferable to buy the company anyway, use its assets and worry about the trial later.

Well, later is now, and now your acquisition is costing you 25% more.

I hope it was worth it but, since you are a multinational with, apparently, billions in the bank, I won't be too worried either.

A cloud server with no network, no persistent storage, and no user access – what is AWS thinking?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

What's the point ?

So, if I understand correctly, I am to open a new cloud service thingy, put in it data I already have, have that data processed "securely", and then get the result back.

Great.

Now someone please explain how this is better than just processing the data where it is in the first place. It's already in the cloud, so why bother transmitting it somewhere else ?

Can we stop megacorps from using and abusing our data? That ship has sailed, ex-NSA lawyer argues in new book

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Stop

Exports from China and Russia ?

Honey, the NSA has done a brilliant job of replicating the principle of government surveillance on its own, no export needed.

I'm glad that someone knowledgeable has penned a tome that is dearly needed, but stop pretending that government surveillance is a threat from abroad.

That bird is roosting on your chimney right now.

SpaceX’s Starlink finally reveals its satellite broadband pricing for rural America: At $99 a month, it’s a good deal

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: $5 each from a few dozen households

You obviously have no idea how hard it is in some countries to earn $5.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: leaps and bounds better than the supposed 1Gbps connection

You don't have a Gbps fiber connection and you've never experienced it.

I have a proper FTTP Gbps connection now, and I can guarantee that there is nothing better.

That said, I had to wait a year using 4G, so maybe I'm a bit over-enthusiastic about it, but I did spend over a decade on a 12Mbps ADSL line, so I do know that there one hell of a difference.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Because you trust Ofcom speed statistics ?

Node.js 15: What's new, what's coming, and keeping pace with Deno. 'We're not going to reinvent' module ecosystem

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Open source is free to get, but I wouldn't say free to use"

True words. Companies need to stop developers from just referring to GitHub. Take that library in-house, examine it, test it and then put it in production from your own server. When there's an update, check to see if it brings you anything. If it does, then you put it in your test environment and start over.

There is not one line of code in a production environment that should not be known and vetted.

One of the world's most prominent distributed ledger projects has been pushed back by a year

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Re: Scalability not in the specification?

Yeah, that caught me as well.

A Stock Exchange already handles billions of transactions per day. How is it that they didn't have enough scalability in the specs already ?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Security by obscurity?

Yes it does.

Do you know the location of the various US fleets ? China and Russia may know of one or two, but they don't know all the them. Those they do not know are secure.

Do you know the location of CIA safehouses in the world ? Neither does anyone else. They are secure, until the CIA thinks they're not and decommission them to create one somewhere else.

Security through obscurity works very well, just not on the Internet. At least, not if the target is interesting enough. I totally agree with the idea that the Itanium is not interesting for hackers.

That, plus the fact that the Stock Exchange is the most watched, audited and controlled place in the world - due to the overpowering flow of money - means that any hacking attempt will likely be flagged, traced and blocked faster than you can blink. On top of that, police authorities will treat it as a red alert priority one, putting every relevant asset on the case.

No, neither Russia nor China would be daft enough to mount an attack against any Stock Exchange, and no mere lone blackhat would dare try. So the fact that they're running Itanium is actually a very secondary concern.

WeChat wins right to stay in US app stores for at least a couple more months as court denies US govt appeal

Pascal Monett Silver badge

“demand [..] countries cease and desist from conducting cyberespionage against our companies”

Start by demanding that Facebook be actually transparent about what ads it shows to which people.

And throw The Zuck in jail if he doesn't comply. It is high time somebody kicked him down a notch - or ten.

Facebook tells academics to stop monitoring its political ads for any rule-breaking.... on privacy grounds

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

"the browser plugin scrapes information in violation of our terms"

Your terms do not govern my right of using my browser however I feel like using it.

This is just The Zuck in panic mode whenever someone else is controlling "his" information - especially when it doesn't make him look good (when did that ever happen ?).

Oculus owners told not only to get Facebook accounts, purchases will be wiped if they ever leave social network

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"a wave of anger among Oculus users"

I felt that wave the minute I read that The Zuck was buying Oculous. It was at that moment that the product died for me, and that made me angry because it was promising at the time.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

The problem is that you never signed an actual contract. It's the miracle of the Internet and Terms of Service that you automatically accept when you use the site. If the terms change, which they definitely can, then it is up to you to not use the site if you don't agree.

Generally, if a website actually comes up with something I do not agree with, I will indeed no longer use the site (eh, LinkedIn ?). However, one must admit that Facebook has the easy upper hand here, because of the amount of people who basically have it connected intravenously.

So The Zuck just goes and makes a monopolistic dick move, because he can.

I really would like to see a class action lawsuit on that, but I don't see that you can complain legally.

Your IT department should behave like a jellyfish, says Gartner

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Trollface

"coordinated action without central brain"

Impossible. The budget must remain under control at all times, at that means control from the top. You can't have dozens of managers spending money just because it's justified, that would be madness.

President Trump's H-1B visa crackdown wiped $100bn off market value of America's largest corps, top study finds

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

"Putting up a 'not welcome' sign [..] won’t help our country"

No it won't, but it will please the white supremacist Nazi sympathizers who think that they are above the fray and don't want to see any people of any shade other than dead fish.

Except for those who carry the trash and mop the floors, of course.

However, it would seem that such policies will, in the end, be damaging to their lofty position as well.

So go for it. Continue bleeding economic value because you aren't intelligent enough to understand that you need everyone, not just masters and slaves, and everyone, including those 'brown people', need to have a valid chance to make it big, not just the dead fish color population.

Hackers rummaged about in Finnish psychotherapy clinic – now patients extorted with public data dump threats

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"A crisis hotline was made available for victims [..] to access support and therapy"

Pray tell, are they going to be directed to the same clinic that got them in this mess in the first place ?

SAP stock price crashes 23%, €28bn wiped out as firm warns of Klein(er) revenues, profits ahead due to COVID-19

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Fear not

I'm sure the Board will find a reason to allocate itself its usual XMas bonuses.

Uber drivers take ride biz to European court over 'Kafkaesque' algorithmic firings by Mastermind code

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WTF?

"irregular trips"

How exactly do you make an irregular trip ? Do you go from point A to point B.2 instead of C ?

What does Uber know about how people react on the spur of the moment, such as seeing something and saying "oh, just stop me here" ?

I'm guessing that Uber demands that the driver bring the customer from the recorded starting point to the recorded destination, and customer satisfaction be damned. You said you wanted to go to Downton Abbey, and that's where you'll end up, even if your daughter called you in the middle of the trip and tearfully asked you to go pick her up.

Microsoft drives users to the Edge: Internet Explorer to redirect to Chromium-based browser in November

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"There are workarounds"

Yeah, it's called Firefox, with NoScript and Ublock Origin.

Did Arthur C. Clarke call it right? Water spotted in Moon's sunlit Clavius crater by NASA telescope

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So, to get 1 liter of water you need to process 3 cubic meters of regolith

That does not sound like it will be easy to maintain human life. Better to set up shop on the south pole, where there is apparently many tons of frozen ice to deal with.

QUIC! IETF sets November deadline for last comments on TCP-killer spawned by Google and Cloudflare

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I don't get it

"makes it possible for a client and server that have never connected to send data without any round trips between the devices "

So the server never gets the request from the client but it knows what to send where ? QUIC is using magic divination ?

There is obviously a notion that I'm missing here, but it seems to me that the protocol used does not prevent the request from needing to get to the server before the server can respond to it and that sounds like a round trip to me. I'm sure they know what they're doing, but my basic understanding of networking is insufficient for me to grasp the intended meaning of those words.

RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Awesome tip !

Thanks to you, I have now learned how to permanently get rid of that logon crap.

Thank you so much !

Ublock Origin is already great, but now it is on par with NoScript. An indispensable tool to protect my security and privacy.

Thank you Ublock Origin !

Got a problem with trust in AI? Just add blockchain, Forrester urges. Then bust out the holographic meetings. Welcome to the future

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

Yet another desperate attempt to find a use for blockchain

It's been a bit more than a decade now that someone finally found a use for blockchain, and the buzzword bingo has had it on the list since.

Blockchain here, blockchain there, lots of mouthy discourse and absolutely zero achievements.

Now they want to foist it on the statistical analysis machines, because of course they do. Astonishing they didn't think of it before.

Oh and, sure, please quadruple your budgets for the year after the worst economic period since 1929 and 2008 put together. Yeah, we'll get right on it.

Forrester. Should be nuked from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Today's tech giants won't be as naive as I was in DoJ dealings, says former Microsoft chief Bill Gates

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well, at least a hammer can be quite satisfying, right ?

Love Minecraft: Java? You'll have to learn to love your Microsoft account as well – it will be required next year

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WTF?

"security should be better with multi-factor authentication"

I'm sorry, we're talking about Minecraft. This is not a platform that enables bitcoin mining, or personal detail stealing.

It's a game. A small, block world game.

You're telling me that, all of sudden, I need Fort Knox protection to mine cobblestone ?

Fuck off.

NHS awards £500m everything-and-the-kitchen-sink framework to a long list of resellers

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Sopra Steria ?

Another failure in the making, then.

Oh, but it's the NHS. Carry on, then.

Developer survey: C# losing ground to JavaScript, PHP and Java for cloud apps, still big in gaming

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I appreciate any support given to Lotus Notes development, but pairing Notes with Access indicates that you don't understand how one of the two work.

It's not because we call it a database that it is the same thing on either platform.