* Posts by Pascal Monett

16643 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Oh what a feeling: New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums based on driver behaviour

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: It communicates the vehicle's exact location to emergency services

From what I understand, eCall only activates when there's been an accident, which is quite different from a spy looking over your shoulder and whispering everything to its boss.

I am fine with eCall - until it gets proven that eCall is actually on all the time, in which case it will go into the same basket as Toyota, ie the Do Not Buy basket.

Former HP CEO and Republican Meg Whitman – who split HP with mixed success – says Donald Trump can't run a business

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: the Democrats should have won easily

That is something I will never get. Trump is by far the candidate that the Democrats should have mopped the floor with. Where were the attack ads on his failures, multiple bankruptcies, cheating, prostitutes and pussy-grabbing ?

I don't remember hearing anything about all that.

The Democrats had the ammo to bury Trump alive, yet they did nothing.

It's like they let it happen on purpose.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Unhappy

"three other prominent Republicans who said they will put country before party"

It is a sad state of political landscape when you have to actually count on people who state they will put their country first.

Personally, if you don't put your country first, you have no business being in politics.

Samsung slows smartphone upgrade treadmill with promise to support three Android generations on Galaxies

Pascal Monett Silver badge

That _is_ good news

But not enough to make me change for a new phone.

My A3 suits me fine for what I do with it.

Reply-All storm sparked by student smut sees school system shut down Google Classroom for up to a week

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Surely they're using G-Suite Enterprise for Education?

Whatever they are using, it's pretty clear that they've only just discovered access management and user control options and are trying to understand how they work, what the consequences are on their daily life and how to set up said options in the way that best corresponds to their needs.

Ain't it a shame that nobody thought to bother with all that when they first subscribed to the service ?

Bah, it's like patching. They are part of the wait-until-you-get-bitten crowd.

Trump administration reportedly offers Oracle cheap end to $400m wage discrimination case

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I think you mean Autocracy, and it's already your current form of government.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Where's their outrage when Trump goes even further than that?

It's called hypocrisy partisan politics. The Republicans will spare no effort denouncing a Democrat who does something shady, but if it's a Republican, then they will spare no effort to publicly state that everything is normal, fine, it wasn't done with that intention, etc.

It's political bullshit that has now been stretched so thin that you can easily see right through it, but since the Democrats are apparently helpless to stop Trump & Co, who cares ?

Not the Republicans.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

"Herold has been moved off the case"

So, a person does her job and is rewarded by being shifted to another role. Gagging order, anyone ?

She was responsible for managing the case and complained about a shady, manipulative intervention by someone who should have known better (but hey, it's Trump government, so anything goes).

I fail to see the justification in moving her out.

Docker shocker: Cash-strapped container crew threatens to delete 4.5 petabytes of unloved images

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Docker tweaked its terms of service

Right. Because paid for Ts & Cs have never been changed by the company offering the services.

Sorry, that argument does not wash.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Docker tweaked its terms of service

If a landlord tweaked his terms of leasing, there would be a court case, but because this is the Web, one-sided changes like that can be made and nobody can complain.

When will Terms of Service be recognized as a binding contract for both sides ? I understand Docker is struggling, and it's a shame for its employees, but it offered a free service and didn't think things through. Now it is trying to find a way to stay afloat, so it modifies the contract to put people's images in danger if they don't pay up.

Not fair. They offered a service under certain conditions, now they are unilaterally changing the conditions. That should not be allowed.

This NSA, FBI security advisory has four words you never want to see together: Fancy Bear Linux rootkit

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: How nice.

I would have liked to know how it gets installed as well. The article says "When deployed on a victim machine" and stops there.

How does the nasty get deployed ? Phishing ? Targeted email ? USB carried by a sleeper agent ?

Is this a plot of The Americans ?

Well, what are we waiting for? Three weeks later, Windows Embedded Standard 7 still didn't have the answer

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"one of the UK's medical institutions"

Not sure this is actually Borkzilla's fault. It's not a BSOD, after all.

There's a fair chance Windows is functioning perfectly well, and it's just waiting for some network service that has been shut down or is otherwise unavailable.

Epic Games gets itself epically banned, launches epic Fortnite death match with Apple over App Store's epic 30% cut

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Big Brother

"join the fight to stop 2020 from becoming '1984' "

Oh boy, you guys are soo late on that one. We've been in 1984 since the 1970s, when Echelon was created.

When the Internet became ubiquitous, the NSA upgraded our 1984 status by tapping all the calls under the excuse of terrorism.

We've been in 1984 since practically my birth, and we're not getting out of it any time soon.

Obvious icon is obvious.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: After all the appeals

Neither Sony nor Borkzilla have any clause mandating a fee over in-game purchases, so nothing will happen there.

NHS tests COVID-19 contact-tracing app that may actually work properly – EU neighbors lent a helping hand

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Won't work anyway

The point of the app is to alert you to a possibility of infection. If you don't trust the alert, why use the app ?

All those people who don't care about quarantine, protecting others and saving lives will not use the app for sure. Those who do likely will, and likely will pay attention if alerted.

Sources: Oracle Commerce Cloud devs laid off as platform struggles to gain traction, move to modern architecture

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

"Big Red seeks to downsize the struggling platform"

Well I think Oracle is not going to have any problem downsizing it now.

Developers are leaving. That means it's not a good idea to invest in it. That means there will be no customers.

This is undoubtedly going to be a successful downsizing operation.

Tencent’s gaming surge trumps potential loss of the one or two percent of cash it makes in America

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Going to have to get used to it

The USA is not the only economy in the world any more. Chinese companies deal internationally, but they can very well grow inside their own country as well.

And if the US government throws a hissy fit every other President, then some Chinese companies are likely to start thinking that it's not worth the trouble.

You weren't hacked because you lacked space-age network defenses. Nor because cyber-gurus picked on you. It's far simpler than that

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Ah, now I get it

All those major companies that get hacked, proclaim that customer data security is their #1 priority and then claim to have installed "top level" security measures, they're just installing the patches now.

Well, if you need to be hacked to get the idea, so be it.

ZX Spectrum reboot promising – steady now – 28MHz of sizzling Speccy speed now boasts improved Wi-Fi

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Well done

With all the losers who can't deliver on their empty promises these days, it's nice to see that there still are people who can not only promise, but actually ship a functioning product that does what it says on the tin.

And now, they're even improving on it.

If I were to buy any retro console, it would be theirs.

They deserve it.

UK.gov to propose new rules for online political campaigns after last election marred by an avalanche of fake news

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"create more transparent rules for political campaigning online"

How about this for a rule : every politician's every tweet/post/declaration has to include a link to the full list of his/her contributors sorted descending by amount.

That way it'll be a bit easier understanding why he/she says what he/she says.

What looks like a global pay freeze, sounds like a global pay freeze, but isn't a global pay freeze? Ask IBM

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Yep, it ain't fun not getting any raise

But it's still better than being fired.

Which might still happen to some.

Three Facebooks, four more Amazons and one Apple to collect Indonesia’s digital services tax

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

"digital services [..] consumed within it deserve to be taxed"

The ball is rolling. Multinational corporations are going to have to bow to the inevitable some day.

They will pay taxes.

Everywhere.

Transport for London asks Capita to fling Congestion Charge system into the cloud

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

So Capita scored another huge government contract

And it is going to make transformations to bring the system into the cloud.

I eagerly await the article that will tell us how Capita screwed this one up.

How did you spend your time at university? Pizza, booze, sleeping? This Oxford student is snooping on satellites

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Would be really interesting if he could send to the satellite too.

I don't think he really needs to. If internal Windows traffic is being sent to and from space, he can likely gather enough info to make a targeted attack via a proper land connection and, if he's got enough, he might even be able to authenticate without any hacking involved.

Who in their right mind would think "Hey, why don't we just include our non-encrypted satellite link right in our LAN ? Makes things a lot more simple, right ?".

Right. It makes things very simple for hackers to infiltrate you and scumbags to mount ransomware attacks on you.

Brilliant.

Whoops, our bad, we may have 'accidentally' let Google Home devices record your every word, sound – oops

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Damn those lone rogue engineers

He's a consultant now.

Still sits in the same office though.

British Army does not Excel at spreadsheets: Soldiers' newly announced promotions are revoked after sorting snafu

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Mushroom

"Lessons will be learned"

Lesson #1 : When needing to compile data for thousands upon thousands of employees in order to judge promotions, use a proper database with controls and safeguards, not Excel.

But hey, this the military so the lesson will be Get Somebody Else to Double-Check The Figures.

Android user chucks potential $10bn+ sueball at Google over 'spying', 'harvesting data'... this time to build supposed rival to TikTok called 'Shorts'

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

You'll get spied on whatever the box you tick.

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Correlation does not equal cause

It's not even a mistake, it's the gold standard in IT : touch something and everything that goes wrong with that something or whatever touches that something is your fault.

Even when you can demonstrate that you had nothing to do with it.

And it's not just with users. I've had IT guys blame me for a bug because I had created code that did something entirely unrelated. But it was on the same system, so it was my fault.

It's just the gold standard.

USA decides to cleanse local networks of anything Chinese under new five-point national data security plan

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Big Brother

"pervasive state surveillance, represent a threat to human rights"

Yes indeed.

You hear that, NSA ?

This is all just so much bull. Hey Pompeo, you know what ? Every single other country out there can have Huawei equipment. You wanna be secure ? Cut off all international calls. And shut down all routers that allow Internet connection from abroad. And don't forget to make your lovely little wall, but make it around the entire country. And close the ports, those foreign boats could be bringing in lethal viruses. And shut down international airports, they bring foreign terrorists.

Just wall yourselves in and you'll be nice and safe. Safe to go mad, it seems.

We Kana believe it! Raspberry Pi Foundation launches Japanese keyboard

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Re: SAMBA was made by packet sniffing - far more reliable than reverse engineering

Here's me who always thought that packet sniffing is reverse engineering.

Sure, reverse engineering can be applied to code - you take the assembler code and build the corresponding functions and procedures.

But taking what is going through the wire can allow to reverse engineer the procedures that are sending the data, then you have what you need to build the application that replicates that.

The results are in: Science says the Solar System's magnetic heliosphere looks like a deflated croissant

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Its job is to mostly shield our system from galactic cosmic rays"

Um, I think the Sun's job is fuse hydrogen and stave off gravitational collapse for as long as possible. The fact that that generates a ginormous magnetic field around a heliosphere is just a side-effect that happens to be beneficial to us.

That being said, I have now learned that the heliosphere has a magnetic shell around it. So we have the heliospheric magnetic shell protecting us, plus our own Earth-bound magnetosphere, and yet we still are capable of measuring cosmic rays.

Does that mean that there are "weak" cosmic rays that are stopped or deflected by the heliomagnetosphere ?

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: If the latter, it's not a croissant, ask any Frenchman.

Je suis entièrement d'accord avec vous.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

Re: Magnetic as motion

I don't think we have the technology to observe things that are moving backward in time.

That would mean we would have to record the result before taking the measurement.

This is real life, not science-fiction fantasy.

Mozilla warns more Firefox website breakage to come because devs just aren't checking for SameSite snafus

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: How about...

The problem is easy to fix. Google is considering that now, the SameSite default value is Lax instead of none.

Just go and set it to None and the problem goes away.

Of course, if you've never paid attention to that, you might not know where to set it. Time to learn.

UK insurance biz Direct Line drops 'misrepresentation' claims against IBM in £36m database platform lawsuit

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Project management failure

It seems obvious to me that this is not really a coding issue, this is a project management issue.

Client is complaining about some things where the supplier is saying they weren't at that stage yet. IBM use to have very competent project managers - I guess IBM has lightened its payroll a bit too much. That being said, IBM does have experience in managing projects, I'm not so sure the client does.

In any case, this is one more project that got out of hand because somebody wasn't doing his job managing the various aspects of the project.

It's even possible that it happened on both sides.

NSA warns that mobile device location services constantly compromise snoops and soldiers

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Stop

How terrifying

"Commercially available rogue base stations allow anyone in the local area to inexpensively and easily obtain real-time location data and track targets.

Just a minute there : am I supposed to understand that there are rogue base stations implemented everywhere ? Controlled by who ?

Because if that is not the case, then they are being implemented to track someone who is already known, and that is state-level spycraft, so doesn't concern me.

What a good eye-dea: Battery-less, grain-of-sand-sized 2.4GHz transmitter to help save your eyesight

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Could someone translate that into English ?

"For example, it incorporates a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with NMOS and PMOS cross-coupled transistors that support 2x lower startup current and 10.5db lower phase noise at 1MHz offset than an implementation that only uses standard NMOS or PMOS components. "

All that sounds very impressive and very technical and I have no doubt that it is important, but I can't for the life of me understand what the hell is going on and why it is important.

Help ?

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe – because we used astrometry: A Saturn-like world hugging its star

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Great success !

"Quasars are very far away so they do not move "

When I think about it, the amount of knowledge we have gained in the past forty years on the Universe we live in is amazing.

Forty years ago, we were still wondering if ours was the only solar system with planets. Quasars were an unknown object and black holes were a theory.

Now, we have learned that quasars are just supermassive black holes at the center of a galaxy gorging on stellar gas, pulsars are white dwarfs that rotate real fast, white dwarfs have ginormous magnetic fields, some so powerful they are called magnetars, practically every star has planets, there are neutron stars, etc.

Its bewildering.

And then there's dark matter and dark energy to figure out.

We've learned so much, and there is so much more to find out.

Interesting times.

China slams President Trump's TikTok banned-or-be-bought plan in the US

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

Right

So China bans FaceBook, Google and Twitter but the USA banning TikTok is unfair and goes against market transparency.

Okay, basically Trump banning TikTok is unfair, but come on, find another argument. That one is totally not justified.

European Commission: Full-scale probe launched into data-slurping potential of Google's $2.1bn Fitbit buy

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: “Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads”

Agreed, but it can even be more sneaky than that.

Google absolutely has the means of creating an entirely separate structure that will use the data for its ads - that are then not Google ads.

Never forget : every multinational conglomerate is a Russian Doll construction of truth. They say what you want to hear, and interpret the words to their own advantage, never in the way you think the words apply.

Mozilla doubles down on anti-tracking tech: It'll be tougher for wily ad-biz cookie monsters to track Firefox

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

Wait a minute

We've had Firefox addons that kill redirect and bring you to the intended website since ages. Why do we need this newfangled tracker/blocker thingamajig ?

It's not really difficult either, if I'm not mistaken. A redirect is like http://ww.redirect.com?goto/http:www.intended.site.com. Just check for the second http and take that.

It's not hard. At least I think. Why all the hoopla ?

Bored binge-watchers bork beleaguered broadband by blasting bandwidth: Global average speeds down 6.31%

Pascal Monett Silver badge

We broke the Internet, again

I'm thinking that a major part of the slowdown is also due to overselling connections, ie providers that sell "up to" a given bandwidth, gambling on the fact that, generally, nobody is going to use it all at a sustained rate.

Well we needed it all for the past six months, and we're going to continue to need it for the foreseeable future.

Methinks that, after the pandemic has finally been vanquished, we're going to see a change in the way providers offer connectivity in addition to all the changes that are becoming apparent in our society.

China requires gamers to reveal real names and map them to frag-tastic IDs

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well that's going to be quite restrictive

"China will tolerate games if they don't encourage what authorities deem to be anti-social attitudes and behaviours "

I'm guessing that shooting people, blowing them up and bombing them are not considered to be very social attitudes.

So that's EA's entire triple-A lineup except sports forbidden in China, then. No more Counter Strike, 7 Days to Die, Diablo III or IV, Battlefield, Fortnight any other shooter either.

I'm guessing SimCity still qualifies ?

Aviation regulator outlines fixes that will get the 737 MAX flying again

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So now the FAA is basically mandating multiple data controls

Now the 737-Max will have to control two data sensors before engaging in suicidal behavior. That, along with the other changes, seem to be a good thing.

What a shame Boeing didn't think of that before.

Leaky AWS S3 buckets are so common, they're being found by the thousands now – with lots of buried secrets

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Because internal IT is managed by someone who is responsible for IT security or has people to do that, whereas these buckets are thrown up by a clueless developer who didn't care enough ?

Days after President Trump suggests pausing election over security, US House passes $500m for states to shore up election security

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

Well that's reassuring

The upcoming election looks to be just as much of a shit show and the entire Trump presidency has been.

And I'm looking forward to the OHSG refusing to step down and the GOP endlessly pretending they don't know if he can or can't while the Democrates cannot bring themselves to have the fucker arrested for treason to the Constitution.

I've got to remember to stock up on the popcorn - I'm going to need a lot more than I thought.

'We stopped ransomware' boasts Blackbaud CEO. And by 'stopped' he means 'got insurance to pay off crooks'

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

Capitalism at its best

There's a market, so there's money to make, so we shall go get that money. It doesn't matter if the end result is more crime, what matters is that there is a demand.

With insurance on ransomware, there is literally no more possibility of stopping this type of crime. Now, companies are going to flock to their insurance company, get some form of coverage and turn around and not even care anymore about what IT needs to protect their data.

Muppets like this Gianoni will proudly proclaim that they have insurance, and everybody on Wall Street will be happy. And the crminals will be overjoyed, because now they up their demands since hey, what do you care, you're covered.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Brit local authority appoints a systems integrator in leap to Oracle cloud, but support time-bomb is already ticking

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"the cost of moving to a different system would be prohibitively high"

Yup, vendor lock-in is always great for the vendor, Oracle knows that very well, and ERP systems are a great ticket for lock-in. They're expensive to put in place, expensive to maintain and expensive to migrate.

It's expensive all the way down.

Architect of tech contractor tax fraud scheme jailed for at least five years

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Lesson to learn : beware of free

Hindsight is always 20/20, but you have to wonder what is going on when only one company on the market does not charge you for its services.

I readily understand the people who subscribed to the service, why go pay somewhere else when here it's free ?

Well, now we know. It was free because it was fraud, and apparently many people are going to be out of pocket through no fault of their own.

A tale of mainframes and students being too clever by far

Pascal Monett Silver badge

The first best practice is understanding the environment you're working in, not blindly repeating lessons you have been taught.

I'm a Notes programmer. I have been for most of my career now. Back in the 90s, the documentation indicated that, when looping through documents in a view, the old document would be removed from memory.

I believed that and programmed accordingly until one day I was working on a database that had a really large amount of documents that I had to loop through. Somehow, my code was never able to get to the end. I debugged several times, thinking maybe there was a document corruption issue, but the code never failed on the same document. It was incomprehensible.

Until I had a thought : what if all these documents were still in memory and not being removed as I had been taught ? I toyed with that idea for a few minutes and then thought, what do I have to lose ? So I changed the loop structure to not just drop the previous document, but delete it from memory (not from the database, from memory). I tried my code again and it worked flawlessly.

Lesson learned : even official documentation can get it wrong sometimes.