* Posts by Pascal Monett

16643 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

US drugstore chain installed anti-shoplifter facial-recognition cameras in 200 locations – for eight years

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Allow me to disagree. A shop has the legal obligation to allow customers to enter. As long as the customer is not being disruptive, the shop has no right to refuse service.

At least, that's how I think it works.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"an alert would be sent to security staff who could then confront the suspected thief"

The suspected thief. No proof, just suspicion, and that is enough to get in trouble.

I'm sorry but that does not chime with legal rights. I will admit you have the right to watch me, but if you come up to me and ask me to leave the shop I'm going to demand what right you have to do so, and I will not be leaving until the police show up and tell me that that is what I should do.

And when the police show up I'm going to demand what the reason is for being treated like a shoplifter when I've done nothing wrong, and when security comes up blank, I'm going to sue. Because that's what you do in the Land Of The Used To Be Free.

Of course, this is happening in the USA, so you'd better be white to pull this off these days.

Reply-All storm flares as email announcing privacy policy puts 500 addresses in the 'To' field, not 'BCC'

Pascal Monett Silver badge

First of all, I'm Pascal Monett. Don't know where you got Ninety from.

Second, my whole point is that you do not have a moment's inattention when you are sending a mass mail.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Re: why is it not the norm that such things are handled via a CRM

Because that costs more than just banging the list into a mail for a peon to fumble with, and it's the beancounters that count these days.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Or you can take a few seconds to check what you're doing before clicking the Send button.

Putting yourself in the proper frame of mind before starting also helps, meaning paying bloody attention to what you're doing.

Yes, mistakes happen. I have forgotten to attach a file to a mail I send several times, but I only send it to one person. When you're sending out a mass mail, you don't approach the question like a regular mail.

For me, a mass mail is a ticking time bomb. I execute the job with the same amount of care and attention than I imagine a bomb removal specialist would. You need to be extra careful, because any mistake you make will be sent to multiple (sometimes hundreds of) people, and any mistake means you'll have to do the whole process again.

So I pay extra attention in order to not have to start over.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Denial is the first defence.

That is exactly what led me to creating logs of what my code was doing. Too many times I have wrote a script and got told it wasn't working any more but nothing had changed. I wasted years of my life racking my brain to find out what wasn't working any more, until I logged what the input was and what the result was, and found out that it is way easier to come to the user with a printout showing what was going on and wait for the penny to drop.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: How to spot a lie

I'm working with academia right now.

I've been waiting 3 weeks now for them to pull the finger out and test the code that is waiting patiently to be useful.

To all my emails asking about progress they come back answering they don't have time. Yeah, you don't have time to click a fucking button, sure.

Now they're on holiday.

This project is 3 days contractual, and it will have taken 3 months real time.

That is academia.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Cola and orange juice

Happened to me once. The laptop kept working for the day - just what I needed to back up everything important.

The next day, it was dead.

That's when I learned to be extra careful with liquids around a keyboard.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

I understand and partially subscribe to your point of view.

As a freelancer, I have to have a signature that includes my registration identification, but it is just three lines of text with my name, the name I am registered under and my registration number.

There is no 1.5MB image, nor is there any legal warning notice.

In the market for a second-hand phone? Check it's still supported by the vendor – almost a third sold are not

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Flame

"beyond the predetermined lifespan of a product"

And just what is the "predetermined lifespan" of a mobile phone ? Six months ?

The only valid predetermined lifespan is the amount of time the hardware is supposed to be usable. For me, that is anywhere from 10 to 15 years - supposing your battery can be replaced.

It is obvious that the makers believe that a phone's lifespan is the time until the person buys a new one, ie 2 years on average I'll guess. Which also means that the phone makers completely ignore the resell market. How nice.

Well guess what : I have my Galaxy A3 since 2017 and I'm not changing any time soon.

Phone support needs to update their update strategy.

I have a cluebat to help.

And if that is not enough, I propose a law that states that as long as there is one item still connecting to the network, the maker of that item is required to provide updates.

We're not talking cars, we're talking everything electronic. You made it, you support it until the day nobody uses it any more. Don't come whining about cost - you sold it, you support it.

Voyager 1 cracks yet another barrier: Now 150 Astronomical Units from Sol

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Pint

Damn right.

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Not at all. My post was in support of Lee D, not in contradiction.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

It's time to post this link again.

Watch and learn.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

It may no longer be a binary choice, but if your input is 'woman' and the tool indicates a 90%+ chance of the result being male, then your tool is crap.

"we were not sure if it is worth our time and efforts to make a change in existing biased reality "

It seems obvious that the time and effort to correct this monumental cock-up is going to be well beyond your ability. It also seems to me that equating gender with email is beyond stupid.

At least you were intelligent enough to abandon the project.

This investor blew nearly $300,000 on Intel shares the day before 7nm disaster reveal. Yup, she's suing

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

Vexatious litigation

Point #1 : You invested your money before an earnings report -> you made a bet, you lost. Your problem.

Point #2 : You're playing on the stock market. You win some, you lose some. You lost. Deal with it.

Microsoft delivers CouchOps capability with Android TV upgrade to Remote Desktop app

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"a close-to-optimal work environment for a remote sysadmin"

A true sysadmin will always have in the front of his/her mind the fact that remote means vulnerable.

It's great to be able to administer your servers from home, but any sysadmin worth the name knows that doing so is creating vulnerability.

Managing your servers from the local network is not like managing your servers from the Internet. The threat profile is not the same.

I do hope this couch potato system includes considerations for security, because otherwise the fallout is going to be horrific.

Firefighters to UK Home Office: Yeah, maybe don't turn off emergency comms network before replacement is ready

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

"Anyone surprised at the gigantean cock-up"

. . has not been reading El Reg.

Honestly, telling me about the £3bn overspend is useless. UK Government has pissed away so many billions on so many different failures that one specific figure isn't enough to tell which failure we're talking about.

What is not surprising is firefighters reminding government that hey, that comms system you're going to shut down ? We still need it, and we'll be needing it until you pull your finger out and get the next one working.

Once considered lost, ESA and NASA's SOHO came back from the brink of death to work even better than it did before

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Re: syntactically and logically correct

True, but that still doesn't mean it's going to do what you expect it to.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

A fitting tribute to intelligence and sheer dogged determination

The entire history of SOHO is a demonstration of what the human race can accomplish when the best minds are determined to solve a problem.

The goof about Gyro A that almost scrapped the mission in the first place ? I would blame the UI for that. The status of all gyros should always have been visible to the operations team. Apparently, they only had the reading without knowing the status. An easy mistake to make when things are going pear-shaped.

Everything else is just the brilliance of engineers. There's a reason they are somewhat apart in the world, and this whole saga is proof of why : they get results when everyone else thinks it's the end of the line.

That is why Humanity needs to get into space. It brings out the best in us.

We'll find a way to fuck that up, but still, we need to go to space.

DXC says ransomware attack disrupted customer operations at insurance services arm but barely left a scratch

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

"full restoration of Xchanging customer operations"

So I gather that Xchanging actually had backups, and knew to restore them.

Finally a case where the miscreants didn't win.

Isn't it nice to have a functional IT department ?

YOU... SHA-1 NOT PASS! Microsoft magics away demonic hash algorithm from Windows updates, apps

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"a legacy cryptographic hash that many in the security community believe is no longer secure"

Um, sorry, no. It is not a question of belief. It has been mathematically demonstrated to not be secure.

That's kind of like saying that many believe that the Sun is going to rise tomorrow.

Duh.

BT: 'Because of the existing underlying supply of the 4G equipment, most of our 5G (NSA) so far is with Huawei'

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"BT is similarly exposed to Huawei"

And we all know that we prefer being exposed to the NSA instead.

What a farce.

An expensive one, but a farce nonetheless.

Irony isn't dead... Facebook sues EU on data privacy grounds for requesting too much personal data

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Okay, that is a good explanation.

But why the hell does the EU need to investigate that ?

With the US election coming up, when better to petition regulators for a controversial way to chill online speech?

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Megaphone

"The Fairness Doctrine would have made Fox News [..] illegal"

Really ?

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine !

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine !

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine !

AMD is now following More's Law: More chips, more money, more pressure on Intel, more competition in the x86 space

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Go AMD !

The little company that could. AMD deserves a bit of time in the sun, Intel has made its life hell for long enough.

But we still need Intel around, lets AMD start slacking off.

Arm China brands itself a 'strategic asset', calls for Beijing's help in boardroom dispute with Brit HQ

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Well, that does it for Western companies investing in China

Great idea guys : not obeying orders from HQ because you're in China. Great example to set for the rest. Great way to demonstrate that you're reliable.

It is common sense that a subsidiary is linked to its parent company. It is the parent company that has authority, period.

Not respecting that rule means that no company can create subsidiaries anywhere. That means no more multinationals and . . hey, wait a minute, that might not be such a bad thing after all.

Okay, just kidding.

In any case, these clowns have completely destroyed their credibility on the international stage. I wonder what the fallout will be.

No wonder Brit universities report hacks so often: Half of staff have had zero infosec training, apparently

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Little by little, the lesson is sinking in

Security. It's a thing you need to take into account. People are learning that the way they usually do : the hard way.

In this particular case, it's not the universities that are at fault. It's one of their suppliers that was clueless. The only mistake the unis made was using that supplier.

I'm guessing they won't learn anything from that either.

Virgin Galactic reveals giant mirror feature in cabin design for Beardy Branson's space bus

Pascal Monett Silver badge

A 10-minute countdown ? For real ?

What idiot thought that include 10 minutes of countdown in a YouTube video would be worthwhile. It's already a stupid idea for a livestream, but nobody is going to watch 10 minutes of a countdown. So I skipped over all the talky parts until I got to the so-called "cabin reveal". I didn't find that it revealed all that much about the cabin. On the other hand, I found hilarious the fact that the pilots are in full gear with masks and an oxygen supply, whereas the passengers . . not so much.

I'm sure the passengers will be soo reassured by that.

Amazon and Google: Trust us, our smart-speaker apps are carefully policed. Boffins: Yes, well, about that...

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Down

"optimized for quantity over quality"

That seems to be what the epitaph of our civilization should be.

"We require developers of skills that collect personal information to provide a privacy policy "

No you don't, you just say you do. There are 47K+ "skills" that prove that a privacy policy is not a requirement.

Brave takes step closer to sensible business model by building subscription VPN into the iOS version of its browser

Pascal Monett Silver badge

The browser business is really tough

But the VPN business is almost worse. Practically all of them promise they don't keep logs, but then we regularly get articles about discovering that many of them do.

Besides, using a VPN does not protect your privacy - it only allows you to access stuff that is country-restricted.

And let's not even mention the people who use VPNs or TOR to access their Facebook account. Bloody morons.

I do use Brave, especially on my phone. The amount of data and time it saves is just gob-smacking. With Brave, surfing on 4G is practically as fast as my fiber line at home. All the other mobile phone browsers can take a hike. But I do not participate in the Rewards scheme. I don't trust ad brokers, they're all lying thieves who will not even blink when pushing malware-riddled stuff.

Gone in 15 minutes: Qualcomm claims new chargers will fill your smartmobe in a flash

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Why are we talking about cars ?

The article is about phones. Phones and cars are not at all the same subject. An EV is something you use to get to work, leave it to charge for the day, then go back home and leave it to charge for the night. A phone is something that is on all the time, that you likely need to have available all the time, and might need recharging during the day, following your usage.

Nobody driving an EV is planning a road trip - the infrastructure is not there. Phones are basically on one long road trip. When was the last time you turned yours off ?

The needs are not the same is what I'm saying. Comparing the two simply because they both have batteries is a mistake.

Face masks hamper the spread of coronavirus. Know what else they hamper? Facial-recognition systems (except China's)

Pascal Monett Silver badge
WTF?

What ?

"the most accurate algorithms fail to authenticate a person about 0.3 per cent of the time"

Well it's a shame that those algorithms are apparently not in use in what is implemented these days in public areas. I wonder what the cops in the USA think of that kind of declaration.

I've been reading for months about systems currently in use having a false positive ratio of about 80%. Where the hell does 0.3% come from now ?

Google allowed to remember search results to news articles it was asked to forget. Good

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Nice move

Trying to use the Right To Be Forgotten to erase the more unpalatable things one is responsible for.

I think it is nice to see that RTBF is not for crooks or incompetent idiots to cover up their actions, even if their actions were not intentional.

I'm sorry, if you are responsible for the finances of any organization, even a charity, and you let million go to waste, I don't see that you have the right to cover that up.

Data-stealing, password-harvesting, backdoor-opening QNAP NAS malware cruises along at 62,000 infections

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I have a Synology, and it refuses anything that is not from the local network.

Media is disabled, internet access is disabled, FTP is disabled. The only way to access it is by being on the same local network.

That, plus the fact that the router doesn't accept outside queries either, and I think I have a good foundation for being secure.

Which, obviously, does not mean I do not pay attention to the firewall on the router, or on the machines I work with.

I just can't understand people who configure their machines to accept Internet requests without wondering how to ensure that only the "right" people will access their data. Twenty years ago, you could be forgiven for not knowing that some miscreant is just begging for a chance to get at your data. Today, not so much.

Cloudflare's new serverless platform lets its Workers run for 15 minutes before giving them the boot

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"Ninety per cent of the savings"

I have one question : where does 90% of the risk come from ?

All of this edge computing hoopla sounds great, I admit, but there are dozens of companies offering CPU time and every week there seems to be a breach that took advantage of IoT or something else.

I'd like to see a risk analysis when CEOs trot out a new product. We never see that.

Chinese tat bazaar Xiaomi to light a fire under Amazon's Kindle with new e-book reader

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Well, that would kind of depend on what you read, wouldn't it ?

Intel's 7nm is busted, chips delayed, may have to use rival foundries to get GPUs out for US govt exascale super

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Process is both Intel's strength and their weakness

From where I sit, Intel is starting to have a history of botching its fabrication process.

It failed on 14nm, now I read it failed on 10nm.

I'm sorry, but how long is Intel going to be able to continue to fail before falling flat on its face ?

Intel is a CPU maker, for Pete's sake. If it can't make its own CPUs, then what can it do ?

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

"the case is yet to be quacked"

Oh my God, that should have happened on a Friday.

Would have been a perfect article for that.

Well done on the puns in any case !

UKIP blackmail, data breach sueball allegations were groundless, rules High Court

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"you don't deserve pity but we give you're [sic] choice"

Writing like that deserves no pity whatsoever.

What a bunch of chumps.

Is that croaky voicemail of your CEO just a Fakey McFake Fake – or does he normally ask you to wire him $1m?

Pascal Monett Silver badge

a "software-generated voicemail message"

That's interesting, but if the Boss is calling you, you have his number and can check that it is the right one. Plus, your boss may a have croaky voice, but I don't think software is yet up to the stage where it can convincingly impersonate someone you know.

Of course, I'm situating the whole thing as boss-calls-financial-person-as-usual kind of scenario. I don't see how this could really work. If the company is small, the finance guy is going to know the boss very well and it won't pass mustard. If the company is big, the finance guy being called will wonder why the hell he's the one called, go to his manager and it shouldn't pass mustard either.

And yet some numbskull did fall for this.

There's always a better idiot.

WTF is cloud-tethered compute? We're not sure either, but it just made a hype cycle for the first time

Pascal Monett Silver badge

cloud-tethered compute

The last step in transforming our powerful PCs and laptops into dumb terminals.

Welcome to the 1970s.

Next, there will be a flash of genius when somebody realizes that distributed computing would make things faster, and we'll go back to the 90s of computing.

Honestly, this industry needs to stop being defined by the kids that relearn everything every 20 years.

Australia sues Google over data collection practices that merged DoubleClick data to create single user profiles

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: I wish

Blocking Javascript is a powerful damper on a lot of tracking options. For cookies, you have other options.

It is not that difficult to deprive Google of information on your activity. On the other hand, blocking Javascript does have important consequences on your surfing experience.

It's an important choice, not to be made lightly.

With NoScript, you can temporarily allow Google, choice which reverts to Forbidden as soon as you've closed the window. When I absolutely have to allow Google, I open a new browser window to allow it, do my research, and then close the window.

That limits the damage.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Those were the days indeed

Those were the days that taught an entire industry about the usefulness of clear plastic guards on on/off switches, manager's butt or no.

What is surprising is that there still is kit today that is sold without any guard on the on/off button.

We're not done reading this kind of story, I'll wager.

If you think you've got problems, pal, spare a thought for these boffins baffled by 'oddball' meteorites

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: POE

Science is the governing rule here. Science does not content itself with "it's God what did it". Science wants to know.

If we were supposed to ignore how our Universe was made and how it works, God would not have given us intelligence. As a Christian, I believe it is our duty to study the Universe that God gave us in order to truly comprehend His power.

I believe in a God that can count beyond ten thousand.

No, boss, I'm not playing Minecraft. Minecraft is where I run VMs on the desktop now

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Thumb Up

Insane

I know that someone has already made a functional 8086 in Minecraft, but this is insane.

Brilliantly insane.

Raytheon techie who took home radar secrets gets 18 months in the clink in surprise time fraud probe twist

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

"he had downloaded documents to an external drive against company policy"

Well there's your problem : he had the possibility to connect an external drive. Add to that the fact that he probably had access to a lot more documents than he should have (c'mon, you know it has to be true), and it's blindingly obvious that he could export the data.

He's obviously guilty of having done that, but if he could not connect an external drive to his computer in the first place, then that would have been a serious barrier to overcome.

I find it interesting that they had logs of his activity, but no alerts on the logs. They had to go digging to find that out. Why wasn't there an alert when something classified is loaded onto an external drive ?

I have worked for banks and insurance companies that have more effective lock-downs than these clowns.

Amazon's auditing of Alexa Skills is so good, these boffins got all 200+ rule-breaking apps past the reviewers

Pascal Monett Silver badge
FAIL

"the research [..] skewed the results by removing rule-breaking Skills after certification"

Bzzzzrt ! FAIL.

It doesn't matter that results were removed after certification. That does not excuse Amazon from having certified apps that broke the rules.

If you tout a platform that only accepts rule-respecting apps, it is on you to make sure that 100% of the apps you accept respect the rules.

Pretending that you have a clean-up crew that acts after the fact is like saying that you will catch jewel thieves once they've already plundered the jewelry. You promised that the jewelry was protected.

You lied.

Congrats, First American Title Insurance, you've made technology history. For all the wrong reasons

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"First American strongly disagrees"

Well duh. I would also strongly disagree with a cop arresting me for drug trafficking. That doesn't necessarily mean the cop is wrong (in my case, yes, he would be, but bear with me).

I really have a hard time with companies being caught red-handed and then publishing bullshit like they "disagree" with the charges.

So. Fucking. What.

You go to court, you dispute the charges there, and you bear the result.

In this case, the court case is pretty much already sewn up. The data was available. It's your bloody fault.

The only question left is : is this going to be a case of Too Big To Fail ?

Because we all know that, when real money is involved, the government will swoop in with bailout money, even if the cause is criminal incompetence.

Microsoft tells AMD-powered Insiders they're unblocked in new Windows 10 Dev Channel build: 'Oh no we're not!'

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: the much-vaunted Eye Contact feature

I have disabled the camera on my laptop.

I am tired of seeing people waiting to be able to say something. There is a benefit in face-to-face communication, that I do not dispute, but when remote, honestly, I see no interest in watching four people silently stare, bored out their skulls, while the fifth takes the floor.

Remote viewing is useful for one-on-one conversations. For meetings, just make it a conference call.

Saves on bandwidth as well.

UK surveillance laws tightened up as most spying demands to be subject to warrants

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"all was well in state surveillance land"

Well of course it is. There have never been so many ways to get data on people, not to mention the data people themselves willingly post in social media.

Surveillance organizations are positively creaming themselves daily on all the stuff they can gather without any oversight whatsoever. And if a judge starts getting uppity, they just promise to not do it any more, continue doing it, and flag it under National Security where no judge can go.

It's a great time for surveillance. Not so much for Democracy. And I would really like to know just how many crimes all this "surveillance" has prevented.

Because that's how they're presenting it, right ? They need surveillance to find terrorists before a bomb blows. So how many terrorists have they stopped ? I think we should be told.

Then again, that just means that I'm expecting them to actually tell the truth, which is a patently ridiculous notion.

So let's all just carry on with our lives, and wait for better times.