Posts by Pascal Monett

"made available to the public"

Does that mean that the good people abord the ISS will soon have a video-recording-enabled robot trundling around and watching them ? With the entire world able to see what they are doing ?

It must be an idea from marketing. I'm sure that the control software will keep the robot away from private quarters and the space toilet, but still, there is a good risk that thing will get nicknamed The Eye Of Sauron before long.

"the politically fraught task of policing home-grown implementations"

Now that I can understand. And we have a magnificent example, don't we, NHS ?

I do prefer that the two major players get their teams on this issue and iron out a common solution. I like that they say that no data goes back either of them, but I'll wait until the experts demonstrate that that is true.

In any case, I do believe that Google & Apple (Googapple ?) are less of a risk than some local company who got the job because the CEO goes golfing with the minister's brother.

Plus, at least the techs in both companies know exactly what their platform can do and how to call on it most efficiently. Knowing how to program an app for a mobile platform does not mean you know how to do the job using the least amount of power possible.

So good on Googapple. Let's just keep in mind the age-old adage : trust, but verify.

"whether the Taiwanese giant was lured with the promise of financial incentives"

Really ?

Are these guys new to the concept of capitalism or what ?

When a supermarket chain eyes a spot of land it wants it not only gets the local authorities to exempt it from taxes for ten years, but also gets roads and infrastructure made on its behalf then takes off after nine and a half because, all of a sudden, it remembers that it won't be making money soon.

And now these senators are wondering about a $12 billion plant ? Were they born yesterday ?

Of course there were incentives. Of course there were promises to not tax them on the basis of surface usage, or headcount, or anything that ensures that TSMC will build the damn thing and employ local people to make it run.

And even if that means that the only locals are janitors, it still means that there will be an influx of housing improvements, as a whole lot of people will be flying in from Taiwan to be part of the plant.

Because the USA no longer has that expertise. So shut the fuck up and take what you can get. And smile while you're at it.

Apple promised a “thorough review of our practices and policies”

And I am absolutely certain that Apple did a thorough review as promised.

Except that Apple never promised to change anything. Apple just promised to review the situation.

People are going to have to learn to read what is said, and act accordingly. Words are words, and actions speak volumes more, but you cannot expect one of the richest companies in the world to have the same interpretation of "review" as you do.

If you have any questions, ask yourself why you are not managing billions in the bank, and Apple is.

A right pig's breakfast

Slop all around and nobody wants to mop it up.

Somebody remind me why we have government already ?

A hard sell ?

Maybe.

It will mostly be a measure of how many people are really fed up with phoning their life to Google.

"We believe this allegation is misleading"

Of course you do. So please provide an official explanation for why that code was included.

This is not a bug, nor a mistake, nor a case of rogue engineer. The code was written specifically to check on Borkzilla's driver certification. There is no reason why the guy should have alerted you beforehand so you could silence him with spurious excuses while you renamed MysteriousCheck to PerfectlyNormalCheck and pretended everything was ok.

It is not ok, and I hope you'll get raked over the coals for it.

"learn to defend themselves against audits"

I'm sorry, where's the problem ? I thought audits were a consensual kind of thing. It's a "I'm here to chek on your licensing landscape", "Please come in" type of thing.

Because if some guy thinks he can barge in and check my kit without my consent, I'll have him know that he needs cops and a warrant to do so.

And if he thinks he can just send me an invoice if I do not comply, well that does not mean I'll pay it.

Rotating View

That sounds awesome. Give four or five pics of a chair and get a full 3D view of it. Wow. That is a worthy accomplishment.

Too bad it's done by a privacy-invading ad monster.

Borkzilla looking for a new foot to shoot

Honestly, Borkzilla is responsible for every single restriction to its various OSes. Now it is trying to pretend that it cares about some amount of backward compatibility. Seems to me that that means that Windows 10 is not dominating the market like Borkzilla would like it to.

Well guess what ? The market is defined by businesses that have developed procedures to solve their problems, not yours. If you don't tow the line, they won't budge until you do.

Being the biggest player in the market also means you have the biggest forces to deal with.

Good luck.

"ADT failed to monitor consumers’ accounts"

Right. Absolutely true. Just like White Star Lines failed to put enough lifeboats for all passengers.

ADT is guilty of trusting its employees. A harsh lesson, and one that will bring down a raft of restrictions and technical difficulties that will indeed make it impossible in the future to do such things as spy on an underage girl. And that is undoubtedly a good thing. However, given that ADT threw the book at the guy and delivered him to the police, and pledged to do what was necessary to keep this from ever happening again, I do not see that that ADT should shoulder all the blame.

Honestly, the technician was there to install the system. He has authority to define the email addresses that have access. Internal procedures already forbade any unrecognized manipulations, what more do you want ? The creep cheated. The system is not at fault.

Now, ADT is going to have to modify the installation procedure to ensure that the technician has a list of approved email addresses, shows them to the customer and gets a signed approval, in order to ensure that this does not happen again. Because of one asshole, countless time and money will be employed to get customer approval of every address added to the system.

That's exactly why we need laws : because of the 0.0001% of assholes who ruin everything for everyone.

"this particular one used his surname as part of his username"

It is truly astounding to realize that people who should be intelligent enough to know better still sell their lives to any app that tickles their funny bone.

I really would like to read a psychiatrist's study on this apparently innate need to sell one's personal life in order to give one's opinion on something.

"what Edge really needs is more users"

Yeah, well, good luck on that.

Honestly, even if Edge admits NoScript and uBlock Origin, I still won't use it. It brings nothing to me.

So it's actually more of the same

Pai is not acting to protect emergency services or - heaven forbid ! - consumers, he's acting to save telcos from forking over money for spectrum they don't need now.

The fact that this, for once, actually helps other people, is not on his mind.

"no thanks to Apple"

And that's a Good Thing (TM).

Apple is not law enforcement. If the law wants to decrypt, it pays the tech consultant the market price to do so. It does not make Apple put a backdoor in a secure encryption system.

What's next, cars that automatically call the police when criminals are driving them ? Of course not, this is just another jab at backdooring encryption by the morons who think they can just wish it so.

Luckily, they can't.

So, several versions of badly written code

Code that still works, but has minor flaws in it.

Well I don't care that they are minor flaws. When I hand over my code to the customer, if he finds some "minor flaw" in it you can bet I'm getting my sorry ass back in the saddle lickety-split and I'm correcting that flaw right damn NOW.

Of course, the big difference is that I depend on my customer's satisfaction to get paid, whereas those three guys obviously didn't.

So they ported an app to a feature phone

Impressive. Now, how do the feature phone owners go about getting it ? They can't navigate to a web site or portal, so are the phone companies going to beam it to them as an update ?