Posts by Pascal Monett 16728 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
When you have a professional opinion stating that iOS security is fucked, with a list of breach types that are so common that bounty prices are in freefall, you're beyond the realm of security is hard.
Yes, security is hard. especially if you don't give a shit about it.
And right then it falls flat on its face because every user has his own logic.
At least, in my experience with users.
I prefer my Start menu well organized, only the icons for applications I use on the desktop, and as many tabs as I need in the browser.
Each to his own. With NoScript and uBlock Origin, obviously.
"hoping against hope that they might just manage to do it right"
Hope springs eternal, but the NHS has, how can I say, a history as far as IT is concerned. Given that there was undoubtedly a smidgen of urgency, the fact that the app is bug-ridden and violates privacy was to be expected.
But, no worry ! There is never time to do things right, but there's always time to do things over again.
So, some time before the heat death of the Universe, there just may be a proper application that does what it says on the tin.
In the meantime, the snouts are firmly in the trough, so all is well.
Unfortunately, there is now a browser that simply does not allow ads. It's called Brave. And it is at least three times as fast as Chrome.
You can do your little bit on the side, but I am done using Chrome on my mobile phone. Brave gets me the page I want without any useless clutter, and it does so in record time.
You're history, Google.
It does not need to verify any identity whatsoever. It has the AdvertisingID, and a request to stop. It stops, and that's it.
This "verify identity" bullshit is just to protect its revenue stream. It is not required for the user, it does not bring any essential service to the user, and the right thing to do would be to say : "Okay, we have stopped collecting data on that ID. If you wish to resume, you may reset your AdvertisingID".
But that would cut into its bottom line, so fuck the user, we keep collecting.
Once again Max Schrems is putting his finger on the point that hurts. I sincerely hope he wins this case.
Companies do not need you to change their working platform, Microsoft. You have forgotten that people use your UI to work with products, not to dick around with your settings panels.
Put your stupid new functionality into the App Store, and let companies download what they think they want to try, when they have time to try it out.
There is really no reason for you to foist changes on everyone at the same time, especially when you can so royally screw everything up in doing so.
Well of course. Do you know how much of a nuisance it is to create a resizable dialog box when a simple call MsgBox title, message seems good enough ? You have to set all those parameters and boolean flags. Ugh.
Of course, this is Windows we're talking about, so it would seem logical that somebody would take the time to write a message routine that could check the length of the message, determine if it holds in four lines and, if not, use the resizable version automatically, but you know, this is only the 3rd millennium, we're not that advanced yet.
And having someone write a routine that either calls the default message box or the resizable one following message length is, well, not being paid for, so . . .
No it hasn't. It has just been forbidden from running an ad that has probably already reached end of display. Marketing is a fickle world and the lifespan of an ad is approaching goldfish attention span.
A public punishment would have been the CEO of Sky appearing before a judge and getting a few weeks sentence (come on, it's just an ad) hard time. No, not comfy house arrest, that's for pussies. No, not community service, it's supposed to be punishment. If we did have the balls to do that, CEOs in general would become a lot more wary of the ads their marketing department put out, so it would be a win/win.
I am frankly astonished reading in these hallowed pages about all the CEOs and important companies that are declaring remote working now a part of their culture.
I was expecting companies to shrug it off and, when deconfinement rolled around, initiate a gradual return to everybody at the office again. It now seems that that will not happen for much longer than I expected.
This is exciting for me because, as a freelance, I am right now working remotely all the time, and it's great. Customers are asking me to do things for them, providing me VPN access and credentials, and not discussing or complaining about not having me toil at one of their (invariably) under-equipped desks in a frakkin' open space office.
The longer this continues, the better it is for me, so I do hope that this change will become a semi-permanent part of the industry.
Never open a file from someone you don't know until you've checked that they had a reason to send it to you.
Never open a file from someone who's mail domain is not from the domain they say they work for.
Never open a file without checking that the extension is legit (a .pdf.exe is a big no-no).
And never, ever open a file from an email that says some throw-away easy phrase like "Important information enclosed !". It's just another skiddie trying to get you to open malware.
Our corner of space should not be anything special, so if asteroids are what seeded life on our planet by bringing water and essential minerals, then it has to have happened elsewhere as well. So it should be likely that there are millions of planets that have some of life on them, and of all those millions, there should be at least a few where some form of intelligence has evolved.
However, from what Kepler and other satellites have discovered, all solar systems do not resemble ours. Many of them have Jupiter-like planets orbiting close to the star. We still don't know how a Jupiter-size planet can form in close proximity to a star, but it may not be impossible. One thing is certain though, if those gas giants formed at a distance from the star, like our Jupiter, and somehow migrated inwards, it would most certainly spell doom for any inner rocky planets. The disruption to their orbits would be fatal, and ejection from the system would be likely.
On top of that, it is Jupiter that has protected us from the worst (well, mostly), by sweeping a large area clean from asteroids of all kinds. It is still acting as a guardian from Kuiper Belt asteroids, and has even taken a hit for us in recent memory. Rocky planets that develop in systems where there is no gas giant, or worse, where the gas giant develops close to the star, will not have that protection and will continue getting hit for eons. Life will have a hard time surviving in those conditions.
So maybe, just maybe, we actually are in a somewhat special place after all.
And now we're adding automated image modifications, even though we haven't the faintest idea of how that actually works because it's done a black box that is called "AI".
Great idea, what could possibly go wrong with something that transforms medical images needed to make a diagnosis in ways we don't understand ?
Oh, and if you're expecting the US Government to "make sure things are up to scratch before approval for the open market", you need to cut down on the weed, my good sir. The US Government is no longer in any state to actually do something useful or needed for its citizens.
I wonder just what goes through the mind of the guy who decided that it was a good idea to invent Yet Another Document Format in 2020.
You want competition with Microsoft ? Fine, go ahead and good luck (you'll need it), but for Christ' sake use ODF.
We don't need another frakkin' document format.
Well, objectively speaking, I think this whole issue was inevitable.
Come on, if you had such a past, would you lay it on the table in front of the press as soon as you got nominated CEO ? In our unforgiving societal climate ? I don't think so.
Whether he is or not a better person now, he did the only thing he could ; try to keep it hidden as long as possible, because the issue was a foregone conclusion if it became known, as it now has.
If he had been in charge of practically any other type of company, he might have succeeded in keeping his past hidden long enough to demonstrate that he had indeed become a "good person" by managing the company well and making good deals. Unfortunately for him, he was CEO of a company doing facial recognition and security surveillance, and these days, such companies come under special attention, as well they should.
So basically he was doomed.
I am willing to believe that he became a better person. You cannot get rid of hate if you cannot forgive those that try to evolve. I hope that his career will survive this debacle somehow.
It will be, rest assured of that. They're getting PII and location data, there's no way they won't hoover that up and try to monetize it later in some way or another.
You don't need location data to know if people have been in contact. It doesn't matter where they were, the app is indicating contact and that is what you're supposed to be looking for.
In the political sphere, perhaps, but in the medical sphere, all the doctors want tests. And they're all saying that contact tracing is a requirement, but it needs to be followed up with tests. And they say that the only way we'll deal properly with this pandemic is by testing.
They have their mouths full of the word, in every way they can say it. For some reason though, the politicians are not hearing the message very well. Well, not many of them. Some countries got their shit together quite quickly, and they're on top of the problem. It's just Europe and the USA who are not putting their money where they should. One group because God knows why, and the USA because their government is a pile of shit right now.
Let's not forget that only Huawei has shoddy programming practices.
That's what the experts say.
With the amount of people who just include a library on GitHub and never worry about what it actually does until said library falls over, it's not really uncalled for.
Personally, where I to include someone else's library, I would import it into my code stack, review the code to ensure that it does what it says on the tin and nothing else, and - after testing the thing to hell and beyond - include it in my production code stack.
Of course, it is then up to me to set a watch over that library to check when it is updated and what the update is, but that's my problem.
The rub is, developers hate problems, so they just link to library and let history run its course.
It's not because, in this particular case, developers had no way to avoid the issue that the argument does not stand.
How can you possibly design a program to accept commands if the user is not authenticated first ?
I just cannot fathom how it is possible for a developer to not design the code to stay in the authentication ring until that is validated. You can't program defensively against everything, but you sure as hell can refuse any input before validating a user's right to send commands.
I had a similar issue in one of my consulting gigs. I had created the application that the user had specced, and testing had gone swimmingly until one day the user called and complained that his notifications in said application were not going out to the right people.
I checked the code and the logs, and could find nothing wrong. I racked my brain trying to find out what the issue could actually be. After two days of searching, I finally hit upon an idea : he was using a local group that was named the same as the group defined on the server.
Not bothering with asking him the question because I was sure he'd deny any fault on his part, I simply changed the log to record the actual names of the people that were supposed to be notified. Sure enough, the next time he called to complain that it was _still_ not sending to the proper people, I checked the log and compared it to the server group : not equal.
I printed out the log and went to his desk and confronted him with the proof.
Never heard of him again.
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