* Posts by Pascal Monett

16645 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

A Nord VPN bug, a(nother) bad Microsoft patch, Zynga data farmed out, and more

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Calling Nord 1.1.1.1

Apparently, some people really adamantly do not want the NSA to know that they're viewing those cat pics.

Iran tried to hack hundreds of politicians, journalists email accounts last month, warns Microsoft

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Because convenience, lack of awareness or lack of caring, and all of the above.

We have sleepwalked into a surveillance state and the state had nothing to do with it.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: If you're doing stuff you shouldn't be doing using email

And what exactly is a journalist not supposed to be doing ?

His job ?

Here we go again: US govt tells Facebook to kill end-to-end encryption for the sake of the children

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Re: Easy to hack ...................

Because you are not required by law to use FaceBook, Google or Amazon. They are private companies and you can avoid using them if you so wish.

You cannot avoid the police if they decide to set their sights on you, and resisting them will, in the best case, land you in jail, and could land you in the morgue.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "Facebook doesn’t know who a user is, [..] what their address is, or anything"

I take it you have no idea what FaceBook is working at with its AI. My wife had a FaceBook account for two years or so. FaceBook was regularly asking her to confirm if she lived in a given village, and the name of that village regularly got closer to where we actually lived at the time.

You may avoid giving specific information to FaceBook, but you have friends, and FaceBook is watching their interaction with you, as well as everything you do. Post pictures ? FaceBook is interpolating with pics from your friends. FaceBook is correlating your messages. FaceBook is watching every damn thing you do.

Obviously FaceBook knows a lot more about you than you think.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: "Notably Apple appears to be missing"

Um, have you forgotten the whole iPhone decryption affair we had a few months ago ? Where the police were practically stomping their feet to get Apple to decrypt a phone, which Apple refused, and then the police somehow got the phone decrypted and (IIRC) there was nothing incriminating in it ?

Apple is quite proud of ensuring people's secure communications - unless we're talking about China in which case Apple is just a proud to ensure government access.

I'm guessing that that irks American politicians to no end, but in the US you can't lock up and torture someone to get information - not on US soil anyway. You have to be abroad for that, and the suspect cannot be white.

Surprise! Copying crummy code from Stack Overflow leads to vulnerable GitHub jobs

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FAIL

"the researchers developed a Chrome extension"

So the researchers are all about security, and then they use Chrome ? The browser that tells everything to Google ?

Does not compute.

Kaspersky warns of encryption-busting Reductor malware

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Turla, another group of highly intelligent people gone over to the Dark Side

Well, at least that kind of tool should be restricted to attacking people that that state is interested in, right ?

Us plebs should be unaffected then, right ?

Please say yes.

The OS is 'no longer' important to Microsoft, and yet new Surface kit has 3 Windows flavours

Pascal Monett Silver badge

So we're back to "Developers ! Developers ! Developers !" then ?

I think that's a good idea. Of course, it's not a new idea, but it's a good one.

That also means that Microsoft is going to have to stick with its tools for the long term. No more burying a product after only a few years, you're going to have to grin and bear it.

In this day and age, that might be a bit too much for Microsoft to do.

FBI softens stance on ransomware: it's (sort of) okay to pay off crims to get your data back

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Indeed. If this ransomware craze can be found to have a single silver lining, it will be to educate the morons that backup IS the only solution.

Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out

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Devil

"Media Bridge, based in Virginia, and LCX Digital, based in California"

Simple solution : take the CEOs of these companies out behind the chemical shed and shoot them. As a lesson to the others.

It's a good thing I'm not World Dictator In Chief.

HP polishes the redundancy cannon, prepares to fire 16% of workforce

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"even more customer focused"

With less employees to do the job. Sure, that's going to work.

As of now, I am just waiting for the CEO who will whittle down employee count to 10,000 and spout the same bullshit.

Being CEO in a large corporation is apparently easy : all you have to do is have no soul and cull the staff numbers. Your bonus is ensured, and in the worse case, you have your golden parachute made from the tears of all those people you fired.

The immovable object versus the unstoppable force: How the tech boys club remains exclusive

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Re: Misguided

No, but sometimes you need a slap in the face to realize that you've done wrong.

This is an interesting time for women's rights. They gained the right to vote in the 60s, they are now gaining the right to be respected.

I, for one, am willing to bow to that.

Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software

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So, Oracle is getting desperate ?

Finally.

When the satellite network has literally gone glacial, it's vital you snow your enemy

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Thumb Up

I love reading On Call comments

You learn the damnedest things.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Agreed. I took that to mean that, when he looked out of the window, he realized that snow could have something to do with it.

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Coat

Re: the dish had been eaten by a giraffe

You mean to say that they had installed a vegan dish ?

Right, I'm going, I'm going !

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

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Reminds me of an episode of Yes Minister, talking about some chemical thing that had almost the same name as a dangerous one.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: Allez, Marcel!

At times I find them infuriating as well, and I'm French.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

I don't know about other French alarms, but mine also has a battery backup.

And, given that the phone and internet connection are on a UPS, any burglar thinking of cutting the power would be well advised to wait half an hour at least before attempting entry, which means that the police will have largely enough to mosey on down to my place and cull the miscreant red-handed.

Because in the event of a power failure I get a notification, and will act accordingly.

Watch out! Andromeda, the giant spiral galaxy colliding with our own Milky Way, has devoured several galaxies before

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Thumb Up

Simulations are never detailed enough

Even though science has already simulated this a number of times, it is obvious that more data can only yield better understanding and more precise simulations.

So go for it, boffins !

DXC has picked a brand new people person: Finch lands as freed Mason preps to depart

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Coat

"Mason [..] was not mentioned even once"

Obviously. Why should one mention the underlings ?

They're just doing what they were born to do.

Devs getting stuck into Windows 10X on Surface Neo will have to tussle with UWP

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Thumb Down

"avoiding registry bloat"

Twenty years in and Microsoft still hasn't been able to reign in that abomination of an excuse to put DRM into the OS. For that matter, it hasn't even included any tool to search for orphaned keys and list them for deletion. You still have to use 3rd-party tools to clean up your Registry efficiently.

For shame, Microsoft. For shame.

You only need to click once, fool: Gaming rig sales up as Trump presses continue on trade tariff tussle

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"IDC reckons the market will hit 55.2 million by 2023"

Did they factor in the fact that current hardware is used for much longer these days ? My current rig was last updated in 2015, and I have no urge or need to update it now. Laptops are a different story, they cannot be upgraded in any meaningful way aside, perhaps, memory, but they can last a good many years as well, especially the more powerful ones.

I doubt that a change in chip availability has that much of an impact.

Google Maps gets Incognito fig leaf: We'll give you vague peace of mind if you hold off those privacy laws

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Facepalm

Ah, targeted advertising

Last week I bought a replacement UPS on Amazon, because the 10 year-old one I had had died. Guess what I have in my mailbox twice this week ? Of course, an email from Amazon suggesting that I might be interested in a UPS.

I just bought one, you morons. Come back in ten years and you might be relevant.

After 72 hours of recurring outages, you'd be forgiven for wanting to slightly tweak the first syllable of Bitbucket

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Hopefully, one day they will.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Re: On premises can have the same problems

Of course it can, but when it's the cloud provider, it's all of that provider's customers that have the problem. When it's your on-premises server that has a problem, it's only your customers that are impacted.

Let's try avoiding humongous single points of failure, shall we ?

Huygens if true: Dutch police break up bulletproof hosting outfit and kill Mirai botnet

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I always thought those types of services were only in countries that were not interested in proper law enforcement. Poor places that have other priorities than worrying about a bunch of bytes only affecting people far away.

Seems to me that local crime in Europe (or at least, in the Netherlands) would do better to choose a bulletproof server in a country that will leave the hosting provider alone. It's on the Internet anyway, who cares about the location of the server ?

In any case, good on those cops. Hopefully they will get data from those servers that will serve to bust other operations as well.

Here's that hippie, pro-privacy, pro-freedom Apple y'all so love: Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store

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Thumb Down

"will stand up to unreasonable requests by the authorities"

Yes, but only in countries where its CEO will not be arrested and tortured in a dark cell.

How courageous.

Happy fifth birthday, Windows Insiders! We'd bake a cake, but it might explode without warning

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"cut down on the borkage"

Maybe, maybe not. More borkage will incite more businesses to move to Linux, maybe. I wonder what proportion of new small businesses are not under the Redmond influence. Surely young entrepreneurs are not all afraid of living a Windows-free life ?

Have you been Thomas Crooked? Watch out for cybercrims slinging holiday-themed fakes

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"block access to any domain less than a month old"

Interesting idea. Could someone please tell me how to configure that in my hosts file ?

Astronaut Tim Peake reminds everyone about the time Excel mangled his contact list on stage at Microsoft AI event

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"once companies understand what exactly AI is"

It is a statistical analysis machine, not intelligent in any way. It's just capable of applying statistical rules over a vast dataset.

There is zero chance that that will become sentient any time soon.

Google will not donate Knative framework 'to any foundation for the foreseeable future'

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Corporate Behemoth Eyes Pie, Takes It

Typical of billion-dollar behemoths, Google has a good thing going with Kubernetes and its stance is to make all the money, so get people hooked on the product and reserve the means to develop on it to only paying customers, thereby adding yet another revenue stream to fill its coffers.

It's an excellent decision - for Google.

Hate Verilog? Detest VHDL? You're not the only one. Xilinx rolls out easier-to-use free FPGA programming tools after developer outcry

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I would think that it is still very much a fatal flaw to need to reboot something during a fighter airplane takeoff.

vBulletin zero-day KOs Comodo user forums – that's 245,000 accounts at risk of compromise

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Well the fact remains that, come Monday morning, the change management process was put on the fast track, the forum was shut down and the site was patched. So that could have happened before they got hacked.

Former! Yahoo! engineer! admits! to! hacking! user! emails! for! smutty! snaps!

Pascal Monett Silver badge

And how did he get caught ?

Some unusual activity was dicovered, and then what ? How did Yahoo! find out what happened and how did the finger get pointed to him ?

This is El Reg, I was expecting a rundown of what happened, not just a commentary on legal proceedings.

Spin doctors: UPS gets permission to expand drone delivery fleet in the US

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"move items [..] faster than a human runner could manage"

So, if I understand correctly, right now large hospitals employ people to run around carrying stuff that is needed ? Funny, I've been to a few hospitals in my lifetime and I don't remember seeing employees running around carrying something.

Nominet continues milking .uk registry cash cow with 4 per cent price rise for... what exactly?

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Not-for-profit, right ?

No, it's not for profit, but it's all for money.

Is there a legal way to force it to change status, and what must be done in order for that to happen ?

EU's top court says tracking cookies require actual consent before scarfing down user data

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Sometimes work forces you to go to a given website. The Internet is not only used for leisure.

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That was nice

So, what about all those sites that put up a message about cookies and the only option is "I understand" (or words to that effect) ?

In that situation I am not offered a choice, I can only accept cookies. That is not informed consent either.

Jamf emits mystery security fix for Pro macOS, iOS wrangler, keeps admins in dark by censoring chatter

Pascal Monett Silver badge
Facepalm

How is it possible

In this day and age, how can a company possibly not be aware of how to properly handle a patch. Trying to hide the issue and refusing to publish details of the flaw, really ?

There are still companies that try to do that and think they will get away with it ?

Sheesh.

HMRC 'disciplined' almost 100 employees for computer misuse over 24 months

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"had already received a final written warning for computer misuse"

Um, so how many "final" written warnings before something actually final happens ?

Because if they already got a final warning last year, and another one this year, what's to keep them from getting another one next year ?

Or is it just final in the sense that they won't be getting another one in that year ?

You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals, so let's watch for tech sales VAT weirdness through the channel

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An interesting read

However, I cannot understand that someone agrees to move product without being able to inspect it in any way and not know that they are part of something shady. If it's legal, it is transparent, and I have the duty to ensure that the product is in good shape and has not degraded in any way, or does not risk degrading.

To do my duty, I am responsible for the product while it is in my care and I must be able to have eyes on it. If that is not part of the deal, then I am not going to take part.

In 21st-century tech dystopia, smart TV watches you, warns Princeton privacy prof

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Roku now makes more from "platform", which is mostly advertising, than player revenue

The mathematical consequence of that is that Roku is now an ad agency that uses players as an excuse to get revenue. You never pay attention to your excuses, you only pay attention to what matters, and for Roku, what matters is the ad agencies.

Roku is now off of my list of acceptable purchases.

A new US-UK data agreement is worrisome but it won’t give access to encrypted comms

Pascal Monett Silver badge

"it won’t give access to encrypted comms"

Well duh, they're encrypted.

I think that law enforcement should totally be able to obtain messages exchanged between suspects, especially in cases like poor little Lucy, but if those messages are encrypted then the law will just have to find the means to decrypt them.

No backdoors.

Brighton perv cops community service for 'hacking' women's Facebook accounts

Pascal Monett Silver badge

Allow me disagree, I do not feel that this is overboard. He 'hacked' the accounts to get to pics of scantily-clad women, that is clearly sexual in nature.

It is also tremendously stupid because the Internet is chock full of pics of women in undies that he could have accessed for free and very legally.

That said, I do have to agree that storing your pics on FaceBook and setting them to Private is very wrong. No one should consider FaceBook, of all things, to be a backup of any kind although, now that I think about it, I never have heard about FaceBook losing data. Hmm.

600 armed German cops storm Cyberbunker hosting biz on illegal darknet market claims

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Re: they'd just have high levels of knife crime

I don't think so. Using a gun is impersonal, using a knife is very much up close and personal. Plus you might get blood on yourself.

But I do agree that the societal guardrails we have thanks to welfare and social care are certainly what keeps the pot from boiling over.

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

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Agreed

They'll be all nice and inclusive with the community, but say something the moderators don't like and you're called names like in kindergarden before being booted from such a nice, inclusive community.

What bollocks.

Pascal Monett Silver badge

And I am right with it. Natural language is not programming, it has to remain natural. It's already difficult enough to have people use accents properly. This dotting bullshit will not take.

Planes, boats and autocrats: US Treasury Dept. slaps more sanctions on accused Russian troll funder

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Go

Oh really ?

"we will use our authorities against anyone seeking to undermine our processes and subversively influence voters"

Check the Oval Office. You have a prime suspect right there.

You can't miss him, he's the only one who is orange.