Posts by Pascal Monett

"It is possible to pay a fixed, one-time fee to activate a monthly option permanently"

Yes, it's called buying the car.

If I buy a car, I expect all of it to work for the price I pay.

The only thing I am willing to pay for after the purchase of the vehicle is the yearly update of the GPS data.

And that is final.

Lightning strikes

No matter how advanced we think our technology is, lightning will always be able to surprise us.

"a review of how and whether messaging services should be used for government business practices"

This is just preparing the road to another trough where billions will be spent for a "government-secure messaging system" which will never actually see the light of day.

Mark my words.

"no-one should assume their level of technical expertise exempts them from risk"

I'm not sure I totally agree with that statement.

If your level of expertise is click-on-any-attachment-or-link-regardless-of-if-you-know-the-sender-or-not, then yeah, you're at risk.

But if your level of expertise is I-don't-know-you-and-I-will-not-click-that, then you're pretty much immune to that risk.

"things are blaming down"

Well I guess that's a good thing, but it's no surprise that PC are on the decline. I've said it before and I'll say it again, COVID made a lot of people buy computers, they won't be needing another one before a decade.

If you really think 2022 will reproduce the figures of 2020, buckle up, you've got a long wait ahead.

Borkzilla has never understood search

30 years on and Windows Search is still as slow as it was before Y2K.

One wonders what Borkzilla is employing all those programmers for.

Oh, yeah, making useless interface changes and creating new emojis nobody asked for.

You want real, efficient search ? Try Everything.

That is a search tool. It returns results as you type, like a proper program should given the power of today's computers.

"Dawn Raid Manual"

If you work in a company that has that kind of manual, you urgently need to find a job somewhere else.

Uber is the sewer of the business world.

"We believe that was both legal and the right thing to do"

Of course you do.

The Court will see if you were right.

Because you didn't ask a lawyer beforehand.

"We need to find more people that have a passion for teaching"

Well, we're talking university here, so students are prone to paying attention and not clown around, but it would probably be easier to find teachers if the levels before University had competent teachers and sufficient material and supplies to do the job properly.

A passion for teaching ? Kids growing up in the US are not given the environment to foster that kind of ideal.

"nothing has changed"

Of course not. Why slave and toil away when someone is promising you easy riches ?

A new one is born every minute, as they say, and educating them all on the facts of life is well nigh impossible.

Because "there is no such thing as a free lunch" means you actually have to work to get by, and nobody likes that.

Especially when you see TV/YouTube celebrities living large while producing nothing of value to society.

Typical Borkzilla

Because it's not your computer anymore.

Companies these days have the attention span of goldfish. Oh, a new idea ! Let's implement without thinking about its impact !

And we need to implement agile, because that means we're professionals !

Our society has completely lost the notion of stability and continuity.

I don't see that changing any time soon.

"if this feeds unfairly into business decisions made by the company's retail tentacle"

I'm going to go waaayy out on a limb here and say : it probably does.

I know of no large, multibillion multinational that actually tries respecting the law before it is crammed down its throat via lawsuit.

So they've finally found another angle

Seems that backdooring encryption has finally been dropped in the hallowed corridors of power.

So now they just make a law to slap a fine on companies that don't subvert encryption. That's not backdooring, right ? So you can't complain anymore.

Gotta hand it to 'em, they're persistent on this issue.

Too bad they couldn't more persistent on some other things, like the economy.

"painting China as a threat with false accusations"

There's a laundry list of Chinese nationals caught stealing secrets red-handed that says that those accusations are not entirely false.

Ask for explanations is the best you can do ?

How about "If you don't send me a proper invoice, I'm terminating my contract" ?

Oh, you can't because they've got you by the balls.

What a shame.

"Previous features may 'disappear' "

Yeah, so may working features that were previously there.

"We're not planning to shut any operations"

Yet.

Operations may be shut, but it won't be planned - promise.

"The stage is therefore set for a full trial"

And there will be many, many eyes following that trial.

"cybersecurity is a fundamentally human problem"

Indeed.

And I have the feeling that a good step would be a national campaign to tell people to not open attachments from people they don't know.

Apparently, that would cut hacker success by 90%.

So, quantum is basically the new fusion

Different types of qubits, you need millions to actually do anything but the best we can do is 5000 and we still don't know how to program them.

177 days to decrypt with 13 thousand qubits ?

I thought this stuff was supposed to be almost instantaneous.

"the US would lose its leverage"

The mistake is thinking that you have leverage.

Xi Pooh couldn't care less about your leverage.

When you're importing 99% of what you use, you have no leverage.

"where it hopes to save an estimated $400 million annually"

So, despite it being already openly stated that cloud does not savo you money, you expect to save not only millions, but hundreds of millions, by going to The Cloud^TM.

I await the follow-up on how you are desperately trying to waive an enormous bill of $700 million.

Good luck.

"make stuff do things it was not designed to do"

I disagree.

Hackers cannot make something do a thing it wasn't designed to do.

Hackers make things do something that the original maker did not intend, but included the functionality anyway and didn't think about it.

A hacker cannot make an RPi shoot a laser beam, but he can eventually reprogram it to take over the local network, and maybe access the CCTV records.

A hacker is not a wizard, he's just someone who looks at the equipment available and disregards whatever artificial constraints the maker thought he was imposing.

"a buyer is asked to perform several tasks like downloading dodgy apps"

So, the Chinese Internet users are on a fast track to learn what not to do on the Internet.

Good for them.

Ah, blockchain

So it has finally wormed its way into the minds of the those who participate in defining the Internet as we know it.

Somebody get a flamethrower, please ?