Posts by Pascal Monett

"73% of users worldwide use their Google or Facebook accounts to log into other apps"

Well that's a big, fat single point of entry if ever I saw one.

Of course, I've been working in IT for more than a quarter of a century. I have no problem managing (checks list) around 200 passwords. I never use the same password twice, nor the same login.

But I know what I'm doing. People who view the Internet as their own personal shopping space, and their computing device as an enabler, those people simply cannot imagine everything that goes on behind and likely wouldn't understand if you explained it to them. It's a shopping cart, what's the problem ? That is their point of view, and I'm not going to blame them.

Maybe, just maybe, all this data sharing and consumer pressure just might end up in creating a world where everyone, not just IT professionals, have the means to really manage where their data is going and who can use it.

Maybe.

Why leave implementation to the vendors ?

It would seem that a proper encryption scheme should also have a default implementation function/procedure.

Encryption is difficult. Even if you (like me) have no idea how difficult it actually is, there's largely enough history to demonstrate that fact.

So don't leave it up to the vendors. If you create an encryption scheme, give a default, secure, functional scheme that vendors can rely on.

That way, if they go their own route and screw up, it's entirely their own fault, whereas here you kinda built the scaffold for them to hang themselves.

Interesting point

The USA could not simulatenously handle Putin and Xi.

Even though aircraft carriers and Green Berets are not going to be in the same places.

Once upon a time the USA handled the Atlantic and the Pacific fronts simultaneously.

What a fall from grace.

"$1.9bn of revenue [..] produced $17m of surplus"

Wow, that's a lot of work for not much return.

As a freelance, if I had almost $2 billion in revenue, I could shut my company down even after income tax (which would be at least $380 million) and there would be plenty enough left for my family for generations (well, until the 3rd one at least).

"We could have done better if we would have had supply at the level of our demand."

So, what are you going to do about it ?

Might be time to think about having a bit of stock again.

"It installs to a FAT32 partition"

Um, idle question : what HDD still has little enough space to be completely formatted in FAT32 ?

I don't think there are any. So, if using an HDD, you're partitioning it into the ridiculously small FAT32-sized partition, then partitioning the rest in NTFS (or whatever floats your boat).

"Universities across Scotland are clubbing together"

This is interesting. Given the atrocious history of ERP projects I have been reading recently, I am really curious : what makes them think that grouping universities is going to make it work better ?

Or maybe it will, since there will be less manglement of the project and it will be managed by a group that wants the whole thing to actually work instead of being managed by one guy who just wants a star on his CV, or a group of psychotics who view this as an empire building exercise (by excluding all other empires, of course).

So, I'm curious.

I just love the idea

A criminal complaining that the police used malware to catch him.

Heh, heh.

"we condemn in the strongest possible terms any malicious use of our products."

Even though we have created a product that specifically allows for stalking without any serious safeguards.

Shame on you for taking advantage of it.

Come on Apple, you goofed. Own up to it, retire the product and think of a better version.

Okay, I have a question

With all these multi-terabyte per second connections coming in from all over the world, what is the impact on the backend in Europe ?

100 TB here, 100TB there, pretty soon you've got petabytes of capacity at your doorstep.

Does the EU have a global backend measured in petabytes ?

One question : how do you track a VPN connection ?

I mean, legally, of course. I live in France. Let's say I use a VPN to connect to Switzerland, then another one to connect to India, then I do my business.

The EU has no right to check my Switzerland VPN, nor does India. India can well find out that there is a Swiss IP behind my India VPN connection, but the trail stops there unless India makes an official enquiry.

I mean, we're not in GoldenEye territory here where the Indian government is going to have the image of the world map and a red line going from India to Switzerland to France, are we ? They still have to do something in Switzerland to find out that there is another connection from France, right ? And that something is illegal if India doesn't show a warrant, right ?

Bold vision

It is clearly a bold stance.

Unfortunately, it's not because you are going to be able to stack chips on top of one another that, all of a sudden, you're going to become a graphics king.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are very capable people working at Intel, that I will not dispute. But there are also very capable people working at Nvidia, and Nvidia has twenty years of experience in high-end graphics. Intel ? Not so much.

So I'm glad that you've set the bar to high expectations. Unfortunately, I have never counted on Intel to power my gaming sessions, and I have no reason to think that that is going to change any time soon.

I am willing to be pleasantly surprised, though.

"Nvidia has a 20-year architectural license from Arm"

So the point of acquiring Arm was ?

As much as I like my Nvidia graphics card, I have to admit that Nvidia is monopolistic. It is following the likes of Apple, Google and Borkzilla in stifling competition as much as it can.

Nvidia has used almost every dirty trick in the book, from massaging benchmark figures to disparaging AMD products outright.

If Nvidia had taken Arm into its purview, I think it would have had catastrophic consequences in the long run, so I'm quite happy that it did not happen.

"the CMA misdirected itself [..] and exercised its jurisdiction in breach of international law"

What international law, pray tell ?

Which international law does Facebook think means it has the right to purchase any company it wants ?

If I'm not mistaken, Nvidia has just been prevented from realizing a $66 billion merger with Arm. Does The Zuck really imagine his $400 million merger is more important ?

Of course not. It's just that, as a complete human failure, he cannot compute when he hears "no".