Posts by Pascal Monett

Trying and failing ?

Okay, I'll accept your comment.

Now, if I tell you that it is that very same IT manager who refused me access to the dev server, what does it become ?

Maintenance is by far the biggest problem in software.

When you have created something remarkable, people will remember you.

If you spend 20 years keeping it up to date, that's a lot less likely.

It takes balls of steel to accept that.

Well yes, but phreaking gave one person one international call.

It did not bring down thousands of data centers.

The scale is not the same.

I absolutely agree on who is responsible for Tor, but intelligence agencies were absolutely a part of it.

The quote I refer to is this :

"The core principle of Tor, Onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect U.S. intelligence communications online. "

The CIA and the NSA have their hands in this, make no mistake.

As for the bridge, I'm sorry but that it is traditional Internet-speak :).

As for your feathers, are they frozen ?

Re: professional coding

Indeed.

A true professional programmer is not just a guy who knows how to code, it is a person who knows what to do in a given environment with respect to data security and operational procedures.

And now GDPR.

One day, professional programmers will be held to the same standards as engineers.

And that will be a Good Thing (TM).

Re: Teaching collaboration

I like the idea, but schools do not teach basic human politeness, they teach technical expertise.

That may be something to change in the future.

Re: Seems pretty obvious

As far as I can tell, a forwarded message is a new message.

Entirely new, with content copied from a given message, of course, but there is otherwise no link to the original message that has been forwarded.

So receiving an encrypted message that only you can read is one thing. Forwarding that message to someone else creates a new message with a different encryption value to the new recipient.

If the writer of the original message somehow gets a copy of the forwarded message, he should not be able to read it because he is not the recipient.

Unless, obviously, the recipient of the forwarded message forwards it to him.

Am I being clear ?

Re: Death by laziness

It's worse than that. The HR department cannot possibly assess what they don't know, and the only thing they do know is how to file CVs and personnel records.

You think an HR drone knows anything about programming ? Or automotive engineering ?

They don't. So they are given bullet points to check off, and it's a damn sight easier to check [Computer Science Degree] than it is to actually ask the years of experience, the successes and failures, and get a general idea of the actual competence of the candidate.

HR is basically the last place you want to go to evaluate a candidate. Get one of the experienced people who actually work in the department and know exactly the profile they need, bring him/her in to evaluate the candidate and you'll have a much better indicator of if or not that person can fill the position.

"You just need to identify which bits of the filesystem and registry they are trying to write to and adjust permissions as required "

Well yeah, sure, everyone knows how to do that, right ? What's the problem ?

</sarc>

The problem is that the vast majority of PC users are people who's job is not sysadmin, and their priorities are elsewhere. To them, the PC is a tool, and they just want to be able to do what it is they want to do.

The Registry ? They might have heard the name, but they're not interested.

So Admin access because otherwise either they go crazy, or the poor helpdesk guy (be it family or professional) is tied up over the phone all the damn day long.

Re: Distractions

Person of Interest - it's not a fiction, it's a documentary before its time.

Re: He's never heard...

Well he's going to be getting an earful now, I'd wager.

And rightly so.

It may not be a criminal offense, but he had no authority to publish data concerning the private lives of over 100K people, whether or not he likes whatever activity he thinks they have.

I inherited two rifles from my late father-in-law. I never have wanted a firearm at home, now I have two. Is he going to lump me in with the hunters he very visibly doesn't like ?

I don't see that he's making any effort to make a difference. 5-year-old data doesn't phase him one bit. Collateral damage is obviously not his problem.

In short, he's a terrorist.

Jail the fucker.

How am I contradicting myself ?

Do you forget that, in the USA, if a company gets a National Security Letter it must comply ? And without telling anyone.

How is that different from China ?

It's not because we all agree that China is a dictatorship that the private sector is vastly different.

Oh no.

He had those before.

What I would like to know, though, is what exactly is his cocaine budget ? It's funny how I have no problem imagining Al Pacino pulling a stunt like that.

Re: Staples insists that these algorithms don't have racial biases baked into them

It's not because you don't know what they are that there are no biases in the code.

Re: Ohhh Yesss

It's always better to own up to one's mistakes, that way you don't get a reputation of the guy who breaks everything and lets others take the blame.

Very true, but don't forget the rash of facial recognition that is currently sweeping the USA.

Well it can always be turned off . . .

Re: ...and in other news

Sorry, but a mobile phone is not at all a pair of earbuds.

To be able to make or receive a call, your location must be known at the very least by the nearest mast. That is part of the bleeding obvious in life.

To learn that you can be tracked by earbuds is something else entirely. Unexpected, and unwelcome.

Unfortunately, it is not entirely surprising.