* Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

2711 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009

This witch-hunt will hurt Adobe more than Apple

ElReg!comments!Pierre
FAIL

Erm

"Did Apple add code to iPhone/iPad Safari that says "don't let Flash run"?"

When Adobe released a translator to make Flash apps run on the iThings, did Apple change the license on their SDK to explicitly ban everything originally written in a non-Apple language? Did Jobs confirm that this measure was exclusively aimed at Flash?

ElReg!comments!Pierre
FAIL

Delusion of grandeur v. 2.0

First allow me to voice my disagreement with this article's underlying assumption: Adobe's campaign is NOT directed against Apple; it's quite obviously directed against Jobs. Personnally.

Adobe and Apple love story go way back back and Adobe was not the one who broke up. Apple (as a company) did not either. Both companies slept together for the last decade, feeding on crea-type people smugness. but then Mr Jobs went all control-freak and broke the deal.

Now who will be hurt most by the break-up? Let's go back in time... remember when Macintosh was all the rage? The Apple ][ was the hackers' dream.

Then someone at Mcintosh went all power-freak, took the power off of the users and drove them in Microsoft's open arms.

Macintosh almost disappeared, and the guy, who had been instrumental in Mcintosh success, was fired. His name was Steve Jobs.

I know that most fanbois nowadays see Apple as the virgin underdog which, slowly but surely, tends to overcome the Redmond Beast. But history tells us otherwise. The RIA developpers of today are like the Apple][ hackers of yesteryears: you might not like them (I don't), they might smell funny, but alienating them is unadvisable. And, as the Apple][ hackers of lore, today's real develooppers do hate when developpment tools are forced on them. That's event the main driving force for the era's new phenomenon, OSS.

Sweet, sweet irony: it took that to make Ballmer's "developpers" dance look halway relevant.

Disclaimer: I despise Adobe, I hate MS at least as much as Apple. Also, Linus Thorvalds and Theo de Raadt are freaks. But I have to get my OS somewhere. Until I come around to developping my own lousy one, that is.

Also, as a general rule, people suck. Especially when they think they don't.

Sent from my Ben Nanonote

US Navy's plane-hurling mass driver in tech hiccup

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Infinitely more probable

If the USN ever needs the F-35B, they'll get them first and the RN will get whatever can be soldered together, whenever it's available... and will say «thank you», too.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Name

In other news:

«USS Georges Bush Jr deployed in the Persian Gulf; Iran equips speedboats with pretzel machine guns»

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

bi-polar disorder?

Red connects to red. D'uh.

F*ck you, thunders disgruntled fanboi Apple user

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Because...

Although the beginning doesn't fit very well with what I had in mind, I'll give it a spin.

... because you didn't say «Steve Jobs says»

... because there's no app for that.

... just make it fly, not that big of a deal. Sent from my iPhone.

Microsoft kills off newsgroups

ElReg!comments!Pierre

I say

I say this is rather disgraceful, indeed.

Although on second thought these are only MS-operated groups, so I don't really give a damn. It's some serious weight loss, but most of interesting hierarchies are operated privately by diehard Usenet enthusiasts anyway, so Usenet doesn't really need MS.

Vote Lib Dem, doom humanity to extinction

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Joke

Re: Full Disclosure

« The Lib Dems are the only UK political party to have consulted Lewis Page on defence policy,»

Why did you bury the best argument not to vote for them in such fine print at the bottom?

(don't complain, my alternate one-liner was 'why, was Borat not available?')

Full disclosure: as much as I disagree with you on the weapons (in my view Britain is not a nuclear power to boot, it's more a small outpost of the US nuclear power), I agree that banning nuclear leccy right now would be a huge error.

Feel.me up for grabs in dot-me domain auction

ElReg!comments!Pierre

My new blog

Colour.me

I'm sure I can get a lot of free press from El Reg with a domain name like that (color.me is already taken apparently).

Spaceship 'salad units' to farm special astro strawberries

ElReg!comments!Pierre

the space berries of doom

Forget about HAL or belly-busting aliens, I know what will decimate the astronauts on the first mission to Mars. If those are anything like earth strawberries, they will give some fruits for a couple years to tame their soon-to-be biped slaves, then they will grow rhizomes all around and colonize every single available square inch in the ship while not producing any fruits at all anymore. Or possibly just enough too keep the human slaves alive and begging. Beware the Space Strawberries of DOOOOM!

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

Why, thank you

That little comment of yours, it elicited one of the most yukky images ever in my mind.

Mine's the one with the flask of mindbleach in the pocket.

State senator eyeballs smut during abortion debate

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Funny

Funny to see how in certain parts of the world a pic of a babe in a bikini is «porn» and a «pornographic image» (cited from Sunshine State News).

I mean it kinda is, in a -prudish- way, but then a good half of the billboards and TV ads are, too. By that definition the guy would have ogled more pornography by just looking out the window.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

I don't think so

The thing with porn watching is that it often doesn't lead up to the need for an abortion. Especially porn watching on Senate ground (hopefully), even less so when you're married to Jacki (god forbid).

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Joke

About that email...

«but after talking to the Senate's top lawyer, he declined to let us see those records".»

As per recently unveiled official US policies, all his senate-related emails should be at Mike.Bennett@yahoo.com; I believe most of his password-retrieval answers are a matter of public record. Good hunt.

Disclaimer: see icon; also, you could very well just find emails about the wife and kids of the Chargers' running back instead of juicy boobalicious Senate-related pr0n. Use at your own risks.

Pirate Bay dishes up Iron Man 2 ahead of US release

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Actually people do download screeners

And then they go see it in a theatre anyway for the nice image on a big screen with good sound. Unless it is so abundantly clear from the downloade3d version that the movie is a huge steaming pile of crap. In that case they go see it _twice_.

Jobsian drones shackle gamer with 'lifetime' iPad ban

ElReg!comments!Pierre

downvotes record

«21 Downvotes (at time of writing)?!?!? That's gotta be a record man! »

Well, 90 down votes now. *that* has to be a record. Albeit a somewhat meaningless one, surely.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

You're pulling a Merkin here

Refreshing to see, for once, a UK person assuming that UK laws apply all over the globe ;-)

In lots of places across the pond (most, AFAICT), retailers do have an obligation to sell a mislabeled item at the advertised price minus a punitive compensation; it applies only to items that are not individually labeled (i. e. in supermarkets), and is indeed a way to protect customers against deliberate mislabeling (the compensation varies from place to place, and cannot exceed the value of the item, i.e. if the revised price is lower than the compensation amount they just have to give the article for free, you cannot ask for cash on top).

Voila voila.

Not that it has much to do with the present case of course.

Apple rejects crazy canuck's seal bludgeon game

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Equip flail

«GTA does *let* you do some pretty nasty things, but that isn't the *point* of the game.»

Yes it very much *is* the point. That's even the only bloody point of that game.

«iSealClub is clearly making the clubbing of seals the *point* of the game.» except that you do lose points for doing so.

There's also the small matter of whether it is more or less condemnable to kill a critter or a human being. Plenty of games have for sole purpose to squash mosquitoes or other bugs, should they be barred?

Where Apple might have a point, is that the theme of the game might be considered derogatory (against Canucks).

ElReg!comments!Pierre

PS

«Contrary to popular belief, games, movies, TV and stories *do* affect the consumer. That's the whole damned point of making them in the first place. Spielberg didn't make "Schindler's List" for shits and giggles.»

I don't quite get your point (and it seems you don't, either). Are you saying that, if released, this game would make US suburban teenagers go club baby seals on week-ends? Or that it would deter them from doing so? Are you suggesting that Spielberg made "Schindler's List" as an enticement to send jews in concentration camps? Or *not* to send them? Or to prevent others from sending them there? What would be the relevance in today's world? (by the way, philanthropic as he might seem in the flick, in real life Mr Schindler happily made wads of money off the free captive labor he "saved". Not unlike today's "kind hearts" who "save" miserable people from Africa, Easter Europe or Asia to make them work 15 hrs a days in a basement in Leyton). Or are you saying that mass-killing innocent people is bad (I might agree), and that attempting to hit a (virtual) feral beast with a (virtual) stick is at the same level (WTF)?

What if the seal killed the poor kid's parent right before? It seems that we only have half of the story there. Would it be OK then?

Would the game be acceptable if a (virtual) cop cuffed the (virtual) kid for his (virtual) attempt at poaching?

Perhaps more importantly, what would happen if I was even *more* bored than I am now?

SCO: jurors too busy Facebooking to rule on Unix claim

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

Preposterous claim

Everyone knows that the rightful owner of UNIX (and, incidentally, Linux) is Microsoft.

Ta-Dzimmm!

Beijing security know-how rules irk suppliers

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Different case how exactly?

Read again, this new guidelines will apply only for government purchases. As said by others, most countries won't even consider buying foreign kit for these uses.

San Francisco's rogue BOFH is guilty

ElReg!comments!Pierre

pretty basic security

If any of this kit was in «public» space (i.e. anywhere the cleaning has access to, for example), what you describe is pretty basic security, by no means over the top. The password recovery systems are probably the single most idiotic feature for this kind of equipment. They should always be disabled by any mean necessary (the single password recovery system anyone could need is a note in a sealed envelope inside an airtight safe, preferably one that needs 2 keys, kept by two different persons).

Protecting the security logs does make a lot of sense too. And loading configs from a remote server after power failure? Puh-leese.

No, really, all that does make a lot of sense. Of course it makes it difficult for anyone but the admin to change anything in the configuration, but guess what? That's the bloody point (and that was his job). You don't want to leave admin rights to your whole network too near to the mexican temp who empties the paper bin after hours, or to the redneck with alcohol and gambling issues who checks on the parking lot at night.

A big city's network should be locked down a tad more tightly than Aunt Mildred's PC, don't you think?

Microsoft's FUD goes mobile

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Quite simple really

Let's make a parallel:

1. Cuba and the US have a few geo-political disagreements.

2. ........

3. The US refuse to buy cuban cigars again, despite them being the best.

Do you understand point 2 a bit better now?

Stick a fork in floppies - they're done

ElReg!comments!Pierre

I told you so

"Steve Jobs gets to say "I told you so." "

So basically you're saying that we will have to endure flash as the only RIA platform for another 10 years or so, and that it might be truly obsolete within the next century, if we're lucky. Hardly reassuring.

Also, joke appart, the iMac's lack of floppy drive (or any external drive, for that matter) was not a wonderful insight: everyone knew floppies were ultimately doomed, it was yet another gratuitous functionality withdrawal. I can sell boxes today with no keyboard, no standard USB, no SD card reader, no nuthin; my device might be unusable as is, if the marketting dept does its job in 20 years I'll be a visionary wizz. as keyboards, USB, mice and all will be things of the past. Wait, such an unusable brick does exist already. I guess I will have to "invent" a device with no input or output methods at all. Screens (especially the "touch" variety) are so last millennium. Granted, my device won't be usable at all, but in 50 years time it will be hailed as a piece of visionary anticipation.

PGP co-founder takes OS security job with Apple

ElReg!comments!Pierre

to be fair...

... Linux security guys first looked at what MULTIX and VMS did. Whether they improved on these models or just mitigated structural issues is open to discussion (most *BSD people, for example, would tell you that the Linux security model sucks moose balls. Most VMS people would probably not even utter the words "Linux" and "security" in the same sentence without washing their mouth with black soap immediately afterwards. But IT is all about making exactly the right amount of compromise. Or so I've been told.).

Good news for the Church of Jobs anyway. With the usual reservation: you can have all the security experts you want, it won't help you the least if their choices are overridden by the marketting dept. (see MS history for proof).

Reverse-engineering artist busts face detection tech

ElReg!comments!Pierre

beard or not beard?

«Paris cos her beard would be very appropriate for Nixon's face...»

Not to mention that he would look silly with a small patch of hair on the tip of the nose.

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

So all that time...

... American football players have just been trying to avoid face-recognition tech.

Explains a lot really. It wasn't me ref, look at the face-recog logs!

Apple leaves profits on table for 'huge' iPad future

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Flame

iPad ShmiPad

«iPad, netbook - it's sort of a hundred to zero." And he wasn't done there. "I can't think of a single thing the netbook does well. And iPad does so many things very, very well that I'm already personally addicted to mine and couldn't live without it."»

That's very nice. I wonder how I could, say, work on my Python (ipython with scipy and matplotlib) and Matlab (OK, Octave, but still) data analysis, while checking my mail, browsing the web and posting comments on El Reg. All at the same time. While listening to my drm-free music. On an iPad?

Sent from my ASUS EEEPC 900 netbook.

100 to 0: not the Apple way.

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

"I can't think of a single thing the netbook does well."

Well, I can't think of a single thing the iPad does. Let alone well.

Rogue admin waits for verdict

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Unhappy

For once...

Somebody please think of the Childs

Grammar? Wat?

Joke aside, sad to see a sysadmin facing jail for doing his job properly.

Jobs to iPad skeptic: 'Are you nuts?'

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

Nuts? Could be worst.

I heard some people are actually *buying* the thing.

Wii Fit fall woman turns into nympho

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

That supposed to be a deterrent?

Cause it sure sounds kinky.

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Paris Hilton

Doing it wrong

«getting your hair cut»

If long hair hinders your horizontal tango abilities, you're doing it wrong.

Think you can outdo the political mob?

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Why not?

The post is required, and must contain letters.

MS kernel patch skirts infected machines

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Pint

Beer time at last!

Cheers. You apparently got ahead already but I do plan to catch up.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

What's your point?

«Scenario A was what we had in Feb, and everyone blamed MS then.»

So what if a couple overexcited, erm, respectable-though-not-very-IT-literate MS customers flamed their fave vendor back then? Anything is better than the «there might be something terribly wrong with your machine but carry on as usual» approach. Thanks to the collusion between Intel and MS (and Apple?), as well as Best Buy /et al./, most home and small biz users have *massively* overpowered machines. When you have a top-of-the line 8-cores CPU and 4Gigs of RAM on a machine you only use for web browsing, email and the occasional Word document, you're not likely to notice any performance hit from a rootkited spam engine that spews nastiness all day long. If the software vendors are doing everything they can to make life with malware as comfy as possible, why the heck would the average tech-illiterate punter go out of his way to sanitize his/her machine?

ElReg!comments!Pierre

How about scenario D?

«User with virus attempts to install patch, thanks to MS gets the following incredibly clear message:

""Your computer might not be compatible with Microsoft Security Update MS10-015. Proceeding with installation of the update could prevent your system from starting successfully. For additional information please visit http://www.microsoft.com/security/updates/015." "»

User is used to getting strange error messages, can't be arsed to check the related URL (this minesweeper won't solve itself) and -as usual- just clicks OK and forgets about it. User never gets patched and is infected forever.

Police send Reg hack CRB check database

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Thumb Down

Not an honest mistake.

And the cop who actually sent the email is not responsible, either.

«Instead, if you really want to spend some money, train these people. Use the person who made the mistake, and do something positive with it. That's better than Yet-another-kneejerk-reaction which won't address the real issue»

No. That is so incredibly wrong. Instead, you want to use some of the money to design a system that cannot dump all of it's data to random email adresses. Especially not in unencrypted form (not talking password here, real encryption.). Not that the encryption thing would be very important anyway if the data handling was done properly (i.e. NOT relying on junior staff not hitting the wrong button by mistake).

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Not public record

«The info "leaked" is already a matter of Public Record...»

So I believe your name, adress, current and prospective occupations are regularly published in your local rag? As well as that time when you got lectured by the plods for roving in the streets while drunk? And that time when they suspected you of being a pedorrist for taking pics in public space, and confiscated your camera? And that time when they questioned you as part of this rape case only to discover that you were abroad at the time? You don't need to be convicted (or even seriously suspected) of any misdeed to have a non-clean CRB check.

ElReg!comments!Pierre
FAIL

No. Again.

There is only need for one single point:

1) why is the database system allowed to spew out 10 000 + _complete records_ ?

Because the system is fucked up and need to be redesigned, preferably from scratch. End of.

The email client has nothing to do with it, nor has the poor plod who hit "send". They could have *mitigated* the issue but given the type of data -and the wide availability of solutions designed precisely for this kind of things- they should NOT have to do any mitigation in the first place. Good practice data handling by base-level plods should be _at most_ a redundant 3rd-line security feature, not the only bloody one.

System is a clusterfuck of FAIL.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

No.

«Today I read that someone has screwed up and the senior decision makers are red-faced. Therefore, it is likely that sensitive data is safer today than it was yesterday.»

Wrong assumptions lead to wrong deductions.

1) You assume that they care and thus are going to do something about it. WRONG. They ignored the issue before ("won't happen to us") and they will most likely continue ignoring it ("can't happen twice")

2) You assume that they have the technical ability and the cash to plug the hole. WRONG. This kind of incident prove that the system is fundamentally flawed. Even if they did actually want to fix the system It would take a complete audit and redesign. Which they probably don't know how to do, and they couldn't afford to anyway.

Only thing that will happen will be a couple memos reminding everyone to check their emails' recipients list twice, and that's it.

New road made from pigsh*t in Missouri

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

fairly logical use

as most existing roads in Missouri are shit already.

Argentinian jailbreakers dress in sheep's clothing

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

Large, one eyed and not interested in ovines...

... Cyclops: Not From Wales (TM)

Apple in Brazilian iPad shocker

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

Re :o

"Glorified PDA? Dude.... You're going to get SO flamed."

And sued for libel. By PDA makers.

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

The strange case of the software pillow

"So I could trademark Micro-Soft pillows without getting sued by the beast of redmond"

I wouldn't be so sure. There is significant overlap with Vista.

RSA says it fathered orphan credential in Firefox, Mac OS

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Thank you Brett

Thank you for this dash of sanity! I admit that «thousands» of certificates was an exaggeration but you got my point. A CA certificate should be a trust pact between the end user and the CA; though I trust most of my software vendors to develop good software, I don't really trust them to «sign» these «trust pacts» in my place and select my points of entry in the famed «web of trust» (bleuargh).

Just look at the default list of certificate in Firefox: maybe not thousands, but most definitely over a hundred CA certificates (there are almost 20 just for Verisign!), most of which none of my users will come across, ever. That's as many potential security breaches.

ElReg!comments!Pierre

How many certificate do we need?

Well, we certainly do not need any by default. I understand that the practice is for software vendors to accept hundred if not thousands of CA certificate by default to make things easy-peasy for the tech-illiterate crowd, but that rather defeats the very purpose of such certificates. I for one refuse everything by default and add the certificates manually as needed (and that of course include those for my own CAs, most of which are not validated by Verisign or any crook of the ilk).

Cash-strapped trolley dollies in nude calendar protest

ElReg!comments!Pierre
Coat

It's the other way round Shirley

Regarding who's having a free ride in whose cockpit, I would have put things the other way round. But my grasp on the Queen's English is not perfect.

Apple drops HTML from iPhone and iPad

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Can do better

You had me going until the middle of the headline. Seriously guys. That was not too subtle was it? Nice article nonetheless.

iPad includes hyberbole generator, first reviews show

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Designer chair

«The same nerds that thought text interface was best when GUIs came out»

Ha but when serious work is to be done (yes, including image fiddling), text interface is STILL best indeed, m'lud.

«the paradigm shift of the iPhone/iPad»

Paradigm shift, as in «e-mail without local storage», «no-tabs browser», «no background apps», and at the time «no cut'n paste». You're right that IS a paradigm shift. Not necessarily in the direction you seem to imply, though.

The way I see it Apple gadgetware (i-Pod -Pad -Phone) is a lot like designer furniture: that chair is very expensive and not really comfortable to sit on, but that's not what you bought it for. If you wanted a cheap comfy chair you'd go to Ikea or the like. No, you bought your designer chair because you like the look of it, and it makes you feel «different». The only difference with Apple gadgets is that _everyone_ seems to own one of those for some reason. Feels a bit like seeing 300 million hipster all wearing the same «I am different» T-shirt.