Posts by Pascal Monett

"Nominet’s board has dug in and effectively dared their own members to force them out"

Challenge accepted !

Quash those cockroaches once and for all. And make sure they can never be elected/appointed to such a position ever again.

Another win for GDPR

My am I happy to live in the EU these days. Between Max Shrems and the European Court of Justice, there's no better place for a lover of privacy and Democracy.

Those multinational behemoths will bow to the Will of the People.

Some day.

Translation

Infosys will be massively hiring inexperienced youngsters who will learn on the job.

The 130 new customers will undoubtedly be overjoyed.

Ah, warez

The good old days. The dawn of the New Information Highway, with plenty of people who wanted to show off their skills and make sure that you could run Settlers 2 or Battlefield Vietnam without needing to have the disk in the optical reader.

Bless them. They made my gaming life easier - without depriving authors of their revenue. Yes, I still have my Settlers 2 install CD. And Battlefield Vietnam, and about 600 others. I even bought two Battlefield 2 games because I played it so much that my first gamedisk shattered in the player. So much for my right to a license - in a normal world, I would have sent the pieces back and got a new DVD - because I only have license, right ? My license does not expire with the death of the disk.

So yeah, warez used to be good, until the crooks understood that they could distribute their version of a CD/DVD crack and include a nasty little package with it. It really didn't take all that long for the despicables to catch on.

Nowadays, warez is synonymous with malware. Thankfully, games no longer need to have a bloody plastic disc in a reader. Unfortunately, they do need to phone home every few minutes.

Progress ?

"updates to protect against new vulnerabilities in on-premise Exchange Servers"

How come there are always "new vulnerabilities" when it comes to Exchange ?

Frankly, it starting to look like Exchange is the new Flash.

"GitHub also has its own Secrets API"

Okay. For the past two decades I have been working with RSA encryption and I have repeatedly been told that knowing how encryption works does not mean you know how to decrypt a specific set of data.

Despite the NSA, I do still hold that to be true, so, instead of everybody creating their own Secrets API, I think the community would be better served by an official, open-source Specrets API. One that even the NSA can't break into.

Sorry, I'm not intelligent enough to write it myself - not to mention that it needs community adoption - but I'm guesssing that until we do have such a globally-accepting, publicly-reviewed tool in place, all we're going to get is different solutions who all base their efficiency on the words "highly unlikely".

And that is not enough.

How long can a MEV function ?

No word on that. Apparently, if it's in chunks of five years, it should at least be able to function ten years, otherwise it wouldn't be very good for servicing multiple satellites.

But I'd like to have more information on that. The wiki page hardly mentions any technical specs at all, and Grummans' site is only a polished marketing piece.

Could anyone get some cold, hard numbers on this thing ?

"[he] did not explicitly say why he decided to leave"

Of course not. One needs to demonstrate loyalty and discretion if one wants to stay part of the team and remain a high-flyer.

Blurting out the truth would be sure-fire way of not ever getting that level of position any more.

The future is FOSS

End of argument.

What ?

The day after the inauguration and there's already a major issue ending in a shutdown ?

That didn't take long.

Iran should look into thorium reactors. If it's really for power, a thorium reactor would not create nearly as much tension.

So, the service is free, and a Pro plan is being thought of

And you don't have ads, or tracking.

VC money is not going to carry you to success, guys. You need to monetize this or you will die. 10GB free is too much, 1GB free is enough and will incite the people who need this to splurge on a paid plan.

"A [..] facial recognition system therefore makes sense"

Well, at least they won't have any white bias in the data. Maybe they'll even have found a way to make the system accurate, contrary to the failures in the US and UK.

If that is the case, then India could be the first country to export an actual facial recognition system worth the name.

"convenient alternatives to self-hosting"

Am I glad that I don't work in the kind of environment that thinks that self-hosting is anathema.

It may work for some, but I have been self-hosting my data for over two decades and I have had no problem. That does not incite me to indulge in handing over my data to some faceless virtual hosting facility.

All the stories I hear about burning datacenters, entire swaths of hosted servers wiped by some "event", and the many, many stories about pilfered user data really do not make me think "hey, I just might try out that cloud stuff everyone is talking about".

"vendor agnostic and free from lock-in"

The advantage of the free software movement is that, once the basic list of requirements are set up, things can be added under public scrutiny and the software can evolve according to the needs of the users, not the budgets of the providers.

Free Software is the death knell of closed voting machines, whose controller nobody knows. It is the end of Windows (yeah, okay, not anytime soon, but still), an OS that is decided by a company that thinks it knows better than you what you need. At some point in time, it will even make IoT reliable and secure (not holding my breath either).

Closed, proprietary software is dead, it just doesn't know it yet.

"applying [ML] and [AI] (and their predecessors) to the field of satellite imagery"

Then it is perfectly logical that Borkzilla enters the field now, a decade after everyone else.

It's SOP, you see.

Astronomers have not waited on Borkzilla to wake up to their needs. This is just another soon-to-be-abandoned project.

"COMPUTEX will now revert to a virtual format"

As was inevitable even in December. But don't owrry, governments are forcing people to get untested vaccines so, by next December, everyone will either be vaccinated or dead and everything will be business as usual.

Well, for the businesses and business owners that survived the confinements, that is.

Can we get a Reaper icon ?

Ah, tax laws

Instead of changing the rate at which corporations are taxed, it might be simpler to change the rules that allow them deductions on their tax bill.

I'm guessing that would bring in a few billion.

It was 3.5 million kilometers away

And an Earth-based telescope allowed boffins to determine that it has talcum powder on the surface. The image quality, power and precision to establish that is simply staggering. Well done.

No so well done for the wiki page though, it doesn't mention the Subaru telescope at all.