Posts by Scotech

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

I always wondered why there was never an open-source equivalent to MS Access. It's dire, and in its time it was just as abused as Excel 'databases', but it did make sense to the average spreadsheetDB user. It seems like it ought to be pretty easy to achieve these days. Of course, everything is cloudy nowadays, and MS are trying to pretend Access never existed, but there's still plenty of use-cases I can think of for a simple, no frills, forms-over-data utility that's compact, self-contained and friendly enough for the average spreadsheet user to just pick up and run with.

Having things under your jurisdiction is a key metric of sovereignty, so yeah, it demonstrably would result in 'more sovereignty' if the developers and all development activity took place within the EU. It's not a dumb play, and if it also happens to increase competition in the office productivity software space, that's not a bad thing - the dead wood will get cleared out in the end. It's a shame if someone's business or pet project dies as a result of that, but that's just free market economics at play, and just simply being open source or having an ideological bent doesn't exempt you from that. If your product is good, it'll survive, maybe even thrive.

Re: Forking Hell...

I wonder what's the relevance of file formats, open or proprietary, in the context of cloud-based collaboration suites? At least, on the user-visible side of things?

Naff all, except for among crackpots like us lot :)

The only thing that'll ever move the needle on this is if a major government decided to fully adopt ODF, and require all suppliers and contractors to as well. And I just don't see it happening. For all practical purposes, OOXML is just as open a standard - at least in every way an average business or government is likely to care about.

Re: Pretty sure that

Or it's just considered bad to be trying to pitch ideology at someone who neither knows nor cares about file formats beyond just wanting to get their work done, except now their software is stopping them until they declare that they truly are a heretic who can't be saved? Telling the user they're wrong is a bad way to do it. Just ask neutrally on first run, default to what most users are likely to want (whether you agree with their choice or not), and respect their choice, maybe even just put in a small message in the save window that unobtrusively explains why MS formats are bad whenever saving in that format, giving them a littlenudge, just without getting in the user's way. Of course, LO doesn't really want the users who'd pick MS Office format and move on, and that's the real rub here. They don't want to replace MS, they want to cater to a tiny pool of people who care about 'Libre' principles. Which is fine - but you can't have it both ways. If you want to specifically cater to a niche, you can't then complain that the majority don't want to come join you.

I use LO and ODF file formats myself, BTW - I just don't get evangelical about it, and I send documents to others in the standard MS formats because realistically, I'm the crank using a niche product, and they're the mainstream who are almost certainly going to be opening it in MS Office.

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

Re: Here's where IT "pros" fall over yet again...

Exactly - just because there's still a niche market for something, doesn't mean it's going to stick around for mainstream hardware. Liam gave plenty of examples of this happening in the past. Startech's whole business model revolves around this process, after all - they specialise in catering to this niche market, much like Radioshack and Maplin used to.

There's the option of specialised hardware for this - we're already seeing this with the rise of compute modules in industrial applications. I don't think it'll be long until we start to see CM mounts (to allow SoC upgrades while breaking out the I/O separately) become the standard approach to this sort of use case. It's already commonplace in e.g. the Raspberry Pi ecosystem.

Exactly what I came here to say. Thunderbolt/USB-C is fast enough for most use-cases that aren't already being integrated into SoC's, and the PD capability is also sufficient for powering most of those too. I've no doubt PCIe will remain a thing that's available for certain niche applications, in much the same way you can still buy serial adapters or external SATA docks, but if the majority of consumers don't want, need or care about such things, it'll disappear from the mainstream - and pretty much already has. Business customers are a different kettle of fish, but with the prevalence of leasing arrangements these days, they're also caring less and less about this stuff for the bulk of their fleet. Gaming was one of the last fortresses when it came to consumer uses, but the writing's on the wall there, given the climbing price of GPUs, coupled with the ever-rising TDP for diminishing returns in performance and capability. Moving them into an SoC that offers better power efficiency and performance for very little difference in cost (at the mid-high end of the market) is the obvious place to go, as Liam is arguing.

Ofcom sees no need for overhaul in next phase of fiber rollout despite BT domination

Re: I have the better version

In a similar position here - I have two fibre lines in the downstairs cupboard of my new build house I moved into a month ago now, neither of which are connected to an ONT. Both the Openreach and the Hyperoptic line use Openreach's ducts, and I can't get connected because Openreach haven't signed off on them yet, to which my question was "Well why are there cables in there then?". No answer on that one, but I did find out that there's apparently no capacity for Openreach to connect us at the local exchange, which might explain why Openreach aren't in a hurry to let their competitors get us installed either. Utter law unto themselves.

It's much more convenient for them than having to wrangle 20-30 different companies who may or may not have operations in any given locale. This way, they at least know who they need to pick up the phone to whenever there's any trouble. Assuming they can get a working line installed this month, that is. If only they knew who to talk to about that?

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

Re: @Dan55 - At the risk of another 40 downvotes

You don't need to be constantly shoulder-surfing to check what's installed or what sites they've visited. Nor do you need to check those things daily until the moment they turn 18. I was 8 before I was allowed to go out after school or at the weekends on my own, and I had to say where I was going, what I'd be doing, and when I'd be back. As I got older, the restrictions were slowly relaxed (barring a few punishments for abusing my privileges), until by the time I was 16, I was basically trusted to come and go as I pleased. The same applied to the digital world. Firstly, I was given screen time on the computer in a shared space, but with no internet. Then, I was allowed online for a few hours a week. Then I got a computer in my own room, and a year or so later, I got admin rights on it so I could install whatever I wanted. I was 14 before the parental controls got removed completely. It's not surveillance, it's parenting. Surveillance is what you get when the state steps in at the invitation of parents who are too lazy to actively parent, and results in stuff like the UK OSA or the New York law. This isn't quite there, but making it a legal requirement for all classes of device and user is in the same ballpark, and it's the thin end of the wedge.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Re: Comparing fruits

Or alternatively, the answer is that parents actually have to parent? I'd hope most parents don't let their younger kids leave the house without some idea of where they're going, and would take some sort of action if they found out their kids were trying to sneak into strip clubs or casinos, buy alcohol or cigarettes, or engage in any other form of illegal or age-inappropriate activities outside the home. The internet is no different.

The analogy that keeps getting used is of proof-of-age requirements for the likes of the above activities, e.g. buying a six-pack, as a safeguard against parental ignorance, but the difference here is that a) the store only needs to check in cases where it's not patently obvious that the buyer is underaged or not, b) the store has no need to make or retain a copy of the ID, and c) there's not necessarily any way for a parent to know what their kid was doing. None of these are true in the digital context - especially the last one, where the parent is the person who controls the child's access to the internet as the bill payer, and presumably controls their access to the devices they're using to access the web too. The idea that everyone should be required to submit copies of identifying information just in case they are a child is already a massive overreach, and extending this to the device is simply unworkable.

Scottish broadband service looking a bit dreich, says UK outage study

Per £100?

So if BT regularly charge more than their competitors, they get a better score?

Bundle of human neurons hooked to silicon learns to stumble through Doom

Re: This is largely bullshit.

Most living tissues will do pretty well if left in a nutrient bath that's being constantly refreshed, provided they're small and simple enough that the liquid can reach every cell and circulate reasonably effectively. That's all the body's circulatory system really does at the end of the day.

Re: No it doesn't

Technically yes, although it's a living brain roughly on par with that of a cockroach, so probably not something most people would consider even remotely sentient.

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Re: Edge can be uninstalled

So far as I was aware, it's incredibly difficult to perform a complete uninstallation of every instance of Edge from Windows as that would necessitate removing Edge WebView, which portions of the system use to render HTML content. Not that many of the OS use-cases are actually of any value - I always hide the widgety stuff - but other apps often have it as a dependency thanks to it being the default method for rendering web content in most .NET applications. As with most core elements of the Windows OS, removing WebView is certainly possible, but with the caveat it can break things and it could get reinstalled at any point. Of course, WebView doesn't include Copilot. Yet.

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

Re: Software IP

You give them too much credit. They're not addicted to Microsoft, they're addicted to consultants who recommend the US tech giants because of the kickbacks. Oracle have a pretty strong representation in there too.

Re: Software IP

I think the concern OP was voicing here wasn't with GPL software, but rather with IP squatting by big tech, where they tend to claim ownership of vast swathes of ideas by virtue of the fact that very little is new and moneyed corporations can wage lawfare on challengers who attempt to disrupt their business model by replicating or replacing some vital component of their product. While this has definitely occurred on some occasions though, I don't think it's anywhere close to the biggest problem with tech IP law. And I don't think IP law itself is a particularly big issue for FLOSS as it currently stands.

The bigger issue is just that businesses and orgs looking at Open Source only really have two options - adopt it (with or without contributing) and run the risk of the developer(s) abandoning it at a critical time and having to adopt the maintenance in-house, or else pay a third-party for support and development backstop. Most businesses or organisations outside the tech sector aren't keen to take on the risk of the former, while the latter tends to put the cost on a par with proprietary options that are usually better marketed. Unless a business has an ideological reason to prefer FLOSS, there's no real incentive to use it, except for if they already have a decent contingent of devs familiar with the tech.

HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations

Re: Banks!

The definition of security to them is "how easily can we make this somebody else's problem?" - whether that's Google or the customer. Of course, ultimately it's always going to be the customer.

There's also the fact that they're actively complicit in the accelerating erosion of liberty and democracy in Hong Kong to consider. I cut ties with them over that years ago so thankfully haven't had to deal with their ridiculous technical decisions since. There's plenty of less scummy alternatives out there.

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences

The big players aren't the root problem. Some are already trying to self-regulate, per the article. Others (e.g. Grok) will be forcibly regulated, if they don't bring themselves in line first. But for every commercial LLM out there, there are several hundred open source ones, and the same goes for image-gen models, and soon, for multi-frame image-gen models (video models) too. Anyone with the right consumer-grade hardware can easily use these models. And that's before we look at how trivial it's becoming to tweak the outputs, or even train while new ones. The core problem is the random guy (or state agency) somewhere who very carefully uses a number of models running locally to create highly believable deepfakes across multiple media that are strewn carefully around the web to feed some conspiracy narrative serving some narrow interest or antidemocratic movement. AI amplifies the ability to produce and distribute misinformation. The genie is out of the bottle on this now, and there's no way to legislate the problem away.

This is the reality that society needs to adapt to in order for democracy to survive - we as a society need to learn to always be sceptical of everything we consume second-hand, take better care of what sources we choose to believe, and to strike the right balance between trust in domain authority and distrust in power. Paradoxically, the LLM boom has actually made good journalism more relevant than ever before, right as traditional media is collapsing before our eyes, a process now accelerated by that same boom. It's probably orders of magnitude more important that we legislate to protect good journalism from predatory practices by tech businesses than legislating to ban naughty uses of AI tech at this stage, but as usual, legislators are about a decade or more behind the curve when it comes to all things tech.

Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025

Re: The Next Big Thing

If I was forced at gunpoint to pick between these and the meta ones, I'd choose the Google ones. As bad as Google is, I'd still rather they be the ones having a live feed of my entire life than Facebook, though it's splitting hairs, really. Of course, as someone who actually has prescription lenses, I'd have to object to all of them regardless of who they're made by or how much data they scrape, as they're all terrible glasses.

Re: Memory failure

Came here to say the exact same thing. HoloLens had the advantage of tight integration to the wider Microsoft ecosystem, a relatively simple development toolset, a significantly lighter and less cumbersome construction, and a massive push by them to get it embedded in most of the segments cited here, segments where Microsoft already had a strong presence, unlike Apple. It failed. Hard. Do Apple even really want to be in the enterprise space? Their entire trajectory for the past 20 years now has been away from almost anything that isn't consumer-oriented. Even their basic MDM capabilities seem to be provided reluctantly and with contempt for the idea that employers should sully their precious devices with any kind of external security controls.

Ofcom comes knocking after BT, Three mobile outages cut 999 access

Unfortunately with the switch to VoIP, this sort of thing is only going to get more common. The barrier to attacking the voice call functionality is significantly lowered, and even the biggest or best providers can't fully mitigate against a DDoS partially or fully emanating from compromised customer equipment across their own network without cutting off those customers' services at least temporarily. Not that that kind of attack was impossible prior to the VoIP era, it just required a more specialised skillset and would have been harder to scale.

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

Re: follow-up tasks

And then we can store a recipe for apple pie on it.

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

Re: A Letter

Such low volume though, it doesn't touch the sides. Chrome books on the other hand... Now they've become a serious threat to Microsoft's historic dominance in education, and they have the unfortunate (for Microsoft) side-effect of demonstrating that for the average user, a web browser is largely sufficient these days.

Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter

The problem for OpenAI is that plenty of people want ChatGPT, based on its usage metrics, but very few people feel like they need it enough to justify paying the full cost of the service. Hence the losses just keep on coming.

I've said before that I don't find this stuff completely useless - there's been places where we've seen genuine productivity gains at work from rolling out both Copilot and other AI tools - but the problem for big tech is that they're still subsidising these services to make their use economical, and if they stop, they'll likely find most customers unwilling or unable to pay for them at full cost, let alone at a price point that returns a decent profit margin. Even where we're finding it useful, we're being careful not to make it indispensable, precisely because we're well aware that there could be a rug-pull at some point, and in that situation, we need other options. Any business that's making itself totally dependent on these services is likely in for a rude awakening when the bubble bursts.

Elon Musk's Grokipedia launches, filled to the brim with plagiarism and AI slop

Re: Is there nothing he won't enshittify?

Unfortunately, it tends towards the opposite, usually in proportion to the money.

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Here's an idea... Why don't we plant a tiny explosive charge in every mobile device, that can be triggered by the network provider or enrolling cloud management platform if the device is flagged as stolen. I can't see any possible way that could be abused...

On a more serious note, while it's absolutely feasible for the likes of Apple and Google to log a device's IMEI number upon device enrollment, that would be a disaster for privacy, as well as introducing a further impediment to lawful resale of a device while still being gameable by the criminals, just as network-locking is. In that context, the bit I can't fully figure out is why the manufacturers are against it. Do they think lost sales from resale of stolen devices will outweigh the additional sales from people replacing stolen devices and/or avoiding second hand ones for fear they're either stolen or still IMEI-locked to the previous owner's cloud account?

Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block

Re: typo...

I'd guess because it's ironic, given MS Office in various guises has been attempting to 'monetise productivity experiences' since 1990, with the slight problem that their products tend to get in the way of 'productivity' about as much as they facilitate it. I'm still struggling to adapt to the recent rework of Outlook, which seems to have basically been rebuilt to unify the code base of the desktop and online versions, but broke Microsoft's generally reliable approach towards backwards compatibility. They seem to be heading the direction of Google when it comes to the reliability and lifespan of their services - a big chunk of which is thanks to the shift to cloudiness.

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist

Re: strong-arming rather than positive enforcement, makes no sense

Of course it's about strong-arming those running the services. This is a bloody stupid piece of legislation, but let's play devil's advocate for a moment. Assuming that you want to regulate content on the internet, which is cheaper and faster - policing the content yourself (by hiring more... uh... police officers?) or trying to force those hosting the content to police themselves and their users? To be fair to legislators, this is hardly a new trick. Just look at laws regarding alcohol, cigarettes, or betting shops. It's not actually illegal for minors to drink, smoke or gamble - it's illegal to allow them to do so. The threats and regulatory risks are all on the supply side.

The problem is, those things pose immediate material threats to minors, and are relatively simple to gate in a manner that doesn't impinge on the rights or privacy of adults. The 'material threat' posed by a teenager seeing some pornography isn't anywhere near as severe, or as clear, and the intrusive manner in which the gatekeeping is required to take place respects neither rights nor privacy as we've come to understand them in the internet era. The law imposes significant burdens on internet platforms and services without regard to context - equivalent to requiring newsagents to check the age of everyone so much as looking through the window - and it does so in a way that totally disregards the historic precedent on these things. It creates a massive privacy risk by generatinga whole bunch of additional processing activity around personal data that must now be gathered by law. It pushes people towards using further anonymisation methods that make actually finding and cracking down on the problems this law ostensibly solves all the harder (wow - sounds like that problem might need a few more police officers to deal with, good thing this law saved us some dough to spend on that!). And it further masks the problem by giving parents a false sense of security that obviates the need for them to hold awkward conversations in order to actually educate their kids.

It was entirely possible to put a mechanism in place that was lighter-touch, but also had teeth for the bigger players, but they ignored that because our legislators have no clue how the internet actually works or is used beyond their own use of social media to campaign and search engines to Google their own names.

Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

Re: Viva Blocked

A lot of the use cases we've been seeing are genuinely helpful, which is why we're not cancelling the subscriptions. The time savings on meetings alone have been enough to justify the cost, as we've been able to set up reminders with suggested prompts to help draft agendas and discussion points ahead of calls, and then to review and correct the post-meeting summaries the AI drafts from the transcripts. And there's other cases where it's been helpful - finding trends that were being missed in customer services and operations and suggesting metrics to better track these issues, restructuring documentation to be posted on our CMS, and generating human-readable incident reports from system logs. The key thing is that people can't be replaced, all of the output needs to be checked against the inputs to verify and ensure nothing's been missed - but this is still way faster than having to do the full write-ups manually.

Re: Viva Blocked

Viva Insights (as opposed to Viva Engage, per AC's comment above) is just an analytics suite for Microsoft 365 adoption and use. Not sure why the article characterises the tool as 'creepy', the point is to do exactly what the article later on describes - give managers data-driven insights into how people are actually using Microsoft 365 apps on the ground. It's just an extension of the base analytics that were already available to IT teams centrally anyway. These are actually a pretty valuable tool for monitoring and forecasting licensing needs, and making and reviewing business cases.

We've already been using elements of this to look at Copilot license usage within our own business, and in particular, looking at the stats in conjunction with anecdotal feedback has helped us to tailor our AI usage policy to weed out emerging bad practices and promote the good. E.g. We had one specific user who was using it in Excel a lot more than everyone else, and when we asked what they were using it for, it turned out that they were using it to restructure pivot tables, without then cross-checking the results. Without those stats, we'd never have known that this was happening, and that user would likely have spread the bad practice around as adoption slowly increases. This is especially useful for us as we're about to slam the gates shut on staff using any other AI apps or tools given the risks involved in exposing business data. At least Copilot keeps it all within the tenant so it doesn't increase the attack surface beyond what's already there. If staff must use a chatbot, we'd rather it be one we have a degree of insight and control over.

UK Lords take aim at Ofcom's 'child-protection' upgrades to Online Safety Act

Re: UK Fascism

One of the reasons I so strongly opposed this legislation is that it feeds the fruitcakes, unfortunately. Posts like this trying to frame bad, incompetent legislation as a grand conspiracy are only fed by cock-ups of these proportions.

UK toughens Online Safety Act with ban on self-harm content

Liz Truss, much like Peter Kyle and a certain famous historical emperor, has no clothes. It's nice to see she's still wandering around her office with a blank sheet of paper and a slightly bewildered look on her face all these years later...

How Windows 11 is breaking from its bedrock and moving away

Re: Intel couldn’t license Arm cores and build chips themselves.

To be fair to Microsoft, if you look at the various GUIs many Linux distros now use for app installs, their equivalent would be the Windows Store, which is absolutely capable of hosting and selecting the correct version of an application and it's dependencies (albeit the 'Windows' way, which is more equivalent to Flatpak, but worse in almost every regard).

The problem is, (almost!) nobody does that - the standard methodology for Windows since before it was even a thing has always been to install and/or run manually obtained binaries from any old source - whether that be a floppy disk, optical media, flash drive or the web. Try doing that on Linux, and you'll have similar issues a lot of the time.

The difference really boils down to the fact that both the people who make Linux apps, and the people who use them, know and prefer to use better ways to handle software installation and management, and meanwhile, Windows is stuck supporting the free-for-all that developed in their playground, with no ability to do much about it unless they lock things down to their preferred method, which isn't going to play nice with the 'backwards compatibility' mantra here. They've tried this with 'S mode' in some of their first-party devices, but all it did was cause a spike in people googling 'how to turn off Windows S mode' the first time they wanted to install some random app they got elsewhere, and the impression I get is that Microsoft are edging away from it the way they do when they plan on ditching it in the medium-term.

I know that the likely response from Linux users (of which I am one) here would be to point out that on Linux, apt, packman, flatpak, Snap Store, Gnome Software or whatever CLI or GUI tool you use isn't limited to just a single source, but is capable of pointing to multiple repositories, public or private, while the Windows store is more akin to the Apple App Store or Google Play, which is a fair point. However, looking at it from Microsoft's perspective, I can certainly see why they'd want to retain control over exactly what software can be distributed via a 'store' under their brand. Given they aren't solely distributing open-source (or even at least 'source-available') software, they can't rely on the 'many eyes' approach either. On the positive side, so far as big tech app stores go, Microsoft's are some of the best deals out there - just a 15% cut of sales made via store infrastructure.

Microsoft wares may be UK public sector's only viable option

Biggest issue in public sector IT is that the technologists business leaders are listening to are almost always external consultants being paid to sell the vendor's products regardless of how well they fit the business requirements, rather than internal permanent salaried professionals being paid to find the right solution to balance and hopefully address the various competing business requirements.

Re: Panglossian

"more accepted by staff who use the same software at home"

- circular argument: they use it at home because they are expected to use it at work (and they pay, directly or indirectly, for the home versions).

Circular arguments aren't fallacies in and of themselves. In this case, it's describing a self-reinforcing cycle, which is legitimate. And how is whether those staff pay or don't for their home use of the software in any way relevant to the argument for or against public sector adoption of it?

"public sector business leaders, accountable for and able to demonstrate return on investment, benefits realization, and UK public value for money"

- the polite response is that the voters will be sceptical on that assertion. ("Fell off chair laughing" would be the colloquial version.)

Value for money in UK public sector IT (or rather, the general lack thereof) has a lot more to do with the fact that so much of the money is spent on external consultants and implementation partners instead of building and retaining those skills internally, than it does with any particular software vendor's pricing.

Re: I read this as propaganda

To be fair to Jos, the opinion does draw a distinction in the final section between proprietary software that is available and usable off the shelf, versus bespoke or FOSS solutions. With Microsoft 365, for instance, the delivered products and feature sets are fairly well-known and easy to compare against business requirements, and a price can be relatively easily quoted and weighed against those criteria to assess cost-efficiency. When it comes to FOSS or bespoke, the landscape is different. Do you use an implementation partner or a supporting vendor, which can introduce just as great a risk of lock-in but with less predictability around transition pathways to alternative technologies? Or do you go in-house, using homebrew code or borrowing code from FOSS community projects, which means accepting potentially significant additional risks and overheads?

Like it or not, most Microsoft products set the standards by which their competitors are assessed, simply by virtue of their ubiquity. The same goes for a select group of other big tech vendors. Technical professionals have to answer to actual users of the solutions they provide, and they must accept the reality of the situation is that most of those users will be reaching for OTS equivalents from Microsoft et. al. as their yardstick by which to assess any proposed solution. Trying to sell these people on a solution that can't achieve full feature-parity for their potential use-cases will always be an uphill battle, even more so when you tell them that in addition to that, the organisation will be spending more upfront and shouldering a bigger portion of the risks and ongoing maintenance activities than would be the case with a third-party cloud vendor. The biggest advantages OTS solutions bring here are that they're very easy to fit to user expectations, they tend to be quicker and easier to implement and deploy, and they tend to act as BAU force multipliers when compared to bespoke equivalents, requiring fewer internal staff to administer large estates than would often be be possible with a cobbled together solution of FOSS and bespoke equivalents.

I should point out at this stage that I actually disagree with the position taken in this article - I'm a big believer that the public sector should have it's own flagship software engineering unit building bespoke solutions that are designed specifically to be rolled-out at scale across all areas of the public sector, alongside the more niche projects that are inevitably required by any large organisation with unique business requirements. I explicitly believe that such a team should by necessity be permanent and have zero downtime between projects. I see this as being no different than the need for in-house expertise in other areas of infrastructure engineering - e.g. countries with great train networks and associated services tend to have dedicated public-sector engineering teams who are kept in constant work on building or improving some area of the network in order to ensure that the necessary staff and skills are kept sharp and current. The same goes for public sector IT, in my opinion.

That said, here in the UK we've been running in the opposite direction to that logic for the last few generations now, and our public sector is thoroughly infested with private sector providers and consultants throughout every level of national infrastructure provision. These posts tend to be ephemeral in principle, but in practice, there's a revolving door of consultants from the same old firms coming and going, ultimately costing more than retaining them in-house would. Rectifying the situation would require reallocating those resources to building up the public sector's internal capacity to independently deliver once again, and that wouldn't be a quick or simple process. It's a chicken-egg conundrum - building up internal capacity would take time and requires resources that are already allocated to the external consultants and vendors who need to get paid to keep the lights on. And committing to an internalised delivery model would also send a surefire signal to those external suppliers that government is potentially susceptible to significant price gouging as the gravy train approaches its final stop.

UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act

It will when it's politicians being caught in the crosshairs. Might actually be good for the country, as the ones least aware of good cyber-security practices will be the most likely to get embarrassed out of office, while the inevitable media storm it'll cause might focus the surviving parliamentarians' minds on taking a tougher stance regarding how businesses treat our personal information. There's nothing like a good scandal to poke our parliament into action.

Re: Labour just love legislation...

That's just it, there isn't a will. The parliamentary agenda tends to be quite cramped, so for something to get in there requires a significant amount of pressure either on the government or it's backbenchers. Labour simply had bigger fish to fry coming into office, and since nearly nobody outside of the tech sector had a clue about this law or what the implications were, there wasn't any really pressure on them to prioritise fixing this. As if stands, I'm not sure if there ever will be, it might just be the case that either handing over ID/card details or browsing the web via a VPN just quietly become the new norm. If they won't gain a significant number of votes for doing it, or lose a significant number for not, then sheer political inertia will prevent any further action on the subject. The only reason this law ever passed in the first place was that Sunak's Tories were out of any other ideas and realised that if they set all the dates right, they wouldn't even have to be on the hook for implementing this dog's breakfast.

"[...] age checks are not a silver bullet, and some determined teenagers may get around them. Ultimately, this needs to work alongside education, awareness campaigns, and through supportive conversations with trusted adults."

Does this spokesperson have kids? Because they seem to be unaware of the fact that this isn't a case of the odd tech-savvy basement-dwelling teenage boy discovering some novel trick for getting around the filters. VPN providers have been sponsoring the content creators these kids follow for years - most of them are well aware that VPNs exist and what they do. Not that any of that matters, because it doesn't even take a majority of boys to access this stuff themselves - one kid will do it, then it'll be shared peer-to-peer outside of the moderated web. It's just the modern version of the kid who looks mature for his age buying a top-shelf magazine and sharing it with his mates.

You know, I wonder if perhaps the education, awareness and support angle might actually be a better way of tackling the problem, rather than pushing this stuff even further underground?

Brit watchdog says public service TV must 'urgently' join Team YouTube

Re: I’ve never understood the UK TV licence thing

OK. I'll concede the vans were real. Too bad they were unwilling to disclose to the courts how they actually worked and thus weren't able to admit their 'detections' as evidence. Didn't stop them running scare ads about them well into the 2000s, but they were effectively never anything more than a piece of propaganda.

Re: the BBC – affectionately known by Brits as "Auntie"

While there's a fair consensus of analysis that supports the idea that the BBC's news output skews mildly pro-government in terms of coverage, the same body of work also tends to find that when it comes to coverage of individual political parties and the issues they care about, most people tend to think the BBC is biased towards the opposing viewpoint, with the perceived bias becoming more pronounced the more extreme the party's position is on the political spectrum. That would indicate that the BBC is actually fairly balanced overall in terms of the content, even if it does tend to devote more airtime to the government than to the opposition or anti-establishment figures. Most bias rankings tend to find that the BBC is located somewhere between fairly centrist and moderately centre-left in terms of its overall output. The one place the BBC excels is in accuracy, and it's still internationally regarded by most fact-checking services as being one of the most accurate and trustworthy news sources out there.

Re: I’ve never understood the UK TV licence thing

They don't. The vans were a myth. Nowadays, they basically just send you scary letters in the post until you either pay up, or tell them you don't have a TV. If you do the latter, they occasionally used to send someone around to check, but I don't think they even bother with that any more, given how ineffectual it was.

Re: Interesting implications for the licence fee

But but but... What if they send the vans round your street?

At one point, I'd thought the most likely solution would have been to axe the TV license and replace it with a broadband license, but I think the ship has sailed on that one. There was definitely a time where you could have argued that having an always-on internet connection was a luxury, but with the push these days to get rid of all offline modes of interaction with any kind of public service or utility, that argument just doesn't fly. Only way I could see that solution getting any traction now would be if there were discounts or exemptions based on income or employment status.

Of course, assuming it's to remain publicly-funded, the best approach would be to replace it with a funding model out of general taxation. Given the government can and do meddle with the license fee funding settlement already, we may as well just stop pretending that the BBC's funding is anything other than a political decision.

Re: Interesting implications for the licence fee

Nah... Knowing our leaders they'll just make it so you need a license to watch YouTube too. Why build a better boat when there's plenty of gaffer tape around to deal with the leaks?

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

I don't know... I've met IT consultants who that description would be pretty apt for...

Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show

Who could've predicted...

Arms race, anyone? Bets on which one will win out in the end... the AI equivalent of DRM, or the efforts to break it...

DRM in any guise always ages like milk, doubly so with the pace of change in this area, so I don't get why anyone would waste their time, effort or money on it when there's a much simpler option out there - don't post your copyrighted content in a public place if you don't want it to be copied! Put it behind a login, with ToS and access logs and such, so you can at least make some vague attempt at a legal defence of your rights in the event they're trampled. This isn't rocket science!

ICANN fumes as AFRINIC offers no explanation for annulled election

Sounds familiar...

Ah, Cloud Innovation... I was wondering how long it would be before their name cropped up again in connection with this latest mess. And, what's this... They don't think that these allegations should invalidate the result of the ballot? Hmm... It'll be interesting to find out after all this is over exactly which member it was who seemed to have convinced so many others to lend their proxies, apparently in some cases without them even seeming to know they'd done so!