Posts by Captain Planet

Facebook: Yeah, we hoovered up 1.5 million email address books without permission. But it was an accident!

Utter, utter BS! There is no way Facebook could accidentally scrape and upload contacts, to develop something that could log into a webmail account and go through the contacts and then send them to Facebook would take quite a lot of development work and simply could not happen by accident. It's like building a house without planning permission and telling the council you just bought some brick and dumped them on your land, but they just so happened to fall in such a way that they landed in the shape of a house.

Please tell me they won't get away with pretending it was an accident??

That's before you even look at them acutally asking for your password, WTF?? That creepy little android c#nt Zuckerberg needs to learn some respect.

Pregnancy and parenting club Bounty fined £400,000 for shady data sharing practices

Yeah they can't use that data unless they can show there was informed consent and have proof of this. Judging by the fact Bounty do not gain informed consent AFTER GDPR I doubt they will be able to demonstrate they got it before

They still do this after May 2018

"Of course, if the data sharing had been done since 25 May 2018, Bounty would be facing a far greater fine, up to 4 per cent of annual turnover or €20m, whichever is greater."

They still break GDPR rules after May 2018, new mothers are not advised on what they are signing up to (or that they are even signing up). A friend of mine recently had a baby, a Bounty rep had been in and spoken to his wife who was on all sorts of drugs after giving birth, he asked the rep what consent had been given (his details had been passed on without any communication with him) the rep simply said 'you just need to sign this', 'I just have to collect details' she didn't think any consent was needed and would not say (or did not know) what happens to the data. The rep was even dressed like a nurse and made out it was an NHS thing.

Bounty exploit their position of trust, they don't explain what you are signing up to and do not gain proper informed consent. They have not taken any notice of GDPR, I hope they get fined for their activity after May 2018.

Not even 60,000 of you want an ethically-sourced smartphone

Re: Exploitation-free?

Did you not smell BS when you read about Marxism?

Re: It might be created ethically, but it still runs Android

They were talking of a Firefox version I think

Undead galaxy cluster spews 700 zombie baby stars A YEAR

How to make any headline more exciting... add zombies

Hackers spunk 'pcAnywhere source' after negotiation breakdown

Captain_Planet

You are right about it being the next 'terrorism' it will kill any sympathy the public has with Anonymous. Before the invasion of Afghanistan al-Qaeda was given an image of an organised military force with facilities that would make the baddest (and richest) bond victim very jelous. before the war Rumsfeld was on TV explaining a diagram of an 'al-Qaeda base' in a mountain which had advanced communication rooms etc this youtube video shows one of the many bases http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo When it came to the reality it was a squalid cave full of old Soviet guns.

Anonymous can more easily fall victim to this fear inducing exaggeration having no spokesperson to counter claims, things like this are perfect ammo for the film industry, and perfect ammo for the government to pry closer on our interwebs because of cyber terrorism. There you go you heard it here first al-Qaeda have decided to stop making money off copied DVDs and run bit torrent sites instead, if you use them you are also a terrorist, obviously.

Captain_Planet

Spot on, the easiest way to get the public to dislike Anonymous is to make them into criminals after money, or better still terrorists. How long before they are linked to Al-Qaeda??

Orange contract price hike angers subscribers

Did they not know inflation happens??

"Due to recent increases in inflation" Were they not aware that there would be inflation before they set prices??

They tried this one a few years back when you had to pay 12p a text on pay as you go, they offered 5 texts a day forever if you paid £5 for a voucher. They then realised people like to keep the same number and would continue using the offer, they contacted all people who had taken up the voucher saying it was no longer valid, they got thier asses kicked as they had no right to do this and had to make an apology and reinstate the offer.

I’m sure it is buried in their Terms and conditions that they can do this but it is jsut plain rude and deceitful as they know there is far to much junk in there for people to read. I will be making a fuss on Twitter and hashtagging them (everyone else please do the same!) and will not renew my £500 or so contract next time

Google report reveals YouTube takedown requests... by country

Can we see them please?

Is there any way to look at the ones which weren't removed? I'd be interested to see what the UK gov think is unsuitable for me

'Being cyber-stalked is as bad as being raped, or in a war'

They should know that it will be mis quoted

You are right, it doesn't actually say that. But they shouldn't mention it together like that as if they had half a brain or ever done a press release on a report before they would know that it would be mis-quoted.... unless of course they knew it would get misquoted and therefore get more publicity.

I think it is rather pointless and justifying their existence, they have come to the shocking conclusion that something bad has a bad effect on people, and if they mention rape and war it will get loads of publicity

Digital Rupert’s bumper $545m loss

Dind't Timberlake invent Facebook or something?

Do Specific media realise Timberlake isn't actually Sean Parker, that was just a film

UK mobile punters get swift network switcheroo ability

Mr T Shirts

That sounds like a nightmare, the best thing to do in these situations is to get all over Twitter, only post things that are 100% factual that you can prove. if you have the time put a video diary on youtube of your progress, they will HATE this as it will potnetially show up in Google results and some marketing bod will tell the customer service people to just give you the phoen to shut you up

Google opens Android front in Zuckerberg data war

The Yahoo app did the same to my Hero

My HTC Hero randomly decided to put my Yahoo contacts in as I have the yahoo mail app, I really didn't like this, seemed creepy and also ended up with everyone I have ever emailed in the last ten years as a contact in my address book! I do however like being able to manually link Facebook contacts into my phone contacts, mainly so I can get a pictures of people in my phonebook

Bumper Patch Tuesday tackles multiple Windows flaws

Blue Screen of Death

Looks like this patch fixes lots of problems but causes another - The Blue Screen Of Death!

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistawu/thread/73cea559-ebbd-4274-96bc-e292b69f2fd1

I don't recall any blue screens of death on my Amiga!

BBC botnet investigation turns hacks into hackers

Why do the BBC think they have the right?

Great, so now a hacker can get into people's computers, put a screensaver on saying this is the BBC, you need to install some software to fix this, cue download more malware. This is exactly the kind of thing we are told not to trust, 'you bank will never ask for your password' etc, you would think the BBC wouldn't hack inot your computer!

They will get off scott free but they deserve a massive fine for this, what were they thinking????

Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

Switch from Virgin and BT

Simple option is to switch, but how many people know anything about net neutrality and will make a switch? My guess only a small percentage of turned on people.

The Government should step in and ensure net neutrality.... oh hang on a minute this Government is all for trampling free speech and civil liberties.

I would bet a fair bit of money this will spread form restricting bit torrent as it is a nuisance, to other thing, like rival companies, then when Virgin start offering downloads they will be lightning quick. Someone should punch Neil Berkett

Boffins conclude machines still not quite people

A book can pass the Turing test

in response to By Steven Hunter, "If "simulated" intelligence is indistinguishable from "actual" intelligence, does it really matter if it's "simulated"?"

It makes a massive difference, true intelligence and a computer program that gives believable answers but understands noting of what it is saying are not even comparable. Think about what I said about the Chinese room, if I did it I would just be matching up symbols, I would have no idea of what the questions or answers meant, infact you wouldn't even need to tell me they were questions/answers, I could think it was just a match the symbols game and provide the correct answers. This is exactly how the artificial 'intelligence' is working.

Another way to look at is if I wrote (over many years) a book which had an answer to every question a human could think of, the book could pass the Turing test, yet it is just bits of paper, it does not think.

Turing test does not test intelligence

This is a great achievement but sadly the Turing test was never a true test of intelligence, it cannot show there is semantic meaning behind the answers. You could ask it "what is your favourite food?" and it might say, "my favourite food is Pizza" Here it has answered the question but this does not show it knows what a pizza is.

The 'Chinese room' is a good way of illustrating this, if you stick someone in a room and ask them written questions in Chinese symbols, if they were quick enough they could answer them all correctly if they had an answer book with a list of Chinese questions with appropriate answers. The person answering would have no idea of the meaning of the question or answer but they can pass off as being a Chinese person. This is exactly how a computer would do it, it is fitting questions to set answers it has, I know it is far more complex than this but it is not 'thinking' or showing any intelligence

UK ID card service mounts birth, marriage, death landgrab

The British people don't have the intelligence or spine to stop it, sadly

People just dont seem to care, the Governemt will tell them it is for terrorism, they accept it, next stage is when we already have epassports etc we may a well hand over some more information on us, and it would make sense to link our medical records to the big database, and if that is on it would also make sense to 'streamline' the state's databases and add everything to it thus reducing costs and helping departments communicate with each other more efficiently so terrorists can be better tracked, and they will say "if you are not a crimial what have you go to hide anyway"

I give it ten years until EVREYTING in our lives in known by the governemnt, by then we might even have a more totalitarian government that the current one, and in twenty years time who knows what crackpot government could be ruling the country with almost complete access to our lives. If you think that couldn't happen you are just plain wrong, it happens all the time around the world, there is nothing about being British that makes us somehow amune to letting the next Hitler in, and the best way to do it is to sleepwalk into it, just like we are doing now.