* Posts by DavCrav

3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007

Top Euro court: No, you can't steal images from other websites (too bad a school had to be sued to confirm this little fact)

DavCrav

Re: Seems a bit churlish...

"Exactly my first though! It says rather a lot about the photographer, who must have gone to the school's website so could easily have fired of a quick friendly email to them."

No. He did an image search for his images, looking for people who stole them. I bet he found loads. Sent a nastygram to each one. The school thought it was above the law so told him to do one, probably didn't even take it down.

DavCrav

"What about user generated content without copyright? How would you know which is which?"

No such thing. For the umpteenth bloody time, and I'm going to use shouty caps now, ALL WORK IS AUTOMATICALLY COPYRIGHT. User-generated content is copyrighted, just like all other content. In fact, user-generated content isn't even a term, it's just content. The need for the long 'you give us everything' form on Facebook et al is precisely because this comment is copyrighted to me and I'm letting El Reg publish it. You can't copy it and use it on a different website without breaking the law.

DavCrav

"I think that if your work is copyright then it is your responsibility to ensure that whoever you authorise to use it makes that clear or you add something to image indicating this."

Well you think wrong, then. That's not how the law works. All creative works are automatically copyright unless the creator has explicitly stated that you can use it.

DavCrav

Re: What to do with the fine

"Considering the possible backlash, and the cost of the litigation if I was the artist involved I'd be donating the fine back to the school as a thanks for being involved in establishing my rights."

The school could have said 'yes, obviously we are breaking the law, sorry'. But no, they were a bunch of dicks, and rather than say sorry they took it to court. Where they lost. ANd then lost again, and so on, until they were no longer able to lose any more.

Hopefully the school gets fined enough to shut it down, and then he can donate the winnings to set up another school on the same site, rehire all the teachers except for the senior staff, and the people responsible get a genuine punishment.

DavCrav
Joke

Re: New internet standard...

"If I can play your song over my speakers, I can copy it."

Are you saying you have the Audacity to copy songs as they play over your speakers?

Internet overseer ICANN loses a THIRD time in Whois GDPR legal war

DavCrav

Re: Not legally binding...

"I can see ICANN eventually just disallowing European registrars from registering domain names, which will kill the internet in Europe."

No, it would fragment the Internet. I think it's unlikely that the EU would just allow ICANN to take the EU's bit of the Internet off it.

Game over for Google: Fortnite snubs Play Store, keeps its 30%, sparks security fears

DavCrav

Re: Sweeney shuns Google's haircut

"Not really the same though is it. One is a DIRECT result, the other is totally unrelated"

The only way you can get to the dentist is by travelling outside temporarily, where there is a risk of an accident.

The only way to install this software is by accepting third-party sources temporarily, where there is a risk of malware.

DavCrav

Re: I can't blame Epic for doing this...

"However, I fear the message that Google will hear is that they need to build some serious walsl around their garden, and maybe cyanide the gophers, moles and bunny rabbits that are cavorting inside."

Unless they fancy a(nother) massive fine from the EU, they probably shouldn't.

DavCrav

Re: Sweeney shuns Google's haircut

"Will I be able to sue Epic if I get malware because they made me disable my device security???"

Will I be able to sue my dentist if I get injured while travelling to see them? No, and no to your question, for the same reason.

Grad sends warning to manager: Be nice to our kit and it'll be nice to you

DavCrav

Re: what the fuck does PC LOAD LETTER mean?

"I'm going to be a pedant and remind you that the Wapping dispute was about Murdoch closing an entire printing plant with the intent of secretly bringing another one online."

You mean close a plant employing 6800 people to open one employing 670 people that did the exact same job? It's almost as if technology moves on. Hope you aren't using electric lights, when candles are just as good.

Both sides were dicks in the dispute (any side Rupert Murdoch is on is automatically a dick side), and I was just making a reference to it because, you know, printer.

DavCrav

Re: what the fuck does PC LOAD LETTER mean?

"The printer thinks that is a reason to down tools."

The printer thinks that is an excuse to down tools. It's a continuation of the Wapping dispute.

DavCrav

I had a computer keyboard whose space bar was dodgy. I threw it out of the window in frustration, but subsequently realized I didn't have a spare keyboard lying around. I retrieved it from the garden (I threw it from a first floor window) and the space bar worked slightly better.

Think tank calls for post-Brexit national ID cards: The kids have phones so what's the difference?

DavCrav

Re: "Israel should stop murdering Palestinians"

"There are two groups, those believing Israel is always right, and the other believing Palestinians are always right."

I was in Israel a few years back and the one thing that struck me, from Jews, Arabs and Bedouin, was how absolutely 100% correct each person thought their opinion was, whatever it was, and how obviously 100% wrong all others were.

Early experiment in mass email ends with mad dash across office to unplug mail gateway

DavCrav

Something similar with less disastrous consequences happened with our mailing list: we wanted to remove all 'Dr' at the start of people's names for a conference. So the person deleted all instances of 'Dr' in the name field, not even case sensitive. Well, that's great unless your name is Andrew, or in one case the newly named 'Alessano'. Nobody noticed until people pointed it out on their name badges.

UK slides from first to fourth in UN e-gov survey

DavCrav

"I can't see how the UK ever got to the top of this table in the first place. Government IT is shambolic."

Move to Germany. Embrace the tax system administration. Top tip: when moving to Germany, don't say you are a Christian if you aren't, else they will set up a tithe to go from your wages directly to the Church. You can't get out of it unless you have a signed letter from the local church saying you are an apostate which, given you were never there to begin with, is not possible.

PAYE works very well for the vast majority of the population (fewer people on here of course, because of the contractors). PAYE doesn't work that well in the US, France, Germany, or a variety of other countries.

Ecuador's Prez talking to UK about Assange's six-year London Embassy stay – reports

DavCrav

Re: Preferred Option

"That's what they want you to think. He's currently at subway with Elvis."

Is he chasing Elvis round the tables or is Elvis chasing him?

DavCrav

Re: Preferred Option

"It would be more entertaining if Benny Hill did a re-enactment of the whole thing..."

Probably not that entertaining. Benny Hill has been dead for more than 25 years.

DavCrav

Re: Makes no sense

"Never understood why sweden wouldn't just give an assurance not to extradite him to the US?"

Why the fuck should they? He's the suspect. You don't bargain with the suspect, you arrest them, and if there is sufficient evidence, put them on trial, and if there is sufficient evidence again, they will be convicted. As a suspect in a rape inquiry, you don't get to set conditions on whether you would like to be arrested.

This is where the whole 'Assange thinks he's above the law' thing comes from. Because he clearly does.

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

DavCrav

Re: "How to use a barometer to measure the height of a building."

"5) use barometer as a gnomon and scale the length of shadow up to extract height of building from it's shadow."

Even better, hold the barometer in front of you and move away from the building until the two are the same size (the Father Ted approach). This works even on cloudy days.

I predict a riot: Amazon UK chief foresees 'civil unrest' for no-deal Brexit

DavCrav

Re: Vogon

""17.5m v 16m is not exactly a majority anyone should be celebrating"

Just about everyone I know did."

Just about everyone I know voted Remain. But they I mostly know educated people, PhD level or above, and if you go and check the data you'll find that lack of education is highly correlated to Leave sentiment. Ideas that correlate negatively with education level are usually not good ones.

Brit tech forges alliance to improve cyber security as MPs moan over 'acute scarcity' of experts

DavCrav

Re: Sigh.

" " ...no real sense of the scale of the problem or how to address it effectively".

No change there then.

See also: Brexit."

See also: climate change, the antibiotic catastrophe, the AI revolution, the water scarcity crisis, the gig economy crisis, the pension crisis, health expenditure exponential growth (Cont. p.94)

DavCrav

Re: Phew!!!

"companies and government won't pay enough to make the career attractive"

It's always and only ever this. We don't need more STEM graduates; we need to make sure the ones that we have end up in STEM by not paying a graduate chemist £18k but a graduate management consultant £40k.

Companies say there aren't the skills, but what they mean is "There aren't the skilled people at the shit wages we are offering". Supply and demand seems to be the favoured viewpoint except in employment.

Will this biz be poutine up the cash? Hackers demand dosh to not leak stolen patient records

DavCrav

Re: Don't bother paying the dosh

"Look, this stuff is all going online now. It's all your fault. You rushed to be modern and online"

The trouble is, the other direction is:

"I'm sorry, we don't know what's wrong with you. Your medical records are currently being couriered over from Vancouver, but we are in Toronto, so let's hope it's nothing urgent."

So there has to be some online-esque method of moving the data. For a country like Canada, a separate hardened network connecting all health centres is possible, just insanely expensive, so it'll use the Internet. So now there will be breaches. You can minimize them -- in this case, that appears not to have happened -- but you cannot eliminate them entirely.

Brit watchdog fines child sex abuse inquiry £200k over mass email blunder

DavCrav

Re: Bureaucracy fines bureaucracy, nothing changes

"Government departments (and companies, really) should be required to deploy email clients/servers/relays that refuse to send if there are more than 5 external addresses in either the To or cc fields."

Or just if more than 5 people are in To/cc and it isn't a reply all to a message, produce a dialogue box that says "Are you sure you meant to include this many people?" Since it wouldn't be a common dialogue box that appears, users would be less likely to click past it.

Micron-Intel 3D XPoint split: It's not you, it's m... nah, it is totally you

DavCrav

Re: On the bright side...

"Realistically speaking, it's not as if one day NAND Flash got released and conquered the world by storm.It's only over the past years that an SSD has become a standard feature of new laptops, and even then at rather pitiful capacities at exorbitant prices."

My first hard drive was a whole 20MB of storage for an Amiga 600 back in the mid-1990s. Every hard drive from then has looked the same: the circular thing underneath, a metal plate on top, about the same size, the same weight, just capacities have increased. Initially SSDs were a change, but the cost was a bit crap, and they still looked roughly the same.

The first time I installed an M.2 SSD I felt excited. I couldn't decide whether this was finally the future or I was stepping back in time and plugging in a SNES cartridge. Either way, here was something different.

Fork it! Google fined €4.34bn over Android, has 90 days to behave

DavCrav

Re: First time someone gets fined for giving something for free

"Is that Googles fault, or a market that does not work well ?."

From the article:

"But by making even one FireOS phone, the OEM would have lost the ability to include Google Play Store on its other devices."

It's Google's fault.

Dudes. Blockchain. In a phone. It's gonna smash the 'commoditization of humanity' or something

DavCrav

"That's nothing, for those that haven't seen it I present the Hdac advert on itv during the world cup in all it's complete and utter b*llocks glory."

I've now seen it several times and still haven't worked out what exactly it is supposed to be about. In this brave new world do your home appliances have access to your bank account and pay for their own energy use on an hourly basis using Bitcoin? This can't possibly go wrong.

DavCrav

" I have it on good authority that things ending in gasm are supposed to get smaller with time"

You're holding it wrong.

UK privacy watchdog to fine Facebook 18 mins of profit (£500,000) for Cambridge Analytica

DavCrav

Re: How much did the investigation cost?

"How much did the investigation cost?

I bet the real cost of the investigation cost was over £500,000 and some twonk in a government office thinks £500,000 is a lot of money!

They broke the rules....they CERTAINLY knew they were braking the rules....they CONTINUE to break the rules.....so why let them trade in the UK, EU?

Only a good hard slap up the money grabbing box will get them to change....even then only to the minimum requirement. So be very, very careful about what you state as the minimum."

Maximum. Punishment. Allowed. By. The. Law.

DavCrav

Re: Seems inconsistant [sic]

"Regardless of Facebook's ability to pay, the fine seems too high in comparison to other cases."

Remember this is in connection with (allegedly) fraudulently maniplulating the Brexit referendum, and the find is actually really small beer.

DavCrav

Re: Max Fine

"There are people in British prisons for stealing sandwiches when they are hungry, smoking a joint or not having a BBC TV licence. Let those losers out and make some space for some corporate criminals."

No there aren't.

1) The law has since changed, the fine is now a certain percentage of global turnover or €20m, whichever is greater. This is the GDPR, you might have heard about it. There is also a criminal investigation happening, which has the potential to result in jail time if the stronger offences are proved.

2) Nobody is in jail for not having a TV licence. People are in jail for not paying the resulting fine. If you don't pay court fines, I don't know of anywhere in the world where you don't end up in jail.

3) A few people were jailed for stealing bottles of water during a riot, and as such were charged with rioting, not theft. You would rarely get jailed for stealing sandwiches, as in never.

4) More or less nobody is in UK jail for possession of marijuana for personal use. The only example I could find was a British man who smoked cannabis in the UK, then flew to Dubai, where we was then arrested. You know, in Dubai.

Nissan 'fesses up to fudging emissions data

DavCrav

Re: Will they be Fined?

"Really? The US fines were $4.3bn (€3.6bn). The German ones were €1bn. Granted, not as much, but not exactly what I'd call symbolic."

Also divide by the number of people, since it's reasonable for small countries to levy smaller fines since they are affected less, and the difference gets even smaller.

DavCrav

"unauthorized technicians ? So rouge techs broke in o Nissan and started to work on their cars ??"

They were authorized right up until they were caught.

DavCrav
Headmaster

Re: 1.6 litre!

"The latest generation 1.6 bi-turbo diesels are perfectly fine to lug a 2 tone 4x4 or pick-up truck off-road."

Why would the towed car's colour matter?

Big contenders in the broadband chart this week, but who will be #1? Well, not Britain

DavCrav

There is no way that the average speed in Madagascar, across all households, is higher than the UK. Just think about it, many people in Madagascar cannot even get broadband Internet. They are forgetting to include a load of zeroes for those people.

It's like a country having only one, but very good, hospital. Standing inside it, you can proclaim that country has the best healthcare in the world.

Sysadmin cracked military PC’s security by reading the manual

DavCrav

Re: Only cracking I have done is

"I have a photo that reminds me how security works in the minds of many, and which illustrates this story perfectly."

Someone recently came to visit us at home. I had to go outside for some reason and came back in.

"Is that your bike out there?"

"Yes, why?"

"We should put it round the back, it's safer."

"OK, I'll just be there in a second."

She came out of the house and I was holding the bike in front of her. She had locked it to our gate post, so I had just lifted the bike, and lock, over the gate post and wheeled it down the drive.

United States, you have 2 months to sort Privacy Shield ... or data deal is for the bin – Eurocrats

DavCrav

"heir Trump"

You misspelled 'dickhead'.

'Plane Hacker' Roberts: I put a network sniffer on my truck to see what it was sharing. Holy crap!

DavCrav

Re: Bike Garmin

"Is that the Kestrel run over the moors?"

Is that shopping for cheap beer in Yorkshire?

US Declaration of Independence labeled hate speech by Facebook bots

DavCrav

"The paper guessed that the term “Indian Savages” was the problem and suggested that "Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as 'Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development' that would have been better." "

Perhaps 'victims of colossal theft of land' might be a more appropriate phrase?

Xiaomi's Wang: We're coming to the USA

DavCrav

"That's enough to deflate any Wang."

Came for the dick jokes. Was not disappointed.

Potato, potato. Toma6to, I'm going to kill you... How a typo can turn an AI translator against us

DavCrav

Re: Nothing new here

"Actually, that is likely to be an artefact of an idiom rather than an adversarial typo: for a Russian "to sit/live on bread and water" means to be constantly hungry, either due to extreme poverty or due to some illness or another reason that does not permit one to eat normal food. "

Also in English. 'Bread and water' tends to rarely mean actual bread and actual water.

DavCrav

Re: Hmmm

"Smoe mistkaes are eaiser to corerct tahn otehrs."

Google translate went with 'Smoe-Fehler sind leichter zu korrigieren.' Apart from 'smoe', it could also correct your spelling mistakes. Must try harder!

Tesla tips ice on Apple, Google, Microsoft accounts of '$1m leaker'

DavCrav

"wrote specialised software designed to export confidential and trade secret information from Tesla's manufacturing operating system"

I bet this 'specialised software' was 'cp -R'. No wait, this is Tesla, could well be 'robocopy /e'.

Creep travels half the world to harass online teen gamer… and gets shot by her mom – cops

DavCrav

Re: Psycho creeps will always be with us.

"Not wanting to go all DM here, but in the UK the mom would probably have been arrested."

Well, yes. Anyone firing a weapon in the UK will be arrested. First, arrested is not charged, it is done because there is clearly reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed. Second, it is highly like that this was a handgun, which are more or less completely illegal to own. So whether she would be charged for the shooting, she would definitely be charged, found guilty, and sentenced to 5-10 years in jail for possession of an illegal firearm.

DavCrav

Re: I thought of the child(ren)

"When its your child he's attempting to kidnap, rape, and murder, your definition of safe simply doesn't encompass the offender."

Does it encompass bystanders?

Top banker batters Bitcoin for sucky scalability, security

DavCrav

"a currency outwith of the direct control of one government entity."

What are the benefits of dollarization? For countries with poor local currencies, dollarization presents a defence against runaway inflation, but in an emerging economy you want an inflation rate above rich countries to push producivity growth. Bitcoin is highly deflationary, which is a catastrophe in more or less any scenario.

Worse, the money supply in a general blockchain currency appears to be tied to investor confidence. During an economic boom people will pile in and generate lots of new money, fuelling inflation and bringing forward the recession, when people will run away from mining and you will have deflation to go with your recession. (To see how fun that is, look at Japan's lost decades.)

As for a currency under the control of several government entities, see the Euro, which is unbalanced without fiscal transfers. Which isn't going to happen as they are separate government entities. (Although the bailouts are a version of fiscal transfers, just hidden.)

On Kaspersky’s 'transparency tour' the truth was clear as mud

DavCrav

"Remember all the questions around Dr Kelly (weapons of mass destruction)?

Remember the questions about the young MI5 agent found in a sports bag he'd apparently managed to zip up completely from inside?"

Ah, I specifically said 'your family' for a reason, because I knew both of those were going to turn up. I think it's reasonable to say that the Russian government kills more people than the UK government, and is also a lot less squeamish about 'collateral damage'.

DavCrav

"Are we honestly to believe that the USA, UK etc wouldn't/won't/don't do the same kind of thing?"

Do I believe that the UK government would murder your family if you say no? No, I really don't.

Do I believe that the Russian government would murder your family if you said no? Well, they have done on several occasions.

White House calls its own China tech cash-inject ban 'fake news'

DavCrav

Re: Enjoy this while it lasts

"the anger of some democrats at the hijacking of the convention by the super-delegates to ensure Clinton was nominated."

Popular vote:

Hillary Clinton: 16,914,722

Bernie Sanders: 13,206,428

Contests won:

Hillary Clinton: 34

Bernie Sanders: 23

Delegate (not superdelegate) count:

Hillary Clinton: 2,271

Bernie Sanders: 1,820

Clinton won without the superdelegates. Try something else.

Uber's London licence appeal off to flying start: No, you cannot do driver eye tests via video link

DavCrav

Re: Cough, cough....

"I don't get why it's up to Uber to be doing medicals on its drivers. The drivers themselves are all individually licenced as Private Hire drivers, any medical requirements should be part and parcel of that licencing."

They don't have to, but if they do they have to be done correctly. Hope that helps.