As an alternative to fines, the entire board of directors on Virgin Media have to spend a day in stocks being pelted by rotten vegetables. Let them personally share in suffering.
Posts by davenewman
493 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2008
Virgin Media fined £50,000 after spamming 451,000 who didn't want marketing emails
You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?
Thanks, Sir Clive Sinclair, from Reg readers whose careers you created and lives you shaped
Kenyan businesses ran on the Sinclair QL
As it was small enough to smuggle in when there was 160% duty and sales tax on computers, as President Daniel Arap Moi had declared the only purpose of a computer was to put secretaries out of work.
A complete direct mail marketing company ran on the QL. While I wrote a timekeeping programme for the Nairobi Round Table 24 hour pedal cart race. It had multi-tasking assembly programs controlled by a QL BASIC one.
Even before that, the university microelectronics course that trained the first ever computer technicians in the country used a lab full of Sinclair Spectrums - connected to a cassette recorder via an amplifier and cooled with frozen tetrapaks of milk.
Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU
Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children
Four women suing Google for pay discrimination just had their lawsuit upgraded to a $600m class action
To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user
Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99
Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities
Perl-clutching hijackers appear to have seized control of 33-year-old programming language's .com domain
Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard
I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?
Realme 7 5G: Parents, this is the phone you should have got your kids for Christmas
Well, on the bright side, the SolarWinds Sunburst attack will spur the cybersecurity field to evolve all over again
iPhone factory workers riot over unpaid wages in India
YouTube is going to splash adverts all over your videos, and won't pay creators unless there's a big enough audience
Ordnance Survey recruits AR developer to build 'geolocated quests' to help get Brit couch potatoes exercising outdoors
The revolution will not be televised because my television has been radicalised
If only there was some mythical way to get your computer to record only the programmes that interest you? One in which you look through the list of new titles and pick the ones to record - just one or maybe the whole series. Then later you choose to watch some of the ones you picked.
Oh there is. MythTV and its imitators.
FCC sucked deeper into partisan politics, Trumpism: Nominated commissioner sparks conflict-of-interest row
State rural netification
There is an Internet policy that would win back rural voters to the Democrats. A massive rural netification programme on the scale of the rural electrification programmes like the Tennessee Valley Authority. These would be state run to take back control from the cable companies. Once every rural town can work remotely, they don't have to lose all their young to the big cities.
Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party
British Airways fined £20m for Magecart hack that exposed 400k folks' credit card details to crooks
To stop web giants abusing privacy, they must be prevented from respawning. Ever
Re: a series of food and drug laws in the United States
The food laws worked. They no longer adulterate flour with alum and other white substances.
The drug laws worked until Congress voted to make it illegal to buy generics at a lower price. In the rest of the world, governments invite tenders from drug suppliers, achieving discounts for quantity.
Nominet refuses to consider complaint about its own behaviour, claims CEO didn’t mean what he said on camera
UK privacy watchdog confirms probe into NHS England COVID-19 app after complaints of spammy emails, texts
Microsoft forks out $3m in back pay settlement to make Feds' hiring discrimination probe go away
Why is it impossible to prove? There have been plenty of studies where the same c.v. was sent in under a European name and an African-American name and only the one with the European name got invited to an interview.
And it is not an impossible data analysis task to do a factor analysis of criteria correlated with hiring, including all the qualification and demographic data. The Government can certainly do that.
Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer
TCL notices lockdown has made tablet market a thing again, tosses out pair of cheapish 'droid fondleslabs
Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update
Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe
'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad
It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?
If there's a lesson to be learned in these torrid times, it's that civilisation is fleeting – but Windows XP is eternal
Former UK Labour deputy leader wants to know how the NHS's contact-tracing app will ensure user privacy
Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea
Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps
Safari still bad a video conferencing
One reason fewer people use Safari on the desktop is the problems people often get when running video conferencing systems on it - particularly the ones that don't have their own client but use WebRTC. as I found out when running an 800 person conference in Hopin.
Couple wrongly arrested over Gatwick Airport drone debacle score £200k payout from cops
Whatsapp blamed own users for failure to keep phone number repo off Google searches
Barmy ban on businesses, Brits based in Blighty bearing or buying .eu domains is back: Cut-off date is Jan 1, 2021
All-electric plane makes first flight – while lugging 2 tons of batteries aloft
Fancy watching 'Bake Off' together with mates and alone at the same time? The BBC's built a tool to do that
Oracle faces claims of unequal pay from 4,000+ women after judge upgrades gender gap lawsuit to class action
Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard
Sheffield is one of the (mostly Labour) councils who have used the Coronavirus crisis to delegate all powers to the CEO with no oversight at all from elected councillors (except the leader of the Labour group). Oxford is another. The Stalinists are taking over in local councils (as opposed to Conservative Ministers in Whitehall shitting on us).
Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word
Your PC is not a typewriter
Was the title of a book in the 1990s. The author pointed out that with proportional fonts, the way to make text look good is to use the conventions of typesetting rather than typewriting. So only one space after a full stop in proportional fonts, 2 spaces in monospace fonts. (Word know which font you are using.)
Work from home surge may work in Wi-Fi 6's favour, reckons analyst house
New York Attorney General probes Charter over claims it forced staff to work in offices amid coronavirus pandemic
Lockdown endgame? There won't be one until the West figures out its approach to contact-tracing apps
Re: many European nations hesitated when it came to instituting lockdowns.
Since health is not a competence of the EU, but strictly that of national governments, it doesn't matter what the European Parliament or Commission does.. The EU is as powerless to intervene in this crisis as Donald Trump is against the state governors in the USA.