Posts by Alan Brown 15087 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"It will be great when workable fast breeder reactors, for a low price and safe design come on board. With little waste and great economies."
Fast breeders - heh heh. With molten sodium coolant, heh heh. "It won't catch fire this time guys, honest. We learned from Shippingport, really!"
Richard Nixon was sold that when he killed the Oak Ridge project in favour of his boys in Southern California. Guess what happened.
Japan was convinced they'd solved it when they setup Monju. 20 tons of burning sodium in the basement makes for a bad day. They're still cleaning that one up (and that wasn't even in the nuclear loop!)
The Russians tried molten lead coolant loops - the fumes ate the brains of a number of their researchers.
I'm quite sure that at some point in the future Alvin Weinberg will be canonised for his successful effort to produce a properly safe and usefully hot nuclear reactor - and his production of one that ran for 9000 hours between 1966 and 1969 - with NO measurable corrosion despite the claims made by FUD teams since then.
Weinberg used Uranium for the Nautilus reactor because that's what was available, not because it was the best fuel for the job. He used a steam boiler design because that's what worked for the job and was entirely containable and had an effectively infinite heatsink just outside the hull, and steam turbines were well understood by navies - not because it was the perfect technology for the job. He was _extremely_ unhappy that his 60-80MW 6bar design was scaled up to 3000MW and 100bar - the stresses on the engineering go up with the cube of the power and these are massive steam bombs ready to explode. He was firmly convinced even before making the Nautilus and Shippingport reactors that Thorium was the best long term answer - likening it to diesel and enriched uranium to TNT in terms of fuel types.
"There just hasn’t been much serious deployment of more modern designs that aim to mitigate those known issues."
That's an understatement - One Richard Milhous Nixon not only killed the only project which was pretty much proven actively resistant to weaponisation and immune to every kind of accident we've seen in civil nuclear power systems, he had it classified beyond top secret. The world only rediscovered Oak Ridge in the late 1990s.
It's ironic that China's set to be the world's dominant player in molten salt nuclear systems as a result of this(*), because they were diligent enough to acquire as much of the original research as they could when it was released AND because they're willing to put in the large scale investments to make it work whilst all other governments are simply letting small commercial outfits flail around hopelessly with no money.
(*) And _THE_ economic superpower of the 21st-22nd century as a result. When they sell these systems to most of the rest of the world do you think they'll care that America or western Europe won't buy them until everyone else has one?
"The amount of high level waste is not "tiny" in any financial sense. "
The total amount of high level waste produced from a 800MW nuclear plant over its 60 year lifespan is about enough to fill an olympic-size pool - which oddly enough is also the best place to store it until it cools off sufficiently to handle it safely (about 300 years when the caesium decays away, not 20,000)
Alternatively if you have a working molten salt nuclear reactor you can dissolve the waste directly into the fuel stream (rod and all) into the fuel stream and achieve 98% burnup - vs the 2% burnup in a conventional reactor. At that point you no longer have hazardous nuclear waste, you have valuable nuclear fuel. MSRs can also dispose of depleted uranium and plutonium the same way, but after you get them up and running on uranium fuel (kickstarter fuel) the ongoing fuel is Thorium - at about $200/kg vs the $40k/kg of enriched uranium - and incidentally thorium happens to be the primary contaminant making rare earth mine tailings difficult and expensive to get rid of most countries, so finding a market for it solves another problem.
"rare earth minerals are not necessarily rare, some are more abundant than copper, they are just often hard to find in large deposits like other minerals."
Not even that - they tend to be bound up with an element called Thorium - mildly radioactive (15 billion year half life) and as such expensive to get rid of.
Unless you decide to restart Alvin Weinberg's Molten Salt Nuclear reactor projects (which eliminate the single most problematic item from nuclear power - water) - and the it becomes a valuable nuclear fuel at less that 0.01% of the price of reactor-grade uranium (those reactors were ALSO invented by Alvin Weinberg - he made a better mousetrap in the 1960s because he didn't like the costs or weaponisabilty of uranium, or the danger of radioactive steam boilers/bombs and was promptly drummed out of the nuclear industry). Lookup LFTRs and the Oak Ridge Project
"Few countries have gone full-retard the way we have."
I can think of one - around the 1930s, very enthusiastic about back to the past, country cottages, nature, greenery and crystal quackery
It was Germany and the most enthusiastic adoptors of such fakery were the Nazis.
That was our saving grace - because in their zeal for such things, they drove out all the experts and scientists, essentially shooting their war effort in the foot - much like we're doing now to our economy.
> No, they're 30% of nameplate capacity
To translate that to the more wilfully clueless, that means that in REAL PRACTICAL terms their annual power output is 30% (or less) of the "nameplate" capacity (ie: that 1MW wind turbine puts out an average of 300kW when averaged over a year - meaning you need 3 times as many as you thought - when you thought you needed 800 to match ONE gas-fired (or nuclear) power plant you really needed 2400 and in fact you needed 2400 in one location and 2400 in 2-3 other locations, plus battery backup systems to ensure stabilised power output, or you're pushing the costs of coping with wildly intermittent power sources onto the distributors.
Once intermittent sources exceed 20% of the grid, things get hairy - that's what caused the South Australian power blackouts. You can assume that at that point, subsidies are going to be pulled and grid operators will _insist_ that renewables suppliers have battery stabilisation systems on _their_ side of the connection.
> and require spinning conventional backups for when they're not available"
And if you're not willing to pay for those spinning backups to be maintained AND pay their minimum startup costs, you get wide area blackouts - it's exactly that reason which was responsible for the SA blacklouts (the forecast drop in wind wasn't long enough to allow the generated electricity to pay for the backup plant startups, so the owners declined to fire them up and lose $5million or so. Lights went out until payments were guaranteed.)
Renewables are hopelessly expensive when you put all the hidden costs together - the amount of subsidisation that National Grid is forced to provide via "must take" rules alone is higher than the direct subsidies. It's no wonder that windfarm operators are being paid £30k/month per turbine to NOT connect them to the grid (ie, what's being farmed is subsidies)
"a Li Battery 8 if your lucky"
So everyone thought. The original crop of EVs are hitting that age and their batteries are turning out to be perfectly serviceable in most cases. Where they're not, the batteries have dropped 75% or so in cost to replace and the batteries are 100% recycleable (they fail due to electrode cracking, not chemical failure)
>> "There's some mitigation, ie regenerative braking might reduce brake dust."
> An EV with decent regen will not wear out brakes anything like a ICE will.
Brakes hardly contribute anything to road dust. Tyres are the primary offender and with the base model Nissan Leaf weighing in just shy of 2 tons (where a comparable petrol vehicle is about 1.2 and the extended range one a portly 2.1 tons), you're going to see more of it. (Reports so far is that they _do_ eat tyres faster)
Demanding extra range means heavier vehicles == bigger motors to get acceptable acceleration == more tyre wear
"until we can generate the power for them without burning dino juice"
It's worse than that.
Even if we keep the dino-burners (which we won't), we won't have ENOUGH generation capacity to feed an EV fleet and keep up with existing electricity requirements, no matter how much "renewable" generation capacity is deployed (simply because it can't extract enough from what's available - unlimited supply doesn't mean unlimited availability)
removing gas connections after 2025 is going to add as much electrical demand again.
The _only_ way to meet demand is nuclear and those tend to take 30 years to build. By the time this gets realised the rolling power cuts will have already begun (and those whizzo smart meters with their ability to charge uber-peak time rates will be earning their keep for the power companies - yes they DO have remote cutoff relays in them to knock the plebs offline, see Big Clive's teardown of one obtained under dubious circumstances)
"Whatever you think about overseas call centres. The guys and girls have mouths to feed."
It doesn't matter if the script monkeys are in Bangalore, Sheffield or San Jose, poor service is a management _decision_.
The _best_, most switched on techs I've ever had dealt with were in Bangalore - AFTER I got through the obstructive minions in Halifax UK.
" I'm in the States. I only have one choice for anything really resembling broadband"
Until Elon gets Skynet running. This has the existing broadband monopolies cacking themselves and looking for ways to have it outlawed. Tracing the money sources for these astrotrufing astronomy protest groups is "interesting"
I expect it will quite effectively knock out and expose the regulatory capture of the state PUCs
Famous last words about any ISP:
"They're great unless something has gone wrong."
Oddly enough it's how they put things right that matters.
That was the catchphrase of a retailer who came to dominate mail order in New Zealand in the 1980s-1990s - and why they came to dominate. The number of problems they had were tiny and when there were issue, they fixed them. Too many companies treat customer complaints as a cost centre - it's a far greater cost centre if you don't address the issue (Dale Carnagie - if you offer poor service, then the customer will tell ten people and they will tell ten people, etc)
"The only way to get anything resolved is to go into the local office. "
What local office?
The nearest thing these companies have is a post office counter - and that's only there to pay bills as an agency. The staff there have even less ability to deal with anything than the call centres.
"Then they contacted him to ask him to be the expert witness in question..."
Australian police lost a number of cases in the 1980s involving misuse of radar guns.
The response was to get laws passed declaring radar guns infallible.
When challenges went in due to photographs of "speeding" vehicles clearly showing that the oblique angles the mobile installations were setup at were incorrect (60 degree angles mean that cosine calculations are critical), further legislation was passed making the photo evidence infallible.
"He gave up just over 120kph because he said it was too dangerous and was becoming uncontrollable. "
My 120Y coupe would do this with only the driver onboard - the shape meant it actually had lift, not downforce. With 4 people onboard it was a lot more stable and good for 160km/h - IF you had a long enough road.
That said, in general terms exceeding 110km/h was unwise if there were crosswinds....
"Didn't they make stuff with prison-labour in the the US before they moved that function to China?"
They still do.
Slavery isn't actually entirely outlawed in the USA and being legally imprisoned is one of the ways in which someone can still legally be an indentured or enslaved worker in many states. This is what makes the private prison system particularly repugnant as the companies involved exploit that to the hilt (to the point that judges in some areas have been found to be getting kickbacks from private prisons in exchange for giving harsher sentences...)
"This may mean the evidence was rubbish or the accused grassed up the next one up the chain."
It can also mean the possessor is a heavy smoker and it really is for personal use. The police involved tend to charge "supply" as anything more than 16g or so (half an ounce) but a heavy smoker might burn through that in a weekend.
The CPS on the other hand have the history of the offender onhand as well as the amounts he's been caught with and access to bank, medical/social worker records and are better able to make the decision (because this WILL be raised a defence in court).
In any case if you really want to make a dent in the narcogangs then it has to be done by torpedoing their profits, which means treating addiction as a health problem, not a criminal one.
The gangs are in it for the MONEY - there are spectacular profits to be made and harsher punishments just mean higher profits, so that path isn't working unless the purchasers are taken out of the loop entirely - The purchasers are committing low level crimes to get money to feed their addiction.
It's a simple cost-benefit matter to work out that feeding addicts medically pure product is cheaper all round (knockout doses are less than a pound) and saves the complications caused by contaminated street drugs/needles/etc along with territory fights between gangs, removes the motivation to sell crack to schoolkiddies and gives the opportunity to possibly get victims off the addiction cycle (worth noting that addiction is usually caused by a shitty life situation, not the other way around, but they become self-feeding - see the Rat Park studies)
Switzerland and Portugal have BOTH seen marked drops in "petty" crime rates with this approach.
The "gateway" drug theory only holds water because the gateway is to the criminal dealer network, who want to get victims onto higher profit products.
"£923k in Bitcoin, and he lives in a trailer park? "
Look up "Rathkeale Rovers" and you might understand more.
It's not a "trailer park" in the USAian sense. These are the nearest thing the UK has to Trump's "no go" zones - where the police usually only enter in large groups, with heavily armed backup and helicopter support.
Financial crimes frequently affect far more people, at least as badly, as knife crimes.
Ask anyone who's had their pension stiffed - and ask the actuaries who do the sums in medical costs, etc on the stresses involved. Now multiply that out by a few hundred or a few thousand.
Don't forget with knife/gun/violent offences crimes most of the time the people involved are known to each other and have a long "history". Stuff involving 3rd parties tends to get much stiffer penalties.
"White collar" crime has historically been attractive due to the very low penalties involved if caught, regardless of the trail of mayhem and death that can happen in its wake.
One can argue that the effects of this kind of crime (it's a robbery spree, under any other guise) are so severe that 10 years before parole should be a STARTING point - and I know some prison systems where such crims would have to be put in isolation as the other prisoners would put two and two together about their granny being bilked by such people with shortened life expectancies resulting.
This is why I usually attach a deadman switch to security vulnerabilities I report.
Being silent is one thing - I'll disclose in this case anyway, but some outfits go nuclear with the gagging attempts - having the details passed to a couple of 3rd parties in other countries with a countdown timer BEFORE notifying the outfit means they can't prevent it happening.
I also work on a policy of giving outfits 2 chances at being cooperative, then I don't bother with notification delays anymore.
Why? Quite simple: I doubt the bad guys don't know about it already - and in the cases where I've tried to go through the "right" paths the bad guys have been observed using the vulnerabilties in the wild before the announcements were released - turning them into zero-day things anyway.
"Took them a while to get to grips with it"
I found a simple solution: "OK, I'd like you to sign HERE on this document to say that you've had the necessity for onsite operational spares explained to you, that you've declined to allow for this in planning and that you take on full fiscal/legal responsibility for the consequences of this decision."
Get it witnessed.
And if they refuse to sign off on it, make a note of that too and have it witnessed (and recorded) - because when spinny thing and fecal matter intersect this is the kind of slippery fucker who will go out of their way to make it someone else's (your) fault, or fire you for "not respecting their authoritah" - and then blame you for the shitfest because you're no longer there. (which can have devastating employment consequences - slander is a serious issue, so keep this stuff recorded)
As an ISP, I fired a couple of customers and _never_ felt guilty about it.
One I specifically warned not to put NT4 systems directly on the Internet without a bastion due to its documented hackability tried to smear me amongst local businesses by painting my warning as a threat to hack their networks - they lasted about 6 weeks on their new ISP before being utterly reamed and having all their business records stolen (they were a successful pharmaceutical manufacturer) - the company never recovered and was taken over by a multinational drug company shortly afterwards. The "Consultant expert" they'd used was cut loose and went on to wreak havoc in a number of other companies - apparently because people don't talk to each other or because a condition of leaving is a glowing reference (which is why I treat such things as suspect).
It's funny when a client who leaves because you refuse to be "flexible" about poor security practices comes back and begs to be reconnected, having worked his way around the available competition. It gave quite a bit of leverage in insisting that they cleaned house. (back in those days as an ISP you paid a hefty penalty for hacked clients as a few of them would invariably trash your bandwidth - so policing it was in your own interests)
"If you're concerned about that you could run Coreboot. coreboot.org"
Except that EVEN THAT can't deal with the embedded parts of the firmware and Intel nicely introduced deadman switches into the boot code binary blobs - if you deliberately disable ME/AMT via a bios code tweak the machine will shut down after a few minutes (don't forget it's always there even if vPro isn't visible)
AMD is suspected of having done similar things.
"Currently, the law calls for $500/call civil damages (with $1500 for calls after a request to cease). Court costs are going to be a lot more than that, so it's a losing proposition for the call-receiver."
Incorrect.
The TCPA provides $500 _statutory_(*) per call damages, tripled for wilful violation(**) - filable in small claims court local to the plaintiff - against BOTH the calling company and the company which hired them - with all filing, administration and other charges acruing to the respondent.
Attorney fees are not provided for as attorneys are _specifically excluded_ from small claims courts.
This has led to a mountain of false information being circulated by scam/spam companies about how it's impossible to file, etc etc, legal fees, etc etc.
The other problem has been that small claims judges across the USA have refused to hear cases or enforce the _statutory_ damages against local businesses or directed that this case must be heard by a higher court.
_Every single time_ this has been kicked to higher courts it has come back down to the lower courts with the judge in question being censured and told to both hear the case and find for the plaintiff (the unspoken part being that a judge who doesn't comply has a limited tenure left as a judge or as a lawyer)
There's enough precedent in all 50 US states now that if a small claims judge even thinks of taking this route (s)he is courting a permanent loss of employment.
There's only one grey area left in TCPA law - that of vicarious liability of franchisors for the actions of franchisees (ie, going after Dominos USA for the phone spamming of the local franchise holder is unlikely to fly unless it's shown the business model was approved by the franchising company, ditto going after an alarm company for the spamming actions of retailers selling the product, unless it can be shown the activity was encouraged - this is where "affiliate" spamming gets traction)
(*) Statutory meaning that judges have _zero_ discretion in awarding the damages.
(**) Wilful is defined, but boils down to multiple calls per day, forged (or no) caller-ID, calling after being told not to or breaching do not call lists(***), robo(prerecorded) calls and calling hospital lines or emergncy services lines.
(***) Several states have their own fines for breaching DNC lists - Indiana is about $50k/call
The idea was and is to take down junk callers/faxers with the death of a million papercuts - and if it put the company out of business, that was intentional - this is the part that small claims judges refused to allow - and got slapped down hard on - remember that lower level US judges are elected, not appointed and they were afraid of bad publicity - although that cuts both ways and one judge who refused to apply the fines was voted out on a landslide once the media got hold of it and the subsequent appeal court spanking delivered.
As for enforcement: once you have your judgement, if they don't cough up you apply to the court for bailiffs to enforce - which gets added to the respondent's bill, not the plaintiff's. There are a couple of hoops to jump through for interstate enforcement but they're a basic formality.
"It's usually much worse, as with Mr Pai, than having no regulation at all"
Wrong. At that point the dominant player simply stomps all opposition into the ground and raises prices when done.
That was proven multiple times over in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Those regulators (The FCC and FTC in particular) EXIST because of what was happening in a regulatory-free environment.
The failure is that the abusive dominant players realised they could game the system to their advantage - and the government didn't stop them doing so. It's happened before - and the players eventually ejected. The abject failure and capturability of US State-level PUCs pretty much guarantees that next time around they won't exist in the forms currently known - and you can expect stricter rules about where regulators come from or go to.
All this has been made possible by cultures of secrecy and the inability to track money flows. Times change and it's becoming harder for this stuff to remain swept under the rug.
"Wireless network gear sold for the US market enforces DFS, but wireless network gear for the international market does not "
This is becoming less and less the case due to the safety issues worldwide (5GHz weather radar operates everywhere). DFS is even finding its way into "indoor" frequencies due to the proliferation of point to point links being setup by people with no concept of aviation safety.
Decent equipment snoops the band and will switch to an unoccupied frequency rather than shutting down, unless rigidly locked to one channel.
One of the reasons these ISM bands exist is because of the issues of water attenuation - which means that weather radar must work on these frequencies - and they were there first (long before Wifi existed)
One of the operating conditions for outdoor 5GHz wifi equipment is to CHECK for radar emissions and change frequency away from them if detected. This isn't the first time US ISPs have been thwapped for deploying illegal equipment that doesn't do that.
(It's also why Europe _requires_ that outdoor point-to-point 5GHz links only use the "C" segment of the band and are licensed - it's not so much to control the things as to know where they are when things go wrong - and outdoor point to point in the lower bands is illegal despite the proliferation of such things on channel 100)
If you don't want to play the "license-free" ISM non-interference game, then get licensed channels in other bands.
"have been getting more so since Clinton's days, "
You need to rewind about 20 years. This started happening more openly under Reagan but the power plays in one form or another date back to the late 50s.
That late warning about not letting the military-industrial tail wag the national dog was ignored and the result was inevitable.
" one scam a while back involved ringing landlines and simply not hanging up to hold the line"
Which shows the sheer number of dipshits who don't listen for dialtone before starting to dial (Worth knowing: When the exchange is overloaded it'll withhold tone. Some provide a pip tone but that's not universal)
And of course if you think your line's been grabbed this way, dial a couple of other numbers first to ensure they go where you think they'd go.
The ultimate defense is simply calling out on another line.
"Back staff react surprised "
I've had them become quite abusive. Moreso when they start rabbiting on about Caller-ID and I calmly point out that having worked as an exchange tech I know how trivial it is to fake those - and NO, I'm not going to call back any number you give me.
Of course banks deny that their staff do that - which is too bad when there are recordings.
"Jaded box heads on help desks are, luckily, becoming a thing of the past."
What's replacing them is far, FAR worse.
The standard response is frequently "We don't support that" - despite documentation showing that they DO support it and memos from senior management to stop giving that response.
On top of that, when someone takes your name and userID at the start of the call, they shouldn't then be asking you to re-supply it _3_ times during the call - nor should they be ignoring what the user says and just typing something generic in the fault fields - leading the investigators to either be chasing the wrong fault ("no fault found") or have to phone up and ask for the description AGAIN.
(Similarly, refusing to link tickets, or reopen improperly closed tickets...)
Then there are the helldesk systems which don't allow the helldesker to pull up fault histories to find series of tickets for the same fault which have been repeatedly closed by the SAME staff without being fixed (these are the people you need to deal with or remove from the organisation)
I have stand up arguments with my managers about tickets which are open for long periods. He subscribes to the metric that they MUST be closed within 7 days or he gets stroppy. I subscribe to the metric that they get closed when the fault's fixed and confirmed fixed - NOT BEFORE.
It's dickheadedness like that which causes faults to go unfixed for _years_ until someone with half a clue decides to look at the ticket - assuming that it hasn't gone way up the food chain on one side and come down _hard_ on the support crew from a great height on the other.
The UK had the type 706: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GPO_706_Green_Telephone.JPG
That insert in the middle was used for a recall or bell disable switch or had 2 buttons for 2 line phones.
For internal (non PABX use) they ended up looking like THIS: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/GPO_706_HES.JPG
"When I were 'lad" these were the phones everyone had (if they didn't have the black bakelite versions) in areas where the phones weren't crank handled and answered by a manual operator. They only stopped being standard issue in the mid 1980s - which curiously enough was also when I was involved in removing the last of the aforementioned crank handled phones and party lines from service. (The standard issue became the BT Viscount aka "pert", which have proven to be 20 times as reliable as anything else since, despite costing less than £3 each when new - achieved by buying 500,000 of them in only 2 colours - reputed to be an ordering typo/off by one error)
One of our staff _used_ to be a helpdesker.
Now he's a developer - and every time people walk in to regale him with their latest problems they pull him away from essential tasks
Those same people - when told NOT to disturb him and to either use the webforms or talk to the current helpdesk guys get all huffy - just like you do.
We started documenting how much disturbance they cause. The answer is about 9 months delay on one project so far.
And yes, this is a "Ivory tower" organisation. The problem isn't the helpdesk, it's the tenured staff who think they can ride roughshod over everything coupled with management who 'don't want a confrontation' - to the point that the only thing that can stop them is locked doors and even stricter access conditions than would otherwise be necessary.
We can't actually say that all the issues are down to professor X, Y amd Z and we CERTAINLY can't direct the restrictions only at them or staff of that level, so everyone gets to wear the results of the shitfest they create.
University academics are some of the most entitled (as in demanding) prima donnas you'll ever encounter - and whilst they have deep qualifications in their speciality that does not make them automatic experts in everything else. The average academic has a mildly above average IQ, on par with most El Reg readers. The _really_ smart ones are actually easier to work with, with less tendency to micromanage or play "dying swan" at the slightest provokation.
Horses for courses.
The single biggest problem with multithreading and weak singlethreading isn't the CPU, it's the programmer - WE are the ones who have difficulty writing multithreaded code and have always done so even in the days of Occam, so we try to make up for it by using faster single cores.
Perhaps this might change (yeah right) or perhaps someone might come up with some kind of breakthrough to make parallel coding much easier.
The human brain doesn't clock very fast, but its computation rate is pretty good regardless.
"I did get my CF card back but I'm not sure if the cops ever figured out how to read the CR2 files."
I'm pretty sure they don't know how to read fingerprints or DNA either, after an experience crashing into a car driven by someone who ran off - the license plates, tax disc and VIN plate on the car all turned out to be counterfeit (never existed at all - which might explain the scarpering), but somehow the Met managed to lose those in less than 48 hours - AND they didn't manage to get any DNA or fingerprints off the driver's airbag.
Meantime the guys attending the crash told me that London's facing a plague of about 10-15% cars being on faked (usually cloned) plates to avoid congestion and other charges - with that kind of response to being handed pretty much easy evidence to go track someone down (and a bunch of their CCTVs watching) you start understanding why people start believing most police are lazy jobsworths who can't hold down work anywhere else.
I suspect that if they keep their historic 5% "solution" rate on crimes, they'll find themselves being made redundant by the general public.
"Reads to me as Talk-Talk and Telstra are a steaming piles of insecurity."
Oh, indeed - and an astute judge could make hay by dint of simply pointing out that the only reason they're not facing massive charges and fines themselves is because noone's thought to prosecute them yet.
If a social-engineering skript kiddie can crash into someone's IG account by sweet talking telco employees, then the privacy bodies in all countries affected should be going in boot-and-all for maximum fines.
Yes he's a criminal scumbag, but they still broke a bunch of laws (and GDPR liabilities apply for TalkTalk) by handing over the data. Right now they can blame the 'evil hacker' instead of being made to sweat a few million, have some explaining to do to the shareholders and fix their broken processes so it doesn't happen again (What was the Talktalk record? 3 almost identical bull-in-a-china-shop hacks in as many months where they tried to play it down as "sophisticated and subtle" and "we've fixed our security" - fines should be tripled when that kind of bare faced lie is publicly shown up for what it is.)
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