Posts by Grease Monkey

Death Becomes It: Who put the Blue in the Blue Screen of Death?

Can't remember where or when I first heard it called the Blue Screen Of Death, but the action of windows displaying the screen has always just been Blue Screening.

As in the well worn phrase "windows just fucking blue screened again, the bastard"

Virtual cycling service bans riders for doping – doping their data, that is

Chilly Winter Months?

In the chilly winter months I riding is still just as possible.

Yes during the pandemic if you happen to be a competitive rider (I'm not) then it must be good to compete. But before the pandemic there was still plenty of competitive riding available - if all else fails get yourself a cyclocross bike.

But social riding in winter still exists and at least none of those fair weather riders turn out.

The real chore of riding in winter has always been the amount of cleaning you have to do. Which is why most all year riders have a winter bike so the salt doesn't destroy their pride and joy. And of course the proper winter riders probably own a fixed wheel bike which has a lot fewer moving parts to clean.

Re: How sad do you have to be ...

It' no different from cheating at online gaming and people have been doing that for as long as online gaming has existed. The only difference between this and other online games is of course that at least you get some physical exercise.

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

I was unlucky enough to work in local government in 1999 and we were still coming across systems using two digit year. Some of which had cludges in place to try to compensate for such things as residents born before 1900. You know rather than just changing to a four digit year.

However the best cock up wasn't based upon a two digit year, but the tax bands in the payroll system. There was a file containing each of the tax bands. For some reason this particular local authority paid some of its staff weekly, some four weekly and some monthly. Just to add confusion rather than storing the tax band information annually and calculating the monthly thresholds for each payroll period for that the file stored the thresholds for each tax band based upon the pay frequency. So for each tax band there was a record each for weekly, four weekly and monthly. Each of these records contained an upper and lower threshold. Why you needed an upper and lower threshold I know not. Surely just storing the lower threshold for each tax band was enough, but the system was probably decades old and had also probably been recoded in different languages each time the hardware was refreshed.

Anyway one thing that had been overlooked was that the record for the upper tax band had an upper threshold. And that threshold was never changed. When the record was first created the value that some numpty decided to enter for the upper threshold probably seemed an impossible amount to earn in a month. But obviously pay increases over time and here we were in the late nineties and one particular senior employee not only had a very high monthly salary, but was also due some extra taxable pay which took them over the threshold. The payroll system was so brilliantly coded that when the monthly pay went above that upper threshold the system just basically shat itself resulting in that very senior officer getting paid absolutely nothing.

Of course nobody realised that the above was the cause until one morning the payroll manager got a call from a very irate senior officer who had just received a pay slip covered in zeros. Which quickly resulted in a very irate payroll manager calling the IT department. The programmer who found the error corrected the problem not by recoding but by increasing the value of the upper threshold. He then couldn't work out why nobody was willing to accept his solution of simply paying the senior officer two months salary the following month.

As it was the payroll department had to manually run a bank transfer for the correct salary, plus of course they had to manually adjust the tax paid. And then we had to scrutinise everything very carefully to ensure everything tied up correctly at year end between the payroll system and reality.

And of course then the system had to be recoded in order to ensure that there was no repeat of the debacle.

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

Having left the whole server arena about ten years ago I thought Itanium would have died a looooong time back so I was quite surprised to learn it was still available. Especially when the Xeon has always done a decent job.

I wonder how much of distraction continuing Itanium development for so long was for Intel.

Top engineer who stole trade secrets from Google's self-driving division pardoned on Trump's last day as president

@Trigonoceps occipitalis the royal prerogative of mercy has been used in only two cases in Britain this century affecting three people in total. Both of these were certainly exceptional services involving as they did heroic action and the saving of lives.

It seems that most presidents issue hundreds of pardons with absolutely no good reason for any of them. It's certainly something that needs looking at, but it seems there are a lot of presidential powers that need to be examined and limited.

Bear in mind that the monarch of the UK has all sorts of powers which are at most ceremonial. Or if you prefer they only exist so long as the monarch does not exercise them.

Everybody was expecting Trump to issue well over 100 pardons on his last day. Including pre-emptive pardons for himself and several family members. As it was he didn't get close to 100 and didn't issue any of the predicted pre-emptive pardons.

Some people seem to have got very upset by this as they were expecting to be outraged by the scale of pardons issued on Trump's last day and were robbed of that opportunity.

Previous presidents have issued more and it has to be said more outrageous pardon's than Trump's final tally and I have to say I expected the orange one to issue way more than the 70 pardons he settled on. I also expected him to pre-emptively pardon family members. However even though he has previously stated that he had the power I never expected him to pardon himself. The thing is though that I was presently surprised by the scale of Trump's last day pardons, rather than annoyed.

Those who seem to be annoyed about the fact that he didn't issue all that many pardons and didn't issue some of the outrageous pardons they were expecting are annoyed because they were all ready to take to social media to vent their outrage and have been robbed of the opportunity. Some of them have even gone so far as to suggest that Trump actually issued secret pardons which nobody will ever find out about. That is as ridiculous as some of the comspiracy theories touted by Trump's supporters. A pardon so secret nobody would ever find out about? What even judges and actual pardonee?

Although I have to say the rumours that he questioned why he couldn't pardon people convicted below federal level is quite amusing. Whenever you hear that Trump got upset at the limits of his power it makes you chuckle. However it also chills. It's a worry that the man clearly thought that the president is all powerful.

Raspberry Pi Foundation moves into microcontrollers with the $4 Pi Pico using homegrown silicon

Re: Neither fish nor fowl

@Pete2

Curious reasoning you have there.

It's difficult to see what this addition to a crowded market has to offer. Henry Ford should never have bothered with his Model T.

Hollywood drone pilot admits he crashed gizmo into cop chopper, triggering emergency landing

Re: Helicopter danger

@Peter2 have you ever been near a cannabis farm? You don't need any form of thermal imaging to spot them. Mainly because they stink.

The fact is that the police just aren't really interested in dealing with them unless they are absolutely huge, like on the scale of a warehouse.

A friend was walking down a street near his home when he encountered the unmistakable guff. He immediately spotted the house from which the guff was emerging. And a quick proximity check with his nose confirmed it. The house was a middle terrace with all the curtains not just closed but clearly taped up front and back. A neighbour spotted him sniffing about and stuck her head out to tell him the house was empty, but somebody came by occasionally because she could here them moving about, but that she never saw them and they never opened the curtains. Absolutely classic signs of a cannabis farm. So he called the police to report the farm. The police response sums up the police attitude. Firstly they told him that they had no previous reports of a cannabis farm at that address. Well I should hope so, after all you'd think they'd have shut it down if they had. Then they told him that his suspicions weren't actually evidence that a crime was being committed so thanks very much for the report and they would pass it to the drugs squad for consideration. About a month later he passed that way again and nothing had changed.

Back in the days before quad copters when r/c aircraft (as drones were called then in the UK at least) took some skill to fly a lot of bozos might have wanted to fly one, but frankly couldn't be arsed with acquiring the skills.

Of course now quadcopters are incredibly easy to fly. Especially high end ones which are pretty much fly by wire. And they are so easily available and of course cheap.

Already there's a lot more regulation in most countries than only a few years ago. But these regulations seem to be largely ignored by pilots and go unenforced by the authorities. Take the UK laws on flying near crowds, built up areas or roads, how often do you see those being adhered to? How often do you see then being enforced? However I suspect that it will only take one fatal accident for that to change to the extent that the sale and use of drones will be all but outlawed in that particular jurisdiction. Whether it's at a city or country level will largely depend on the size of the event. If a drone kills an individual on the ground then they will probably be outlawed in that local jurisdiction, but should one take down an aircraft resulting in multiple deaths then you can expect a ban at national level.

If you think they won't be effectively banned following such an event you need to consider three things. Firstly policing the things effectively in most countries where they are legal is just not happening and it would be much easier and cheaper to issue a ban on all but licenced commercial use than it would be to improve policing of their use. Secondly the majority of people seem to dislike drones, so whipping up an outcry to ban them won't be difficult. And finally politicians love a kneejerk headline grabbing blanket solution rather than a reasoned response, they can tell the population they have taken decisive action.

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

Yes the pilot was a dick.

The force and the CAA are also dicks for allowing pilots to fly after only two hours training.

And the manufacturer is a dick having an emergency cutout that will simply drop a flying drone out of the sky with potentially fatal consequences.

Sounds like a perfect storm of dickery.

However the biggest failure here is definitely with the CAA. Their regulation is clearly inadequate. I wonder if they are going to revisit their regulations following this or wait until somebody is killed or seriously injured as a result of such lax legislation. The answer is probably neither as their response to this event will probably be of the "nobody died nobody got pregnant" ilk. Then of course if somebody is killed in a similar even later changing the regulations then would be seen as an admission of liability so they wouldn't do it for fear of financial consequences.

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

I too was in local government at the time. It was strict policy that every server has a UPS and was backed up to tape nightly. The network was not up to remote backups so it's a shame there were no fitness trackers in those days, the daily tape swapping routine involved daily visits to remote server locations.

Another thing though. Why set up a remote server so it needed a logon at the console to function? Especially if it didn't have a UPS.

And what sort of support person needed to stake out the server? Logs would show it power cycled. So you investigate the power supply. Response #1 why does this server not have a ups? #2 why is the server on the same supply as dirty devices?

We had a policy back in the day that connecting unauthorized devices to the same ring as a server was prohibited with sanctions up to and including disciplinary action. Every socket in every buildings was labelled clean or dirty. Somebody got a written warning for connecting a fan heater to a clearly labelled clean supply. It wasn't so much the noise on the supply that got them a warning. It was tripping the supply for several rooms.

Gloucestershire IT pro faces court over £30k Amazon voucher theft allegations

He may walk away with a suspended sentence. But I suspect he'll also be hit with an order to pay back the value of the goods. And making the payment is often a condition of the suspension of the sentence.

IOW words pay back £30K plus within a certain time or go to jail anyway.

Pirate Bay co-founder criticises Parler for its lack of resilience

Re: Easy solution

They have found somebody to host them . I heard it was Epik which given their history is unsurprising.

However so far the authorities have not come down on either Epik or Parler. It seems likely however that in about oh... a week from now they will do. How long they survive after that is questionable, at least on US soil.

It would be funny if the likes of Parler ended up being hosted in Russia.

Union warns Openreach that engineers are ready to vote for industrial action over new grading structure

I think some people are confusing Openreach engineers with those working for subbies like Murphys, Quinns and Kellys.

There's a good chance that the "Openreach" engineers you have encountered are subcontractors rather than employees of Openreach. The difference in standard is not unlike day and night. Or more accurately like the difference between somebody who can be arsed to do their job and somebody who will look for any excuse to avoid doing it. I have been told this is because the subbies get paid a fixed rate per job so their solution is to make sure the job takes as little time as possible so they will red door a task whenever they can or even on an LL14 task or the like just to a line test and if it passes run away and send the task back as right when tested even if the customer has no service. If they are getting a fixed rate then it's not really in their interests to spend time fixing a fault if they can just spend ten minutes on the job and on to the next. Don't know if this is actually true however. If it is then it's a dumb way to run a business.

Some of the subbies drive round in rusty old vans with an Openreach sticker on the door, but others use vans that look like legit Openreach vans but with their company name subtly among the Openreach branding.

What’s that in CES heaven, is it a star? Or is it that damned elusive flying car?

Re: If it only flies then how is it different from a helicopter?

I think you're missing the point of a flying car. Look back to the days the idea was first mooted and nobody was suggesting something that could be driven on roads. They were talking about a personal air vehicle that would never need roads.

The idea of a car that could fly is more recent and something completely different. However somehow in the eyes of the media it seems to have replaced the original idea.

It would never fly however. No authority is ever going to allow takeoffs from public roads and without that it's entirely pointless.

Roads?

Looking back at the origins of the concept of the flying car it was never a road going car that could fly. The idea was more a personal air vehicle which fulfilled the role of a car. It would take off at the start of the journey and land at the end of it. In other words: Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

Somewhere over the years though the idea mutated into one of a road car that could fly. The number of problems with this concept is almost insurmountable. The most basic is a car which meets with all the legislation required in most countries tends to be very heavy indeed. Then there's all the home comforts that most drivers insist upon these days (well hardly home comforts, most people's cars are better specced than their houses, what with climate countrol, heated and air conditioned seats with built in massagers and the like). Add the means to provide lift and airborne control and you are adding even more weight thus making for a very impractical aircraft. Then there are more esoteric considerations, if you've ever flown a light aircraft you'll know about all the preflight checks. If you clock some exterior damage you're not just going to take off. How often do cars get minor bumps in car parks and the like?

So building something that's practical and legal for both air and road would be problematic.

Then of course you would still need somewhere to take off. I can't see the authorities in any jurisdiction being happy with the idea of a rolling takeoff from a public road. As such you would probably need to drive to an airstrip to take off. You'd obviously need to land at one too and then drive to your destination.

So the original concept of a convenient personal air vehicle that fulfills the role of a car would be a lot better than the idea of a car that can also fly. And we already have something that comes pretty close to that, the only problem being cost. Small choppers (ooh errr, obviously) are available but they ain't cheap. Well an R44 may be pretty cheap for what it is, but it costs a teeny bit more than a Nissan Micra. However an R44 ticks most of the boxes for me.

There's a bloke just up the road from me who has one. He parks it in a field behind his house at night - yes he owns the field. He can land it over the road from where he works. He'll use the car locally, but says when he goes further afield he'd rather take the Robinson and get a taxi or hire a car when he gets there.

Now for me the ideal "flying car" would be something VTOL but not a chopper, something with a smaller footprint. Then it could fulfil the same role as that R44 but without needing so much space to take off and land. Then you'd be getting there. After all it would be much easier to sort out permission to take off from your back yard than a rolling takeoff from the north circular. For me if it could carry a dirt bike I'd be sorted for transport at the other end as well.

But of course the real issue with a significant uptake of flying cars of any sort would be congestion in the skies particularly over built up areas. At the moment a near miss involves pretty wide tolerances. If we start replacing road going cars with air vehicles then the proximity of air vehicles over densely populated areas would be terrifying. VTOL would be almost compulsory to deal with these situations along of course with the ability to hover and fly very slowy. As such I think the only way such a concept could take off would be with completely automated control of these vehicles in the air. After all would you trust most of the idiots you encounter in urban traffic to take charge of any aircraft other than a kite.

Unauthorised RAC staffer harvested customer details then sold them to accident claims management company

Once upon a time you had to be a proper law firm - well solicitors - to carry out this sort of work. But the law changed and "claims management" companies came into being. They don't have to registered with anybody and don't have a regulatory body. Then people are surprised when they turn out to be dodgy.

There are trade bodies and regulatory frameworks for solicitors and insurers, but no such thing for these "claims management" companies. The simple solution would be to make them sign up to the same system as insurers. Half of them would go out of business overnight as they wouldn't want the extra expense.

I had forgotten the car hire firm. The courtesy car was delivered by a car hire firm and they would have had my name and phone number but no other details of the accident.

1. No they weren't fined. Those were just orders to reclaim the profit they had made. The point about fines is that they should be punishments rather than just orders to repay the money you have made. The latter is not really much of a punishment as it just takes you back to square one. Also these are often based on underestimates of the amount of money received if no records are available - and it would be a pretty special kind of criminal that kept detailed records of their misdeeds.. And the additional grand is contribution to legal costs rather than a fine.

2. If she was doing for cases she'd handled then she would have had more information than partial names and mobile numbers.

When it comes to financial penalties remember that the ICO has had the power to levy unlimited fines since 2015.

Re: Competition for the RAC?

They do sell it but only if you've checked the box that says you authorize them to pass on your data to trusted partners. Remember this stuff is strictly opt in by law.

Although I suspect that now we are out of the EU it won't be long before this becomes opt out. With the only way to opt out being to send them a letter countersigned by the prime minister.

Re: These type of activity is a plague on humanity

Rather than "claims management company" I've had two types in the past.

Number one "I am calling on behalf of your insurance company" to which a good response is to ask them for the name of your insurance company. Due to the nature of the data they often won't know it.

Number two "I am calling about the motor accident you had in the last three years". Clearly these buggers are as dodgy as possible and the best response is to simply hang up. Or if you have nothing else to do string them along and waste as much of their time as you possibly can.

Seriously though I had an accident earlier this year and received an iffy looking letter from a solicitor which wasn't very clear about what they were trying to reclaim and from who. I called the my insurer who explained that the letter was from a solicitor who they had engaged to try to recover my excess from the third parties insurer (this wasn't clear it looked as if they were trying to recover it from me) and that they should never have written to me as it wasn't really of any consequence to me. So sometimes insurers do employ third parties to manage claims or parts thereof, but these companies should not be communicating direct with you they should always do so through your insurance company unless your insurers have informed you of it before. As such I am told the best way to deal with any of these companies is to refer them to your insurer. If they are not happy with this or try the "but your insurer asked us to contact you direct" ask them for their name, company name and phone number along with their case number and tell them you'll be calling your insurers to authorise the call. Explain that if the insurer do authorise the call you'll be calling them straight back, otherwise you'll be calling the police and the ICO. This tactic will generally be rewarded with a rapidly terminated call.

This stuff is not unique to the RAC but the ICO seem to have difficulty tracking down the perps. In this case it seems that they only got a result because a victim managed to point the finger at the RAC as the source of the leak.

I tried to raise a case once after a similar call about a car accident. It was clear the caller had some details but they were very limited. This then led me to believe that the had come by the data by nefarious means. If they had a right to the data it would have been much more complete. However I was told that I could only make a report of a data breach if I could provide the name of the company who had suffered the breach. The trouble is that the data could have come from a number of sources, my insurer, the third party's insurer, the company who'd towed the car, the body shop who assessed the car, the company that collected the write off and perhaps a few subcontractors as well. I explained this but was told that without a specific company name there was nothing that could be done. Since there was no way I could identify the source of the leak (all they seemed to have was my name, phone number and strangely the month of the accident - not the full date) there was no way I could procede.

However given those three specific items of data you'd think the ICO would have been able to work out which of the companies was the most likely source since they could surely ask to see the reports. After all it seems somebody had got hold of a monthly report that included partial names (they only used my surname), and phone number. Obviously there was probably more information than that on the report, but nothing they would have found useful to give me on the call. As such you're looking at it being unlikely to be my insurer as they would have had more personal information. However all of the others were likely to have that data, but no other personal data. The other thing all of them would have had would have been my registration number, but strangely that was never mentioned on the call. But then maybe that wasn't included in the particular report that was leaked. To look at it another way it could even have been something as simple as a phone record. It if was the latter then my insurer, the tow company and the body shop all called me on that number and knew my surname. But once again this apparently wasn't enough for the ICO.

The ICO needs 1. More teeth and 2. KPIs to work on. If they had a clear up rate they had to meet I'm sure they would try harder.

Not even close to a strict enough punishment.

Both should have been subject to hefty fines as both will almost certainly have gained financially from the arrangement. Then the claims management company should have been subject to a significant fine.

Finally the RAC should have been fined. Yes they co-operated. Yes they caught the rogue employee. The reason that they should be fined is that their systems allow the bulk export of data. I remember years ago being a member of a corporate data protection board I explained to one department that their systems allowed personal data to be exported in bulk which was in breach of our data protection declaration. I pointed out that one default report included customer names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and bank details. I asked the the idiot (sorry department manager) why this was necessary and he could not provide a single instance where having all that data together in a handy spreadsheet was necessary. In this particular case there should be no reason why a report containing the customer names (albeit partial) and mobile numbers in a single bulk report should be necessary.

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Re: Indisputable trump if the world

It's not censorship.

Twitter, FB and all the rest have Ts&Cs and if you breach them you can and indeed should be banned. The problem I have with this action is not that it happened now, but that it did not happen years ago. Trump has repeatedly broken the terms and conditions of just about every social media platform he has used, but the closest the platforms seem to have come to censuring him is flagging his post with a warning. The argument that he is president and as such is above being banned is nonsense. There is the official POTUS account, but he chose not to use that.

So he has not been removed from the platform. He has been forced to use the official account. Of course other folks - mostly White House staff have access to that account - but that doesn't mean Trump doesn't.

I think it would be a good idea if in future all elected representatives have their personal accounts disabled for the duration of their office and be forced to use only the official account of their office.

Remember there was some quite heated discussion a few years back over whether Trump had the write to block people. The argument in Trump's favour was that his twitter account was personal and not the official presidential account. Of course he was overruled in that case, but had he been forced to use the POTUS account then surely it would never have been open to discussion.

However in the above case Trump actually argues against himself and his apologists in the current case. Trump thought it within his power to block and therefore effectively censor anybody he diagreed with, thus infringing their first ammendment rights. He and his apologists are now complaining that it's unfair for him to be banned and therefore censored.

My own view however is that the whole freedom of speech argument in terms of social media is moot. The first amendment protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Neither of which covers social media. The closest it could possibly come to social media would be if you could classify the platforms themselves as equivalent to the press. If you do that then surely editorial freedom means the platforms have the right to publish or not publish as they choose.

Re: "No one can legally disobey the C in C":

Who actually fires the missiles though. It's not the president and it's not the generals.

The people who turn the key(s), press the buttons(s), override the safeties and all the rest are ordinary military personnel. They and anybody in the command chain between the president and the button could refuse to carry out the order quite legitimately.

You could argue that any of them could be replaced, but the point is that this would delay the launch. Perhaps for long enough for the order to be countermanded. Or perhaps long enough for Pence to invoke the 25th amendment.

Launching a nuke against anybody, even the likes of Iran would likely lead to worldwide armageddon. After all nobody wants to be late to the party. As such were Trump to even hint he we going to issue the order, let alone issue the order then it's likely that Pence an the rest of the cabinet would get the 25th through in double quick time if only for the sake of their own skins and that of their investment portfolios. Of course the minute that clause 4 is ratified by the cabinet then Pence becomes C in C and he can countermand the order.

It's all a bit shaky as to whether the launch would happen in this scenario, but I think it is unlikely.

Surprising everyone, spending watchdog says the UK's 2025 deadline for nationwide gigabit broadband is 'unreachable'

The strangest thing about the fibre rollout is the amount of work being done for no results. My local exchange had stacks of fibre drums in the car park until recently. All this fibre is now strung to every pole in the village. When I saw the work being carried out I got quite excited at the thought that I would soon be able to get full fibre.

So I jumped into the Openreach website only to find that there was no date showing on there for the rollout. Working as I do in the bcomms industry I have access to enhanced availability checkers from a few providers. So I thought I'd get more info from there. Nope. No date for the fibre rollout. No end date for WLR.

I spoken to an openreach engineer who was fixing a fault nearby recently. He told me that yes the fibre is all run to a rack of fibre trays. However that rack strands alone. They haven't even installed the track to take the kit that the fibre will connect to.

I just don't understand why they would put all that money and effort into stringing up all that fibre and then just leave it there with no plans to connect it to anything.

I recall the review of fixed line telephony services (PSTN and ISDN) published in 2014 IIRC. It started that PSTN and ISDN should be switched off by 2025. However it also confidently predicted that most customers would be migrated to alternative services by 2020. Really? What percentage of PSTN and ISDN haves already been migrated to other services I wonder. Three information doesn't seem to be available.

Back then the review wasn't talking about full gigabit broadband (that's some creep in only six years) only about replacing PSTN and ISDN with TCP/IP based services. A lot of politicians and CPs were until very, very recently still talking about full fibre gigabit to every home by 2025. But if this was the career why was (and is) FTTC and it's big brother G.Fast still being rolled out?

Well G.Fast will give gigabit connections, which sounds good to Joe public and any politicians you may need to impress. The reality however is that in order to get sync of a gig you need to be a very sorry distance from the cabinet (under 100 metres from your street cabinet anybody?) So as an alternative to fibres this would mean a start cabinet every couple of hundred yards. Not only would that be bloody expensive and time consuming, but you also need planning permission for each and every cabinet. As such G.Fast seems to be a blind alley. Unless of course the next amendment to the plans is going to be that they will roll out "up to 1Gbps". They already call fibre to the PCP (ie copper to the premises) a fibre connection so don't be surprised if by 2025 your promised gig fibre connection becomes something under 100Mb copper.

TikTok to be hit by a UK class-action-style lawsuit backed by the Children's Commissioner

Totally agree.

If the case succeeds then it could set a precedent. The only argument I can see for the case to succeed would be that tiktok did not carry out sufficient age verification. But if that is the case then the impact would have to be that all online services with age restrictions would be liable were they to allow underage individuals to sign up. Which in turn would not only impact social media but absolutely anything with an age limit. iPlayer or All4 for example. It's pretty easy to sign up for an account on services like this without any age verification other then ticking a box that says "I confirm that I am at least X years of age" or indeed filling in a date of birth field. Plus of course clicking something similar when viewing content with an age limit. At the moment the providers are protected by the fact that the boxes and/or fields were filled in. But the argument here seems to be that the contracts are not valid because the person who signed up was actually below the age of responsibility and therefore not liable.

Boeing will cough up $2.5bn+ to settle US fraud charge over 737 Max safety

Re: nothing happening here then

The certification processes agreed between Boeing and the FAA were clearly flawed. But even though they were flawed Boeing willfully abused those processes to certify the MAX and not just in the area of the MCAS software. Other areas of the aircraft were rubber stamped as passing the certification criteria when they did no such thing.

As such this action does not go nearly far enough. The courts should examine the certifications made for as long as these arrangements are in place and find how many Boeings do not meet the certification criteria. And fines should be levied for all those too. As well as Boeing being forced to recall and rectify all the affected planes.

And that still isn't far enough.

The best way to impact Boeing is to take ALL certification tasks out of their hands and pass them on to the FAA. Remember that the arrangement is the way it is because for the FAA to carry out all certification would have been prohibitively expensive and would have slowed down getting new aircraft certified. So the best penalty would be for the FAA to employ and train new staff to certify Boeing aircraft completely at the expense of Boeing. That's right Boeing should be billed for the recruitment, wages, training and incidental expenses of all these staff.

Oh and finally while they're at it they should investigate the certification arrangements that the FAA have with other manufacturers just in case.

So Boeing finally have to admit that they did something wrong? It's a start.

However they still need to be prosecuted for misleading the FAA. And the FAA in turn need to be prosecuted worldwide for misleading the certification authorities around the world.

Why both? Well clearly the deal on certification between the FAA and Boeing on certification was flawed, particularly in so far as the FAA clearly had insufficient oversight of the process. Prosecute Boeing because they willfully abused the process. Prosecute the FAA in the US for not having robust processes. And prosecute them worldwide for their flawed processes leading the world's certification authorities being misled.

Or failing that other certification authorities should refuse to accept the certification of any US built plane until it's been done properly.

US backs down from slapping import taxes on French goods over Macron's web giant tax

Unfair?

So paying taxes on the money you make is unfair now?

And the way to counter that is to impose taxes. Taxes which must be unfair.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

The odd thing is that the US government themselves seem to be cracking down on these same companies. So my reading of this would be that they don't want these companies paying the tax they owe abroad because that in turn might mean that their earnings drop and the opportunities to tax them in the US would be reduced.

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

An MT-2 woult certainly prevent you from thinking for yourself or indeed at all. Two fuzz pedals in series with a flanger on top would make a less irritating noise.

Cyberpunk 2077: There's a great game within screaming to get out, but sadly it was released 57 years too early

Something I find of about certain products with games probably at the top of the list is the way people pre-order things or buy them on the day of release. In other words they buy them without having seen a single review our having any word of mouth about the product.

Maybe this is a pretty extreme example, but I've heard plenty of people moaning about hyped games that they bought on day one only to find they didn't enjoy it. I just don't understand why folk can't wait a few days before spaffing a big way (of money) that way they won't waste their money if the reviews are bad or the game turns out to be a bug ridden, untested, POS. The only justification for this behaviour is the desire to be one of the first to play the game. Or maybe to be one of the first to find out the game is a POS.

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

"Lithium-ion phosphate earned his scorn on grounds that it can’t be a breakthrough because Tesla already uses it. He declared a monocell “is electrochemically impossible, as max voltage is ~100X too low. Maybe they meant cells bonded together, like our structural battery pack?”"

I don't doubt that Apple may have figured out a way to make a monocell work. Low voltage maybe but one big battery could deliver a lot of current. How about something like a lot of low voltage motors in parallel. The drivetrain would be interesting but not impossible. And then there's the question of whether you had to use electric motors at all. There are potentially other ways of turning electricity into motion, although I can't think of a sensible efficient convenient way of making that work packaged in a car. For example I once saw a boat demonstrated that had a good old fashioned steam turbine where the water was heated electrically. It was only a POC and I can't see it working in a car but it shows that there are alternatives. There are even crazy alternatives like an inverter and transformers. Surely too heavy and bulky not to say inefficient, but again it shows the possibilities.

However...

What worries me about a monocell is the fire risk. We have seen problems with runaway in fires in EVs before. Individual cells suddenly igniting sometimes hours after the fire is extinguished. With a monocell holding the same amount of energy as the typical EV battery pack the potential conflagration doesn't bear thinking about.

"During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting."

Even if this is true I fail to see the relevance to Apple's announcement they are going to build their own car. The Musky one seems to prevent it as evidence that Apple are either not interested in building cars or are lying about building a car. I don't see how that's the case.

If Apple are going to build a car then I suspect a lot of the running gear will come from somewhere else this is pretty normal practice. Remember when Tesla basically just added electric power (plus dangerously ungrippy tyres) to a Lotus platform. And if you're on the sort of budget Apple are on you're not going to be looking at buying an iffy startup when they could just go to the biggest and best car manufacturers and buy a platform from them.

'Best tech employer of the year' threatened trainee with £15k penalty fee for quitting to look after his sick mum

"I'd have thought that the three months unpaid work at the start of the contract would be against the minimum wage law."

You'd think. But apparently internship is legal on the grounds that it forwards people's careers and banning it would potentially hard people's career prospects.

Few things to consider. Poor people seldom have internships, interns are generally from well off families. Otherwise they couldn't afford to live without a wage. And of course you don't seem to see interns at companies with cashflow problems, they are usually large rich companies. In other words internships benefit people from well off backgrounds and rich companies. I'm trying to avoid using words like donor, voter and conservative but you know where I'm coming from.

All part of the usual plan to keep the poor poor (and paying taxes) and make the rich richer (while preferably not paying taxes). But of course rich people and businesses is good for the country any Tory MP will tell you that while of course not being able to adequately explain how it's good for the country.

Re: Most industry awards

Bit like Obama being selected for the Nobel peace prize after having been on office for only 11 days and having done jack shit in that time

Awards?

Just goes to show that most of the awards handed out to businesses are done with no due diligence being carried out.

I was sub contracting for a large company once when an all staff email came round. Basically the company had been nominated for a "best place to work" award and please could we all visit a web page to place our vote. Sounds fair enough, but then they asked if we could all ask our friends and family if they could vote too.

I queried this with HR. Isn't it a little dishonest to ask people who aren't employees to vote? HR responded that there were much larger companies nominated and therefore we would stand no chance of winning. Basically it seemed that the award was simply decided on who got the most votes regardless of whether people were employees or not. Indeed it didn't seem that there was even the most basic of checks, such as checking the number of votes against the number of employees.

I didn't trust these business awards before then. I trusted them even less after that experience.

UK on track to miss even its slashed full-fibre gigabit coverage goals, warn MPs

@osakajin

"So... Japan 2004 I had 100Mb sync fibre to my apartment for 40 pounds a month."

100Mb SYNC on FIBRE?

SYNC? FIBRE?

<FACEPALM>

Plus ca change

Every successive government gets worse in respect of setting targets without providing the resource to meet those targets. What then happens is that the target gets revised downwards or the delivery date put back, sometimes both.

Then there are the excuses:

Top of the pathetic excuses chart is that conditions (often economic) have changed since the target was set. Sorry but if you're setting targets you should be taking the possibility of this happening into account. The most common failing in these cases is that the project has gone over budget. All because some idiot set a budget for a target ten years in the future without taking into account rising costs or carrying out any risk assesments..

Another favourite is that the target was set by a previous government so it's their fault. If the government in question was the same party as the current one then this makes no sense.

Then of course there's blaming the contractors. Erm who's managing the program? Surely you didn't leave it to the contractor to manage. Nobody in business would be that stupid so nobody in government should be that stupid either.

The classic example of all this is HS2.

Dodgy procedures doomed Arianespace's Vega before it even left the launchpad

Re: Note to self

As has already been stated polarised connectors do not prevent conductors being inserted into the connectors incorrectly. Which is why testing is so important. And that is the biggest failure here. Somebody made an assumption and didn't test.

Testing at every stage is important. Pin to pin testing of cables is vital, it it was indeed a single cable.

I can believe what the report says about the integration procedure, but what really seems to be missing here is operation testing of every system before launch. Had that been carried out the cock up would have been picked up. Fixing the issue and re-testing may have taken time and cost money, but which would they rather have, a total loss or maybe going over budget? Unless of course they were insured against the former and not the latter.

45 million medical scans from hospitals all over the world left exposed online for anyone to view – some servers were laced with malware

Re: quelle surprise? @Santa From Exeter

Doctors have little to do with this. Clinical staff just use the tools, they don't design them or manage the servers. As ever this is down to incompetence at the management level.

FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers

Stateside Jack

Are we sure this was't work by the American equivalent of Wearside Jack? Certainly reads like one of his messages.

iPhone factory workers riot over unpaid wages in India

"Others suggest that Wistron and Apple simply picked the wrong location to run the plant."

So they're suggesting that in other locations the workforce would put up with not being paid for months?

As usual Apple seem to be trying to distance themselves from sharp practice (to put it mildly) in their supply chain. I've heard too many stories of the workforce being maltreated in Apple's supply chain to ever buy one of their overpriced products. If course the Apple faithful will just stick their airpods in and play LA LA LA LA LA LA at full volume and claim they never heard anything bad about the treatment of people working in Apple's sweatshops.

What you need to bear in mind if course is that Apple is a fashion brand and this sort of shit has long been standard practice in the fashion industry.

Cruise, Kidman and an unfortunate misunderstanding at the local chemist

Sorry I just don't buy it.

Back in those days there were plenty of professional photo developers and printers catering to this market. Boots just weren't geared to printing from 1000+ individual negatives. Plenty of other labs would have been not only geared up for that sorry of work but would also have been quicker and cheaper.

The story also suggests that Boots were going to hand print from 1000+ individual negatives in two hours. Not happening in that timescale I'm afraid.

And as had already been suggested somebody used to operating on that scale would probably have had their own lab. Or at least a dedicated subcontractor. The company I worked for at the time had our own lab and print unit.

And there's no such thing as porn police.

Not only are there bits of the story that don't really add up, but it's also a bit too similar to the "newsreader takes photos of named toddler in bath, boots report her to plod" story for my liking.

Exonerated: First subpostmasters cleared of criminal convictions in Post Office Horizon scandal

There are people who should have criminal charges including attempt to prevent the course of justice, withholding evidence, misconduct in public office and probably a few more. None of them are sub-postmasters. But will it ever happen?

Cybersecurity giant FireEye says it was hacked by govt-backed spies who stole its crown-jewels hacking tools

Can't see them getting any new customers for a while and I expect some of there existing customers will be leaving as soon as is practically possible. All of which is perfectly understandable. Would you want to be protected by a company who had their "most secure servers" hacked?

It matters not how much they protest that the attack was sophisticated and unusual you can't go round claiming to be the best in your field and then get pwned and not pay the consequences.

All things considered I think their share price is doing very well indeed.

Channel Isles cop sacked after abusing police database to track down women drivers for Instagram 'comic' page

Trust based? So the number plate system was trust based. In other words there was no reasonable security. It's not just the plod who need the boot for this, it's the person who manages that system.

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

You can get up to things that I would call programming in excel (although I wish you wouldn't*) but a formula does not constitute programming.

*It's long been a problem with excel that it allows idiot beancounters and the like (not managers, they're usually to lazy) to create huge data mangling edifices off which they can chuck reports to the board. They usually work at first, but then art some point in their ever more complicated lifecycle they stop working as expected and start throwing out blatantly incorrect figures or better yet error messages. At this point the IT department are called in to fix things. Often ten minutes before the idiot is due to present to the board. And if course it's an IT problem, not the fact that the idiot isn't actually capable of building a complex spreadsheet and should have gone to an expert in the first place.