Posts by Peter2

Brit authorities could legally do an FBI and scrub malware from compromised boxen without your knowledge

Re: Options

I'd actually just go with "force the server offline".

Did it affect business? Well, sorry. Couldn't leave a box flinging malware online. Did you lose money? Sue the company that didn't secure the box properly.

If this started happening, then it wouldn't take too long for people to start asking "what sort of security precautions are you taking?" to make sure that their stuff stayed up.

If it forced companies that didn't care out of business then would this really be such a terrible thing? Their business then goes to people who do care.

You want a reboot? I'll give you a reboot! Happy now?

A tool I think that you really need is BGInfo; free download from Microsoft as part of the Sysinternals suite.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/bginfo

Force it to run via group policy on servers, and problem solved.

Pentagon confirms footage of three strange craft taken by the Navy are UFOs (no, that doesn't mean they're aliens)

All human engineered craft have certain characteristics.

Cars, vans and HGV's have wheels and are generally vaguely aerodynamic. Boats are pretty much always long and thin to maximise the speed obtained for the energy put into propulsion. Aircraft are pretty much always long and pointy with wings for lift.

You would reasonably expect to be able to at least identify some common design elements from accounts.

The problem with UFO sightings is that they are just that; Unidentified Flying Objects and not actually alien spacecraft. They will run the gamut from Chinese lanterns to experimental military aircraft (a flying saucer could plausibly have been somebody making a reasonable description of a frontal or side view of a B2, for instance) to deliberate pranks, and possibly a few actual alien craft in the reports somewhere. The problem is that the latter (if any do actually exist) are going to be so buried under a mass of false positives that you'd never figure it out, especially given that there is some benefit to being able to rubbish people who have spotted a B2 or something more secret by making out that they are fruitcakes.

Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

Re: What this needs

So, to recap.

1) We have an article posted on Wikipedia, the BBC has referenced Wikipedia and other places then referenced the BBC for a law having been written stating stocks were required to be built at all (which is actually objectively in some doubt)

2) And no evidence whatsoever to support the specific claim that this law is still in force today. Because you know, it's not actually in either the statue books or the governments legislation.gov.uk service, and ergo not in force.

Re: What this needs

Apparently, the 1405 law requiring every town to have a pillory has never been repealed, I can think of a use for one.

Is that true, or did you just read it on the BBC website? It's not on the legislation.gov.uk website, which is the authoritative source of UK laws and it's also not present in Halsbury's Laws of England or any reputable sources (history books etc) as so far as I can see.

The Statute of Labourers act was passed in 1351, and had no requirement for towns to have stocks or a pillory. (the act was passed after the black death depleted the workforce and made it illegal to pay a higher wage than the average before the pandemic, or for the peasants to move to where people were being paid more)

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Re: forthright with outspoken opinions

I think though, NerryTutkins, you have to remember there are people out there who's lives depend on the fact of having the Royal Family to cling on to, as if they're in the water and the only thing they have for buoyancy is an upturned lifeboat. Not considering of course, total inaction of the Royal Family over successive governments caused the boat to sink in the first place.

Winning argument.

Let's immediately replace the monarchy with a new Monarch or president if you prefer; you would of course want a prominent party politician of course since they actually want the power and PR and wouldn't at all be a bunch of divisive twats that start acting like the unlamented ex speaker of the commons did before he got his marching orders with the far greater powers of the monarch. Pick from the following list of no doubt willing candidates:- (possibly excepting the dead one)

Corbyn

Boris boi

May

Cameron

Brown

Blair

Major

Thatcher

Donald Trump (cos his family were scottish and he would surely be interested)

Or alternately let's consider if actually we'd rather keep the monarchy. Personally i'd rather dissolve parliament and have a royal commission on considering and implementing replacing it with something fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Belgian police seize 28 tons of cocaine after 'cracking' Sky ECC's chat app encryption

Re: 28 million grammes of coke

A large part of the population may well think "what's the harm".

At least the same percentage of the population would probably also react badly if somebody on drugs then stabs a member of their family while totally out of it, or ploughs a family down while driving under the influence.

I'm not particularly against the idea of allowing drugs to be sold legally, however as a quid pro quid I would expect a life sentence (and by that I do actually mean life) for people who make the choice to take drugs and then kill whilst under their influence.

UK reseller sues Microsoft for £270m in damages claiming prohibitive contracts choke off surplus Office licence supplies

Re: "Earlier this year it slashed the length of support perpetual licence holders could expect."

I think you know what he meant. ;) 20 years ago hardware performance was explosive; in 2000 a 5 year old computer would have been (if you bought the bleeding edge hardware) a 486dxSomething with a MHz count in double digits and the 2k PC would probably have been an AMD Thunderbird with a performance that'd just gone through the Ghz barrier.

The next upgrade cycle from 2000 to 2005 the upgrade would have been from a ~1 Ghz single core box to a duel core Athlon x2 running at ~3Ghz (or a single core P4 that could double as central heating running at 3Ghz if you were intel inclined, which few techs at the time were...)

While performance has increased in the last 16 years, it's entirely possible to run modern applications on 10-15 year old hardware; I have > decade old kit floating around at work which were redeployed from the scrap pile during the pandemic due to a sudden need for hardware for home use combined with suppliers not having any kit at affordable prices. Redeploying decade old hardware in 2000-2005 would have been completely impossible.

Imagine your data center backup generator kicks in during power outage ... and catches fire. Well, it happened

Re: Lots of places gets as cold as Texas ...

The big fail in texas was due to the temperatures being desertlike and often above 40 degress celcius. They (correctly imo) didn't massively inflate their energy generation costs by requiring everything to be specced to work in -20c temperatures.

Where they screwed up is not having interlinks in place to draw power from elseware during the couple of days in a decade (or arguably century) that their generation infrastructure is frozen over by Antarctic temperatures.

Re: Guarantee not worth the paper.....

It's putting your money where your mouth is and meaning that the SLA is something other than an empty promise. Unfortunately though, unless they put an upper limit in there though then unless my math is out though then 24 hours worth of downtime is going to cost them 96 days worth of free credits.

So if they have been out since Sunday then they are offering a free service to all of their customers at this site (is this their only site?) for the next year. Not many companies are well resourced enough to be able to do a total rebuild and then have an entire years worth of revenue sitting around.

While truly self-driving cars are surely just around the corner, for now here's an AI early-warning system for your semi-autonomous ride

Re: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

Typically most of these systems (used on fly by wire systems etc) as you say use 3 computers to check the input, and if one is "wrong" then it's input is discarded, and in certain use cases the computer that came to the wrong decision is cut out of the loop as being possibly subverted.

This experimental model was thus able to accurately predict potentially dangerous scenarios with 85 percent accuracy up to seven seconds before they occur.

I'm torn between pointing out that the experimental model has an "up to" 85% probability of passing the hazard perception test a human driver has to pass before being allowed to drive in the UK, and that it takes 6.87 seconds to bring a vehicle to a halt from 60MPH so in many real world circumstances "up to" 7 seconds is too slow. Hence the Hazard Perception test with a minimum pass rate.

I do wonder how many of these autopilots would pass a driving test.

X.Org says it's saving a packet with Packet after migrating freedesktop.org off Google Kubernetes Engine

Re: Are the numbers correct?

I'd bet that $6k p/m was the peak because they realised they were paying that and started going all out on reducing the spending.

If they hadn't have started taking drastic measures then I suspect that it wouldn't have peaked there.

So...

The price given by the nice helpful salesman is actually well under the figure charged by the company when they have decommissioned their existing infrastructure and this price continues to continually rise despite drastic efforts to reduce the cost?

I'm shocked I tell you, shocked.

Time for an upgrade: Dev of the last modern browser for PowerPC Macs calls it a day

Re: Maybe another layer is required.

I wish folk supported those who write code like this more. Crowd-funding should enable anything with a thousand+ users to bring in a decent sum.

Quite. If everybody donated a quid a month then i'm fairly sure that with a thousand users for a grand a month he'd have been willing to chip in the time to keep doing the updates. For nothing? Eventually it ceases happening.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson reluctant to reveal his involvement in the OneWeb deal

Given how much the government has spent with BT over the last couple of decades to get openreach to roll out something slightly better than a wet bit of string to large rural areas (which must be in the tens of billions in total over the decades), personally I think a 0.5 billion investment in a satellite broadband system might possibly prove to be a tolerably good investment in the long run.

If nothing else the implied threat that in the future the government might just give OneWeb investment money will probably encourage BT to deliver a competitive service to areas where they don't currently do so before the service becomes active.

The silicon supply chain crunch is worrying. Now comes a critical concern: A coffee shortage

Re: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !

Just saying, but if you go to a trade distributor (ie; cash and carry) then you can buy by kilogram sized containers, and there are often price promotions for buying multiple packs which will work out a lot cheaper (and easier to store) than a pile of retail packets. And you'll get a lot more for your money.

Savings are of course greater the further you get up the trade chain.

Guilty: Sister and brother who over-ordered hundreds of MacBooks for university and sold the kit for millions

This happens frequently in stores departments where the people doing the work are paid the minimum wage and abused by management and then expected to faithfully manage millions of quids worth of stuff going through their hands without any "shrinkage" occurring.

Alternately, paying the staff enough to put a roof over their heads legitimately with them knowing that they could get fired if caught doing something dodgy can work wonders with reducing shrinkage.

Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities

The simple fact of the matter is that should the remaining board members prove utterly intractable the publicbenefit.uk campaign has a demonstrated majority of the membership on his side, a majority which is frankly only likely to rise without the extreme measures taken by the late board.

This means that the publicbenefit.uk campaign has (in extremis) the ability to vote off every remaining board member, and then use the existing articles of association to make a number of member appointments, who would then be the only members of the board and whom could then make further appointments at their discretion, including appointing the executive members such as the CEO.

One would therefore expect the remaining board members to eventually realise this, at which point any reasonably intelligent person who wished to retain their position would start considering how sustainable it is to hold an adversarial position towards the majority of the members. (and it certainly is a majority; the existing board tried as hard as anybody could possibly do to get people to vote against it)

Chairman, CEO of Nominet ousted as member rebellion drives .uk registry back to non-commercial roots

Re: One question

That's pretty much it. The only thing that they are doing that couldn't be done by a bloke in a shed at the bottom of his garden is the Dispute Resolution stuff, however to be fair I suspect that most of these issues arise because Nominet essentially appears to have a first registered first served policy for registrations, and also has no problems with mass registrations by domain squatters, probably because they pay them lots.

Changing the rules to make it clear that domain squatters etc might as well just pack up and go home because you won't support their business would likely remove most of the need for arbitration.

Lord joins campaign urging UK government to reform ye olde Computer Misuse Act

Re: Or just typing a url

He set off an intruder detection system and got prosecuted for typing a URL? The article your linking to says it's more than that.

Cuthbert, 28, of Whitechapel, London, told Horseferry Road Magistrates Court yesterday that he had made a donation on the site, but when he received no final thank-you or confirmation page he became concerned it may have been a phishing site, so he carried out two tests to check its security. This action set off an Intruder Detection System in a BT server room and the telco contacted the police.

Someone defeated the anti-crypto-coin-mining protection for Nvidia's 'gamers only' RTX 3060 ... It was Nvidia

Re: Cryptocurrencies should be banned.

What's the real intrinsic value of gold, silver, or anything else other than, "Ooh, shiny"?

"Ooh, shiny" is a perfectly reasonable starting point for precious materials, actually.

Gold doesn't rust or decay and remains bright and shiny so is a very good material for decorative jewellery. It's also worked easily with rudimentary hand tools, so it's always going to be valuable. If everybody else stopped using it, there would be a sudden craze for making your own 22ct gold necklaces in your garage because that's actually possible to do with only rudimentary tools.

Gold is also practically a superconductor, which is always going to be valuable to people doing electronics stuff.

Most of the same comments apply to silver, apart from that it tarnishes quickly.

The reason that copper, silver and gold were the original basis for currency is that they are actually valuable in themselves if melted down. During the Napoleonic wars this was actually done by the Duke of Wellington when invading France; the locals wouldn't take British currency so he simply melted it down and recast it as French coins; one way of getting the best possible exchange rate! The locals in France therefore hid food from the French army who wanted to requisition it and pay with paper money, and sold it to the British army for hard cash; a lesson in economics that might be quite applicable to cryptocurrency in the future.

Cryptocurrencies meanwhile are objectively worthless and their most significant source of real money is truthfully almost certainly going to be via extortion payments via Cryptolocker et al and as a method of money laundering. The entire bubble is exceptionally vulnerable to crashing horribly and there must be entire nation states that would be happy to pull the plug for any number of reasons. When that happens, what is a bitcoin worth?

Re: Gamers also have to contend with bots and scalpers looking to make a profit

They can't.

LAN parties were the way of showing this back in the day; flashy gits would show up boasting about getting an FPS into triple digit numbers and it'd turn out that they were running their monitor at 60Hz.

But then consoles were capped to 30FPS for a long time and nobody really noticed.

Re: Gamers also have to contend with bots and scalpers looking to make a profit

The demand is just too crazy. The only way the demand drops enough for mainstreamed to get on board is for new tech to supersede it, which by then is way too late in hypercompetitive gaming.

Which assumes that in "hypercompetitive gaming" the game is won based upon the equipment used, rather than any skill of the participants. Or that the gaming is being done for the sole purpose of winning, rather than you know, for entertainment.

I have been gaming since the days where the games were loaded from floppy disc, and in that time I have never needed to buy a bleeding edge bit of kit. The performance will have incremented by at least 1% in the next month, so you could always just buy something at the sweet spot of price/performance chart (You can usually get ~90% of the performance for bleeding edge kit for ~50% of the price) and then just buy a new card as a life extension in a couple of years and remain close to the maximum possible performance without spending megabucks.

Anybody spending megabucks on gaming is truthfully trying to "keep up with the jones" and show off, rather than be into "hyper competitive gaming".

My box is the most offensively boring and battered beige box that could be found in homage to the years where that was in fashion. It's ignored in favour of the cool brushed aluminium boxes with windows into the interior showing off the pulsing RGB lights up until it unexpectedly turns out to perform just as well because the performance difference is inperceptable to the human eye. And that's when LAN gaming rather than doing things over the internet where nobody can actually see the box anyway.

PSA: If you're still giving users admin rights, maybe try not doing that. Would've helped dampen 100+ Microsoft vulns last year – report

Most companies? Perhaps most *within a particular market sector*,

Ok. Let's assume a particular market sector of "subject to the GDPR"; because how are you controlling and securing data access if your letting home users store the data on their personal equipment?

Of course, most companies make it punishable by summary dismissal to have sensitive company information on personal equipment. You did have it agreed in writing with the people who wrote those policies that you could do work on your own equipment, right?

... right?

It appears that you might have more of a problem with corporate policies and HR than IT who are enforcing those policies.

It's not just users but sloppy development, or lack of development resource by the vendor, means a lot of legacy applications demand excessive rights as well as out of date dependencies before they will work.

In my reasonably extensive experiance (up to enterprise level) almost all legacy applications where people say "it needs admin permissions" usually actually just want write access to their installation folder, and occasionally to the folder where their dependancies from another company are stored. Digging under the surface you'll usually find that these programs started life prior to XP/NTFS when access permissions weren't a thing and were feature complete by around 2000 and haven't seen much development in the last 20 years beyond periodic reskins to make the GUI look less outdated and minor feature tweaks to deal with changes in the law.

This "problem" can be dealt with by right clicking on the installation folder and giving "users" write access to it. Giving somebody admin access to make these sort of programs work is like using a nuke to crack a nut.

Good news: An end is in sight for the COVID-19 pandemic. Bad news: Nitrogen dioxide pollution is on the up as life returns to normal

Re: Wow, a glimse from the future?

The only places that are going to take 1-2 years to sort out vaccinating everybody are third world countries waiting for vaccines from elseware after the first world has completed their rollouts, or countries relegating themselves to second world status to due to suffering from incompetently planned and worse executed rollouts with governments deliberately undermining public confidence in the vaccine to reduce the demand down to their delivery levels.

Pretty much everywhere else appears on track to have finished their rollouts to everybody down to 18 in Q3 this year.

OVH founder says UPS fixed up day before blaze is early suspect as source of data centre destruction

Depends.

Restating the obvious school bits, the fire triangle is "Oxygen, Heat and Fuel" Most of the time in IT applications people use CO2 extinguishers to remove the oxygen, and yes an 8 second CO2 extinguisher will never remove the oxygen for long enough for the thing to cool down enough that it won't reignite the moment the extinguisher runs out as there is still tons of oxygen in the room that can burn.

A buildling mounted CO2 flood might do it, if you threw enough CO2 into the building.

Back in ye good old days of lore, there was the holy grail of fire supressents, Halon. This worked by having a funky chemical reaction with a fire and removing the heat from the fire when it's percentage in the air exceeds something like 10%, at which point the fire goes out, and stays out until somebody leaves a door open for long enough for the halon to slowly leak out. It's also not harmful to breath in.

Flooding the room with Halon and disabling external ventilation would certainly have done it, back in the day. Unfortunately Halon is a CFC and was doing it's bit for burning a hole through the ozone layer, and so has now been discontinued and banned. There are replacements out there that work in the same way (ie Novec 1230) however IIRC they are more expensive and weigh more than Halon did. However, they are viable options for applications like data centres.

As battle for future of .UK's Nominet draws closer, non-exec director hits a nerve with for-profit proposal

Re: This NED is testing the water

We’ve yet to hear publicbenefit’s plan, but they won’t settle for that!

It's posted on their website.

Microsoft settles £200,000+ claims against tech support scammers who ran global ripoff from cottage in Surrey

Re: And prosecution?

Because Microsoft can sue them for trademark infringement itself in a civil action.

Criminal action would require the Police to build a file, and for the Crown Prosecution Service to decide that it is in the public interest to prosecute and then take them to court because the politicians only gave the CPS the ability to prosecute.

Allegedly, the Police tend to think the CPS stands for "Couldn't Prosecute Satan", which indicates that there might be a certain difficulty with getting the CPS to prosecute.

The torture garden of Microsoft Exchange: Grant us the serenity to accept what they cannot EOL

Re: Ah...Exchange Admin

I disagree. Microsoft 365 and Exchange are a tornado shitstorm disaster of conflicting design choices and odd to nonsensical UI organization. Have you seen the "new" Exchange Admin Center?

The 365 one? Nope; we're still on prem.

A consultant manager tried to move everything to the cloud, I won the day by pointing out that he was proposing to leave the physical server & backup in place for being the DC, for file storage, required internal applications and the print server and we already owned the exchange server licenses so moving to the cloud would be a cost with no saving attached.

He did manage to sell the bosses on Office 365 licenses instead of VLK's for new PC's with the obvious long term intention of eventually getting everybody on 365 and then transitioning to exchange since at that point we'd have already had the licenses.

Alas, a month into the pandemic we had a really major and ruthless cost saving drive eliminating any spending that wasn't an absolute requirement, and since the 365 licenses were incapable of being used on RDC due to the licensing and could be terminated immediately then sadly and regrettably they didn't make it and simply had to be replaced with VLK's for anybody working remotely due to licensing issues.

;)

Re: Ah...Exchange Admin

Well, in fairness to Microsoft it's a lot easier to muddle through when you have no idea what you are doing with the GUI than a CLI so I can understand the desire to move more towards a CLI; i've often fixed problems caused by people doing things that they shouldn't have been doing and feverently wished for the days where you had a CLI that you could only use if you know what you were doing that would exclude the clueless from playing with things that they don't understand.

For better or for worse though this is no longer possible; while this was the case prior to the internet these days you can go online and find a helpful video telling you that if you have a Dedicated Ethernet Line then you should type "del *.* /s /f" at an elevated command prompt and a certain number of people would probably do it.

European, US watchdogs approve Microsoft's $7.5bn deal to takeover video games publisher ZeniMax

Re: Complaints to the EU

Yeah. But Nintendo isin't a convicted monopolist with a habit of buying out everything in sight, and destroying everything it touches.

Intel CPU interconnects can be exploited by malware to leak encryption keys and other info, academic study finds

Re: Another nail in the coffin of x86?

Another nail in the coffin of x86?

So this works on AMD x86 processors, or just the Intel ones? If the latter, then surely it's an Intel problem as opposed to an x86 problem?

Dutch government: Did we say 10 'high data protection risks' in Google Workspace block adoption? Make that 8

Re: Surprised?

Not to mention that those agreements (and the price) can change at any time without notice leaving no alternative to agreeing or not having a functional work enviroment.

Pressure builds on Nominet as members demand to know leadership's contingency plans for when they’re fired

Actually, the Land Registry hasn't done that badly. In the last 20 years they successfully (shocking for a government department) actually managed to digitalise and become more efficient. They then closed down offices surplus to requirements (ie; most of them) and their fees have been doing down over the years as more of the work becomes automated.

All of the others present significantly poorer examples; it's impossible to communicate with swathes of the government via email at all.

One other point is that everybody is assuming that it is going to be a win for removing the existing directors.

If you take the figures on the public benefit.uk website then it appears numerically possible for the existing directors to remain in post should they (somehow) persuade only the largest 7 registrars to vote for them.

The thing is, that Nominet doesn't actually appear to have any published rules as to how votes should be counted.

The Nominet Articles of Association covers this under article 19 where it says that the board should create bye laws covering how votes ought to take place.

Where are these bye laws? They certainly aren't published on the Nominet website.

UK government may force online retailers to pick up e-waste from consumers

Re: "people will be mining old landfill sites"

Natural supplies are rarely exhausted per se, they just get more expensive as they become more scarce. That's why we have never run out of oil; as the price goes up then smaller deposits that weren't economically viable become economically profitable for extraction.

Re: All well and good..

The business model of certain companies relies upon selling a cheap and irreparable device that is deliberately engineered to have a lifetime that will only exceed the warranty period by the time required for a politician to forget an inconvenient fact.

As the disposal of this device is then via sticking it in the local dump's recycling section the costs are carried by the local council, not the consumer or suppliers. Therefore, the customer doesn't care, the supplier doesn't care, the supply chain doesn't care and the manufacturer doesn't care. Pretty much all equipment looks like this now because everybody else has either been driven out of business, has adopted this business model to compete or they produce a niche device that is not capable of competing in the mass market.

As soon as the costs are attributed to anywhere other than where it is at the moment then people are going to start caring.

If the supplier of new equipment is required to collect and dispose of the old device at their cost then the awful manufacturers still wouldn't care; people don't tend to deliberately repeatedly buy shit equipment so chances are that the people paying to dispose of the cheap unreliable equipment wouldn't be the ones making, stocking or supplying it. This would be an awful idea, IMO.

However; If the supplier of the original equipment that broke gets the bill (or their supplier in the supply channel, should the end seller go out of business) with a waiver for if a device has a repairability score of less than 10, then what would you expect would happen?

Suppliers wouldn't want to import, transport, warehouse or stock anything with a repairability score of less than 10. The supply chain as a whole would quickly start considering considering handling containers full of lower quality kit with all the enthusiasm of an equivalent weight of radioactive waste. At the very least, prices of touching anything from that container would rise massively to cover the anticipated risk of it arriving back to them in the future. That would immediately mean that "cheap" irreparable devices with expensive recycling costs would rise in cost to the point that actually they weren't cheap anymore and would be displaced in the marketplace by more repairable equipment.

We need a 20MW 20,000-GPU-strong machine-learning supercomputer to build EU's planned digital twin of Earth

Of course if your "2metre dyke" is a €100m dyke programme surrounding a significant area, it's probably cheaper and more efficient to bid for a couple of days on DestinE to check your calculations than to "just build it" and find it doesn't work because of a fundamental error in your design.

It would certainly be cheaper.

However going by the $70 billion damages caused by the flooding at New Orleans then i'd suggest that it would be safer to estimate the worst possible case (from previous historical patterns such as the once in two centuries 1953 storm) and then build taller "just in case" with a generous margins for error, subsidence and sea levels rising. And then with a bit more added in for paranoia's sake since better safe than squidgy.

In almost all cases I would expect that it's going to be cheaper to build the dyke higher than repair the damage and I doubt that the results of a computer program are going to come with an indemnity policy covering the potential damage, or even a guarantee that the people who recommended the wrong level would admit fault.

If you are planning a two-​metre high dike in The Netherlands, for example, I can run through the data in my digital twin and check whether the dike will in all likelihood still protect against expected extreme events in 2050," said Peter Bauer, deputy director for Research at the European Centre for Medium-​Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and co-​initiator of Destination Earth initiative

And for what one imagines would be likely to use far less expended energy and be significantly more practical use, one could just spend the extra time with a JCB and pike an extra meter or two on the dike if you had any concerns about what it was protecting getting wet.

UK minister tries to intervene after Government Digital Service migration mangles Ministry of Justice webpages

Re: Ignorance of the Law

You could be done for breaking the law in an era where sailing ships and no digital communications meant that people genuinely and provably had no idea a law had been changed, and that they were now breaking the law. That didn't stop them being prosecuted; so i'd suggest that a crap website wouldn't either.

Scottish rocketeers Orbex commission Europe's largest industrial 3D printer to crank out 35 engines a year

Re: Suddenly..

A single solid block probably wouldn't be much good for anything other than 1:1 scale models though.

Nominet sets the date for extraordinary meeting where members could fire CEO

Upon what legal basis would Companies House launch an investigation? As so far as I can see they barely have the power to force people to file their accounts.

Dangerous flying car drone zoomed into UK's Gatwick Airport airspace after killswitch failed

Re: A breadboard

Over the sea, or if they *really* want to do it over land then hire part of the defence training estate. (aka artillery firing ranges etc; they are actually available to rent when the military is not using them)

Or the Mach Loop; it'd be good practice for dealing with other aircraft in airspace for a flying car. ;)

AWS tops up the Bezos rocket fund thanks to more money from Brit tax collection agency

Re: "that still doesn't make tax avoidance ethical"

CEOs are not there to be ethical - they exist to "maximise shareholder value". As long as that situation is not changed, there is no amount of laws that will force a CEO to things ethically.

[Citation needed], because UK Law does not actually say that. UK Law says (under section 172 of the Companies act 2006)

Duty to promote the success of the company

(1)A director of a company must act in the way he considers, in good faith, would be most likely to promote the success of the company for the benefit of its members as a whole, and in doing so have regard (amongst other matters) to—

(a)the likely consequences of any decision in the long term,

(b)the interests of the company's employees,

(c)the need to foster the company's business relationships with suppliers, customers and others,

(d)the impact of the company's operations on the community and the environment,

(e)the desirability of the company maintaining a reputation for high standards of business conduct, and

(f)the need to act fairly as between members of the company.

(2)Where or to the extent that the purposes of the company consist of or include purposes other than the benefit of its members, subsection (1) has effect as if the reference to promoting the success of the company for the benefit of its members were to achieving those purposes.

(3)The duty imposed by this section has effect subject to any enactment or rule of law requiring directors, in certain circumstances, to consider or act in the interests of creditors of the company.

Now, Could you explain where that requires a director to "maximise shareholder value"? I'm not seeing that requirement anywhere.

It appears to be (at least as so far as the UK is concerned) a complete fabrication with the intention of providing a fig leaf of an excuse to defend behaviour that is indefensible. (you know, "the law makes me do it", despite the law not actually requiring anything of the sort!)

Samsung floats autonomous ships as ready to sail in 2022

Re: Safety?

Frankly, the need for a pilot has been a non starter for the last hundred years at least.

Originally, the practice of hiring a pilot becoming widespread was caused by the Royal Navy in 1700-1800 not really wanting to run aground with an expensive and difficult to replace wooden ship. With no effective accurate charts available the safest way of navigating shallow areas was hiring a person with individual knowledge of that area; a pilot. It was then laid down in the naval general printed instructions that when going into harbour thou shalt hire a pilot as the cost of doing so for a few hours is cheap (even at consultancy rates) compared to buying a new ship.

And if thou break the ship entrusted to your care then the part of your commission that says "Hereof nor you nor any of you may fail as you will answer the contrary at your peril." comes into play. Noticing the relatively fewer accidents this occasioned eventually the insurers at Lloyds of London required commercial outfits to do the same. (via saying that if you ran aground in a harbour where a pilot might have prevented the accident then your insurance was void)

Now this all makes sense, up until every bit of water on the planet was nicely mapped so everybody knows where all the shallow bits with rocks sticking up are. At this point nobody had to rely upon the local knowledge of a pilot; they could get the same from a chart.

As a job, that had pretty much happened by 1900 even with the job being done with people in boats tossing lead weights with depth marked string overboard. With the advent of tide charts, sonar and photos from orbit? I'm not quite sure what relational reason there is for a pilots job to exist anymore.

Nominet vows to freeze wages and prices, boost donations, and be more open. For many members, it’s too little, too late

Re: Caught out by the .uk money grab.

The entire point of the proliferation of useless TLD's is to force every business to own a dozen useless domain names. It is basically just a barely legal form of extortion; it's rather obvious that if they had of given everybody a free .uk domain name then they'd only make as much from it as they would have done from new registrations.

A captive market of every registered business being forced to register another domain forces huge numbers of people to double the money they are paying Nominet.