Posts by no_RS 67 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2009
You need to read the relevant EU directives e.g. EMC and LVD plus the EU 'Blue Guide'.
I would also look at the EMCTLA website as they have guidance on there which maybe useful.
No-one is going to show you a technical file as it contains proprietary information but basically it describes what the product is and the justification for compliance e.g. test report, analysis, etc, what standards it complies with.
EE have obviously screwed up and someone has been injured, if the publicity does anything then I hope people will get shot of these battery packs back to EE asap to prevent any further accidents or injuries.
EE's supplier getting the marking slightly wrong is noise really and El Reg is just making a song and dance about it but missing the real point (very Daily Wail) that Li-Po batteries have such a high energy density that they need to be treated with care and respect otherwise they can fail spectacularly. In this case EE are responsible for the safety of the battery pack but the original supplier is going to get landed with the bill for sorting out the mess.
I suspect EE have just accepted the battery pack manufacturers DoC and used this as the basis for their CE marking. The risk assessment performed shows they have considered things and they have come unstuck due to manufacturing quality issues.
Lastly withholding the DoC is a strange thing to do as it is a public document that anyone with the product is entitled to have a copy of.
I am surprised there are so few comments, it seems that every man and his dog complain about privacy invasion or can't make the connection between giving out their details and the subsequent deluge of spam (electronic and paper) they receive.
For example, the HSBC mobile banking app on android wants access to your contacts, the camera and lots of other things, why? Surely verifying the device is the right one would be enough but apparently not.
The EU will fudge the issue as usual and 'we the people' will suffer for it, then they wonder why people want to leave the EU...
Would nice if the register provided some help in how to reduce or fix these issues, highlighting them is all very well but readers are no further forward in trying to reduce the leakage that inevitability happens. This isn't unique to any specific vendor because peoples private data is treated very badly by pretty much any company or organisation that holds it.
How would you check that the surgery or others have followed your instructions regarding the opt-out for your data. I did receive a leaflet but it was wasn't very clear and personally this whole thing is the wrong way around, your data should stay private unless you say it can be released.
Once the data is out there you can't get it back so why is it assumed you can chuck it out by default.
Wel, I was looking at the Ovivo mobile options and decided to try and run through the purchase process using garbage details I.e. just random characters. Basically got through to the Sagepay page and entered in a random 16 digit number for the visa credit card obviously expecting to get rejected. I did get rejected but to my surprise the random characters in the surname field were replaced with a proper surname!! Nothing else was changed but this would indicate some form of data leak is occurring.
Time for the reg to investigate..
As the titles say, why is there an assumption that the user has to turn off or stop the device doing something. What happened to a presumption of privacy unless the individual wants to give it away.
This whole situation is the wrong way around i.e. only those who think about it get privacy whereas everyone else doesn't. Isn't privacy a fundamental human right and the clowns at LG and others think people aren't entitled to?
Doesn't the European human Rights Act have anything to say about this?
There is probably a graph somewhere of IQ v Privacy which follows the y=mx+c formula..
Yes but you have forgotten there was probably a volvo driver the front of the queue.
I would also point out that a lot of bmw drivers have changed brand to audi so the twat in the beemer is now a twat in an audi. Irrespective the vehicle brand they are still twats but come in all different brands.
I am not impressed with them either, I used to get bill payment reminders when picking up the phone but what annoys me the most is geting clobbered with a £4.50 charge for not paying by direct debit.
I choose to pay online but at a time of my choosing not theirs as they cannot be trusted not to empty your bank acocunt, so how does 3 transactions when convenient to them a quarter cost more than 1 transaction convenient to me. I think I am being punished for not bending over and taking it!!!
Now that Balmer is on his way to obscurity they seem to be getting a bit of competence back, it isn't that difficult to support both desktop and tablet interfaces and give people a choice. From Microsoft's perspective surely it doesn't matter how you use it but that you do use it.
What we have now is the result of an arrogant company being beaten round the head just enough to compromise and stay in business. Hasn't gone far enough to make me jump from win7 to 8.1 but it is progress.
Hmm,
Very suspect as I believe there is power spectral density requirement as well so this cannot be a 4W CW signal but must be spread over several MHz. As it is using multiple antennas these will get added together to calculate the total power radiated.
Still I wouldn't want to go anywhere near such a device as meeting RF Exposure requirements seems a very distant dream, wonder how they would SAR test a wall?
Well as the reg has raised the issue I think they should write an article about how to block all this is sort of shenanigans.
What annoys me about all this is me the user doesn't have any say in the matter and these people think they are entitled to do this. They aren't entitled and I don't like it either.
I predict the future will be a black box suppository for the ultimate in personal tracking.
There is not a shadow of a doubt that li-po batteries in their current form are becoming problematic, most cells are just contained in an insulated aluminiun bag so if something goes wrong there is no containment, so we end up relying on the product enclosure to contain the failing cells. Most people treat car batteries with a bit of respect because they understand some of the risks but abuse mobile devices.
As most products that contain these batteries are made of plastic, the device just becomes a very hot molten mess that sticks to people's skin and makes a very nasty injury.
It is accidents like the one in this article that make me only buy genuine batteries/chargers for phones and other devices just on the basis of better battery costruction that is less likely to fail.
I would also point out that in Europe there aren't any specific safety standards for lithium ion batteries, there are in the US because of the problems these things cause, maybe the EU will wake up to the danger these things presnt and do something about it.
This obsessions with constantly changing the user interface is just madness and makes no financial sense, it is like a car manufacturer deciding the put the steering wheel in the boot just because it is different.
Microsoft should take a leaf out of Honda's book, all the controls in their cars are in the same place throughout the generations, this is why people (espeically older people) like them because there is no steep learing curve trying to find everything. We want to use the operating system not fight it just to get the basic things done.
I took the plunge and built a PC to avoid Win8 and keep using Win7 as it just worked, quite frankly I don't believe a word of Microsoft insisting they have listened to their customer/users.The astonsihing arrogance they display just doesn't disappear overnight so I will sit back and patiently wait for MS dump their next offering over their customers.
The filter maybe cheap if used indoors, as soon as it needs to be installed outdoors right next to the aerial it is a different ball game. Are they expecting (assume) that they can just ship a filter and the problem is solved i.e. The person suffering the interference has to fit i.e. FOC to the operators/at800.
The SIM in my galaxy S3 died so I requested a replacement from Vodafone which duly arrived but having installed and activated the SIM I noticed a new app named Vodafone had appeared in the list of applications on the handset. The app just seems to provide links to 'allegedly' useful things but checking out the permissions of the app it has permission for just about everything, all your contacts, text messages, location, pretty much every permission in the android handbook!
Now as someone who likes to know what is or isn't happening on my handset I wanted to know where the app came from especially as it could be deleted, you could force stop it but it would restart and there was no way of uninstalling. Eventually Vodafone said it was on the micro SIM and is being rolled out to help customers. After the HTC Desire bloatware debacle I won't buy a branded handset again so was unhappy that Vodafone have found another way to put unwanted software on the device that the user can do absolutely nothing about, has access to all areas of the handset and can be used to extract information remotely from the device.
I hope El Reg will take this up and make Vodafone come clean about this, why does it need such a wide suite of permissions? If this is just to help customers then why aren't they being open about and let people choose not to install rather than force it on customers.Make it available on the app store so people have a choice.
Naughty Vodafone, go sit on the naughty step!
This whole not paying tax issue is a red herring and designed to divert attention away from the fact the government can do nothing about it. It is a by product of being part of the EU common market where to retain company headquarters you need to make it attractive for them to be in your country. The 1% tax rate that the Netherlands gave Amazon is the reason why they are there.
What is wrong is using internal cross charging at extortionate rates (i.e. above market rates) that are designed to suck any profit from one location to another where tax rates are more favourable.
If people want this to change then we have to accept harmonisation of tax rates to remove the race to the bottom tax rate. The companies themselves are doing nothing wrong and are complying with the tax rules in force.
PS if you work for a multi-national company in this country then you are working for a company that is using the same tax rules as Amazon, Starbucks and Google, if they pay more tax you might not get a pay rise this year.
The 1800MHz licences that EE have deployed 4G (LTE) in just had there terms and conditions changed, no money changed has as EE already owned the spectrum.
It literally could have cost the time to write a letter and the stamp to send it to OFCOM.
The other operators could also ask for the same change in T&C's to do exactly the same thing. The technology restriction in the licence to GSM only is one of the reasons why GSM has become a global technology that pretty much works in any part of the world,.
Same old, same old.
This is exactly what happened with the 3G auctions and prices for everyone rocketed afterwards, we never had 2 year contracts before the 3G auctions but did afterwards. After the UK and Germany had extracted all the money the operators had, the remainder of the 3G licences were issued on the 'beauty contest' basis.
3G is still over-priced for most consumers and 4G will be even worse. Wonder how long contracts will become, would you sign up for a 3 or 4 year contract at extortionate prices?
Everyone who carries a taser type device should test it on themselves so they know what if feels like, they might be less inclined for use it unless absolutely necessary. Joe Public has been getting upset in shops for as long as shops have existed without being tasered, smacks of a totally over the top reaction relative to the incident.
Sueing for excessive force might be more profitable than shipping iphones to china...
The reason for not using mobile phones at petrol stations has nothing to do with the RF signal at all, but if the person (idiot) using one drops it. This can actually cause a spark when the battery contacts temporarily disconnect due to the impact of the phone with the ground. It is the spark that represents the danger especially due to the flammable gasses that are typically present in a petrol station.
It seems the abscence of proof is proof of abscence argument is at work here, there are no tell tale signs of a EMC problem, it's not like seeing a hole in something and being able to say that was the fault, inteference appears in many ways and does not leave a trace than can be followed so it is very hard to say something happened because of an EMC problem hence the no proof of the problem.
The argument that because the pilots are allowed to use ipads it is okay for everyone else to use obviously makes sense to politcians but not in engineering terms, the immunity of aircraft systems may well be fine with a small number of ipads on board but not if a large percentage of passengers had them. Compare 3 ipads for the pilots versus say a 100 for the passengers. Having 3 ipads increases the noise level by a factor of 3 but 100 ipads increases it by 100 fold which can potentially overwhelm some critical system. An alternative analogy is lie on the floor and let the pilots put 3 car tyres on your chest, you can probably still breathe okay but if they let a hundred passengers each put one car tyre on your chest you're probably dead because it is too much for you to breathe, exactly the same for aircraft electronic systems, can tolerate 3 but not a 100.
The people demanding to use an ipad will the be first in the queue complaining that the plane got lost or had to make an emergency landing (assuming they survived)..
The real issue is the immunity of the RF systems (particularly safety critical ones) is probably well known by now but the sources of potential interference brought in by the passengers are not. This leads to a situation where several identical devices operating together may actually exceed the immunity level of an aircraft system causing mis-operation. Some devices are very popular so many passengers on the plane could have the same device or using the same interface e.g. Wi-Fi, it's all about emissions adding up.
The passengers would be pretty unhappy if they got lost or worse because of passenger generated electro-smog, being disconnected for a few hours is not too high a price to pay for getting to your destination in one piece.
They need to put some processing power in the box so it doesn't feel like you are being ignored when you have the audacity to push a button on the remote. My Sony TV is a fussy sod and only plays a very limited number of formats so I end up transcoding on the fly.
I don't mind the extra add-ons that are in the internet video bit if I could delete them but I can't, about as user friendly as a hungry salt water croc.
This is the inevitable result of letting politico's sort out technical matters, at the moment the interference is limited but as these devices becomes faster the signal bandwidth increases and this is the future danger. There are reports of interference with FM radio, what worries me is when these devices start interfering with communications that affect peoples lives e.g. police/ambulance/fire services and someone loses their life because of it.
Some may argue that is already happening because the HF band is getting swamped by these devices.
I also wonder why I spend the time I do making sure the equipment I work on meets the CISPR and ETSI limits when PLT can do what they like, not a fair playing field. Anyway how do you measure the RF exposure from one of these things?
Going into a shop and playing with the products, letting them make their pitch and then buying on the internet is completely unfair on the shop. If the shops hadn't abused their customers over the years people feel would feel some form of loyalty to the shop and wouldn't be so inclined to do this.
Personally if the shop has made a good sales pitch and I like the product, does what I want, etc I would buy it from the shop but not before getting a discount that reflects what the competition if offering. Trouble is more often than not the sales pitch is appaulling and they don't make their sale even if they offered a discount.
I upvoted this because it doesn't really matter what you use for storage it can and will go wrong at some stage, usually a critical moment. I suffered a HDD crash and got zilch data back from the disc, even the pro's couldn't retrieve anything.
Having a backup strategy and using it is the only sensible course of action, anything else is just foolish and asking for trouble..
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