* Posts by heyrick

6551 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2009

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

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"Remember your audience El Reg."

Came to say the same.

I don't live in the UK any more, but I listen to Love '80s during my work drive, and quite frequently both EE and Sky (I think?) run adverts that claim their broadband is the bestest, fastest, most reliablest not only because it's new and shiny, but it also has automatic 4G rollover: one goes as far as to point out that when your broadband is down, you lose business, which means you lose customers and money.

So, yes, in their rush to put as many thoughts into one article as possible, they forgot to do the research...

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Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

Your town mayor is an incompetent twit.

I live rural, and our mayor very clearly specified two things:

1, all cabling within the signposted part of "le bourg" runs underground. There are only a few electricity poles left now, ones they've not yet removed, or the high voltage ones supplying the village that are best left in peace.

2, all properties within the legal definition of the village are to be connected at the same time, no taking the easy route and hooking up the village now and doing the outlying properties and farms in n years.

Looking around, it seems that several of the nearby villages have taken similar approaches. There are a lot of new phone poles around as most of the fibre is being strung on the existing poles (but not always, sometimes it's running on poles on the other side of the road <shrug>).

French mayors have a fair bit of clout, should they decide to get up off their arses and wield it.

Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

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Re: Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient

I find the taste of coffee to be quite disgusting (but I like the smell, never really understood that).

But all the rest? The zombie bit? That's me in the morning before I've thrown at least three teas in me. And not wimpy stuff like a lemon green or a delicate Earl Grey, but a proper builder's tea...thrice.

Then, and only then, am I able to mostly pass as a functional human being.

FCC ups broadband benchmark speeds, says rural areas still underserved

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Re: I'll wait for it

In rural France, I get 3Mbit down (used to be 4, but connection speeds suffer the endless repairs due to careless farmers giving zero fucks about either the poles or the attached wiring). It's good enough for standard quality Netflix. My upload speed is about 760Kbit (realistically around 64KBytes/sec) which makes uploading stuff to YouTube rather painful.

They've rolled out fibre around here, just waiting for things to be finalised so they can begin to transition people over. Not sure what the intended speed is, but anything will be an improvement. I do wonder how long it'll actually work for given that it is slung up on the same poles as the copper stuff that keeps getting snagged on hay bales, digger implements, one run of wiring and the associated wooden poles suffered a flailing. Oh, and somebody digging to install a new water main hacked though the big bundle serving the entire village, about five minutes before he hit the underground power cables. Yes, mate, that bright red mesh stuff buried in the ground was supposed to be a warning...

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

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Re: Doing their bit...

"flame-grilling is the only bit that adds any taste..."

Isn't that the other place?

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Facepalm

Re: I refuse to use those touch screen thingies

"and the whole thing doesn't work"

I used to get the ones in my local burger slinger (about five years ago when I frequented such establishments) to speak to me in Japanese.

Why? You can get surprisingly far if you can read katakana, and if not there are always pictures. But the main reason is that it amused me no end that the system was clearly neither thought out nor actually ever tested - because it would happily print your receipt.......as line upon line of nothing but question marks.

And, yes, I'm exactly the sort of annoying bastard that would hand over such a receipt to pick up my "get it later" hot chocolate.

Hey, ain't my fault if you don't bother to test your ordering system...and, anyway, why are you idiots not providing the collection receipt in user language and local language for the employees that will have to read the thing? Didn't think this through did you?

Icon for obvious reasons.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Table service

"Astonishingly, McDonalds now offer table service."

They've done that for ages (6-7 years?) here in France. End result? Fewer staff needed (the only till is now usually [*] for those annoying people paying in coins) and the various McWaitresses have been dehumanised into biological robots. I can't imagine there's much in the way of job satisfaction in that. At least they finally copied The Crown Place and put little chips in the number widgets so the staff know where you're sitting instead of walking in circles trying to read all the numbers to find the right one (and memorise some of the others for next time) - it was the anticipated level of utter chaos during the busy periods.

"I am quietly impressed"

I'm usually impressed when they can get your order delivered in under ten minutes when there's nobody else there. Some McDos understand the "fast" in fast food, but most of them are so lackadaisical that they'll get the chips made and stuck in the chip holder quite quickly but by the time everything else is ready the chips are not just cold and icky, but damn near fossilised. And the burger that took so long to prepare? Colder than a corpse in a coffin. They need to stick a microwave in the corner for those of us that like our peculiarly processed proteins something resembling warm.

* - They do make exceptions for older people ordering coffee and croissants if they figure said old person wouldn't have a hope of getting on with the pokey-proddy device.

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Why does it need global scope connectivity to process orders locally?

Record breach of French government exposes up to 43 million people's data

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Re: This clearly breaks GDPR

Upvoted because.... "sad but true".

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Re: This clearly breaks GDPR

"pension entitlements, disability claim histories, marriage and birth records ..."

How is any of that relevant to an outfit helping people find work twenty years later?

Claim histories should be with either Ameli or the CAF, pension entitlements should be with... whoever (Assedic? I forget), and marriage and birth records again should be with the relevant places.

This information can be voluntarily shared, you know? I hope they've heard of FranceConnect so it isn't necessary for everybody to cling on to every bit of information because they can.

I'm surprised they don't purge records after X years (leaving only anonymised data points for reference).

heyrick Silver badge

Re: This clearly breaks GDPR

I came here to post exactly that - as 43 million people is, like, half of the country's population.

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

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Re: "make their websites dependant on Google's proprietary features"

Maybe over on this (right hand) side of the ocean, the problem might be resolved by pointing at accessibility rules?

Example: https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/accessibilite

Home Office’s shiny immigration system glitches causing delays

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Re: Hmm

"The irony of these two statements in a single comment."

What? That I have an ID card and that the police... oh, I'm sorry, I forgot. You don't have police that actually police any more do you?

The guy looked at the photo, looked at me, looked at the form that my employer had printed, and waved me on. Pretty much exactly what was supposed to happen, and probably only necessary thanks to some bloody-minded people thinking the rules don't apply to them.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Hmm

"Nothing irrational about paranoia of a mega everything-here database"

<looks at French residency permit>

<shrugs>

It's what gives me the right to be here, and more than that, proves my right to be here. The natives have cards like this too, just different because they're not foreigners. But ID cards are just an expected thing ... though in my time here I've only been stopped by the rozzers three times - a random car check, and twice during lockdown (yes, I have the paper that says I'm going to work...). It's really not a big deal, even if I'm now a datapoint on a database somewhere.

That being said, the application form and the census (that was also done this year) were quite notable for not asking dubious or irrelevant questions, such as "what god do you pray to?". Maybe, just maybe, a little event in the middle of the 20th century demonstrated the dangers of holding too much unnecessary information?

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Re: Now we know how Rishi and Dummerly could say the immigration figures were dropping

...while being the exact same party that gave us Truss and... how many PMs and Home Secretaries in the past decade? Not to mention so many cabinet reshuffles (partly as a result of the above) that I'd have to wonder if anybody really knows what post they're in, or if they even care given there's an election coming and they're either going to be out or shuffled yet again.

Honestly, comptence, integrity, professionalism, accountability...all words I would not use when describing the last decade of governance.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Hmm

Well, you guys do have some weird irrational paranoia of having identity cards, so why are you surprised that it's a bit of a shitshow?

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

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any cat "that seems abnormal"

A cat that seems "abnormal"? Yup, that'll be easy to spot...

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Re: Looks like Curiosity did it again

"I just wish cat owners"

Cats will look at your confinement and then walk right through it, around it, or climb over it. And then sit there on the other side looking right at you, daring you to say something.

Anybody who thinks it's easy to contain a cat clearly has never had the company of one.

Hint: they're not smaller, furrier, dogs.

Sunak's defunct SaaS scheme spent seven percent of budget designed to help 100,000 SMEs

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Unicorn Kingdom, huh?

As a Scot, I find that interesting...

Telegram eyes IPO as user numbers close in on 1 billion

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It's all downhill once the bankers turn up

Minimal advertising? Privacy respecting? Nope, screw everything in the quest for shareholder profits...

UK and US lack regulation to protect space tourists from cosmic ray dangers

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Look...

Anybody that can afford to go into space can afford a tin foil hat. Or to talk to medical professionals with actual experience of people that have been into space.

There don't need to be "regulations" to appease some rich blokes that want to dick around in a different playground.

"significant health implications for crew and passengers"

I'd have thought the idea of sitting atop an enormous controlled (sometimes) explosion might have been a greater concern.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

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"I smell an attempt to move away from GDPR."

France already does this - consent to potentially being tracked by hundreds of partners or cough up some coins. There's no such thing as the ability to say "don't track me" so I don't know what tortuous logic deems this as acceptable within the existing cookie legislation - being coerced to accept or pay is not freely given consent. It's barely better than asking for protection money (and I say barely better as knowing how scummy the online advertising industry is, I absolutely don't trust them to be tracking you anyway, because they can).

The thing is, in most cases I wouldn't particularly have any problem with the site I'm visiting dropping cookies on my machine, it's those fucking hundreds of parasites that come along for the ride. A pox on all their houses.

IAB Europe's ad consent popups pose privacy problem

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Re: But here in Blighty ... [Other Tracking Methods]

"if a site then requests your MAC address"

There's your problem right there. No browser should be handing out that information.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Shut it all down, please

and their 275 partners

I can top this. TVGuide.co.uk says:

"We and our 449 partners store and/or access information on a device, such as cookies and process personal data, such as unique identifiers and standard information sent by a device for personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, and audience insights, as well as to develop and improve products."

Four hundred and forty nine! WTAF.

Thankfully "Reject All" is two taps away, as if that is anything more than a placebo.

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Happy

Re: Shut it all down, please

The little arrow that points me back to whence I came.

(but, yeah, could have worded it better)

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Mushroom

a "mortal wound" for online ad tracking

Kill it with fire.

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Re: Shut it all down, please

Long list of companies? Due to a potentially unlawful "interpretation" of the rules (my opinion), the French authorities have allowed for users to be given a choice to "accept all this tracking" or "pay/subscribe". There's no free choice possible so I don't know what mind twisting is necessary to think that is acceptable.

At any rate, a site I briefly stopped by (comment ça marche) had a pop-up that explained this and stated what would be done with my information and cookies placed on my machine by both them and their 275 partners.

Fuck that noise, I hit back so hard the shock wave created a singularity.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

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Yup. For a recruitment test back in the mid 90s, I was asked to demonstrate my typing abilities with Word. A document with styles that I had to reproduce.

As I began, the "error bar" swung heavily to the red until I sussed that this wasn't Word but some lame piece of crap that checks and times what was being entered and just sort of looked like Word. More specifically it had exactly zero support for hotkeys.

Now, I don't know about you but I find the mental shift between keyboarding and mousing to be quite heavy (something that always bugs me about RISC OS).

Eventually I finished with an okay score.

I asked, for the sake of interest, can they please show me an actual copy of Word. The woman did, so I brought up a new document, adjusted the page margins, and started typing. I did not once touch the mouse.

The woman was like "b....how?".

I thanked her, left, and decided that an agency that doesn't even know something like that wouldn't be much help to me.

When I got home I talked to my mother about it and she suggested that I have a try working with her (Care Assistant in nursing homes). I shrugged and said "They're short staffed again? Yeah, alright, I'll come in for a day."

That day lasted several years, life's weird like that, but... I dunno, I think I liked that job better than had I been sitting on my arse staring at a screen.

Chrome users – get an alert when extensions are in danger of falling into wrong hands

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Happy

Re: Money Money Money

"the retard generation"

You can't say that!

You'll make the little snowflakes cry.

heyrick Silver badge

Simple solution for browser extensions and apps alike - don't just blindly update immediately as an update is released (unless it's a special update for a known vulnerability). Give it a while, keep an eye on it. And don't be afraid to not update something unless there's a specific reason to do so. Browsers, yes, they need to be updated as the web is a moving target. But a useful little notepad app? If it works, stick with what you have to avoid "even more embedded advertising" or "these useful functions are now only in the (paid) pro version". It's gotten to the stage where, with Android apps, that I've felt glad that I backed up older apks so I could revert. I get that there's a certain amount of advertising so we can have "free" things, but what's going on these days is not so much taking the piss as tossing a grenade into the sewerage treatment facility.

And, for the love of God, don't let all that stuff update itself automatically.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

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Flame

They've thrown those toys so high they're practically in orbit.

Icon because I'll need some to get the popcorn popped.

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

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Re: "...more users to become subscription addicts."

smooth-brained, non-thinking, fucking sheep.

...that can vote.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: A fool and his money

"This is something where a subsctription might make sense. Ink is a consumable, and printers don't live forever."

I have Instant Ink and for my use case it's enough that I feel like I'm saving on the cost of ink over buying the cartridges as I need to (whether or not they're all horrifically overpriced is a different question).

The thing is, the printer that I bought (a 3630) was cheap and cheerful and according to my blog I got it in July 2017, so it has...actually done surprisingly well. I think I paid €40 for it. These lower end printers are not expensive at all as they want to hook you on the ink subscriptions.

Which means you need to work out the cost of the printer, divided by the 24 months subscription time, in order to see if you're going to be losing out here.

This is also why I wasn't interested in the paper subscription when it was offered. I mostly print to regular A4, and a ream of that is something like €4 at the supermarket. If I was after a high quality print.....sorry HP, but those little essentially single-use print heads can't hold a candle to the sort of prints my sadly deceased Brother could manage. But, then, it's a €40 printer, what can you expect?

Plus, another question worth asking is what happens once the 24 months is up but you don't cancel? Do you get a price reduction? A new printer? Or is it considered a lease and you just keep on paying the same price?

Citrix reveals invitation-only 'Platform' license

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those who understood the nuances

Translation: the price we quote is the price we think you're able to pay.

Spam crusade lands charity in hot water with data watchdog

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Re: RNLI vs chuggers

In modern Britain, public money goes to paying MPs expenses and helping to alleviate the "tax burden" of the rich.

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Re: Imagine donating to a charity

Possibly less onerous than the donations going to giving certain members of staff a good wage.

Microsoft: Copyright law didn't stop the VCR and shouldn't stop the LLM

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What an absolute joke of an equivalence

VCRs were personal items that people used to record stuff, and no, copyright law didn't stop the VCR. Though in some countries blank media had a levy to compensate rights owners regardless of what the media was actually going to be used for.

Fast forward a couple of decades to the DVD era. It's now possible to make good quality copies of DVDs, and at scale too. You know what? Copyright law had quite a lot to say about people that did so.

So conflating old analogue tech mostly used by individuals/families with a modern corporate garbage spewer that pilfers other people's content is perhaps the dumbest argument I've yet heard regarding AI.

US and Europe try to tame surveillance capitalism

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Re: "[The FTC] has decided that browsing and location data should be considered sensitive"

Wait until they lobby for, and utilise, all the little loopholes...

...like the "legitimate interest" wheeze over here in Europe. No, fuck them, they have no legitimate anything when my browser clearly says "do not track me" and they're making a conscious and intentional choice to ignore that.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

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Happy

Re: For some of us, no.

Econet timestamps will outlive the both of us.

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Coat

Re: BBC article

It's okay, AI will make it all better...

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Re: For some of us, no.

I'll probably still be around but I'm not entirely sure my mind will be.

(child of a boomer, so have an upvote)

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Re: Time to go

Where I work, we are paid a (mostly) fixed monthly amount that is calculated upon a specific yearly number of hours worked (1,607 I think; it's the number of non-holiday days multiplied by seven hours) divided by 12 (months).

As we clock in and clock out, the time worked is subtracted from that big scary number. The aim is to be +/- 14 hours by the end of the "year" (April 1st to March 31st).

So we don't get paid extra for the 29th, but we do get seven hours deducted so we're not losing.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

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Re: Not the first time...

Given the news in recent months, that description could apply to far far too many of them (but especially the Met).

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Re: Ccea blocks me, why?

They like France. Not blocked.

I guess we get used to the cookie nags, though there are plugins that help. Given plenty of sites set cookies before asking, some UBlock filters to make them vanish can help too (well, I didn't consent if I didn't see it, not that I believe that anybody really takes it seriously; and you'll see the same advert providers asking the same question over and over because no, they don't care about our privacy, they're hoping to annoy us to the point we accept all the crap (at which point they won't keep on asking)). Best idea is to periodically flush the cookies.

What annoys me is the number of American sites that say "Because of the GDPR, we're blocking your access to our site blah blah blah". A simple proxy gets around that, but it's a bigger pain in the arse then clicking away the pop-ups. At least the Baltimore Sun is now available again. It only took 'em half a decade.

heyrick Silver badge

Re: Plus ça change

Many years ago down in Somerset, a lot of commotion and banging on the door. I open it and a bunch of rozzers push their way in. I was about to push back when I noticed the uniforms so let them come in, look around, and shout "where's Annabelle". I shrug, no idea who they're looking for.

Is this such and such an address?

Yup.

Annabelle something-complicated-that-sounds-scandanavian lives here, we need to talk to her. Judging by the attitude, I'm guessing "talk" was a euphemism.

I invite them to look around again and tell me if they see anything at all that looks in any way like a female lives here.

...

Two months later, bang bang bang. I open the door and say "Annabelle still isn't here". The guy is like "Oh, it's you again, fuck".

I offered to go put the kettle on but they politely declined. Never came back so I'm guessing other they caught up with her or got the address wiped.

The only Annabelle I knew at the time was about six, cute, and perpetually clumsy. Hardly a criminal mastermind.

<shrug>

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

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Pint

Me too --->

(there must be some text here)

Meta's pay-or-consent model hides 'massive illegal data processing ops': lawsuit

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Re: I'm starting to think GDPR has failed

"they just suddenly said, "we can tag your photos" and users lapped it up"

This story is from a few years ago. A woman at work used to post loads of pictures on Facebook, and she'd post photos of get togethers, work meets, her daughter (though carefully only referring to her as "my daughter" as the daughter didn't trust Facebook), and so on.

Along comes Facebook to helpfully tag who's in the photos. At first she's like "this is useful, my friends can find the photos they're in more easily".

Where it backfired is when she realised that it was tagging more than her friends, some photos had tags of people she hadn't set up connections to, and it tagged her daughter by name (which Facebook shouldn't have known).

That freaked her out so much that she requested her account be deleted.

So, I'd imagine at least some people found the tagging to be creepy...

Facebook probably knows about me. I don't want to know about it. Thankfully fewer phones come with an un-uninstallable Facebook app built in these days.

OpenAI sued, again, for scraping and replicating news stories

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Re: costs

Copyright/attribution means sharing their hard earned dollars with everybody else, so...

Chinese PC-maker Acemagic customized its own machines to get infected with malware

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isolated reports

So, all of them then?

Google sued by more than 30 European media orgs over adtech

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Can I countersue everybody for enshittifying life with all these bloody stupid adverts that are increasingly intrusive, obtrusive, and not in the slightest bit substantive?