no ..but
In the UK at least they can be charged with aiding and abetting.
They are assisting the illegal sellers and should be prosecuted for doing so.
202 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Apr 2010
My experience in the UK is that the TPS (Telephone Preference Service) and their contact with the ICO is completely broken. EVERY complaint to TPS has a boiler plate reply that the complainee has said it is not them, some other company is using their name, EVEN WHEN you have proof with a verified email from the spamming bastards.
As a member of one of the pension schemes involved I would be interested in this. If it was not for the fact that Barings a lot of scamming bastards that ignore TPS and GDPR regulations and the Solicitors Regulation Authority do not give a fuck either.
Angry of Tunbridge Wells
Intel have a history of paying to eliminate the competition. Perhaps they are still managing to do that. Itanic failed even though Intel manged to nobble Tru64, HPUX and others by doing a deal with Carly. Who knows what they are up to now. I wonder if any under the counter deals are happening with TSMC to reduce AMD's capacity?
If this leads to a way of verifying spam calls that 99% come with an Indian accent I would welcome it tomorrow.
The TPS treats any complaints with the same boilerplate message "Despite our best efforts, TPS has not been able to ascertain valid contact and/or address details to raise this particular complaint"., Even if you have a voice recording. Even if you have an email from the company with DKIM and SPF headers verified by Google. Even if you give them full company details.
A I understand it - Gates and Allen were 50/50 originally. Allen was doing something else on the side, so Gates "suggested" they reduce Allen's share to 60/40 or something because Gates would screw any one he could. When Bullmer came along he was from the same mould as Gates and they tried to concoct a deal that reduced Allen's shares even less. Allen overheard the discussion and said FU, I am off.
I believed Allen was the better programmer, but I do not know where I got that from.
3 years ago when my laptop failed and I needed a replacement in a hurry, I had 2 requirements. Wanted a recent AMD processor so my bollocks were not burned and to reduce the jet engine noise when the cooler cut in of my then Intel processor - and the ability to run Linux.
I was forced to buy a Lenovo paying the Windows tax AND I had to suffer a soldered SSD. I thought long and hard about this but eventually bit the bullet. It is still going OK, but when the SSD fails I will have an expensive brick.
I will probably think about one of these as a Xmas present for myself.
This is a joke survey by an organisation that does not seem to have a clue. THE BIG ISSUE is as above, POTS disappearing in 2 years. There has been no consumer publicity for this. How can any company offer a 2 year contract when the hardware existing will not be usable in 2 years.
Ofcom is a complete waste of time. Has anybody mandated what is going to be offered at switchover time. Or is this date another load of cobblers that will be put back because BT is not ready. Or is it a ploy to stitch up all the non technical consumers and force them into another 2 year above inflation new contract otherwise they will lose service and their existing numbers.
If the tossers at Ofgem had a clue, they would ban agents and sub agents from working on behalf of the energy companies. This all because in a short sighted pursuance of competition it was decided it would be a good idea to allow agents to peddle their wares. Why is a sub agent based abroad and ignoring all UK laws allowed to be in this arena?
There was enough problems when the energy companies marketed directly - it is easy to see how they have got round their obligations.
Receive letter today from Unilever Pension fund that their scheme administered by Crapita may have been compromised. Data includes pension ID and banking details. 12 months free Experian monitoring for free . Guess that is worth sweet FA ( https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/12/experian-account-hijack-krebs/ )
I am turning to be a socialist in my old age. What we want is an organisation to plan and develop storage solutions. We could call it the CEGB. We have power companies who have their own systems, we have water companies that have theirs. The CEGB could develop pumped storage systems using our reservoirs that are relatively local based to even out the load, using all that wind energy when not required by the grid and storing it locally for when everyone puts the kettle on after Eastenders or the cup final.
We have thousands of miles of canals with the potential to give a large storage solution with perhaps 150mm of 'storage'. With a central non profit body, this could all be planned with adequate capacity.
It is not in the interests of the generators to do this. It is not in the interest of the water companies to do this. It is not in the interests of the British Waterways to do this.
Where I live there were 5 oil storage tanks put up virtually overnight in WWII that had the capacity to store something like 25Mwh each. Plenty for the local community. If they could do it then, it would be easy now.
IN 2017 I bought a 2 year old Citroen C4 with only one key. Timpsons said they could duplicate the key with a authorisation code from Citroen. When this came the car was booked in, for most people this would be a short drive straight there. For me it meant a ferry trip and turning the ignition on. On Trying to restart the car I got a Key Fob error warning and the car would not start.
This is too much of a coincidence for me. I believe there is some telemetry in the car at allows this.
From Citroen website -"Citroën Connected Services includes practical programmes such as Real Time Traffic and Telemaintenance which are FREE to activate for new car customers"
I think word has got out how to do this.
(the internet is a big place).
Cornwall council tell me that I MUST verify voting information every year and they give a convenient link to do this. Stupidly not only do I need to enter password and keyphrase I must also do a captcha with US based themes. I have told them this is stupid as they are sending this request to a verified email address.
What are trying to guard against? A bot that registers 50 new voters.
Well I am not an engineer but I think everybody wants to do things on a massive scale when small and plentiful can be more beneficial.
Just a few miles from where I live there are 4 x 25,000 m3 ( 50m diam x 7m high) WWII oil tanks buried in the hillside 100m above sea level ( which is only 200-400 metres away). These are in AONB and are not visible unless you look hard for them. When i did a fag packet calculation several years ago i worked out to be 25MWh of storage. These were put up in months 80 years ago. Would work for all the local renewables in a 25 mile radius with using partly existing infrastructure.
These could be replicated thousands of times if politicians could think small instead of big.
My memory might be failing , but I am sure when I was at Homechoice/Videonetworks in the year 2000, some big wig from BT said consumers would never need more than 2Mbs. Thet were charging £700 for a broadband connection at the time and even then Premier League football was blurry at times.
On planes these things are installed for safety. In cars they are used to justify obligated visits to a garage to clear the faulty faults before the car will not start and you need a tow, all because there was a micro amount of static that the sensor read as a fault.
Sore, not me - I am happy to pay best part of a grand for a fault that comes and goes.
Back in the day when 4GB memory was about £4k, we would raid 10 our data on live services because a good controller would allow writing to one of the pair while reading the other and because reads do not need use any locks would be extremely fast. This was more expensive than RAID5 or 3 or 4 but much more resilient, allowed for different batches of disks in a mirror pair and was a magnitude faster at replacing a failed disk.
I had a support call yesterday from a friend who could not access his webmail because he was getting a message that his computer might be compromised. He sent me a screenshot of the error and it was a cert error for xx.btmail.bt.com. When I followed through with Firefox it stated cert expired at midnight Friday. OK today though. Downdetector did not show any particular problem.
Not only does our monopoly suppler for most of the country BT use hyper inflationary mid contact price rises, they are advertising it as super fast fibre when it is not fibre at all - it is hybrid fibre/copper. And meanwhile Ofcom sit and watch without a murmur.
Luckily for me I have just had the pavement dug up by Wildanet so it is full fibre in a week or two :-)