Posts by alain williams 2911 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
A phone is not dead just because it no longer gets security updates.
It is more than security updates that are needed. My ancient phone still works as a 'phone (+SMS & wifi hotspot) and the battery lasts most of the week but the SSL certificates expired a couple of years ago so I can no longer browse the web - which I only did occasionally.
If I follow the link in the article https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_gb/nokia-g-22 I get 'Access Denied', if I search for the 'phone the links that I get show much the same. What is going on ?
Also: Nokia seems to wants to rent it at £10/30 days - so I would pay the £150 purchase every 15 months. Not a good deal.
The trouble is that consumer ISPs want to offer low priced "all you can eat" packages and then find that consumers take them at their word by viewing huge numbers of videos, etc.
What is needed is a dose of reality: use lots of bytes, expect to pay more.
Big Tech should pay what it costs to get its bytes to the backbone and consumers pay for what it costs to download them from the backbone.
When I talk about "backbone" I mean more than the local Internet exchange, this should include the cost of bytes between these exchange points.
Yes: prices will go up for heavy consumers, that is only fair. Lighter users will pay less.
An App is the easiest way to handle that for half-wit vehicles.
A credit card is even easier -- FTFY
What if the car is not yours, eg a hire car ? You do not want to give the car your credit card details - you then have to remember to remove them when you give the car back.
Even if it was my car: I would not want to give it my credit card info.
Because it was open (specifications more important than code) it has always been possible to replace components. So people did. Sometimes the replacements improved things, sometimes they did not.
So there was diversity and experimentation. In a Darwinian way the better alternatives usually** won out after several years, so Unix systems gradually evolved to use better components. The same is happening today but without the benefit of hindsight today's diversity just looks like a mess. In a few years time what is considered a mess will be something different.
** "Usually" - large company marketing and techie conservatism sometimes meant staying-with/adopting non best solutions.
the big stores get to see exactly what I bought anyway - I will probably pay by credit/debit card. So they can put all the transactions on that card together to get some sort of profile.
OK: the loyalty card gives them a bit more, mainly email address for spam purposes. Address and, to a lesser extent name, lets them work out who I live with and thus further profiling.
I suspect that card number does often give them the address by seeing were the same card is used to buy something over the Internet. A bit harder in my case as I have one card that I use for all Internet purchases and use for nothing else.
Just use https://meet.jit.si/ - it is free and you do not need to (pretend to) read a complicated license.
if you ask it to write a story about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 ?
Maybe the rest of us should crack their research labs and grab the blueprints.
I am not one who usually advocates such action, but China regularly steals tech info from us. Sauce for the goose & gander.
If we do not do so then I doubt that China will hesitate to use whatever advantage that it has against us.
It is a shame that as a species we do not cooperate for mutual benefit. Maybe something of Darwin as the cause.
Backblaze do provide ssd-drive-stats.
I am fatigued at all these corporations that assume that I consent to their slurping and sharing my data.
The one that currently annoys me most is how many web sites have www.googletagmanager.com in them and do not ask if I consent to that. OK: my /etc/hosts maps that to 127.1.1.1 but most people do not know how to do that.
Oh: El Reg - you have googletagmanager ... when are you going to ask us if we want that ? To see how it should be done go to https://ico.org.uk/
the outgassing will act like a rocket
How much gas, how quickly, what force ? I suspect that most of the heating will be absorbed by the rubble/sand/... close to the nuke, some of it will be vaporised. So some material will be made to move but most of it very little. The result will be that it bulges for a bit but most of it will still hit us.
After a few years gravity will have pulled it all together again.
He might be able to wiggle out of paying (part of) some of what he is being sued for but I would have thought that the lower payments would be dwarfed by the legal bills. We know that lawyers do not come cheap.
Then what is the reputational damage ? Or has he decided that he does not have any reputation worth trying to salvage ?
This includes big tech and people at home.
So if you spend all day on Youtube or Netflix then expect to have to pay for the large number of GB that you will use -- just as Youtube/Netflix will have to pay for those GB to get to the backbone/Internet-exchanges.
The problem is that ISPs like to advertise all-you-can-eat packages at some low cost. They then find that they lose when a couch potato burns through many many GB.
The solution is simple: £X gets you Y GB, if you want more then you have to pay more. The trouble is that the ISP marketing departments do not like this reality and go crying "unfair" to government.
At least they care about privacy.
I doubt that the UK government will do much, especially seeing how they are giving Plantir all of our medical data.
What needs to be added is how google sucks up personal data via google-analytics javascript that is embedded in many web sites. Users are not told about this let alone given the opportunity to opt out.
Ten years time and some country is having a go at another. Large nuke power sites are well known. SMRs are designed to be delivered by truck thus their locations will not be as well documented. Some future Putin wannabe wants to freeze a country into submission and so takes target practice at civilian infrastructure and hits one of these that it powering a hospital.
The release of nucleotides hardly bears thinking about.
It will be blamed on the locals of course ... but the wind does not care and will blow this everywhere.
Ideas that will harm them. This seems obvious but is not. "protect" too much and you can harm by hiding them from ideas of which they should be aware and gain understanding through discussion.
Having your view challenged can make you stronger - if done in the right environment.
This was discussed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in today's Reith Lecture. It is worth listening to.
One group that can cause kids (& adults) harm is religious organisations. Their attacks on LGBTQ+ people can make those people depressed, upset, fearful, ...; their pushing the meme that those of other, or no, faiths are wrong/evil is harmful, the pushing the idea of a god when their is no real evidence makes people prone to baseless ideas from scammers, conspiracy theorists, politicians and you get abuses like the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God reported today.
I know that my comment will not please many people, but please do try to think rationally before down voting.
