Posts by alain williams 2644 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
So it is broken from the outset. It should be opt in - ie user data only once the web site has got permission.
I suspect that we will see games played along the lines of "Last week you opted out for purposes x, y, z. This week we are doing a, b, c and you need to opt out of that separately."
This stops "sharing or selling of personal data", it does not stop use of data that has been collated by looking at & collating who does what on many, many web sites.
They will just say "we track everybody so we understand everything about everybody. GPC means that we cannot tell you anything, but we have new services that we can sell you that: do anything on your behalf & so let you do almost anything to anybody. So you will reap benefits of all our tracking of everybody (and we get lots more $$)" ?
If I visit a web site I kind of understand that they will learn something about me from that visit. What I do not want is:
* data from the many web sites that I visit collated to draw up a profile about me.
* the use of spooky/subversive techniques (more that just cookies) to identify me, eg abuse of ETags.
Maybe I do not understand but I think that this is naive and will not be much more effective than DNT ...
is that you need to be able to continue to service the on-going cost. This is especially painful when your income suddenly drops - maybe due to a certain virus. If you have bought the hardware outright then no one can take it away because you stop paying them. OK you do need to pay when something breaks, but that does not need to be who you bought it from (unless you bought a John Deere tractor).
Yes: capex means that you need to be able to stump up the cash when you buy it, this can be especially hard for a new/growing org.
Long may this continue.
I don't know if it will start to deal with some of the evil ones who track us from web site to web site when we have explicitly set Do Not Track in our web browser. It would be nice, but I don't know what legal basis it could use.
for what I use a laptop for: something to take out & about, a bit of web browsing, ssh, libreoffice. It has a small 12.4" screen which makes a nice fit for my rucksack. I assume that I will be able to upgrade the OS to Linux Mint or similar.
My main machine at home is more powerful. El Reg reviewers always assume that everyone needs a lot of grunt, not true.
£550 is a tad expensive for a small machine to use on walkabout, there are others that are cheaper. Finding a small screen is harder.
Just provide the source code and be done with it. Huawei makes its money selling hardware, by opening its code (even if that is just to its large telco customers) it would increase trust that it does not have back doors.
I doubt that their algorithms are vastly better than the competition.
If it does not want to do that then publish the complete hardware specs and customers could install their own firmware ... OK: something would need to be obtained, but once done, and shared with telcos world wide, we could have something robust.
The same should apply for Nokia, Cisco, etc.
The likes of google give themselves judicial like powers and then act in a way that can materially affect people. There is hardly any real oversight in the way that they use these powers, very often the decisions are done so as to cause them as little work as possible.
They have global reach and so should be subject to court decisions in the countries where they are visible.
it would mean that devices for which there are only Windows drivers (Eg strange wifi cards) should cease to be a thing of the past - ie I should have no problems upgrading from MS Windows to Linux when I buy a new laptop.
In reality there will still be some kit (probably from China) that ships with proprietary device drivers for which they refuse to release the source code - completely breaching the GPL and them not caring.
Linus will be pushed out and the job will be done... well part of it.
If he is forced out it will be fascinating to see Linus forking the Linux kernel to keep a free version.
But I doubt that this "MS take over" will happen - there are too many others who depend on the Linux kernel.
Not a Boeing
You will never see that on a flight booking form.
The airline might say "we fly Airbus" or similar but then change a flight due to one of a hundred reasons. What are you going to do when you realise as you board the air plane ? You won't be given a refund if you refuse to get on.
I have read most of the exec summary in the report. A large part of the problem was the watering down of the independence of ARs (Authorized Representatives) who are supposed to be the eyes & ears of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), but many were concerned about their job security if they made negative comments - many being paid by Boeing.
So: governance put in as a result of learning from earlier problems - dismantled to reduce costs and, presumably, as those who understood why the governance was put in had retired.
This reminds me of the watering down of banking regulation put in after the banks wrecking the global economy in the 1920/30s being watered down in 1980s - the "big bang". This allowed the meltdown of 2008 to happen.
I suspect that unchecked corner cutting will be found to be one of the causes of the Grenfell fire.
Search for bonfire of regulations to see that this is still happening.
No: the ! told which was the next machine to send email to via UUCP, the final part was the username. For this to work you needed to know which machines talked to which other machines. At one point I had an A3 sheet above my desk with a world map, 100 odd machine names & lines connecting them.
So your routing path would have looked like: machine1!machine2!jsmith123 ... this is the email address that you gave to the mail or mailx program.
This is important to me; I form my opinions from several places, including the comments pages here. It would be easy to place "desirable" opinions here to influence individuals known to read The Register.
I doubt that I will have featured as important, but my views could be polluted through association with those worthy of being targeted.
and I got to an article in Dutch at the bottom of which it claims that the orange one's password is YOUREFIRED. We can only hope that that will become true in a few months time.
who don't we make a dozen and send them into the asteroid belt and just let them wander around ? Who knows what they will come across.
Yep: good chances that they will bump into something but hopefully will have shown us something interesting before then.
If NASA can find a bit more loose change then something similar to the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, not just in the solar plane, might be good -- although they would need a heck of an initial push to get them there in a time that has political payback.
Yes: got them.
The problem is the web sites that insist on using 3rd party javascript. I will, generally, allow javascript from a site but do not from other sites. If a site does not work without 3rd party stuff - I go elsewhere.
The trouble is that the web masters don't get to know about them losing me, sometimes they don't care. Yesterday a web site would not work without 3rd party javascript, so I emailed the company to ask them to 'phone me for an order. They refused and said that no one else had complained about the javascript - I emailed back saying that I had bought whatever elsewhere.
Unless companies know that they are losing business they will not do anything. So: please, everyone, tell the companies that you walk away from.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm reasonably sure that the GPL prohibits doing that.
They might not bring the fixed kernel code back, but they will be able to see where & why fixes were made and then fix the same bugs in their own code.
Often the hardest problem in fixing bugs is finding that they exist in the first place and where they are in the code. Once you know that then, often, the fix is not hard.
So: maybe they are using the Linux kernel as a free test system.
* gets to charge a business to be 'verified'.
* learns who is calling who and why, so learns more about the business and the person being called. Google says that it won't "share sensitive information about users with its business partners" - is not the same as Google not learning something.
Can 'phone users opt out of this completely - ie no calls will be shown 'verified' ?
As all government ministers know: us IT people are magic, so a small amount of programmer pixie dust sprinkled on a vague agreement on 31 Dec will result in a well polished & documented system that can be tested against on 1st October. It might need a bit of help from the driver of that blue box in the BBC documentary.
So it seems that someone from the DWP 'phoned and did not say enough to show that s/he really was from DWP. This is how 'phone calls that end up in identity theft, or something, start out - social engineering. So DWP is clueless that they are making things worse.
Actually: I am not surprised. I get unexpected calls from banks, etc, where they ask ME to prove who I am before they will talk. I always insist that it is the wrong way round.
Sigh
Apple should be required to pay current and past workers for time spent being searched. How much will be interesting since I doubt that records were kept, but the judgement contains "typically ranges from five to twenty minutes ... up to forty-five minutes" (page 7) - so, perhaps, 15 minutes for every day worked.
All UK councils must have roughly similar needs; all are splunking huge sums to solutions providers.
I can't see why they don't club together and produce something that does what they need, then all use it. Sure it would cost an arm & leg and take several years, but after that they will save bucket loads. Yes: there is maintenance (need change, etc). Maybe it could be open sourced and let councils/... in other countries use it, add modules, submit patches, etc.
When all councils are using the same s/ware: exchange of information would be so much easier.
Anyone want to join a sweep stake on how long before some of this stored audio is leaked onto the Internet ? a) 6 months, b) 1 year, c) 18 months, d) 2years. I see no point in going beyond (d).
I wonder before someone watching a cookery program on the in-room TV unexpectedly finds room service knocking on the door having brought supper ?
Not sure if I should up or down vote.
Answer: No, I don't use Google news.
I listen to the radio & visit some news media web sites (not getting there via a search engine). Works well for me.
What I would like is objective & impartial news media. I am increasingly fed up with the spin being put on news stories and media setting agenda rather than clearly telling the stories.
A radio play, an advert about butter, football commentary, ... all ostensibly non political can contain subtle comments that form opinions about what a political party is saying. It will be cheaper as well: no buying of air-time or bill boards; all that you need is a friendly author, copywriter, ...
All very hard for the Electoral Commission to prove wrong doing.
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