Posts by alain williams 2644 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
the other soft/hard ware vendors that have security problems, some mandated by government, eg:
* Microsoft telemetry that sends who-knows-what back to the USA
* Cisco kit with backdoors installed by the NSA
* Spyware from the CIA mandated by the Patriot Act
* Spyware from GCHQ under the Investigatory Powers bill
* Australia: The Assistance and Access Bill 2018
and more
He, and Facebook, only care about maximizing profit at all costs
If he were to allow richer people to opt out of data collection/sharing then he would be removing the very people that other advertisers pay Farcebook lots of $$ for - the ones who are likely to buy stuff via the Internet. The ones left will be those who generate little dosh and who are of little interest other advertisers.
Remove the few rich guys and Farcebook will lose most of its income - no one will pay to know about the poor guys.
Unless you have looked at it you cannot start to make a judgement that their views are wrong and come up with cogent arguments of the same.
I can see the point about trying to stop impressionable minds from being led astray and do things to harm people. But I doubt that this will really stop that and may drive it underground. Far better to engage the impressionable in discussion.
Who decides what is 'terrorist' as opposed to just bad taste or a result of stupidity ? Is saying that the Prime Minister has gone mad and should be forcibly removed from No 10 expressing terrorist sentiment ?
Is this the start of the UK sliding down to Tiananmen Square like restrictions ?
When I were a lad I bought the Times almost every day, as did many who I knew (OK some might have bought the Grauniad, Torygraph or Currant Bun [The Sun for you 'mericans]). Now I rarely do so, I can get news & opinion free on-line without getting out of my chair. I do give the Guardian £50/year as thanks for not pay-walling their site (I'm looking at you Murdoch).
The result is that most news sites have to have a lot of click-bait to get page views to report high eyeball counts to advertisers. Click-bait is also cheap to generate. So quality suffers.
Facebook, Google, etc, are pure click-bait, the more outrageous the content the more eyes, so fact drowns under fantasy & fabrication. It is so easy for nonsense or malice to form opinions, there is little cost to someone writing this stuff to get many people to believe it; years ago spreading of ideas was expensive.
I have changed my mind: I used to think that the media should survive on their merits; but we risk losing losing the Fourth Estate who should hold the powerful accountable and be the pin to burst wacky ideas. So some tax on big Internet to fund solid journalism would be a good investment.
The question is: who benefits ? Those with my view on life or those who hold your view ?
Patents are not a problem as anything with a patent as all the IP should have been disclosed as part of the patenting process.
You do have a point about copyright of other people's code that they might be using, in theory it could be given under a license that restricts its use to Huawei products, in practice people will use it however they wish.
Why should Huawei have to give away their privately paid for code?
Because it might get them a lot more sales. Anyway: many organisations give away code Open Source and do very well.
Huawei should point two fingers at the govt of the USA by open sourcing its firmware and then ask the USA to point to the Chinese gov't bugs.
Huawei should document how to compile & install the firmware - then challenge Cisco, etc, to do the same.
Huawei makes its money by selling hardware so this should not be a huge problem. Yes: some of its competitors may find interesting things to copy; the NSA will produce its own firmware that creates a NSA back door; others might even improve/debug the firmware - making it better.
The USA gov't will then have to invent some other excuse for protectionism.
Are there Chinese gov't back-doors ? Quite possibly. But if the bugged Huawei gear is not being sold any bugs are pointless, so they might as well support clean firmware and get the economic benefit.
In fact all security sensitive software should be Open Source, let's start with mobile 'phones and desktop operating systems.
Where are they left ? They have not signed up thus they have not agreed anything with facebook, so clause 1002.b (written in point size 6) cannot be deemed acceptance of anything.
The implications of this will be much wider than facebook: any web site, commercial or otherwise, must have restrictions imposed on it as to what it can do with casual visitors. I am OK with them counting how many people looked at garden spades (anonymously), but should they be allowed to keep the IP address (or other info) and later correlate it with that visitor looking at lawn mowers ?
Under EU law (I think) they should not - look at the cookie directive; unless you agree they cannot set one (in theory).
I suspect that we will see that the agreement pop-up/... to cookies will now contain much more.
The cookie has been run around, tracking these days can be done by ways other than cookies - these methods should also be regulated, using language that covers intent rather than enumerating specific technologies (with would then be run around).
I have fixed IP addresses (IPv4 & IPv6) at home, I live alone - that makes me easy to track from the server, no javascript needed. Even if others lived here it would narrow it down to a few people.
What is needed is legislation to stop the various sites from sharing tracking information. This might happen in Europe, but I doubt that it will in the USA (no comment on a post brexit UK).
Taking global averages is not illuminating
Women made 3.8% less in base salaries on average than men in the same job categories, 13.2% less in bonuses, and 33.1% less in stock value, it alleges.
To me it appears that there might be a 3.8% disadvantage to women. Bonuses tend to be paid as a result of performance thus, for whatever reason, men appear to be more productive; I assume that something similar is at work for stock value.
But: without looking at all individual cases it is hard to be sure.
about people (most will say 'so what, why should I care ?') but what happens to that knowledge; this is a bit more nebulous and not so easy to understand.
One lady (single, mid 20s, well paid job) I met a year ago liked it that when she went somewhere the web site knew the sort of things that she liked to buy. It made on-line shopping better for her. She could not care less about privacy or that prices displayed might be 'tailored' for her.
But this is exactly what others (including me) do not like.
£20 billion over 30 years ... The EU's defence spending was €200 billion in 2016 (ie one year). So per year about 1/300 of what the EU spends on guns, bombs, etc.
I think that the benefit to humanity of a new LHC would be vastly more then what you get from 1/300 of defence spending.
I was one of those federal employees, especially one of the "critical" ones being forced to work without pay like the TSA or air traffic control, I'd try to organize all my co-workers into going on strike
A far better thing for them would be to get another job. When this brouhaha ends government would not have the staff to work properly.
Saturation is where sales are, by & large, for replacements.
* Personal Computers: Apple was there at the start 40 years ago, that is at saturation
* Servers. Apple got out of that market
* Laptops (ie portable PCs), that is at saturation
* Portable music players, subsumed by smart 'phones
* Smart 'phones, that is at saturation
* Tablets (cross between laptop & smart 'phone), that is getting to saturation
* iTunes Store, still healthy
* Watches, still growing but not a must have
Apple is playing with TVs, cars, ... but there is nothing that is an obvious new cash cow.
Or a small fraction of the Military budget of the United States
allowed by the tax man in recognition that goods sold are (usually) not free to the seller. It is part of the tax man being reasonable and not taking the piss.
However: Amazon (& others) are taking the piss by artificially exporting profits overseas to a low tax country.
Thus it seems to me that it would be reasonable for the Inland Revenue to remove the allowance grace for Amazon. It would be up to Amazon to prove to the Inland Revenue what are the real cost of the goods that it provides and then ask for the grace to be applied to that.
Some things should be specifically excluded, such as some Intellectual rights, use of company name, ... which are fantasies just to provide a fig leaf to syphon more cash overseas.
Life from Earth maybe, but it isn't that hot. Pyrolobus fumarii is OK up to 122 °C.
A limiting factor for water based life will be water's boiling point. But water boils at 150°C at about 5 times Earth's atmospheric pressure, so life at 150°C might not be that hard.
(Yes: boiling point is not the only factor, high stability cell walls, etc, will also be needed)
I have a HP stream 11, I use it for when I am travelling, giving presentations, web browsing, word processing, ... There is nothing on it that I don't have on my main machine (or is soon copied there). Cheap: so I won't cry hard if I drop it under a bus.
Works nicely: plenty of 'disk' space, enough RAM, performs fast enough.
Maybe I should mention that I upgraded it from MS Windows 10 to Linux Mint.
I don't think that it is a dumbass & her mates, the software in modern a drone will stop it flying near an airport. So some expertise is needed to hack the software to change this.
One possibility is that this is a practice run sponsored by Al Quaeda or Putin for some future planned disruption (or maybe just as a bit of seasonal fun). If done for Putin part of the exercise would be to enable the drone operators to escape and some plausible deniability.
Ie those who make up the judge-and-expert panels.
Well, the government of course!
I fully expect that if the expert does not come to a conclusion that the government wants they s/he will not be appointed again. Everyone likes continuity of income, so what is the pressure to give the ''right'' opinion ?
Conflict of interest anyone ?
Some will, inconveniently, do the right thing, but they will be quickly purged from the system.
Yes: those that don't pay should be fined but the real problems are:
* web sites that pre-tick consent boxes to receive junk mail, etc
* shops/... that demand personal information that is not needed to complete the purchase, eg: a theatre recently refused to sell me tickets that I was buying in person unless I gave an address; shops that insist on an email address; ...
* organisations that share personal information when they should not
* web sites that send spam in spite of the 'want spam' check box being unticked
Little point in making a complaint about these to the ICO, they won't do anything.
I ring your doorbell.Bang, I instantly know if you're at home or not*.
But if you want to ring doorbells:
* you need to walk around the streets, guess where lights are 'just left on', press & wait. Takes time
* you might be noticed going from house to house
Have someone sell you a list of candidate on-holidays is much safer & faster.
Yes: there are other ways of guessing that I am away, but it does not mean that we should not add another one.
this they never talk about.
If my lekky usage is uploaded somewhere every 15 minutes then it will be easy for someone to make a guess if I am at home or not. All it takes is a cash strapped sysadmin to write a query that looks for homes where usage dropped sharply 2-3 days ago, pass the addresses on to his mate Burglar Bill as candidates for people away on holiday.
Wake me up when these things have a householder option to delay the sending of usage by a fortnight.
Some medical AI having/not-having some medical data of mine is not the really important question; the real one is where else does that AI pass that data, probably without my agreement and out of scope of what the NHS trust thought it was agreeing to.
I don't want to find: myself getting spam for hypertension pills; or my mortgage rate going up; or being denied a job; or ... We all know that private data will end up in all sorts of places not envisaged, there will be flimsy excuses invented to give a veneer of justification - but the real reason will be some organisation's profit at my expense.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
