Posts by Woodnag

South Africa's state-owned energy firm to appeal after court rules Oracle does not have to support its software

Contract...

I expect that Oracle's duty to maintain was voided when customer breached the contract with the licensing fraud.

Facebook says dump of 533m accounts is old news. But my date of birth, name, etc haven't changed in years, Zuck

That doesn't fly...

Perhaps phly phishing?

UK terror law reviewer calls for expanded police powers to imprison people who refuse to hand over passwords

free country?

Name me one country where police or other LE face accountability when powers are exceeded and/or abused.

Name me one country where prosecution is not discretionary and therefore subect to abuse.

BP Chargemaster's Pulse rebrand let crims send IcedID banking trojan from formerly legit mailboxes

Not quite.

Actually companies genrally don't "send emails telling you where on their website you can check the document". They send individual URLs that track whether you can be bothered to click the link.

Crafty: Cricut caught out by user revolt, but will cloud stop play?

good faith

Exactly...

API and ecosystem?

Customers are not actually buying a machine. They are leasing the machine after placing a £350 non-refundable deposit. When the cloud service dies, the lease essentially ends, and the machine is useless.

Australian police suggests app to record consent to sexual activity

...the message is as clear as a really clear thing.

But then one party can change their mind at any time, so yes is only yes until it changes to no.

There a "magic word"

If put in the position of responding to the app, respond No into the app. Now all the evidence in on your side. Don't refuse to respond to the app, because the evidence is then opaque again.

This doesn't stop the No person from 'dallying' of course, but forces the other party to trust that the No evidence won't be abused. No trust... well, probably shouldn't be a-cuddlin' anyway.

Privacy purists prickle at T-Mobile US plan to proffer people's personal web, app pursuits to ad promoters

They don't want me to opt-out

Privacy settings won't load. Keep being told to try again later.

Funnily enough, loading the direct URL (after logging in) works fine. Hmm.

https://my.t-mobile.com/account/profile/privacy_notifications/advertising

Linux Mint users in hot water for being slow with security updates, running old versions

You should be able to lock the version under the package manager.

President Biden to issue executive order on chip shortages as under-pressure silicon world begs for help

Jobs?

The shortage is simply becuase customers, such as suppliers of modules to carmakers (tier 1s and 2s), cancelled orders last year because CV19. Now there's an upside, and suddenly it's the semi industries' fault that there's no inventory. No forecast, no build.

Ring, Ring, why don't you give me a call? Amazon-owned doorbells aren’t answering after large-scale outage

Thank you for your valuable contribution.

Online only? That's the idea...

If Ring could be used standalone, then there needn't be a subscription service. Wouldn't want that, would we?

European Commission outlines appeal against Apple's €13bn tax ruling

Lawndering

...that's it's Ireland's DPC that has steadfastly refused to prosecute FB under GDPR for 7 years now.

https://noyb.eu/en/irish-dpc-settles-judicial-review-and-agrees-decide-swiftly-facebooks-eu-us-transfers

There are tax haven countries, money laundering countries, and countries that refuse to apply the law to anchor companies. Let's call it 'lawndering'.

European Commission redacts AstraZeneca vaccine contract – but forgets to wipe the bookmarks tab

confidentiality clause

A breach is a breach... deliberate or not doesn't matter. Duty of care, etc.

Four cold calling marketing firms fined almost £500k by ICO

What's worse?

"The company was fined £180,000 and ordered to stop making calls within 30 days".

The 30 days grace to stop breaking the law? Or the fact the fine won't be paid anyway?

How does any of this deter future miscreants?

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

Records, permanent removal thereunto

"The police WILL have records that they are not allowed to keep indefinitely and that will need to be permanently removed when certain criteria are met."

Nothing is ever permanently removed. Beat plods won't be allowed any visibility, sure. But senior police will probably be allowed to see that there was a record of something, and can get an ministerial exception to see the data. Cheltenham will keep everything, for ever. That's their job.

Wine pops cork on version 6.0 of the Windows compatibility layer for *nix systems

Re: Finally!

VI? EMACS?

Signal boost: Secure chat app is wobbly at the moment. Not surprising after gaining 30m+ users in a week, though

Re: Have WhatsApp halted the "privacy" change?

It won't be halted. It will be delayed.

Explained: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

Re: Whaddabout CDs?

Thanks to both of you!

Whaddabout CDs?

Must have interesting authoring a 650MB CD in the early 1980's...

New year, new rant: Linus Torvalds rails at Intel for 'killing' the ECC industry

Absolutely

Although the article overstates with "ECC memory solves these problems" when actually "ECC memory mitigates these problems" by correcting single bit errors reliably.

NHS awards £23m two-year deal to controversial Peter Thiel AI firm Palantir

I have a fix...

...mandate that private hospital records must be available to Palantir also. Oh gosh 'n' golly, let's not do this after all says Boris.

More evidence that UK will pull out of GDPR

After FB announced UK will be subject to CA T'c and C's instead of EU on Jan 1.

No way an American surveillance company managing UK health data passes any sort of GDPR test.

Ethical power supplier People's Energy hacked, 250,000 customers' personal info accessed

Re: Dates of birth?

Sure, but after that the info doesn't have to stay on the DB. Just the check status.

Dates of birth?

Under GDPR, why is DOB even legal to be on a 'leccy supplier database?

Twitter scores a first for big tech after being fined €450,000 by Ireland's data watchdog for violating the EU's GDPR

The fine could hardly be smaller

I doubt Twitter even care. Ireland's DPC showing their gums, not their teeth.

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Re: Identity Theft

You're conflating using an alias for non-deceptive purposes (usually legal) with identity theft, which using someone else's ID for fraud.

Change it to their customer service email address...

Whoa BlackBerry: Firm hooks up with AWS on cloud telematics platform for vehicle data

Eh?

"This software platform ... without compromising safety, security, or customer privacy."

Wait... so it monitors drivers with compromising customer privacy? Obviously by "customers" they must mean the corporations who buy the data, not the drivers or car owners.

HPE to move HQ from Silicon Valley to Texas, says Lone Star State is 'attractive' for recruitment, retaining staff

Re: Texas doesn't surprise me

Another big hurricane, and the Keys could be blown to Houston :(

Hurricane Houston? No thanks

From Pikiwedia:

"Hurricane Harvey was a devastating Category 4 hurricane that made landfall on Texas and Louisiana in August 2017, causing catastrophic flooding and many deaths. It is tied with 2005's Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical cyclone on record, inflicting $125 billion (2017 USD) in damage, primarily from catastrophic rainfall-triggered flooding in the Houston metropolitan area and Southeast Texas."

Ticketmaster: We're not liable for credit card badness because the hack straddled GDPR day

total Madness?

Shirley total Madness would require every member of every lineup to be present? That would improve my gray day...

Micropayments company Coil distributes new privacy policy with email that puts users' addresses in the ‘To:’ field

Message to CEO Stefan Thomas

Saying "we take privacy extremely seriously" is clearly a lie.

You didn't.

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Re: Yay! Party time!

Lregal issues, sure. But civil - debt related - ones, not criminal. He's still a member of the Protected Classes(TM).

It's happened: AWS signs Memorandum of Understanding for fluffy white services with UK.gov

The cloud server locations will be in the EU to meet GDPR, right?

And provably so, too?

Hackers rummaged about in Finnish psychotherapy clinic – now patients extorted with public data dump threats

Confuse I be

How come the therapy notes were accessible online anyway?

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

13-years old piece of software?

I use Office 2003 because I prefer the old menu system, and it t does everything I need (apart from incompatible Outlook).

I use Protel 99SE (you possibly guess the date) because it does everything I need.

Yes, both paid for.

Outlook? Nope

MS keeps updating the Exchange client killing backwards compatibility, so older Outlooks are SOL for the obvious use. Can't even use Ofice 2007's Outlook for current Exchange.

Huawei's UK code reviewers say Chinese mega-corp is still totally crap at basic software security. Bad crypto, buffer overflows, logic errors...

Re: Lets hope

Every country tries to exploit vulnerabilities in every other countries' networks. It's not good guys vs bad guys, it's sigint and everyone does it.

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

Samsung puff pitch

https://image-us.samsung.com/SamsungUS/samsungbusiness/samsung-ads/resources/total-tv-watcher/samsung-ads-resources-2019-total-tv-watcher.pdf

"Samsung Ads has the industry’s largest Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data set: nearly 60% of the U.S. ACR footprint. This unique, proprietary data creates unparalleled insights into consumer behavior in Advanced TV. This report, based on the 2019 Samsung Smart TV Viewer Behavior Study, shares important learnings and key implications for advertisers."

England's COVID-tracking app finally goes live after 6 months of work – including backpedal on how to handle data

Re: data use policy

I'm impressed that there must have been a commitment to not use any libraries that aren't open source, so everything can be audited.

data use policy

There will be a massive problem with the data use policy, no matter what it finalises to. That is, if there's either an inadvertent breach or a deliberate violation of the policy, the only people who will get a jail term will be the whistleblowers.

How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit? Let's call Peter Thiel! AI biz Palantir – you're hired

GDPR?

The contract details will be interesting from GDPR perspective. If any processing is done outside EU, it's probably illegal from the get go, plus deliberate UK gov policy because 5 eyes.

Bet there aren't any mandatory monetary penalties in case of data flow 'accidents'.

Ireland unfriends Facebook: Oh Zucky Boy, the pipes, the pipes are closing…from glen to US, and through the EU-side

NSLs

Nope. Nothing to do with NSLs, because they are an individualised legal warrant. Abused, sure...

From https://noyb.eu/en/next-steps-users-faqs :

...companies that fall under a US “mass surveillance” law can no longer use the SCCs . This is because the SCCs cannot override US law.

Transfers to US companies that fall under a US “mass surveillance” law like FISA 702 (also called 50 USC §1881a) are usually illegal. The companies that cannot rely on them are the so-called “electronic communication service providers”. This is a broad term under US law and covers most IT and cloud providers.

Examples of these providers include AT&T, Amazon (AWS), Apple, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon Media (known as Oath & Yahoo) or Verizon. The links of each of the companies will take you to their transparency reports that tell you how often they were subject to US government data access requests.

SCCs for some transfers

For your bank transactions, SCCs work fine, because banks aren't subject to FISA 702 data hoovering. FB is subject to FISA 702 data hoovering, so SCC is meaningless (doesn't protect), so can't be used.

Ireland DPC

It's also interesting that the R. of I.'s DPC has been working closely with FB to avoid enforcing GDPR on FB. Even after this second judgement. Lots of detail on https://noyb.eu/en

Here's the letter from NOYB to Irish DPC after the DPC's recent prevarication:

https://noyb.eu/sites/default/files/2020-09/Letter%20to%20DPC_bk.pdf

Re: About time too

This fails GPDR. You can get your country's DPC to force them to move.

FB are pretending FISA 702 don't apply to them. It's called lying

EU data cannot be stored in US servers due to GDPR if the US gov can access it without any due process under 50 USC §1881a (FISA 702). Which is true for FB. So SCCs can't be used in this case either, because, again, the US gov can access it freely regardless.

https://noyb.eu/en/next-steps-users-faqs

Adobe Illustrator's open source rival Inkscape delivers v1.0.1 - with experimental Scribus PDF export

Yup, buy it once

Still using, weekly at worst, my copy of Protel 99SE that I paid £995 plus VAT for over 21 years. EditPadPro, a year later, used daily. WinZip, another year later, used daily. Office 2003, used daily....