Posts by MarkW99

Tax the tech giants and ISPs until the bits squeak – Corbyn

Re: Boo Hoo

Mandela thought Mandela was a terrorist. That's why he was in prison after all. Mandela made no excuses for his terrorism. He thought his cause was just. YMMV.

Re: Hmm

The only reservation is that with an elected body, pretty soon Corbyn or Momentum would have a very big say. They are very adept at taking over supposedly democratic institutions - the democracy of the committed - and once they are in there is nothing you can do to get them out.

WannaCry reverse-engineer Marcus Hutchins hit with fresh charges

Re: Who do you trust?

Add to that list George Brown, one of the Merrill Lynch bankers jailed for the Nigerian barge case. The four were released on appeal after the judge decided that the "fraud" for which they were convicted wasn't actually a crime under US law, but Brown was arrested charged and convicted of lying to the FBI when in practice the worst that could be said of Brown's testimony was that it was imprecise open to interpretation. Unfortunately for Brown the FBI didn't interpret his statement the way he meant it.

Ex-Microsoft intern claimed one of her fellow temps raped her. Her bosses hired him

Re: This sort of thing makes me ever so careful at work

Don't worry pal. Just keep your hands to yourself, ease up on the smutty jokes, smile at everyone and you'll be fine.

Not exactly Maigret

So she was asleep and yet she has flashbacks about what she saw? Her nakedness is unexplained yet she is certain about consent or lack of it? I can see why she doesn't seem to have got very far with the police or Microsoft. Maybe she does have a case, but it is easy to see why wiser, older people may have simply tutted, shaken their heads and said "let's move on".

IBM's contractor crackdown continues: Survivors refusing pay cut have hours reduced

If I could forecast the future 2 weeks ahead, I wouldn't have to work for IBM or anybody else.

Ex-cop who 'kept private copies of data' fingers Cabinet Office minister in pr0nz at work claims

Re: Confused

"Misuse of a computer the taxpayers paid for is a crime, pure and simple."

It is? Wrong? Perhaps. Immoral? Almost certainly. Criminal? Not unless there is a specific law, which there probably isn't.

Which sets aside your previous point about retaining evidence of criminality.

Jingle bells, IBM tells more staff it is D-day ♫

Re: why stay?

Profitless? IBM makes about $5billion a year. IBM is shrinking, but it isn't exactly loss-making.

Brit ministers jet off on a trade mission to tout our digital exports...

Re: Ha

You remember wrong. The current figure would be closer to £400m a week. It is 1% of GDP, but not as we measure it. The EU like to include drug dealing and prostitution in GDP now because that pushes up their income. And if we stayed in the EU you could kiss the rebate goodbye - sure to disappear after qualified majority voting comes into force and the EU starts looking for more cash.

Guess who doesn't have to pay $1.3bn in back taxes? Of course it's fscking Google

Re: Basic accountancy problem

"Corporate taxes ... are standardised by the EU." Err... wronger than the wronged wife of a Labour Party Director of Communications.

Corporate taxes (laws and rates) are set by individuual EU countries. Issues between states on the taxation of income are largely resolved by double-taxation treaties. Modern tax treaties largely conform to a model treaty established by the OECD (not the EU), but many tax treaties predate the model agreement or are non-compliant. The EU has a general principle that member states should not withhold taxes on payments to other member states, but that principle is still enforced by bilateral tax treaties, which were in place between west European countries before the EU started. The EU also dislikes overt tax competition between member states (read that as Germany and France among others don't like seeing their corporate tax base eroded). Any dislike of a countyry's tax policy is met with threats about anti-competitiveness, but the EU commission has no direct say in individual counties' tax policies.

Frankly this case was always likely to end up like this. As is often the case it is simply a matter of waiting until the case appears before a court of sufficient competence to make the correct decsion. The facts of the case is that the advertising agreements were entered into by Google Ireland which clearly had the power and competence to do so. Furthermore while nobody disputes that there is a French subsidiary that is trading in France, the court has accepted that the French employees were not involved in activities in connction with the advertising business that under the Irish-French double taxation treaty would allow the French authorities to deem the French operation as a permanent establishment of the Irish company. Hence the sales income all gets to be taxable in ireland not France, even though Google outside France may be covering the costs of the French operations for service they provide that are preparatory to or ancillary to the advertising sale.

That is exactly how international trade works for other companies. The facts are a bit different with tinternet sales, but the law and treaties haven't caught up yet.

Labour says it will vote against DUP's proposed TV Licence reforms

Re: Yes, I know. I'm a wimp.

Yes, I used to do all that fine stuff, but the new BBC T&C's make it easier for them to simply pass an IP address to Capita, and all the BBC websites will soon require a login, so it just isn't worth holding out any more.

Yes, I know. I'm a wimp.

I don't know about abolition, but I would welcome a subscription service.. I must be one of the few who has no TV, never watches TV, but now have a TV licence just to keep the Capita boys at bay. With the new iPlayer regime, (BBC will/may pass IP address and other data to Capita), the risk of being fingered by Capita and put up before a magistrate who will believe anything Capita say, is too great. If the Beeb can collect IP addresses accessing the radio iPlayer, news/weather sites, then frankly it isn't worth taking the risk and hoping that Capita will play fair.

UK PM Theresa May's response to terror attacks 'shortsighted'

Re: Can the solution be non-political?

I probably stand to be massively downvoted, but here goes. On of the root causes , at leats one which gives the perpretrators license to commit their crimesis certain passages in the Koran. We can address the other issues, but the issue of religious justification will not go away so long as those verses remain part of core Islamic teaching. Moderate muslims may well object to the behaviour of the more radical believers, but so long as they share the same techings the rest of the population is at risk from their religion, and the religion needs to be reformed to allow them to live alongside others in peace and harmony. To use an analogy, we have speed limits because of the risk of accidents at high speed. Nobody claims that accidents will occur when anybody breaks the speed limit, nobody denies the utility of getting from A to B as quickly as possible and nobody wants to deny the right to use cars, but it is generally agreed that a little moderation works for the greater good.

EU announces common corporate tax plan

Re: I guess this explains why we are leaving.

Funny thing is, the rich Tories mostly voted to remain. Gove was adopted and Boris went to Eton on a scholarship.

Vodafone hints at relocation from UK

Love the hogwash preamble about participating in the single digital market. Vodafone has several large operating companies already active in Europe so this is not an issue. The real issue is the taxation of profits that have not yet been distributed to the UK, sitting in its European subsidiaries. The UK lost a case in the ECJ where it tried to apply the UK's CFC (controlled foreign corporation) tax rules taxing passive income in subsidiaries in low tax countries (in this case Luxembourg). The ECJ ruled that this was against various EU principles. After Brexit, all gloves are off and firms such as Vodafone risk a big tax bill. While we are still in the EU, they may be able to get away with a corprate restructuring that largely avoids any exit charges, but that may rely on having a business purpose and not just being some fancy footwork with their tax bill. Hence the guff about single digital markets.

IBM says no, non, nein to Brexit

Re: @codejunky - RE: Brexit is all a sham like the Scotland referendum.

"'almost' 37% is a pitiable basis to run the country on. Hardly democratic at all"

This assertion would be true if there was ab initio a simple binary choice, but this is not the case. We live in a country where about 40 million people are entitled to stand as an MP, but not many do. Those that do tend, but are not obliged, to do so under the banner of one of the political groupings that we call parties, and whose policies are relatively fluid, following public opinion in many cases. In order to ensure that any government was elected by more than say 50% of those who actually voted could take several rounds of voting and doesn't give any guarantee of any party satisfying the 50% threshold.

Having a single round first past the post system ensures that some party or collection of parties will have a claim to form a government. It isn't perfect, but given the facts above, a single party getting 37% of the vote is pretty impressive. FPTP is the system that the parties sign up to, and is the basis on which the election is fought.

If the basis of the election was changed then it is likely that the parties would simply their strategies, so that instead of targeting a number of marginal constituencies they would seek to maximise the vote in the constituencies that they are strongest (on the basis of a higher return on campaigning effort) where at present the turnout is lower than it might otherwise be because the incumbent looks certain to win.

So is 37% of the vote and 51% of the seats democratic? I would say it's not bad.

UK.gov could reopen Google's £130m HMRC tax deal, says Parliament

The problem is not so much UK rules as the UK-Irish double taxation treaty which specifies that if Google says that it is selling from Ireland then the sales will be taxable in Ireland provided that the activity of the UK company is "preparatory" or "auxillary". The UK company gets paid a commission which is comparable to whatever commission would be paid to an independent company to do the same work, but the bulk of the profit ends up in Ireland. The treaty rakes precedence over UK laws, so changing UK laws won't make any difference. Renegotiating the treaty requires the consent of the Irish. Are they going to do this in a hurry? I think not.

Samsung smart fridge leaves Gmail logins open to attack

Why would anyone want to hack a fridge?

Spain donates Enigma gear that kick-started Brit code-breaking

Re: Cribs

Sorry, but that is complete tosh. A "crib" is some plaintext that the cryptanalyst knows/believes to be widely used by the encryptor. The Poles knew that the |Germans stuck an X on the end of the word AN to avoid confusion (no spaces) so ANX was a 'crib'. An informed guess doesn't usually entail risk to life and limb.

BT confirms broadband upgrades for rotten boroughs

What's the point

The point is that if you are 4km from your nearest exchange you may get less than 250k bandwidth with ADSL, so 80Gb bandwidth is not an issue.

If you are 4km from your exchange but 500m from your nearest cabinet, you are going to get 20Mbit+ under VDSL/FTTC, so the 80Gb limit (actually I think it is 300Gb) is one you can live with.

WHo needs fibre?

People who live so far from the exchange that they get less than 100k, but also live less than 200m from a cabinet. Very common in villages.

This post is plain incorrect

BT did check the valiity of votes, not just email addresses but also IP addresses of posters. We jknow because Castleton which was up with the leaders 2 weeks before the end of the contest had its score cut from 78% to 22% and Inner leither lost 15% of its vote. All towns lost a few votes because voters had double voted at the same address, but anybody who followed any of the winning teams and their progress saw that their vote was growing at a steady and consistent rate.

The reason they all got over 100% was because BT took the number of premises with fixed lines at some point earlier in 2010, but any new homes occupied by Dec 31 were allowed to vote as were any homes without fixed lines, probably 10% in many places. So the true scores were closer to 90% than 100%, and 90% isn't difficult to achieve in places where ther is a 75% turnout at the General election.

Concentrated populations

It isn't the density of population but the local demand around a cabinet that makes a difference. Many urban cabinets linked to enabled exchanges do not have FTTC installed because there is no local demand for high end services with everybody going for £8 a month high contention low bandwidth ISP's. If you take a rural site there may well be a much higher level of demand around a cabinet from a small village of less than 100 connections because a £25-30 a month connection that allows homeworking still saves a fortune in travel costs.

"The 100% is a real figure."

Not quite. The Blewbury figure was adjusted down to 99.8% by BT while others scored over 100%.

Towns scored over 100% because the denominator was BT's estimate of premises with fixed line connections (which wasn't always up to date when new houses were being built - we had 65 people move into newly built houses just before the competition was announced and it was clear they weren't in BT's numbers.

The numerator was every business or residence with a separate identifiable address. Since many people, particularly young and single, but also people living in short term rentals etc do not bother with a fixed line, the actual number of potential voters is often about 10% higher. So we scored 104% but tbat should probably have been 104/113 and I suspect numbers elsewhere were similar.

BT fibre-up-your-exchange poll in 6-way Mugabe style pileup

100% voting etc

It is not surprising that voting exceeded 100% because the denominator in the equation was the number of premises connected to each exchange counting business lines and residential lines being to separate premises at the same address. The numerator was the total number of lines connected to the exchange plus the number of votes from residential premises without fixed telephone lines which were collected by signatures on voting forms and submitted to BT by text message.

Reaching "100%" was quite easy once you take into account that in most communities a fair number of people do not have fixed lines but were entitled to vote; young professionals living in short term rentals and single mums being particular cases, but there are many others making up about 10% of the population here, so that a real 100% vote should have shown up as 110% on the BT scoring system.

For those who think that all you had to do was enter a lot of phone numbers online, that wouldn't work because BT recorded IP addresses for voting. IP addresses where multiple votes would take place (we had one in the Town Hall and another in a hotel) were notified to BT, and all votes at such IP addresses were supported by signatures on voting forms. BT also deleted all multiple votes from the same premises.

We know that BT counteracted abusive voting because Castleton in Gwent whch had flatlined on 20% suddenly shot up to 78% in 3 days and then flatlined, with no obvious campaign. After investigation by BT most of their votes were removed and they finished on 28.5%.

Here in Whitchurch we had a campaign which while not necessarly the best thought out at first grew very rapidly, starting with financial support from the town council to fund a poster campaign and leafletting which got the town into the top handul after a month, but with about 3 weeks to go and support at around 70% that switched to an intensive door knocking and telephoning campaign, pretty much like an election canvassing or "get out the vote" campaign, with meticulous recording of who had voted and targetted door knocking from a team that grew to abou 40 strong. As well as campaign's own supporters, the campaign had support from the local borough councillor (LibDem) and MP( Conservative) and their supporters had the know-how to run such a campaign, as well as the local knowledge to know where all the rural houses were.

Given that it is much easier to get people to sign a form or click on a link to an email at any time in a 2 month period than it is to get them to a polling station on a particular day, and given that very few rational people would actually vote against faster broadband for free (a few did), it is not surprising that some towns did reach 100%, but in our case it was only through a lot of hard work by a lot of people that we managed to get the most votes in the country for any size exchange as well as the mythical "100%":

http://whitchurch.org.uk/2011/01/we-won-top-in-the-uk-for-rural-broadband/