Re: Were we not told...
... and NATO is still in place
38 posts • joined 4 Feb 2011
... the key thing when buying a SaaS business and conducting DD, is to look at the *quality* of the revenue, the recurring nature, the amounts which are not recurring. I think this seems to be (but obviously I have not read the mountains of legalese) a case of insufficiently thorough DD... the seller in a deal is expected to be 'coy'... the buyer therefore hires massive teams of expensive accountants and lawyers to look into this. Looks to me like HP were keen to announce to a fixed deadline, so took some expensive shortcuts. Caveat emptor and all that.
I studied law at Durham, when some of the Harry Potter were being filmed... but anyway there's plenty of scope for creative legal thinking in the Potterverse... do users of magic owe a special duty of care to people around them? If a dangerous substance/item/troll escapes and causes carnage, who is responsible? Is there a product defect with a wand that causes havoc? Is the manufacturer of the wand liable, or the retailer in Diagon Alley? The nice thing about studying law is that when you learn about defining legal cases, it's often because some very strange things have happened to people, who have gone to court to argue about who's at fault! ... or whether you can kill a cabin boy if you need to eat him to survive when marooned at sea (is "necessity" a defence to murder? Answer: no, but you may get a pardon)
... https://equinix.box.com/shared/static/8z38w0gjkbsajgzkaq3qoelalop5hr6x.pdf does not really have the Brexit/data protection/adequancy decision angle that the author claims. It is purely about bandwidth and global/regional interconnect volume forecasting, and it's not clear the report has actually taken Brexit into account (it's not mentioned once).
Whether the UK gets an adequacy decision is certainly an open item. The Commission has taken the UK to task for years on its surveillance activities and other data protection/privacy shortcomings, and that pressure is only going to be greater if/when UK no longer a full EU member. Just like the UK taking banking jobs and automative jobs from the UK post-Brexit, it does not take a wild imagination to assume that EU countries/businesses will be looking to use GDPR (non) compliance as a means to exert competitive pressure against the UK post-brexit (if brexit goes ahead, which for full transparency, I hope it does not)
Also, leaving EU does not = leaving customers union (ask Turkey); it does not equal leaving EEA (Norway); as you say, we had a margin of error like result, which has given some charlatans the perceived authority to lurch off into extremely damaging territory all in the name of 'the will of the people'.
The "ICO's reputation" ... as the (deliberately) worst funded and most toothless data protection regulator in all 28 EU member states? Ah, yes, invaluable to the EU... they will really miss the unfair competition from UK on this... And yes, the EU has been sparring with USA over massive NatSec over-reach/mass surveillance... pretty sure this will no go well for the UK, but then again Brexiteers live in their own fantasy land.
Consultation response (even though I'm NFI'd as I'm not an ISP): get on with it. Make it faster and more widely available than all other European countries (or at least as fast!). If there's $1Bn for the DUP, and $100Bn for a bloody train, there should be several billions ($10Bn?) of public money for making the UK's connectivity network brilliant/future proof/fast.
This is called beggar thy neighbour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggar_thy_neighbour
It won't work. Do you think the EU would not take counter-measures to deal with that? Like it or not, there is no rose-tinted past anymore to run back to you - we live ina globalised world now, and the best / only credible option is multilateralism: being part of a 500m population / developed world trading block is the most rational course. It's also, on the whole, what the younger generation wants: freedom to travel, work, consume, communicate etc accross borders, and they (we, I'm 33) are the ones who will have to live with the decision in the long-run.
So a more-democratic-than-private-businesses body (including the EU parliament) issues laws that protect individual people and this is somehow a flaw of the EU? Idiot.
Oh, and even if Brexit happens, guess what, just like Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, the UK will have to comply with this Regulation anyway as a condition to any trade agreement. This is a good news day, son.
Edited: I see you have a 30 year career in the MOD, so you probably think that Her Majesty (or rather her government) will look after your personal data... which has been precisely proven... NEVER
This is partly due to the requirement which the new Data Protection Regulation will introduce (which requirement already exists in some countries e.g. Germany) that organisation must appoint a "Data Protection Officer", that could be done by in-house Legal, or indeed within the CIO remit, but given the legal/privacy nature of the duties, the CIO may not be the best person/team to manage this function. Also, because the Regulation is going to introduce competition-law levels of fines for data protection breaches (e.g. 3% of annual revenues) there is a serious incentive to manage these risks, up to C-level.
Well said. I for one welcome the end of rip-off EU cross-border mobile bills. And yes, your comment about content blocking drives is also well said. I welcome an end to that. As a Dutchman, living in the UK since 1990, not being able to (legally) view Dutch international football matches is very annoying (and I'd even be willing to pay, although I shouldn't have to). So, I get geo-blocked by Dutch TV channel NOS on their website, and have to use a Korean sopcast or similar, combined with a Dutch (out of sync radio broadcast). I can see services like iPlayer might get more viewers from abroad than the Dutch equivalent the other way around, but there has to be a sensible commercially attractive way to deal with that rather than just blanket blocking based on country, especially when we're supposed to have a single market.
Big John... YES, US citizens (and every other nationaility in the world) enjoy exactly the same rights as EU citizens, when in Europe, or when affected by a European company or an EU Member State in relation to privacy and data protection rights... Do you now understand why Europeans are not very pleased that the USA does not do the same?
...that successive governments, both red and blue, have deliberatley under-funded the ICO. The new DP Regulation, which harmonises the law accross the 28 EU Member States, may change that, because the UK ICO will have to be just as strict/uniform in its application of the law as, say, the Germans....
This is data protection legalese, but it means the data given to the USA will not be processed beyond the stated purpose, being "prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of crime".... My biggest concern is that the US will say that collecting everyone's data about everything is to do with "prevention" of crime (i.e. they have to collect lots of innocent people's data to look through to see if there's anything criminal-related, i.e. this might give a fig-leaf to the already massive data harvesting being done by the USA.... Also, the definition of "criminal" is not the same on both sides of the atlantic (or indeed in the 28 EU member states).
No, to leave the ECHR, the UK would have to leave the Council of Europe (nothing to do with the EU). The CoE has 47 member countries, including Russia and Georgia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_Council_of_Europe
It would be an unprecedented departure by UK from human rights agreements, agreed between a large number of countries over decades.
There's no such thing as a 'human rights directive'...
European Convention on Human Rights (shortened to ECHR). The ECHR is a Council of Europe treaty, including all EU countries, but also Russia, Turkey etc. (41 countries are signatories, as well as the EU itself additionally).
The European Court of Human Rights (which is in Strasbourg), rules on breaches of this treaty, which is why you have cases like "R v Russia" and "Z v United Kingdom". Churchill was a fan.
The Human Rights Act [of [UK] Parliament], gives effect to this treaty in the UK.
Withdrawing from the ECHR would be a bit like the USA withdrawing from its Constitution. Crazy.
Not really. Snowden is referring to journalists' treatment of the material. Greenwald is referring to (and rebutting) an allegation abouttthe government (namely that he is subject to a an agreement with the government that restricts his ability to report). Simple really.
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... What exactly does GCHQ do for the "economic wellbeing" of the UK? Does it actively steal IP and commercial secrets from foreign governments/companies? If so, how does it (lawfully) pass that on to domestic companies? (with difficulty!).
Does it protect private companies from foreign espionage?
Curious 's all
.... European Convention on Human Rights:
"Article 10 – Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
The relevant bit is: "freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."
So, in a sense, the internet is nowadays an extremely important method by which people can exercise their human right to expresseion (a.k.a. freedom of speech).
1. European institutions are the only ones ACTIVELY doing anything consumer/human-friendly about data protection (cf. the UK ICO).
2. One of the biggest costs to businesses (big and small) is complying with the various different European Member States' differing implementations of the 95/46 Directive (clue: UK citizens get very few rights as "data subjects"; countries like Germany get constitutional-level protection).
I'd say a European "Regulation" would be very welcome. By the way, to all readers, a "Regulation" is European law that must be transposed into national (in our case UK) law as-is, whereas a "Directive" allows Members States freedom to determine how to implement said Directive.
Anyone ever wonder WHY the UK's ICO has no budget or teeth?
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... I worked in the largest law firm in the world (as a solicitor), in the Netherlands, Poland, France and the UK and I worked as in-house lawyer for Airbus and now I'm the head lawyer of a software company. In all these places (certainly in the last 6 or 7 years) signed/scanned PDFs have been perfectly sufficient to create the desired legal relationship. Indeed that is far more common that faxes.
If a party was to say (in an English court at least): "Sorry Judge, I don't consider myself bound by the contract because it was a PDF" [not a fax], he would be laughed out of Court (by the Judge) and he would lose and he would be ordered to pay his opponents legal costs. Of course, if there was a digital forgery, that could be raised, but then the emphasis would be on the party seeking to allege that a signature had been forged (email chains are good against this).
Incidentally, I now sign documents by inserting a JPG of my signature into a word document and printing to PDF which preserves the quality of the text and avoids having to use a printer at all, and I've noticed more and more people doing this.
0 Even in the 'conservative' law firm, contracts and documents which were suposed to be binding
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