Posts by ahnlak

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

That "home office budget" is generally more than compensated for by not having to buy an astronomically priced season train ticket or clock up thousand of miles burning petrol.

Brit firm fined £200k for banging on about missold PPI in 11.4 million nuisance calls

Would that be the form that asks for the number that called you (which is routinely spoofed) and the company making the call (who generally lie or refuse to tell you unless you play along long enough for them to think you might take the bait)?

Sure, we could all do that for every spam call we get and six months later (if we're lucky) the ICO will turn around and say there's not enough information to pursue. And then on the rare occasions they actually get around to doing their job, they issue an insultingly tiny fine like this.

If the ICO actually wants to stop this, they need to impose company-closing fines, hand out director bans and maybe send a few folk to jail. That *might* be a touch more effective than billing them fractions of a penny per call.

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

Re: the use of section 49 by CT Police is likely to be rare indeed.

I *think* you may have missed the sarcasm in that original post.

Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities

Re: And further down the line - #DissolveTheUnion

I would happily switch my .co.uk domains to .cymru ones, but that doesn't exactly get me away from Nominet...

Ubiquiti iniquity: Wi-Fi box slinger warns hackers may have peeked at customers' personal information

If the only reason you're sending it back is because they had a data breach, I've got bad news for you - whatever other vendor you go to will *also* have a data breach at some point. At least the hardware is pretty reliable.

Age checks for UK pr0n site visitors on ice as regulator cobbles together some guidance

Re: Gov and modern tech....not a match made in heaven!

"It is like trying to ban electric from the power supply because someone used it to power their PC for hacking!"

For God's sake, don't go giving them ideas.

Brit regulator pats self on back over nuisance call reduction: It's just 4 billion now!

Paltry Fines

"The largest penalty - of £400,000 - was against Keurboom Communications Ltd for making over 99 million unlawful automated marketing calls"

I can't help feeling that if they got fines closer to the order of £1 per unlawful calls, they might pause for thought a little more. £400k might have been the largest penalty, but it's still insultingly tiny.

Reg man 0: Japanese electronic toilet 1

Luddite

While that control panel looks a little less pictorial than you usually see, it's nothing that common sense and Google Translate can't explain to you these days.

Of course if you're actually defeated by simple technology, rather than going on a hunt for a "conventional toilet", you could just leave the damn buttons alone.

Jeremy Clarkson and Co. rise to top for Great British Bake Off replacements

"How that figure got tripled is down to lazy fact checking... shame on El Reg for repeating misinformation."

That figure got tripled because it's a per-season price, and C4 have bought 3 seasons. Talking of lazy fact checking...

HAWKING ALERT: Leave planet Earth, find a new home. Stupid humans

Re: Flaw

It's not that they would be exempt from nuclear war - simply that a nuclear war on Earth wouldn't directly impact colonies on other planets. Obviously if Earth and Mars end up tossing nukes at each other, you're back to square one...

Play.com spam points to malware downloads

"Please do be vigilant with your email and personal information when using the internet"

Presumably as part of "being vigilant" with my personal information, I should avoid doing any business with a company that manages to hand it over to a third party who promptly gets it nicked.

While I'm sure that's just their standard boilerplate privacy crap, they probably should have thought about leaving out the instructions to be careful with our personal information when sending out an email telling us they've just lost our personal information.