Re: SNAFU?
Sandal & Agbrigg Freight Underpass?
3902 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2007
... one of the drivers was told he had made fraudulent trips, and he was reported by Uber (as required) to TfL. TfL asked the Driver to defend the Uber claim or risk losing their licence. The Driver responded to TfL that he had no idea what he was accused of, so how could he defend it. When TfL asked Uber what he had done, they refused to provide any Information. Naturally, the charges were dismissed by TfL and the driver kept his licence (although he was not reinstated by Uber).
If Uber are not willing to hand over the data to TfL that implies to me that, a) they dont have a leg to stand on, or b) that they are doing something illegal in the collecting of the data and dont want anyone asking difficult questions like "How do you know they did that?", which might expose them.
This being Uber I wouldnt mind betting its both a) and b).
IANAL but at least in Europe, I would think that them deleting games from your account would be an illegal act. Yes, I am aware that you dont "buy" software anymore, you licence it, blah, blah, blah. But even so, removing something you've paid for would seem a step too far simply because you deleted your account. This is not a service shutting down and deleting the things you've bought (like what happened to that Microsoft book service whose name i cant remember). This is an active service deleting paid for content because of a change in the terms of service (now requiring a login). That would seem likely to be illegal to me.
Any one want to test the rules, and then take this to court? It would be lovely to get a solid European court ruling on this, so that we can finally put a stop to these tech giants threatening such actions. I wouldnt count on the American Courts to do anything about this, so lets hope the European courts continue to be the beacons for consumer rights...
I have to agreed with David Davis* on this one, if HP lose the civil case despite the significantly less stringent conditions attached to a civil case ("on the balance of probabilities" rather than "beyond all reasonable doubt"), then a criminal case should not stand a chance. Therefore, the extradition proceedings should defiitely wait to see the outcome of the civil case.
* Boy what were his parents thinking when they named the poor bastard. I guess he got them back by becoming a politician...
Thinking about it a bit, I also cant remember the last time I got any questionable content/jokes from work colleagues. Maybe it's because my current colleagues are a pretty boring bunch, but even before I changed jobs 5-6 years ago, I think the whole sending jokes/etc. had died in the old office (with colleagues who were certainly not boring!). Such things if they were done, were done over personal emails and not the work accounts. Much safer on the career that way...
Great work from the whole team to get the mole in and working.
The best description I can give you for how hard this mission is/was is as follows:
I need you to drill a hole in a wall. Here's a picture from Google Maps of the house. Choose a drill bit and the feeds and speeds you're going to use.
What do you mean you need more information?
That's effectively what the mole team needed to do. You have pictures of the area you're going to dig in, you have the experience of what other landers have encountered in other parts of Mars, but you cant say exactly what will be in the area where you will actually land. Based on the other landers, the Duricrust (the part of the soil that clumps together and doesnt refill into the hole) was only expected to be 5-10cm deep as a maximum. But here it turned out to be about 25cm deep, which really screwed with the ability of the mole to operate. One of Mars's little jokes no doubt.
So to find a way to get the Mole deep enough to operate, was really a great achievement for the whole team. Beers for all involved...
From an Ex-mole team member.... :)
Try reading an actual article about the douchebag with the hotel reviews. He left months of fake reviews including that the staff were slave labour, all over an incident that when he stayed there he was asked to pay a corkage fee for bringing his own bottle of wine to the restaurant. In the end after kicking up a fuss and being rude, he didnt even pay the corkage fee.
So he tried to destroy a business's reputation, all because someone asked him to pay a corkage fee (standard practice in most restaurants). What an utter douchebag. He would have deserved to go to jail for it. As it was, he got let off with a warning after he apologised and promised not to do it again.
Thailand has insane Lese Majeste laws, which are incredibly wrong and are often misused. But dont try and conflate the two topics because it just makes you look like an idiot.
If you ever happen to meet someone who throws away Lego (rather than giving it away as next years presents or passing it on to various kids/cousins/neighbours kids/etc.) then by all means give them a good whacking for adding to humanity's plastic waste.
But Lego is one of the few bits of plastic that I've never heard of people throwing away. Maybe the occasional piece that gets broken, but even then I certainly remember having more then a few broken bits in my Lego box back in the day... So if people dont throw it away, it cant be counted as waste right?
Actually you're both right.
Earnings based fines have been shown to be far more ethical, and have the same deterrent effect on the rich and the poor (Sweden for one has an earnings based speeding fines meaning a rich person caught speeding pays a significantly higher monetary fine than a poor person commiting the same speeding offense, but both people losing a weeks pay hurts (almost) equally, and has a similar deterrent.
However, the punishment applied should absolutely be proportional to the crime committed.
I'm just curious, does anyone know WHY international bank transfers are so damn expensive anyway? Usually, a bank adds a few cents to the exchange rate to cover themselves there, AND charges a fee (sometimes flat, sometimes a % of the transfer amount) on top of that for the transfer.
Is this just profiteering from the banks, or are these fees set by governments? I suspect the former because there are digital services (transferwise, etc) that seem to ditch the extra cents on the exchange rate and have pretty low fees for the transfer itself. I know last time I made a transfer to Australia over transferwise, I saved over €100 (on a €5000 transfer) in fees that my bank wanted to charge. I cant imagine they could do that if the fees were regulatory based.
So maybe the first thing the G20 could promotoe for its members to ease international money transfers was limiting what banks could charge customers. That would certainly have a more immediate effect than all the work on developing a digital currency...
How about the government not steal a photo off instagram, but actually hire a photographer to create an original. That would put money in the pockets of a photographer, a model, a venue owner, and probably a few other local people as well.
Nope, just steal a photo off the internet and send that money into some managers pocket instead.
Thats where the real rage should be...
Can't see IT being a route to escaping our present pestilential pit anytime soon. Even if there were anywhere to escape to.
I dont know... you could always say you need to check the offsite disaster recovery site that just happens to be located on the otherside of the world*...
* for resilience purposes of course...
Actually Nominet is (nominally and only really in a legal sense) a non-profit organisation. It acts very clearly as a for-profit organisation, but has somehow managed to hold on to its non-profit status.
So it could very clearly bid for this, although the lack of transparency and communication would probably rule it out...
@AC
I get what your saying, but i think your missing a couple of points -
1) the economic disparity in china - a large proportion of rural Chinese people do not have computers, smart phones, etc. So removing all physical currency would not be possible until everyone is at a level to have the method of making use of the digital currency.
Additionally, a large proportion of rural Chinese do not actually have access to bank accounts, so again how do you make them able to use the digital currency? The divide between rural and urban China is truly staggering at times.
2) There will always be loopholes. The communist party functions by being a well greased machine, If every transaction is traceable, then the greasing would have to stop and those at the top would lose out. Therefore, loopholes will exist to allow the greasing, and where there are loopholes, there are places criminals can exploit.
3) There are plenty of other ways to pass value other than cash - An example I am aware of is that when a Chinese organisation (or people) want to move large quantities of money overseas, they buy a bunch of (very) expensive jewellery, fly overseas with it (with the wife wearing it of course so that it's not obvious that its the equivalent of cash), and then sell it at the destination into local currency. Often the exchange prices of the jewellery is organised in advance, so they can choose their own exchange rate. That's just one way of moving around money outside of controls.
To bring this back into an internal China way, the criminals could buy gold or jewellery with stolen crypto, take it, melt it down into a new form, and then resell it. Provided they werent caught at the point of purchase, the money earned would be almost the same as that stolen, and would again be completely untraceable. So there are certainly ways around it.
Perhaps if the Chinese could wipe out the problems of 1) and 2) above, then they could potentially make a close to fraud free system, but they're not going to be able to flick a switch and there be no more cash to use, and in a dual system (cash and crypto), fraud will be rampant.
And Point 3) above will not go away, even with a full crypto system. No matter how ubiquitous surveillance and controls are, a street kid being paid a 5er (or bought dinner to avoid a trace in a full crypto system) to knock out street cameras near the sales point, would allow underworld figures to do their transactions of stolen crypto without any problems. A fully protected system is impossible, it just becomes a question of how high you want to make the bar for the criminals to jump.
Probably not as hard as you think. Bank transactions are fully traceable as well, as are those that go through intermediary services like Western Union and yet money laundering is still relatively prolific.
Once you can exchange the stolen crypto for goods or services or just plain old untraceable hard currency, then there's little that can be done about it. So long as the thieves are quick to move they should get away with it.
What I imagine the Chinese central bank would have to do is reimburse stolen crypto just like visa and Mastercard have to do when someone steals your credit card. It's rare that the credit card thieves get caught and I cant imagine it will be too much different in China once this takes off. (At the start, probably easier to track, because people using the crypto to purchase things will be rare and therefore memorable).
This is not correct because there is far more water vapour than CO2 in the atmosphere. The overall effect is a stronger greenhouse contribution.
Actually it is correct. On an emissions basis (which is what we were talking about) 1g of CO2 is 30x more problematic than 1g of Water Vapour. Thats why our raising of the CO2 in the atmosphere by a few ppm is having such a large effect. Yes the overall effect of Water Vapour is more because there is substantially more of it, but the vast majority of water vapour is produced naturally.
But lets say this another way, if every man made polluting source of CO2 production was changed overnight to produce water vapour instead, the affect would be that climate change would be 30 times less devestating than it currently is. The maths would need to be done, but I'd willing to bet that if that was the case, we would no longer be causing a noticable temperature rise.
It's true Water Vapour is a greenhouse gas, BUT it is a significantly milder greenhouse gas. The value i found on New Scientist says that CO2 is about 30 times worse that Water Vapour. So if the Hydrogen aircraft produces the same quantity of exhaust as a current Aircraft, then the overall effect would be that its greenhouse gas emissions have 30 times less effect on climate change.
Actually its more complex then that, because Water Vapour's effect on climate change is dependent on temperature to a large extent (the hotter it is, the more effect it has). But you get the idea, water vapour even though its a greenhouse gas, it is significantly less polluting then carbox dioxide.
Speaking as an Aerospace Engineer, none of this is too different to what we already do. Piping is already heavily designed with redundant collection systems because in an aircraft ANY leak is a bad thing. Will this require even tighter restrictions, sure, but nothing too excessive. Additional ventilation between sections will be required to prevent Hydrogen build up, but there is absolutely nothing in these designs that will require Airbus to develop new aircraft design technologies.
There will be plenty of years of design ahead for sure (they do talk about 2035 as delivery, which means 10 years of intensive development), and a lot of testing and learning, but really there is nothing too much involved in this. The hardest parts will be the actual hydrogen tech (the hydrogen storage, the fuel cell-electricity converters, and the actual engines themselves). Everything else should be relatively normal development...
It's supposed to be an immediate dismissal from the Marketplace to offer bribes to remove Reviews (just like its supposed to be for fake reviews).
I've had success reporting fake reviews, but I've never been offered cash for removing a review, so cant comment there. But probably, this is a case of if you got in contact with the right people things would have happened, but often (as with any big organisation) finding the right people is like pulling hens teeth!
Oh well at least you tried. :)
Im still amazed that Über didnt have a dead mans switch in the car (like with Train/Tube drivers) to make sure that the "driver" was paying attention had their hands on the wheel, etc.
It shows either a staggering level of overconfidence in their systems or a staggering level of disregard for the wider public. Considering we're talking about Über, I'll let you decide which one of those it likely was...
You have taken a job as a Self Driving Car Test SAFETY Driver (my capitalisation).
Now maybe, Über are at fault and instructed her that she doesnt actually need to do anything, feel free not to concentrate, just enjoy the ride, etc. But if thats the case then I would strongly imagine that would be her first line of defence.
But here's the thing, you ARE testing the car, thats what should have been drilled into her from the start. You might only need to take over once every hour, once every shift, but you are driving something that cannot think for itself but which can kill. You are responsible. Everything else is side dressing.
Ahhh I think i found the problem - "Citrix executive veep of strategy and chief marketing officer Tim Minahan"
Any firm that lets marketing anywhere near strategy, is bound to go through more rebrandings then a perpetually stolen cow.
Lets all say it together "Rebranding is not a strategy, it's a distraction...". So i guess the question we need to ask is, what have Citrix senior management done that they need a distraction for...
Thats why you have copies (known as Backups). So that even if those things are stolen by the thief, you still have them.
As for the ransom revealing, well thats basically the same as being blackmailed. And if you pay a blackmailer, they will milk you regularly and often. They might say they will destroy the evidence once you pay, but you're relying on the word of a blackmailer. Sure they might destory the evidence after you paid, but oh look here's another secret they found down the back of the sofa, you need to pay for that to be destroyed to. And the next one. And the next one. etc...
Pay a blackmailer once, and you'll be paying forever...
I just tested with my email address and it does say when the breach was at least discovered. So if you're password was changed more recently then the latest email breach, you are probably safe.
I say Probably, because haveibeenpwned only know about the breaches that have been discovered after all... ;)
Funnily enough, my email address ended up in the breach for the game EVONY. I've never heard of the game, let alone played it so buggered if I know how that happened, but it just goes to show that your email will turn up everywhere on the internet, even in places you never would have expected...
1) No Autoplay EVER.
2) Fetch video content only when it is clicked on.
3) images/Gifs etc limited to a few hundred kb each. Anything larger than this is only fetched once clicked on.
See how easy that was? But of course google is not interested in what the consumer wants. We're not the ones paying them, that's the advertisers. So the advertisers get what they want and we, the consumers, get screwed. Vote with you're feet people, thats the only option... (yes I'm well aware that I'm preaching to the choir on El Reg. It doesnt change the message though...)
I notice that none of these rules stop China from abusing their own citizens as much as they like. Only other nations citizens are discussed.
So this is just a continuation of China's normal policies which are that other nations should butt out of their own business. Human rights? China has heard of them. They're something that happens elsewhere.
*cough*Xinjang*cough*Tibet*cough*Hong Kong*cough