Posts by Denshi

Wanna force granny to take down that family photo from the internet? No problem. Europe's GDPR to the rescue

Re: Where does the copyright law stand on this?

It's a more compelling argument than some of the ones on here, but the implication is that permission is not a single transaction, granted and then persisting for all time, but rather something ongoing - you have permission for as long as the granting agency grants permission.

Otherwise we get into the scenario where I can give you permission to borrow my car, which I then sell to some disinterested third party who must continue to allow you to borrow it because I gave permission when I was the legal owner.

It's not about who could have granted permission at the time that the photo was taken, or when the photo was published. It's about who can grant permission right here, right now.

All bets are Hoff: DXC exec is standing for Brexit Party in UK General Election

Re: he's american

Eh, not really. Boris managed it easily enough.

The relevant page implies it's a bit of a faff because you have to go to the local US embassy in person but it doesn't put any horrible barriers in the way https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-legal-considerations/us-citizenship/Renunciation-US-Nationality-Abroad.html .

There's a comment that it doesn't get you out of your tax obligations, but that doesn't prevent you from surrendering citizenship.

Morrisons tells top court it's not liable for staffer who nicked payroll data of 100,000 employees

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

But we can use a slightly different analogy because, by law, Morrisons are required to safeguard the data in their possession.

If I give my valuables to a bank to lock in their safe and the Bank Manager (who has access to that safe because he's the manager) abuses his position to steal my valuables, can I sue the bank for failing to keep them safe? For failing to provide adequate security to prevent the manager from accessing my valuables in the safe without oversight?

Your analogy is an employee using tools provided in the course of his employment to commit an external crime - the bludgeoning has nothing to do with Morrisons. This is Morrisons saying "Well, we're legally obliged to keep this data safe but in this case the crime was committed by someone we vetted and gave access to the data to, not some third party who breached out security, so it's not our fault".

Morrison's shouldn't be held accountable for the theft of the data - they don't go down for Computer Misuse and Identity Theft and the various crimes I can pin on the employee. But they should be held accountable for failing to protect the personal information entrusted to them - which is something they have done, not their employee.

Remember the Nominet £100m dot-uk windfall it claims doesn't exist? Well, it's already begun

£3.75 per domain (https://registrars.nominet.uk/uk-namespace/managing-account/payments/fee-schedule/).

Fasthosts about page states 'we keep over a million domains running smoothly', so if we assume those are all .co.uk domains (which they won't be) then this will be about £4 million. They last filed financial reports in Jan 2018 for an annual turnover of £40 million and an operating profit of £12 million if I'm reading this right.

But they can potentially recoup a chunk of those costs by auctioning off the interesting names that they're grabbing 'for their customers' if it turns out their customers still don't care.

Lloyds Bank bans Bitcoin purchases by credit card customers

Re: The folly of individuals notwithstanding...

I think the distinction is credit vs debit. If you want to use your money to make a "risky" investment then go nuts, it's your money.

If you want to borrow my money to make that investment then I reserve the right to decide not to lend you my money. And a credit card is a loan at the end of the day.

Now, the problem that Lloyds have is that having said they'll do it for bitcoin, the immediate follow up question is why haven't they done it for all these other things (like the previously mentioned gambling).

Ofcom wants automatic compensation for the people when ISPs fail

It sounds like OfCom's actual intent is to use charges as a stick to try and make ISPs lean on Openreach do better at attending appointments - which is fine in principal, although it's probably more effective to just lean on Openreach directly.

But it fails because all it will do is drive your your ISP will to hedge their risk. Effectively you'll get compulsory insurance against faults bundled into your bill - say an extra £5 on install costs and £1 on your monthly bill - so that if the ISP has to pay out then it comes from the extra that everyone has paid already.

At the end of the day, the payout money has to come from somewhere, it can't be miracled into existence. And all the money that flows into a business comes from it's customers, so by definition any payouts will come from the customers.

It's all smoke and mirrors, pay no attention to the increase in your bill, focus on the big payout, don't stop and realise that nothing has actually changed and nothing is better because here's a "free" month that you paid for in the preceeding year.

Apple on the attack against British snooping bill. Silicon Valley expected to follow

Re: let them live how they want?

"As Mark Twain is often paraphrased as: "Freedom of speech does not give a person the right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre.""

You may find it helps your argument to get your quotes correct. The above quote has nothing to do with Mark Twain, it comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion on a Supreme Court case in defence of the idea that criticising government strategy (specifically the draft) during a time of war should be classified as sedition rather than protected free speech. As such I'd treat the sentiment with some suspicion.

Which isn't to say I don't agree with the rest of your argument.

ISPs should get 'up to' full fee for 'up to' broadband

Re: Up to all the time

Whilst your proposal has gone certain merits, there is a couple of flaws.

First you state that if the maximum you use at 16Mb is 5Tb so if you only transfer 1Tb you should only pay 20% of your "current price". This is not going to happen. Your current price is likely calculated on an average monthly usage on the order of 50-100Gb (maybe you use more, maybe your neighbours use less, average). So this model would therefore first require you to increase your current monthly fee 100 fold (in peering and back haul infrastructure costs) and then you could reduce in proportion to your usage.

Second, the main issue with charging based on actual speeds is that the cost to the ISP doesn't really change based on what speed you get - the cost to actually peer 1Mb of data is a tiny fraction of the costs of providing your connection. There are two primary expenses - back haul connectivity and the cost of your line (in installation and maintenance).

Backhaul has high lead times to change so it's aggregated and estimated - before you order your line I have no idea what speed you'll get so I'll order a connection to your exchange based on a couple of guesses - first I guess how many lines I might get and then what the average speed of those lines is and buy the appropriate amount of fibre bandwidth, then I average the cost among all my lines. Calculating it on a per user basis is impractical since it's likely my guess doesn't always match with reality - the number of lines I have and their speeds will vary far faster than any changes I can make to the amount of back haul I have.

So unless you want to see your bill vary on a month by month (made up numbers: our back haul bill is £3,000,000 this month, we've gained 217 new lines, lost 113, your line sync speed averaged 9.8Mb compared to 9.5Mb to last month, every other line we have also changed slightly and therefore your share of the back haul cost has gone from 0.00023132% to 0.00023284%) a certain amount of averaging has to take place.

The second cost is that of your line. Your line is a length of copper and copper has value therefore there is a greater opportunity cost to Openreach to provide a long line (that will have lower speeds) than it does to provide a short line.

In addition longer lines are more prone to faults - there's more line that might go wrong, they're more prone to interference since there's more of them to pick up other signals, the signal is weaker so noise issues that could be ignored on a short line can become crippling. All of this means that a long line actually costs an ISP/Openreach more to provide - you're more likely to require technical support, you're more likely to require engineering work, etc. At present this cost is averaged - the long line pays proportionally less for their line (compared to the cost to Openreach) and more for their speed, the short line pays more their line and less for their speed.

So whilst charging you less if your line can only achieve a slower speed makes sense, it also makes sense to charge you more if you have a long phone line - just like what happens with the specifically installed not "budget residential" connections such as leased lines or ethernet connections.

Fundamentally ADSL is a stopgap technology - it was designed to deliver better speeds than dialup, which it does, but more importantly it was designed to do this cheaply. And consequentially it's a cheap and nasty solution.

As long as the average consumer in this country is obsessed with getting the cheapest possible service (and they are - the number of businesses that spend less than I do to be able to read my e-mail when I'm roaming around for their "business critical, I will lose tens of thousands of pounds for every hour that it's down" internet connections is depressing) then we are going to continue to receive a flawed and limited technology.

Pushing ISPs to cut costs further is not going to deliver you a better service - it's just going to result in greater contention, overloaded networks, and slower response time on fixing faults. You'll get a a pathetic connection but oh, look, you only have to pay half as much each month so it must be so much better.

Ofcom: UK broadband speed on the up as punters' packages swell

On ADSL? Probably never - the protocols just aren't developed that way. Even AnnexM caps out around 2.5Mb upload and that requires that you live practically in the exchange.

However the FTTC stuff looks more hopeful if it ever gets rolled out to enough places. That 80Mb upgrade mentioned at the end of the article is supposed to come with a matching 20Mb upload which should be sufficent for at least the immediate future.

Swiss insist file-sharers don't hurt copyright holders

"As an owner of one of the last remaining independent dvd rental outlets in the UK, i can categorically state it IS detrimental to my income, my distributors income and that of the film studios and it is now detrimental to the cost of $Billions annually."

Can you though? Cite sources, reference research, produce statistics. The Swiss have done this and concluded that whilst particular aspects of the industry change, the overall economy remains the same. Or do you feel that legislation to preserve individual jobs that cannot compete on the free market is a good trend?

I didn't stop renting DVDs because Piracy was easier, I stopped renting DVDs because the competitive difference between rental (say ~£3, two nights only, limited selection due to finite floor space, and requires me to go to to the rental store) and owning the media (£3-£7 and can be picked up during my foodshop at the local supermarket) shifted against you as my disposable income increased as I got older.

You might as well blame Tescos for having a cheap DVD aisle.

UK broadband speeds crippled during 'rush hour'

Throttling

Your post borders on misinformation with the implication that your ISP deliberately limits the speed that you can receive when you're home because they're evil, manipulative people out to screw with you.

There is a distinction between throttling (and/or traffic shaping) and contention. All ADSL (including Be but they have tons of bandwidth so you won't notice) is sold as contended. Which is to say the ISP sells the same 24Mb of bandwidth to the exchange to 20 (or more) people on the generally safe expectation that you won't all use it constantly and passes the savings on to you - thus your ASDL service costs £10 per month and not the £300+ per month that a 1:1 contention service would set you back.

In the end, you get what you pay for. Tanstaafl.

Throttling tends to occur against specfic protocols/applications and is a deliberate limiting of your speed. And yes most ISPs will do this to things like P2P during peak hours so that there is more bandwidth to share for less intensive things like webbrowsing. But it's not a comprehensive "your speed sucks because you are throttled".