Posts by spold 602 posts • joined 8 Feb 2012
Xiaomi just won a temporary court injunction in New York blocking the Defence Department's attempt to block investment in them, on the basis that Xiaomi was likely to win a full reversal of the ban. Please don't downvote this, you may not like it, but it is a fact. Talk to the judge :-)
Mostly you have to give people choices about cookies these days (at least in GDPR-land, California, etc.) which means that typically there is an option in small print on the cookie banner to allow you to make more fine-grain choices - typically essential ones are prechecked otherwise the website will collapse in a heap of springs and cogs, secondly functional ones (meaning analytics, etc.), lastly advertising ones... you have to opt-in to last two categories they cannot be pre-ticked... OK, generally people will do the usual thing and click accept without going into the fine-grain options.
Ah, we have put you in with the other hamster-porn aficionados.
Hopefully, there is a FloC-off option.
Back in the 90s, I worked in a 6 story building leased by a computer company with Incredibly Borked Management. One Bank Holiday, when the place was empty, thieves broke in.... they didn't access the office spaces, which had badge access, but they did steal all the security cameras!
I was just going through some old boxes and found my "A course on programming in Algol 60" by Reeves and Wells! (1970 print edition). I wrote Algol code (on paper-tape) for an ICL 1902 - second programming language I learned! ... the first being Basic, ok a smattering of Cecil (the ICL was old and had been donated to my school by United Bread - now toast).
In the early 90s I actually was the project manager for IBM's project with Barclays for Image-based cheque recognition. The actual technology wasn't actually in-house IBM, it was a third party out of the US (Something like Check Decisions but I can't be accurate). It was a bolt-on option for the IBM 3890/3897 cheque sorters. These were amazing machines to witness working as thousands of cheques whizzed through them - primarily they were sorted by the FI number.... is it ours "on-us" or another bank. In the early hours of the morning then little trucks would tour the City in London carting the other bank's cheques over to them. They would then stuff them through their 3890s again to sort down to branch level. The image-based system had a couple of aims - stop moving trucks of paper everywhere, secondly introduce signature recognition to help with fraud. The general process was called "truncation" - the other aim was to get rid of staff in branches that would inspect/handle cheques. Also, they could introduce the little pictures of your cheques in your monthly statement instead of sending you packets of your cheques. The fun part, and the almost but not quite happened wheeze I came up with was based around the fact that American signatures are actually slightly different from UK ones (don't ask me why), so this affected the signature recognition confidence accuracy. Obviously, you can't go pulling cheques out of the banking system for long, and they had some stupid rule about using old cheques. So I proposed grabbing 100,000 cheques out of a Friday night batch, sticking them (and me) on Concorde to the US, stuffing them through the vendor's signature training systems, and then putting them and me back on Concorde to have them back in the system before Monday. The whole thing didn't fly (haha) because British Airways would not guarantee the integrity of the "cargo" for the flight. I thought it one of my better ideas though.
The context of the article was in the dear old USA,,, but on the other side of the pond there are some useful levers to pull....
The GDPR has provisions both on profiling and automated decision making (without any human involvement).
You can only carry out that type of stuff in very limited circumstances. You have to identify if the processing of your data falls into that category, if so, then you have to give the data subject information about that processing, as well as provide the ability for them to request human intervention and challenge any decisions made. It's mostly in Article 22 if you want some bedtime reading. Also, there is a more extensive article on this from the UK ICO.
However, this is also in the category of people bothering to read the information, the usual lie "I have read and understood....<Click>".
I still have my T430s that is 7+ years old. The T series has always been the most dependable, unlike the cheapo E series (bargepole territory). While slim, being carbon fibre enhanced it is a tough as old boots. I've taken it seven times around the world (literally) on trips to China, uncountable numbers of transatlantics... it's been stuffed under airplane seats and crammed into luggage racks. I've probably hit a number of irritating junior consultants with it ;-) If you spec' them well at the start they last for donkey's. Yes I have another nice new shiny blade thing but these are business workhorses.Only thing I had to do last year was swap out the HDD for a SDD, should keep it going for a while longer.
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a big screen with a camera on top makes a handy tool for bringing remote workers virtually into the room.
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But if everyone's is remote, and there is no-one in the meeting room to use the pricey hardware (except for the squirrels that have moved in).... is that what was meant as "problems following installation"?
A "somewhat limited" market of people that are concerned at the moment (unfortunately).
When I were but knee-high to a grasshopper I was PMing a roll-out of a new networked in-store terminal system to a now-defunct electrical retailer. The sort of thing the salesy people would use to tell you it was out of stock until next year. The logistics went fine but the customer was not happy as the whole thing would collapse in a heap of springs and cogs at random points in the day. Great effort was spent trying to debug/diagnose everything to no avail. So, similar to this, I got an engineer to sit in a store all day and watch.... after a couple of hours, sure enough, it fell over... the culprit... every time they got a new delivery of a telly or a fridge they opened the rear electric wind-up door to move it in, the motor thing created huge spikes on the mains at which point the server had a wobbly and went tits-up.
Ultimately the moon does not make the best business continuity plan for mankind. We know it is a rock, future missions are best directed further afield. Why not set up a gateway at one of the stable Lagrange points L4 or L5 - things can sit there forever and if you want a staging area, shipyard, colony, or whatever these would be much better places to put them.
If I buy a mobile device in China then I have to show a passport... my identity is recorded... and it is now bound to my International Subscriber Mobile Identity (IMSI) number, and my International Mobile Equipment number (IMEI). As data flies through switches it may be subject to access through Lawful Interception Gateways (LIG ports)... in many countries... and is identifiable using these numbers. Depending on the encryption provisions, I may or may not be able to see the data, however, I can see who is talking to who or accessing what, I may get additional data from your ISP (who also has your real identity).
I have occasion to do security reviews for companies from time to time. As well as confidentiality and integrity of data, availability is the third component. Reviewing a company just outside Toronto I delved into the power side of things.... oh we have a new UPS they said. This UPS turned out to have been housed in what was intended as a small underground car-park in the building. Ummm... what happens when it rains? (Thunderstorms and huge amounts of rain from them are not uncommon in the summer).... well they had thought of that... the UPS sat on a couple of 2x4s (2 inch by 4 inch planks translating into English, and I won't go into why they are not actually 2 inches by 4 inches here). This was just in the corner of the said garage with an open ramp to ground level. I asked some questions about it and they obviously clued in as to where this was going. When I came back a week later, there were 2x6s, and there was a security guard in full uniform sitting outside at a small table and chair that had been positioned at the top of the ramp (I'm sure hired for the day since they knew I was coming back). I didn't ask if he had an umbrella and a bucket....
I use re-manufactured (3rd party refilled) toner cartridges for that reason....
Why? Because every time the toner got low it was cheaper for me to junk the printer and buy a new one rather than buy a new HP cartridge, I'd just keep an eye on the sales, and when a deal came up buy a new printer and store it until needed. Sticking a perfectly good printer (except it had no toner) out with the garbage made me feel like an environmental terrorist (I know - if you feel like one why don't you indulge yourself and have one).
HP also had this "green" send your used cartridge back to us for free scheme... so I requested the return, they promptly couriered me a 3ftx3ft shipping box with a pre-paid return label. So I dump 1 used cartridge into it to rattle around and drop it off with the courier (who gave me a lot of strange looks of course). So you still feel bad since they shipped you a box involving all the transport that required (it involved air-transport from a different city), and then shipping the humongous box with 1 toner cartridge in it all the way back again.
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We will, however, leave it to others to make the comparison between the frequently broken or blocked toilet facilities onboard the Space Shuttle and International Space Station and what tends to spew from certain lawmakers
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We are looking forward to seeing the pyrotechnic ejaculations.
OK, perhaps not.
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