Posts by Oengus 1113 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2012
The attorneys general of 35 US states on Wednesday signed an open letter calling for the quick passage of the Clarify Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act
If a legislator is seeking quick passage of anything be afraid. It is never in the best interest of the general public and is seldom well thought through. Just look at legislation like the US Patriot act and how it is abused.
it surely can't be worse the human-created bad security advice that crashed Australia's online census or the Queensland Health debacle
Malte Ubl, engineering lead for AMP at Google, said over 31 million domains have created 5 million AMP pages since the technology debuted in early 2016.
31 million domains create 5 million pages that means that 5 out of 6 domains didn't produce an AMP page meaning only 16% take up at best (assuming 1 page per domain).
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/h_l_mencken
I would have thought that the number 1 of his top 10 quotes would apply. I almost fell off my chair laughing when I read it...
The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of roughly 129 million US Google users who had their privacy violated ...
Due to the huge number of people affected, the settlement amounts to a paltry amount – roughly four cents – per person.
129 million people impacted and a penalty of $8.5 million. That penalty will only encourage Google to continue violating people's privacy. Another example of court imposed penalties just being taken in their stride without impacting the company's bottom line.
Until the legal system starts imposing penalties on these mega corporations that actually hurt they will keep on going the way they are and it will remain a legal system not be a justice system.
In Oz we have similar restrictions. At one charity event I work with we had some people working in the AV control room who supply Clubs and licensed venues with transmitters for In-House TV on a public access channel. We setup one of the transmitters in the AV centre to transmit to the TVs (and large screens) we had around the venue. We attached the transmitter to a small domestic TV antenna. When the local community radio station wanted to rebroadcast the audio from our feed using their OB setup we gave them a HD Set-top box and indoor antenna to tune into the broadcast. The set-top box wouldn't find the channel using the Auto-scan function so we manually tuned it in. The signal was so strong it was overpowering the auto-tune function. The set-top box was 200m away from the transmitter and was able to clearly pickup the signal without the antenna attached.
We worked out that anyone in the immediate area (several Km square) who auto-tuned their TV or Set-top while we were broadcasting would have been able to view our feed.
"3. Ask 100 users, get 101 different answers."
Your users are remarkable. If I ask 100 of my users I'll get several hundred different responses (especially if the users can talk to one another). Each user will have multiple ideas about what they want and when they hear other answers they will change their mind and modify the other users' requirement to make it a different requirement.
Many years ago I worked for a major financial institution. Christmas day fell on a Saturday so we were looking forward to our reward for working (I was part of the IT operations staff). Our conditions stipulated double time plus a day in lieu for working the public holiday. It turns out that this particular year the Government of the day decided not to gazette the Saturday as a public holiday.
There was a hue and cry from the public when they realised that Christmas day was not a gazetted public holiday because, effectively, this meant that people could be expected to work Christmas day as a normal Saturday (retail staff in particular could have been impacted). We protested but the HR department bought out the agreement we worked under and stuck to their guns. We decided to do some independent research and found that Easter Saturday was gazetted as a public holiday for the finance sector (and always had been). We had never received the appropriate payment for Easter Saturday so greatly enjoyed enforcing the rules and made the HR department calculate the back entitlements for all impacted staff (more than 5 years worth of Easter Saturday entitlement for most of the 40 staff on the shift roster).
It ended up costing much more than it would have had they just given us what we expected for Christmas day.
Even the best written spec today includes a lot of unstated commonsense assumptions.
The problem with commonsense assumptions is that what is commonsense to one person is entirely different to another particularly cross culture. I am dealing with these "commonsense assumptions" on a project I am currently on and it is causing a lot of grief...
These government probers aren't going to even touch the root problem here.
When did a government enquiry (especially an Australian government enquiry) ever get to the root of the problem? They are merely to placate the masses and make it look like the government is doing something (or cares about the general public).
It could so easily happen in my workplace. The managers used to be required to approve all leave requests. If they didn't do their job the request went through to payroll who automatically approved the leave (Policy decision). When this was reviewed the system was changed to automatically approve all leave that the employee had entitlement to because so many managers were not "doing their job". The managers are advised of the leave and have the ability to decline the leave but seldom bother review the leave calendars. If employees decide to apply for leave for the same period at different times the manager probably wouldn't notice that all of their staff are off at the same time.
I had a manager who received one of the first PS/2 PCs in our office. We had an agreement with IBM that they would send out someone to install all equipment (including PCs as they were very new to us). The manager the PS/2 was destined for decided that he could install the new box himself. He assembled the system (forgetting to plug in the mouse), fired up the PS/2 and was rewarded with the Windows desktop. When he went to do something he realised he had forgotten the mouse. This was one of the "new" PS/2 bus mice (previously all we had were serial mice). He went to the back of the running PS/2 and plugged the mouse into the appropriate PS/2 port. The PC immediately shut down. All efforts to revive the box failed.
He rapidly re-boxed the PS/2 taking great care to put everything back where it should be and waited for the IBM tech to turn up to install the PS/2.
When the IBM tech removed everything and set it up it failed to startup. The IBM tech declared the PS/2 DOA and arranged a new one. He later told us that it was a defective motherboard.
By all accounts plugging a mouse or keyboard into a running PS/2 could cause a spike that would destroy the motherboard because of the way the PS/2 bus was connected to the system.
To this day I still give that manager a hard time whenever he gets something new and decides to set it up himself (he is a friend of mine long retired)...
that if a backdoor were mandated the Russians and Chinese would make it a priority to find and exploit it.
That would be illegal... They would change their laws to require that the companies supply them with the same access they had provided to the US government or have that phone banned in their countries. So much easier than trying to find the backdoor...
Basically we've two parallel global economies: one for those in the know with enough resources to use it and one for the rest of us plebs who pay for all the services.
I thought this has always been the case. One rule for the rich and another for the poor... Why do the politicians allow this - so they can exploit it for their benefit.
As long as you can keep kangaroos and people with earbuds off the tracks.....
Kangaroos are generally smart enough to avoid the trains. "People with earbuds"... if they are anywhere near these train tracks they are so lost they will die from their "stupidity" long before they can get back to civilization.
If I have to put a password on a file that really doesn't need the password but some numpty insists I password protect the file I like to use something like "What password" or "There is no password"...
When the user asks what the password is I look at them blankly and repeat the password. It takes some of them ages to realise that I am telling them the password. Some will argue for ages that there is a password and don't get the joke... I just keep repeating the password.
Microsoft will be less pushy in Germany
Microsoft will break the deal as soon soon as the fines are less than the cost of compliance (or less than they can make from breaking the law) and they will fight tooth and nail in the courts then come up with a "voluntary" payment with no admission of guilt. Regardless the customers will be screwed over and get no recompense.
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