Posts by Nick Kew

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

Re: Shady?

Neither BoJo nor the Queen should have that kind of unilateral power.

Magna Carta said that. The Supreme court repeated it.

He's been brought up to 'get away with it'. His track record, especially as Foreign Secretary, makes that abundantly clear, when he routinely performed hit-and-run operations so he was conveniently far away when his s**t hit the fan.

The Bully-and-Coward may be a classic public school trope, but I think Boris is rather more so than some of his fellow old-Etonians. Nice-but-dim Cameron, for instance, showed natural politeness, and would never have taken such drastic action against Parliament.

Re: Regardless of which side of the fence you are on.

It hasn't been required before, because there hasn't been such abuse before.

Arguably not even in the time of King John, when the Magna Carta first(?) formally limited the powers of a governing executive.

As for fucking law, strangely apposite.

Re: Regardless of which side of the fence you are on.

The concern is that future decisions by Government may be challenged in a similar way,

How is that a concern?

If a future governing person - be they minister, civil servant, judge, or even monarch - seeks to dispense with the elected parliament in pursuit of a controversial Agenda, is it not a Good Thing that the precedent says[1] they can't?

[1] insofar as it can be a precedent for anything.

Re: Regardless of which side of the fence you are on.

The judgement addressed that question explicitly.

Quote: The Government argues that the Inner House could not do that because the prorogation was a "proceeding in Parliament" which, under the Bill of Rights of 1688 cannot be impugned or questioned in any court. But it is quite clear that the prorogation is not a proceeding in Parliament. It takes place in the House of Lords chamber in the presence of members of both Houses, but it is not their decision. It is something which has been imposed upon them from outside. It is not something on which members can speak or vote. It is not the core or essential business of Parliament which the Bill of Rights protects. Quite the reverse: it brings that core or essential business to an end.

EU court rules Right To Be Forgotten doesn't apply outside member states

Re: "illegal content should be deleted where it is stored"

If I publish content that seriously libels you, you can come after me in my country regardless of the fact that the server hosting the libel is on another continent.

It's not foolproof, but it raises the stakes.

Re: Seems quite limited in scope, but there you go...

Or in practical terms, if I - detected as coming from an EU location - search google.com, it'll redirect me to google.[my-country] for results. Does that count as taking reasonable measures?

A poor solution, of course, with the horribly-broken precedent of abusing similar user-sniffing to determine what language to serve a user. But if the law demands it then it might be the least-bad.

Bored and looking for something to do with your fingers? Why not try speed-cubing at a central London pop-up?

40 years

What exactly is this 40 years next year an anniversary of?

It's already more than 40 years since I first saw the "magic cube" - though not yet the name Rubik. I remember it well: a couple of weeks in the summer of '79 to get a taster of Cambridge before going up in earnest for the autumn term. John Conway demonstrated the cube during a (suitably lighthearted) lecture to us.

After that, I was one of many who bought a cube for myself sometime during my first term there (autumn 1979).

Imagine if Facebook could read your mind: Er, I have some bad news for you...

Re: Gyms

Of course that's all regular family banter. But should you really be posting about them in public in such terms?

Re: Gyms

I avoid them 'cos ... dammit, too many Good Reasons ...

The big one that would keep me away even if it didn't cost good money and was open-air so the smells of stale sweat and worse could disperse, is the dreadful thumping noise they all seem to pump out over some speaker system. I also avoid shops that inflict muzak on us.

Do you have something to tell us?

I never quite turned out to be the fine young woman my parents were hoping for.

So should we now call you Alice? Alison? Alicia?

That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away

Re: Yep, Same Here

Never had *that* problem with those Sun mice.

Just the horror of that vampiric mouse mat sucking the lifeblood out of my hand. And of that oversized quantum of mouse movement from the coarse grid: the computing equivalent of an oldfashioned all-or-nothing ketchup bottle, or of a shower that gives hot or cold but nothing in between.

Re: Environmental issues

Dust comes from animals. Specifically humans, in indoor environments where it doesn't just disperse and get recycled by nature. So I wouldn't limit that observation to a manufacturing environment!

Good Mouse

The mouse's refusal to work in bright sunlight should be adopted by humans, too. For the user[1] it could mean the difference between eyesight in 20 years being much-degraded vs similar to what it is now. Not to mention the effect a poor work environment can have on both productivity and general wellbeing.

[1] Congratulations on an On-Call story with a difference: the hapless user wasn't being dumb!

You better get a wiggle on then: BT said to be mulling switching off UK's copper internets by 2027

There's me having just ordered FTTC to my new house. FTTP not being an option here.

I was in two minds whether to bother, since 4G has become a viable option for consumer-grade stuff. But having extras like fixed IP address will enable me to bring some stuff in-house from the cloud.

How long before ISPs start offering wire-free techie-grade service?

Re: How many connections is that?

I certainly hope government doesn't try to plan any of this. It's bad enough government are blocking 5G.

If BT plans this without government interference, we can reasonably hope that they get at least some of it right.

The Central Telegraph Office was serving spam 67 years before vikings sang about it on telly

A good read, and even the clickbait about historic spam seems to be merited!

One little bit of history that may be missing: were they involved (and if so how) in Blighty's famously successful espionage on German communications in the lead-up to war?

Woman sues Lyft, says driver gang-raped her at gunpoint – and calls for app safety measures we can't believe aren't already in place

Re: Par for the course

So you'd've paid more to be driven by John Worboys?

Remember that security probe that ended with a sheriff cuffing the pen testers? The contract is now public so you can decide who screwed up

We should be told ...

Evidently they were working outside their regular hours. But were they moonlighting, or was it a dark night?

You can trust us to run a digital currency – we're Facebook: Exec begs Europe not to ban Libra

Re: Poor comment

Thanks (and thumbs up) for the demonstration of doing all the Right Things in your critique of my post. I don't have strong enough opinions on the subject to take you up on your real arguments there.

Let me just pick you up on your final point about FRB. It's one of those things that work in principle, but it's wide open to corruption, when you lend money that'll never be repaid. Then you get a bubble, as in the early years of this century when it drove a hugely damaging bubble in property prices.

Not FRB on its own, but FRB in an environment of interest rates driven by a broken policy that let money supply rip while pretending all was stable. As in the Pork Futures Warehouse, the FRB was a then-future debasement. But that's a whole nother story.

Poor article

You (El Reg) have every right to attack Facebook. But please at least give us a reasoned argument, rather than an ill-considered rant!

Facebook has every right to evangelise its proposals, which seem to be the subject of the article. You can disagree with those proposals (as some politicians are doing) and you can present your arguments: that's all normal debate. AFAICS Facebook is not arrogantly saying "you're wrong" as characterised in the article; rather it's arguing "we're right, and here's why". You can of course disagree with their arguments, but when you instead attack the messenger it smells of an update to Godwin.

For what it's worth, I note that one of the points at issue in the debate is that cryptocurrency transactions are harder to trace than regular bank transactions. Methinks the usual Reg position on that argument (e.g. when applied to any story about getting rid of cash) is that privacy is a virtue.

Also for what it's worth, I haven't dabbled in any cryptocurrency. But it seems to me that the Libra looks like a big advance on Bitcoin by virtue of being backed by 'real' currency. Insofar as that's a Bad Thing, it's because those currencies are themselves routinely debased by governments and by fractional reserve (banks).

p.s. I expect I'll get downvotes. You won't persuade me to sign up with Facebook: I never have, and I even block their infernal "like" in my browser.

This image-recognition roulette is all fun and games... until it labels you a rape suspect, divorcee, or a racial slur

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

This is a problem for any machine learning system: if your ground truth contains errors,

How is that different from human learning?

As for getting the ground truth right, I shudder at the thought. Who guards the Ministry of Truth?

Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

Re: A product of his time

Every generation has its idiots, and Political Correctness goes back a long way as one vehicle for them.

See for example Tom Sharpe for a 1970s/80s view.

You look like a fungi. Got mushroom in your life to build stuff with mycelium computers?

Re: The Laboratory of Unconventional Computing?

Indeed, I was just trying to imagine what Sir Pterry might have made of this story. Oook!

Magnetic cockroaches, dirty money, wombat poo and posties' balls: It's the Ig Nobels 2019

Re: "make something incomprehensible of permahols"

Well I certainly hope the beer is comprehensible.

Re: Dabsie, you're being quite productive this week!

He has a cunning plan.

He's just back from hols, and demonstrating high productivity. So he can say to them, "gimme more hols, and you'll get yet more productivity". Ultimate goal: perma-hols (I've hyphenated perma hols for the benefit of your screen reader, lest it make something incomprehensible of permahols).

The results are in… and California’s GDPR-ish digital privacy law has survived onslaught by Google and friends

Re: stereotyping

Of course it's possible.

If you have four of them, you can do it twice over!

stereotyping

Regarding that hideous stock pic of some twats round a table throwing papers into the air.

I expect two of each sex is supposed to be politically correct (though shouldn't there be at least one black face)? But when the two males both have those slimline laptops while the females have none, you're just feeding a "systematic gender bias" line to the likes of the BBC who take it as an article of faith.

Reg articles in general would be better without silly irrelevant pics. This one more than most.

Justice served: There is no escape from the long server log of the law

Re: Speak for yourself

I remember a student poster. Picture was a tiger. Caption It's hard to be humble when you're as good as I am.

Harsh. I read that as just an attempt at lighthearted tongue-in-cheek humour. Possibly motivated by "hey, first comment".

Wake me up before you Gogo ... so I can jump out: Kenyan MP takes on aeroplane flatulence

Re: Must have been on the flight

When the article is by a Mr Currie ...

Time for another cuppa then? Tea-drinkers have better brains, say boffins with even better brains

Where's the original?

This raises more questions than it answers. Not just the chicken-or-egg of the first comment above, but others like whether the comparison might be to a population encompassing some altogether less wholesome alternatives, whether the tea is associated with something social, or indeed whether the role of the tea is anything more than avoiding dehydration or providing necessary breaks.

If the study addresses these questions, what does it find? If not, I don't think you can really claim it tells us anything.

Malwarebytes back to square one as appeals court rules blocking rival antivirus maker isn't on

Why would someone run 2 AV programs on their PC?

Because they're researching AV programs? Maybe a BOFH/PFY, or a journo for an article, or a student for an exercise, for instance.

France says 'non merci' to Facebook-backed Libra cryptocurrency

Re: "thought needs to be given to creating a public digital currency"

We have a national currency that is perfectly functional

Lucky you.

We have one that is routinely debased by governments.

From pen-test to penitentiary: Infosec duo cuffed after physically breaking into courthouse during IT security assessment

Lucky escape

Once upon a time, I was kind-of invited to pen-test Iowa.

MPs would love to hear all about how UK.gov plans to ratchet R&D spend to 3% of GDP

Re: Easy!

You may jest, but I came here to post the time-honoured formula for increasing R&D spending.

Namely, re-classify what qualifies as R&D investment.

Re: Foreign aid!

The key to the foreign aid slush fund becomes clearer when you spell it Foreign Influence.

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

Re: The arcane arte of using a mouse

Hmmm, that might well count as an actual disability. If the user can't learn, they have essentially the same need as Granny Arthritic who just finds it too physically painful.

If presented with such a luser @work, my thoughts would turn to whether an alternative device like a trackball might serve?

Re: pet peeve

Oh dear. ITYM "how actually to log in".

Which not merely rids us of the grammatical faux pas, but perhaps also demonstrates the redundancy of the longer word. Would "how to log in" not be our best expression here?

I'll get me coat.

Watchdog: Hush-hush UK.gov blew £97m on Brexit wonks from six of the usual suspects

The rule of secrecy

When an activity is shrouded in secrecy, someone has something to hide.

Usually that "something" is embarrassment at the prospect of any kind of public scrutiny.

The rule of secrecy: If you have nothing to be ashamed of, you have nothing to hide.

Re: Small Change

Chaos is very hard to make money from: you need to be able to predict what happens next for that.

Fund managers are like lawyers: they get handsomely paid even when their clients lose. The money you can guarantee making is your fees for managing your investors' assets. Of course you make more if you do well for the clients: those performance benefits can get seriously juicy.

Those fund managers who are insider-trading (inside the UK government) have an obvious advantage.

Re: Small Change

Hedgies shorting the UK will dip in and out of short (and long) positions many times over as sentiment swings. Some will make money for their investors, others will get it wrong and lose money. But the fund managers always make money, even if their investors are wiped out.

Those running hedge funds from within government are insider-trading. They'll make money even if the country is wiped out. And that's a conflict of interest that should have them on trial for treason when they bet against the UK.

Oh, and equities are a red herring here. Their relationship to the country's health is sufficiently complex that a bet on equities isn't a bet on the health of the country - unless there's a fair bit more context to it.

Brit MPs: Our policies are crap and the political process is in tatters, but it's Twitter's fault, OK?

Re: No s##t Sherlock...

ohj FFS - housing is one of the things thet is keeping and even driving folk into poverty, as too many landlords charge exorbitant rents

True.

But (bugbear alert) it's a lot less bad now than it was a generation or so ago - which is why renting has become less of a problem and more people do it, including some who could buy.

The house I just (last month) moved out of was £700/month. Translate that back to the era of my first job as a young grad, and that house could've been an HMO for seven[1] people, each of us paying in relative terms[2] well north of £1k/month. And that £700 got me both a proper tenancy (not available in my youth[3]) and extra luxuries like hot water that worked.

[1] Or for a London landlord, nine or more people.

[2] As a proportion of a graduate salary after tax.

[3] From 1977 to 1989, a law was in force granting excessive rights to tenants. It drove landlords right out of the open market leaving only (borderline-)gangsters to rent from, and you'd get only a non-exclusive "license" to live somewhere, not a tenancy with legal rights. Unless you had a grapevine - such as that provided for students by university accommodation offices.

Cloud, internet biz will take a Yellowhammer to the head in 'worst case' no-deal Brexit

Re: just a scenario

The government is long, as it has to be. Big mainstream biz has to be long - especially financial biz such as your insurers and pension providers, whose (legally required) reserves dwarf the hedgies. And - not least - a big aggregation of ordinary people hold assets: for example, every homeowner has a few tens or hundreds of thousands in their asset (unless they have a 100% mortgage).

And of course, a lot of rich foreigners hold sterling. Both legitimately - such as holders of FTSE-listed shares or owners of UK companies - and those engaged in laundering money. The latter are prepared to accept substantial losses to get their remaining money out 'clean' - hence various unprofitable carousel businesses such as parts of London's property market and sub-prime art through to pure tack.

Just look back over the past six months or so of Private Eye's investigations into the man who owns the Tory party, and most recently the men recycling money sent notionally in 'aid' to Afghanistan.

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

Re: 40 years of "employee" status

Well I'm ahead of you. Not far short of 40 years, covering periods of "permie" work, contract work, self-employed work and desperately-seeking work. But never a job with long-term security.

The "gig economy" isn't new. Its real heyday was when the poor would go and queue each morning to get hired for the day. It shrank for a while, but never went away. Now it's grown a little more, back to something intermediate.

CEOs beg for America-wide privacy law... to protect their businesses from state privacy laws

Re: Makes sense

The original common market was a much more limited free trade area. Coal and steel, and lack of tariffs. But if you were doing business in an area involving elfin safety, consumer protections, etc you had to deal with red tape on a country-by-country basis. Not that there was much of that in those days: if your toy had jagged edges, that was no business of the law (kid I knew at primary school managed to lose an eye).

For example, my first bike (as a child) wasn't legal under UK law due to not having a front brake, but was a lot easier for a child to ride due to both gear change and brake being back-pedal operated. And safer: borrowing a bike with a front brake, I went head-over-heels braking on the downhill! Mrs Thatcher's single market was about making it easy for a bike manufacturer to find a single set of rules that would make its bikes legal to sell throughout the EU.

Particularly important in areas like medicines, where red tape is complex and compliance onerous and very expensive.

Makes sense

Take away dodgy motivations and the problems of a single point of lobbying and potential corruption, and the underlying point makes perfect sense. In any walk of life, industry accepts that it will be subject to red tape and compliance is a cost of business. Asking for one set of red tape and compliance costs rather than 50 makes complete sense.

It's the same argument Mrs Thatcher used, to convince the EU to adopt her greatest idea - the Single Market.

Required: Massive email fraud bust. Tired: Cops who did the paperwork. Expired: 281 suspected con men's freedom

The punishment

Let's suppose some of these get convicted. What punishment will they face? We can speculate ...

US: several years in a rather harsh regime.

African countries (I may be out of date here): some proper hell-hole, though not necessarily the most secure.

UK: Not violent nor sexual? That'll be a slap on the wrist. Maybe as much as a suspended sentence.

Everywhere: Innocent until proven broke may apply, depending on how rich and well-connected individual defendants are. How many cases will be thrown out when the right palms are greased on a technicality?

Not so easy to make a quick getaway when it takes 3 hours to juice up your motor, eh Brits?

In honour of your rather convoluted formulation[1], I propose calling it the Wiltshire.

[1] Probably symptomatic of a good reason for the lack of a simple term for it.

Re: Unpopular comment

John Major's government did just that. It fell victim to politics a few years later.

Perhaps things might have been different if he'd put it into a wider context?