Posts by Daniel Hedley

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

Amiga HVAC controller

Not sure this beats the record of the Amiga 3000 running HVAC for a US school district for the thick end of 3 decades:

http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/14/amiga-controls-school-district-hvac/

Microsoft's top legal eagle: US cannot ignore foreign privacy laws

"As well as the Irish government, almost 30 technology companies ..."

Isn't there anyone else who actually finds this very encouraging? Brad Smith has long made his views on this clear, but everyone else who matters seems to be piling in behind him.

UK call centre linked to ‘millions’ of nuisance robo-calls raided by ICO

Re: Calculating a fair fine

Which is why the ICO's fining powers are so inadequate. The new law working its tortuous way through the institutions of the EU looks like it will up that power to the greater of EUR200mil or 5% of global turnover. THAT should make these gits sit up and take notice.

Lazy FTSE 350 firms think lawyers can fight off cyber-security worries

The lawyer's view

Speaking as a member of that profession that everyone loves to hate, this article is bang on. If your strategy for dealing with data breaches and attacks is to look to your lawyers to rescue you once it's happened, you are going to be disappointed. That's not to say we can't help with damage control, for instance by engaging with the ICO (and other regulators) and helping to navigate the contractual fallout. But really, prevention is so, so much better (and cheaper) than cure, and prevention needs engineers, which needs budget, which needs board buy-in.

If it helps to make the business case, engineers tend, rightly or wrongly, to be a fair bit cheaper than us lawyers.

So, does anyone in UK.gov actually know what G-Cloud is for? Apparently not

Re: They probably think it's something to do with a G-spot

This is the most pithy, masterful summary of government IT policy I have ever read.

Google sued for 'crimes against humanity'

Actually, yes it is funny ...

For a legal system to have any meaning, everyone must have access to it, including those Mr Rendle declares "obviously sick".

This case will be thrown out at the earliest opportunity, and for a good legal reason.

In the meantime, we can all laugh until tea comes out of our noses.

Geek Squader gets fruity with customer porn

@ A J Stiles Re: Easy way to deal with it

Such a law would be unenforceable; you would need to show that a person could not possibly have acquire a given piece of information from any other source, and it would be very difficult to define what constitutes volunteering information in a sufficiently certain way.

Further, it would act as a disincentive to anyone inadvertently stumbling across something which _might_ constitute evidence of a crime since if they acted on it and it turned out to be innocuous (or even just inconclusive) they would expose themselves to prosecution under your proposed law.

I would also suggest that a person who neglects to write zeroes to every sector of a hard disk before handing it over to a stranger is not an idiot, but is simply not an IT expert.