Posts by Doctor Syntax 42396 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
That wouldn't be a very effective provision. Just form the new company, then start to liquidate the old one. There does need to be a provision in law to deem the new company as being the same entity as the old one. That would put a stop to a lot of the shenanigans. In fact, I wonder if there's any provision in existing law to prevent a judge coming to that conclusion.
"we would get a stupid number of faxes per day from a car leasing company"
The solution to that is a fax modem on which you can send a stream of random nonsense to create a mountain waste paper overnight with the occasional message saying you'll stop when they stop. Better still if you find their MD's PA's fax number.
I can't help thinking that POTS and to some extend Fax are like cockroaches and water bears. They'll be the last things to go when ransomware, power cuts or whatever take out your fancy digital infrastructure. Obviously fax would be susceptible to power cuts so it's not quite so robust and a JCB can take out the lot, but as a fall-back they should be considered for a place in your resilience planning.
Two reasons.
The first is that there would have to be a readily available application for it. Such an application would be limited to real-time chat and probably just for two participants as the number of D/H key pairs would rise rapidly as more people are brought in.
The second is the network effect. There's no point in installing it if you don't know anybody who uses it and nobody uses it because they don't have it installed because...
Given that a lot of money had been spent in development writing it off against one or two prototypes gets very expensive. Even more so when you write it off and then buy imports. And most of all when you do so to tell the world the exact depth of your commitment to "the white heat of technology".
Nevertheless, if they want to look like scammers they're going to be treated as such.
Maybe initially nobody will notice. Nobody, that is, except the scammers. When the customer gets used to this way of renewals they'll get scammed. Next time round after that the renewals are going to fall off.
No problem, the vendor manager will have had a couple of years' bonuses paid and it'll be time to move on and explain how he boosted the renewal rate at his last job.
When I send an email Mythic Beasts send it for me from my domain because they're the MSP for that domain but it originates from my machine sent by me.
Somebody sending an email not via Mythic Beasts and purporting to be from my domain should be instantly treated as a scammer.
they themselves signed on the altar of “taking back control”
I fear the attitude of the current govt. is that that's something somebody else signed log ago. It looks as if getting them to abide by something they signed themselves is hard enough, probably on the basis of an elaboration of "We didn't read it properly".
"With each passing day the opportunities are missed," said European Scrutiny Committee chairman Sir Bill Cash. "British institutions are left high and dry while science marches on without them and the returns on our financial contribution edge lower."
I suppose he'll argue it's nothing to do with him, hoping we'll forget his contributions to the car crash.
"does the end-user really need a third-party holding (and snooping on) their business?"
The snooping should have been dealt with long ago. The existing system should have incorporated a PKI years ago so that encryption could be built into the clients.
The equivalent of a torrent would be that you send out the email to lots of other people and the when the intended recipient goes online they pick it up from whoever is online at the same time.
Shifting habitual thought is a bit like turning a supertanker. A pandemic and the consequences - problems it's raised with supply chains and discovering that having everyone in the office isn't essential - is probably starting to do that.
It's going to take time to work out that cities as presently used aren't sustainable but there's a lot of money invested in them, together with more than half a century's planning dogma, at least in the UK. Things might have to bite very hard to change that but bite they will.
"which means ensuring that OS, drivers and software will run on older kit"
The OS, drivers and software that ran on the older kit will continue to do so. If you want something he older kit didn't support then you will need something newer although the older products might need continuing security releases.
The real clash comes when the old kit has some very expensive, much longer life machinery attached, such as a PC running W7 controlling some expensive machine tool or medical diagnostic equipment. That case could be dealt with by requiring the source code to be placed in escrow and released if the software is declared EoL before the equipment it was controlling.* If the S/W vendor doesn't want that then they have to look on provision for continuing support as part of the original cost of doing sales.
"Escrow and release would also be the solution for security releases in general.
Interests can be steered.
In many countries a lot of equipment has to meet safety requirements to be placed on sale. Looked at in the broader sense repairability can be seen as a public safety issue.
If the choice is a longer life-cycle and selling of reasonably priced spares versus being not being allowed to sell products at all I'm fairly sure most companies would be able to decide pretty quickly to do the right thing.
"Woman haven't been required to wear hair coverings in the UK for as long as we have recorded history, which encompasses at least two and a half millennia."
Accepting "the UK" as shorthand for either the island of Britain, the whole archipelago including Ireland or anything in between: we have two and a half millennia of recorded history?
Even stretching "recorded history" to include the occasional reference as seen from the far end of the Mediterranean: we have recorded history sufficiently detailed to record requirements for hair covering?
The Robin Hood Airport case was a particularly difficult one. Whether one takes a bomb threat seriously is heavily conditioned by factors such as whether you have public safety responsibilities or whether you have experience of an environment where bombing were sufficiently frequent to make one inclined to take them seriously.
I've mentioned before something that highlighted to me the contrast between someone with NI experience (me) and someone with just English experience (facilities management). One of the other tenants in a glass-walled business received occasional bomb threats. They were taken sufficiently serious that the building would be evacuated but not, inmy view, seriously enough.
FM's idea was that people would walk round the end of the building, following a path very close to it, to the assembly area on the opposite side of the building to our exit.. Mine was that I'd exit the building and proceed in as straight a line as possible as perpendicular as possible to the facade until I'd reached a safe distance and if you want to walk past a glass wall with, potentially, a bomb inside it you're welcome. I'd seen what a bomb detonated a few tens of metres from my place of work had done and heard accounts from those who'd been there at the time.
"The Minister rated the chances of such a kill switch being built as low."
Unlike ministers elsewhere who are convinced that saying they want it is all that's needed to bring it into existence.
Perhaps he had to put somebody's wish list into the speech to keep them happy whilst personally being realistic.
"If you give somebody your phone number and they store it in their phone, you don't each agree to a set of legal T+C's about what that person may or may not do with your number."
If I give someone my phone number it's for their use to contact me. There's an implied limitation there. I'd hope that if someone else asked them for my number they'd check with me first as that's what I'd do in the reciprocal situation.
As to your straw man argument - that would very likely be an offence under some aspect of common law.
