Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"For the record, I don't see a fix."
The fix would also be long term - to turn boardroom thinking round so that it looks at the long term. That would require changes in financial and taxation regulations. Ban bonuses that don't reflect long term performance or make them more highly taxed. Likewise, hit short term trading in stocks and shares.
As I read it you won't be able to order it through your usual supplier,you'll have to bid at the auction. The auction will be advertised and there's more likelihood of somebody noticing it. The Harry Potter first edition that the local charity shop marks at £1-50 on its bookshelf would make much more if they put it into auction.
I can't help thinking that the best way to deal with things like this is to take advantage of the fact that those who believe conspiracy theories are both paranoid and gullible. Don't try to explain there is no deep state. Accept they believe it exists and play on that by launching counter conspiracy theories along the generic lines of $CONSPIRACY_THEORY is a lie propagated by the deep state to distract you from $WHATEVER_ELSE_THEY_CAN_BE_PERSUADED_TO_FEAR
Cynical? Moi?
"It is important both that people be able to participate, and that they feel comfortable expressing their inputs. Since we have heard from some people that they would not be comfortable participating if they expected audio recordings to be made available"
That seems to be a cogent argument for making recordings and making them public.
"Within the space of 10 minutes"
I wouldn't have stayed there so long.
I'm always prepared to walk out on poor service and high pressure sales count as -ve service in my view. I've also walked out for the opposite reason; after being left alone for an unreasonable period of time I walked to the dealership across the road and bought a new car there instead.
Dear example.com
It has come to my notice that you are storing data on my computer. Please find attached my invoice for storage costs at 1 [currency unit of choice] per byte. Payment is due in 7 days. If this invoice is not paid all such existing data will be removed as will any further data you may attempt to store.
They can't complain about the consequences they were warned about and which result from their own inaction. They should consider themselves lucky that you didn't get a winding up order on non-payment.
I agree public confidence is critical but an honest impact assessment of the actual situation would ham that. Putting together an honest and acceptable impact assessment would have required changes to policies (such as "we're going to keep this data for decades and not limit processing to what's required by track and trace"). That would have been high level, taken ages of infighting and the reason it hasn't happened is that the required policy changes wouldn't be forthcoming anyway.
"Obviously the numbers aren't going to be perfect due to reporting issues"
One interesting fact that emerged from HMGs preferred measure is that any death from any cause is counted as a COVID-19 death if the deceased had had a +ve test at some time. Eventually that will reach 100% of confirmed cases.
"I would hope that it would be seen taking away money away from the PHE budget."
It would be seen as that. And political suicide for the ICO.
Perhaps a compromise would be for the ICO to appoint a consultant of their own choice to do the impact statement for them and fine them the cost of that. It wouldn't be effectively taking away the budget if it was used to do what should have been done out of the budget in the first place.
In an ideal world failure to fulfil such an obligation by a public servant would be dealt with as a disciplinary matter. It doesn't seem likely that somebody low down would have been told to produce an impact statement and failed to do so; more likely that somebody higher up failed - inadvertently or otherwise - to instruct anybody to do so. It's a very long time since anyone in that position was disciplined.
On the whole, however, I'd prefer them to take a punish the official approach. It would send a message to both public and private sectors, especially to the latter that if you fold the company we'll just come after you.
The ICO is in a difficult position here. It can exact a monetary penalty but how do you do that when the offender is a public body?
For a private offender a fine results in a loss of profits. A public body only has money in the form of a budget given to it to do its job. What would be the consequences for the ICO being seen to be taking away from PHE the budget given to them to deal with a national public health crisis?
About the only option it has would be to use its powers against an officer of the body responsible. Perhaps it ought to do that. AFAIK it's not been done against an individual in the private sector so it would be by way of being a test case and probably lead to the ICO still being pilloried for distracting management attention at such a critical time etc etc.
"technically free to stop being your franchisee and go do something else"
Only if the franchise contract allows it to do so.
"What happens if the franchisee has a huge IT security failure? Does the mothership have any liability?"
ROFLMAO
The the current situation has an ongoing, built-in security failure: the CLOUD Act.
"will the franchisee's cut of mothership revenues generated be enough to keep the franchisee operating in the marketplace?"
Back to the contract.
As I read it SCCs per se are legal but when applied to the US they're worthless because US legislation prevents them being honoured. If you have SCCs with a company in a country that doesn't enable its govt to override them they're OK. I've no idea if such countries exist but I suppose the countries that do override them will have to be excluded one at a time. UK next up?
I've suggested previously that the way round this for a US service is to offer a franchise to a an EU business, set up under EU law with EU citizens as owners, officers and staff. The franchise pays for IP - branding and copies of S/W - from the US business. EU data is handled purely within the EU. If data, mail in the example in the article, is to be sent to a non EU, no US destination then it's not routed through the US.
There's another option for EU businesses to use email of course - use an EU owned and based MSP. That's assuming the MSP doesn't simply resell a US-based service (Is BT still reselling Yahoo! ? Not that that matters now anyway.).
Probably nobody.
Given the way that cables mysteriously breed (there's no other possible explanation) new and completely incompatible cables or knot themselves into configurations which are topologically impossible from the original, tidy configurations, they're perfectly capable of growing their own hoods after being fitted.
Cables are an alien life-form.
Be sure to leave a lot of press reports on bleach and UV laid about the place.
Seriously, I suspect if the result of this spying were put in front of researchers much of it would be what they already knew from their own work or what's published. Advance figures from clinical trials might well excite managers. But what would be missing from information acquired by this means would be viable samples of the actual genetically engineered adenovirus or whatever is being used to manufacture antigens.
"What they *should* do is wrest Thunderbird away from Mozilla, make some adjustments to the GUI, and give M$ a seriously good run for their money."
Or SeaMonkey. The SeaMonkey GUI is compatible in appearance with the default LO GUI - although I suppose they'd need both for the ribbon fans. The ironic thing here is that OO and, I think, LO, were said to have originally included a lot of the email client so it could access the address database. Instead of writing their own code for that they could simply have exposed the UI and made it an all-in-one. Add in Lightbird for completeness.
On the whole I agree. However as afar as I can seen MS deprecated Paint but had to back-pedal and the only damage was to drop support for the original .pcx format a long time after support for standards was included. Their real offence in my eyes was to keep releasing S/W which, by default, saved in non-backwards compatible format, effectively forcing expensive upgrades.
Gimp, of course, continues to support .pcx - at least it tells me it would open one if I had one to open.
"it's usually pretty obvious when you've finished writing a library or a utility application because you can't think of anything else it could do that would be both useful and relevant."
There's another school of thought which says a design's finished when there's nothing left to take away that isn't useful useful and relevant.
"Who really LIKES resting their palms on the touchpad and causing all kinds of spurious changes of focus in the middle of typing?"
I can't say I've ever had that problem. Getting a big enough screen to be readable with a useful amount of information displayed is another matter.
"The Data Protection Act 2018 is still in force. You know, the updated UK legislation that supplemented existing data protections with some additional rules to comply with GDPR."
The DPA 2018 does indeed do this. However we no longer have the ECJ watching our backs in terms of enforcement.
"I find it strange that the standard contractual clauses were not also struck down."
I think the judgement says that the clauses are fine, just that, as applied to the US, they're not worth the shrivelled fig-leaf they're written on. Applied elsewhere they're fine.
One aspect of this that bothered me was that the EU position was - and still is - that it was sufficient that the injured party had recourse to law in the country to which the data was exported irrespective of whether such a theoretical right was practically (including financially) possible to enforce. Enforcement in the EU seemed to me essential.
Not that that has any effect in the UK now. Thanks to Brexit I'm denied these rights anyway so for those of us living in the UK this has become reduced to an academic curiosity. This must be some new meaning of taking back control of which I wasn't previously aware
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