Posts by Doctor Syntax

An axe age, a sword age, Privacy Shield is riven, but what might that mean for European businesses?

Re: No Shit Sherlock

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.).

"When an organisation's only customer interface is via Facebook or Twitter (to name the main ones), it forces customers to agree to terms that harm their privacy in order to communicate."

In that situation no consequences will be undeserved, regardless of how costly they are.

UK.gov admits it has not performed legally required data protection checks for COVID-19 tracing system

Re: There we go again

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.

But - but - but .... We used all the bast practices we'd adopted at Talk-Talk.

"In no way has [there] been a breach of any of the data that has been stored."

At least, none that we know about.

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

Re: The Russians?

Just four beats to the bar, OK?

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.

Re: So short sighted and petty.

"share the vaccine"

Or the Remdesivir

Companies toiling away the most on LibreOffice code complain ecosystem is 'beyond utterly broken'

Re: Grow Up or Give Up

"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.

Re: This is grim

"there seems to be a distinct absence of decent Qt based web browsers"

Firefox and derivatives (Waterfox & Palemoon) and Seamonkey all work under KDE.

Re: Civilisation demands documents always available

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.

Re: Disagree with this

"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.

"Please tell me that it's configurable and can be turned off?"

No, it's configurable and can be turned on.

So do I - but without the TimeMachine bit.

Re: This...

Downside of that is that, possibly to make way for it, NextCloud removed their Documents app in a point upgrade.

As far as I can make out the actual Collabora doesn't run under NC, NC just connects to it. Likewise, I suppose, the online LibreOffice. If that's the case these solutions aren't going to be available if you're running a personal NC instance on a Pi, as I'm doing, or considering running it on a hosted web service as I was thinking of doing.

The local Pi server isn't a problem - I just keep a desktop folder synced to the Pi. The idea of being able to economically run a hosted NC server to collaborate on a project with my local history group just hit the buffers if users have to download a file just to be able to view it - it doesn't offer enough advantage over an email list.

Re: Payment workaround?

I think the relevant word is "foundation", not "charity". Apparently German legal support for foundations is considered preferable. In any case, I doubt the idea of moving to the UK would even be entertained. It wouldn't be considered stable enough now. We have a government that wanted to take back control so it could tinker with things according to its own whims.

The existing version already includes remote open and save which I think covers your cloud sync. But let's be cynical here. Enterprise users can't get their heads round the idea that an office suite doesn't have to include an email client so get together with Mozilla to add the Thunderbird-based element of Seamonkey plus Lightbird and call that the Enterprise edition.

I'm very seldom pleased with UI changes in anything. The one change I'd like to see in LO would be use of OS file and print dialogs for KDE.

Re: This...

You can run the online version on your own server. While that might not be a good use case for you - it isn't for me either - I can see circumstances where there might be. A lightweight front end like a Chromebook and an in-house server might fit very well into an educational context for example.

Re: Long-standing issue with volunteer development

"I would think the first thing the TDF should do now is set up a bounty programme."

It's clear from the interview is that one problem is that TDF has some money but can't spend it, at least not directly, on development because of its charitable status.

Perhaps a bounty programme would be one way round this. Like many I tend to pay a contribution when downloading a new version. This isn't much use if it goes into a fund that can't be used productively. To be given the option of paying into a bounty fund administered but not owned by TDF would be better. Better still would be if TDF were able to match bounty payments if it has more money than it actually needs.

Teardown nerds delve into Dell's new XPS 15 laptop to find – fancy that – screws and user-serviceable parts

"The battery is affixed with screws and a bit of tape"

I'll stay with laptops where you can just clip the battery in and out without dismantling.

Re: Why so few size options?

"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.

Re: Cans of Compressed Air, how quaint!

A solid blast with compressed air. Solid? That takes compression to new levels.

Oh deer! Scotland needs some tech smarts to help monitor its rampant herbivore populations

Maybe a whole new midge-powered technology is needed.

This used to be the sort of problem they'd set up a grant for a PhD student to work on.

Re: Reintroduce Wolves & Bears

"if they happen to munch on the 'other type of herbivore'"

But could they be relied on to tell the difference between herbivores and omnivores?

UK's Co-operative Group to centralise IT teams across various divisions, warns redundancies 'inevitable'

When Tata take over will they still continue to respect all this: https://www.co-operative.coop/ethics/ethical-policies ?

Privacy Shield binned after EU court rules transatlantic data protection arrangements 'inadequate'

Re: Standard contractual clauses

"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.

Re: Standard contractual clauses

"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

Re: Good

Surprised, no.

By "our", who do you mean? The EU's, probably not. UK's maybe. US's - can they get worse?

Twitter mass hacking: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Biden, Obama, more hijacked to peddle Bitcoin scam

Re: A sad reflection on society

"Just someone who can open their eyes and think for themselves."

And it that doesn't make you grumpy nothing will.

Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleads guilty again after cryptocurrency flop broke laws set up to stop him

I don't think I'd bother to think so specifically. I'd just assume it was designed to relieve investors of their money in order to transfer it to the promoters and leave it at that.

SoftBank: Oi, we paid $32bn for you, when are you going to strong-Arm some more money out of your customers?

I suppose the inflexibility of WeWork and Uber revenue is obvious even to beancounters, Arm less so. I wonder if they've considered the possibility that having had a lot of money to splash around might have made them a tad too careless and that if they want to find out who's responsible for poor ROI they should look for a mirror.

On an entirely disconnected topic do we have any idea when the HP verdict is due?

€13bn wings its way back to Apple after Euro court rules Irish tax deal wasn't 'state aid'

Re: All about jobs? Unlikely!

This simple fact seems so hard for so many to understand. When there's an international market in corporate taxation - as there is for multinationals - countries with small economies are at a distinct advantage.

Re: The Elephant in the Room

"There needs to be a better definition of Intellectual Property ... Apple should have been paying 10% tax, not 0.5 down to 0.005%"

You need a better definition of "should". The court has just said what Apple should pay. Maybe it morally ought to pay something else but the rules and legislation in place say what it should pay.

Having made the tax rules it must be annoying when you find somebody obeys them and the outcome isn't what you want. It's almost like you got them wrong.

Trump gloats, telcos weep, and China is furious: How things stand following UK's decision to rip out Huawei

Re: Must be a bad move

"I was convinced by listening to Iain Duncan Smith - to believe the opposite of whatever he said."

He's very good at that.

UK PM: "How high?"

US ambassador: "Sir!"

UK PM: "How high, sir?"

Google employs people to invent colours – and they think their work improves your wellbeing

Re: Who names these things?

felt a twinge of sympathy for the poor sod tasked with coming up with names that "sell"

Don't bother. These "poor sods" are Marketing.

"Look at flowers, some of which evolved to look bright to attract bees."

Does this mean Google intend to extend their colour range into the UV?

Apple and Google, take note: Newly enacted EU law aims to protect developers from arbitrary decisions of tech giants

Re: Sigh.

Who's going to enforce it in the UK?

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Re: "algebra and geometry"

"A lot of people say that the stuff they learned at school in maths is not real-worldly useful."

I was at school well before the "New Maths" syllabus came in. Years ago I was discussing some data question with users and summed up what they needed from the database in terms which were recognisable from their much later GCSE maths.

"Oh!"

The sound of realisation of what that had been all about.

OTOH I reckon that many subjects, maths included, are taught in ways that only make sense to those who instinctively think like mathematicians, latinists or whatever so I only really grasped my O Level maths by doing A level physics and my Latin is largely botanical with a smidge of medieval admin stuff.

UK smacks Huawei with banhammer: Buying firm's 5G gear illegal from year's end, mobile networks ordered to rip out all next-gen kit by 2027

Re: Huawei Firmware Question

But not in any of the alternatives. How reassuring.

A "qualification" to be listed seems to include membership of the S&T Committee which seems to be a fairly low bar. There are also former shadow science ministers there. Unless the shadow ministers are better qualified than their govt. opposite numbers that's a very low qualification indeed. And there's at least one person double counted.

Isn't it great to have taken back control so we can do just what Trump tells us to do.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a charred white dwarf star blasted across our galaxy by an ancient semi-supernova

"Prof Gaensicke believes the star is proof that there may be different types of supernova that astronomers haven’t yet classified."

Waiting for one of them to be classified as a bossanova.

Detroit Police make second wrongful facial-recog arrest when another man is misidentified by software

"that by definition is a black box of uncertainty"

Are you allowed to say that these days?

"but skin colour is relevant to the story here"

Only is as far as it affects poor software.

I don't think US govts have sole possession of that objective.

Re: Confirmation bias

"I recently saw a set of scales that could do the same and it wasn't that expensive."

We had a lab balance that could tell when you were leaning over it. But that might have been more to do with being on the first floor of the nasty pre-fab building.

But you reinforce my point. A balance should tell you about mass. The mass doesn't change when move from the bench to the floor even if the force on it does. A real balance compares one mass with a standard mass so that gravitational field effect doesn't matter; it's the same for both masses.

BTW our building was next door to the local weights and measures dept. so I borrowed their standard weights.