Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"That [pay once, use forever], obviously, isn't sustainable for a service that incurs ongoing costs"
It would be if the upfront price was big enough to generate income to pay for the service - but then you'd probably never sell any.
Even worse - the company has been taken over a couple of times so that some of the users no longer represent payments to the present owner, they represent payments by him.
The technologists have been asked to build a system in a certain way and it's likely there's no body in the loop saying, 'You don't really need this.'
That seems particularly generous in this particular case. A less generous view would be that there's someone in the loop saying "We really want this."
In the wider sense of the govt's response there really seems to be a lack of somebody in the loop asking "How do we do this?" or "Could you clarify that?". The logistics of just about everything have been abysmal and the alleged "rules" of lockdown only get defined when some over-zealous enforcement hits the media.
In the circumstances it's right that somebody needs to make big top-down decisions but they also should ensure that there are people to deal with the bottom-up details of implementation and that the inevitable questions that raises get answered promptly and consistently.
"Is all the source code there? ... and that's just the Client side."
That's the problem right there. Leaving aside the matching algorithm what is there that protects the data against access beyond that algorithm's requirements and what is there that provides for deletion on the data subject's request?
We know the answer to that because we've already been given it; nothing at all.
Very much so as half his money probably wasn't just wasted, it was actively putting off prospective customers.
However, he was before his time. Nowadays there are ad-blockers. The people he was trying to sell to could have told him which half. He needn't have wasted his money and needn't have spent it counter-productively unless, of course, those rip-off intermediaries charged him extra for trying to get past the ad-blockers.
And remember, the advertising industry only sells one thing. It's not soap or cars or whatever the advertiser's product might be. It's advertising and the people hey sell it to are advertisers.
The first of the bullet points brought to mind the saying that to fail to plan is to plan to fail. That was misleading. The rest made it clear that they'd knowingly planned to fail.
The only possible explanation for this is the politicians syllogism: something must be done, this is something therefore it must be done.
"Some critics see Lee's announcement as less penance than a shallow PR trick to lift the company's reputation with the public."
Or maybe it's what we've always reckoned - directly enforcing the personal responsibilities of corporate officers with a bit of attention from the courts helps concentrate their minds on what the law requires of them.
"Some of the username password stuff is EU law mandating businesses know their customers/users."
Oddly enough, if I go into a real shop either they're flouting this law or it doesn't apply. As another commentard wrote, I've lost count of the number of shops who didn't ask me to create an account.
For very obvious reasons neither Twitter nor Facebook have my phone number unless they've stolen it from someone else's contact list. I have a couple of gmail accounts for whom Google who have nothing resembling a name; admittedly one is on my mobile.
"Millennials It’s all about me, me, me, me, me"
If you're calling me a millennial you'd better get the right millennial.
For avoidance of doubt, my banking passwords are important to me as I suspect yours are to you.
My password on a site which demands it if I have the temerity to download an information sheet for their product isn't, nor I suspect, would yours be important to you. I doubt such a site would be able to find an explanation of why it would be important to them that would satisfy either of us.
"There's only about 20,000 English words in common use"
cd /usr/share/dict
wc -l british*
99156 british-english
341393 british-english-huge
650656 british-english-insane
OK, that includes proper nouns, possessives and borrowed words with diacritical marks although there's no reason not to include them and certainly not to stick to those in common use.
At a conservative estimate an English word must be worth at least 16 bits.
I'm aware of that.
This is the usual thing about marketing. They have one-sided metrics and think one-sidedly in terms of how people will react. They have no insight into the business they lose by this approach except, for those of us who have disposable email addresses, they might, if they bothered to collect the data, see some bounced spam.
"Given that nothing is supposed to have changed then that is an awful lot of people who are now travelling, either for leisure (unlikely at 7:00am) or are now returning to work."
A binary division into essential and non-essential might be part of this. Somewhere in the middle is deferrable; what could be put off or put up with a few weeks ago might not be now.
Then there's the possibility that over the last few weeks managements have worked out means of allowing some work that requires physical presence of workers to go ahead to some extent.
"Like we* did when we* asked people to just stay home and not gather, unless they had to, and just be sensible about it ?"
That "unless they had to" opens up a whole load of opportunities for infection. There's also the small matter of just how long "we" took to getting round to this.
*Who's this "we"? Are you HMG's lurker?
Maybe you're new here - first post & all that.
The point has been made many times here that privacy is important in that governments in general and HMG in particular have proved themselves extremely untrustworthy in respect of that. In this particular case they have been unusually upfront and told us they can't be trusted - the data will be retained for research, whatever they might designate that to mean, and can't be deleted.
In this instance I'm prepared to credit Apple & Google, especially when they work together, as being altruistic, or at the very least, taking a long term view in that it's not in their interest to see a lot of their user base die.
I also remember that they're ultimately subject to GDPR and the DPA and that HMG isn't, having left themselves sufficient wriggle room when writing it into UK law.
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