Posts by Doctor Syntax 42421 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"I was discussing increasing the size of the attack surface, not the abilities (or lack thereof) of the staff."
Actually, you framed it in terms of businesses understanding that. But it's not the business as some legal entity that understands things, it'sthe people who work there. It matters if that ability remains in the company after the PHBs have done their thing,
"So why houses?"
The Wikipedia entry on plurals gives "housen" as a rare/dialectal plural. I think modern "standard" English was cobbled together from multiple dialects which handled plurals (and other things) in different ways so maybe some of these exceptions come about by most words of a class coming from one dialect and the odd word from another.
"The service concerned, Plutus Payroll, was technically the contractors’ employer,"
That should have been a warning. If you're freelance* work through your own company, not someone else's. Engage an accountant to do the sums ifyou wish but ensure the money comes into, and taxes go out of, the company's account where you or the CoSec can control it.
* and not a sole trader
The GDPR also has something to say about looking after the data and the responsibilities of data processors. The big failure here has been the Privacy Figleaf saying it's OK to ship the data to some overseas processor providing they abide by certain terms some of which cannot be honoured US-based corporations as court has finally ruled on.* And it was OK if you could only proceed against the overseas processor for breaches in their jurisdiction.
What we haven't heard about yet is what Blackbaud's customers are going to do about taking action. Presumably Blackbaud were in breach of contract. I'd have thought their earnings call would have said "We expect to lose contracts and be sued into oblivion."
* But we knew that anyway,didn't we.
The standard contract clauses ot the Privacy Figleaf are quite inadequate protection for data subjects (assuming, of course,that the UK is still enjoying this fictional protection during the transition period). There needs to be provision for the data subjects to take action for compensation in their own jurisdiction. From what the report says HM Opposition should have some support for this principle.
Ah diddums. An Atlantic journalist, self describes as a member of Twitter's "obsessive elite", got locked out of his account and now the sky is falling - at least that seemed to be where he was heading when I baled out of his rant.
Disliking ads leads to ad-blockers which could also contribute. There might be a third factor. Remember all that business about advertisers boycotting FB? Maybe it's spilling over; advertisers starting to wonder why they're spending so much on adverts generally.
It's harder to fake damage than people think.
A young woman had had a telling off from the police apparently tried to inconvenience them by reporting she'd been kidnapped and assaulted and here was her clothing to prove it. She didn't seem to realise that if she couldn't manually cause the damage she claimed (pulling off well stitched on buttons and tearing a dress from the hem) it wouldn't happen in an assault either. The use of scissors to start the tear and to snip off the buttons was quite obvious, as was the lack of the sort of tears that occur in reality.
The real gems are the corporate sigs that say if you're not the intended recipient you shouldn't read this email. Appended at the end where you only see it after reading the email. Because email clients have a facility for adding sigs but not headers and the thought that would have to go into issuing a corporate template and instructions to prepend it would be too hard.
"Look, for example, at the furore at the ending of support for XP after 12 years, or the ending of Windows 7 support after 10 years,"
If either of those had been made "the last Windows ever" as W10is billed I doubt the faithful would have objected. Just maintained it, fixing bugs as discovered, adding support for new H/W (without taking away). It would have meant fewer developers to pay from M/S's PoV and fewer people trying to shoehorn crap into it from the users' PoV.
If it ain't broke don't fix it. If it is broke fix what's broke, don't add more breakage.
"They are stereotypical because it works"
No, they are stereotypical because people selling advertising sell advertising. That's all they do. They really have no idea about who's reading their crap but they're safe in the knowledge that the advertisers are no better informed so they can keep selling their "insights" to their marks.
Take the situation here. SWMBO does some searches then says "If you're on Amazon can you order $PRESENTS_FOR_GRANDDAUGHTER". Consequently Amazon now offers, based on my previous purchases, stuff suitable for a 15-yo girl. I'd seriously believe they know what they're doing if in about 11 months' time they start showing stuff suitable for a 16-yo girl. It would, by their standards, be an improvement if searching for "desoldering" didn't bring up mostly soldering irons with a few heated solder pots thrown in for good measure. By contrast I'm due to receive the latest order of stuff I previously ordered months ago; I had to search back orders to find it.
"this binary classification could be harmful if it was used for, say, selecting targeted advertising to show to people online."
Harmful to whom? Presumably the advertiser. In that case it's unlikely to do a worse job than the usual bazaar (or bizarre) technique of showing stuff on the basis of "your previous searches" or "your previous purchases".
