Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"the problem with laws, writing and re-writing them.. is it's the job of the lawyers to do this.
And you're back to having Google own the lawyers and getting them to write clauses in that benefit Google."
I don't know how things work on the other side of the pond but here it's Parliamentary draughtsmen who rewrite the laws and although, of necessity, they're lawyers they're not lawyers Google owns.
"If the private sector can design websites that track our every move, that come up with suggestions for goods before we realise we want them"
These suggestions generally fall into two groups:
- stuff we just bought so don't need to buy again
- stuff we don't and won't want which is not quite the same as saying they're suggesting them before we realise we want but the difference might not be clear to an easily confused person
On the whole it doesn't put the private sector into that brilliant a light.
@Joe Harrison
Any judicial or quasi-judicial body with the power to levy fines does so on a graduated basis. If they go for a maximum fine in minor cases how are they going to differentiate the more egregious cases? Or, as the saying puts it, might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
"If BA is found to be liable I hope they get a fine in the £100's of millions"
Their quick disclosure takes them out of the top tier of fines.
A more desirable outcome would be for them to have relatively little in terms of fines to be contrasted with someone who tries to cover up being hit really hard. If BA were fined heavily after a quick disclosure it would send the wrong message entirely. It would suggest that the difference in penalty between covering up and being found on the one hand and owning up on the other wasn't great. That would lead to a risk analysis that it would be worth trying to cover up to avoid any penalty as the additional cost price of failing over the certain cost of notifying would be minor.
"have another box on the network getting PoE so I could easily add another to the cabinet, which would mean less cabloid mess behind the telly!"
I look on it the other way round - what's one more cable given the mess that's there already? I don't think I'd like the fan and SWMBO certainly wouldn't.
It was, Upton observed, "dumb luck" that heavy load testing was done with one brand of switch while lighter testing occurred with the other.
Where does luck come into it? Given the historical problems with power on Pis I'd have expected anything in that area to be fully tested with all possible build configurations.
"Not saying you may not have a point, but it is not really helpful to point out possible mistakes without also explaining how they may be fixed in a satisfactory manner."
How old are you? It's not that long since sites didn't work that way. The problem is that more development money goes on shiny UX <spit> than providing essential functionality on the server. It's more a matter of manglement deciding on whether to spend money now on development and maybe running services from their own servers or spending it later on compensation, fines and PR costs to try to repair a trashed reputation.
The report lists the members of the committee in the form of
Name, MP (Party, Consituency)
and also list the names of their supporting staff. Wouldn't it be great if it listed their full qualifications for being on a science and technology committee: their degree and/or memberships of chartered professional bodies? They do have additional qualifications other than just being MPs don't they? Likewise it would be useful to know if any of their supporting staff also have relevant qualifications.
"even if webmail went away tomorrow, email still wouldn't be secure."
It would be a necessary first step in establishing client to client encryption. With webmail the web-server to browser link might be encrypted but the email decryption is going to be done by the mail provider. That means that the mail provider has to have the user's private key and that in turn raises some pretty obvious problems.
"by definition it can only be identified as bulk after some number have been sent"
Spam filtering works on more than number of similar emails*, hence my point about the length of time some of this spam has been about.
Even if retrospective detection is applied then as long as the user at the top of the list hasn't collected email - and I only collect from the Hotmail account at wide intervals - then it's perfectly possible to move mail from Inbox to Spam.
*In fact, legitimate bulk email isn't uncommon so number isn't an indicator of spam
"Is your point that, for example, Office 365 should know it when the email header says that a message comes from an Office 365 email server, while in fact it doesn't?"
My point is that a user such as Maintenace Care<random-user@hotmail.com> (other MS domains are availabe) can send a message with a title such as YOUR HOTMAIL WILL EXPIRE SOME DAYS TIME to a Hotmail (other MS domains are available) user and it's not picked up by their spam filters even if, as is likely, such messages are sent in bulk. That particular one, a couple of weeks ago, carried a docx attachment; yes, I'm really going to open that, aren't I? Then there's the ever faithful "Account Team" who sent not one but two "De activation in progress" emails 5 minutes apart a week or so earlier than that.
This sort of spam is old enough to buy its own drinks
Sometimes, for weeks at a time, they seem able to trap such crap into the spam folder then they have a spate of letting them through.
"PGP is too tricky for many."
Is it?
Email itself would be too tricky if you had to connect to the server with telnet and type in all the responses by hand. All that is wrapped up in the client's standard behaviour. HTTPS would be too tricky if the user had to vet the certificates themselves but the client does that.
PGP is too tricky because it's not built into the standard as a basic element, in particular it needs a PKI which isn't provided for in the current email architecture. If we moved to a new standard which included the handling of private keys as part of the provision of a server the whole thing would just disappear into the background for most users.
"So do an Europeans affected by this have any rights to redress under GDPR?"
They have right to register complaints with the appropriate regulator which could lead to large fines (maybe even 4% of Apple's turnover if they were held to have responsibility). Not the sort of redress you might have been thinking of but there could be accommodation to be reached if you were prepared to withdraw the complaint.
As this sort of thing works its way into corporate conciousness I think the operators of app stores are likely to tighten up to avoid the risk of vicarious liability.
"European data regulators should not be allowed to decide what Internet users around the world find when they use a search engine."
And the point is being well and truly missed. European data regulators aren't deciding what internet users around the world find. They're empowering individuals to decide what should not be found about themselves. It's a big difference. It's about individual data subject's rights.
"Many companies where I have worked operate on the 'budget protection' mindset where each manager jealously guards their own budget so that they look as efficient as possible."
Ah, budgets. And what happens when different budgets fragment the ability to manage as a whole. I'm pretty sure it was lack of coordination between budget holders that resulted in the following sequence at Marylebone station years ago.
Station was repainted. Beautiful job. e.g. there was a bookstall handily placed between the gates to the various platform with a moulded frieze showing the sorts of things they sold, newspapers, books etc. and each individual object on that was individually painted. Must have cost a fortune. Painting budget.
The walls were sandblasted covering all the new paintwork with a coat of dust. Buildings budget.
Some of the tracks adjacent were filled in covering part of the sandblasted wall. Tracks budget.
The whole station entrance was reconfigured demolishing the carefully painted bookstall (which was replaced with a small, far less convenient cave-like space). Utter wanker's budget.
There appeared to have been no budget for running trains; every evening involved a long pause which I interpreted as being the time it took for them to find enough working DMUs to string together to form a train.
"Number spoofing or hiding for these companies should be removed - the telcos must know who they or their agents are as they will be billing someone for the calls!"
I'm all in favour of PAYG. Get a call, dial something like 1472 and get a fee for receiving the call credited to your telephone account. If the telco can't ensure they know the originator to transfer charge they carry the bill. OK, it needs safeguards so you can't get a fee from Auntie Mabel every time she calls. But as a general mechanism I think you'll find cold calling disappears almost immediately.
"What's the odds that the first iffy company director that the ICO pokes a fine at will be a poor dupe living off state benefits who didn't even realize they had a company directorship?"
It's not an aspect of company law I had reason to look into but I'd guess the penalties for setting someone up like that are pretty substantial. Apart from anything else it's probably going to be an offence under plain old fraud legislation and the trendy new money laundering stuff as well.
"Once people stop being teens, they stop paying attention to 'what's in'"
As far as I'm concerned most music worth listening to was composed and a great deal of it recorded before I was born, let alone in my teens. It's just that I've spent my time since then discovering more of it.
I often hear "but I like to see the pictures"
I once got an email from the Co-op which consisted only of a picture of text. This is the touchy, feely, all-inclusive Co-op, right? I pointed out to them that not only was it a daft waste of bandwidth, that by default anyone with any internet security sense doesn't open pictures and that it would discriminate against blind recipients because text to speech wouldn't work. I think it was probably the last that did the trick; the other two would be over the heads of marketing.
"Surely this demonstrates that the usually inept ICO is actually far more useless then we thought?"
You underestimate the population's capacity for avoiding thinking about anything that might be complicated. Add in a percentage who desperately don't want to know anything about it because it makes how they make their living illegal and hope ignorance of the law will protect them.
"So for my needs Libre-Office is fine (although I also have Office-2000 with the compatibility pack lying around for reading docx / xlsx). However in my home others need access to Office and the Ribbon because that's what they're comfortable with."
How old is your LO? I've not come across any docx/xslx LO can't read and the later versions also have the optional ribbon interface although it's currently labelled experimental. As I have no familiarity with the MS product I don't know how closely the LO ribbon mimics it but I really found no trouble moving between Office 95 or whatever and OO in the old days.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
