Posts by Doctor Syntax 42409 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Obviously there's the easy go to of the Robin Hood Airport Case. What everyone wrote off as a joke, South Yorkshire Police thought was worth pursuing"
And yes, every bomb threat can be written off as a joke. Right up to the time when one isn't and then everyone from the Grauniad to the Fail will come down on the police like a ton of bricks for not taking it seriously.
"Where, if you lose then you may well find that YOU are having to pay the other sides legal fees as well as your own."
Not if the damages fall within the small claims limits. BigCo then has to decide whether to throw lawyers at the case or pay the claim which is probably going to be the cheaper option. They may, of course, choose the former to avoid opening the floodgates.
"One could ask the same of the vast majority of software packages and features, and never receive a satisfactory answer,"
It depends who you ask. Ask most people who thought, say QGIS (what's that, you've never heard of it?) was for and you'd receive blank looks. But there are enough people who need a GIS (never heard of that either?) to develop it originally and to continue with that.
Another good book pass on to the youngster is O'Reilly's "UNIX Power Tools".
Got that one somewhere as well. Coherent brings back memories albeit only of reading about it in Byte. However, there's a limit to what one can present a 10 year old with.
However, mention of Byte reminds me it might be a good idea to find my copy of the issue on RDBMS from which I learned pretty well everything I know about database design* apart, of course, from what I picked up by actually doing it for a few decades.
*I've encountered at least one CS graduate who knew less than that Byte covered.
"So, there wouldn't be much signal below them anyway."
Now try explaining that to those objecting to near-by mobile phone masts. And also explain that when they connect the mobile transmitter next to their head to a more distant mast it has to transmit at higher power and there's this thing called the inverse square law.
"My phone quite happily connects with my car every day, makes and receives calls using the car audio system"
Connecting isn't the problem. It's not realising it's disconnected when I take it out of the car that's the problem. It ends up in an offline mode but only infrequently so that I never get to learn the incantation needed to get it working again without a lot of trial and error. Or maybe the trial and error is the incantation.
"The popular salt/hash method demands that the password is transmitted plain"
It demands that the password be made available to be hashed for comparison with the stored has. How it gets from keyboard to hashing algorithm is not addressed. It can be encrypted in transit and decrypted to be hashed.
Very much like banks that are so "secure" that they insist on certain characters out of the extent of your password. In other words, they have the thing in plain text in order to compare individual characters.
They ask for a combination of several characters. Let's try this one for size:
- You enter a new password.
- The bank extracts combinations of N characters. Perhaps all possible combinations, perhaps a subset of a long password.
- Each combination is hashed and the hashes stored together with a note of the positions of the characters of that combination.
- When you log on the system chooses one particular combination, asks you for the relevant characters, hashes what you enter and compares the result to the stored hash.
Not only can this be achieved without storing plain text, the system doesn't even store your password as a single entity, not even when hashed.
"gotta wonder what their customers would have thought if they found out all the business and personal information they were sending these people was going to a hosed , not secure in any way, computer."
As a customer I'd first want to know what exposure the computer had to the internet. XP off net vs W10 on net: which would you prefer?
"A 'business' with a few thousand pounds of turn over is clearly not in line to spend huge amounts on a consultant to verify their system, paying their increasing business rates is probably further up their action list."
A business with a few thousand pounds of turnover probably isn't paying huge amounts for data storage in the first place - possibly an old exercise book. It still doesn't excuse them if they write more in it than they're entitled to.
"I'd maintain my position that the new rights and fines will not substantially improve the situation in the real world."
I think the knowledge of this extends well down the scale of business size. The problem is more likely getting a firm grip on sales and marketing pestering departments who have the mentality of 4 year old children including the same response to being told "No".
"If you're, say, a software developer doing the same work/same hours as your colleague in the next cubicle (who happens to have ovaries or any of the other recognised grounds for discrimination) you should both earn the same pay."
You seem to have missed several posts pointing out that as that's the law it is actually the case. Maybe you missed it because it wasn't stated in sufficiently colourful language for you to complain about.
the subsidy the net gets from the advertising industry will have to come from somewhere else
The net existed without it and many feel that those were better times.
Too many people expect everything on the net to be "free" for alternative payment to work
I'm quite happy for them to be disappointed.
Even if faced with a stark "Agree to let us slurp your data or you don't get access" warning, most Facebook users will happily tick the box and go on their merry way.
I think Facebook is too smart (i.e. employ enough lawyers) to realise that that just lines them up for maximum fines rather than being told not to be naughty. The authors of GDPR saw the possibilities of that one and dealt with it
"But you have just told world + dog that you do eat breakfast, and that you go out to eat it."
You believed all that did you? That's the trouble with the data fetishists who pay for that stuff., they can't distinguish between data and fact, let alone information. Intelligence and wisdom are entirely beyond their reach.
"all of which ... is monetisable."
The most valuable thing for advertisers to know about me is that advertising at me is counter-productive. It's not a thing they want to hear, of course, wants and needs being two different things. Would they pay good money to discover that?
"So they probabbly HAVE data about me, but that data is likely to be of very poor quality."
Never mind the quality, feel the width. As nobody has any alternative data about you to judge the quality of what's collected the customers will believe what they've got and pay for it so the phone companies or whoever collects the data in the first place get paid. At some point, however, the customers might finally realise that what they're getting is worth less than they're paying for it. It's a bubble that's due to burst some time.
"A vanity domain you pay for, then you can redirect as you want and noone will be any the wiser."
Nothing vain about it. It's just a more practical solution. If you have your own domain you can move ISP without disrupting your email contacts.
Some years ago my formerly very good ISP fell into the clutches of TalkTalk. At that time I'd used the ISP email. I moved to a new ISP but to prevent a recurrence of the inconvenience of that happening again I registered a domain with a registrar who provided an email service. After my new ISP fell into the clutches of Sky I switched to another ISP.
I also found that eventually my original choice of registrar started getting outages which they never troubled to explain - and seldom troubled to acknowledge to I transferred the domain and email service to another registrar/email provider, again without disrupting my email address.
The other side of having your own domain is that you can set up and tear down addresses as necessary. Anyone I expect to deal with on a regular basis is given an alias I've set up specifically for them. If they start spamming I simply drop that alias; in fact I've the option of setting it to bounce email with a message telling the sender why they're being bounced. I also set up aliases which will only last a few weeks and anyone who doesn't, in my view, need a long term alias gets given the current one of those which will be pulled immediately if it gets spammed.
For a few quid a year you can have a flexible email service that's not, on the one hand, tied to a service provider you can't dump, nor, on the other to a big corporation who treats you as their product.
I have a Hotmail address for situations which demand an email address but where I don't expect any interaction whatsoever and that's treated as /dev/null and a gmail address if I need a Google login which carries no traffic at all.
"What collateral damage?"
Those innocent bystanders who are the victims of testing a new technology on the public.
"So we should abandon the rule of law to make an industry stumping regulation for shits and giggles? Why?"
So we should allow technology to be tested on the public and if it goes wrong it's up to the public to hope they can pay a lawyer more than a big corporation? Why? In your own words, for shits and giggles? Or is it simply that in your view the little people don't matter?
"Monetary compensation is only relevant for things that can be compensated for - which doesn't include death."
So it would be OK by you if, as a result of some big corporation's conducting experiments on the travelling public, someone gets killed and their family is put out of house and home because they can no longer pay their mortgage or rent.
"The only info that could have been gained from searches of phone numbers and email addresses is your public profile info that YOU posted."
I haven't posted anything there. But anyone with whom I've corresponded or given a phone number to may have that, and my name, on their mobile. If they also use that mobile for FB then that information will have been harvested despite my not having posted anything.
FB, between now and GDPR coming into force, need to purge every bit of data of EU residents and potential EU residents who are not account holders from their system because they don't know who might challenge them and their transgressions are surely egregious enough to attract the maximum fines.
