Posts by Doctor Syntax

FTC lets Nest off the hook over Revolv IoT hub bricking shame

Re: simples

"Watch as the insurance industry gears up to offer this as part of Product Liability cover"

They're not going to be pleased if the original offer wasn't realistic.

'"Continuing to run an essential central server shouldn't depend for finance on continuing sales of new product - that's effectively a Ponzi scheme."

This is a difficult one. It sounds reasonable until you think "how else can a company do this?"'

SImple. You sell it as a paid-for service. I pay my ISP, my domain registrar/email provider and Usenet service providers monthly, annually or whatever. The latter two just provide the service but the ISP also provides the network interface kit which, in fact, remains their property. What's to stop an operation such as Revolv operating as a service and charging as such? The H/W could either be part of the service deal or a separate sale but making quite clear that the service needs to be paid for for it to keep working.

'Storage obviously isn't unlimited: it's limited by the total data storage in the world, for example. Any reasonable person knows that it cannot be truly unlimited. What it means is "don't worry about caps". If you go silly then you can be told off from the company, and eventually disconnected. Is this a better or worse way of going about business than explicitly stating caps?'

It is worse. If you say unlimited then that's the offer. As we both agree it's a nonsense so don't offer it because if you do and then try to apply caps later either you're in breach of contract or, if you snuck a limiting clause into the contract, you're guilty of false advertising.

'The idea is mostly to reassure people who have no real idea what a gigabyte is'

s/reassure/lie to/

People have no idea what a gigabyte are going to be the ones who have least idea of what the realities are.

The principle is very simple. Sell what you can supply. Don't mislead people into thinking that you can supply something you can't.

"it will refund customers"

So it hasn't yet? If it was the plan to do that then it would have been sensible to have made the offer when the shutdown was announced, not when it had the FTC on its case.

At least Revolv was bought by a company that has the resources to make refunds. What happens to a company that just goes bust because of cash-flow problems or because the owners have taken out all the funds as dividends and done a runner?

The FTC and consumer protection world-wide need to lay down some rules:

If a device is based on connectivity to a central hub it must fail-safe if the connectivity fails temporarily and there should be a software escrow arrangement whereby up-to-date copies of the hub and device software are available if the company goes out of business or just shuts down the hub.

Companies should not make infeasible offers. If an ISP or the like offers uncapped data then they should be able to sustain every customer using their full bandwidth all day every day. Continuing to run an essential central server shouldn't depend for finance on continuing sales of new product - that's effectively a Ponzi scheme. And unlimited storage is a complete non-starter.

Windows 10 a failure by Microsoft's own metric – it won't hit one billion devices by mid-2018

I wonder if this is the start of backing away from what's proved to be, shall we say, less popular than was hoped, that Windows 10 won't be the "last Windows" unless you count Windows 10.1 which won't be forced on anyone, won't have telemetry, won't have smash and grab T&Cs and may even be popular. And Wataworld will be telling us how bad W10 really was.

Re: The penguin struggles to reach 4% market share with a free product

"Googles slightly shady front-end is not really the same as GNU/Linux."

OTOH after Microsoft's UI adventures of the last few years if you were to take a Win 7 user and show them KDE, W8 & W910 they might be hard pushed to say which was & wasn't Windows.

Re: "run MS Office"

I think the solution will be a Win 7 machine* which may well be dual-boot by the start of term. Unless they extend the free upgrade "due to demand" it'll just miss that by the time I give it to her. If the school has a bulk licence agreement for any form of Office they can provide that, otherwise - or also - it'll be LO.

*According to Laptops Direct website they still have W7 stock. As soon as I finish this cuppa I'll drive over there and see.

Re: I'd add

"you can keep all of your personal settings by tarballing /home"

Easier still. Have /home on its own partition & don't reformat it. Same with /opt & maybe /usr/local.

Re: Perhaps ....

'Its a damn shame they will never know what UNIX or POSIX really was. Only a "modern" hairball pretending.'

It's only a short step from Linux to a real Unix. BSD is still there. I wonder what SCO could have become if they'd tried. (For those whose horizon doesn't extend beyond the litigation, SCO, under its original management, was a very capable Unix system on Intel processors. It took a very long time for Linux distros to catch up with them. They might not have been able to compete on free-as-in-beer but if they'd cut prices to be affordable they could have competed on quality.)

Re: Perhaps ....

'"Whats also interesting is how many college types I talk to who are just using a penguin now."

Businesses are where it is at; lose them and you lose the game.'

And, of course, today's college types become the next generation of business decision makers.

Re: Perhaps ....

'As for the "we're focusing on mobile" - well, that says it all.'

I suspect that when "focusing on mobile" is translated it means "we were counting on that and look how its working out".

Re: Amazing

"the world's first human-shaped Mobius strip"

You should be entitled to a second upvote just for this.

"I'm less bothered by the existence of the telemetry than I am by how shady MS implemented them."

You should be bothered by more than the implementation; the implementation can be changed at will by an update you can't block. The real problem is the open-ended nature of the T&Cs which, at least last time I looked, let them gather your log-in credentials and transactions without limits, not just your creds & transactions with MS.

This gives me a problem this weekend. I have a granddaughter with an upcoming birthday about to move to secondary school where she will need access to a computer which should be able to run MS Office (I'm not convinced they'd know the difference if she turned in work from LO in MS formats). We're thinking of getting her a laptop. So do I get her a Win 7 version, still available new if Laptops Direct website is to be believed, which will be EOL before she finishes school or something that will own her as much as she owns it?

Microsoft wins landmark Irish data slurp warrant case against the US

Re: this ain't over yet

"Glad to see I'm not the only commentard from the occupied six counties."

It's as well to remember that if there hadn't been partition the consequence would undoubtedly have been a war of secession. I've often wondered whether that might have been the more stable long-term outcome but it would certainly have been bloody. I don't know enough about modern Irish history (as far as I'm concerned modern is anything later than, say, Early Iron Age) to work out whether this would have replaced the Irish civil war or whether it would have resulted in a 3-way war as it would have been in a similar time-frame.

Re: US will probably alter the law when it modifies MLAT

"Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) process with the UK"

What part of "Ireland" did you not understand?

Re: Us citizens data in ireland

"the Irish government was offering to help the FBI get a warrant through the Irish courts."

Were they? My impression was that they simply said that that's what the proper route should have been. It would have depended on there having been an adequate case to get a warrant. When a government offers to help get a case through the courts it's on very dangerous ground.

Re: First round to Microsoft....

"How badly does the US Gov. want access to the data?"

Not badly enough to have gone through the proper legal route in the first place. That's the one where they prepare a case and present it to an Irish court to get an Irish warrant that can't be refused by an Irish business operating on Irish soil. Or could it have been that they never had enough of a case to present in the firs place?

Re: this ain't over yet

"Not sure whether by Brits who want to invade again"

One of those downvotes was from someone who spent many years there during the IRA/UVF campaigns and has seen the consequences at close quarters. That's "seen" as in having helped dig up the occasional murder victim or help identify very badly burned remains (Google La Mon for details).

Some of us know very well what a land war is like in Ireland. It's not the land that gets hurt.

Good news - subject to an appeal of course. But what's the LEADS Act? Is this simply the one which allows them to do what they should have done in the first place, namely try for an Irish warrant?

Chinese hacker jailed for shipping aerospace secrets home

Re: Light Sentence

"I wonder ... how much misinformation they planted into the system which was then transferred to China?"

And how much of it was planted intentionally.

Your next storage will be invisible (for a while)

"For example, if you are running the IT infrastructure in a university, you'll probably have access to a lot of manpower (in the form of students and researchers)… in this case it's probable that your TCO won't be affected by the cost of Sysadmins"

In that case you might be paying for more Sysadmins to defend it all from the students and researchers.

Mine's an old white one with ferric chloride stains that won't come out.

IPO spews email addresses to hundreds of recipients. Twice

Re: Why oh why...

Amend the the message to "You are about to send $NUMBER people each other's email addresses. Many of them won't want to have their address given away like this. Some of them will object very seriously and may sue your company. At the very least you will look stupid. You may get fired. Do you want to have your comany sued, look stupid and maybe lose your job?"

Yes.

Ad viewability worsens

Re: TVs

"Like how many people switch channels, or hit the mute button when the ads are showing."

I don't watch much live now. Everything goes through Myth TV & fast-forward just runs through the ads.

Ad blockers responsible for rise in upfront TV ad sales, claims report

They still haven't worked out that their crap is no more welcome on TV than it is online.

Successful fintech: UK has some, but it's not in Silicon Roundabout

2 years survival is a criterion for success?

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

'The company had also “migrated all their data to a huge Oracle 7 database running on SCO Unix.” Yup, SCO!'

SCO: My preferred OS for running small businesses back in the day. But with Informix.

Empty your free 30GB OneDrive space today – before Microsoft deletes your files for you

Re: One drive faux pas

" I found myOrb.com which is excellent."

It won't even display its home page without unblocking NoScript and you call that excellent?

Unlimited?

If the offer is unlimited how can using it as such be abuse? No bad apples, just people taking Microsoft at their word.

Re: A few bad apples

' If I am paying for a certain amount I should be entitled to continue paying for that amount at the "contracted" rate.'

A couple of problems with that. First, if it's free then you're not paying and it's doubtful whether there's a contract at all. Secondly, remember the old saying: if it's free it's worth every penny you paid for it.

"Never before in modern history has a company tried as hard as Microsoft is trying now to alienate its customers."

I'm not sure about that. It's a race to the bottom and there's plenty of room there.

Capita redundo staff: We are free at last, free at last… at the end of this month

Re: Outsourcing

"We are committed to ensuring we continue to deliver great experiences for all of our customers with our new Partner"

Translation: Shut up and just keep paying us.

You really do want to use biometrics for payments, beam banks

"a great deal of excitement in the payments space"

That devalues anything else he said.

UK gov says new Home Sec will have powers to ban end-to-end encryption

Re: ROT13 - the future of encryption in the UK?

No, double ROT13, just to make sure.

"We should remove it and replace it with a second elected house."

The Commons will never approve of that. As things stand they can claim a legitimacy over the Lords that being elected brings. They're not going to give that up.

For the rest of us the advantage of the HoL is that because its members don't have to depend on the party machines to keep their membership they can ignore party lines if they think those are wrong.

I think the HoL needs some ex officio members other than the bishops. Say the presidents or equivalent of the Royal Society and the chartered institutes, maybe a few University VCs etc. If they have several acknowledged experts in a field explain why a proposal is bollocks they'd have to listen (assuming Gove doesn't get booted upstairs, of course).

Shocker: Computer science graduate wins a top UK political job

Re: Highest achiever

"David Davis MP today becomes the highest-achieving politician in a worthwhile subject"

I'm trying to parse this. Do you mean Brexit minister is a higher achievement than PM or that chemistry isn't a worthwhile subject?

Brit Science Minister to probe Brexit bias against UK-based scientists

Re: In other news

BoJo in the FCO should be ... interesting. As one comment on there said, he'll probably spend most of his time apologising to countries he's insulted.

"IMF"

Actually, that was later, but in light of what had gone before, pretty well inevitable.

"our politicians had already signed us up to it without a democratic mandate."

Nevertheless we were then asked for a mandate to continue and gave it.

"The 1975 referendum did not affirm that the UK public wanted to give away their national sovereignty etc"

You know as well as I do that the nature of a referendum question is that it wraps all the individual negotiating points into a single question and:

"The same applies to every European treaty signed since that takes more power away from member countries and hands that power to the EEC/EU/United States of Europe."

I completely agree with you. I think every EEC/EU country should have held a referendum to enable its government to ratify all the succeeding countries. I also think the referenda should have required a substantive majority, say 2/3rds, to change the status quo, just as I think this recent referendum should have required it. Such a requirement would have caused the negotiators to have come up with much different treaties if they wanted to get them though. In fact we may still have had the EEC in place.

You should realise that my position isn't what you think it is. I think there's a great deal wrong with the EU but that walking away is just plain nuts on economic grounds. I don't think that the great economic opportunities that the leavers are hoping for are there.

If we try to retain the foreign investment that's here because of our EU membership we'll have to retain all the other aspects of the EU that you don't like but with one difference - we won't be part of the decision-making process so this much-vaunted regaining of "control" or "sovereignty" won't just be a chimera, it'll be the opposite of what you claim. In this respect the Leavers have scored a massive own goal.

The globalist option is going to involve trying to negotiate our own trade treaties with existing players. Again, our degree of control is severely limited. You have to ask what they're wanting and whether it's going to be to our advantage. The likes of India are going to be looking for even more off-shoring. As for the US - look at their recent "partnership" negotiations; they're clearly commercial colonisation acts intended to put US corporations in much the same situation as the East India Company once occupied in India. Any "deal" we get there is going to be a lot worse than what was being negotiated with the EU.

We've simply cut off our own economic nose to spite the EU's political face.

"the UK government needs to immediately expand UK science funding"

Something no UK govt of any colour has ever done outside of wartime.

In other news

I see from the Beeb site that David Davis is to be Brexit minister. Given his previous position on privacy maybe he'll manage to retain the EUs rules on this. It might go some way to offsetting May as PM.

"This begs the question of why our politicians ever signed us up to Europe against the will of the people"

It clearly does.

'"Begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.' ( http://begthequestion.info/ )

Your statement that joining was against the the will of the people falls foul of http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/6/newsid_2499000/2499297.stm

Re: Shock

"From our previous exchanges I thought you would know by now I absolutely voted leave."

Indeed. Maybe you didn't read my last post on a previous exchange - what with one thing and another I got round to it pretty late. If you had you'd realise that I'm not an outstanding fan of the EU, it's just that I think the idea that we can just walk out to be an economic nonsense. At least we're not in the Euro.

"By the time we are out it will be another GE and the people can choose the direction of the country."

Our ability to choose the direction will be restricted. What if the choice at that point would have been to remain - as it might well be if all those businesses here for an EU base have started to migrate? That choice would be gone. If the choice is a trade treaty with the EU then it will be on the EU's terms. The choice of being an imperial power is long gone. The choice of being a major world power hasn't existed for the last 60 years, post Suez.

"Those of us who remember what the UK was like before we entered the EEC ...Deciding for ourselves the direction our country is to go in."

I certainly remember those times. A good many people who want to go back to them seem to think we were still a great imperial power. We weren't. Our ability to decide effectively was pretty well finished when Eden declined to show two fingers to the US in '56.

European Commission straps on Privacy Shield

"Some tortuous english"

Sigh. Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister should be on the national curriculum. I think the original was one of Bernard's

"Similarly Privacy-Shield is not really there to protect privacy - it's there to try and provide some kind of control over our personal data."

No it isn't. It isn't even there to look as if they're trying to protect data. At best they're trying to look as if they're trying to protect data. And as we all know they don't even look as if they're trying to look as if they're trying to protect data.

HTH

SCADA malware caught infecting European energy company

Re: Never as easy as it seems from an armchair

"10 year or more support"

Easy to promise but what good's your regulation or contract if the vendor's in liquidation? You'll need a source code escrow scheme, assuming the source isn't open anyway.

Tupperware vehemently denies any link to storage containerisation

"Maybe we should rebrand them as TupperWare"

If there isn't a software containerisation product called that something's seriously wrong.

Re: "Kleenex"

"Band-aid. What's wrong with saying ... "plaster", I ask?"

In this part of the world it used to be a spetch.

Trial to store benefits claimants' personal data on blockchain slammed

Re: Why would the DWP need to use a blockchain?

"you know what I said about not everyone getting it ?"

When dealing with the DWP never attribute to craftiness that which can be attributed to stupidity. A former colleague in a project where we dealt with them summed them up: "not the sharpest knives in the box".

Student Loans Company burns £50 million in IT project superfail

"The Transformation Programme brings us the opportunity to become a standard-bearer for the government’s digital delivery agenda. We have already made progress here, becoming an exemplar Government Digital Service organisation."

BINGO!

Smartphones aren't tiny PCs, but that's how we use them in the West

"QR code is unsafe, and like URL shorteners a great way to lead to malware."

AIUI this system reverses the normal QR situation. The customer, via the phone, presents the QR code to the store. The customer is not at risk of a malicious code and, if the till software is in any way sane, it's not going to interpret the code as a URL. If the code doesn't make sense within the requirements of the payment system it's just going to decline the transaction.

What's not clear in all this is how the system guards against fake codes. I take it there must be some dynamic element in generating the code.