Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"This is why cyberspace needs its own government and laws (perhaps owned by the UN)....a worldwide agreed standard and laws to protect each individual."
The second part is the requirement but the first part isn't the only way to achieve it. International agreements should be sufficient if (and it's a big if) governments then abided by the agreements they made.
"potentially better"
I suppose anything other than already perfect is potentially better. And when someone completely fails at a basic requirement then yes, there's maybe potential for improvement. But if they fail due to circumstances outside their control* then I'm not sure the potential really exists.
*Other than buying themselves a better government.
"Every attempt to mobil-ify desktop OS has resulted in a train wreck."
It's a bit more complex that that. Remember that Linux is just a kernel. Linux distros such as Fedora, Ubuntu, etc are collections of desktop userlands wrapped round that kernel. It's equally possible to wrap a mobile userland round it. Whatever your opinion of Android it would be impossible to describe its market share as a train wreck.
"old HP printers just don't work"
That probably can be fixed. I tried W10 on a test box under the Insider scheme & had the same problem. I downloaded the 8.x driver from HP's site & that fixed it. Up to a few months ago didn't we get posts telling us how hard Linux was because drivers for $HARDWARE weren't available?
The test box, by the way, has been restored to health running Debian 7 to test ownCloud.
I expect downvotes as the pro-MS downvoters who had previously taken cover seem to have psyched themselves up to weather the shitstorm & have reemerged.
"If they operate in any shape or form in the US then this still wouldn't work"
That's the whole point. Safe harbour is a hollow promise. In the absence of the US reforming its entire privacy legislation the way to go is to kill it and go with wholly EU operations. If, for instance, your EU telecoms provider wants to run a credit check on you (I can't think why this particular scenario came to mind) it would have to go to a wholly EU owned and based agency to do so.
Actually I don't see why we need safe harbour at all. If you (for values of you which evaluate to EU citizen) deal with an EU company you should be able to hold that EU company responsible for any breaches of data you give it. If they take the decision to pass that on to another company, irrespective of where that company is, they'd better be sure that they can trust that company or else have T&Cs with it that allow them to recover any damages that they may have to pay out the customer. A further element should be transparency; before passing on data a company should ascertain any further transfers that will be made (no weaseling out with vague "may" clauses to unnamed "partners"), report back to the customer and receive positive opt-in before proceeding. (Actually there could be circumstances in which it would not be possible to decide up-front whether a transfer would be necessary; in that case it would be OK to say "may" in the first place providing they named the options and sought additional opt-in for any such transfers when the necessity arose.)
" the European Parliament called for it to be suspended.
However, the EU executive, the European Commission, was reluctant to do so and instead pinned its hopes on renegotiating the terms of the arrangement."
If the court follows Bot's advice renegotiation will be a lot easier & faster. Wasn't it one of Tricky Dicky's henchmen who said "when you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow"?
"The same could be said of Luddites too"
I think it was a fairly complicated situation. It was a movement which took place in different parts of the country so that the nature of the industries varied. What was happening was that various industries were moving from a domestic to a factory system, a move facilitated and, indeed, required by new technology (the new machines were often driven by non-human power sources, initially water wheels, which required them to be aggregated around the power sources).
The owners of the new factories were, in many cases, some of the more successful domestic operators. Clearly not everyone who operated a domestic business could set up a factory - there'd have been neither the work-force nor the markets available. The end result was undoubtedly increased employment in those industries that lasted for many generations.
The protests came from those who objected to becoming factory employees and were being put out of business by the more efficient machines in the factories but who didn't make the alternative transition to becoming factory owners themselves. At least that's what I make out of the evidence I've looked at.
"I think it's extremely relevant, because it goes to the heart of the sort of society we want to have."
A mature economy or society, much like a mature ecological community should surely have many different niches so there should be room for settled employment, freelancing and casual employment. Each has its advantages (to both engagers and workers) in the appropriate situation. What we need, as a society, is to ensure that all those niches are recognised, understood and kept in balance.
Take a moment to remember that other, natural stutterer, Patrick Campbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Campbell,_3rd_Baron_Glenavy
The collections of his articles include a couple of items about his encounters with another stutterer in Dublin. It's probably essential to have heard the man himself to appreciate them but they always have me laughing uncontrollably whenever I read them.
Edit. The two encounters with Theo I'm thinking of are the dinner party & the one set up by his editor about archaeological remains. If anyone has a reference to any others I'd love to hear of it.
It's beyond belief that T-Mobile would even think of handing the ritual fraud monitoring gig to Experian. It may well be that the latter offered to do it cut price or even for free as it was their problem in the first place. But surely the likely reaction should have been predictable. What were they thinking - no, were they even thinking?
"It's an election."
And as the saying goes, it doesn't matter who you vote for you always get a politician.
With our unelected upper house in the UK there should be an opportunity to fix this. Instead of the usual political appointees there should be ex officio places for representatives of the chartered professional bodies, Royal Society etc. As things stand there are a few members of the HoL who have real world qualifications and experience but largely because they also have political affiliations. Having ex officio representation would ensure that there would be far more systematic provision.
"I have been repeating for years now that the only surefire way to prevent patent trolling from even starting is to tie the amount claimable to the revenue of the company."
No. It's a perfectly legitimate business model to develop something and licence it to others providing that the something is a genuine innovation. The problem here is the granting of patents to something that isn't innovative or that is obvious.
As far as S/W patents go, given any particular problem to be solved most of the time most developers will come up with the same solution or, at worst, one of a few alternatives and move on to the next line of code. Then along comes some smartarse who applies for a patent to do what a stack of others have done already. The patent offices should require evidence that the proposed patent solves something for which is recognised as a previously unsolved problem; such evidence might be peer-reviewed papers discussing the problem (and not strawman papers published by the proposed patent's claimants).
And the patent office that lets crap patents through should be liable for costs along with the troll.
"Yet no matter how much people say they care about privacy and security, (or insist that they do on the internets), in practice, they just don't put their money where their mouths are."
Some people still take security seriously. When my daughter started a new job a few months ago she was issued with a company laptop and phone. The laptop was all set up with a VPN (she lives & works about 200 miles from the office and spends much of her time on site) which is used not only to access the office computer networks but is also used for conference calls. I've no doubt its drive is encrypted. And the phone is a BB of some variety. But then she handles a good deal of data which will be subject to a whole series of different regulatory regimes.
Whatever the mass-market might want there's a serious business need for devices made where security is taken seriously. There's even a possibility that the mass market could flip and make security a must-have; NSA & GCHQ are doing a good marketing job in this respect.
If they annoy Google sufficiently there could be scope for some really interesting moves here. Such as Amazon first appearing on the 200th page of a Google search for any product or an online Google store.
In fact, if you add this to the rise of ad blockers a change of direction could suit Google very well.
Apple might be a different matter. I can't see them wanting to sell competing products but for non-competing products there could well be scope for order online, collect from the Apple store.
"And why wasn't the T-Mobile DB cleaned up after the credit checks were run? That would ensure minimal customer exposure to attack?"
Exactly this. Or are they trying to tell us that they handled nearly a million applications a day (the breach is said to have run for about 16 days and there were 15 million records stolen).
"You can prove that you are the bank by getting them to phone you back on your bank number. It's pretty certain that if you phone a bank, the person you end up speaking to works for the bank."
There's actually a well-known scam based on this. The scammer puts a recording of a dial tone on the line to fake having hung up and then an accomplice takes over the call after the mark has gone through the motions of calling back. Ring-back verification only works if you call back on a different line.
"There really is no answer to this one, as eventually one side has to trust the other, but the banks are aware of this"
They show no indication of such awareness. The proof that they expect you to offer is the sort of information a scammer would need to impersonate you. It's no different to a faux website at www.somebnk.com collecting passwords from a mistyped URL. The onus has to be on the originator of the call.
As to your challenge there are three responses to this
(a) it's the banks' problem - they should have solved it before they started making the calls;
(b) you have an agreed set of information which they will use to identify themselves and which is different to that which you use to identify yourself, a solution so blindingly obvious that even the USPO should be able to reject a patent application;
(c) absent any such arrangement a few moment's thought should reveal to you an obvious technique which you can apply unilaterally, which works equally well with passwords if you're not sure the site is genuine and which will actually impede the fraudster so long as everybody doesn't start using it.
"My wife works in a high street bank"
Stop!
You have the answer right there.
High street banks should be training their customers to resist frauds.
But do they? No they train them to fall for frauds.
They have digital marketing companies <spit/> send out emails which bear all the signs of phishing emails by purporting to be from the bank but are clearly not from the bank's domain and which include links which are also not to the bank's domain.
They phone customers and expect the customer they phoned to prove their identity without making the slightest provision to authenticate that they really are the bank.
And yet they, of all people, have most to lose. The marketing people are in charge which is another way of saying the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
"complaining to Microsoft won't help"
You know that, I know that. We also know not to fall for the scam. But we're talking about people who did fall for it so it's not surprising that they complain to Microsoft. They're probably the people who call 999 or 911 when their interwebs go down & they can't twat or facebitch.
You know the noise the TV used to make just before the mobile rang? A couple of weeks ago we were in the pub & that noise kept coming over the speakers. The landlord said it was because he was using his phone to play the music. He normally used his iPad but it turned out he'd been one of the early adopters of the borked update. I reminded him of the saying: the early bird catches the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.
@Symon
I know they're emitted by trees and shrubs in nature; I'm a botanist by training. The point of this paper is that they've discovered abiotic isoprenes being generated at the ocean surface. Short of an hitherto unknown abiotic photosynthetic process they must be derived from some organic material. What might that be?
"The Northern hemisphere jet stream is being disrupted by something"
Disrupted from what? How long has the existence of the jet stream been known? What records exist to show what its "normal" pattern might be?
Most of the things which we can measure now are so recently discovered that our total knowledge of them in relation to the length of the current interglacial amounts to buggerall and yet people keep making this sort of statement.
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