Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"While I agree that catch-alls can be a problem, in small service companies they can be a life (company) saver."
There's a difference between external mail and internal mail in this respect. And the larger the company the greater the probability that there will be legitimate internal mail that's above the monitor's level of responsibility.
If you think you need a catch-all make sure everyone knows about it and whose will be reading it. At least anybody who's sending anything sensitive (personal or business) can either take extra care with addresses or choose not to use email. Shock-horror - other methods of communication exist!
"Suppose the emails contained evidence of some crime that was later committed?"
I'll see your straw man and raise you. Suppose they contained confidential company information that would affect share prices? Difficult to avoid suspicion, even if innocent, if there were then suspicious share trades.
The fact is that intra company email can contain all manner of confidential information. It could be customer or employee personal data. It could be product plans. It could be results of clinical trials. All sorts of things above a support desk pay grade and operation of the email system shouldn't depend on such an employee opening it to route it correctly. It should bounce and give the sender a chance to re-route it correctly, sight unseen by anyone else.
'If you mentally block out the word "digitalising" and replace it with "computerising" then it all works so much better.'
That doesn't work here.
Consider:
'the company is also winning "digital" contracts, too – including the digitisation of a number of train companies' front-end ticketing systems.' Aren't these systems already computerised and, therefore digital?
or:
"we have a lot of demand to digitalise the front end of those legacy systems – rather than full legacy modernisation."
and especially:
"Moran believes digital and legacy are not mutually exclusive."
In order to make sense of this one has to assume that either these systems aren't already running on digital computers or that she has some previously unknown meaning of "digital" in mind.
Did she get parachuted in from some entirely different industry?
"the pedestrians should be walking on the side facing traffic"
Common sense needed here.
On a blind corner walk on the outside of the band irrespective of whether you're facing the traffic or not. Cyclists, of course, have their own technique in this situation. They just barrel round the corner in the middle of the road.
"Will the subject province of Great Britain have to make any changes to its networks and data retention to comply with its European government's new statutes and dictates?"
Well, I hope so because up until now our elected representatives have been doing a crap job of looking after our interests.
There are a couple of likely outcomes.
One is that the mutual incompatibility of the requirements would become its downfall in court. A company builds the encryption its customers require. Some investigator attempts to invoke the decryption requirement. The company goes to court with any number of expert witnesses to state that the requirements of the law are mutually impossible. Based on they argue that they've complied with one and must then be excused of complying with the other. There'd be scope for pouring on a certain amount of ridicule such as comparing the bill with attempting to outlaw gravity.
The other is that the US loses its IT industry.
'Perhaps the best response to this bill is "Please publish your online banking details.". The idiots will wonder what you are talking about and deny that it is relevant'
And they'd be right. Because apart from being able to decrypt on demand for law officers the vendor would be required to protect the data from everyone else. The fact that these requirements are mutually impossible is beside the point as far as the authors are concerned.
"I wonder whether these congresspeople ever think their ideas through to the end. If they insist on weakened encryption, this encryption will not only be broken by law enforcement, but by criminals ranging from individual to corporate."
That's not a problem in the minds of the bill's authors. The vendor just has to provide encryption that criminals can't break but they, the vendors, can. How they do that is the vendors' problem: "Nothing in this Act may be construed to authorize any government officer to require or prohibit any specific design ... to be adopted by any covered entity."
Given that they found nothing "useful" on the phone leaves the claim that it was cracked open to question to anyone who takes an evidence-based view of such matters. So does the fact that they haven't disclosed how they're supposed to have cracked it. Or who did it except that it wasn't the company that commentators expected it to be.
They have retreated from a situation which worked out unexpectedly bad for them in PR terms and done so with face intact.
"protestant-ism (or whatever the word is) was created purely so Henry VIII could divorce his missus and get it on with a new bit of fluff."
Serious historical naivety at work here! Luther? Wycliffe? Lollards? Divorce or annulment? Dynastic considerations (bits of fluff were not a problem; lack of a legitimate son was, given the risk of plunging back into the decades of dynastic warfare which preceded the Tudors taking the throne)? Henry's own opposition to Protestantism?
It would be a good idea for the bill to clarify that email providers are trustees of their customers' emails. The pretext of the Microsoft case AIUI is that the emails are part of Microsoft's own business records. Clarifying the trust issue would ensure that the Microsoft grab would endanger the entire US trustee industry: everything from safe deposit companies to the financial industry. I doubt any US court would countenance doing that.
The data exporter must remain fully accountable to the data subject in the jurisdiction where the subject provided the data as provided by the legislation of that jurisdiction.
Nothing less should be acceptable, nothing more is needed.
It's very simple. It applies equally to exports to all countries. It requires no international agreements. If the exporter doesn't think that holding the data in the intended destination can't enable them to provide such accountability they have a straightforward option: don't export data.
"the deputy chief of the Home Office was ordered out of a parliamentary committee hearing for failing to give proper answers"
Even better, AIUI, he was told to go and find out and come back with the answers by the end of the day. I hope the day in question was specified to avoid wriggle room.
"It was horrible for the weavers who were thrown out in the street."
Back in the early C19th it wasn't the weavers who were the Luddites. It was the cloth dressers or croppers who finished cloth for the clothiers - it was the clothiers who were the weavers. Under the factory system there were far more weavers then before. And as far as I can see the factory owners were largely those clothiers who could see what was happening and sold their farming interests to finance building mills; at least one of my 3xgreat grandfather's brothers was one (not that he was successful).
"Ask the luddites. They faced this same issue. Maybe you can learn from history."
It's an interesting matter. It wasn't quite a single movement and it the issues weren't necessarily simple. The outcomes varied.
For instance in the East Midlands one company that wanted to mechanise lace production was driven out of Loughborough by Luddism and moved to Tiverton in Devon. Workers who wished to remin with the company walked to Devon. Tiverton acquired a mechanised lacemaking industry at the expense of Nottingham's industry.
In the West Riding the Luddites were one particular branch of the textile industry, the croppers. Historically the industry had depended on clothiers, home-based family businesses carding and spinning raw wool and weaving it, often combining this with part-time farming. The clothiers depended on others for finishing, fullers, who mechanised earlier and cropping. As mechanisation extended the croppers tried to resist. AFAICT the numbers involved were tiny but reading between the lines of the usually politicised accounts they seem to have been trying to hold the clothiers to ransom. Some of the clothiers sold their farming interests and set up factories with varying degrees of success. Some moved out of the industry into others, quarrying for instance. Many must have ended up as factory workers. And the consequence, from the mid C19th to the mid C20th far more people were employed in textiles in the factory system than there ever were in the domestic system. Employment per se might not have been as significant a factor as remuneration and status.
And the moral is? Search me. Probably that the results are unpredictable. The set of circumstances that led change in the textile industries to raise numbers employed might not happen in the IT industry.
"Just as the purpose of marketing is not to inform customers. It is for the vendor's benefit, not the customer's benefit."
In some cases it can be very difficult to ascertain whose benefit marketing are for other than their own. They seem to assume that their pestering will not lose my custom. This benefits neither myself as customer nor their employers as vendor.
"How does that work?"
Second hand dealers buy books in bulk for bugger all. Some of them take library disposals. House clearances. Car boots. Remainders. Whatever. They can then afford to pass them on for very little. In fact many of them can sell for a nominal amount because they have enough margin in "post and package" charges.
"Sorry but you are plain wrong. That black and white enough for you."
Hi there, A/C.
Are you a judge who's had this case to decide? Because if you're not neither your view nor Stallman's nor Ubuntu's nor Linus's nor my opinion counts.
The contention on Ubuntu's side seems to be that loading a module does not create a derived work of the kernel, it's just two works sitting alongside each other in memory. Until we get a court ruling on that we don't know whether it's right or wrong. Stallman may have been responsible for the GPL but even he can't determine how the court will rule on the facts of a specific case.
"Ubuntu runs Firefox just fine. You think if it didn't, no one would have noticed? Your fault finding doesn't impress me"
Way back, when Ubuntu first went to Upstart, it became more difficult to diagnose incompatibilities between H/W & drivers or config settings. It was that issue with regard to graphics that pushed me off Ubuntu onto Debian. Of course when Debian Wheezy goes out of LTS and it's wall-to-wall systemd that particular solution will have been lost.
So I believe the OP. "Works for me" is not an example of skilled fault finding but unfortunately it always seemed to be the staple of a few voluble Linux fan-boys.
