Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"You could say maybe he's a dickhead for suing but not visiting those web sites etc"
Fair enough comment for that. But did he download and read the spec sheet from AMD before he bought. If the manufacturer's spec matches what he's bought then how can he complain? I bought the 1.6 turbo - why wasn't I given the 2.6 V6 4-wheel drive? Should I sue?
"It says nothing about open source whatsoever. If you *want* to circulate open source code, then nothing in this text prevents you."
I thought that at first. After a few seconds consideration I'm not so sure. The principle of the GPL is that if you distribute an executable you must provide the source. There have been a few instances of companies building products around GPLed code, modifying it & then distributing binaries without source. Although it doesn't stop you circulating code if you want to it seems to give a hiding place for companies who don't want to but should under the terms of the licence.
A while ago I had an email like that from someone I'd corresponded with a year or two earlier. Apparently some people from her address book had been spammed with one of those "help I'm stranded in foreign parts" scams. She wasn't sure who'd been spammed so she sent the email out to everyone on her list, about 200 addresses IIRC. I wrote back to her to advise her how to do it properly next time.
Oh dear, I've just remembered, I forgot to include her in my change of address emails earlier this year. What a shame.
As far as I can make out the situation was that Schrems was accusing Facebook of playing fast and loose with data beyond what it was provided for, i.e. beyond Schroepfe's "clear legal grounds to make sure that your feed isn’t limited to only the people who are also in the EU". His Austrian legal system had punted him to the Irish authorities who tried a "nothing to do with us, squire" on the basis that it was an EU Commission matter because of Safe Harbour, which was their baby. The ECJ kicked it back to them taking out Safe Harbour as collateral damage.
It's up to the Irish to investigate Shrems' complaint to see if it has merit. That could limit FB's use of the data beyond its nominal intended purpose but assuming that intended purpose was to enable FB's customers to blurt out whatever they choose to whoever they choose wherever they may be it's difficult to see that Safe Harbour could ever have been involved with that.
OTOH if a company based in the EU is shovelling customers' or, worse still, employees'* personal data to the US they have a real problem.
*They might stand a chance of defending a model clause as part of a customer contract but I can't see anybody getting away with making it condition of employment; "constructive dismissal" is the phrase that comes to mind.
"Enforcement against non-compliance with the Safe Harbour court ruling kicks in early next year."
So expect another trip to the ECJ next year if this is the best they can do.
Somebody in another thread mentioned groupthink in connection with TalkTalk. Clearly something similar is happening here if they think there's a way of rebuilding it short of a blinding revelation in the US govt.
"But in the UK class actions don't exist, and the burden of proof will be quite difficult for individuals to claim compensation"
However a host of customers wanting to leave & claiming in the small claims court against any attempt to extract fees could be a different matter.
Would they try to defend? If they tried and failed would they keep trying? If they overlooked one or two and ignored the judgements they might have a procession of bailiffs rolling up to the front door to seize bits & pieces such as the recepionists' PC. If a couple of well presented cases defeated them they could look forward to haemorrhaging customers.
"With 4m customers what is the probability that in any one given week someone will be subject to credit card fraud?"
You are correct in this, there's no evidence that TT were responsible. However:
"What is with the witch hunt by The Register?"
The response he got from TT deserves condemnation on its own (de)merits. They have failed abominably in their duty of care to their customers and yet are still trying to hold them to contracts. It's probably not going to do them much good in the long run. At the very least it keeps bad publicity in the media for longer. At the most they'll die the death of a thousand cuts in the small claims court and multiple Trading Standards investigators climbing all over them. The contrast between the way they've handled this and the way VW are handling their problems couldn't be greater.
@ Commswonk
You may well be right about groupthink. This is why the CEO of any company in this position should be expected to walk without compensation (VW got the first bit right). It provides them with a big incentive to keep a close watch on what;s going on in the company and to have that little worry that the person who's "being negative" might actually be the one between you and the one way exit.
If Microsoft are so good at this AI stuff why is it that they can't trap "click here or your Hotmail/Live/Outlook/Whatever account will be closed" spam when sent to their Hotmail/Live/Outlook/Whatever customers? The number of these that get through would be good evidence that they're not defending their trademarks if they ever tried to get a passing off case into court.
Perhaps one of the reasons big companies aren't innovating is that there's only a limited scope for profitable innovation at any particular time.
The legitimate options for making money from innovations seem to be providing a new service that can be charged for at a profitable level or advertising. If a business like Uber can't turn a profit the first of those seems to offer very little. So is this what the internet has come down to - conning advertisers that its worth paying good money to piss off potential customers? Or as a medium for criminal activity?
"but what good is it when it's all shit?"
It depends what's all shit. As it happens I spent the greater part of the afternoon trying to work out a problem with a Windows 7 laptop owned by a friend of my wife's. It had been OK until a few days ago, when it was working all morning & not since. Neither IE nor Firefox worked - the former came up blank with "not responding"on the title bar, the latter displayed nothing, just a busy cursor for a few seconds. Internet connection was there - ping to Google worked and my Mint laptop had no problems. Ran virus scan. Ran Windows diagnostics which couldn't identify a problem. Disabled firewall. Re-enabled firewall. Nothing. Eventually I removed the adaptor for a wireless mouse, rebooted and got a major hang - nothing responding but the fan working overtime. Cut the power, replaced the dongle, rebooted & got the screen offering safe mode, went for a normal reboot & the thing started working properly for no obvious reason.
Yup. All shit.
"Not least an OS shouldn't ever 'support cloud storage'"
It depends what you mean by "support" and, indeed, "cloud storage".
In a lot of cases the latter just means some form of remote synchronisation. ownCloud and Kolab are both OSS S/W which provide Linux clients for this and Dropbox is one of several commercial products which do the same. As the OS supports these clients then it's reasonable to describe it as supporting this style of cloud storage as a client in the same way as saying it supports a web browser or an office suite. And don't forget older flavours of syncing such as rsync.
At a more fundamental level of support, and taking "cloud storage" to mean remote storage in general, Linux has both NFS and CIFS available at kernel level which can let a client integrate remote file systems directly into its own tree.
Looking at it from the other side any Linux system can be set up to offer ownCloud, Kolab, NFS and/or CIFS as a service. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dropbox service was also running on top of Linux - in fact I'd be surprised to hear that it wasn't. Linux can also host VMs and containers to provide other cloud services.
The OP's claim was complete nonsense typical of the once common but now almost silent crowd of Microsoft boosters.
'"Yea, got that covered too. External hard drives with encrypted content stored at family members houses "
What do you do about the hideously slow upload rate that your ISP provides? well mine does anyway.'
Whaaa? External drives! Unplug them & take them there, no ISP involved. Bandwidth similar to a van-load of tapes on the motorway. The bandwidth will be fine, it's just the latency he has to worry about.
"There's no problem with cloud storage as the shareware OS doesn't support that."
Your prejudices are showing again. Apart from the fact that you don't know the huge difference between OSS & shareware take a look at https://owncloud.org/ https://kolab.org/overview https://www.dropbox.com/install?os=lnx for a start.
I wonder what OS Dropbox's servers run on. And AWS...
You are, I think, correct in your first point.
However it's more likely that the bitching is coming from the people who put their trust in Microsoft. They've now been kicked in the face twice haven't you noticed all those posts in other threads from people telling us they've been MS stalwarts but are now moving to Mint because of W10? The rest of us are just standing on the sidelines shouting "Told you so!".
" Linux desktops still look like they were designed by 7 year olds."
Those must be the ones still trying to look like Windows for Teletubbies. You do realise, don't you, that with Linux you not only have a choice* of desktop systems but you can also theme them to a greater or lesser extent.
*If you're a Windows user - or a marketing shill who's probably actually using a Mac - you may need to look this up in a dictionary.
"She and all the other MP's who vote in favour of it and anyone who can access it have all their data recorded and posted openly on the internet for us all to see."
That would, of course, include any communication you might have with your MP about this or any other topic.
'Unless of course they are using "perfect forward secrecy" schemes such as ECDHE. Oh, except we heard a few weeks back that this had been broken anyway.'
IIRC it was the original DH that had been broken for some values of primes & elliptic curve was the way forward - providing you don't use the NSA's preferred EC, of course.
"It's a fact that a lot of criminals are stupid"
The sort who advertised on Craigslist for someone to hack his local court house, certainly. And many who the security services should be targeting are also stupid* but the prime targets aren't. Assuming the entire population is suspect, which is the basis for indiscriminate bulk surveillance, simply defies the presumption of innocence and that's the basis of a free society.
*And it wasn't particularly bright of some US bloke who explained how a drone attack had been made on the basis of some numpty's online activity.
"but presumably can now sue the Commission for any costs in relocating to Bulgaria or Argentina"
What makes you think you can sue anybody for the costs of not breaking the law?
Mandatory car analogy: if the police pull you up & find that there's a fault on your vehicle do you really think you could sue them for the costs of getting it fixed?
I've now read through the links purporting to show weaknesses in iMessage. They're dated a couple of years ago. In the recent court case Apple said that they could previously intercept messages but not with the current iOS versions. So is the Quarkslab analysis still relevant to current iMessage protocols?
@ Grikath
Who cares about average teens except average teens? HMG can ban all the shiny apps they want with no real effects except pissing off potential voters. If secure non-shiny alternatives exist they'll be used by anyone with the incentive and knowledge to do so. That, of course, includes those who HMG are most keen to eavesdrop on. Great idea, ruin the average punter's privacy to no useful end.
