Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Royal Mail Special Delivery is specifically mentioned as a permissible transmission channel for everything up to Top Secret"
In this case we don't know the marking nor whether it was Special Delivery. For all we know they were sent 2nd class in which case they might be delivered tomorrow.
"ICO should issue the maximum fine for a data breach"
It would make no difference in this case as fines just go to HMG. Now a fine to be paid personally and not reimbursable by the depts. Perm Sec or minister. That might have some effect. For one thing it would be made clear all the way down the chain that this would be a sacking offence.
'You don't get it. The can be no "air-gap" with the PATRIOT Act. It applies to any US owned company - and any companies they own - US or not.'
I think it's you who didn't get it.
Contract with a friendly non-US owned company to provide the service in a non-US country on that company's non-US-owned servers as a franchise with carefully chosen T&Cs under that non-US country's law. Note that: a company not owned by a US company; such things actually exist.
Any court in the US can bleat as much as it wants but the US-owned company has no access to the service provider's servers and can't have any court-mandated request fulfilled as the T&Cs prevent the service provider from doing so and the US court's jurisdiction doesn't cover those.
For Amazon, who presumably would be thinking in terms of running it on their own cloud, it might be a bitter pill to swallow, and it would mean sharing the profits with a franchise partner. But it would be doable.
"What doesn't work on the HSBC site?"
Working & being officially supported are two different things. I used to bank with HSBC for both business & personal. I don't know if it's changed but their credit-card settling process used to look a bit Heath Robinsonish. AFAICT it was handed over from one system to another mid-process & not hiding the join 100% successfully. One night this hand-over consistently failed. I thought I'd give them a friendly heads-up that they might have a problem, maybe some overnight job getting in the way. Of course they want to know what S/W you're using & their instant response was "we don't support that". This was later confirmed in writing by them. So for that and other incivilities such as closing my most convenient local branch I sacked them.
As of a few weeks ago HSBC group - including FD - still had the same restriction listed on their web-site. Even Barclays list Linux as supported. So although First Direct may work OK with Linux as soon as there's a problem, even at their end, you''ll find they don't want to know.
"Back when owning a generic dot com domain was supposed to be the ticket to success, there was the famous crash and burn Pets.com. I've never visited that site before, but I did just now to check on it before making this post. There's no site at pets.com, it's just a re-direct to another domain that I've never heard of that sells pet supplies."
A few minutes with whois shows that pets.com was last modified late last year. The other domain was registered a few years ago. So it's possible that the pets.com domain was acquired fairly recently by the owners of other site who elected to keep their existing site - and existing customer recognition - and do the redirect as a quick fix. Not saying that that's what happened but you can't draw too many conclusions from a redirected name.
"This one is going to be particularly hard to fix"
Really? I paused reading when I got to the sentence that said fixes were available, installed them which took less than a minute, carried on reading and then went to the comments section where, of course, I found exactly the sort of comment I expected.
Write to your local MP. Suggest they get together with various members of their friends & family of a reasonably wide range of age groups. Get each one to check his smartphone for apps which use encryption. Ask them what their reaction would be if those apps were made illegal. Point out that the likely results would make the Cameron policy the shortest political suicide note in history (your MP should get the reference).
Also point out that criminals, including terrorists, disregard laws. Although the MP's constituents would be affected by such legislation and considerably angered by it the terrorists wouldn't. They'd have sufficient resources to roll their own apps; the strong encryption genie has been out of the bottle for a couple of decades now and it isn't going back, ever. So all that will have been achieved is a large bunch of unhappy voters and a smaller bunch of uninconvenienced terrorists.
AKA Tom King. It looks like wonkpedia's account may need to be rewritten:
"King's career in the Cabinet may appear odd to some observers due to his many quick moves between departments. The moves were a reflection of his ability to 'master his brief' quickly, and as successive crises hit the government it was King who was moved to fill the gap. King never had a strong public profile compared to other members of the Cabinet, but neither did he draw attention to himself by elementary errors or public gaffes."
Of course there's an alternative explanation of why he got moved round so much...
Similar experience except, being a bit more public spirited I asked them to hang on and then put the phone to one side. I reckon that whilst they were hanging on they weren't pestering anyone else. But I'm sure there's a don't-even-bother list that gets sold to spammers.
"businesses demanding your contact details"
Lie.
In the case of UK registered businesses Companies House is your friend - Webcheck will give you their registered office which is an excellent contact address to use. Unfortunately it's had the .gov.uk makeunder & isn't as easy to find as it used to be.
"Well no, then again, the absolutely last thing you want to do is bring professional extortionists into a business model."
Let's examine that a little.
Maybe you haven't had the experience I've had of being in a taxi that's crashed*. If you had & had been injured then you'd need some compensation for loss of earnings or any out-of-pocket costs arising from that. As the taxi driver himself might not be able to afford this you'd rely on the driver's insurance.
The driver's insurance costs will in turn be based on certain assumptions. If the driver is assumed to be involved in the sort of mileage and passenger carrying levels of a private motorist then the insurance company will be rating the risk as much less than that to which they were really carrying**. And in that case they may refuse to pay and you'd be seriously out of pocket. That may be a risk you wish to take but most taxi passengers probably won't agree with you.
*No injuries to me or the other passengers. I'm not sure about the car he T-boned; it was amazing how quickly another taxi arrived to remove all possible witnesses.
**The alternative, of course, is that the insurance companies spread the taxi drivers' risks across all motorists so that the many of us who aren't taxi drivers subsidise those who are.
The comment on the New Scientist report at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26844-human-ancestors-got-a-grip-on-tools-3-million-years-ago.html#.VMIwqv6sXTo give this a different slant. The squeeze grip is related to climbing (my first reaction to reading the report here was much the same) and the precision grip has a possible alternative origin in peeling fruit.
"So you're already committing to a platform that isn't released, stabilised, proven or even gained a mentionable user base?"
It makes sense. His company's customers are looking at kit with an EoL in, say 2030.* W2K has EoL in 2020. 8.* has EoL when? Of course they're going to want something that has a long life in front of it.
* Industrial kit has to run for a long time, that's why folk are finding it difficult to get away from XP and when I retired in 2006 my client had industrial printers still going strong which, as far as I could make out, had W95 embedded.
"Why bother using labour-saving technology in the first place if we don't want to save people from labour?"
The problem then is how to distribute the products of the technology. The employment route achieves this by paying employees who use the payments to buy the products and services which they and other employees produced.
'"""Windows 7 doesn’t work with Microsoft app-store apps."""
They say it like it's a bad thing.'
Or as if they couldn't provide an app-store for W7 apps.
What is this app-store thing anyway? Is it something like Synaptic which I can run to install most of the stuff I need on Debian?
True. But the sentence before the one you quoted reads "Windows 10 will be delivered as a service to offer a safer, innovative and updated experience for the supported lifetime of the device." This is the one that introduces two doubts.
1. What does "as a service" mean? As long as you keep paying us?
2. What does "supported lifetime" mean?
Until these are clarified people are not going to drop their long-held habit of distrusting Microsoft and all the suits who sail in her.
'The problem is that tricky phrase, "for the supported lifetime of the device".'
I have a VM running W7. It started off as what seemed a reasonable size for a VM which only runs one application for which I don't have as good a substitute on Linux. However every time it got patched it grew and grew. Now, despite applying the "clean system files" option (or whatever it's called) firing up the VM brings up error messages about not having enough room for swap files.
So maybe "the supported lifetime of the device" means "the time it takes to bloat over all the drive it was installed on".
