Posts by royston_vasey

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

So if you don't trust the app, you won't download it. If you do trust it, it won't work very well. Looks like a strategy of herd immunity is still with us.

As HMRC's quarterly deadline for online VAT filing looms, biz dogged by 'technical difficulties'

Free Alternative?

I've used the VitalTax extension for Excel (https://vitaltax.uk) which seems to work OK.

Sex robot forum venue 'encrypted in a poem'

Re: wrong approach?

Perhaps you should have tried Facebook. Then you could poke them.

Can ad biz’s LEAN avert ADPOCALYPSE?

Maybe, or maybe they'd value the feedback about what people think oftheir ad without obscuring the signal with a load of noise?

This could go further. How about a "rate this ad" option? It would be compulsory(non -compliant ads would be blocked in the browser) and it would give feedback to the carrier of the advertising as well as the advertiser. If an ad really upset users, it would get bad feedback. If not there would be no feedback and if it was well liked, it may even get some positive feedback. This feedback could then be used to develop some heuristics to determine what end users find acceptable rather than the IAB defining it.

Advertisers would be able to see what was acceptable and what wasn't and deign ads accordingly. Web sites could set the level of acceptability to users that they would accept from advertisers. This would be a much more nuanced system than the one proposed.

Hillary Clinton says for crypto 'maybe the back door is the wrong door'

I have a plan. I think it will take $1bn to run this project and take around 10 years to complete. I'll get started just as soon as I receive the money ☺

Free Windows 10 could mean the END for Microsoft and the PC biz

This is just MS changing its business model to exploit the existing range of applications written for Windows and give up charging for the OS. It's not unheard of amongst their competitors. They just needed to work out how to get from where they are know to a more advantageous (to them) position.

So,

Step 1: MS corralls the broad range of applications currently available for desktop Windows into an App Store.

Step 2: Give the OS away to maximise the number of devices compatible with the Windows App Store

Step 3: MS takes a cut from each chargeable download from the App Store (just like other well known companies do).

Result - business model changed. MS Revenue diverted from the OS to a tax on 3rd party developers.

There it is! Philae comet lander found in existing Rosetta PICS

The lander was "in the air" after it bounced?

Facebook pays INFINITELY MORE UK corp tax than in 2012

The loophole seems to be mostly around valuing intellectual property rights sales between related companies. A tax minimising organisation will register the IP in the lowest tax country and charge as much as they can get away with for the IP to minimise their total tax liability.

One mechanism would be to tax all IP transfers in and out of the EU at a standard rate. This has to be EU wide otherwise customers will simply buy grey market goods from elsewhere in the EU (well, they can for software, not so much for a cup of overpriced coffee). Of course, they can still buy from outside the EU, but then you put a tariff on anything that attracts this EU-wide tax and pass the problem to customs officers to police.

It'll never happen because we haven't got tax harmonisation across the EU.

This flashlight app requires: Your contacts list, identity, access to your camera...

A few tweaks to Data Protection legislation could help here. Make it illegal to collect data that's unnecessary for the application to function correctly & a lot of this would go away overnight. Sure there'd be a few scumbag developers who would add functions that require all the extra data they don't really need to get round the laws, but it could at least deal with the lazy developers. The nefarious ones will always be out there anyway.