Posts by anothercynic 1043 posts • joined 4 Dec 2014
If a device's MAC address is available to software (such as a Facebook app on your device), then yes, a fixed MAC address can be combined with other data sets to start tracking you through indirect means.
Add to this Google's proposed Orion WiFi system (on the network side), which will inevitably include MAC addresses (Calling-Station-Id in RADIUS) in the data they'll capture and the same will be the case. Public WiFi networks (like the ubiquitous BT OpenZone, Fon, Gogo Wireless, TheCloud, etc etc etc) rely on MAC addresses as well, and they can, if they choose to monetise that information, combine your device with other data to again create a profile of where you've been at what time.
This information is pervasive and constant, and it is used surprisingly often. So yes, randomised MAC addresses will break that link, at least to a degree that makes aggregation of data more difficult.
I didn't say that either. Read my original post again. CAREFULLY. Then tell me again when you lose access to your Apple ID and you can't log into anything anymore... and anything that supports SIWA despite not being an Apple service.
This is an article about authentication and authorization technology (i.e. 'Sign in with Apple'). It is, given the short notice, a big problem for hundreds of thousands of users. *You* may not see the problem here, but I do (given how I worked on single-sign-on systems for the better part of a decade and know both the benefits and the pitfalls of them).
If you choose to trust a third party with your login details, you better trust them to behave like adults and not get their users stuck in a petty p***ing contest. Apple is choosing not to behave like an adult (not that Epic covered themselves in glory either, but they're not the ones cutting off access to SIWA), and thus, this is an IT and legal issue. It's stupid, petty and will for some be the last straw to tell Apple where to stick their ecosystem and their hardware.
I don't play games, so Apple GameCenter, Apple Arcade, Epic etc don't affect me, but then again I absolutely categorically choose to not put my eggs in the 'log in with a third party ID' basket either. I don't trust Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple with that... I'll stick to a password vault.
While Google shows ferry routes, there's no ferry route showing betwixt Zeebrugge and Dublin (or Rosslare, or Cork for that matter) for those superferries meant to bypass the UK.
That said, I'm glad to see Ireland *has* done its homework and has alternatives to having freight destined from/for it transshipped via Brexit Island (until 2021 the more efficient way rather than going via Roscoff/Cherbourg).
There was a massive disagreement between TNMOC and BPT a few years back, big enough to lose BPT a trustee or two who were instrumental in getting BPT enough money to continue its existence (and actually persuade BT to cede the full site to the trust)... BPT's argument was that they now had to be commercially minded to not disadvantage other commercial businesses on the site, despite TNMOC having a very close and beneficial relationship with BPT before that. BPT even fired several of their veteran tour guides who continued to tell people to visit TNMOC as well for Colossus and the other history of BP and how it relates to modern computing. It was a mess.
I visited the 'improved' BPT once after that, and as much as it was a slick experience, I vowed to never go back and do a TNMOC tour instead (which I did after my BPT one). It's sad for many people who work for BPT, but for the management I have *zero* compassion.
While I agree, the other side is that Amazon customers could also start writing to Jeff Bezos en masse to protest the treatment of the warehouse workers. His email is still active, and while he has the 'executive customer service' people deal with complaints, when people, who've been Amazon customers for years (or decades even), start writing and saying "look dude, this ain't cool, improve conditions", something *might* happen.
The sad thing is that it's not necessarily the people at the top who mandate this, but rather shitty middle managers who never should've been middle managers (i.e. who failed upwards) who decide to make life hell for their minions like a perverse version of the Stanford Prison Experiment (Google it, you'll immediately notice the similarities).
It's worth remembering that while 52% of Amazon's turnover is from warehouses, the margins are miniscule compared to AWS (which makes up 12% of turnover)... AWS is the profit driver (58% of income/profit before tax and investment). Looking at the latest Investopedia listing, North America has a *lot* to answer for in terms of working conditions (2/3 of Amazon's revenue is from its domestic market). 'International', which covers all other online/warehouse operations but *not* AWS, is a quarter of their business. Find activist investors in the US... drive it from the shareholder side as well (although, given Bezos gave investors the middle finger for years, who knows how that'll go).
There's lots to be said about the oddness of the situation surrounding the case in question, as is the oddness of how Trump practically ambushed the family with his "she's in the next room, do you want to talk to her" tactic. I hope the family get their justice even if it takes a while to get it.
Apparently there was a loophole in the regulations of the UK that govern diplomatic immunity. It has, according to the genius in charge at the FCO, been plugged and there continues to be negotiation over the case. But no, there *is* a case to answer, and the person in question will, if she ever leaves the US, be subject to a pretty little warrant of extradition from whatever country she happens to head to.
Have to agree here... Although it may have been useful for Paragon to have engaged with whoever has contributed filesystem drivers to the kernel before and asked "how do we do this best?"
That's how I got started contributing to open source efforts... Rather start off on a good note as a newbie than having your Nomex pants scorched.
The wastebin Mac Pro is surprisingly good and holds its value well. I recently had to upgrade away from mine to... the newest iMac at the time and the specs and prices were on par despite a 5 or 6 year difference. Performance of it was also grand. I was sad to have to give it up. If you're concerned about SSD storage wearing out, buy 1TB of USB 3.1 Samsung T5 storage in a credit-card-sized bundle and stick it into one of the Thunderbolt 3 ports in the back. You won't notice any difference really...
Ditto. Albeit for me, it wasn't a hard drive (or Seagate). For me it was a pair of prescription sunglasses by a brand so beloved by sports people and fashionistas the world over - OAKLEY.
Imagine dropping an eye-watering amount of moola for their top-end prescription sunglasses (*and* a standard pair of prescription glasses). Then, a year or three later, checking how I get the glasses refurbished and getting a "sorry, go speak to an eye specialist" answer (I'm paraphrasing) and *no* further information back. Try *everything*, from friends who work at said brand, to trying their various HQs (US, Europe, Asia, UK) and getting either *no* answer at all, or the same boilerplate message back.
I would've bought new frames and updated prescription glasses from them again if I'd had even the simplest "ok, yes, we do refurbish, but you will have to contact your local Oakley eye specialists as first point of call who'll take things further" email back. That would've been immensely helpful. Instead, Silhouette got my business the next time around.
Bonus is that Silhouette's prescription kit (sunnies or not) weighs even less than Oakley and is just as good (if not better), and that if you happen to break/damage something, they'll be delighted to tell you that they've got stock of parts all the way back to their first models. Will I carry the grudge against Oakley forever? Absolutely. Will I drop it if Oakley were to, for same reason, offer a sponsorship? Absolutely not. I don't want their kit, even if it's free. I'll happily continue to drop the money Silhouette asks for to keep my eyes happy purely because they have a level of customer service that Oakley once had and clearly no longer cares to.
You know what... as a customer of A&A's, I'm happy to continue to pay 'over the odds' for a service run by real IT specialists, who know what people want and how much they'll pay for it, and who provide absolutely excellent service. No poxy filtering either, nor bandwidth throttling. They have a bandwidth allocation for the lower-end services, but they are still vastly superior to BT, Talk Talk or any other organisation.
Ummm, partially. Airbus did agree that the pitot tubes freezing was part of the problem. The suppliers fixed it and everyone retrofitted heated pitot tubes to their Airbus jets. At least airspeed is no longer a disagree case (still happens, but at least less chance of it happening to *all three* tubes at the same time).
Here are some hints:
1) EASA and other certification authorities are part of the FAA's technical group who are evaluating everything Boeing has submitted. They're also part of the group that will provide input to say whether what Boeing has done is enough to convince the FAA that the plane is safe to fly. It's been a collaborative process.
2) Boeing expects to see their orders start to roll through for precisely that reason... older, more inefficient planes will see themselves turfed out to pasture much faster in order to take advantage of better fuel efficiency from the new planes. See British Airways and Qantas retiring their 747s, Qantas, Air France and Singapore Airlines re-evaluating their A380s and parking them in Victorville and Spain for storage (or possibly retirement). Once traffic picks back up, the A380 will return, but the 747 is toast. Delta is dumping their 767s and 777-200s in favour of newer jets. Someone like Southwest will absolutely be bringing in their MAXes to dump their older -500, -600 and -700s.
3) Yes and no. Some airlines (*ahem* Ryanair) have already renamed the jet in their data, so people aren't likely to cotton on that it's a newfangled MAX200 they're on, other airlines are more honest and intend to offer their customers alternatives, and intend to provide reassurance about the plane.
I personally am considering what happens when BA starts introducing the MAX (they've retired their A318 that flies to the US from London City) and they start phasing out their older A319/320/321s they inherited from BMI. Vueling and Iberia are likely to follow given that it's the common parent company (IAG) that made that commitment to Boeing.
A mix of the two. There is low appetite for the classic corporate road warriors to hit the road (the plane) to travel for business now that it's kind of proven that you can do conference calls with Zoom as effectively as spending 6 hours on planes, trains, and automobiles to do the same thing. Aviation analysts Atmosphere Research Group say that now is actually the perfect time to fly because airlines will be disinfecting the planes to yazoo, those who can avoid flying do just that, and you are likely to have a much nicer experience. That's debatable though.
As for the aviation professionals, some look at the recertification (and return to flight) of the MAX as being a good thing because, as others have succinctly pointed out in other MAX-related threads on here, it'll have had its innards deeply inspected, others are planning to avoid the MAX where they can for ideological reasons (Boeing management's horrific response primarily).
No, it's not, you're right, it shouldn't be an excuse for grown-ups. But unfortunately, it appears that many are being rather petty and not-grown-up about some things. Also, the advice in England wasn't quite plain enough. When you have the PM say one thing, Gove say another (and it's not his brief to start with), and then Hancock saying yet another thing (it *is* his brief but he neither backs up the PM nor provides clarity), then the public can be forgiven for thinking "what the hell, and who do I listen to?"
Mask advice *should* have been simple right from the start, not vacillating between "you should wear a mask, really, it protects everyone" (from the PM, who's actually *had* the disease and has finally realised that it's actually *serious*), to "yeah, but you don't really have to" (from Gove, who with his wife has fanned the fire of anti-mask-wearing sentiment), and everything inbetween. It should have provided in simple yet effective advice like the graphic shown below why wearing masks is important:
Illustration of why wearing masks help decrease the spread of the COVID-19
But that didn't happen. So people thumb their noses at it and get all passive aggressive with you when you wear one and look at them funny for not social distancing. There is a distinct trend that within government some factions in the same party are actively attempting to sabotage each other's efforts to be alternatively coherent (and evidence-based health-focused) or ideological (herd immunity for the win, only our besties get a look-in, or 'here, have a peerage my good man'). it leaves the members of the public confused, annoyed, and fed-up. Scotland has had consistency that England hasn't. That's the difference.
Consistent messaging from the government helps. That messaging in the early days of lockdown was *fine*. It worked. People complied. It all went south when a certain SpAd decided he'd travel 250 miles out of his way to 'find childcare' and then 'to test his eyesight'. That SpAd should have been fired on the spot and everyone would have continued to comply. But because high-ranking members of government couldn't be arsed, it set a bad precedent.
What was sorely missing was the government advice explaining *why* wearing a mask would help loosening the lockdown, *how* to wear a mask effectively (with or without glasses), and to maintain social distancing. All that advice never showed up. The rubbish three-word tag lines didn't help people, the decisions spaffed out over TV, then countermanded by some other minister, then 'clarified' and 'clarified' again by other ministers without the specific guidance having been finalised *DID*. *NOT*. *HELP*.
Instead look at Scotland's advice. It was clear. It was concise. It didn't use jingoistic three-word sloganeering. It explained what was what.
Yes, Britain will always be full of 'laws don't apply to me' asshats. But the sooner and the more people actually comply the way they did early in lockdown with the understanding that this was for the greater good and to minimise transmission rates, the better. It's very upsetting and saddening to see how the 'screw everyone else' mantra that pervades US society has also made its home here.
Great that you extensively quote the 2006 Companies Act. If you are going to rap Apple's local directors over the knuckles for being less than compliant with the act, then I would hope you do the same with every other 'badly behaved' company doing business in this country, including all those who demanded rent discounts whilst not paying their staff (a certain publican of the Brexit persuasion, and a sports clothing retailer and football club owner, amongst others).
Remember, what goes for the goose, goes for the gander.
Funny you should mention this... Jeff Bezos famously thumbed his nose at Wall Street for the better part of the first decade or so of Amazon's life. He didn't pay dividends, the company was constantly making a loss. For *years* he resisted Wall Street, told them to bugger off. Why? Because he decided that all profits should be reinvested in the business to make it better, help it grow, and ironically, turn it into the behemoth it is today.
Wall Street celebrated when the company turned its first quarterly profit and then its first annual profit (of $35 million) in the early 2000s. Profits remained small in the beginning and then grew quicker and quicker because the groundwork (the processes that make Amazon efficient) was laid and things started to take off.
Of course, the *real* profit engine at Amazon now is AWS, which came to life as an internal infrastructure product (part of the groundwork to make Amazon's service run better), and which they then turned into a public product to help other companies run *their* service better (and of course make money off that while they're at it). AWS contributes 71% of Amazon's *profit*, despite only generating 13% of Amazon's revenue. The AWS margin is *huge*, books, DVDs, electronics, groceries, not so much.
You appear to be conflating moral responsibility and legal responsibility. Morals are subjective. Laws are not (not meant to anyway). Apple and Ireland always insisted that there was no special treatment and the argument hinged on a legal point, which was that the Commission had not proven sufficiently that there was impropriety. Note that the court did *not* say "don't ever darken our door with this again"... they said "bring us the proof and we'll reconsider". So, the Commission can bring the case with more evidence, and if anything, this has put countries' revenue offices/ministries and the companies they have oversight over on notice that they had better have perfect paperwork or they would find themselves in court. Another little outcome of this is that Ireland closed its side of the grand 'double sandwich' (double Dutch-Irish, double Irish-Dutch) tax loophole, which the Netherlands *have not*, so fair dues to the Irish for having been jolted into action to stop abuse of their tax system.
Also note that I don't have an opinion either way... but I do understand the nuance between 'moral responsibilities', 'legal responsibilities' and 'social responsibilities'. Often all three overlap to a great extent (potentially turning a great Venn diagram into a nice circle), but when it comes to law, they may not necessarily overlap at all. I'd venture to bet that some of the judges (who are after all lawyers) who had to come to the conclusion they did, did so with clenched teeth and much muttering of 'those goddamn swine' or similar under their breath.
Just remember: What goes for the goose, goes for the gander. While I agree that Apple probably could suck this up, they are perfectly entitled to every tax break they can lay their hands on, and also perfectly reasonably ask their landlords for rent breaks if their neighbours were granted the same. Just remember that they asked for an extension of the lease in lieu of payment (i.e. they'll still pay what they would, but for a longer lease, which gives the landlord some certainty).
Please note, I do not agree with what they *are* doing, the optics are... not good. I speak as someone who knows several retail landlords. As others pointed out, when retailers and landlords work together towards a mutual solution to avoid a cash crunch on both sides, then there is no bad blood and loyalty follows.
Please note though that Boeing's 'people' were more than happy to pander to the airlines by making several things optional (AoA disagree indicator being one, especially when it then transpired that it wouldn't work if some software, which again was optional, was not present). Boeing practically guaranteeing airlines that they would only need to do some computer-based training (i.e. read an iPad) with zero simulator testing also came *from* Boeing.
... Are likely to be the kind of panicky dramatic Karens of the world... Given that one would expect Garmin to have DR processes, I'm not too concerned yet. They had a similar problem a while ago where FIT files uploaded to their platform were ignored/not ingested and processed.
I have to agree with the person asking why this would have to stop making the watch communicate with the phone... Why the phone app can't simply download the files/data from the watch and keep it until the API becomes available again has been a question I've posed to Garmin before. But this outage won't make me change away from them purely because they haven't communicated with me and held my hand (virtually) to stop me panicking about how my life has not ended because their service fell over.
Stuff happens. It'll be back no doubt.
The fact remains that Nicola Sturgeon presented a consistent message throughout. There was no blustering. There was no wishy-washy moving of goal posts. There was no 'garden press conference from an unelected SpAd-who-got-caught-with-his-pants-down-250-miles-from-where-he-was-supposed-to-be'. There was leadership. There was caution.
All of the above was sorely absent from the party-line spin that No. 10 presented to the point where they were annoyed when someone pulled them up on failing on their promise to do 100,000 tests a day (shipping 100,000 tests out per post does not count as 'actually performing 100,000 tests a day'), and then suddenly not showing the figures, and suddenly pulling people from the daily conference saying "they have better places to be" (really?)
So yes, if you want to argue that the measures were a delay measure (yes, I agree with you on that), it was clarity of message, clear leadership, zero tolerance for breaches by staff/advisory roles and consistency in reporting that was missing from the UK government, that made the country's response look shambolic and incompetent. This is why sensible people in England followed *Scotland's* advice, masked up despite various politicians saying "nah, we don't need that" and rolling out their favourite naysayers in the media, and continued to stay home unless it was for necessities, and continue to rather look to Holyrood than Westminster.
There is no point in saying "oh, but it would've been as bad or worse under Labour". We don't know if it would've been. Whataboutery and coulda-shoulda-woulda holds no water in arguments.
The thing is that Tristan da Cunha truly is still sea-locked. They only get visited by passing ships. The island's website makes a big deal out of the fact that you have to *plan* to visit them. Ascension gets a monthly South African Express flight via St Helena (because the runway needs properly renovating and the little Embraer SAX use can still take off on the bit that's still in decent condition), but that's less than the weekly flight St Helena gets (by the same airline, with the same little Embraer), so less chance of escaping your banishment (and more time to plot). :-)
Of course my comment of banishment was a bit snarky (but someone clearly took it serious enough to downvote it - *HI* anonymous Tory voter!).
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