All the actual data should be on a network drive, which is most likely a Linux box running ext4 FreeBSD box running zfs with a samba share.
FTFY
172 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2017
"What are they doing if it's a multi year process to switch over? Manually entering DB records for every single person?"
From a systems point of view, yes. Universal Credit is a new benefit combining what were historically separate benefits - but it's not a 1:1 replacement for the swathe of benefits it replaces, so each claimant moving to UC has to go through the claim process again.
There's also been resistance to moving onto it due to both issues in the new system causing claims to get messed up, and political decisions on how the system should work making switching over painful and potentially less generous to some groups.
Training is simple.
You take all the CVs you've considered and you separate them into ones you discarded and ones you interviewed. Or you take all the interviewed candidates and separate them into hired / not hired. Or if you want to get really clever hired and did well at annual review / hired and quit after 3 months.
Hey presto you have a classifier that splits future CVs into good and bad. And you've probably just embedded all sorts of unconscious bias into your model. If you've done a really good job you've also got a good dose of irrational factors in there - like people that use Word versus AbiWord - and illegal discrimination - companies that have tried automated CV filtered have found it's really hard to hide protected attributes like gender, race and age from these models.
And that's the real problem with many of the large statistical models - If you shove lots of data in the algorithm will find patterns. But you really need to be able to explain what patterns a model is identifying before you accept the output is delivering what you want.
For email receipts in real stores it's the till operator rather than the customer that has the magic tick box and I wouldn't be surprised if it is preticked.
Under GDPR if they ask for personal details 'in order to send an e-receipt' then they cannot use those details for any other purpose. I had a £20 voucher from Debenhams for my second complaint when they started spamming me.
Yes the UK ICO is useless and I expect they put the 20 quid down as cost of doing business. More people need to complain to get them to change.
All my receipts go to a separate email (with a plus sub address if their till accepts it). When I'm bored a send complaints for anything non receipt like.
> Another meaningless term now is "Air Gapped." ... somehow now means firewalled
> with all inbound connections disabled to the specific host
WTF? I get how complex technical terms can be misunderstood or subverted, but it is hard to understand how anyone can subvert such a clear physical concept.
> do want to say its not outright ban anonymous accounts but offer ways for users to verify their
> identities and control who can interact with them such as by selecting an option to only receive
> DMs and replies from verified accounts.
The argument for ID appears to be "(troll) can create an anonymous account and send nasty content to (target)".
If it will work as you suggest then the target would block unverified accounts. The troll would have to verify in order to send content so, in theory, could be traced and investigated for illegality. But any other person would also have to verify to communicate with the target. If public figures like MPs turn on verification it becomes mandatory for their constituents if they want to use social media as a channel.
Either no one will turn it on - net effect zero
Public figures and companies turn it on - Joe public is forced to verify in order to interact - removing one of the few goods that social media has provided[1] and handed more valuable/sensitive data to private data harvesters.
Either way it seems a very poorly thought out response to the problem.
[1] I've found social media an effective channel to communicate with local council and companies. Let's faced it you can't actually phone the council anymore but they do read twitter.
Afraid it's you.
The mining process is simply software which uses rules to validate transactions into a block and then computes a nonce as proof of work. Change the validation rules to allow it and you can add a transaction that consumes a previous output [1] without signing with the private key and moves it to a new address that you have the key for. You need a majority of mining compute power to adopt the new rules for the block to successfully get onto the chain [2] - which in theory is what stops random hackers doing it. But if you get a court to order the software developers that write the miner the majority use to do it you are at least part way there.
[1] output because the blockchain is a ledger. Wallets don't really exist.
[2] Vaguely recall this has been done on some crypto chains when they introduced rules to 'fix' already committed transactions.
> Access is still used in a lot of backend for windows applications
Access? or Jet?
I still see the Jet engine used a lot behind the scenes (Has MS Exchange moved away from it now?)
Access as a GUI into 'real' databases for users that need to dig further/more flexibly into details than simple canned reports allow.
"among the most usable desktops in the free software world, despite because of limited features"
FTFY
Most desktops are way too complex for the average person to get a handle on and just use. Lets face it, half the Linux distros are the same software configured slightly differently.
To opt out completely you need a Type-1 opt out form which you have to present to your GP before 23 June. Explained here:
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/data-collections-and-data-sets/data-collections/general-practice-data-for-planning-and-research/transparency-notice
(direct link to form - https://nhs-prod.global.ssl.fastly.net/binaries/content/assets/website-assets/data-and-information/data-collections/general-practice-data-for-planning-and-research/type-1-opt-out-form.docx)
The same form is also available on _some_ GPs websites which is how I found it originally - because it wasn't obviously available on the NHS site - almost as if they didn't want people to use it.
Type 1 opt-out prevents all sharing of your data from the GP into NHS Digital. The National Data Opt out is a secondary opt out which limits some of the sharing. I presume that if you have opted out at the GP level this is not strictly necessary as the NHS Digital system will not have your data in the first place. But better safe than sorry...
Because there are more adverts for X than there are people who want to buy X. Consequently many people who do not want X will see an ad for it.
Also, marketing departments are insane/stupid/drank the ad industry kool-aid.
Where I've worked with marketing there has always been a constant battle between data driven analysts targeting better and sales/marketing execs wanting 'more volume' in their campaigns. The move from direct mail has massively reduced the cost per contact and changed that dynamic in favour of higher volumes.
Assuming chivo243's using his cars built-in usbstick/mp3 capability it'll probably have all sorts of software limitations because of the manufacturer's half-arsed implementation.
Mine is limited in number of directories, number of files per directory and doesn't read sub-directories.
The manufacture will never provide software updates - even though the underlying mp3 software is open source and the bugs were fixed in the source before the car was even manufactured.
Icon - have a frosty one for the Good Omens reference :-)
> what if somebody stores something abhorrent in them.
Already been done with bitcoin. Didn't stop it.
A Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of
Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin
"This robot might look the part but its lacking agility, speed and teeth attached to very powerful jaws."...
After being cornered by Digidog, martinusher reportedly shouted "you're not even a real dog" before shoving past it and escaping.
A police spokesman said if only Digidog was equipped with some form of grappling apparatus the megalomaniac intent on world domination would have been apprehended.
Boston Dynamics has announced Digidog V2.0...
And 94K? Are the sales team at Boston Dynamics readers of Private Eye?
"I don't trust this government but they might be right that 'smart' motorways are safer"
PrivateEye have been following smart motorways recently - Your mistrust is well placed.
IIRC the DoT are still defending smart motorway by quoting safety statistics based on the original trials, ignoring more recent accident stats. Also ignoring that those trials used the hard shoulder at busy periods only (so always at reduced speeds) and the refuge areas were significantly closer together.
> i can't tell the API how big the buffer is so it will it admits happily trample outside of the buffer if it wants to causing as it admits unknown effects
...
> the char pointer reference (what the fuck is that.. char*&) actually contains the size of the contents
At least you can say "an error has occurred" if it returns a size bigger than the buffer you gave it ;-)
Add a twitter API so it tweets a message to their CEO every time. Seems twitter shaming is the only way to get support these days....
Most impressive fail recently was Northumberland Council's car parking website. Aside from the terrible UI given most people will be using a teeny phone screen, at the very last stage it has a big 'Pay Now' button, perfectly hidden by the 'install our app' popup. Given at that point you've confirmed multiple times I wonder how many people think they've completed the process and end up getting fined.
Screwfix's web checkout is almost as bad. It's almost as if they make the website deliberately bad to force you to install their trackerapp
I like your confidence in the system, but it might be a little misplaced.
This fraud [1] happened in my city. Followed the case at the time and the biggest issue seemed to be finding the evidence to get a conviction because of the lack of traceability of votes cast. I think it would be a lot easier now with postal voting (and not just me [2]) and may have happened in the last election [3] in my area.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-23461729
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11560017/Postal-voting-fraud-is-easy-electoral-commissioner-says.html
[3] https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/derby-news/former-derby-city-councillor-charged-4996796
There may be little evidence of voter fraud because its quite hard to identify as there's no verification.
We were in a trial area for ID at the polling station. Personally I see no problem with it, but I understand the concern that it may exclude people. I see no reason not to go for a simpler low tech solution like indelible ink to prevent multiple votes.
Of course, nothing you change at a polling station will do anything to close the holes in the postal ballots.
There's a hazard that nobody seems to have everyone doing it properly has allowed for.
FTFY
Backups always get raised in GDPR discussions. I've always been given the same guidance - If you hold non-compliant data because it's not technically feasible to remove it, you MUST have processes in place to prevent it being utilised. In the case of data backups that means ensuring if the data is ever restored the non-compliant elements are removed as part of the restoration.
I would hope the ICO would take a very dim view of anyone using data restoration as an excuse for non compliance. Technical explanation of what happened, yes, but not an excuse. Either the restoration process was non compliant, or was not followed (I.e. You failed to look after the customers information properly)
In the olden days of humans checking passports I flew to France with one 6 months out of date. The return check-in noticed.
"Your passport expired 6 months ago. How long have you been on holiday?" she asked.
"2 weeks"...
She said I could fly since the destination was in the issuing country. No idea if that's a real rule.
"Another power supply one at the time involved an IBM PS/2 Model 50. They had a known fault that the PSUs would fail if they were switched* off and on again too quickly or if there was a brief interruption in power."
My first part time job I got roped into helping admin the till system, including performing the weekly failover test. Now I know why the instruction to wait 5 minutes before powering back on was in bold and underlined!
> As a financial system, cryptocurrencies use way less power than all banks, their infrastucture and support structures
My home made cider activities use less energy than the world's agricultural industry.
Conceptually blockchain is interesting, but these public experiments are nuts. Bitcoin itself is a flawed system. As a value trading platform it's kind of working for now, but largely because there are enough vested interests [1]. The overall chain may not have been broken but there's opportunity for corruption within the mining process and the egalitarian ideals of mining has long since gone away as it's way out of reach of individuals. Instead of trusting large corporate banks, you have to trust large anonymous and *completely unaccountable* mining pools.
[1] you could argue that is true for 'real' currencies and other forms of value exchange
> can't be bothered to take 5 minutes to learn how to format cells during the import process
From the users' perspective there is no import process.
User looks at file in explorer - it's an Excel file because Excel has registered itself to handle .csv files
User opens file - Excel silently corrupts random values
User saves file - Data is now permanently corrupted
PS. I took four goes to write ".csv" without my browser correcting a perceived typo.
> An option in Excel settings. That's all what is needed.
No one would use that option. If there is no guessing then when opening any text file it would have to assume all columns are text. That would make any genuine numeric and date data unusable without the pain of excels data type conversion functions.
There are 2 problems with the current behaviour
First it guesses on a cell by cell basis, not a column basis. So if you have some values that might be a date they get converted but the rest of the column looks OK.
Second there is no visibility of what's been converted so when the user sees the first screen full and it looks alright they assume it's all good.
Even a notification on opening a non-native file that it is being interpreted/converted would be an improvement - I'm sure I'm not the only person in financial services that's had to break out the luhn algorithm to regenerate the last digit of credit card numbers after a csv file has been opened and saved in Excel.
Own scooters, electric and conventional, seem popular with my colleagues in the Paris office. Walking around their offices you see plenty folded up under desks. Apparently they're very convenient for short commute along the well maintained, wide cycle/footpaths or getting to/from the metro. Being able to fold them and carry into the office is an advantage over bikes.
Like others I don't see any reasonable reason a hire scooter is legal and a personal one isn't. It's academic for my town of Derby anyway - they canned the ebike scheme after half were nicked and others had their controls smashed so I doubt there will be a clamour from scooter operators to set up here.
Perhaps because Unix user/group or ACLs are based on WHO, not WHAT?
The example exploit says the browsers history could be accessed by A.N.Other application. Nothing about one user accessing another's files.
That said, there's probably ways of partitioning processes in *nix even when running as the same user. It sounds like a reasonable security requirement that has probably already been addressed elsewhere.
If you had housing benefit, grants and subsidised beer then I'm the 'next generation' as I didn't have access to any of those - but I definitely remember drinking large quantities.
My 3 offspring all went through a phase of drinking but all pretty much stopped by 20. They seemed mainly put off by the choice between trendy bars with music blaring or smelly pubs full of oldies.
... 'to help authorities "access information stored on an electronic device or to access remotely stored electronic information." '
Remotely stored? You're the law enforcement, go to the remote location and get _them_ to help you. Unless you're definition of 'remote' means "stored outside our geographical borders". In which case your law requires companies to undertake international espionage on your behalf. I think other countries might take exception to that.