Posts by eldoc

Ireland fines Meta $414m for using personal data without asking

Re: Ireland Got Paid for Its Complicity

Lots of folks have zero trust in the US government but will happily share their lives with the likes of Meta. So, all the US government needed was to strike a deal to use the likes of Meta as a back door. Simples. Then they can get all the data they want with minimal effort.

Too bad, contractors: UK government reverses decision to axe IR35 tax reform

Re: The very definition of an omnishambles.

Absolutely. The pension funds had modelled for market volatiliy over and above the previous record level. However, their models hadn't accounted for a level of volatility 3x higher than had ever been seen before as a result of the Kami-kwasi budget.

The pension funds and regulators had stress tested the LDIs based on the previous record spike in bond yields and would have been ok in the event of a spike over and above that previous record of, say 50% more, or double, just not by the 3x that this bunch of clowns managed to cause.

Latest FinFisher spyware upgrades 'particularly worrying,' says Kaspersky

Re: Two-tier legal system

No, some of us do. The rest of us actually have no say at all thanks to the UK's 19th century electoral system.

Zoom incompatible with GDPR, claims data protection watchdog for the German city of Hamburg

Re: Let's just hire every person in Europe to be a bureaucrat

Try even bidding for a piece of government work (at whatever level) in the US if you're not a US company, whereas here in the UK, how many of those contracts are won by non-UK companies?

UK Supreme Court declares Uber drivers are workers, not self-employed: Ride biz's legal battle ends in a crash

Uber are cheaper purely because the Saudis are paying a percentage of the cost of every journey, allowing Uber to lose billions each year. The price of an Uber journey is not reflective of the cost of providing it.

Re: Not all Californians are idiots...

Check out Uber's financials (billions a year in losses) and investors. Uber is only cheaper because Saudi VC money subsidises every single journey and allows Uber to provide it at a loss.

Re: Well....

Indeed, and outside of London, taxi firms have been able to create viable businesses and compete with each other while complying with appropriate legislation. It's only the likes of Uber who don't want to compete on a level playing field.

Re: Well....

Uber currently lose billions a year (and were doing pre-Covid). That suggests that the current Uber business model is not sustainable whether their drivers are considered workers or not.

Their business model appears to be to use Saudi government investment money to undercut other taxi firms (and thus put the competition out of business) until such time as Uber are the only game in town.

Zoom records another bumper quarter as pandemic rumbles on, but Wall Street types quiz execs on how long it can last

Re: The reason for that is

"The only people who should have access to your video and/or audio conferences are the people who have accounts created by your IT dept"

Really? Have you ever worked in a sales or a support function for example? Would you really expect your organisation's IT department to have to create an account for every support contact, customer and prospect you might ever interact with?

Furthermore, to get the missing functionality, you don't need an account with an IT department. An account set up with any random hotmal or gmail address does the same job in terms of enabling the missing bits.

Zoom manages this perfectly well with the likes of meeting registration, passwords, waiting rooms and the ability to boot people out and ban them. To improve the usability of teams, MS needs to look at some of its competition and what they currently do better.

One big annoyance of Teams is that certain client functionality is not available unless you create an account and you are logged in. A well-designed client should not require that.

Tech support scammer dialed random number and Australian Police’s cybercrime squad answered

Re: “Police recommend that you do not engage with scammers,”

20 minutes. Good effort. Best I've ever managed is to have them swear at me and hang up atfter 15.

I try and keep them online as long as possible. I view it as a public service. Every minute they are failing to con me, they can't be trying it on someone else.

Maybe it'd be more of an even contest if they understood what Fedora Linux was.

You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come

Re: Bought votes?

That's the fault of the FPTP voting system. If the UK used a representative voting system like most of the rest of Europe do, then you don't end up with just a few hundred votes having a massive impact on the outcome, while on the flip side, millions of votes serving no purpose whatsoever.