Posts by jollyboyspecial

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Even totally obliterating GDPR in the UK would not in any way make the UK the "world's data hub"

If companies in the UK want to process data from abroad then they have to comply with the data protection regulations in the country where they operate, wherever the data is processed. I'm pretty sure the minister is aware of this. However the government doesn't like any laws that restrict businesses from operating (or a least businesses who donate to the Tory party) but "we want our mates to make more money" is not really an excuse for riding roughshod over GDPR. So instead they present that old Brexit chestnut of being a world leader in whatever field happens to be under discussion.

The thing that puzzles me is why they think any normal voter will say "He great the UK is going to be the world's data hub, I'll vote Tory"

The reality is that about 40% of people vote Tory every time no matter how much the Tories shit on them. The problem being that the other parties split the vote between them meaning that even if that vote isn't enough to get them a majority in parliament it puts them in pole position to form a coalition. The difficult part for the other parties is convincing 39 of that 40% that the Tory party don't have their best interest at heart. At all. Not even a little bit.

Ex-eBay execs jailed for cyberstalking web critics

"Defendants Wenig and Wymer provided the other defendants with carte blanche authority to terminate the reporting of the Steiners by whatever means necessary."

Good luck with that. It's one thing proving that somebody did something, it's another thing entirely proving somebody else instructed them to do it. While you may have grounds to suspect that the big boys told them to do it and ran away you still need to find evidence of that.

Cisco asks shareholders to vote against global tax transparency

Cisco... said it would "potentially have an adverse impact on our business."

Well if this change has been requested by investors they must surely realise that upsetting their investors could also have an adverse impact on their business

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

Way before the Pentium 4 was a thing I worked in an organization where the rules on PC upgrades were very strict. Replacement was on a strict rota with the only exception being for those few people who's defined roles required a certain hardware spec. This was usually based on the software they needed to use to do their jobs. So if a new software version came along people who's PC spec fell below the minimum requirement may have got to jump the queue. But to be entirely fair they seldom got a new machine, more likely they would get more memory or a better graphics card or more storage depending on what was required. The upgrade cycle was such that apart from those lucky few most staff got a new machine somewhere between every three or four years.

In the IT department we were aware of all the scams in use to get a new machine. Usually these involved staff breaking their machines in some way to get hold of new hardware. It was however our policy that even if somebody did manage to do something completely fatal they would not get a new machine, we would do our best to repair their existing kit. Usually by cannibalising our stock of hardware which had been returned as part of the upgrade cycle. We had been known to entirely replace the internals of a machine even though it would have been easier to swap the whole thing just so the staff knew they were getting their old machine back.

Senior staff seemed to expect preferential treatment, but they didn't get anywhere. Our director of IT realized that management for the most part needed less powerful hardware than the people who did the actual work. Some of these people got very, very petty in their attempts to get things upgraded.

To give you an idea of how petty it could get one such "manager" (she was really just a team leader of a team of two but insisted on calling herself a manager) had some amazing tricks. One day she put a blown fuse in the plug of her PC. How could we tell it was a blown fuse? Facilities insisted that all equipment was fitted with the appropriate fuse. As such PCs always had 3 amp fuses. However when I went down to investigate this "dead" PC I was smart enough to check the power cable first by simply swapping it. Sure enough the PC burst into life with a new cable. When I checked the fuse the blown fuse was 13A. I can only guess something at home blew a 13A fuse and she decided to use that fuse to wangle hereself a new box. Fail.

One day around the turn of the millennium we got some optical mice in stock. One member of the team suffered a dead ball mouse and got a nice shiny new optical mouse to replace it. Coincidentally we got a fault ticket from the manager the very next morning. Her mouse was apparently dead. I arrived at her office and picked up her mouse and found that it rattled. Suspicious, I told her I needed to take the mouse back to our office to test it. When I got it back to the office I found that there was a hairline crack in the base of the mouse. I opened it up and found that the insides were damaged, one of the rollers was bouncing around loose. This in conjunction with the fresh crack suggested to me that she'd simply banged the mouse on the desk until it stopped working. I could have replaced her mouse with one of the stock of optical mice or perhaps I could have replaced it with a used ball mouse from stock, but I wanted to make a point. As such I spend some time replacing that roller and it's housing even having to solder a couple of wires to the pcb. I then handed her back the mouse telling her it was fine after a clean. You could see from her face she knew I had repaired the damage, but she couldn't say anything because to do so would have been to admit she had broken the mouse to get a new one. Yes we could get every bit as petty as the users.

Then came the day when a member of her team left. That team member had the newest PC in that office since there's was a new post added to the team around a year after the original PCs had been bought. Between the old team member leaving and the new starter arriving the PCs had been swapped around so the "manager" had the newest PC. This was very much against the rules. She had even gone the the lengths of swapping the asset tag sticker on the front of the two PCs so that she retained her original asset number. Had she been willing to wait a few months she would have got a brand new machine, but she decided that she as the most senior member of staff deserved the best PC.

I considered various solutions. The easy one would have been to simply report the issue to HR, but that wasn't good enough. Instead I changed the serial numbers on the asset database so she officially "owned" the newer machine. This might appear as if I had let her win, but I was playing a longer game.

When upgrade time came around a colleague and I rocked up at the office with two new machines and began swapping the machines of the desks of the two junior members of staff. Of course it wasn't long before the manager asked what what we were doing. So I told her we carrying out scheduled PC upgrades. But why, she asked, was she not getting one? She was, she said, sure she was due an upgrade. So I made a great show of checking the asset tag on her PC, cross referencing that to the serial number of her PC on the database and explained that she wasn't due an upgrade for over a year. Once again I could see in her face that she knew she'd been had, but couldn't say anything because to do so would have been to admit her subterfuge.

Boffins spot baby planet forming around young star – and that's rather cool

The thing that fascinates me about the whole field of astronomy is the distances. So the astronomers aren't observing a planet forming now, they are observing it forming 518 years ago. Not that I suppose it will have finished forming yet, or for quite some time.

Dump these small-biz routers, says Cisco, because we won't patch their flawed VPN

Re: All you pro-EU folks,

Read the story again. The kit in question was out of support before the particular vulnerability was found.

Or are you suggesting that all kit should be supported forever?

And IT kit is probably the least vulnerable kit around. Cars are a fantastic example - so many automotive "security" systems are vulnerable by design, but you don't seem to be suggesting care manufacturers should be fined every time a car is stolen. The locks on your house are likely to be vulnerable to very simple attacks, should lock manufacturers be fined every time a house is broken into? Residential security systems are often vulnerable to simple attacks too. Should manufacturers of house alarms be subject to fines? And so on and so on.

Re: It's the modern way

The "aux plugs" a direct line level input to the amp. Just like if you owned a separate amp all the inputs (except phono) were line level inputs. So exactly the same thing.

The problem with music centres was twofold. Firstly the component parts were usually of a low standard and secondly that you couldn't upgrade any one part. Most of them had at least one aux input so adding components wasn't a problem. Not that I ever owned one.

However I don't see how this compares to this situation

News?

Vendor won't patch out of support kit is not news

Halfords slapped on wrist for breaching email marketing laws

Until fairly recently if you bought something at a Halford store you were asked for an emails address "for your e-receipt" but that has stopped.

Was that just a way of harvesting email details and pretending they had consent for marketing emails?

G7 countries beat UK in worldwide broadband speed test again

Re: Italy's problem...

Uptake is not the only problem. Coverage is still the biggest issue. Even in areas that are allegedly covered by fibre a lot of properties are not covered.

To give my own village as an example Openreach made a big fuss of telling us full fibre was on the way. We then heard no more. I'd seen the Openreach vans. I'd seen the big drums of fibre in the car park of the exchange. I'd even seen engineers installing fibre in chambers and up poles in other parts of the village. The chamber outside my own house however was untouched.

Then I found out somebody living a few hundred yards away had already got full fibre. So I went to the Openreach fibre availability checker page. Entered my address. No full fibre, no schedule for full fibre. But GOOD NEWS I could get FTTC. Err thanks. Already got that.

One day there was an engineer fixing a fault down the street so I thought I'd ask him. He told me that Openreach had indeed planned to install fibre to the whole village, but until they spoke to the engineers they were under the impression that the whole village had it's telephony delivered overhead. So it was a quick win to deliver fibre to every pole and therefore easy to install a new d-side from the pole to every house that wanted fibre. Of course once they spoke to the engineers they found that almost all new build since about 1970 was cabled underground. And you're not talking convenient modern plastic ducting to a demarc point in the property. Oh no, you're talking copper cable simply laid under the pavement, road, driveway, path and even garden (one resident once dug though his own telephone cable). So it's not a simple case of pulling fibre through from the nearest chamber using the old copper as the pull through.

So I said. If I want fibre can't I pay the (no doubt extortionate) fee to have the driveway dug up from the chamber at the end of my drive? I could even dig the trench myself. Not possible because apparently there is a standard charge on the product list for FTTP based upon being able to simply drop in a new d-side. So they opted not to even bother running fibre to the chambers on streets where there are no poles as they would have made a loss on each and every install. So there is simply no fibre availability for my property because the chamber right on the curtilage of my property does not have fibre. All this even though I received a letter from Openreach stating that our exchange was going full fibre.

I spoke to Openreach and asked why this was the case. They blamed the government and told me that they had to do the job quickly as they had government targets to meet on the number of properties covered by a certain date. Once, they told me, those targets are met they would then be able to come back and cover the properties they had missed. Except of course that the original target was 2025 so presumably they were not looking at fibre to my property before 2025. And since then the government have very quietly moved that target back to 2030.

And remember the goverment said full fibre for everybody by 2025, but that wasn't what the deal actually was. Like so many of these things it wasn't quite what it seemed. They actually said PSTN/ISDN switch off by 2025. And people took this to mean full fibre. Openreach and the government count FTTC as fibre. So if you are on FTTC (like me) then they never promised to give you a better service. They just said they would switch off your PSTN service and move you to a VOIP service. And bear in mind that if you are a long way from the DSLAM you'll only be getting ADSL speeds anyway. Just been looking at a circuit this morning in a fairly urban area that's 1.5km from the DSLAM and getting 17Mbps downstream and 1.2Mbps upstream. According to Openreach and our government that qualfies as high speed broadband.

But wait for the really fun part. Even on an ADSL service you may still not get upgraded to full fibre. Hard to reach properties my just be given a new modem/router when PSTN is switched off on their exchange. This modem will feature a telephone port so you can plug in your PSTN handset and get a VOIP service.

In short you can't complain about people not buying fibre if they don't have the option of buying it in the first place

Amazon drivers unionize after AI sends them on 'impossible' routes

TomTom has always been bad at route planning particularly in rural areas. It doesn't seem so be able to distinguish between roads and dirt tracks. Or roads and private driveways. Or roads and smudges on the map.

I remember once driving in Anglesey using TomTom. I was concerned that is was leasing me down a ridiculously narrow lane and looking for a gateway to turn round in when I arrived at a farm yard where the road simply ended. Immediately beyond the farmyard was an embankment and then the A55. TomTom clearly thought that this was a junction with the A55.

You might argue that maybe the map was out of date, but that is not the case. The A55 had been there since long before the TomTom was manufactured. There was never a road where the A55 is now so there had never been a junction. And while I was turning round the farmer informed me that road had never gone anywhere before the A55 was built.

Ever tried watching your amazon drivers route on the app once they are eight stops away? I don't know what software they use to plan routes but it doesn't work. I've seen the vans go from one end of the village to the other passing my house in the middle before reaching me. I've even seen the van deliver on the next street to me then head a mile away before coming back to me.

Clearly this must be costing amazon in time and fuel so it needs sorting out. It's odd how big corporations so often waste absolute fortunes because nobody seems to be overseeing basic processes. These companies are obsessed with making obscene amounts of money, but don't seem to understand the old adage about looking after pennies.

NASA's Artemis rocket makers explain that it's a marathon and a sprint

"Last week's planned launch was scrubbed after problems during fueling, and a second attempt went south on Saturday after yet another fuel leak."

Last week's failure was due to a temperature issue (probably a sensor failure) nothing to do with a fuel leak. So how is saturday's failure "yet another fuel leak"?

VMware confirms Carbon Black causes BSODs, boot loops on Windows

Re: Huh?

I never understood the product name anyway. To me Carbon Black was always a compound used in the industrial manufacture of rubber because it makes vulcanized rubber harder, stronger and more resilient which are obvioulsy desirable properties in rubber. Oh and it also makes the rubber black rather than a mucky brown colour which is apparently another desirable property in rubber products. Not sure why that is the case. I mean yes we're used to tyres (for example) being black but if your tyres weren't black would that make them any less desireable.

Getting to the point however...

Why choose a name for a fairly well known product used in the manufacture of rubber to describe a product for virtual machine computing? I mean there's no way VMware can claim they didn't know of the previous and widespread use of the term before they began marketing their product,

Nvidia will unveil next-gen GPU architecture in September

Re: cost

Of course high prices and low availability of GPUs have been blamed on crypto mining. You could argue that GPU manufacturers have been only too happy with this situation. The problem for them being twofold, firstly the demand for GPUs for gaming has fallen as a result, but secondly the demand for GPUs for mining is also seems to be falling. As such pandering to the mining market could well have killed the gaming goose that laid the golden egg in the first place.

But you could also argue that high end GPUs are already better than most gamers actually need and that could also account for a fall in demand.

Apple autonomous car engineer pleads guilty to stealing trade secrets

Anybody working in R&D will have it made very, very clear to them what they are allowed to physically remove from their place of work. That is to say absolutely nothing. And that will be contractual. Further to that contract there will no doubt be an NDA saying that they are allowed to discuss absolutely nothing of their work outside the workplace.

Given the evidence here I can't see why the prosecutors would offer a plea deal.

Unless of course the prosecutors or Apple themselves are worried about what may be discussed in open court.

Re: Doesn't sound like espionage

So you think that "several percent of engineers could almost harmlessly take home" a linux server?

And what do you mean by "several percent"?

And how do you define "almost harmlessly"?

Re: Plea deals

A lot depends on the reason the prosecutors offer the plea deal in the first place.

A plea deal is a good thing if it's used to secure a prosecution against a bigger crook. For example a plea deal with a small time drug dealer in order to bring down their supplier would be a good thing. But a plea deal just to improve the prosecutor's success rate wouldn't.

Two years on, Apple iOS VPNs still leak IP addresses

Jaysus It's VPN 101 that the data should be encrypted.

Apple are always banging on about being secure by default and other such nonsense. My arse! Not only could they not get the basics of VPN security right to start with but they can't even be arsed to fix it when they do get it wrong.

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

Slightly worrying that he didn't think to check if there was owt plugged in at any time but instead had to rely on device manager

Seems a lot of people working in IT seem to start at a high level and word down rather than starting at the lowest level and working up. It's basic diagnostic procedure to start with physical checks.

Skyrora fires up second stage of XL rocket

Sunlit Uplands?

According to Bogjob this is all thanks to Brexit. Apparently while the ESA are involved with NASAs next moonshot and potentially the visit to Mars as well the UK is testing rockets on piles of containers at old RAF bases in Scotland

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Re: Comparison

Musk predicted Tesla would achieved full self driving this year so I think it's reasonable to test how close they are. As it stands they are a country mile away.

But the thing that puzzles me is why call it Autopilot and then constantly moan that people mistake it for self driving. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that Autopilot would mean self driving. If they didn't want people to make that assumption why not call it something else - like maybe driver assist?

Google sues Sonos yet again, claiming it stole IP and infringed patents

All this patent bullshit has gone far too far now.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that most of these patents on both sides are invalid. It seems to be the standard to grant patents and then wonder whether they are valid later. The patent system hasn't been used for the purpose it was originally intended for decades. The only solution to this is to change the system so that patent offices have the power to fine companies for filing patents that are found to be invalid. Of course there are those that argue is that patents applications are filed in such great numbers these days that the world's patent offices don't have time to properly check them, but surely the real problem there is funding. If patent offices could afford to employ more staff then they could keep up. How to find the funding to employ more staff. Fines that's how.

The many derivatives of the CP/M operating system

That takes me back.

Back in the eighties before PCs were ubiquitous in offices I worked for a company that sold a strange little device that connected to an electronic typewriter to run word processing software. We also developed and sold other packages for things like accounts and payroll to run on these machines. They were usually twin floppy drives and used a CP/M derivative called OS/M.

We also sold Comart machines running Concurrent CP/M or Concurrent DOS.

Oh those were the days. Driving all over the country to rebuild linked list "databases" when somebody decided to unplug the machine before saving their data.

BT accused of 'misinformation' campaign ahead of strikes

Re: "This represents a pay rise of around 5 percent on average"

There used to be a time when execs got payrises and bonuses and shareholders got dividends only when the company performed exceptionally well.

However that was captitalism. We are now operating on late capitalism. So now companies are expected to give execs big payrises and bonuses and pay shareholders big dividends every year, regardless of how well the company is performing. Obviously to justify "rewarding" execs and shareholders for good performance (like shareholders actually perform) the books have to look good. The best was to achieve this especially when times are tough, is to reduce expenditure. And staff pay is a big expenditure. So the simple solution is to keep staff pay down, erode your staff's terms and conditions and of course not replace staff when they leave meaning your staff have to work even harder than before. That way the books will be black and you can "reward" the execs and shareholders by punishing your staff.

This is particularly true for BT at the moment as we know that the execs are trying to fatten up the company for sale.

Promises promises

Openreach promised that all repair appointments already booked for today would be honoured. We're already seeing AM appointments that have been missed. Getting updates from OR telling us that engineers will still be assigned today and then suggesting we check back for updates on Monday. Normally they would be suggesting we checked back for updates the day after the appointment.

Cleary their contingency plans have failed, but rather than owning the problem and trying to re-appoint for tomorrow they have their fingers in their ears and are pretending that they don't have SLAs to meet. It's pretty clear they are going to build up a backlog from missed appointments today and monday. Add that to all the stuff that they have already booked for next week that would otherwise have been booked for today or monday and they are going to be dealing with a massive backlog come tuesday. Anybody trying to re-book appointments missed today or monday will probably find there's no availability on tuesday or wednesday and before you know it there will be circuits down for a week that should have been fixed inside 24 or 48 hours.

Can you say service credits?

BT strike action is coming: Comms union to serve notice to company

Re: Happy days are here again!

The tax burden on working people is higher than it's ever been simply to rake back the tax that should be being paid by corporations, but isn't.

This is because we've had 43 years* of government that favours big business over the people who actually vote them in. Of course so many voters believe what the Tories say rather than looking at the facts+. The Tories always claim to be the party of low taxes but in reality you generally pay more tax under a Tory government. The Tories claim to be the party of law and order, but crime tends to increase under a Tory government. And of course the Tories claim to be the party of low unemployment, but all they do is change how unemployment is measured. They love to claim that employment is higher than it's ever been while failing to mention that they will count a school dinner supervisor who works five hours a week as employed even though that person is claiming the full rate of universal credit. But that's the real reason for universal credit. The old version of unemployment used to be anybody who was claiming unemployment benefit or jobseekers allowance or dole or whatever you call it. These days unemployed is anybody who doesn't work at all. And working includes voluntary work that the dole office (sorry DWP) make you do as a condition of continuing to receive your benefits. Volunteer in a charity shop? According to the Tories you are employed.

*Don't try to tell me that New Labour weren't anything other than a slightly more liberal version of a Tory government

+It's amazing how many Tory voters I speak to still believe in trickle down economics

Apple's guy in charge of stopping insider trading guilty of … insider trading

Did he think his job was to prevent insider trading? Or did he believe it was to assure the board that insider trading wasn't happening?

Musk can't tweet about Tesla without lawyer approval – and he's still fighting to end that

Just another spoiled little boy who thinks he shouldn't have to abide by the rule of law

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

"But what of sound quality? According to Victrola, modern players aren't manufactured with the same attention to detail when records were the primary source of home music, meaning modern players don't sound the same."

Back in the day they were players made with great attention to detail and some were pile 'em high sell 'em cheap built down to a price rather than up to a standard and they didn't sound so good.

The same is true today, but the top of the range stuff is better than it ever was due to more modern design and manufacturing techniques. Ironically of course those improvements come from digital technology.

The difference today is that it's harder to find a mid-range turntable. Something with good (if not perfect) reproduction but not costing the earth. Which is why I'm still using an old turntable from the nineties. I've never been in the financial bracket that would allow me to spend many hundreds if not thousands of pounds on a turntable, but I've always preferred something a few tiers above the low end crap that makes up 99% of turntable sales these days.

Record Collecting?

Record collectors are a funny lot. Many of them don't actually need a turntable as they don't want to listen to their precious investments.

Here's a great example of how ridiculous the collectors market is. I was recently in a record shop and the discount section contained a album for £10 that would usually sell for £60 at the very least - I have seen it for over £100. The reason for the discount was that the sleeve was falling apart. The vinyl itself was absolutely mint, but the sleeve was a mess. There's absolutely no way I would pay the normal asking price for this album after all you get get is new for less than half that, but for £10? Sure. Got it home and it sounds great.

There's a load of nonsense talked by collectors about original pressings being better than current pressings. Thus keeping the price of earlier pressings high.

All of which proves that that the collectors aren't really interested in whether vinyl actually sounds better or not. They are interested either in money or maybe just the perceived elitism that comes with rarity or exclusivity. In that respect they are no different to most other collectors.

Clearview AI fined millions in the UK: No 'lawful reason' to collect Brits' images

Contradiction

"Clearview AI is not subject to the ICO's jurisdiction, and Clearview AI does no business in the UK at this time."

"My company and I have acted in the best interests of the UK and their people by assisting law enforcement in solving heinous crimes against children, seniors, and other victims of unscrupulous acts."

Those two statements contradict each other

Elon Musk 'violated' Twitter NDA over bot-check sample size

Musk has a habit of saying, doing and tweeting things that influence stock prices. Whether or not he does it with that intent is open to debate. But you can't debate that he is somewhat impetuous. His intent to buy twitter may be just another example of his impetuosity.

What natters here is whether the test is repeatable. But Twitter don't seem to be answering that question. What they have admitted is that their data could be wrong and the real figure could be over 5%. In their position that seems to be a particularly silly thing to do. They can argue that Musk violated the NDA, but he can argue that they presented him with data that they have admited may be innacurate.

Your data is only valid if you publish it to the people concerned. In other words if I were in Musk's (no doubt horribly expensive) shoes I would have wanted to see the sample and know exactly how it was selected. Normally you wouldn't need to see the whole sample, maybe just a sample of the sample, but when the sample size is so ridiculously small you may as well see all of it. And then of course I'd ask what tests were used to check whether the account was bot controlled.

A sample size of 100? Really?

How many accounts do twitter claim are active? A third of a billion last I heard. I don't think that can be considered a statistically significant sample size. That would be like picking 100 people in the US and trying to extrapolate statistical information about the whole population of the country.

Of course Twitter themselves have admitted that their estimate of below 5% may not be accurate. In other words there may be more than 5% of accounts controlled by bots. Furthermore they have said they need to improve their method of estimation. Like what? Starting with a decent sample size?

The fact that they choose such a ridiculously small sample size also calls into question what method they use for working out whether an account is a bot or not.

Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

Think of all the good you could do with 44 billion dollars...

Then consider spending it on a debt ridden social media platform which may never b turn a profit.

Or maybe you could use some of it to pay a load of tax arrears. Just a thought. Second thoughts maybe this is just something to use as a tax write off for the next few decades.

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

@Blane Bramble

As stated in my original post my Speccy did not have socketed memory chips, they were soldered direct to the board. I could have soldered them (I haven't been without an iron close at hand since I started high school) however to do so would have voided the warranty.

@Ian Johnston

My 16K version was £125 direct from Sinclair, the 48K one was £175 IIRC. 50 quid does seem like a lot of money for 32K of memory even in 1982 however so I could be wrong.

I had one of the very early 16K ones. Not long after I bought it I got it upgraded to 48K. The problem there being that the memory chips were soldered in and doing your own soldering would have invalidated the warranty. As such it got sent back to the factory for the upgrade. The good news was that I got a brand new 48K unit back from the factory. Best of all I only sent back the computer and when the new unit came back it had all the accessories in the box.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Will It Happen

A few weeks ago we had the announcement that should a self driving car be involved in an accident then any liability will not fall upon the driver but on the manufacturer. But where "driver assist" is in use then any liability will fall upon the driver.

For me this calls into account whether any cars will be sold as full self driving cars in the UK. I'm pretty sure that manufacturers will be reluctant to sell cars as self driving in this country. This isn't for financial reasons - after all they can rely on insurance just like everybody else. I think this is more to do with what happens when somebody dies. Firstly there is the possibility of a corporate manslaughter charge, that could be very damaging. Secondly there is the possibility of reputational damage resulting from any charges - imagine the harm that could be done to sales by worldwide headline like "Car Manufacturer Found Guilty Of Killing Toddler!!!"

As such I think there's a strong possibility that a lot of manufacturers will either disable full self driving features in their UK range or more likely just make sure they are simply not called self driving or anything similar and aim for something like driver assist.

Windows 11 usage stats within touching distance of... XP

Server

Those figures don't look very trustworthy to me.

Are they really telling us that almost one in every ten windows machines is running a server product? I really don't buy that.

The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google

Forgiveness v. Permission

It is deeply ingrained in the Google psyche that is it better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Now that has long been a mantra in certain businesses for certain situations. For example take a common situation in various parts of the IT industry that you need to take down some services in order to fix an issue outside of the normal planned maintenance window. You could go cap in hand to all your customers saying you need to carry out this work and that it will take longer than the normal periodic maintenance windows agreed in contracts, but there will always be at least one hold out. One customer who says they simply can't cope with an extra half hour's downtime no matter what the consequences of not doing the work. Most companies are well aware of this and don't bother asking permission. They just extend the maintenance window, blame the extended downtime on unforseen circumstances and beg forgiveness. That is the normal an acceptable application of the forgiveness/permission mantra. One off relatively small impact situations.

Unfortunately businesses have now started using the same mantra to excuse absolutely anything they fancy doing.

Using that mantra to excuse long term criminal activity (and data theft is definitely criminal) is no more acceptable than using it to excuse sacking 800 employees without notice.

As long as the authorities treat each apology as isolated and sincere then the like of Google will continue to carry on like this. Hit them with a big enough fine just once and they will think twice. Some countries allow for unlimited fine for data protection breaches others have caps based on a percentage of annual turnover others have pathetically low caps. But if somebody hit Google with a fine of even 1% of their annual turnover they certainly wouldn't do it again and it would probably go a long way to sorting out most countries budget defecit too.

Hackers remotely start, unlock Honda Civics with $300 tech

Water

What always makes me laugh is when you see modern cars advertised as part of an active lifestyle. Ever tried taking a modern key fob surfing with you?

Re: almost never use remote key fob features

Buttons are getting more and more rare. It's almost twenty years since I drove a car where you never even had to take the keyfob out of your pocket. The RFID tag in that car was supposedly only effective when you were right next to the car. And we did find if I was standing two metres away somebody next to the car couldn't open the door. However I recently tried a modern equivalent and the doors would audibly unlock when I was more than six feet from the car and wouldn't lock again until I was twice that distance away.

With an RFI reader a thief could easilly read that thing from outside your house unless you were to deliberately find the point in your house least accessible to RF to keep your keys. Or maybe invested in a lead box to keep them in.

Re: Slim jim

There was a period when cars had physical locks as well as an RFID tag in the key. The security with them was pretty damned good. I had a late 90s Volvo with that set up and no remote fob until fairly recently.

I watched an expert try to "steal" it once as part of a demo. Modern cars he was driving away in seconds. My old Volvo defeated him. He had to admit the only way he was opening the door was would be by causing serious physical damage - breaking the window being the easiest route. But even inside the car he was stumped. With the key in the house (the house was actually the police station where the demo took place) the range on that old RFID tag was so low he couldn't activate it. But even with the RFID tag right next to his reader although he couldn't manage to crack things enough to start the car within the 15 minute limit he'd been set.

With access to the RFID tag - for example if the keys were right next to my front door he could fool the ECU into thinking the key was present, but the physical security was too much for him. He had to admin that in order to steal the car he would need to smash the window and then rip the steering column apart. Not just to hot wire the ignition switch, but to bust the steering lock.

And that's all it takes. If the potential thief has a choice of cars they are always going to go for the easy target. Time taken stealing a car is time at risk of being caught in the act. Also there is the risk from failure. Fail to steal a car and you risk leaving physical evidence on the car which is just another way of getting caught. The thing is that most modern cars are pretty easy to steal so the thief is spoiled for choice. Back in the day of course it was GM products every time because you could steal one as quickly as if you had the key.

Car security has gone backwards massively in the name of convenience. But I never found a physical key an inconvenience in the first place.

Re: Steering Wheel Lock Anyone?

There never was one of those that you couldn't pop the lock in under a minute. Doesn't matter how big and sturdy a security device is if you can open the lock with a ball point pen.

Maybe somebody should invent some sort of alternative to all this RF stuff. Something radical like maybe a uniquely shaped metal token of some sort that you fit into some sort of receptacle in the vehicle designed to only accept that uniquely shaped token. You could use the same token to open all the doors and maybe start the engine too.

Just random thoughts really...

How experimental was Microsoft's 'experimental banner' in File Explorer?

Advertising is absolutely the norm these days. That people are outraged the Microsoft may be planning to stick adverstising in Windows seems a little strange. People accept ads in all sorts of other software even when they appears in software and hardware for which they have paid.

And when is an ad not an ad? Remember the old paperclip in Office all those decades ago that used to give "helpful" suggestions until you worked out how to switch him off? He would sometimes suggest using Microsoft products or services that you didn't have installed.

The right to repairable broadband befits a supposedly critical utility

Re: No line test

"Line tests aren't particularly accurate though. If it's disconnected at the green box it still usually comes back as "customer equipment not connected"."

That's not true. A line test has to detect the NTE (master socket) in order to pass. If the result comes back with something like "masterjack not detected" some CPs service desk employees don't know how to interpret that result and will say it's not a fault, but that's a problem with badly trained staff not the test itself. It's very much an old school result you get from some older test heads and has been replaced with more modern results like "dis at or near customer premises" or "dis in local network" which is much easier to interpret.

With the more modern test equipment on most FTTC services you even get service test failures when the actual copper line tests pass. So you would get something like a possible copper joint fault when the test sees a lot of retrains and errors. There's no hard failure but the service test will give a failure on the balance of probabilities. This seems to be something that's been implemented because so many CPs employ staff who can't actually interpret the detailed data you get along with your headline test results.

The most likely reason for getting a bogus "CPE not detected" sort of result you're talking about is a misjumper. These are usually caused by some engineer managing to incorrectly jumper a DSLAM port to the wrong d-side pair meaning that yes the line test passes but it's completely the wrong line that's being tested. When you get that sort of result though a decent CP engineer will notice that line attenuation has changed.

One of the things you need to be aware of when it comes to broadband and telephony provision in the UK is the acronym MBORC. Lightning strikes are often considered MBORC. As soon as you hear MBORC that means your SLA is out of the window.

Depending on what service you have a fairly typical repair SLA for a total loss of service here in the UK will be two working days. You can pay extra for shorter SLAs but nobody does. Yes you think, I can manage for 48 hours without an internet connection, right up until you discover that your SLA doesn't cover sundays so when your service drops on friday afternoon you might not get it back until monday afternoon and that's a weekend worth of Netflix lost, not to mention not being able to change the settings on your central heating.

And then the term MBORC rears it's ugly head. Of late there have been MBORCs declared for storm damage and flooding over large areas. MBORCs for power supply failures to street cabinets are not uncommon. The same goes for lightning strikes. Some other fun ones are "vehicle strikes" - when a vehicle has hit a cabinet or pole. Even rodent damage can be declared MBORC.

All these things are MBORC - Mattersd Beyond Our Reasonable Control and whenever the carrier decides unilaterally to declare MBORC all bets are off and your connection can be down for weeks.

The cry of MBORC is the Openreach equivalent of the knights of the round table shouting "Run away! Run away!"