Posts by DavCrav

"We did ... three times. But at some point security becomes more important than familiarity which is why we took the decision and " did the other thing"."

Sorry, I misunderstood. It sounded like it was just that version that was broken, not that *and all subsequent ones*.

"I see , make the hundreds of £s worth of phone unrepairable . thanks."

No, it's completely repairable.

1) Break the glass case.

2) Make repair.

3) Plunge into molten glass to reform new case around the phone.

Easy!

Re: Creat a fake account.

"with an image of Winnie the Pooh instead"

Wrong east Asian dictatorship.

Re: Not going to happen

"Where is a government equivalent of Google Maps,..."

Where is the Google equivalent of a free primary school?

Re: Brown-nosing

"I’d love to see the citation on this little gem."

It was some Republican idiots who say that, but don't say it about Trump, despite him literally refusing the say he will leave office if he loses.

Re: Comcast user here

"People in the UK have no idea how crappy and predatory US cable companies are"

Oh I do, and wait until you hear what we pay for our mobile phones.

"Do China get a say?"

Sort of. China's authorities can say 'no', which Softbank can then ignore, and then find all Softbank assets seized and all Softbank employees thrown in jail, or kidnapped from neighbouring countries, etc.. This is China we're talking about, not some pushover like the UK.

Re: Commuting

"Unfortunately, work from home has only exacerbated the behavior of the vocal minority of staff who are all about the penny pinching "if work wants me to do it, they should pay" attitude."

Presumably these vocal minority of staff are in senior management? After all, penny pinching appears to be their specialist subject.

"That's quite apart from computer hardware depreciating so fast it ought to be considered a consumable rather than an asset."

UK research councils classify computer hardware costing less than £10k to be a consumable.

"For one thing, some corporate registrants will have very powerful and justifiable reasons not to have their contact data published in whois - refuges for domestic abuse victims, people who might be targets for violence because they run a mosque or a lab that does animal testing, etc."

No.

If you are running a refuge then you should probably not have your registered address, which is necessarily public so that people can contact the company, and the refuge address to be the same.

Re: Hmmm

"Remember the UK rules to catch terrorists - you know, people who use guns and bombs to kill people? Subsequently used to catch people who put bins out on the wrong day?"

RIPA was the overarching legislation governing essentially all investigative powers by all UK bodies, from MI5 to the Post Office. A local council 'using RIPA' to investigate dog fouling was not accessing a national database of CCTV images and facial recognition software like in the movies. It would mean that some dick was letting his dog shit in a specific place, and a council enforcement officer stopped by and waited for him to show up to nab him.

Things like that didn't used to be regulated at all.

Re: El Reg guilty too

"Stop calling it metadata El Reg. Just don't. It is data."

It is metadata. Metadata is a specific type of data, so it is data, but it's specifically data about some more data, and so metadata.

And it is qualitatively different from collecting all data, as well. If I give you the complete metadata about films, you can build all sorts of information about who likely is friends with whom in Hollywood (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, for example), but you still cannot see any movie.

I'm not saying whether or not governments should collect these data, but metadata is a better description of what is collected.

Re: Uber Employees

One of my favourite Jokes from Frasier is "What is a Freudian slip? It's where you say one thing and really mean a mother."

Re: Why use the word racist.

"Light is obviously not racist, you bleeding fool."

Yes, it's called reductio ad absurdam.

Of course light isn't racist. But light has differing effects with regards white and black people, and in particular makes it much harder to make out black faces in dark conditions. If humans (who are very good at pattern recognition) have more trouble in low-light conditions with black faces than white ones, why it is clear that a computer should be able to treat both equally well in higher-light conditions?

The point is that racism is meant to be where decisions taken by people have a deleterious consequence for one or more racial group. After many, many examples of algorithms having difficulty with black faces, perhaps it's time to start thinking that, maybe, algorithms have a harder time distinguishing black faces because it is an objectively harder problem?

If that is the case, then suddenly it looks unseemly to throw words like 'racist' around to describe the perhaps completely blameless programmer (because, as you have stated, non-people cannot be racist, so if the algorithm is racist that means the people who programmed it must be).

Repeating the 'these computer programmers are racist' mantra/libel is starting to become tedious, when the evidence is stacking up that it is just more difficult. Of course, evidence is not a proof, but it should be fairly easy to check. Use a million-strong dataset of white faces and a million-strong dataset of black faces. Then evaluate the performance of the algorithm on a new selection. I've not heard of such an experiment being conducted, but it would go a long way to settling this argument.

And, here's the interesting question: what happens if it turns out that these algorithms will always be worse at distinguishing black faces? You know, like humans are.

Re: Was the phone private or company?

"sounds authoritarian which jurisdiction is that?"

Eh? I think that pretty much every jurisdiction has warrants and subpoenas. Paper records can be siezed in the process of an investigation. Digital records should obviously be subject to the same legal considerations. Being compelled to hand over documents is a standard part of every justice system.

The question is with encryption. What do you do when a judge says 'hand over these documents' and the defendant says 'but I don't wanna, and you can't make me'? Different jurisdictions have different approaches at this point, depending on what digital documents are technically classified as.

In the US, for example, you are compelled to hand over physical objects, but not mental ones. Case law is not settled on the question of whether you can be compelled to decrypt, although it's leaning in the direction of no. France, the UK and Ireland all can compel, Germany and Switzerland no, Netherlands you can but not of the suspect themselves (but of any other party, yes), Belgium yues to everyone other than the suspect and family.

Re: You lot...

"Because HMG decided it was a good opportunity drive a coach and horses through one of our legal protections instead of sending the message legally."

Hoe do you know. The message was not addressed to you personally, at least the SMS I received wasn't. If, indeed, it was sent to all active phones in a cell, then there is no GDPR violation.

Re: Other commentary ...

"Well, if its done correctly, each user should have their data encrypted with unique key. All copies of these keys should be deleted, making the backups for that user unusable (in the near to mid term)."

How many companies do we think really encrypt each person's data with a different key? I mean, given that some companies don't encrypt the data at all.

Re: Scandal, but not this

"10k downloads is nothing on Play"

Well, it is only available to Ohio residents, for a start.

Re: Leaving it blank....

A collegaue sent me this Zoom attempt at captioning:

Speaker: A is inside U.

Zoom captioning: AIDS inside you.

Re: Huge approval rating

"Meanwhile Duterte told the Police to shoot drug dealers who fight back when being arrested."

Well in excess of 12,000 dead from extra-judicial murder.

"Nobody in the Philippines feels sad for these people except for their immediate family,"

That's a lot of families.

"The EU and some other human rights bodies are complaining while their own countries are basket cases."

Yeah, damn that rule of law.

Oh, and one of those 'human rights bodies' is the International Criminal Court.