Posts by Christoph

“Outsourcing is and remains a critical part of public sector service delivery”

Because taking a service that is run for the public good and making it run for private profit will obviously produce a better service (because it's run solely to make money) with less cost (because you have to pay the shareholders as much money as possible as well as provide the service).

Unless you happen to live in the real world, that is.

This 'age verification' is of course nothing whatever to do with making sure that everyone is identifiable and can be tracked.

Delay publication of the report for several years.

State that it was all years ago and the problems have now been fixed.

Rinse. Repeat.

While the citizens of this country who it is your job to help are driven to despair, starvation and suicide.

But according to Jonathan Coulton they can't open until the first of May each year.

At the moment you can be arrested for the crime of going to Notting Hill Carnival while looking vaguely like a known criminal. In the future you will get nicked every time you walk down the street.

Standard tactic

The usual trick. We can't solve this, so we simply make a law that someone else has to solve it, and impose draconian penalties if they don't.

This means of course that the tech firms will have no practical option but to simply remove stuff that's even slightly suspicious, with no checks at all. And the governments can say "Well we didn't tell them to do that, so it's not our fault."

A million bees?

That's two million Erics!

This has always been the problem. Single sign on = single point of failure.

Re the passer-by noticing the problem instantly: Back in the seventies I wandered past the electronics guy who had a very large sheet of paper pinned up showing a very intricate maze of components he was designing.

"What's this?" I asked. "Output converter for a non-standard Gray code".

"Oh. Err ... why can't you use a lookup table in an EPROM?" "Aaaargh!"

"they will soon expect their access to the online world to be clean and free from bugs and threats, in particular in relation to the online safety of their children”.

We are going to bring in draconian laws, and if anybody objects we will scream "But think of the Children!"

The first use is always porn

"After the pixels associated with the bodies have been mapped, various skins and outfits are superimposed onto them."

One of the first uses of this in the wild will of course be to produce 'naked' videos of celebrities.

However it will be extremely useful for CGI films - Andy Serkis will no longer need to wear a special motion capture suit to play Gollum, you can as shown motion capture a whole crowd at once with no extra special equipment at all.

Ah, those loony foreigners, eh?

They're obviously much sillier than the wonderful USA, which merely bans entire countries.

Not a problem

As it approaches Venus, a Little Green Man will pop up and say "You can't park that there, mate".

So she just waves her magic wand

And says "Daesha Kedavra!" and all that nasty content just vanishes.

You can no longer just view the image and then save it, you get the Getty copyright page instead. So what happens if instead you elect to visit the page where the image is hosted and download the image from there?

Don't worry

"These are quite OK. The data will be deleted after the scan. It will only be used where there is already suspicion, and never ever to check people guilty of walking while black.

So it's quite safe and OK. There's no need to protest."

Very shortly after they have become widespread: "We've just made these teeny, tiny changes in the conditions of use. And we have really good reasons for needing this."

A few months later: "Ah, just one slight extra adjustment to when we use them. Oh, and just in case of terrorism, we really do need to retain all the data".

Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera.

Once they have these, there is no limit on what they will want to do with them and will demand the right to do.

The mainframe room had a big red emergency power button on the outside wall in the open office, so you could hit it after abandoning the room for instance for a halon dump. So normal blank office wall with prominent protruding red button in the middle.

Not just "I wonder what this does?" but possible to bump into it by accident.

Later they fitted a box over it.

Jakarta EE?

As ISIRTA put it many years ago:

My wife went to the West Indies!

Jamaica?

Oh, is that in the West Indies?

Yes.

Then I must have meant the East Indies.

Jakarta?

No, she went by train.

'Jason Colon'?

Maybe Nobby Nobbs messed it up trying to nick it?

I thought the US emergency services were largely self-funding? The Ambulances charge you a few thousand dollars to drive you a hundred yards down the road, and the Police rob passing drivers with 'civil forfeiture'.

"However, he declined to identify who he had sold the data to"

"Welcome to the cell you'll be occupying until you name your accomplices."

Why repeat the experiment?

Sending up a steam-driven rocket to check whether the Earth is flat? This was already tried many decades ago and described by the BBC in the report "Wings Over Dagenham" first broadcast on 10 January 1957.

Flat Earth Society member: Er, could you slow down just a bit here, I want to take that photograph of the Earth.

Eccles: Oh here. I just saw the Earth through the clouds.

Flat Earth Society member: Did it look round?

Eccles: Yeah, but I don't think it saw me.

There's often complaints about people regarding everything on the net as free. With the end of net neutrality that will soon change - Americans will find that for everything on the net they have to pay through the nose.

"we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States "

Cue massive wave of spam saying "This is Twitter. Russians may have compromised your computer. Please log in here for details of how to deal with this. ACT NOW or it may be to late!"

"This program has gathered information on innocent Americans and is ripe for future abuse," warned Daines. "We must do our due diligence."

"Section 702 as it is written allows the government to spy on us," noted Leahy. "We have a right to privacy."

And tough luck on innocent foreigners who have no protection for their privacy and no right to privacy.

If the Yanks don't like it up 'em then don't do it to everyone else.

There is supposed to be a massive database of details of known child porn images so they can be automatically detected. A nude picture of a 14 year old is (other than some *very* restricted cases) clearly child porn. Why was this image not detected in this way after the first complaints?

"in many cases the dosh was blown on updates or modifications to existing contracts – and staff did not think they needed approval for the changes"

You can't just spend that extra million dollars on the modifications to meet the changed specs - you need to get approval first! It will only delay the project by about six months and add 10 million to the cost.