* Posts by Nick Ryan

3751 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Welcome to The Reg's poetry corner... hiQ once again / beats LinkedIn on web scrape case / more appeals await

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: "May have been (at least in US law) legal"

Yep. While some parts of the GDPR are rather misunderstood, and possibly misapplied too, in general it is rather good. In this case it is making no distinction between EU citizens and others, there are no "aliens have no rights" intended in this regulation, the aim is to protect all people equally. Quite different to certain "1st world" (hahahaha) regimes in the world.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

It's more complicated than this...

When going to such an exhibition or gallery you are contractually agreeing to the terms of your access - which may or may not prohibit you from taking photos.

This is entirely separate to copyright law. For example a four hundred old painting is thoroughly out of copyright and you as an individual or a business are free to make copies of it and exploit and use it in almost any way that you feel fit to, including printing the images on T-Shirts, posters and so on and selling these. Aquiring access to the image in order to produce these copies is quite separate and usually you have no specific rights to do so.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: "May have been (at least in US law) legal"

It's complicated, which is the whole basis of this case, by the content being publicly accessible.

Linked In has non-publicly accessible content where a signed in user, who has somehow agreed to the terms of use of the use service, has access. Control of this content is entirely within the contract terms, although organisations should remember that while they can write whatever they want within these contract terms, these terms being legally acceptable is entirely different...

Because Linked In has "private" content, it also means that what it publishes outside of this is "public" content. As in freely available to all. The presentation of this content is subject to Linked In's copyright, however the content itself is provided and therefore (co)owned by the data subject, who has "chosen" to make this information about themselves freely available to the public. Linked In benefits from this content being freely/publicly available as it drives searches to the Linked In service through search engines. Linked In cannot have it both ways unless they want to specifically go down the route of licensing search engines to access content and to also have the data subjects (users) of the service agreee to this.

It's an interesting situation that largely benefits lawyers, who without this kind of thing would doubtless struggle to maintain their (frugal) lifestyles.

Thinking about processing a payment, Sage Group? Biz confirms mulling sale of Sage Pay

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Why?

It does stink of short-termisn. As in, one-off large payouts for a few people with the overall business suffering in the long term.

The service makes a profit and ties in with their other services. If the bundling of the service is a commercial issue through customers from one one not wanting to be forced to use the other, or potential partners and customers of the payment system being put off the service through the links with Sage then either going the less nuclear route of separating the business into a separate concern or just making it very clear that the use of one does not depend on the other in any way and good and fair terms will be offered to all users, including competitors to Sage's accountancy/payroll business, them that work too. But just selling off a profitable and I can only guess ongoing profitable into the forseeable future, component of the business that is quite linked just feels like typical short term cashing in.

Now on Amazon Prime: The Amazing Shrinking UK Tax Burden

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Tax Revenue

Stop hankering after the past for the sake of the past. The high streets twenty years ago were not the same as they were one hundred years previously; Does this make one better than the other. Things change, get over it.

This doesn't mean that things shouldn't be fair, but needlessly attempting to punish online retailers with a higher VAT rate helps nobody. In particular it would not help all the smaller businesses who operate online in some manner, would you suggest forcing all of these offline instead?

If what Amazon is doing is legal, as in taking the profit and reinvesting it, that is fine and this is a perfectly fair and ethical way to operate. If they are instead using tax loopholes to move the money out of the country to where it can be taxed at a cheaper rate, aka a "tax haven" (one of BoJo's "great plans" to encourage the remnants of the UK economy once he's finished destroying it), then that is very different. The UK operates a couple of these tax havens already anyway so why not extend them to the mainland? If Amazon is paying such low wages that staff have to supplement their income and food using government subsidies then that is very bad and indicates a thoroughly broken social and economic model. Raising the minimum income will not fix this, as the increased wages will generally just loop back in the system increasing costs for the recipient and in the end nobody really benefits. None of these problems can be tacked in isolation.

Look, we know it feels like everything's going off the rails right now, but think positive: The proton has a new radius

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Pinch of proton salt

To be fair to your lecturer, no single element had the enargy/bandgap require for blue LEDs. However a rather smart scientist managed to work out how to use a combination of elements to produce the required gap and his research also contributed to much brighter LEDs than were previously thought possible.

Science is full of people claiming limits, later scientists merrily break these "limits"... because they can. The statement a couple of hundred years that there was nothing left to discover was probably the lowest point of such claims.

Beware the developer with time on his hands and dreams of Disney

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Never live it down

Once you have exchange, PSTs should become a thing of the past - get all their email onto the server.

As long as you can control group policy and prevent, in many different ways, users from accepting or activating the awful "archive" function that used to be pushed at users by default. Hmmm... Would I like users to arbitrarily move their emails onto the C: drive of the local system and wonder why they can no longer find them on another system or where their entire history of emails has disappeared after a system replacement or crash? No. Just no.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Never live it down

Only 2GB? Your users just aren't trying hard enough. At least with later versions of office, the limit is raised, or on recennt versions of Outlook it doesn't just fuck up the entire file due to integer overflows and disappear in a huff. And a puff of smoke.

Uncle Sam is asking Americans if they could refrain from slapping guns on their drones

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Stop

Re: But...but

Please stop! This kind of thinking could make Australia even more dangerous. Currently one just has to look out for trees containing drop bears... if they could drop from drones as well??? Nowhere would be safe.

Security gone in 600 seconds: Make-me-admin hole found in Lenovo Windows laptop crapware. Delete it now

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: "crapware remains primarily a Windows problem"

None of the crapware is Windows intrinsic not made mandatory in any way by Windows - Microsoft itself got tired and promoted the sales of "clean" systems. And after the antitrust rules, it would have a very hard time to forbid OEMs to install anything.

Apart from, of course, all the crap apps that Microsoft foists onto systems using the windows 10 app store. Games, crap and pointless media applications, social media junk - all pre-installed and often repeatedly re-installed in an entirely opaque manner. Then there come the "recommendations" and the utterly useless and detrimental cortana which is more concerned about sending data and recommendations from the same app store that even finding a locally installed application is hit and miss.

The same old OEMs still pre-load their systems with a load of crap ware. I do what I have done for years: delete all partitions and install from scratch using vanilla windows media.

Cambridge Analytica didn't perform work for Leave.EU? Uh, not so fast, says whistleblower

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: No One Cares

Sadly and disgustingly, this is all true.

But what the hell, I'll be branded as some weirdo liberal who should be ignored because I don't like racism, fascism nor lying bastards. All of which seem to feature heavily in the current crop of politicians "at the top" (if such a dung heap could be said to have a top)

How does UK.gov fsck up IT projects? Let us count the ways

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Project managers

They also make up for not having clued up people involved in the specification phase by having many committees full of unaccountable clueless jobsworths.

Microsoft adds Internet Explorer mode to Chromium Edge, announces roadmap

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Oh noes, undead zombie brower

Largely because Microsoft developed and deployed desktop software development tools for the purposes of web development. They provided all kinds of examples helping idiot developers pretend that a website page is instead a local rich application. As a result we have a legacy of use of ActiveX, stupid JavaScript practices which all rely on "_postback", to the point that whenever I see a website or service relying on this I know that it's been developed by somebody lacking in any real competence.

Previously we also had the mess of idiot developers using Flash to deploy an entire website rather than its intended use which was to enhance parts of a website. The parallels between this and JavaScript usage are uncanny, as is the utter lack of quality and the seeming looks of surprise when things stop working.

Boris Johnson's promise of full fibre in the UK by 2025 is pie in the sky

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: What is a BloJob promise worth?

Don't worry, nothing is happening and Hy Brasil is definitely not sinking. The self-deluded piffle-waffling "politician" said so. Here's a previous politician saying much the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJh6EQ5gv7g

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Is El Reg

Given that we've faced multi-gigabit DDoS waves in the past for annoying black hats, Cloudflare's CDN is particularly useful in staying online at the moment.

...and Microsoft and Apple and IBM and Sun and Google and Adobe.. and [n]. :)

Unless it turned into a sales advertorial for cloudfare, a write up of the scale and what it takes to keep el reg online, it would be quite an interesting write-up for us commentards to read. Without wanting to encourage more attacks of course...

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: An alternative border is obvious

Regrettably there are already a lot of abject shite pushers going on about "the blockchain" and how will solve everything, from storage, to trust, to distributed computing. Bullshit mongers, the lot of them. It's not even really a "solution looking for a problem", it's nothing more than an algorithmic technique with a load of bullshit about distributed transactions, trust and accountability added for good measure. Just add AI, IoT and for humour reasons No-SQL and Big Data into the mix and you'll win any round of Bullshit Bingo.

BGP super-blunder: How Verizon today sparked a 'cascading catastrophic failure' that knackered Cloudflare, Amazon, etc

Nick Ryan Silver badge

if the internet is down, is a troll still a troll ?

It depends if the bridges are still up or not.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

That is fake news

No, this is fake news.

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Gone is the full-sized HDMI type A connector,

Definitely go for the cables. The weight of HDMI cables will destroy the crappy little micro HDMI connectors all the time - the adaptor cables will prevent most of this damage.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Sata

This one has PoE? Skimming through articles I thought this was still a bit of a hack job? I know that PoE is a bit of a niche thing, but it's great for reducing annoying cable requirements.

As for the Micro HDMI connectors... while I love the idea of dual outputs, Micros HDMI connectors are the work of the devil and fail all the damn time. I can see that the USB3 port will be used for video instead on many systems as a result...

Comms room, comms room, comms room is on fire – we don't need no water, let the engineer burn

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Petrol

Isn't it true though that NO liquids burn

It's all down to how well, as in how efficiently, these things burn. The higher the surface area for the chemical reaction the more efficiently something will burn. This is why gases burn better than liquids which burn better than solids. The burning of liquids is particularly complicated because liquids flow and in a "resting" state the surface area for the reaction is quite static, however creating a mist of the liquid is known to work quite well...

For instance, a mist of petrol droplets will burn considerably better (faster) than a pool of petrol because of the greatly increased surface area of the petrol droplets. It is more complicated than this, of course, because depending on pressure and temperature petrol will turn into a gas, but in essence in a petrol engine it is liquid petrol that is being burned, not a gas. While creating a fine mist of petrol in air will cause some of this petrol to convert into gaseous form this won't happen quickly enough to make much of a difference given the cycle period of a typical internal combusion engine.

After years of listening, we've heard not a single peep out of any aliens, say boffins. You think you can do better? OK, here's 1PB of signals

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Sorry folks...

Who's to say what might come out of Cern and the LHC or elsewhere. Are dark energy/dark matter just more fudge factors?

While there is some evidence of sparse matter/energy that doesn't interact with much... the entire dark energy/dark matter fascination does feel like a huge fudge to fill in some glaring inconsistencies between observations and models. There are some interesting, and not entirely whack-job, alternatives to the dark energy/matter fudges too, but all effort seems to be towards investigating dark energy/matter - which isn't a bad thing in itself as we are bound to discover some interesting things along the way regardless.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Joke not a joke.

Minor technical details aside, speed of light, food, oxygen and so on - largely because experts are worthless and just sneer, we should pre-empt an alien lawsiut by firing off all our own lawyers now. Via any form of rocket type device into the general direction of Alpha Centauri.

We should probably also broadcast a galactic apology because some of the buggers are likely to survive.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Physics and Mathematics

Given that exo-planets are usually* discovered by us as they transit their local star how difficult would it be to detect our planet looking from perpendicular to the ecliptic - let alone tell if it had intelligent** life?

Pretty damn difficult really - a species would have to be looking specifically at our system in order to observe it and to target it with rather better and more sensitive equipment than we can reasonably deploy - and to do so over a longer period of time.

As for intelligent life... the jury is still out on that one.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Physics and Mathematics

Currently we can pretty much only detect planets in other star systems through one of two ways:

The gravitational wobbles these cause their star (not strictyly true as the bodies orbit around each other therefore the centre point of the orbit is not the centre of the star, although it will be close - same way that the centre point of the earth/moon orbit is not the centre of the earth) - however this is only currently detectable for large mass planets and requires a reasonable timeframe of measurement to record and detect the change in position over time - complicated by our own orbit. For example to detect a large mass such as Jupiter it would have to be closer to the star than Jupiter and rather faster moving because otherwise we would need to observe the plantary system for a sizeabable fraction of the planet's orbit period - Jupiter has an orbit of 12 years which gives an indication of the time periods required for observation.

The transit of a planet between the star and ourselves. This relies on both the system being aligned such that the planetary system is side on to ourselves (most won't be) and happening to being observing the star during the relatively short transit period and being able to measure the decrease in the star's observed output during this period and to perform this measurement a few times in order to remove any other reasons for the difference in the star's observed output.

We are getting better at such measurements and observations and as time goes by we are discovering, and confirming, the existence of more and more planets in other systems; and the size of these planets is getting smaller and smaller too as our measurements are getting more accurate and are over a longer period.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Physics and Mathematics

The Alpha Centauri system is the closest to us, however it's a mess as it involves three stars which means that the likelihood of favourable conditions for any form of life is pretty low.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: A significant part of the problem

<= This.

Even if we extend the strong broadcast period of a technological society to 200 years, this 200 years would have to coincide with our listening period. That's the tiniest fraction of time compared to the timeline of even just our solar system during which a technological society could have evolved. When looking for such signals we'd have to be within range and looking for such a signal and incredibly lucky to be looking at the precise frequencies involved at the right time.

It doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep listening... if we do so for tens of thousands of years then there is a reasonable chance of detecting something. Or we could be really lucky.

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: That's why when importing data...

No, however the morons who designed Office 365 and its security pretty much do their best to make it that standard user accounts have to take on Office 365 administrative roles. Cockwombles.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: That's why when importing data...

Which is the most sensible way to do this.

10 PRINT Memorial in New Hampshire marks the birthplace of BASIC

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: WOW...

Same here. I kid myself that it will be valuable some day. Most likely to prop doors open though!

Anyone else find it weird that the bloke tasked with probing tech giants for antitrust abuses used to, um, work for the same tech giants?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: I'm shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on in this establishment!

That would be the United States of Corruption and BriberyTM then?

Organised crime is jealous for a reason. Largely because they are labelled as criminals whereas the others are not.

When it comes to DNS over HTTPS, it's privacy in excess, frets UK child exploitation watchdog

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: The ol' Dual-Use Problem

Almost all child abuse is carried out in the home or a similar environment by close family or those who are the equivalent. If you truly want to reduce child abuse, then change society, don't blame the Internet for child abuse.

The Internet is not the cause of child abuse, it's been happening probably since humans started dragging knuckles along the floor. The Internet is, however, a medium allowing the relatively easy spread of material produced as a result of child abuse and individuals who are already inclined to doing such things may be more inclided to do it more - or, they may even find that they no longer need to do it if their gratifications can be satisfied.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Golden Rule of Audit

That's true.

Playmobil reenactment, or it didn't happen.

Want a good Android smartphone without the $1,000+ price tag? Then buy Google's Pixel 3a

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Cloud Storage

While people frequently complain that "why anyone would want to watch video on a phone this size", try considering the relative visual size of the phone display (close) and the average TV (not close). Obviously TV like devices are often somewhat larger now than they used to be but it wasn't many years ago that sitting three or more metres away from a 19" TV was considering pretty immersive.

Tangled in .NET: Will 5.0 really unify Microsoft's development stack?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: what a mess

Arguably everything before as well. It's been one DLL hell after another for years as well as one interop system after another too, with DDE, ActiveX, COM, DCOM and .net amongst the most common - often built on top of one another. All starting with an operating system that had no concept of decent library management, and rather than introduce one they just bodged layer upon layer of copies of files and versioning and path precedence mangling until we get to the stage that it's pretty much untanglable. The WinSXS directory, being one many GB horror of an example.

To be fair the importance of system security has made the task much harder. However, with the combination of no appreciable library management system combined with no initial consideration for security is not a good one. If security is not deployed from the start then attempting to retro-fit it will always fail at some point. Windows was designed from the concept of it being a single trusted user environment and has had amendments to this cobbled on since. The world of computing has changed since, of course and it's quite forgivable for the early developers of single user, stand alone operating systems to not consider the impact of web browsers and prevalent malware...

Office 365 user security practices are woeful, yet it's still 'Microsoft's fault' when an org is breached

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Stop

MFA

I'd be more include to deploy MFA if it currently wasn't such a barely worth it mess. While the vendors are trying to push rubbish where non-secret things replace secret things such as passwords, they can just go away. A user's voice or face is a reasonable replacement for a user identifier however it is not a reasonable replacement for something that is secret such as a password and no amount of hollywood bullshit will change this. True, retina scans are rather secure as they are harder to fake however they should still be considered only a user identifier, or a third attribute, not a replacement for a secret.

If Microsoft's MFA was vaguely sensibly granular, and worked with cheap(ish) fobs or smart cards then it would be a help. But it's a totally disjointed mess particularly where authentication connections come across a spread of devices and services. Enforce MFA for external webmail/outlook proprietary/IMAP connectivity to mailboxes, particularly when in a different country? Hell yes. Enforce MFA for using a workstation within the corporate network? Not so much? Enforce MFA to allow a user's email application to connect to email on their mobile phone? Erm, this is getting awkward. Particularly when they may have a tablet and a laptop as well and use remote desktop.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

In fact, even by flinging a document or two into OneDrive, Microsoft will reward you with 10 points.

It's bollocks like this that devalues the entire scheme.

Taking a potentially sensitive document out of corporate control and dropping it onto a largely uncontrolled file dump service where every user gets their own file dump area and often manages their own sharing... and duplication... and versioning... this is 10 points better for security? Is it possible to granularly restrict such data leak services? Nope, it's a case of "use this service and microsoft will force and encourage the use of others that provide easy leak options" or "don't use this service at all". For example, we are (relatively) happy to use teams as it's being forced as the replacement to skype for business. Are we happy to have this include effectively uncontrollable file dump areas where documents are stored on Microsoft's clouds? No, we are not.

I may be permanently grumpy attempting to keep data secure... and to manage office 365 (hybrid) to get the best out of it.

Portal to 'HELL' cracks open in street – oh sorry, it's just another pothole

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: If the hole was the road to hell ...

Surprising really since in York they have seem to be relaying a few of the cobbled streets and replacing them with tarmac ones instead

UK taxman falls foul of GDPR, agrees to wipe 5 million voice recordings used to make biometric IDs

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Or just people like me who worked with the original Data Protection Act and found the GDPR not even remotely scary: because I'm capable of reading the GDPR itself and not running around like a headless chicken throwing tens of thousands at consultants and lawyers and then deleting everything just in case.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: The funny thing is

Voice, like fingerprints, should never be used as a password. Possibly as an identifier, or as part of a multi-way authentication system that is genuinely secret, but never to replace something secret.

More idiot developers and managers who have been succored in by hollywood nonsense. Next they'll believe that Unix is a 3D file system navigator (or that this is a good idea)

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Not an IT guy but..

I will have executed each separate statement as they were terminated. Multi line statements usually work this way.

Gather round, friends. Listen close. It's time to list the five biggest lies about 5G

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: All well and good.

I think the point is that were there is no investment in current technologies, the likelihood of any investment happening in "5G" is pretty much zero. There is often reverse investment in these non-5G areas.

Parents slapped with dress code after turning school grounds into a fashion crime scene

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: I'd ban North Face clothing.

Somewhere tremendously pink, obviously. Barbara Cartland's boudoir perhaps?

Well I certainly wouldn't want to be spotted there...

Tesla touts totally safe, not at all worrying self-driving cars – this time using custom chips

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Benchmarks and other deceptions

The local Cornish approach is far too often "it's OK to drink dive if you're a local as you know the roads".

A particular hazard on many of these roads is curiously abandoned cars. In the middle of fecking nowhere, about a metre from the edge of the road, usually just after a blind corner at the top or bottom of a hill. No sign of the driver of course, or even why they would stop and park where they do. Other hazards are:

  • mud covered vehicles with no lights doing 10mph on the A30. In the dark.
  • caravans. Is any other country in the world blighted by these things as much as the UK?
  • tosser trolleys (chelsea tractors, wanker wagons, various other terms for non-offroad "offroad" vehicles) - driven by locals or emmets and always too big to fit on many roads or in parking spaces.
  • "Interesting" place names that one feels a need to stop and photograph :)

/(still) honary Cornish I guess...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: What Rot

Or the lane markings are a bit worn and it's dark and wet and the road has had contraflows or some other reason for different lane markings on it in the past. Which are burnt off but equally as prominent as the current lane markings in the dark and wet.

Take your pick: 0/1/* ... but beware – your click could tank an entire edition of a century-old newspaper

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Generally the password is not a part of the encryption key - if it was then changing the password would render the device unreadable and not being able to change passwords is a bad idea.

At some point in the code there must be a "does this password match" function and "all" a hacker has to do is to change this code to always return true. The encryption keys must be on the device somewhere, however a small amount of private persistent memory is common in such devices and it will be stored in there and not accessible to anything other than the control chip itself.

Hole lotta crud: Chinese stock photo pusher tries to claim copyright on Event Horizon pic

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Color me surprised.

This is little different to the US's "prior art" patent ruling that only "prior art" in the US counts as "prior art".

Town admits 'a poor decision was made' after baseball field set on fire to 'dry' it more quickly

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Now that is one proficient spider. Amazing creatures and the self-propagating irrational fear of largely harmless to human critters doesn't help much and is annoying to see. While some are a touch dangerous to humans, most aren't and there is much more danger from farmyard animals, automobiles, the bugs that spiders eat, pets and, in un-civilised parts of the world, privately owned firearms (which have no practical use against spiders except for ill-advised bludgeoning).

You were warned and you didn't do enough: UK preps Big Internet content laws

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Here we go...

I don't want to link to the content directly, it's too horrible by far, but here's a wikipedia link to it: (link)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Complete separation means hard border through Ireland. The EU refuses to accept that, and won't even talk about anything else until Ireland is dealt with.

This is not quite true. The EU accepts that if the UK leaves the EU with no deal then a "hard" border results and must be implemented. This is no different to any other border with the EU, just that this one would to be on land and is therefore rather different to patrol and manage compared to a sea border. There is also the case of a "hard" border with Gibraltar but this is forgotten about even more. The EU does not want such a border in Ireland because, unlike the cockwomble retards who are spouting out nonsense without even looking at the situation, they understand that a return to a border with border posts and separation will be very bad for the people of Ireland and rather fragile peace that has been brokered there. But, hey, what do the lives of millions pf people matter compared to blinkered ideology, rhetoric, lies and denials?