Posts by Charlie Clark

But there is literally no solution

Au contraire there are well-established ways of dealing with this kind of abuse, see previous post for an example.

Re: Follow the money...

Indeed. And you can include the telephone networks in there and make them potentially liable for providing access to the network for known offenders. This is done in Germany and is surprisingly effective at blocking even international dialers.

Money owed to the ICO is just a debt and debtors are protected by bankruptcy law. Do you think the lawmakers knew this when they drafted the law? They surely wouldn't want a toothless regulator, would they?

Re: I do not imagine Apple will take long.

The most recent stats show decrease of alcohol consumption per capita by a factor of more than 2.

Last stats I saw showed that the average life expectancy for men was still in decline and significantly below OECD norms. But this stuff is all relative. Putin has weathered the double-whammy of lower oil prices and sanctions reasonably well and most Russians still compare their situation with 1990 – 2000. The cloud on the horizon are those born after 1990, but they're still a tiny percentage and, of thouse, a signficant number are of the usual nationalist persuasion.

Re: What about iMessage?

What about an app that simply encrypts over other's channels

Not sure what you're suggesting but SMS runs over systems controlled by the networks. I suppose you could shard an encrypted message like this but you've still got a problem of distributing the keys. I suspect it's only a matter of time until Telegram manages to put the necessary components on something like TOR which is more or less unblockable.

But this has never been about the technology. Russia is a mafia state and the people who set up Telegram refuse to kowtow to Vlad. This usually means a holiday in Siberia along with special bank account.

Re: I do not imagine Apple will take long.

Russia is China and the Russian market is not that big. Russia has a few very rich people and the rest are musiks. Apple can probably get more from the PR of not going along. After all, unlike Android, there is no replacement store so if the App Store gets pulled, there is no store and no way to provide updates.

Re: Wonder what would happen

Are there european social networks that would explode over night?

I'm not sure there needs to be. Growth over the last couple of years has been in messengers, particularly WhatsApp, and fashion-darling Instagram. WhatsApp is currently limited by use of the Signal protocol as to what Facebook can mine it for, though that is changing, but there are numerous drop-in replacements. For YouTube there is Vimeo.

Basically, it would be bad business to let users find out that they can live quite well without the snooping.

Re: Big-Tech vs Big-Tobacco vs Banksters

GDPR is a mere experiment, no one knows how the law will shake out...

Hardly an experiment. It's EU law with the ECJ as ultimate arbiter. It's been drafted based on cases with non-EU companies, which is why fines can be turnover based. Previous ECJ judgments against non-EU companies have been upheld.

Seeing as how easy it is to persuade people that "they've nothing to hide" I don't see why companies aren't being smarter about this.

fucked the Paris agreement probably irreperably which will likely result in billions of deaths over the next century; fucked the Iran nuclear deal which will probably result in major wars in the middle east, possibly including nuclear war

Looks like you've been sucked in.

Trump's main actions have been tax reform and regulation repealing. So, expect a resurgence of dodgy financial products, wildcat oil and gas exploration and a return to 1980s and 1990s levels of water and air pollution.

Most of the international stuff has yet to come fully into effect. For example, withdrawing from the Paris accord doesn't happen before next year. The Iran thing will only cause problems if the US decides to enforce secondary sanctions. Shouting at China and North Korea has handed them the initiative (China has already lifted some energy restrictions on North Korea). Not that I think Trump gives a shit where golf clubs or Make America Shite Again caps are made.

Re: "But that’s democracy for you - it’s flawed, but better than any alternative"

Isn't democracy by definition the will of the majority

Sort of depends on your definition of majority and the electoral system. In general, there is no single majority for all issues but successive coalitions for different ones. Well-organised minorities can and often do achieve outsize influence in coalition. This can be a long the stable lines of traditional European governments but also effectively blackmail as is the case in Israel and to a lesser degree in the UK (Democratic Unionists) and Denmark (Danish Peoples Party).

First past the post systems favour binary opposites and, hence, often riding roughshod over other minorities but they also tend to have the advantage of clear choices, even if long-term the to-ing and fro-ing tends to be inefficient. You can see this to some extent in the current US regime with Trump rolling back regulation from Bush and Obama where possible but also largely failing to fill important positions with capable candidates (new Dutch and German ambassadors embarassing examples of his placemen).

Re: Toddler

The major mistake is, of course, for a president to involve himself directly in the matter. His job is to represent the country and to set policy directives and negotiate with the legislature.

But I think that we have to see how this plays with the Trump Chumps who will see it as hardball negotiations leading to a concession by the Chinese and a huuge fine. That the deal was most heavily lobbied for by ZTE's US partners and suppliers doesn't matter to them; neither does the loss of face in Asia by these childish, short-term tactics which lead inevitably to things like the Mnuchin fudge on trade with China, and the dance that King Jong Eun is leading him on: some kind of fudge on the sanctions is bound to come.

Trump's overriding aim, and we shouldn't make the mistake of treating him as a complete idiot again, is to shore up votes in the mid-terms so that he can continue dismantling government and push for legislature that is subdordinate to the executive. As things stand presently I think he has a 50/50 chance of realising Trumpland – the land of golf courses, no minimum wage and no welfare.

Re: Irish abortion referendum.

The French only voted 51% in favour of creating it.

Fortunately, this meant that the French government didn't have to offend sensibilites by pointing out that referendums have no legal force in France.

Re: Well, duh

Can't be done. Not in todays world where countries need to work together. Total exit is unrealistic.

In that case, which idiot signed the request to do just that without a plan b? Nobody in the EU would have given a shit if the UK took ten years or longer to work out what it was going to do before enacting the clause to leave the union. But the Tory press would have gone ape shit and that's all that seems to matter.

As things stand the request was made, and the UK has about five months to come up with a workable arrangement for a transition period that is acceptable every single of the other 27 member states.

Re: Fines vs. Compensation

You have to distinguish between civil and criminal cases, particularly as this is European and not US law. The fines are levied because the companies break the law. Compensation has to be applied for separately, ie. the law is not supposed to be invitation for class action suits.

No need for a chat, someone is going on the naughty step for this.

Actually, I've just had an update for MS Office 2016 for Mac which now has simple "yes" and "no" options.

Re: Autonomous vehicle safety ignored

I'm a bit worried about the reliance on LIDAR for many of these vehicles.

Nearly all the vehicles use multiple systems to reduce the limitations of each. LIDAR is currently favourite for object detection because its much faster than anything using video processing, though I think the hope is that real-time video processing will become possible in a few years, which should help in the situations where it's known that LIDAR has problems.

But then, for example, small child in white clothing on a snowy street or in dark clothing at night present problems for all kinds of drivers.

Re: Autonomous vehicle safety ignored

That's a flawed argument, though. If an autonomous vehicle can't at least match the safety standard of the meatsacks

I don't think the argument is flawed. Put someone entirely untrained in charge of a motor vehicle and you'll have a crash in minutes if not seconds.

The bigger issue is the comparability of the statistics: autonomous vehicles already have the better accident per km statistics but these are in selected environments.

John's original point does stand that, at least in the US, the number of road deaths is staggering but barely reported. If people focussed only on the numbers car drivers, along with gun owners, would have to be considered domestic terrorists.

Re: Did anyone really except anything different?

How it must gall them that their 'Snoopers' legislation keeps getting declared illegal

And that's by the British courts! Mind you other governments are just as shitty: the Bavarian government is pushing through warrantless surveillance. Fortunately, it's almost certain that this will also be struck down by the constitution.

We really need a scapegoat icon for commentards who favour whataboutery…

Re: Did anyone really except anything different?

The rant was to counter the oft-held notion that the EU is some glorious club fighting tirelessly for the rights of the little man.

The bodies of the EU don't always work in concert: the Council favours national interests and champions; the Commission has to enable the single market; only the Parliament acts as a control and does have a reasonable track record here, when it can resist the dual yokes of national governments and populists.

Re: Well isn't that just great

Thanks for the update on Italian MEPs.

The unelected commissioners, though, get paid around €270K + allowances per year.

Unelected in the same way that the head of the civil service, the BBC, OfCom, etc. are unelected and probably remunerated about the same. Actually, inasmuch as the European Parliament gets a say on the commissioners, it could be argued that they are more accountable than QUANGO heads: I don't remember parliament getting a vote when the government decides which job to give to Sir Willoughby Todd Hunter-Brown!

The problem with the European Commission is less the manner of appointment or the level of pay, than the need for every country to have one and the stupid redundancy and horse-trading and patronage that goes on as a result. I'd much rather have good bureaucrats than the ex-politicians who've dominated recent intakes. 12 - 15 is probably sufficient and there should be a strict rotation principle, as there is with the ECB board and other similar bodies.

Re: Well isn't that just great

It's a marathon not a sprint.

It's was quite an achievement of the parliament to get Zuckerberg to turn up at all. He, and his lawyers, almost certainly wouldn't have agreed to attend any kind of adversial quesitioning so a hearing was all that was possible. It was the same with the US Senate except there the questions were much worse.

For Zuckerberg it was supposed to be a bit of PR (not that the users of Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram seem to mind but the investors do) which he failed by dodging the bigger questions. What counts legally are the written answers that will be submitted by Facebook's legal team. Yes, they will have time to prepare them but they will also be legally binding and this was the aim of the hearing: Facebook has at least to some degree accepted the jurisdiction of the European Parliament.

While the parliament has its fair share of layabouts on expense accounts (Italian MEPs are fabulously well paid it turns out) it has also an impressive track record of expanding its oversight remit and has increasingly been able to distance itself from the relevant national governments, as we saw for example with roaming charges and more recently with environmental legislation.

Re: Keep it going

Can't get quite get used to Thunderbird but my own favourite, Opera Mail is also on life support.

A BSD Eudora could get some traction. Pity I don't do C otherwise I'd seriously consider donating some time to this. May well donate some cash.

Actually, to survive a dedicated DDoS attack you really do need to hind behind a CDN like Cloudflare and let them manage all that stuff for you. I've seen a whole data centre taken out by a traffic flood: your firewall won't help you much there.