Posts by Alan Brown

Re: I hate to say it

"Imagine the outcry if government put 100's of people on stand-by, with more than needed fuel/water etc all placed ready to move at a moments notice and then the storm never hit, or was less than predicted."

It may come as a surprise to the average American (or Brit), but sensible governments do exactly that vs kneejerk reactions that end up being too little, too late and full of political posturing. It's called "preparedness" and in regions with a history of such events sensible governments spend some time building up stocks of the necessaries in a fairly relaxed fashion for when fecal matter hits spinny thing.

Sure, it doesn't make for drama-filled TV news and it's not a ratings winner - but it saves lives and is usually the cheaper option than paying inflated prices immediately before/just after a big event.

Re: Forewarned

"but image the mess they'd make if they were doing storm planning and DR."

Imagine the bigger mess if the need for storm planning and DR (and scale of such requirements) passes outside of their sphere of awareness. Such things then become casualties of budget cuts as "frivolous things we can do without"

Re: Double standards?..

"You need a UK address (PO box not accepted) to register a .uk domain. "

However you can trivially get away with using a MBE dropbox or a serviced office block as your registration address because Nominet don't bother checking.

"If we are not in the EU then no-one in the UK is entitled to have .EU - end of story."

It's almost as if those who cry "out" can't comprehend that "out" means "out" and they can't keep using the clubhouse.

Re: Small minded petty eurocracy

"It's long since become pretty clear that the principal reason for a (tiny) majority¹ Leave vote"

Bearing in mind that the _real_ reason for the media blitz in favour of brexit was the impending introduction of tax laws which would effectively make tax havens illegal and badly affect the owners of said media, along with their chums:

It was one party's infighting that triggered it, one party's infighting that ended up with the results, one party's infighting which has made the last 18 months at Westminster look like an extended Keystone Kops screening and one party's infighting which is preventing anything meaningful being done in either direction (either making it an effective brexit or scrapping the whole deal as unworkable)

The legality of the referendum campaigns is about to go before the courts, with an argument that the entire thing be annulled due to the illegal activities of certain campaign groups. Which would put Cruella DeVille in an awkward position of having called article 50 without a mandate after all.

We live in interesting times and I suspect that if things carry on as they are now, cancelling brexit won't matter much as all the important industries will have already bailed out of the UK, along with an increasing number of skilled workers - 1970s style. How long will it take before you're restricted to carrying out a maximum of £50 when leaving the country?

How long before Poles and Romanians are complaining about the influx of British economic migrants taking their jobs? Think it won't happen? Look at migration stats when the UK economy was well and truely tanked, before the EEC lifted its arse out of a sling.

Re: Couldn't have said it better myself

"But you can't vote civil servants out"

Perhaps not, but you can certainly expose them to the white hot disinfectant of sunlight.

Re: Flame on peeps...

"Anyway yes there are too many civil servants in the EU"

If you look a little closer you'll find that this isn't a problem confined to the EU, nor to its consitituent countries. You'll also find that the same pattern keeps playing out repeatedly (lots of pen pushers of dubious utility coming up with rules and regulations to justify their continued employment, vs a dearth of actual staff needed to actually do things that matter, like cleaning the streets, keeping the lights on, protecting the environment and investigating/dealing with corruption)

Re: Do as I do

"They are too easily used in court as evidence that you're doing something dodgy"

Has anyone actually made that stick? Recall what's happened to Prenda Law and the other copyright trolls, along with rulings that an IP is not personal identification.

Re: Airline / Travel HTTP Crimes

"That can even just be a random 3rd-Party site (again over HTTP only)"

Any of this is grounds for a complaint to the ICO and making sure that El Reg (amongst others) has enough detail to make it impossible for the airlines to brush off or the government numpties to sweep under the carpet.

"Well, if you're not using HTTPS, you wouldn't be aware of it, almost by design."

It would be "very good" if the ICO (or the EU privacy oversight watchdogs) declare that it's a prima facie data breach to use http for ANY kind of entry of personal data, regardless of provable data breach - and if there is a subsequent data breach then failure to use https adds a multiplier to the fines.

Re: scrap tv licence

"scrap tv licence

Simplest answer"

Yes, but not for the reasons you're pushing.

Radio licensing was scrapped in the late 1960s for the simple reason that with the advent of transistorisation there were too many radio sets to keep track of and the licensing income wasn't worth the hassle. TV licensing was kept because TV sets were large, cumbersome and easy to track.

Times and technology have changed and now TV sets are as ubiquitous as radio sets were at the time their licenses were scrapped.

The assumption since the 1970s has been that "every house has a TV set and every one without a license is a dodger" - with "TV detector vans" mainly being minibusses and the "detectors" being people looking for aerials or the telltale signs of a TV in use (flickering lights and the warbling sounds of coronation street coming from premises which supposedly had no TV)

You'll notice that receiver licensing is no longer a radio regulatory job: that should give a big hint as to its actual necessity.

>> "I presume the BBC is responsible for the infrastructure?"

> Why would they be?

Because TV Licensing _limited_ - the privately owned company which is responsible for actually collecting TV licence fees - is a wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC which then contracts operations out to Crapita and IBM.

It's a nice incestuous little circle jerk when you start digging into it.

Re: I had a sort of similar experience

", and I needed to explain myself or I would be fired on the spot."

I would have responded with "I can do with the six-figure unjustified dismissal finding and the very public bollocking you'll get in employment court."

Re: HMSO

"Ended up spending the rest of both shifts watching TV"

Which is as it should be. With the grunt work out of the way you're now free to deal with what comes up. IF it comes up.

Re: I can see some of the US networks

"Then AFAIK, one US network charges $80 to unlock the phone at the end of the contract."

So did several UK networks - until that was declared illegal by the regulator

The difference being that the regulators actually have some cojones in Europe

Re: 0845

"i used to have an 0845 number that I would give out to any non friend / family member."

I have a 070 number (£1.50/min) that I still have and use for the same purpose. It gets a few scam calls and it's quite easy to get them to stay on the line for 20+ minutes.

I don't get any revenue, but the telco I get it from makes sure they collect.

"make the company who hires them responsible for their actions."

THIS, in spades. Joint and several liability, per call statutory damages, multipliers for willful violations (as in, breaching the DNC lists) and the right of private action is the key to stopping the illegal calls.

A company hiring a spammy marketer will shrug and move onto the next one if the spammer goes under. If the spammer's activities have a direct impact on the bottom line, they won't do it again.

"IME an increasing number of hospital departments have a departmental mobile due to an increasing number of patients not accepting callers who withhold their numbers"

It's a _legal requirement_ in the UK that outbound callers on a PABX be able to uncloak their numbers if caller-ID is suppressed by default. A lot of outfits don't comply, but complaints to Ofcom are worthwhile.

For the most part all you need to do is tell the doctor surgery, etc to add 1470 before your number - and hope they add it to the phone number in the system.

Re: It's a start

> I've found that a few minutes spent filling in your details on their website will spare you from a boxful of nasty threatening letters.

Or not. I've been getting them for the best part of 20 years despite having a valid license the entire period.

Re: Administration is frustrating

> You can be disqualified from being a company director, but only briefly for a first offence, and since you only need one person to set it up for you the assorted friends, relatives and the like can keep you going through a good few million nuisance calls.

Of course, should the law notice that the phoenix companies are being "fronted"(*), the orbital anvil delivery system tends to get locked and loaded.

(*) Dodging a ban by fronting someone else as a director is a serious criminal offence in most countries, usually with jailtime attached for all parties. The UK prosecutes and jails a few people every year for this and tipping off Companies House about this is always worthwhile.

Re: If anyone

> the ICO has in the past been clueless enough to believe them.

As I understand it, the ICO staff concerned got educated with a fairly hefty cluebat.

Re: If anyone

"I do have one 'confirmed kill' though: a solar company in Orange County. I got the Better Business Bureau involved"

The apology letter was them being thankful they'd dodged a $1500 bullet of small claims action under TCPA and the PACER record to go with it.

($500 violation, tripled by being wilful as you're on a DNC list - and notifying the FCC would put them in the firing line for $11,500 PER CALL fines - the TCPA dumps the liability jointly and severally on the caller AND the hiring company.)

BBB's are a uniquely american thing and they have little to no traction on a wilfully rogue player.

Re: If anyone

"Yeah, fully agree, especially when most of the calls originate offshore (even if they do spoof a local number)."

Worse, they tend to spoof valid and assigned local numbers. At least one I checked on belonged to a Manchester dentist who was wondering why they were getting hate calls.

However when it comes to PPI and injury claims, the money traces back onshore.

More tellingly than all this other stuff, the thing which stopped cold calling almost dead in the USA's 1995 Telephone Consumer Protection Act was defining statutory per-call damages (to prevent what's happened here, where damages claims have been thrown out as unprovable) AND explicitly allowing a right of private action in small claims courts against the caller AND the company that hired them, with triple damages for wilful violations (caller-id spoofing/blocking, or calling anyone on a Do not call list)

It's easy enough to fly under the ICO/Ofcom's radar or evade them when targetted, but the death of 1,000,000 papercuts is much harder to dodge.

Naysayers have claimed this would paralyse the small claims system entirely - if that's really the case then the problem is so bad that SOCA should be looking into the scale of calls and telco collusion(*) as a matter of urgency.

(*)Telcos make money from terminating these calls. It's not in their financial interest to block them(**)

(**) Unless the call routing information is forged, which only tends to happen on the outright scam calls.

Re: Imagine...

> No switches... because 'manglement' decided "we don't need those"...

Imagine all that on 10Mb/s HUBS - because manglement decided - after being told in no uncertain terms that they had to sort it 2 days into the first term where noone could do anything - that switches were too expensive and it's only a student network.

Cue the entire thing going titsup when 36 students startup office simultaneously (and multiply by N classrooms all doing much the same thing at the same time).

Now connect that into the admin network (also hubbed) with no isolation between student and staff systems.

Re: NHS data supposed to be confidential

"The data was collected with the promise that it was confidential"

Yes, and if the ICO doesn't have the balls to step up to the plate, then going straight to the EU privacy Commissioner(*) for an egrarious breach by the government seems to be the correct course of action

(*) Due to the government having undue control over the national privacy commissioner.

Re: How about...

"What is the NHS getting out of it, not what benefit is there for the patients."

NHS: Nothing,

Patient benefit: probably negative

Benefit to mates of politicians running companies: High.

Backhanders/brown envelopes: Probably