Posts by Alan Brown

Re: A bit of a tumble

"Really, I can't stop smiling..."

The thing that springs to mind is that with a bright orange PFY in a bright orange stairwell the boo would be even more startling than from a darkened corner. The second thing that springs to mind is how many seconds the H&S twit was airborne.

Re: Excellent BOFH

"very very nearly went flying over a 'Wet Floor' yellow sandwich board. "

If you're going to put shit on the floor to warn of hazards, how about making the fucking things tall enough to be at EYE HEIGHT?

Re: GDPR

"I'd rather they went on a road trip to Brussels and arranged an 'accident' for the shit that dreamed up GDPR in the first place."

I wouldn't. Marketers proved they couldn't be trusted to police themselves. GDPR is the result.

If you don't like it, then blame the assholes who made it necessary.

Re: Tortuga bound

"Just box it in at the bow with 2 reasonably sized vessels and it'll have to slow down or stop for safety reasons."

Where are the pirates going to get those from?

Re: It'll Never Happen

"A first step would be a 7X24 watchkeeping system that initially supplements then later replaces this function."

This should be mandatory on all ships anyway. It's clear from the number of collisions of heavy shipping with yachts, whales and other small vessels that human failings need major augmentation to improve safety.

Re: Not quite so fast....

"You mean the UK doesn't trade outside of the EU at the moment?"

1: Not markets that can be accessed via lorry

2: Have you had to deal with customs delays due to paperwork when your goods are on the docks? The parking fee structures for containers ensure it gets very expensive very quickly, so there's strong incentive to get it right before the ship arrives.

Re: Credit Reference Agencies NO consent.

"The Credit Reference agencies then SELL this data out to other companies without our permission as we don't even have a contract with them and have never given them informed consent to do so.."

You've always been able to prevent this with a DPA section 11 notice. The CRAs make more money selling your data to advertisers/marketers than actual credit lookups.

Of course, this is now the default position under the law. It's going to be interesting what happens next.

Re: Oath Hell too please ... and worse

"I'm having to deal with one hosting company that has required me to accept a new contract with terms that allow sharing of personal data with third-party marketing organisations, and "Modal Contract Clauses", in order to continue using an existing UK-based service. "

Send a heads-up to the ICO.

Re: How can just a new privacy policy be compliant

"But they're not supposed to REMEMBER it, lest the information leak out. "

Yup.

So the store needs to ask permission to remember you for future transactions, BUT it also needs to ask separate permission if they want to send you marketing mail AND a separate set of permission if they want to pass your data to an outsourced marketer.

What they're actually doing is rolling it into a 3-in-1 permission and refusing to deal with you if you don't give them permission to retain your data past the transaction. I can't see this lasting long once regulators catch on.

Re: How can just a new privacy policy be compliant

"Like everyone else I have got a bunch of emails from everyone I have dealt with asking for permission to keep contacting me. "

If you signed into a mailing list, then you already gave permission and they can carry on.

The ones asking for permission to keep contacting are admitting they weren't holding your permission and have been breaching the ASA's rules for the last decade. This time the law has teeth and they're worried.

Re: How can just a new privacy policy be compliant

"I'm fascinated by the steady stream of GDPR emails rolling through my inbox."

I'm fascinated by the fact that just about every entity out there waited until deadline day to attempt to update permissions instead of asking in good time. It's not as if they haven't had 2 years' notice.

Perhaps they were all hoping that it was a bad dream?

Re: I sincerely hope...

" we will see just how much people value the services provided by Facebook for "free""

I block FB's tracking cookies and their tracking shit on other sites. Just about everything I post on their site is simply reposts intended to gum up their tracking and I use FB purity to block all adverts when on FB,

If everyone did the same thing, they'd have a hard job selling anything.

There are two ways of responding to the slurpers - one is to try and hide from them, but if it's impossible to do so, then choke the bastards with an never ending stream of irrelevant content.

Re: processing of your PII to provide adverts etc *is* essential

"Do personalised adverts really work better? Trying to sell you stuff you just bought?"

The kind of mentality that tries to sell you another car or washing machine misses the point that you'll need washing powder and tyres.

Companies selling this stuff know that. The problem is that they have to go via marketing/advertising outfits who universally seem to be full of pushy twats with low IQs and poor reasoning skills, aided and abetted by marketing departments in the abovementioned companies full of the same kinds of people.

Re: that isn’t free choice

"It can and should provide adverts based on that. Same as it did before Doubleclick acquired it."

What you're forgetting is that Doubleclick was the poison pill that acquired Google.

If you don't understand what that means:

Doubleclick was on the verge of bankruptcy and one of the most hated companies on the Internet when Google acquired them. In the time since that happened, Doubleclick's CEOs have become Google's CEOs and Google's policies have become closely allied to Doubleclick's reviled policies.

Re: This will go nowhere in court...

"Then they should use entirely a school-provided facility for access"

Many employers have made it a condition of employment.

Are you brave enough to risk your job over this?

Re: This will go nowhere in court...

"Because nobody is forcing you to use these services..."

Even if I don't use these services, they've been busy hoovering up data on/about me.

Which by definition is without consent, unnecessary for the operation of the service, etc and then to compound the damage, that data is then sold to advertisers.

I've served DPA section 11 notices on a number of advertisiing companies, but it's clear that they're still gathering data on me for targetting purposes. When the sharks get amongst this school of goldfish it's going to be "interesting"

Re: he is missing the lowest hanging fruit

"Exactly! If a user des not want his data stored, how do you ensure that???"

Easy: Under GDPR you only store the data of those who have given explicit consent for their data to be stored.

Consent is not fungible (meaning someone else cannot consent on your behalf), so all of those contract terms in the T&C where "you confirm you have permission to share someone else's details" have zero legal validity.

The next step along the GDPR path will be for someone to challenge those clauses and attempt to get the T&C declared void.

Re: Not quite so fast....

"The arguments of the Brexiteers remind me of the Climate Change Deniers, they find a single fact to hold onto and worry it to death. "

The climate change deniers are so loud and have so much politictal clout that they've forced pretty much all climate change estimates to be extremely conservative.

The reality of climate change is looking to be far _far_ worse than science has been predicting since the naysayers started their campaigns and virtually exactly on track of the near-worst case scenarios put forward in the 1990s before the vested interests started funding the naysayers to shout the science down.

Sea level rise is the least of the worries in things to come. Ocean food chain collapse and reduction in oxygen levels are likely to happen sooner.

"You think they'd cut off a market bigger than the USA by 180+million people just because of a data privacy strop?"

Not just larger by numbers, but an economy larger than the USA (USA is #3 or #4 depending on how you interpret the figures for India)

"The analog ones tend to be pretty reliable. "

Unless wired by Lucas or made by Smiths.

Re: Design Life Limitations

"My car has recently started throwing out warnings about the brake lights, even though the brake lights are working fine."

My brother's car did that.

On investigation, I dfound that he'd somehow managed to force a 5W lamp into a socket intended to hold a 21/5 lamp.

When one of my cars started doing it, cleaning all the socket contacts fixed the problem. In another, it was a bad earth connection (lights seemed ok as path to earth goes via the other lamps in this case)

Re: Design Life Limitations

" the bloke who makes hydrogen cars in Wales."

Hydrogen cars _MUST_ use a lease model model with everything supplied. The risks of something going boom if the vehicles are outright purchased and then poorly maintained are too high to countenance.

That's why the makers who test these vehicles with great fanfare never actually sell them. Hydrogen embrittlement and pressurisation cycles are an extremely dangerous combination.

Re: Design Life Limitations

"Anything with electrolytic capacitors has a useful life limit of about 10 years, then the seals leak or the caps dry-out"

Nope., only if they're bad caps.

I have equipment with 30 year old caps in them that is just fine.

Bad caps was an issue we thought had been nailed down in the 1970s. It came back due to industrial espionage and counterfeit manufacturing. In any case if you know it can happen you design for the possibility.

"sling them in the back seats of a bunch of their shitty non self-driving cars, and then setting the lot of them to go round the Indy 500 circuit at full speed. "

Any self-driving car can do circuits.

Add solid moving obstructions and then you're testing them.

Re: Not ready for prime time

"I knew someone at school who that happened to them twice during tests."

I'm surprised that they weren't permanently blacklisted from being tested after that.

Re: Not ready for prime time

"The bus driver could not see the obstacle at the kerb. All they saw was just another idiot in a SUV doing random stuff."

No, the bus driver saw a SUV signalling and turning into his lane in good time, following all the rules, yet carried on regardless in an intimidatory manner despite the SUV having right of way, with predictable results.

This is a good example of WHY humans in control of heavy machinery are a bad idea. He's far from the only asshole bus driver around. In my home town bus drivers were complaining about school run bicycles, so the police put a few cops on intersections one day. They warned a few dozen cyclists about unsafe behaviour (mostly no hands and 3 abreast), but prosecuted more than a dozen drivers for dangerous driving, in particular it was noted the bus drivers were nudging bikes with their vehicles whilst consistently jumping red lights and causing pedestrians to have to scatter at one intersection.

Re: Not ready for prime time

"Google on the other hand haven't put a foot wrong, any incidents involving them have not been their fault, and would have occurred with a meat sack in control as well."

If someone points out the incident where the google car crashed into a bus, I'll point out that the car signalled to go around the obstruction and was being cautious. The bus driver took no account of the vehicle ahead of him even though it was obviously trapped in its lane and need to go around an obstacle and had the car gunned it as a human would have the bus was required to give way to it. When the car realised the bus driver wasn't slowing down it stopped and the bus driver just ploughed right into its corner instead of going around it.

That's no great surprise. I've seen asshole bus drivers like that in a number of cities, including ones who _deliberately_ take off car doors. not their bus, not their insurance. etc.

Re: Uber turned off the emergency braking portion of the 'AI'

"The car "knew" it needed to break."

It did break - the pedestrian. Because it failed to brake, thanks to that being disabled.

Re: Six seconds at 43mph (18m/s) ...

"It also raises the point that nothing less than a fully autonomous car is going to be safe on the roads."

That's the point that Google's been making for quite a while.

Re: Brian Miller

" I couldn't spot that cyclist until probably half a second before impact"

As others have pointed out - that camera footage is doctored and the road is well lit. You would have seen the pedestrian the moment she stepped onto the road.

Nonetheless, even if the road was pitch black (as the roads I drive at night are) and the camera was accurate, you would still see the pedestrian _at least_ 2-3 seconds out.

Most dashcams at night have utterly abysmal sensitivity when there's no external lighting. The Uber footage is on par with my cameras on the roads I drive, which have no lighting whatsoever except the car's headlights. Even then I can see at least 2-3 seconds ahead. As a number of commentators have pointed out the road is required to be lit ahead by headlights for _at least_ the vehicle's stopping distance.

I believe Uber was attempting to fool people into believing the road was unlit/poorly lit.

It fooled me until i saw other footage, because what I saw was on par with what my cameras would show - but even then I know from experience that the pedestrian would have been driver-visible long before the camera picked her up (She would have already been clearly visible to a driver in that frame where her shoes _begin_ to show up in the camera) and as such I was wondering why the car or safety driver hadn't reacted, especially as it was clear she'd already crossed at least one traffic lane and as such had been clearly visible for some time.

What the footage showed immediately was the lie of "the pedestrian jumped out of the bushes" narrative being put out by the local sherriff's department, which makes you wonder about _why_ they made that statement and why no further investigation of it has happened.

"Having that "don't change lanes" light created a new behavior in him"

Why? That light is an AID and is not a legal substitute for turning your head and looking.

If you change lanes without checking during a driving test in most countries (mirror AND head turn) it's an automatic fail. If you get caught doing it after you get your license, it's a prosecution for careless driving regardless of the existence of a blind spot warning light.

Re: Humans see intentions, cars only react afterward

"A ball rolls into the street - you know a child might follow it, the car would not expect that. "

This happened to my mother. She stopped., The driver coming the other way didn't. The kid got minor injuries and the driver got prosecuted for careless driving.

SOME humans would expect it, _with_ training. Once programmed to expect it, ALL cars with the same programming will anticipate the child.

The problem is the programming, not the computer. Google gets it right. It's perfectly possible to predict where a human (or animal) will walk based on where they're looking and where they're currently heading. Further, a robot is good at continuously looking for stuff a human might miss, like movement/feet visible in the gap under the parked cars ahead.

The fault in this case lies in USA car-centric laws that almost always (it's a state level thing) say that pedestrians WILL give way to cars and/or WILL NOT cross the road except at designated locations sometimes only when permitted to. When you program based on those assumptions being canonical you have a robotised killing machine mowing down everything in its path.

Re: Autonomous vehicle safety ignored

"The circumstances of the accident were not some strange or random edge-case which caught the vehicle's logic out"

The reason it caught the vehicle's logic out is simple.

Most US State laws say that pedestrians SHALL NOT cross the road except at designated crossing points and only when authorised to do so. They also say that pedestrians MUST give way to vehicles.

Put that as-is into a programming algorithm and you have a mindless death machine waiting for a victim to walk in front of it.

Re: Autonomous vehicle safety ignored

"Wait another couple of decades with no additional training or monitoring of their driving behaviour and the number who know what they are doing seems to fall"

Agreed, along with the point about 360 sensors, constant attention and lack of emotions/impatience/fatigue (the single biggest cause of congestion is impatient drivers trying to jump queues and gumming things up)

Robot drivers don't have to be perfect, just better than humans. That's not a high bar and Google have already achieved it. On the other hand Uber have not.

Re: Autonomous vehicle safety ignored

"It was only Uber that decided not to use expensive LIDAR sensors that other manufacturers use as part of their redundancy design."

As the reports say: The sensors picked the pedestrian up just fine. The problem was in how the programming (failed to) respond.

Re: Autonomous vehicle safety ignored

"In the one fatality that we know of from an autonomous vehicle (autonomous, not fancy cruise control) we absolutely know that the 'driving instructor' was watching their phone, not the road."

We also know that Google realised very quickly that _despite_ being told that they were safety supervisors and to pay attention at all times, the "driving instructors" were doing everything but - so they went all-out to ensure the cars were safe.

As for national regulators - they ARE overwhelingly cautious. Arizona is one of the exceptions and the US in particular is the odd one out thanks to a century of lobbying, with vehicle-centric laws and a uniquely pedestrian-hostile culture and legislation in most areas. That makes it the worst possible place to develop automated cars as assumptions which codify "pedestrians must not be here" laws turn robots into mindless killing machines where a human would (in most cases) take evasive action or stop.

"it would appear that somebody pointed out to the ICO that they already have the power to prevent voluntary disolutions of companies"

Several somebodies.

Over several years.

Whilst the ICO stuck their fingers in their ears going "neener neener neener, it's tooo haaard!"

And there are provisions in the companies act for holding company directors personally liable for illegal acts, but the problem is that the ICO can't be arsed taking it through the courts to get a precedent that sticks.

Re: Liquidate company to avoid paying

"My suspicion is that the directors will actually find some way of extracting money from the company before starting the insolvency proceedings, in a way that makes the company insolvent, but allows them to pocket the cash."

Any payout like that within the previous N period (6 years?) can be clawed back by the administrator and paid out to creditors.

The question is whether the ICO is a secured or unsecured creditor - and as they've said, making the directors personally liable for illegal behaviour would go a long way towards dissuading them from initiating the activity in the first place.

Re: The device is very light.

" For that they were getting a thrust that would counterbalance a desicated flea."

As long as the thrust is higher than the resisting forces holding it at rest, then you'll get acceleration and it (eventually) adds up to significant velocities.

Ion drives chew plenty of power. Their disadvantage is that they eventually run out of fuel.