Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Lovely, lovely publically available information.

"Think of those BBC consumer programmes where Mr. X's company has gone insolvent owing a small fortune to customers, and the premises opened up immediately on the same site, with the same staff and the same dodgy used cars etc."

Interestingly, the insolvency laws have just been rejigged to try and prevent this happening. In particular they try to nail down reuse of the name, similar sounding names or giving any indication that they've taken over business from the previous company.

Re: Lovely, lovely publically available information.

"So as an individual, Mr Iqbal is presumably not liable to pay this fine."

As a shareholder perhaps.

As a director, he should be fair and squarely in the firing line.

I spent the afternoon looking through the ICO blogs. They've been using DPA laws to go after these companies in addition to the call fines, but the penalties imposed in court are derisory at best.

Re: Lovely, lovely publically available information.

"Just out of curiousity, I've done a bit of basic digging on this one. "

which is about ten times as much as the ICO or trading standards have bothered doing.

Re: Add

" if the report demonstrates unfit conduct, the director can face serious sanctions:"

Spam calls aren't classified as fraud (yet), even if they use fraudulent callerID.

More to the point, going after the companies which HIRE the spammers will shut the problem down in no time flat.

Re: Go after the owners / directors

Limited liability is a shield for the owners. But not for the directors.

Other comments about slow investigations are spot on. There need to be statutory per call damages, right of private action in small claims & holding both the callers and those who hire them jointly and severally liable.

Pie in the sky? Not at all. That's exactly the remedies in the usa's TCPA and whilst the USA still has trouble with illegal calls, they're insignificant compared to the levels of spam calls and faxes before the act was passed in 1994.

Re: Wow

"Which is pretty much why the rest of the world saw the Y2K "problem" as scaremongering."

I saw 3 Y2K issues and none of them happened on December 31st.

1: Alarm systems tended to regard 9/9/99 as an impossible date or a test code. Unpatched ones around the world either didn't work at all on that day or went off and wouldn't shut down.

2: A lot of NTP implementations represented utime as a signed long. There were a LOT of embedded systems and routers which went into reboot loops on "halfway through the epoch" day.

3: A NEAX61 which got a new software load for y2k fixes turned out to have scribbled all over its memory and been writing garbage to backup tapes for at least 3 years. 60,000 lines got knocked out for 12 hours when it was rebooted and came up brain-dead. A very old backup was found to work and then all journalled changes had to be written back into the switch. It took more than 6 weeks to replay that journal.

The only one which did happen on Dec31 was on a very old SCO unix system which a law firm was using. They were sensible enough to back everything up and it booted up fine with no operational problems - but every time it rebooted the cmos clock would be set to Jan 1 1970. The workaround was simply to set the clock at every startup. It was replaced with a NT server system by March 2000.

" Free is Free as in BSD licensing, not as in GNU GPL"

The problem with BSD style licensing is that people can (and do) take your BSD code, roll it into their proprietary system and if they fork anything it doesn't get contributed back to the pool, plus "open source" code under BSD licenses frequently gets buried under the hood of expensive proprietary systems without the sources being acknowledged.

GPL is aimed at preventing that kind of thing from happening.

It's free, but if you distribute GPL-based stuff, you have to hand over the source code too. (If you don't, it's a simple copyright violation issue - this is the reason so few GPL cases have ever hit the court. almost all get settled(*) as soon as lawyers realise what they're up against.)

(*) Settled, as in the source code get released along with the product. When a lawyer tells the client that they have a choice of doing that or risking their product being banned from the marketplace it's a no-brainer.

Re: Well, I agree in theory but...

"Possibly we'd be better served with a user space NFS server, but they all seem to have their own problems."

As one of the miscreants partially responsible for the nfs-kernel-server clusterfuck, I agree with the first and second parts of that statement - and it's not helped by the userspace server not having had any substantial work since 1996.

The original userspace nfs server was - to be blunt - a piece of utterly slow shit. That's why nfs ended up in the kernel.

The other part about it being in kenrel space that you missed is that IT WILL NOT PLAY NICE with _anything_ else accessing the same disk blocks. If you NFS export a filesystem, then the _only_ access to it had better be via that NFS export or you risk trashing the data.

Putting nfs into the kernel more than 20 years ago was a solution to a problem (painfully slow exports and PCNFS being almost unusably slow) at a time when the people implementing it hadn't even thought of the possibility of something accessing XYZ file via NFS at the same time as something else doing it via SAMBA or something doing it at local level. If we had, then perhaps we'd have been more careful.

Re: "shifting to electric, autonomous taxis in 2030 would cut vehicle emissions by 90 per cent"

"impose the doubling of nuclear power plants"

Nuclear currently produces around 5-8% of the UK's power. In order to reduce/mostly eliminate carbon emissions we not only have to replace coal/gas plants with nukes, but also produce enough extra electricity to replace gas/oil heating systems (roughly as much electricity capacity as currently exists) AND provide transportation energy (Double that again).

(It's that 4-6 times current generation capacity requirement which precludes wind/solar/tidal "renewables" as a viable source as they simply can't provide that much no matter how whizzy the technology in use and no, you can't go carpeting the Sahara in windmills then shipping the energy to europe because the distribution infrastructure isn't technically feasible and even if it was, there's more than enough demand south of the Sahara to take that entire output - which would mean that Africans might get pretty pissed off about 21st century colonialism)

Nukes might be safe and I'm fully in favour of them but if we're going to increase the size of the nuclear fleet by a factor of 100 then I'd strongly prefer they aren't the kind that have highly pressurised, superheated water in direct contact with the radioactive stuff. MSRs _need_ to be commercialised.

"So some might have an employee riding in them to provide that service for passengers who require it."

The bus concierge will load your cases for you.

They might even pretend to drive it, like DLR cabin attendants do.

Re: questionable thinking

"And even allowing for a robotaxi have lightning fast reflexes, is the slipstream useful while still maintaining a safe braking distance."

Volkswagon have been demonstrating "trains" with 3-4 metre spacing at 80mph for nearly 2 decades. A robodriver can react fast enough for this to be safe but it scares the bejesus out of meatsacks when it's demonstrated.

Re: Petrol taxi?

"I haven't seen a petrol based taxi, ever."

I only started seeing diesel ones when I moved to europe. Mind you most of the petrol ones when I was a nipper in the 70s were CNG conversions - apart from the fuel being cheaper, engines tended to last a lot longer and go further between major servicing when running on the stuff, for various reasons.

not just taxis

The driver is the single most expensive part of any taxi.

That figure isn't 250k drivers. It's more like 40 million worldwide facing unemployment in the long term.

Some (hauliers) will likely still have some form of job as loadmasters but the change will be profound.

It's also worth bearing in mind that more convenient (and cheap to use) taxis are likely to reduce the number of cars in cities by about 2/3 if a Barcelona study is accurate.

Re: Just treat them the same

"The first line trotted out was it being illegal to photograph anything to do with the Police. "

Which is BS of the highest order.

I once responded "I'm not, I'm filming you and live streaming to a website so you can't delete it. Do you value your career?" - he went a very funny colour and couldn't get away fast enough (whilst trying to avoid my filming his collar numbers)

Re: Just treat them the same

"ranks close"

"Good cops" who cover for bad cops are just as bad as those they cover for.

There would be a lot more trust in the police _service_ (not force) if the non-bent members were more willing to eject the bad ones.

Re: That's completely wrong.

> since many judges are really on the side of the criminal and deeply distrust the police

They're not usually on the side of the criminal, but they're _very_ well aware that in a lot of cases the bigger crooks are the ones bringing charges, not facing them.

"And that the info will stand up in court even though it was illegally obtained/retained."

Unlike the USA, the UK doesn't have a "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine.

It's time that was changed.

Re: Talktalk: AOL for the UK

That's even truer than you realise: AOL in the UK _IS_ Talktalk.

Re: providing free upgrades to customers.

> My home connection comes via them, but is further subcontracted out...

Ditto - and that means I get to speak to a UK techie, plus not get passed from pillar to post when things go wrong.

Re: Cable physics

"He had a small engraver/printer that slipped over the cable and permanently stamped them."

Those aren't exactly cheap 500+ squid, which is why they're not widespread - and the ones which print onto heatshrink generally mean the tubing needs to be fitted before plugs are crimped on. That's fine in the structured side but not so useful in the patch frame or behind the servers.

Re: Made a rod for my own back...

"like you say the dymo tapes spring apart over time and ping off when the adhesive goes bad."

The standard brother label adhesive does too, but they make three other types of TZ label (laminated lettering so they _can't_ fade) which are bloody useful:

1: Flexible labelling tape (does what it says, good for sticking directly on fatter cables)

2: Strong adhesive: great for cable flags

3: Security tape: makes it bloody obvious when someone's been fiddling ("Someone" kept pulling ID labels off the front of kit because "it looked untidy" - it looked a hell of a lot less untidy than a big white checkerboard pattern when these ones got pulled off.)

Staedtler lumocolour pens work pretty well on most cat5/6/fibre, as (surprisingly) does a ballpoint pen.

Re: Labels

"They were paying massive fines for not maintaining uptime."

And I bet they weren't willing to pay you 10% of those fines because it was 5 times what you used to be paid.

Re: Labels

"Probably as a non techie, they are filed straight into the watepaper basket/shredder."

At which point you get to charge like a wounded elephant. When they complain, you tell 'em to take it up with whoever threw the documentation out.

I've done this on a couple of occasions. After the second time around that person no longer worked for the company.

Re: Full Of What Makes The Grass Grow Green In Texas

Why? Because BT slips them a bung.

There, fixed that for you.

Re: I would give them "regulatory certainty"

Simple solution:

Given ongoing lack of performance and given the money already ploughed in.

Any further broadband funding is contingent on the full separation of BT and Openreach (This is how New Zealand achieved it)

The issue at hand is actually a commerce one. Ofcom cannot and will not deal with an abusive monopoly. The competition commission needs to take action.

Re: Bought for offense or defense ?

"Google is seemingly helping the tech community at large deal with a sticky problem with companies that collect and sit on patents with the sole objective of blackmail. That's what a patent troll does"

Google is large enough to _buy_ most of the patent trolls and shut them down. The hard part would be insuring that the people behind trolling operations can't simply start acquiring new patents with that money and trolling with those instead.

The whole mess is falling apart. The Australians are correct in their recommendations wrt allowable patents /copyright duration and international cartels but these recommendations will never be allowed to happen.

Re: Serious question

"Can you provide proof that all the spyware always obeys those spyware settings? Proof that those settings won't be "accidentally" (honest!) re-set (again) when you're not looking? "

I never take anything for granted. There's software around which will automagically check and _ensure_ that the spyware stays disabled.

Re: Back in the real world

"The software that came with both DTV capture devices was incompatible with W10"

I'll buy the devices. They tend to run happily on every flavour of linux. :p

"Watch as shortly after they release a patch to kill off pirated versions of earlier operating systems and getting them to pay (full price) to play again. Well now you have to pay, we even would have let you use 10 for free, you turned that down, "

I encountered an office full of pirated W7 installations in Outer Bumfuckistan when there in January. One of them ended up being (accidentally - user clicked on yes) upgraded to W10 - the download took 6 days, even in the largest city in the country. It refused to validate because the W7 license was pirated.

On the bright side it offered to sell a genuine license for $20

Re: Serious question

"All things considered, is Windows 10 worse than Vista?"

Actually no. It even runs reasonably well on old hardware which struggled with XP

The spyware settings can be disabled with a bit of work.

That said, Lubuntu runs better.