* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Nuisance call boss gets 8-year ban after trying to dodge firms' £700k fines

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Shoot the messenger

"I work for a telecom company, and it is totally possible"

Of course it's possible. The unspoken part is that phone companies get paid to TERMINATE calls.

BT and others only started moving when the scammers started using forged call origination data so that they weren't getting their cut of the action. The fact that they painted it up as "protecting our customers" is pure PR when it was about stopping organisations using their circuits without paying for them and any consideration about the people on the ends of the circuits was entirely secondary.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"TBH I doubt that'll stop this sort of guy."

10-15 years ago I would have agreed.

There are enough people keeping tabs on these kinds of wankers that it's a lot harder for them to get away it for very long anymore. The Internet makes it a lot easier for a bunch of pissed-off PPI call recipients to keep in contact and egg each other on(*) vs being isolated and pissed off.

(*) In terms of gathering stats and passing it to the law, not vigilante justice, nice as the fantasy of finding that one of these PPI bastards has been thoroughly scrubbed with a lemon zester, had rubbing alcohol poured over him and then been smeared in honey and staked out naked over an anthill in a sunny locale might sound.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Need a new acronym for BT Internet Security

"some of them re-route through premium lines "

Urban legend.

NONE of them will reroute you to a premium line when you ANSWER the call, and they can't change the number you're calling.

The worst they can do is attempt to dupe you into calling one.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Simple change of law needed

"Limited liability is helpful for people who for whatever reason screw up and go out of business."

Limited liability protects SHAREHOLDERS from investment failures.

It in no way shape or form protects directors from the consequences of illegal decisions. The choice to not prosecute lies firmly at the feet of UK regulators.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Punk

"Yup, find something unpleasant for the punk, but fine clients also"

This is EXACTLY why the US anti junkfax/telemarketing laws (Telephone consumer protection act and revision) makes the caller _and the hirer_ jointly and severally liable.

The result was that "legitimate" (as in promoting genuine local businesses) calls virtually stopped overnight when the law was introduced and the remainder usually turned out to be mom-and-pops who didn't know better and had been scammed into buying services by companies selling spam call services.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Director? Who me?

"Then he and whoever fronts for him could both land inside."

Only if someone:

a: Notices,

b: Tells the Companies Office

and most importantly of all

c: the Companies Office actually does something.

In my experience in this country fronting is fairly common and fronting prosecutions are relatively rare

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not bad, but...

"The one problem is they fine the company, not the guy in charge."

Since December they've been able to do both.

About bloody time.

I say, that sucks! Crooks are harnessing hoovers to clean out parking meters in Chelsea

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Getting kids interested in engineering

"Eventually they were replaced, this time with a half inch steel bar welded to the side, all the way up the tube, to prevent repetition of the loss,"

In other words "Oh zowie, a new challenge! Thanks guys!"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I think I may have the solution

"Councils and central government have to spend money to maintain the roads. "

"the government" gets around £5-6 billion from "road tax" (vehicle excise duty)

It gets over £60 biillion from road fuel excise duty (that's a _large_ chunk of total income - possibly the single largest chunk by type)

Both of those go into the central fund and are used for general spending. Talk of "ringfencing" road tax is playing a shell game and hoping you don't notice the fuel taxes because roading costs about £7-10 billion to maintain and then they can say there's not enough income so you have to live with the potholes. (oh woe is us)

Councils _by law_ are not allowed to use parking(and fines) income as general revenue, but in practice they've come up with various scams to allow them to actually do so. Westminster in particular is known as a parking company with a council parasitically attached.

The more astute will have already noticed that:

1: Electric vehicles mean less fuel duty

2: Self driving vehicles can go and park themselves where the charges are lower

3: Self driving vehicles are bound to result in lower levels of vehicle ownership

Which means that in a few years central government is going to be looking to make up a substantial loss of revenue, probably by adding a fuel duty component to electric vehicle charging (~90p per litre of your fuel is tax in some form or another, the actual fuel is only about 25p) because they're not particularly imaginative. VED is a relatively small amount and they can stand the losses there but ZEVs will eventually start having an annual tax on them because they're the government and because they can.

And in a few years (probably fewer years) councils such as Westminster are going to be finding that they're going to be looking at _substantial_ income shortfalls that need to be made up.

Interestingly, public transport can actually make the road condition _worse_ - road damage is proportional to the 5th power of axle weight and the square of velocity, with the practical upshot that a 10 tonne vehicle (bus) averaging 45 passengers does roughly 8-10,000 times the damage PER PASS that a car does. This is something that several cities around the world have found out to their chagrin - having successfully reduced traffic levels in central areas and only allowing busses in sensitive areas, they tend to find that roads and surrounding continue to deteriorate just as fast as before (faster if they have to increase bus frequencies). One city (Vancouver?) made things worse on a particular downtown road by making it bus-only and funnelling the things down it, with the result that its wear rate tripled.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Useless crime enforcement

"how do you think a camera high up can tell if ....."

Whilst they're dodgng the obvious one up high they completely miss the less obvious ones peering out at shelf level.

It works wonders on my installations.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Trickle down economy?

"Cheap hookers are best - you can afford more of them."

Generally you need a first 5/8, a fullback and a couple of halfbacks too though.

Demand for HP printer supplies in free-fall – and Intel CPU shortages aren't helping either

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Finally....

You may jest, but....

Printing in our organisation was increasing by about 10% per year, every year.

About 6 years ago it levelled out for a couple of years and then started falling rapidly.

We're now down to 2004 levels

And this is _despite_ some groups increasing their print output due to legal requirements for hardcopy they didn't previously have.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Finally....

And in the UK too - what you're looking for is a bidet toilet seat :)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Intel CPU shortages?

But that doesn't explain why they've been shoving seriously SLOW M.2 nvme drives in their desktop systems at premium pricing - as in _significantly_ slower than claimed and slower than an old Samsung 840Pro - which would be OK if it wasn't at a 100% higher cost than the _retail_ cost of gumsticks with similar performance stats.

Funny how they run and hide when called on it though - and how they refuse point blank to tell you what drive they ship with systems (there's just a murky spec on the website, which means they can ship anything - and they do)

This earnings call might explain why they've been playing artful dodger, but they've lost a few hundred thousand pounds of sales as a result. (with any luck others will take note and stay away too)

Foldables herald the beginning of the end of the smartphone fetish

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Can we please

" here's a thick phone with an 18000 mah battery:"

You won't get THAT onboard an aircraft. One of the reasons most phones top out around 3200mAh is because that's become the legal limit for carryon lithium batteries in many countries.

Alan Brown Silver badge

I DON'T want a _foldable_ device

It's still too fscking big.

Look for some inspiration from Tekwar, Earth FInal Conflict or a papyrus scroll.

Or even McFly's roller blind TV.

Spooky! Solar System's Planet NINE could be discovered in the next NINE years (plus one to six), say astroboffins

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Exotic orbital inclination

As Clifford Stoll pointed out in Silicon Snake Oil, the problem with trying to pin astronomical events down to history is that things get slid around a bit to big up whoever the reigning bigwig is at the time (or to drag down whoever the prevailing villain was).

In his case - when he presented his work trying to do just that to his mentor, the reknowned chinese astronomer in question said - "Nice, but if it was that easy we'd have done it years ago" - and explained why (paraphrased above)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So they are looking for ...

planet nine = IX

We all know what a slippery bunch of bastards the IXians are.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Planet 9 is not believed to be on the elliptic plane that the orbits of other planets follow.

I'd have thought the elephants would make it fairly spottable, along with the captive light source.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's Dark out there.

"So the Dark planet is hard to see"

It all depends how much light there is.

Check out the Moon's albedo sometime. It's darker than a lump of coal and I don't see any demons running rampant.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: destroyed already

"see Greek & other Myth - some big smash up of planets and bodies"

That one could well be related to hypothesis that a fragmenting comet had a series of airbursts over North America circa 10k years ago, kicking off the younger Dryas period and mostly sterilising the continent of larger fauna overnight - including the Clovis people. (See craterhunter.wordpress.com)

The "smoking gun" (craters) was always missing until the recent discovery of a large crater under the ice in Greenland, but as craterhunter has always pointed out airbursting fragments don't necessarily leave craters - Tungeska being a good example, but they may well leave teltale rockmelt patterns which he believes is there in spades and being interpreted as anomalous igneous formations (anomalous because there's no sign of vulcanism in the basement rocks)

There's a Chinese legend of dragons and gods duking it out in the skies which is believed to trace back to about the same period.

As for positions of planets - orbits change and planets move around. They're definietely NOT nice and stable places where everything stays in the same places for billions years on end. Accumulated gravitational peturbations see to that. (Just when any pair settle into a nice stable rhythm another will upset things)

It's not your imagination: Ticket scalper bots are flooding the internet according this 'ere study

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Far worse than you think

"Freelance scalpers are a good bogeyman to point at and go "oooooh they're evil" when it's institutional scalping."

Indeed - and institutional scalping can be stomped on pretty hard if the appropriate authorities put their mind to it. A law ostensibly written to tackle the fralancers can also have hooks in it to nail the corporate scalpers to the wall - and then prise them off again without bothering to remove the nails first.

Ticketmaster's habit of tacking on lots of extra unannounced fees falls just as foul of the fair trading laws (Up-front prices required) as Ryanair's habit did. I'm surprised there haven't been some actions announced about this particular wee scam.

The Competition and Markets Authority has more than enough power to decree market abuse such as "institutional" scalping by selling to a wholly owned secondary ticketing site is grounds for forcing Ticketmaster to divest itself of the company entirely _AND_ submit to detailed inspections of its sales procedures for the next decade. The FTC can do the same thing in the USA if it sees fit.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Too easy to fix

"d it frequently accuses me of sending automated queries "

You're being run through a transparent proxy by your ISP. Switch to https

Alan Brown Silver badge

1: it's not just a North American problem.

2: Mod throttle helps. The proxies of the ISPs are known and you can treat them differently.

3: As we've been seeing more and more, tying tickets to an individual at point of sale and denying entry if the details don't match is one of the more effective antiscalping measures.

4: "Edging into criminal activity"??? That's an understatement - and in many areas ticket touting/scalping has been explicitly illegal for decades.

About the only _reliable_ next step for taking on scalpers would be to enhance #3 and make an attempt to use tickets purchased from a scalper illegal, but you then run into the problem of the likes of Ticketmaster charging as much as they want "because they can" - in order to make this viable any "exclusive outlet" arrangements would have to be outlawed as inherently encouraging anticompetitive behaviour.

Amazon Prime Air flight crashes in Texas after 6,000ft nosedive

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I'm going to speculate...

_Every_ pilot gets training in engine-out procedures/gliding. A 767 is going to take several minutes to come down from 6000 feet with no engines and that's more than enough time to put out mayday calls, find a suitable landing patch, etc. (even if the ram air turbine doesn't pop out there are still batteries, etc)

Whatever took this thing down was sudden enough that the crew had no time to make a call. Wait for the FAA and NTSB initial report but whatever the failure mode was it had to have been utterly catastrophic to have kept the pilots busy from 6000 feet to the ground.

Sniff the love: Subaru's SUVs overwhelmed by scent of hair shampoo, recalls 2.2 million cars

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not necessarily

"My company was caught out years ago by silicone contamination of low voltage low current connectors,"

This is the primary reason I tell people NOT to use silicon grease in electrical connectors.

Fake fuse: Bloke admits selling counterfeit chips for use in B-1 bomber, other US military gear

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So is this somehow worse than selling a complete weaponry system that doesn't work?

The issue isn't what the F35 can or can't do, it's not much it cost and the resources committed to it.

You should read "Superiority" by Arthur C Clarke sometime - and realise that more than one militaristic society has spent itself into submission in recorded history.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IC marking

The odd thing is that "military spec" is actually less robust than "automotive spec" - and it's mostly driven by the insistence on "exact replacement" rather than "functional equivalence"

In any case remarking of discards isn't anything new. I recall a case from 1978 where a game maker acquired tens of thousands of faulty 1024x4 (1k nibble) ram chips which were supposed to be used as decorations on their circuit board who discovered that the things mostly worked, so they remarked the things and sold them off (at the time I'd paid about $60 for 1kB of ram, this was was a big earner for a company that'd picked the things up for a couple of cents each.

If you really want to ensure that "used" or "faulty" chips don't come back to haunt you, 500V applied across the pins before they leave the premises is a fairly decisive way of making the point.

Merry Christmas, you filthy directors: ICO granted powers to fine bosses for spam calls

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Bankruptcy law?

In a lot of cases you can't declare bankruptcy to avoid court fines

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: death penalty for insurance company directors

Before the staking, they need a good going over with a lemonzester, then a sprinkling with rubbing alcohol.

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: join us by the watercooler:

You have a fridge?

Huawei to the danger zone, ride into the danger zone... Chinese giant denies America's secrets theft, fraud charges

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: They are doing them for Tappy? FFS

When you need to invoke "Yellow peril", you'll clutch at any straws.

Granddaddy of the DIY repair generation John Haynes has loosened his last nut

Alan Brown Silver badge

"one that stuck with me, when replacing a heater matrix in a Ford Escort..

2. Remove Dashboard."

You _could_ perform that task in the mark1&2 without that step, but it was definitely easier and much quicker if you did.

As a radio tech I was tasked with installing kit in a civil defence wagon that entailed dismantling the entire dashboard with lots of haynes references, photos sketches, notes and parts placed along a workbench. The boss walked into the garage, panicked and called in a motor mechanic who put it all back together (using the factory workshop manual) whilst neglecting to fit the aircon ducts - so I had to dismantle it all over again to put those in.

The interesting thing about that particular vehicle (late 1980s Vauxhall Carlton) apart from the wheelbase being 1 inch shorter on one side than the other was that I used 20 more screws putting the panels back together than came out of it. The thing was noticeably less rattly afterwards but it always pulled to one side.

Samsung Galaxy's flagship leaks ... don't matter much. Here's why

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: No jack, Jack.

"Isn't it a bit discordant to complain about £25 headphones to go with a £799 smartphone?"

I've yet to find _any_ bluetooth headphones with audio quality as good as a decent pair of wired ones.

Hold horror stories: Chief, we've got a f*cking idiot on line 1. Oh, you heard all that

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I was working for the telephone company when....

"We had a product called Remedy. "

it's still around - and it's still just as bad on *nixen

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "the nascent internet of the early 1990s"

"Nascent? In the early '90s?"

It depended where in the world you were. Out in the unfashionable fiinges of the western spiral arm in the plural z quadrants the Internet was only making baby steps outside universities and commercial dialups were a rarity even into the mid 1990s. That probably had a lot to do with access costs exceeding US$25/MB well into the mid 1990s (Compuserve and IBM was even more pricey but the local hacking crews all worked out how to breach security and have "free" logins)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Help desk

"A rare case of an intelligent support desk on the vendor side"

There _are_ quite a few of these out there, thankfully.

Unfortunately if you let people know about them the problem numptys with coffcup holder problems pile onto them and make things impossible for everyone else.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Help desk

Apparently he had to waste 90 minutes as well, didn't he?

"Sorry boss, not my faul. I had to make fun of tech support.."

More like "Ok boss, now we've got some documentation of how utterly fecking useless their tech support is, for legal"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Mute... or loudspeaker?

"on a few notable occasions, you'd get someone who'd spent a little bit too much time on the phone, fallen asleep and started snoring..."

Completely off topic on this one:

This is a classic indicator of sleep apnea or other sleep disorder and the employee concerned should be encouraged to see a GP for screening.

Apnea is one of those "silent killers" that takes 30-40 years to do its job (weight gain, heart stress eventually requiring a heart transplant, increasing susceptability to/severity of illnesses). Despite perceptions of only happening in older/overweight people the weight gain is usually a _symptom_ not a cause and they've been suffering it since their teens. Mine was picked up when I was 32, but looking back it'd been with me since around 15-17 and manufacturer-sponsored studies of sports teams have shown 1/4 to 1/3 of teenage participants were sufferers (they were expecting 5-10%. the results were fairly shocking).

There's no "cure", but early (and lifelong) symptomatic treatment (a CPAP blower and mask strapped to the face when you sleep) is dirt cheap compared to the medical costs incurred in later life if not treated (NHS figures are a few hundred pounds over a lifetime vs hundreds of thousands for major medical interventions). Beware of internet quack remedies offering miracle cures. If they worked the medical establishment would be all over them (especially the NHS, for cost reasons)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hold button - The glue that makes IT work

"He couldn't understand how "glitched" recordings put me in a bad position even if it got him someway out of his problem."

Welcome to the world of dealing with narcissists.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Mute button

"Even when someone had made a serious cockup, while they were very clear that while they wanted it fixed ASAP they did not consider me at fault, but rather that I was part of the solution."

Manglement should _always_ work on the basis that the helpdesk is mostly there to fix problems caused by sales overpromising/underdelivering and secondarily there for actual technical problems.

If the helpdesk is there to make it harder for the customer to get things fixed, then they're part of the problem, not the solution.

One of the more classic sales psychopath approaches when hauled into a meeting with an irate customer is to engineer the customer into an angry outburst, then take offence and refuse to work with said customer anymore - these are the most toxic salespeople in an organisation as they end up costing the company far more than they ever made for it (stories of "buying something so he'll go away" are commonplace, as are promising the moon in order to make a sale). Senior management usually only find this kind of thing out long after the toxic person has well and truely embedded themselves into an organisation and it's fairly common for this kind of person to work their way up the organisation over time due to having utterly _no_ shame about conning people. (Sound like a US president we all know?)

This kind of person will treat anyone who calls them out as a personal enemy and is highly likely to engage in vendettas for what they perceive as even a minor slight. This can persist even after changing companies (particularly if they see the target as responsible for them being forced out)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hardware mute buttons which didn't mute

"Plantronics had adapter box like that that plugged between handset and phone."

They also have a plugthrough adaptor for the headset with a big red toggle switch that _physically_ disconnects the mic. (27708-01 In-Line Mute Switch - for the curious)

It's a godsend in noisy environments.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Per the answer to 1,"

In other words "I'm alright Jack. Fuck off"

"By assaulting a sales office when support is bad, you are punishing the wrong people"

The sales office are the people who sold the service which doesn't work as promised. Seems like the right people to me.

Your response is a classic narcissist one. "Not my problem, I washed my hands of it the minute I made the sale"

Are you a narcisstic psychopath willing to push blame for your faults onto other people in real life too?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "despite me being very reasonable"

"Trying to swamp their incoming lines is a serious dick move that helps absolutely no-one."

On the contrary, swamping their sales lines prevents them signing up more customers and if the sales people are on commission (which most are) it will eventually lead to heated screaming at whoever operates the support side to fix the bloody problem "right bloody now"

In most companies "sales" vastly outtrumps "suppport" in the food chain, so whilst support might be ignored when complaining loudly about not having enough resource, if the knock on effect of that is that it's impacting sales things tend to "get done".

It's not illegal to swamp a company's phone lines. Just keep it polite enough that they can't invoke the section 127 of the Telecommunications act and don't go after a single person as that could be construed as harrassment.

Far too many companies still treat support as "mwa ha haaa, we have your money now sucker, and you're locked into a binding contract. Whatcha gunna do?" - without realising that social networks are allowing more and more people to collate that behaviour and draw conclusions. (They can also coordinate action if they really wanted and the likes of TalkTalk haven't yet seen what can be done if they really piss off their customers.)

It took Ofcom, the ICO and friends quite a while to realise that the high level of complaints they've started seeing since 2003 isn't going to go away and that the complaints had existed for a long time but reaching the regulators was not an easy path for the victims.

(BTW, for a lot of shit that Ofcom claims fiefdom over, the Competition and Markets authority needs to step in. Ofcom needs to stick to its knitting as a technical regulator and leave misleading advertisiing/market manipulation issues to the people actually trained to deal with it. Take a leaf out of New Zealand's book - it was only when their version of the CMS (the Ministry of Commerce) stepped in that Telecom New Zealand's blatant market abuse got stomped on and the company broken into lines and services companies - that was the point where true competition emerged and NZ went from being the poster child of how NOT to privatise your telco to a good example of things done right)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I believe the stapled floppy disk story was genuine from the Commercial Union insurance techies in Croydon IIRC from the distant 80's"

I've seen it myself. It's one of the stupid things that users do, along with fridge magnets holding floppies to the filing cabinet. Nobody TOLD them they couldn't do it and they don't know about magnetic fields, nor did they get any training or look at the (cryptic) warning graphics on the disk envelope.

One of my staff took both a "coffee cup holder" call AND several "I can't use my computer, the power's off" calls whilst in a previous university helpdesk job - and that was _after_ he'd read about them on the nascent internet of the early 1990s.

About half the calls we took about dialup problems were due to frustrated other members of the household picking up the phone and pushing buttons or whistling at the modem until it hung up. It never seemed to occur to the users that nobody could phone out and in a lot of cases nothing was actually said about the problem until after we'd sent someone out to diagnose.

(Most of the rest were due to dodgy phones that relied on line power to keep their memories intact starting to change the impedance of the line as their internal capacitors ran down - this was easily fixed by plugging in a "privacy adaptor" - which was simply a bridge rectifier and zener diode to keep such phones locked out when another one was using the line.

Only about 10% of such calls were down to genuine line faults and the telco got to the point of fixing them fast when we called even if they'd been ignoring customer complaints in an area (or linesmen were writing off faults as "fixed" when they weren't) - our account manager made a point of forcing the telco helldesk to tabulate complaints linkable to cables and the clustering made it quite clear where trunk cables needed replacement.

This made us unpopular with linesmen in some towns as it reduced their callout rates by 90% - they'd been milking the system for all they were worth - which brings us back to email trails as it became clear that these problems were known about for some time but not dealt with until we - as a customer with a large number of customers using telco lines and able to identify clusters of problems - started making noises about the issue. I'm quite sure that telco customers in those towns to this day never knew why their lines which had been crackling, humming and randomly cutting off for decades even after the switch to digital exchanges suddenly all started working perfectly.)

FWIW:

It's not just computers where users do stupid things even when you tell them not to:

One of the "never ever do this" rules about handling liquid gases is putting them into unvented containers - back in the 1980s if you used a thermos instead of a dedicated dewar flask it _had_ to have a 1/4" hole drilled in the lid to make sure of this. This is a safety precaution drilled thoroughly into new students - so one day a 3rd year biochem student wandered casually into the workshops (bottom floor of the 6 floor biochem tower block) asking for assistance opening his thermos. "Hang on, this is cold. What's in it?" "Liquid nitrogen" - a small scream, rush for the door and toss into the adjacent duckpond later, the tech was still thanking his lucky stars when there was a loud but dull "thud" and the contents of said pond (including most of the mud from the bottom) deposited themselves along the entire vertical surface of the block (which being brutalist 1970s architecture with recessed windows made it a bitch for the cleanup crews). Legend has it that it took 2 years for ducks to return.

Understandably, materials handling rules were changes after that to absolutely and completely ban the use of commercial thermos containers for moving liquid gases around (uncertified containers of any kind actually) and banning the transport of liquid gases in non-dedicated vehicles using any kind of container (someone managed to nearly asphyxiate themselves with a dewar of LN2 in the boot....Darwin in action). Photos of the building were used as part of the safety training for students at that univeristy for a long time afterwards.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Careful of what you write

"you could just request all the information that the company holds on you under the Data Protection Act, that often shows up some very interesting results"

It's even more interesting when what they give you clearly shows that they've withheld some bits.

The classic being emails referring to other emails that weren't supplied.

Courts really don't like that. (This applies to discovery and DPA compliance)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Careful of what you write

"The one that got me a number of years ago was the way that an email chain, which starts of as being very "internal" to an organisation, can get replied to and forwarded until it hits some numpty in the sales department who then just CC's in the customer contact without trimming the email first..."

That's actually been instrumental in a couple of lawsuits I'm aware of - where that mis-CCed internal email made it very clear that what the vendor was denying was indeed the case.

And in both cases, if the vendor hadn't insisted on trying to cover things up for a prolonged period they wouldn't have ended up in court.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Help desk

"Support is both a profit center (increasing the likelihood of future purchases by the customer) and a loss-prevention center."

You'd think so, but it's clear that most companies see it as a cost centre they'd rather do away with.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I've been on the receiving end of this

"From what I've heard, Sony's reputation for quality started seriously slipping during the 1990s."

You heard right, but it was the late 1980s.

I'm not talking about reputation, but build and design quailty. Failure rates went through the roof compared to earlier generations.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I've been on the receiving end of this

"They sent the customer a nice letter offering to PAY the first month of subscription to a competitor's system."

The letter I sent offered to send staff out to set the customer up on the competitor's system.

It wasn't just support issues. This one was being abusive on several IRC networks and caused our ISP to be banned from them, which affected other customers, caused knockon support issues and directly cost income.