* Posts by SImon Hobson

2539 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2006

Let's check in with our friends in England and, oh good, bloke fined after hiding face from police mug-recog cam

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: The police "fined" him.

Or book a days annual leave and not lose a days pay

And lose a day of your leisure time instead. It may not have an easily definable monetary value, but most people do value their leisure (non-working) days.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: What the heck

He also says that he had been told before he walked down the street that the camera was there, so if he'd been trying to hide he could have gone round a different way...

Having to take a different route because the one you want to use is "blocked" would mean that the police have caused an illegal obstruction on the Queen's Highway. In general, you have a right (whether on foot, horse, or in a motor vehicle) to pass and re-pass along the Queen's Highway - and you do not have to have a reason for doing so.

There have been cases where (eg) a council has installed a gate at one end of a highway (unsurfaced, colloquially known as a green lane) to stop people using it. Arguments that people could pass along the highway, turn round, and pass along it the other way were tossed out in court; as were arguments that people wanting to use the highway could go a different route and so had no "reason" to use it. Basically the magistrate agreed that the person bringing the case had a right to use the highway, did not need a reason to use it, and the gate prevented him from doing so.

OK, Google, please do a half-hearted U-turn: Stay of execution for smart home APIs after Big G goes cuckoo in the Nest

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Re: Nest - the only smarts in my home

You commit to supporting your products for at least five years after ...

That's not long enough. I've recently put up new smoke/CO/heat detectors (Aico linked stuff) in the flat - they have a lifetime of TEN years. Having shelled out £300 (including a couple of radio modules because there's a bit where I couldn't run a new cable to interlink them all), I don't want to be having to look at replacing them before that.

When you consider the price of most of this stuff - eg, typically in excess of £60 each for radiator valves - then I expect to have a decent life out of it. When something gets obsoleted because the company gets bought out and the new parent wants to sell you new stuff, that can get very expensive, very quickly.

There may be an argument for an escrow system whereby if the manufacturer disappears, or stops supporting the product, information sufficient for others to take over (eg open source, not vendor specific systems) have the information to integrate these devices.

Things like this are why I've not invested AT ALL into "smart" home stuff - there's just too much risk in going down any road at the moment, they all offer scope for hitting a dead end sooner or later.

UK taxman falls foul of GDPR, agrees to wipe 5 million voice recordings used to make biometric IDs

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Re: ...and enables us to get callers through to an adviser faster

I disagree too. I've had to call HMRC a few times. While I've sometimes had to wait a while, it's not been half as bad as some other organisations (gov and non-gov). And I've found the staff generally helpful - though of course, you'll never get anyone at HMRC to give you anything more than non-binding advice.

And while it's a general PITA doing it at all, the online system for doing personal tax returns is both free and usable - the latter probably because HMRC refused to let the government's online digital group to f**k it up like they've done with so many other government sites.

A real head-scratcher: Tech support called in because emails 'aren't showing timestamps'

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Re: top-posting

and read in the normal fashion to the bottom

Ah, no. You don't read to the bottom. Between the bit you need to read and the bottom are a gazzillion signatures/footers/disclaimers that build up as each top-poster quotes the whole darn thread - oblivious to the size of the message.

Mind you, if they are using MS's email service then even a short plaintext message is expanded to something like 4k in headers !

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: "WTF do you think you're doing?"

when I started there was one PC to be used by three developers

Ha, back in we 80s there were six of us sharing one Intel MDS writing code for a project we were working on - multiple modules, each with it's own 8031 microcontroller, talking over a shared serial link. We got 3 hours each of keyboard & ICE time/day, the rest of the time we had to doodle on our latest printout in preparation for our next turn. It made quite a difference when we were able to rent an additional MDS for a while !

NASA fingers the cause of two bungled satellite launches, $700m in losses, years of science crashing and burning...

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

So they cost NASA 700m

They get away paying back a small percentage of it.

Others have already pointed out that there was probably insurance that paid out most if not all of the losses. The insurers may well now seek to recover their losses in a civil case ... and they have a $700m incentive to do so.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: He didn't slam capitalism

why did Jack & Jill go up the hill to fetch a pail of water?

Well one theory I've heard was that it was (like a few other nursery rhymes) slang for some rumpy pumpy or even an orgy.

Went up the hill - going upstairs.

Broke his crown - lost his virginity

and so on. Probably untrue, but makes for a bit of amusement.

Cali Right-to-Repair law dropped, cracks screen, has to be taken to authorized repair shop

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Lets see what happens when Ford, GM and VW try to enforce that type of shit onto their customers

They were already heading in that direction - warranty void unless you had all servicing done at a franchised dealer using manufacturer parts. They made all the same arguments - highly complicated machines, quality, safety, need for properly trained techs, etc.

A good few years ago now, the EU turned around and called bo11ocks to that - insisting that manufacturers could not impose such conditions. I can't recall whether it was the same time that they also required manufacturers to provide sufficient information to allow third parties to properly service them.

Facebook: Not saying we've done anything wrong but... we're just putting $3bn profit aside for an FTC privacy fine

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Apple messenger on Android would wipe Zuck out

I use Signal, but as ThatOne points out - that is no use when people you want to talk to are using Whatsapp. I've been trying to persuade some of my family to add Signal - but they just don't want to do it and just keep telling me to install Whatsapp.

Facebook is not going to Like this: Brit watchdog proposes crackdown on hoovering up kids' info

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Re: How to really poke FB in the eye

AIUI, under GDPR they sort-of are responsible.

If you collect data, you are required to say what you are collecting and what you'll do with it. If it gets used for something else then you are on the hook - and that would include if you give it to someone else who misuses it. The latter bit comes from you being required to have suitable measures in place to prevent misuse - including contractual terms with any third parties.

If the third party misuses it, then you've failed - either your contract wasn't well enough specified, or you didn't have good enough oversight processes to ensure compliance.

Anyone involved with financial reporting for a company with US parents/owners will be familiar with this concept. Under the US Sarbanes-Oxley act, the head honcho has to sign the accounts as being true and accurate - and if it turns out that they aren't then they can personally be thrown in the clink (that's a powerful motivator !) It was the result of things like Enron and Worldcom and their blatant false accounting. But the end result is that you, as a small UK company, have to put in all the controls and measures so that when the finance numbers are passed up to the US parent, the US finance bods can be sure (as in, stand up in court and say so) that they are correct when they incorporate then into their own financial statement.

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

SImon Hobson Bronze badge
Facepalm

Re: Cleaners...

In another company the cleaners wet-mopped everything and as last step the computer screens.

Oh yes, I remember back in the 80s we had just got some (Apollo Domain) workstations in - for the day, powerful 68020 systems ! With what was, for the day, huge 19" colour screens. Sure enough, one morning we came in to find a dried on layer of wiped on "mud". By the time the cleaners had gone over a football pitch sized office, the water they had in the bucket was "a bit brown". Yes, we had words with the cleaners and they didn't do it again.

Who had 'one week in' for a Making Tax Digital c0ckup? Well done, you win... absolutely nothing

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Facepalm

Ah, business as usual !

Ah, that well tried and tested government process - impose some technical requirement based on political instructions "from above"; ignore "suggestions" that the scope and timescale are "optimistic"*; fail to implement properly leading to issues at rollout; think about putting support processes in place after the rollout and ensuing "teething problems".

* Reminds me of Sgt Wilson in Dad's Army where he frequently asks Captain Mannering "do you thing that's wise ?" - when we all know that what he really means is "that's a barking idea but I'm too polite to say so". The difference being that people do tell the various government departments that their ideas/timescales are barking.

Menu mischief and interface deceit targeted by US lawmakers

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Facepalm

Hmm, there's a saying involving the words "pot", "kettle", and "black". So there is Microshaft, so well known for their honest and ethical outright dishonest attempts to persuade us to upgrade downgrade to Windows 10 - calling for regulation to block all the dishonest and unethical methods they used.

But then we have to factor in a good dose of "left hand, would you like to know what right hand is doing ?" within a large organisation such as Microshaft.

Apple disables iPad for 48 years after toddler runs amok

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Coat

Re: But we all have something to learn from this..

There's a little known fact about Mr Tell and his wife. Apparently they were ardent crown green bowlers and were in their local equivalent of what we'd call a league team these days. However, no actual records still exist, so ...

... we'll never know for whom the Tells bowled.

HMRC accused of not understanding its own IR35 tax reforms ahead of private sector rollout

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Not that you ever get certainty from HMRC anyway. Any advice they give in response to a query is always given in such a manner that they can't be bound by it later - when they've changed their mind and are now demanding more tax (and penalties) from you.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: It's time for a re-write ...

... throw the current taxation system out of the window, sit down and define a new one ...

Has a look outside, no there isn't a porcine aerobatics team practicing anywhere nearby :-)

Such a change can't happen. For any mass change, there would inevitably be losers as well as winners - and those lowers would "be unhappy about it". Large numbers of "unhappy" voters means "looking for new job come next election time".

And as pointed out, there's a large industry out there that makes a living from two aspects of the tax system - one being that most people don't know enough about it to do it themselves (so "bread and butter" work for accountants doing tax returns etc), another being specialists in tax minimisation (ie knowing the little details that can be exploited to avoid, not evade, tax).

This is not, repeat, not an April Fools' Day joke: 5 UK broadband vendors agree to pay YOU daily rate for fscked internet

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: There's a disconnect between the broadband companies and openreach

but there isn't a scheme for OpenWretch to refund the ISPs when delays and outages occur

AIUI there is such a scheme. In principle an ISP actually makes money if OpenRetch screw up - OR pay penalties to the ISP, the ISP pockets the money. I recall reading about this several years ago, how the ISPs were now going to have to pass those penalty payments on to the customer.

There have been a few articles over the years about how BT and/or BTOR have lied to their customers (the ISPs) about the nature of faults to avoid paying out penalties - one that comes to mind was about leased lines rather than xDSL though.

Naming your company 101: Probably best not to have the word 'Oracle' anywhere near branding

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Re: Unopposed

Yes, IF the director for Oracle101 had turned up (or written in) to file a defence then Oracle would have had to show that there was a likelihood of confusion. But as said already, if you don't turn up to the hearing (or in some sorts of tribunals, provide a written response) then you will lose simply by the fact of not having opposed the complaint.

Unless the director of Oracle101 had some valid excuse (there aren't many) for not attending or responding then it's an expensive reminder not to ignore such correspondence.

Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed

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Re: I would expect a longer process for re-certification

3. Why is there a stabiliser setting which can cause unavoidable aircraft loss anyway?

This was answered further up the page.

Trim adjusts the angle of the whole horizontal stabiliser (the "small wings" at the back of the plane). That's the most efficient way to do it - have the whole surface doing the same thing. Some other designs have a fixed section and a large movable section - which means that you are likely to have two surfaces not doing exactly the same thing.

The elevator that is worked by moving the control column is much smaller - provided the plane is trimmed correctly, only small amounts of force are needed to manoeuvre the plane. So the elevator can only over-ride the trim up to a certain point - after that, the effect from trimming is more than the elevator can counter. Hence the description above of having to realise what's going on, disable the trimming system, and then frantically wind the manual trim control far enough for the elevator to be able to get the nose up again. And while you are frantically doing this, with your co-pilot doing a gym weightlifting workout* holding the control column fully back, the plane is entering an ever steeping dive due to the excessive trim.

Don't forget, this isn't a case of "it trims the aircraft to a certain attitude" (ie constant nose down) - it trims the aircraft to a "rate of change of attitude" (ie increasing nose down).

* OK, perhaps slight exaggeration since the flight controls will still be power assisted or even fly by wire. But I bet that guy is pulling that column mighty hard against the stops !

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Slightly different one, on power up...

UPS at the bottom of the rack

I recall hearing about how one of our clients at my last place who had a server that needed a "BRS reset" - ie it had hung and needed a power cycle. It was the bottom server in the rack and the helldesk guy casually told the customer to power off "the bottom server in the rack".

I think you can guess the rest, never assume people know the difference between "server" and "UPS" !

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Be careful about differentiating by colour

There are many people who are red/green colourblind

About 1 in 7 males IIRC, though there's a range from "barely noticeable" through "quite pronounced but I can still mostly manage" (like myself) and onto the extreme of can't tell the difference at all. Interestingly, when I took my first aviation medical, it wasn't the red-green I almost failed on, it was the yellow-white. I blame the fact that the pigmy bulb in the lantern was yellow to start with - so I had to tell the difference between "supposed to be white but is actually yellow" bulb and "same bulb but through a yellow filter" :-/

Before that the AME got out the Ishihara book and I commented "this'll be interesting". As expected, I couldn't see numbers on many of the plates - but was OK when he turned to the back where they were almost black & yellow. Then he got the lantern out, mumbling about the hassle as he untangled the power cord - I suspect he didn't have to use it often.

Boeing big cheese repeats pledge of 737 Max software updates following fatal crashes

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: "Perhaps regulators need to take a similar approach to automobiles ?"

What I saw in a TV program (a while ago) said that part of the test was to lay the bike on the ground and pick it up again - can't pick it up and you fail. If you pass, you are limited to that weight of bike.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Thumb down?

as the feedback on the stick did not clearly show the nose up was from the other co-pilot

That is about it. One pilot realised what was happening but could not feel that the other pilot was holding the stick fully back - made worse by the way Airbus have put the sticks (basically a gaming joystick) in the cockpit sidewalls so one pilot would have to look across past the other to see what they are doing.

In a traditional "mechanical" system, the two sticks would be mechanically linked - so one plot would be able to feel what the other was doing. It was eventually realised what was happening, but not before they ran out of altitude in which to recover the situation.

How many Reg columnists does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

SImon Hobson Bronze badge
Pint

Re: Long way around the barn!

1) Insert keycard in slot beside door to switch on all lights

Ah, well there was my first stumbling point once, many years ago. I got sent abroad to one of a customer's foreign sites - in a place with lots of sun. Got to the hotel, got given a card for the room, went up in the lift and found myself in a corridor darker than the command centre of a submarine in night combat mode. After a few minutes in the gloom, I got enough vision to find my door, and entered the room.

Being a hot and sunny place they had full blackout curtains that were automatically left fully closed by the staff - so the room was even darker than the corridor, especially when the door closed itself behind me. By feel I managed to find what felt like some light switches - but they did nothing but make a quiet clicking noise. I managed to make my way across to the window by following the pinpricks of light that got through the blackout like a starry night and allowed some light into the room.

it was only then that I found this slot thing next to the light switches, and by experiment found that shoving the card into it made the lights work. Yes I know it sounds daft, but I'd never even heard of this sort of "feature" (I'd call it a bug myself) before - I'd always had hotel rooms with ordinary lights, the sort that come on when you switch them on, and go off when you switch them off.

I did however realise the value of the blackout curtains. Some years before that I'd found myself in a hotel in Stockport during some strange season referred to as summer - "what on earth is this hot weather ?" sort of stuff. Each day I got back from the course, I'd find the room doing a fair impression of an oven - with all the windows closed even though I'd purposely left them open. A little bit of exploration found that the only place in the hotel that was air conditioned was the bar - which made a decent excuse I suppose :-)

We'll help you get your next fix... maybe, we'll think about it, says FTC: 'Right to repair' mulled

SImon Hobson Bronze badge
Headmaster

Re: If someone burns his house or is electrolocuted after his own repairs, what about the warranty?

Pedant alert ...

Anyway, we've had high voltage everywhere since electricity in the home

Actually, apart from inside things like valve TVs and radios, there isn't high voltage in the home - and I don't think there ever has been. The international standard sets "high voltage" as over 1000V for AC - and the nominal 110/220/230/240 (depending on where you are) comes in as "low voltage". The things most people refer to as low voltage (eg the 12V wall wart for the router) is actually "extra low voltage" (<50V AC and some other figure I can't recall for DC).

It may seem pedantic, but it can be rather important to get terminology right when talking about 'lectricery.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Why is voiding of warranty a problem?

There's another issue - where the warranty might only cover certain parts (or there might be different warranty lengths for different parts) which is common in things like printers with lots of moving parts. As an example, some years ago we had a few "not very cheap" label printers for producing the product labels to go on the stuff we made. The barcode requirements are quite strict - and if substandard, some large retailers will simply return all the stock to you. We even had to have different printers for different barcode sizes - it's to do with the elements*/mm in the print head.

If you've ever looked at a barcode label and seen white lines across it (normally in the same direction as the lines in the barcode run) then this is normally a sign that there's a broken element* in the printhead that made it. When you've a printhead something like 100mm wide, with 300 elements*/mm, then it only takes a tiny bit of grit to cut into one or more elements* and you need to replace the printhead. Even if you keep the place very clean (and this is in a factory), just the wear of the ribbon passing over the printhead will eventually start taking out elements.

We went through a bit of "discussion" with the printer supplier until they pointed out something they'd never mentioned when we were buying the printers - the printhead was explicitly excluded from the warranty (and no I don't recall whether anyone read the very small print). To avoid the man hours costs, we got one of our own people trained in how to replace and align the printheads - something that happened every 2 or 3 months IIRC.

So in this case, you've got a situation where there's a non-warranty part replacement required - and you'd not want the manufacturer disclaiming the warranty on the rest of the machine because you replaced the consumable part yourself. Note that the consumable part wasn't a "click out and click in" replacement - it needed partial dismantling of the machine and then careful alignment afterwards.

* For those that don't know how such things work ... These were thermal transfer printers, where a sandwich of backing carrier (waxed paper), label, and wax coated plastic ribbon passes under a printhead and driven by a rubber roller that both drives the labels along and applies pressure to keep the labels, ribbon, and printhead in contact with each other. The printhead contains lots of small resistors, which when powered will heat up enough to melt the wax so it transfers from the plastic ribbon to the surface of the label.

For barcode applications, dimensional tolerances are quite tight - so you always try and print the lines of the barcode along the direction of travel of the labels. That way, the lines (especially the "cleanness" of the edges) is defined by the geometry of the elements and not by how fast or slow they turn on and off. If you print them the other way, the lines are not as crisp as the elements take time to heat up and cool off - and this can vary between elements as well which makes the lines slightly jaggy as well as fuzzy.

It may not be immediately obvious to those accustomed to (eg) modern laser printers which will scale a font to any size and print nice smooth text, but you can't do that with barcodes. Each element in the printhead must be either 100% inside or 100% outside of the line you want to print - if it falls partway then you end up with a line that is either too wide (element turned on) or too narrow (element turned off). This means that for each size of barcode, you must have a printer with one of a set number of elements/mm in it's printhead. IIRC we had a 208element/mm head machine for printing "80%" barcodes (that's 80% of the nominal size laid out in the specs) - with a 300element/mm you could only do a 75% barcode, and some retailers refused to accept that size even though their tills would happily scan them. "The spec says 80% minimum, so we're applying it because we can" mentality from certain buyers - we even had a case where a retailer had accepted 75% barcodes for years, then the buyer changed and refused to accept anything smaller than 80%.

Yes, being able to talk about EAN symbologies is a quick way to get labelled a geek at social gatherings !

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Those "gotten wet" sensors are knock to be extremely inaccurate

I don't own one, but were I in a situation where I wanted a repair and they said "no way, it's been wet" I'd turn around and say "legally imposed implied term of fitness for purpose - it's not been dunked or otherwise abused, so if the moisture sensor is a factor then it clearly wasn't fit for the purpose of being used as a mobile phone with all that implies (such as being kept in a pocket and subject to sweat, or used in British weather". In the UK the law is very clear on that - goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold and you cannot change that with any contract wording (any contract clause trying to would automatically be void).

In practice, what (anecdotally from what I've seen online) seems to happen is that if challenged they will offer a "goodwill" repair - for the simple reason that they don't want a public showing of how they are breaking the law and tip off the less knowledgeable/belligerent customers as to how to enforce their rights.

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

I'm very pleased to be off Faecebook

Oh you poor deluded soul. You can never leave FaecesBorg - like the Hotel California, you can check out, but you can never leave.

They will still be tracking you, they will still be holding and using all that information gained back then and since. Leaving is just an illusion.

Year 1 of GDPR: Over 200,000 cases reported, firms fined €56 meeelli... Oh, that's mostly Google

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Companies going too far.

After speaking to them, GDPR was blamed for being unable to communicate price changes to me.

Just another case of companies not knowing what the rules are - there's a long history of that !

One example I recall from a couple of decades ago was when I put all my employers numbers on both the TPS and FPS in an attempt to cut down on the junk calls/faxes. Not long after, I was informed that we needed to remove one of the numbers from the FPS because a service they subscribed to (a weekly market intelligence report by fax) couldn't send them the fax as the number was on the FPS. I responded "quite bluntly" that the accuracy of anything coming from a company which had so little knowledge of the rules regarding the TPS and FPS was of "questionable accuracy". When the jist of my response was fed back to the service provider, I believe they modified their systems and the information faxes from them started coming in again.

Just like your example, the company had failed to grasp the difference between unsolicited marketing communications, and those happening as a result of a contract with them.

Packet switching pickle prompts potential pecuniary problems

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Back in my NetWare days

one of the network printers

Ah yes, the joys of ISDN dial-on-demand :-)

Some years ago my employer opened offices in a couple of other European offices - well actually I think it was some form or either joint venture or merger, but that's not important right now. Anyway, I initially setup ISDN dial on demand - we already had ISDN in our main router at HQ so just needed an ISDN-2 line at each remote office. The application in use ran on a Unix (SCO OpenServer before SCO committed suicide) using text terminals and text printers. it worked fine, when someone accessed the system, the network dialled up and apart from a second or two delay initially no-one noticed what went on in the background.

Until that is, staff decided that the way to cancel a print job was to just turn the printer off. Being hung off a networked printer server using reverse telnet, all that happened was the Unix box back in the UK kept trying to send more data and getting told by the terminal server that it couldn't take it yet - all weekend ! I happened to notice on Monday morning, can't remember why, probably because I was having a poke around the network to see what was going on, or perhaps noticed the active print queue job.

After management were informed of the cost of the weekend long call (around £300 IIRC), staff at the remote sites were reminded (yet again) of the correct procedure for cancelling print jobs. When we got the proper network in place (Frame Relay, who remembers that !) it became mostly moot - except when one site regularly had to run over ISDN until the telco finally did some proper tests and found the split pairs causing failures on the FR connection.

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

A while ago I went to a local community group meeting. The point of discussion I went for was something else, but there was a short bit before that about plans for a new mobile mast. It seems most were against it, and many would have preferred the operator (Vodamoan IIRC) to spend more putting in several much smaller installations.

It was hard work, but I managed to resist chirping up that those saying that Vodamoan should spend more than they have to have almost certainly complained about their mobile bills, complained about coverage, and "shopped around" for the best deal (or some combination of those). It seems that most people lack the ability to see a link between what a business spends (eg on multiple smaller masts vs one larger one) and what that business needs to charge it's customers.

For good measure, I see that it seems to be going ahead - several equipment cabinets have appeared at the site. However they are on the pavement rather than on the large grassy area where they wouldn't be in the way. Why ? I believe plans for the project (including putting the cabinets out of the way on the grassy bit) were vetoed by local politicians, but by putting the cabinets on the pavement the operator gets to use different rules.

When 2FA means sweet FA privacy: Facebook admits it slurps mobe numbers for more than just profile security

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: And they have all those phonebooks nice data anyway....

<emThere are zero provisions in GDPR that prevent a data grabber from obtaining people's information from OTHER people</em>

Wrong. Unless they have another lawful basis for processing (which would not apply here), then the data processor MUST have the consent of the person to whom the information relates. It does not matter where they get that data, they must have the consent of that person.

So if another person uploads their contact list with my details in, the data processor (in this case, FaecesBorg) would be breaking the law to use it.

If that wasn't the case, then it would be really easy for everyone to use these "got it from someone else" techniques to sidestep the law. But GDPR is clear on this - if a data processor gets information from a 3rd person, they must be able to show that they have the necessary processes/controls in place to be sure that that 3rd party did legitimately obtain the data and the data subject gave their informed consent for it to be shared.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Translation: "We hear you. We don't care.

Translation: "We need to hide things better in future". There, fixed it for you.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: And they have all those phonebooks nice data anyway....

How many data Facebook has about people who never accepted to have those data used by Facebook? Is it legal, especially under GDPR - a third party can't consent to have my data collected.

It wasn't legal before GDPR, GDPR hasn't actually changed anything in that respect other than the potential penalties.

Under GDPR and earlier UK & EU data protection law, you would need the informed consent of EVERY other person before uploading their contact details (via a phonebook slurp) to the likes of FaecesBorg. To think that FaecesBorg weren't aware of that but just figured the potential costs were less than the realisable profits would be naive to say the least !

Under GDPR the penalties are such that FaecesBorg won't be able to ignore them forever, and when they find that the law does apply to them then they'll find their business model is dead. There are already cases that have been started, but it'll take some time for them to work their way through the system of various tribunals, courts, appeals etc.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge
Big Brother

Like the Hotel California, you can leave leave. Unlike the Hotel California, you can't even check out.

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

SImon Hobson Bronze badge
WTF?

Re: Travelling to client sites

Ah yes, the "you MUST attend meetings.

Some years ago the company I worked for managed to get a major retailer as a customer - and we (3 of us, representing 3 roles) had to go to a meeting at their headquarters in south Wales. So up very early for a long drive - which thanks to an accident on the M5 ended up at something like 10 hours. The meeting gets to my part (dealing with EDI) and the entire meeting which I HAD to attend consisted of just 4 sentences :

Do you already have EDI ?

Yes

What formats do you support ?

Tradacoms 9, or if you need it Tradacoms 8

Yes, those 2 questions, which could have been handled over the phone or by email required me to travel to the other end of the country for an 18 hour day of which most was spent in the car. All because the customer has this "if you want to deal with us, you must have this meeting face-face" rule.

So Windrush happened, and yet UK Home Office immigration data still has 'appalling defects'

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

... must be presumed to be legally in the UK

Yes, in a just world anda country that prides itself on having a sense of fairness - that would be what happens. However, under the policies implemented during the reign of Treasonous May in hte Home Office, they have a policy of "you are an illegal immigrant, with no rights to anything unless you can prove you aren't".

In a fair system, it would be a case of at least giving people an automatically renewed, time limited, right to remain while disputes and appeals are worked out. But no, it's deport first, ask questions later. And if you avoid deportation, then you lose the roof over your head (thanks to the "right to rent" requirements that have just been declared illegal) and the money to put food on the table (because of similar rules on employment). Of course, after a few years (some people have been fighting Home Office incompetence for over SIX years) you may win - but you won't ever get back what you lost.

It's an embarrassment to everyone in this country with any sense of decency.

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: waste

Ah yes, been on the receiving end of that at times ;-)

Many many years and several work hats ago we had a local part of the NHS as a customer. We knew that they were looking at a colour printer and that the year end was coming up. We'd recently seen a nice wax transfer job at a trade show and mentioned it to the customer - who found that they has just enough budget to be spent in the next fortnight to pay for one. This was back in the days when "colour laser" meant something like a £25k Canon CLC500 plus another £10k of image processor - so something like £4k for a wax transfer job was cheap 8-O

Phoned the manufacturer's agent to order the printer and they asked when we wanted a demo for the customer. It took a while of "no, no, we've already sold it" and "but no-one buys one without seeing a demo" conversation before we won and it was ordered - and delivered and invoiced to the customer with a few days to spare.

As far as I know, we only ever sold them one set of consumables as they'd decided it was too expensive to actually use !

But yes, the whole "spend it or lose it" mentality is crazy. Managing to not spend a full budget should get praise, not punishment. It may be, as has happened several times in less distant jobs, that a project has been put back - and so the expenditure goes back into a later finance year.

We're not throttling you, says Vodafone, claiming slow vid streaming is down to the 'cards'

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FAIL

At my last place they went with several FTTC lines from Vodamoan when we were decommissioning services that rellied on an old legacy circuit we'd had for years - started off with Yourcomms, then Thus, Then Clueless and Witless, and finally Vodamoan. With each acquisition and merger, knowledge would get lost, and service level would go down - and eventually Vodamoan announced that they were shutting down that legacy network.

To say the task of getting 5 FTTC lines installed and working "didn't go well" would be a massive understatement. By the time I left, one of the lines still didn't work - after something like 9 months ! In the meantime, as a "plan B" we got a FTTC line in from another provider we used - and despite several problems requiring 2 "cease and reprovide"s to fix, had a working line in about 2 weeks from ordering.

Add in some of the completely bogus carp they didn't tell us about - like "you can only use our router" (it's a pile of sh1t and many businesses have their own requirements) and "you can't have a single fixed IP, you have to pay extra for a block of 5", and "you have to phone the residentiall helpline and ask to be transferred to business" - and no, I couldn't recommend them for anything.

Oh, and don't get me started on their nationwide outage on business services which was caused by a catalogue of failures that could have been foreseen by anyone who'd skimmed through "networking and systems monitoring for dummies".

Icon says what I think of them.

Crowdfunded lawyer suing Uber told he can't swerve taxi app giant's £1m legal bill

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Downvoted because I don't think you read the same article I did.

This isn't about shady practices like Crossley was found guilty of, it's about someone standing up for "right" and big business using massive legal bills to try and stop him taking it further. Uber's business model relies on ignoring laws or at least applying "interesting" interpretations - no the drivers aren't employees so we can skip all those employer costs and obligations, no we aren't providing the services so we can ignore that pesky VAT, and so on.

This guy is trying to get a ruling on the VAT - and if he wins it sounds like Uber could be on the hook for a very very large amount of cash. It sounds like they are deliberately loading up the legal fees - nah, one barrister isn't enough, lets use 5, sort of thing - in an attempt to frighten him off. In the subject of this article, he was trying to get a court to limit the costs that he'd face if he loses - and he's failed to get that.

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

In school metalwork classes we had a soapy liquid that we applied liberally when using vertical drills. Think the lathes had a supply too

Yup, standard option on metalworking machines - often referred to colloquially as "suds".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_fluid

When I started as an apprentice at a large engineering firm <cough> decades ago, part of one of the safety lectures was about the risks from cutting fluid - referred to as Gluta which I suspect was a trade name at the time. It was white and looked like milk - so one trick that had been used before then was to replace someone's milk in a carton with Gluta, which the target would then drink by mistake and get very seriously ill.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Cyanide salt solution by themselves are not dangerous

Ah, that's good to know .....

Many years ago, with a different work hat on, a colleague and myself were involved in moving all the IT when one of our remote offices (part of another company ours had acquired) to a new location. My colleague was at the old site busy packing stuff up, and I was at the new site unpacking it as it arrived - and getting the networking stuff setup in preparation.

My colleague left the other site when he'd finished, and we heard that had he been another 5 minutes then he'd have been stuck there for some time. Someone had found a large bottle labelled Cyanide in the cellar of a house and the Police had locked down the area while the nasties clean up squad removed it.

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

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

I gave up once I got a car that was all electronics ...

For me it was not the electronics, but the slide into "too technical for a mere amateur" territory. Back in the day, they would have instructions for a (say) full gearbox overhaul - complete with all the settings/measurements/etc. I mostly gave up on them some time ago when the (for example) gearbox section comprised of words to the effect of "not a DIY job".

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Ephemeris data required

But won't that also be using the same length of week number ? At least, I'd have hoped they'd be consistent.

If they didn't do something stupid and use different formats, then the device would just think it's at some time in the past - and so are all the satellites. The time of day may be wrong (not sure why as it would only be the week that's wrong) but the position should still be correct. Might be some problems around rollover time if the GPS uses a different format internally - but that's likely to just cause it to have to do a completely cold start and find a satellite to download data from again.

Ever used VFEmail? No? Well, chances are you never will now: Hackers wipe servers, backups in 'catastrophic' attack

SImon Hobson Bronze badge
Facepalm

Re: Backups?

That, and I've never had trouble getting a customer that has previously lost data to budget for one to do them properly.

Over the years, with various hats on (variously in house and providing services to clients) there's always been the notion that the easiest time to sell backup to [the client|manglement] is when lack of a proper backup has caused data loss. At my last job I did my best with the budget allowed to me (zero, just what I could scavenge as other stuff got upgraded) - I had rolling multi-copy backups but was never happy that while they were on separate disks, they were in the same box as one of the VM hosts. Unfortunately I never managed to scrape together the hardware to replicate the backups to another site I had available to me - and even then it would have left us open to this sort of thing.

But it does look like it was a really deliberate job if the criminals (lets call them what they are) were able to compromise a range of systems with different authentications.

Cheap call? Hardly. GSM gateway judicial review to settle whether UK Home Sec can legally push comms watchdog around

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Opportunist litigation.

every SIM card used in a GSM gateway was a breach of the T&C’s and explicitly not allowed

But that's a contractual matter between the litigants and the mobile network operators. This case is about a government minister explicitly "outlawing" their business even though the law as laid down by parliament says otherwise (according to the litigants).

I think that if you had a business that was legal, regardless of what anyone thought of it, you'd be a bit peed off if a government minister "just killed it" by signing a letter ordering a regulator to change the rules.

European Commission orders mass recall of creepy, leaky child-tracking smartwatch

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Also if this is an old product and it's not on the market anymore, why are the backend servers still running?

Perhaps "not on the market any more" =/= "no longer used by anyone". Or put another way, you don't shut down the required infrastructure when the last unit goes out the warehouse door - unless you're Google and have just "terminated" Revolv hubs.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/06/nest_kills_revolv/

Our vulture listened to four hours of obtuse net neutrality legal blah-blah so you don't have to: Here's what's happening

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Thank you

Here is what we all want :

We pay $x for x speed at x reliability at less than x latency.

... If they slow down another providers content, it is a breach of contract and theft. Sue them. ... Class action lawsuit and BAM problem solved. And not just with AT$T, the other carriers did not try it after that either.

Big problem with that, all the provider has to do is sell you a target speed 100Mbps service - but only guaranteed to be minimum of 10kbps; and with latency target of <1ms - but only guaranteed to be less than 10s; and with target availability of 99.999% but with no guarantee of any availability.

Great you say, no-one would sign up to that rubbish. Correct, in most of the UK we have a choice of real providers and someone trying that crap would find few takers. But AIUI the state of internet provision in the USA, people would still buy it on the basis that it's better than no connection at all - having the choice of one incumbent since the cable industry did such a good job of carving up the market into several monopolies.

So having signed up to such a service, you are not going to be able to sue because it's unlikely that they'll fail to provide what they guaranteed.

This is where Pai's arguments fall down - backed up by the FCC's blatantly false reporting of the market situation to the government committees that oversee such things. If there's no market, then simply requiring transparency won't help - all it means is that the local monopoly would have to describe their bad service accordingly while people would still be forced to buy it. If there were a true market then it would deal with the situation - the cable co's would find themselves competing with providers who didn't throttle (eg) Netflix, and losing. But there isn't, so they won't.

Jammy dodgers: Boffin warns of auto autos congesting cities to avoid parking fees

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: I said that!

... also double as charging stations for the people who can't charge their car at home

Two problems with that :

The first is purely practical - at the moment they don't have automated plug-in and unplug. Though I guess that could probably be solved.

The other is a bit more difficult. Work out the power requirement of a large scale car park with lots of charging stations - and you're looking at MASSIVE investment in getting the power there. And lets not mention the need for a sh*tload of additional low/zero carbon generating capacity which in practice means a good few new nuclear power stations ...

In both cases (robotic connections and the power supply), that massive investment will need to be recovered - so these will not be inexpensive car parks to use.