Posts by VinceH 3483 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Nov 2009
Agreed.
The ease of leaving problem isn't just limited to mobile phone contracts, though. There are all manner of things where it's piss easy to sign up via a website, but to cancel requires a call and a sales pitch aimed at persuading you to continue paying. If you can sign up online, you should be able to cancel online.
"Erm.. I bet 95% of people still use it and that will not change very quickly at all"
^ This.
I've encountered a few people that seem to think this is the end of the MP3 - but patent expiry doesn't in any way, shape, or form mean the format is suddenly going to stop being used, or that it's going to somehow die off overnight.
Reminds me of about a hundred years ago, when I had a Nokia feature phone with the ability to play back a recording during a phone call. I had a few 'one sided' conversations recorded, and I'd prank people I knew by ringing them and starting one of the recordings. My favourite was a recording from a taxi firm trying to confirm a booking.
I don't know what it is about your post that put this idea in my head, but...
"Could you hold on a few minutes - I just need to finish up with my girlfriend.." and go to a porn site and start something (un)suitable playing (with the speakers on). Wander off and make a snack.
Imagine my disappointment... image and explanation on twitter.
Well, it works against hackers, even when two idiots using the same keyboard can't stop them, so it must be a good defence against this as well.
"In short, Europe has increasingly decided that it will not continue to allow US-based tech giants to break European law. It is prepared to hit them where it hurts – in the pocket – to force them to comply with data protection laws."
And that's just one reason why I am so glad that we in the UK are a part of the EU... oh, wait. :(
'Despite a backlash against Google in March for adding a movie ad to its Google Home voice-assistant [surely you mean "invite to our partner to be our guest and share its tale"? – ed.],'
I can't see any way to fit that in without rendering the sentence nonsense.
Anyway, that aside...
"a marketing analyst said devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home would account for 25 per cent of digital ads within the next three years."
Since I never intent to own one of these, if that meant 25% fewer adverts elsewhere, because they've moved to those devices, that's brilliant. Shame it doesn't mean that, though. Ho hum.
I think this is how it works:
"Look! Over there! Something without advertising!"
"What? We can't have that sort of thing! Grab it! Don't let it get away!"
"2 years ago."
I did away with mine much longer ago than that and just rely on my mobile - but that's where I (sometimes) get nuisance calls. Since adding it to the TPS list the problem has mostly gone away.
I did get an one today, though - and searching online for the telephone number reveals it to have come from an outfit called Galaxy Numbers Ltd.
The caller was ringing me about my business line because, she said, my business has been flagged up as "newly registered"
Well, yeah quite new - I only started a mere 28 years ago. What she really meant was that it had newly appeared on her list of numbers to call, which she isn't checking against the TPS list.
"Doesn't that just mean they would have got 500,000 "please confirm your e-mail address" messages rather than 500,000 "welcome" messages (which often include a "click here" to confirm)?"
Not necessarily - it depends on the frequency with which the list emails for any given list are sent out.
The 500,000 figure is given as within a week - so if that was 500,000 lists that send messages out weekly, it would have been 500,000 confirmation emails if all those lists did that. However, if these are daily lists, then the number of confirmations would be 1/7 of that if they all sent confirmations. That's a lot less.
The true number would probably lie somewhere between the two, because it'll be lists of varying frequency.
Sort of related but unrelated. I started getting 'newsletters' from target.com - of whom I have never been a customer. That''s a newsletter subscription that didn't require confirmation, right there.
They had an unsubscribe link, but I'm a stubborn old git and feel that if I don't subscribe, I should not be expected to unsubscribe. Instead I decided to repay my annoyance - I did a little digging, found a bunch of addresses for Target execs, and told my mail server to forward any emails from Target.com to these addresses.
I commented to that effect (including a suitable @mention) on Twitter, and got a reply from them saying that if I DM'd them my email address, they'd sort it. I didn't - instead I replied expressing my "repay my annoyance" sentiment.
I was getting those emails at least once a day when I did that. I haven't had a single one since - so none have even been forwarded to those exec addresses.
Guess: They searched for my name and removed me that way.
"My bank tends to ask questions like "You recently charged £49.75 to your account, can you remember what it was for?" - well, probably not but I'd guess a tank of petrol maybe? Not perfect but it's better than the other options."
When reading articles like this one - and posts like yours in particular - I am usually reminded of this - followed up here and here.
What this says is that the "you charged £49.75 to your account..." type of security question isn't a lot of use if they then guide you to the answer.
"> Google really need fix the problem of users being left out in the cold.
Wrong, I'm afraid. The manufacturers need to be forced by the courts to do this: Google has no obligations whatsoever to individual consumers."
Ordinarily, I'd agree - but in this case Google are exacerbating the problem by choosing not to address it until the next major version. That's just so incredibly... well, Google, actually.
You're comparing the number of fake "likes" here with the overall number of Facebook profiles - but shouldn't the number of fake "likes" in this instance be taken as a percentage of the overall number of likes for the page in question, and that percentage then be applied to the number of profiles Facebook claims to have?
Suddenly, it's a whole lot more than 0.5%
"What do you expect from a company that went from Windows 8 to 10?"
Of course! They were using an early version of Edge while developing it!
(See also: Microsoft's claims about how successful Windows 10 deployment has been, while world+dog was avoiding it at all costs.)
"The basics are the same and you can make it as complicated and fancy as you want, or not."
Having been using one of the eleventy million varieties on my desktop PC since late last year, the only way to avoid making its use complicated seems to be to not try to do anything with it beyond use existing software, and avoid any peripherals that might need drivers.
"Just don't use that service."
Exactly, yes. I use HSBC, but this ridiculous offering won't affect me. It's a telephone banking thing, and I don't use telephone banking.
If they were make it compulsory for everyone to provide a voice sample, even if they don't use telephone banking, I'd be off like a shot - but dictionaries would have to define a whole new level of stupid to fit that in.
Yes - I hit the comment button to suggest that someone needs to point this out to the likes of HSBC.
https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/contact-and-support/banking-made-easy/voice-id
Then next time you call, no more passwords... you'll just need to repeat that short, simple phrase.Don't worry about remembering it - we'll tell
youwhoever wants to get into your account what to make their system say each time.
@deadlockvictim
Isn't the Raspberry Pi manufactured in Cardiff? (Probably from parts brought in from abroad, but that's another matter). That should do them. They can also put a British OS on it in the form of RISC OS - and there's a release called 'Pico' which boots straight to the BBC BASIC command prompt.
Am I missing something? If I've read that correctly, the fingerprint sensor is on the card - so, presumably, to get their fingerprint on the card in the first place, the card holder has to have it scan their fingerprint.
With a PIN, when you get a new card the PIN is sent separately. This is done to hopefully avoid the issue of a batch of post being stolen, and the crooks finding both the card and the PIN in the same pile. If the above is so, it won't matter - they only need the card. They can then scan their fingerprint onto the card.
^This.
I've encountered a handful of people who were using a particular browser (be that Chrome, Firefox, etc) on a previous version of Windows, but on 10 were using Edge and didn't even realise. Some were aware that something had changed about the way "the internet" works, but that was it.
Looking at them on this Linux Mint box, my RSS reader shows them as https://xn--80ak6aa92e.com and https://www.xn--e1awd7f.com/ respectively.
My browser (Firefox on this box) shows the first one as the article describes, except for one significant difference: The 'l' looks like a capital I - presumably a side effect of the font in use here, but the important point is that for me it stands out a mile.
The second one, however, does just look like epic.com
Ditto - NoScript meant NoTest until I allowed it.
Having done so, unique amongst 6114 so far. However, my extensions came up N/A and I got a 'no' for being identifiable by logins (this will be because cookies don't survive a browsing session, and I've only visited three sites this morning since switching on - including El Reg and the test). It's my browser fingerprint that gets a yes - but that's all.
(Okay, the combination of all three gets a yes as well, but that's as much because of the browser fingerprint as anything else!)
With such a small number of people having run the test, this is not that much of a surprise. So meh.
When I commented last night I was basing my view on what I read in El Reg's article - so I picked up on the word overcharging (unsurprisingly - it's not only used in the article, but the first word of the headline!). However, reading it again, I can see it's not in any of the quoted bits.
Skim reading the PDF, it mentions the longer route used to calculate the users' prices, but doesn't claim the users are being overcharged per se*. So it can be argued that regardless of how its calculated, the amount users are charged is the amount users have agreed to - therefore, they are not being overcharged and it is just that drivers are being underpaid.
However, while the complaint does specify the underpayment, it does also make a nod to the "overcharging" with things like "This fraudulent scheme negatively impacted not only drivers like Plaintiff Sophano Van, and thousands of individual Class members nationwide, but even end users..." which does very strongly suggest that customers were overcharged, without making that the actual complaint.
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