Posts by Joe Harrison 858 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2007
Unlikely that fines approaching anywhere near 4% of global; turnover will ever happen in our lifetime. Even before GDPR the ICO has always been able to fine up to half a million pounds. Their record of actually collecting it (not necessarily their fault) is very poor.
I once had an analog carphone and signed up with Nokia Mobira for airtime. The small print on the back of the contract said the term was ten years.
I crossed it out and initialled the change and the shop accepted it anyway, probably because in those days airtime providers paid a sizeable commission for getting new customers.
Three's website says
"4G Super-Voice doesn't work on other non-Three devices yet however, even if the manufacturer has stated that it's VoLTE compatible. We're working on this, so be sure to check back for updates"
This is definitely not true; my Xiaomi which I imported from China works fine on Band 20 and shows on the display when it is VoLTE connected.
Don't let them misdirect your attention, the real problem is The Register's data slurping! They totally are the eye at the top of the triangle they know everything about you. How do I know this.... I read stuff on this site all the time and guess what I SEE LOADS OF ADVERTS FOR COMPUTERS! Do the math.
I have one but the bad thing is you must remember to take it physically with you when you travel otherwise get fined or told off or whatever. Luckily there is also an Android app which will do instead. Unluckily if you already have a plastic card you can't also use the app so I was screwed. To do it via the app you have to do complicated stuff involving taking your passport somewhere.
If you can cope with the mental stress though it does cut your train costs considerably.
Inconvenient having to find 280 dollars in paper cash to get in. Every single last one of the decent-sounding talks were already full (or huge hour-long queues I didn't want to stand in) and the ones I actually could get into were mostly either disappointingly broad and uninformative or the opposite micro-detailed and hard to understand if outside your speciality.
Having said that. I did get into the NSA guy's presentation but no surprise they don't let him blab any actual secrets so just listening to him moan about the Russians basically. Badge was good I have to admit, and the car hacking area.
Not Defcon's fault but the pathetically weak British pound meant paying for things in dollars in an already expensive town was hard work - once I realised beer was ten quid a pint I abandoned any thought of attending their parties. Finally, Las Vegas is a horrid cluster of over-decorated concrete boxes which you daren't go outside of because the brutal climate will kill you.
The event's moved to the Bally's hotel for next year, likely because of all the anti-customer shenanigins.
Operational choices of whether to keep stores of old papers certainly do have to be made. The potential impact on the people documented in those papers was surely very obvious. It was the wrong choice and it was clear to anyone that it was the wrong choice but they did it anyway.
The deeds to my house are 80 years old but I'm not throwing them away anytime soon.
But I know a link who does.
To all you faux-scientists cheerfully labelling people as nutters etc. Here's your chance to use actual scientific method.
https://pyramidrazorsharpener.wordpress.com/
Give it a go for a couple weeks and let us know how you got on. If you tried it and it's crap then you can start the badmouthing. Yes I know actually doing research is loads more trouble than just spouting off sorry for the inconvenience.
In my dim distant memory I think I remember some bloke who allegedly got this working in the old Soviet Union when new razor blades were rare to nonexistent.
We don't have many external-facing systems that matter, but when we implemented one recently we used TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password that is, not Top Of The Pops.) No licenses to buy it is all either free or Free software.
Many of us resist using our own phones for corporate stuff but for people who use Google Authenticator for everything anyway it was not really a hardship to add one more entry to its list. People who couldn't or didn't want to got shown how to install the Authenticator browser extension instead which is at least 1.75FA and better than nothing.
I take the point from @Caff above "what about the auditing costs" but we had to have it audited anyway no matter how many FA we put in.
Shortage of cyber-security skills really? Who's filling up my firewall logs then?
They mean shortage of White Hat cyber-security skills. Or more precisely a shortage of multi-certified box-tickers report-writers and pen test script runners without tattoos or piercings who wear suits to work.
When a private entity controls public discussion you know that just ain't right. If I decide it's my mission to reveal to the world that Trumputin is building a weaponised nanobot factory in earth orbit then it's legit for people to block my posts if they want.
But I sure don't want Facetwitter deciding (as they would be perfectly entitled to) that I am persona non grata and routing my stuff into the bit bucket before people even see it.
It's unreasonable to suggest that this or that country is or is not the friend of another one.
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow" - Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
Also Privacy Shield looks just as useless as its predecessor Safe Harbor, both relying as they do on self-certification by the US company concerned.
1999 - Bah Windows 2000 heap of junk give me NT4 any day
2001 - Bah Windows XPensive heap of tellytubby junk give me Windows 2000 any day
2009 - Bah Windows 7 heap of junk, give me XP any day that was a decent OS
2018 - Bah Windows 10 heap of junk I'm sticking with good old Windows 7
(we'll skip over Vista, 8, 8.1, as the less said the better)
Having a 30+ character password is not ideal though in terms of convenience.
If you feel you are that juicy enough a target then surely login with a client certificate (maybe stored on a USB security key) is the way to go.
RDP (well mstsc.exe at least) also supports optionally having the server present it's own client certificate to you at login time so you can be sure you are not connecting to a spoofed server configured to look like yours. Time-consuming to setup but no particular expense involved if you can use self-signed certs.
Family member worked as pizza delivery and one day they got issued a smartphone with tracker and I was asked to help. Manglement were sort of half competent at complying with DPA (a year before the GDPR) and despite initial misgivings it worked out alright.
Not unreasonable for people to want to know where their pizza is, also protection for pizza person should they have the misfortune to deliver a pepperami to someone whose reason for ordering was not because they were hungry.
Fairly sure rocketmail was first. At least I remember everyone in my office signing up for an account on same morning to this amazing new mail in yer browser thing. There were some other good ones later such as mailandnews which also gave you browser-based usenet, and Novell's myrealbox - both dead now.
I recall mobile phone customers could at one point get a vodafone.net or orange.co.uk free personal account, which always seemed dodgy to me if you decided to call yourself billing-admin@ or something like that.
When I go to Aldi my phone tells me it has connected to Aldi Free Wifi. Everything then stops working until I actively start a browser and go to an http site and the Aldi router/proxy/gubbins can intercept it, show me an advert for Aldi, then redirect me to where I pretended I wanted to go.
All my bookmarks are by now https and I have to think hard for an http. Currently I am using BBC news site. What will public wifi operators do if http disappears?
The first time I used a sat-nav it went something like
In 200 yards cross the roundabout take the first exit
(then 200 yards later)
cross the roundabout take the first exit
Even though this roundabout had a light which was red and normally I would of course have waited until went green. I was shocked that I so easily just obeyed what the voice told me.
Xiaomi has begun an expansion into Europe by promising razor-thin margins on hardware – making up the rest on services
I have a Xiaomi phone and laptop and the hardware is very good for the money. They certainly are bundled with loads of "MIUI" services but I never use any at all, partly because only some are in English. They will need to look again at services if that's where they consider the money is.
I have heard of this as well, child going to primary school with zero English and nothing special happening in terms of extra teaching provision. The head teacher at the time correctly predicted that the child would pick up English super-quick and so it was. Lady now grown up and totally fluent in both languages without even an accent.
Agree that useless data should not be collected and that if it has been it should be deleted. There is the famous example of Denmark who for years collected people's religions on official forms all the time as they saw no harm in it. Which there wasn't much - until the Nazis invaded and occupied the country.
I spent years supporting various X.500 email services which were supposed to be far superior to your noddy smtp delivered over uucp. It never went anywhere much though.
I had got used to using email at work and when I saw redundancy coming up I shopped around for some kind of personal email account, which were rare in the 1990s. BT had one, which was X.500, but in addition to a standing charge it cost 40p per message! Luckily Demon tenner-a-month came along just at the right time.
Certificates can either be self-signed or signed by someone else. The whole point of the story is that you can't trust the someone elses. So why do you have a problem with self-signed? At least ssh is encrypted which is a lot better than telnet was.
NASA eggheads draw up blueprints for spotting, surviving asteroid hits
I can't put my finger on why this ungrammatical kind of American English (apparently reserved only for use in news headlines!) annoys me so much. May I kindly suggest the British English replacement
NASA eggheads draw up blueprints for spotting and surviving asteroid hits
Years ago they cleverly found a way to separate people from their money in exchange for Ooh Shiny. Now people have got fed up with that, not to mention various macroeconomic stresses adding up to people being skinter than they used to be and needing their money for more important things than a donation to Dixons profits.
If phones aren't profitable anymore then find something else to flog to people. Maybe there's mileage left in those daft tamaguchi electronic pets? OK I'll get my coat
As the story says, if you just want to print it out like it's supposed to look then PDF is fantastic. Must be great for people who still own printers.
For everything else just no. When Amazon first started selling the Kindle I had this wonderful idea to load our existing technical documents onto it. Nope, they are all PDFs designed to look like A4 and resisted my every effort at resizing to fit the smaller screen. Even trying to edit a PDF is a series of unpleasant workarounds unless, I suppose, you bought a full copy of Acrobat.
It's got so much more difficult recently because of Adobe trying to "cloudify" everything, plus extend PDF far past simple document representation into interactive forms and their own version of electronic signing.
Funny that PDF originated from a way to print tax forms because as it happens the "Agencia Tributaria" (Spanish tax equivalent of HMRC) have done a thorough job of offering their users a PKI-based online tax system. Works well but its weakness is its dependence on PDFs and problems are guaranteed in those bits every time.
It's a paradox - the average pro-Brexit person will give you the standard line about how we should take back control of our borders and kick foreigners out etc. Any suggestion that England leave the UK for the same reasons is met with a sudden attack of union patriotism, stronger together, etc.
Why not just turn the damn thing off? The guy who knew how it worked and would have turned it off and on again has been made redundant unfortunately. His function has been right-shored to another time zone and the change control procedure for such a drastic action takes many hours to escalate through 25 levels of management in four countries..
What people have said already is true enough, but to my mind the real reason is so the card can have a "pleb bit" available. Just guessing but if you are a VIP member of the 1% it must really grind your gears having to go through the "take your belt and shoes off and get in the machine" thing like everyone else, because you feel you're above all that.
What they really really want is when they walk through the electronic gate the scanner detects "pleb_bit = FALSE" and gives them the electronic equivalent of a forlock tug and they are on their way.
Not denying the truth of Snopes' treatment of the pencil story, but I find the positioning of Snopes as an authoritative reference point for the elimination of fake news to be somewhat disturbing. As I understand it Snopes is actually operated by just a couple of people with colourful personal lives. Don't understand why I should accept their "fakeness" verdicts unquestioned.
I have a phone and various other gadgets from them and am very impressed. They make all sorts of odd things for example smart plant pots which connect to your smart home and tell you how your shrub is doing and whether it needs anything. The nicest thing I've had from them is their "Xiaomi Air" i7 laptop which cost me half of what I would have paid for an equivalent model from suppliers in UK.
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