* Posts by Cuddles

2337 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2011

IRS doesn't completely scrap facial recognition, just makes it optional

Cuddles

Re: Pork

"Banks and credit agencies check my identity by asking me things only I could know."

Like your mother's maiden name and your first pet? Facial recognition, especially by a third party, doesn't seem like the best idea, but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem that needs solving. The reason so many different ideas keep being tried out is that verifying identity is a really tricky problem, and none of the solutions we've come up with so far are all that great.

Users complain of missing data in UK wills search service

Cuddles

Could be worse. My favourites are the ones that somehow manage to have separate requirements for password creation and password entry. It usually seems to be an issue with length, which isn't checked on creation but then the password field for login only accepts a limited length. You can have similar fun with plus-aliases in email addresses when sites check for a "valid" email address by looking for a @ and . while it's being typed, but only do so when logging in and not during creation.

Ericsson admits it may have paid off ISIS terrorists

Cuddles

How completely?

"revealing the existence of a "previously completely unknown internal investigation"

Presumably someone knew about it, since it would be difficult to conduct an investigation without knowing you're doing so. So it was not, in fact, completely unknown.

Gas cloud around galactic nucleus reveals unified view of center

Cuddles

Odd advice

"my adviser Joe Miller described the field as mere 'stamp collecting' because of the wide variety of inexplicable behaviours seen among this seemingly highly heterogeneous group"

Yeah, why would any scientist be interested in studying a field full of weird stuff we don't understand?

IT technician jailed for wiping school's and pupils' devices

Cuddles

Re: outlook and teams

"If I want to use outlook or teams with my work account on my phone I must give my employer the authority to wipe my entire phone.

I imagine the same would apply to pcs, laptops."

Not quite. When you sign in to Teams on a PC it asks if you want to allow the organisation to manage the device. The default is yes, so you have to remember to untick it every time. I don't know if the employer has the option to block the login if you don't allow it, but it's not required inherently by Teams.

France says Google Analytics breaches GDPR when it sends data to US

Cuddles

Re: Confusing GA with advertising?

Indeed. This seems very much like the arguments about Facebook moderation being difficult and other similar issues. The problem is not that it's particularly complicated, or unreasonable to expect it to be done, it's simply that it might cost a bit of money and therefore no-one can be arsed to even try. Do I know how few businesses are able to code a website or find someone to do it for them? All of them are able to do so. If you want to run your business on a website, then it's up to you to do it properly. Saying you can't be bothered to run your site competently should be exactly as acceptable as saying you can't be bothered to file your taxes properly. In both cases, if you do it wrong you're likely to be breaking the law. It's not an optional extra, it's a fundamental part of running your business.

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

Cuddles

Re: Equality

"Getting hold of research papers is expensive for those without academic access."

Getting hold of research papers is the same price for everyone. As many people have pointed out, pretty much the only thing required for anyone to do research is finding the funding. Access to existing research is just another part of that. Academics don't have some kind of magic insider access to everything, they have to use a not insignificant portion of their funding to pay for it. This is a large part of why there's such a push these days for open access publishing. It's not because there's a groundswell of citizen-scientists demanding access to the ivory tower, it's simply that researchers are fed up of being held over a barrel by a few big publishers and want to be able to get on with their jobs without having to flush half their funding down the drain just to have access to information they need.

FBI says more cyber attacks come from China than everywhere else combined

Cuddles

"With the biggest population in the world (and 5 or 6 times higher than the US), would we not expect 5 or 6 times more hacking from the Middle Kingdom?"

Well firstly, no, obviously not, because hacking capabilties and motivation are not a simple function of population size. But even assuming they actually were, how would that be relevant? The article says that attacks from China are more than every other nation combined. You may well expect 5 or 6 times as much hacking from China; the whole point of the article is that it's actually much more than that.

India to adopt digital rupee and slap a 30 per cent tax on cryptocurrency income

Cuddles

An oddly short list

"Nigeria and the Bahamas currently offer their currencies in digital form"

As do pretty much every other country in the world. How exactly do you think an online bank transfer works? Or a contactless payment, whether using a card or a phone? Digital has absolutely nothing to do with blockchain. The vast majority of currencies have been digital for years, but happen to allow legacy physical money to interact with the digital system.

Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts

Cuddles

Personally I'd prefer they all be in Comic Sans.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Cuddles

Re: started in Jeopardy

"Do we really care how a model developed its understanding of which drugs "might" work? We already have robust tests for understanding which drugs do work, and we have a long and illustrious history of using drugs without a full understanding of *how* they work. So does it ultimately matter when the model is able to apply itself hundreds of thousands of times faster than any human?"

Yes, of course we care. We have a long history of using drugs without understanding how they work. We also have a long history of royally screwing up because of that, with a huge variety of examples that turned out not to work as thought, or even actively making things worse. One of the biggest things distinguishing modern medicine from the vast majority of that long history is that these days we make the effort to actually understand how and why things work, and to use that knowledge to improve things further.

Your last quoted sentence is probably the important part, and is precisely why so many people here are down on AI. If a computer model is able to blindly test things faster than humans could do it themselves, that's great. But that's nothing new; it's what computers have been doing for the better part of a century now, and is exactly what you would expect from them. It's not AI doing something amazing and new that brings a real difference in kind to the way things are done, it's just the same blind testing of lots of different things to find out which ones work. There's nothing wrong with that if it helps do the job faster, just don't pretend it's anything more than that.

Crypto outfit Qubit appeals to the honour of thieves who lifted $80M of its digi-dollars

Cuddles

"If they take the $2mn, that's legal and they can put it in a bank, so to speak. They can also stop looking over their shoulder."

Nope, a crime doesn't stop being a crime just because you change your mind and try to undo it later. If I break into your house and steal your TV, I'm still guilty of burglary if I return it next week. There may be less motivation to actually hunt me down since there is no longer anything to be recovered and limited resources may be better spent elsewhere, but the crime was still committed.

If you want less CGI and more real effects in movies, you may get your wish: Inflatable film studio to orbit Earth

Cuddles

Space is big

This module isn't. 6m is about half the length of my living room. Allow space for cameras, other equipment, off-screen staff, and so on, and you end up with maybe a 4m sphere at best. If the claimed "about 6" is actually less than 6 and refers to external dimensions, you'll be lucky to get as much as a 3m space. The average adult male is a little under 2m tall. What exactly do they plan on filming that can be done with a grand total of 1m of movement? People are talking about action films doing stunts that would be cheaper to film in microgravity than to do in CGI, but how much action can you show that barely even has space for someone to move out of frame?

As a proof of concept showing you can launch a module into space and use cameras inside it, it's completely pointless because we've already done it. As an actual film studio, it might be good for porn or a sitcom set in a single apartment. The whole point of filming in space would be to have enough... space to show things behaving differently from how they do on Earth. If you can't do that, what's the point?

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

Cuddles

Re: Protecting children. We want to know everthing about you.

"All it needs is a government IT project to link it all up"

Thank goodness we're safe for the foreseeable future.

SpaceX Starlink sat streaks now present in nearly a fifth of all astronomical images snapped by Caltech telescope

Cuddles

You may think you're joking, but by far the best way to get rid of space junk is ground-based lasers. You don't need as much power as you might expect to vapourise small amounts of an object, at which point you've essentially created an ion engine that happens to have the power source on the ground. And you don't need much thrust to alter an orbit enough to eventually not be an orbit any more - it's much easier to make the orbit eccentric enough that it touches the upper atmosphere than it is to raise or lower a circular orbit.

There's no new technology needed; powerful enough lasers are available practically off the shelf, and the tracking is already done anyway. The only reason orbital debris is still a problem is entirely political - such a system would be the perfect anti-satellite weapon that could deorbit anything in LEO completely undetectably (dispersion becomes an issue at larger distances, so taking something out of geosynchronous orbit isn't simply a matter of taking more time or turning up the power).

This might seem to raise the obvious question that if it's so easy, why doesn't anyone already have these set up as anti-satellite weapons. To which the obvious answer is - how would you know?

Vulnerabilities and censorship tools among hot new features in Beijing's Olympics app

Cuddles

I don't think that's quite correct. The app is very transparently designed to log everything you do and send it to the Chinese authorities. It also contains vulnerabilities that could allow other people to get access to the data as well. Being malicious is not the same thing as being competent.

AMD returns to smartphone graphics with new Samsung chip for your pocket computer

Cuddles

Re: Nvidia is not "much bigger" than AMD

"About $3.2bn is their Compute & Networking segment, things like AI and high performance computing. Nothing to do with their GPU business."

They're not gaming GPUS, but they're still very much part of the GPU business. Nvidia's own conference focusing on HPC, machine learning and data analysis is explicitly called the GPU Technology Conference.

Microsoft seems intent on buying the gaming industry with $68.7bn purchase of troubled Activision Blizzard

Cuddles

Re: Oh No!

You stopped gaming on PCs because a developer completely unrelated to Steam released a patch for one of their games which you then chose to install? And buying a new GPU would have been cheaper than a console, therefore consoles are better? I've heard some weird arguments over the years in the various PC vs. console vs. other console wars, but this one is really pretty special.

Plumspace's Smart SFP TAP can monitor, capture or relay gigabit-speed comms – for legitimate business reasons

Cuddles
Windows

When is a wire not a wire?

"COTTONMOUTH, a bargain-priced $20,000 USB 2 cable that could wirelessly intercept or modify communications between a PC and USB peripherals."

Interesting philosphical question - is it possible to perform a wireless intercept when the device performing the intercept is itself a wire?

Icon: A philosopher.

Ukraine shrugs off mass govt website defacement as world turns to stare at Russia

Cuddles

Re: The Issue

"this area has been part of Russia for hundreds of years"

You mean since 1783, when Russia invaded and annexed the independent country of Crimea? So apparently your entire justification for Russia invading and annexing it is that Russia has previously invaded and annexed it. And far from being Russian for hundreds of years, it's been part of Russia for less than 200 years in its entire history.

Games Workshop has chucked another £500k at entrenched ERP project with no end to epic battle in sight

Cuddles

"Perhaps, if they listened to what their audience was saying about them rather than being mired in an IT boggle they might understand why sales have collapsed."

By "collapsed" you mean "significantly increased"? Because GW are doing better than ever, and sales just keep going up. You can complain that you personally don't like the direction they've gone in, and your far from alone in that, but claiming that doing things you don't like is responsible for all their terrible hardships don't make a lot of sense when they're not actually experiencing any such hardship. As for covid, it had the exact opposite effect of what you think, since everyone and their dog ordered more stuff to occupy themselves at home resulting in a boom in sales.

I'm also really not convinced you can justify the word "grognard" when talking about an edition launched this millenium. Rogue Trader or bust.

Cuddles

Re: Profit margin!?

There are still some older metal minis available, but they've been gradually phasing them out so everything released in the last 15 years or more is plastic.

Massive rugby ball-shaped planet emerges from scrum of space 'scope sightings

Cuddles

Re: Or rings?

No. These observations are basically looking at the intensity of light coming from the star, and spotting how the intensity drops when a planet passes in front of it. Planetary rings are extremely diffuse collections of dust and small objects, and therefore won't block anywhere near as much light as the body of a planet. Seeing planets in this way has only become possible in the last couple of decades, and this is the first time someone has managed to get some idea of the shape of such a planet. Measuring things like rings and moons will need a few orders of magnitude more sensitivty, and so is likely at least a couple more decades away, if it becomes possible at all.

JavaScript dev deliberately screws up own popular npm packages to make a point of some sort

Cuddles

Re: "sign up for a support contract if it exists"

"How are you going to sign for support contracts for each of them?"

That's entirely your problem. If something is important for running your business, then you either have some sort of contract or payment involved, or you have a damn good disaster recovery plan. It's exactly the same situation as a company like Facebook complaining it's too difficult to moderate posts because there are too many of them. You are not entitled to a profitable business model. If it costs too much to run your business the way you'd like, it's not anyone else's responsibility to come up with a solution for you. Too expensive to moderate comments? Then you don't get to make a profit. Too difficult to track down dependencies? Then you don't get to complain if your business collapses when something breaks.

MPs charged with analysing Online Safety Bill say end-to-end encryption should be called out as 'specific risk factor'

Cuddles

Re: I must be reading this differently to everyone else

Read the full text. They didn't just say "identifying as a risk factor", they also said - "Providers should be required to identify and address risks arising from the encrypted nature of their services under the Safety by Design requirements.". Providers should be required to address the risk. In other words, while they won't explcitly ban encryption, they will make it so onerous to justify doing it that no-one will actually be able to provide encrypted services. Or at the very least they'll be forced to "address the risks" by leaving all the back doors open, which has been openly stated as the goal many times previously.

Gas giant 11 times the mass of Jupiter discovered in b Centauri binary system

Cuddles

Re: B Centauri

It's worse than you think. This article is about b Centauri; B Centauri is a different star entirely.

Similarly, A Centauri is actually about the same distance as B, and quite a bit further than b. α Centauri is the close one.

OK, boomer? Gen-X-ers, elder millennials most likely to name their cars, says DVLA

Cuddles

Ruby

Odd name for a car. Seems more appropriate for a train, what with the rails and all.

NASA installs a new and improved algorithm to better track near-Earth asteroids

Cuddles

Re: Relevance to Solar Wind

"The concern I have with solar wind is that I suspect (I'm not an astrophysicist) it is more variable and perhaps more significant."

It is more variably, but pretty much entirely insignificant. At 1 AU, which is the relevant distance from the Sun for things that might hit Earth, pressure from solar wind is around 1 nPa. So for a body with a Sun-facing area of 1 km^2, that's a 1e-3 N force, and a consequent acceleration of ~ 1e-14 m/s^2. In comparison, the Yarkovsky effect on the same body will cause a force of 0.25 N and acceleration around 1e-12 m/s^2. Far from being more significant, solar wind is on the order of a thousand times less significant. Yes, it's more variable, but any spikes are very short-term events. A CME might increase the solar wind by an order of magnitude or two, but that still only means it might be about the same strength as the Yarkovsky effect for a day or two, compared to being that strong all day, every day, for millions of years.

As for lacking information, we're really not. Things like CMEs happen on long enough timescales, and across large enough volumes of space, that we don't have any problem knowing they've happened even when the bulk of an event's activity occurs on the far side of the Sun from us.

"Ultimately, I would have thought that there is an intrinsic lack of detailed knowledge that would make orbital predictions (especially of medium-sized asteroids, big enough to be dangerous to Earth and also small enough to have larger orbital variations) markedly unreliable beyond a modest timeframe."

Absolutely. Orbital mechanics is a tricky business. The question comes down to what you consider to be a modest timeframe. Taking one of the examples from the article, asteroid 1950 DA has issues with the Yarkovsky effect because it creates some uncertainty in exactly where it will be 800 years from now. It would be utterly irrelevant to an object predicted to hit us within any living person's lifetime, but astronomers tend to consider things happening on a scale of centuries or millennia to be disturbingly fast. These kinds of tiny effects aren't at all relevant to the average person, it's just that scientists generally like to know things as accurately as possible even if it's something that will only affect distant descendents.

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

Cuddles

Re: Expensive test equipment

"I daresay we will find some weak spots (one of the engineers has already complained about the frequency measurement accuracy on one of them), but the do seem to work."

I supposed it depends what you're using it for, but given that one common use is to provide accurate frequency measurements, an oscilloscope that has trouble doing that might not seem to be working particularly well. It may well be true that established brands no longer provide quite the quality that used to justify their high prices, but the problem is that the cheaper stuff still rarely matches that level. So you're often left with the awkward choice of either paying £20k for something that's only worth maybe £5k, or paying £500 for something that definitely isn't worth £5k.

Russia: It isn't just us – a bit of an old US rocket might get as close as 5.4km to the ISS

Cuddles

"unless someone comes up with a cheap and reliable way to de-orbit all the junk and dead sats"

We already have a pretty good idea how to do that. Ground-based ablative lasers can do the job with pretty much off-the-shelf parts. You only need relatively low power to evaporate very small amounts of an object, which results in a change in velocity. It's effectively an ion engine, but the power is on the ground and the propellant is the body of the object instead of a separate fuel supply. Best of all, since you only need to target small objects for a fairly short time, you can even clean up all the mess of little bits that aren't currently tracked - the problem at the moment isn't that we can't see them at all, but rather that it's too difficult to track them in the long term.

The problem, as is so often the case, is entirely political. It's impossible to create a cheap and reliable way to deorbit junk that isn't also a cheap and reliable way to deorbit anything else. As we've seen recently, anti-satellite weapons cause all kinds of fuss because it's difficult to see them as anything other than a MAD situation. Sure, a lot of the news and discussions talk about them as an issue for creating debris, but the political concerns are very much of the military variety. Now think how foreign nations might react to the building of a weapon that can untraceably take out any orbital object at any time.

Like so many of the problems humanity causes itself, it's not that we don't know how or aren't capable of fixing it, it's simply that we're collectively not willing to do so.

UK privacy watchdog may fine selfie-hoarding Clearview AI £17m... eventually, perhaps

Cuddles

Re: Scum

Immoral. Amoral would mean that their actions fall outside the scope of normal morality, or that they have some mental disorder that makes them incapable of understanding morality at all. These scum know perfectly well that what they're doing is wrong, they just don't care.

You, me and debris: NASA cans ISS spacewalk because it's getting too risky outside

Cuddles

Re: Damage protection from space debris

"And yes, when things collide at orbital speeds, they explode."

No, not really. Micrometeorites and small bits of debris will generally just punch a hole straight through things and keep going. Exploding would require hitting something sufficiently rigid that the majority of kinetic energy is liberated into heat. That will almost never be the case with small objects in orbit, they're much more like a bullet hitting a piece of paper.

The climate is turning against owning our own compute hardware. Cloud is good for you and your customers

Cuddles

Re: What kind of sleazeball, low-rent, clickbait tricks are you trying to pull, El Buidro?

"OK, Reg, perhaps you can explain to us great unwashed exactly what the difference is between the two supposedly different articles shown below."

Um, are you not familiar with the concept of a debate? The difference between the two articles is that one is arguing in favour of a particular statement, while the other is arguing against it. Various people have commented on the competence of the voting system and the merits of the various arguments made so far, but I think you're the only confused about the basic concept.

Cuddles

Re: Huge datacentres are built just to prop up the advertising industrial complex

"The client is going to be running and using power anyway."

More to the point of the articles argument, the client is going to exist anyway, which is a point that the article glossed over entirely. Yes, manufacturing hardware is environmentally bad, so having a shared pool with high utilisation might be better than everyone having their own device with overall lower utilisation. Except that everyone still needs their own device in order to access the shared pool, so there are now significantly more devices being manufactured. And the amount of stuff going into a PC is pretty similar regardless of how powerful it is, so cloud services inevitably mean more manufacturing.

With sufficiently efficient data centres and low power thin clients, the power use could well come out ahead for cloud. But the article focussed on pollution and waste from manufacturing and replacement cycles, and that will certainly end up much worse since the cloud option requires more devices to be in use.

Euro-telcos call on big tech to help pay for their network builds

Cuddles

"Why would bigtech pay for it, they aren't the consumers."

Except that's what makes the whole thing so silly - big tech are the consumers, which is why they already pay for it. Telcos are basically just providing a pipe. The likes of Netflix pay to put stuff in at one end, and other people pay to take it out at the other end. What the telcos are now saying is that they want Netflix to continue paying to put stuff in, but also pay again when it's taken out again, at the same time as the person taking it out also continues paying. The claims about capacity and investment are just distractions to try to confuse people into arguing about those points instead of recognising just how abusive the demands actually are.

Renting IT hardware on a subscription basis is bad for customers

Cuddles

Re: Confused

I'm not sure.

Chat among yourselves: New EU law may force the big IM platforms to open up

Cuddles

You can do the same with Facebook, and I'm not sure it's even possible to stop iMessage from working that way. The problem isn't with the technical side, it's that most of the companies handling messaging have a vested interest in not allowing compatibility with anyone else. Apple have been very explicit that they use iMessage as a way to lock groups into the Apple ecosystem by making it a worse experience to communicate with anyone outside it; Facebook certainly do the same even if they've generally avoided saying it out loud. Google probably would if they could manage to go more than a week without killing off their latest chat app. It's only the smaller players, like Signal, that benefit from better compatibility, since the network effect tends to work against them rather than for them.

ESA's Solar Orbiter will swing past Earth this week – sure hope nobody created a big cloud of space junk up there

Cuddles

I believe the correct units would be 1.203*10^6 furlong/fortnight, or approximately 0.00004 times the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum.

James Webb Space Telescope gets all shook up – launch delayed again

Cuddles

Re: a "sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band"

It's still possible they might launch in June. Just a couple more delays needed...

Boffins find way to use a standard smartphone to find hidden spy cams

Cuddles

Re: Haven't movie theaters been doing it for years?

"Or you could use an RPI, a laser pointer, & a light detector as a DIY room sweeper, target the reflective bits every tenth of a second to keep it blinded"

Or get a bigger laser and don't worry about targeting it more than once.

From the studio that brought you 'Mortal Wombat' comes 'Pernicious Possum'

Cuddles

Relievedly

I'm not convinced that's actually a word. Did you perhaps mean "fortunately"?

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

Cuddles

It's abominable hacks all the way down.

China Telecom's US arm sues in last-ditch bid to retain license

Cuddles

Re: Wellllll.... what MORE proof would anyone want? Lemme think about this'n for a moment.

"Everyone in this business know a simple typo / spoofing of a BGP announcement can get you there (rerouting traffic)."

True, but that just makes their claims look even sillier. Any telco obviously has the capability to disrupt communications using its network, so saying that you can't just proves you're a liar. When the real question is whether you are willing to do so deliberately, telling blatant lies in the same sentence of your reply really isn't going to help matters.

Boffins use nuclear radiation to send data wirelessly

Cuddles

Re: Can't help feeling

I think you're both right. The paper that is the main focus of the article, "Wireless information transfer with fast neutrons", is essentially a shutter lamp using neutrons produced by radioactive decay of Californium. But the second article mentioned, "Novel Surface-Mounted Neutron Generator" is about a very small accelerator-driven neutron generator that really does turn the radiation on and off (although it uses tritium as the target so there is still radioactive material involved, it's just producing the radiation of interest).

Basically, the first paper shows that you can use neutrons to carry information, and then cites the second paper in the discussion to suggest what would probably be a better way to think about producing an actual useful device.

Stor-a-File hit by ransomware after crooks target SolarWinds Serv-U FTP software

Cuddles

Impressive job

""We have now removed all third party software from our secure system to prevent any similar issues in the future," said Stor-a-File."

All third party software? Really? They've written not only all their own software in-house, but an entire OS as well? If they're able to do that on such short notice, one can't help wondering why they were running outdated versions of third party software in the first place.

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

Cuddles

Plutonium doesn't have a half-life of hundreds of millions of years. The only plutonium isotope with a half-life in the millions (Pu-244) isn't present in nuclear waste. Rather ironic to reply to posts pointing out that radioactive waste isn't actually as dangerous as people think with exactly the kind of misinformation that causes them to think that.

Super-rare wooden Apple 1 hand built by Jobs and Wozniak goes to auction

Cuddles

The thing about people with plenty of money is that they tend to get and stay that way because they care about exactly that sort of thing. as the saying goes, look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves. A relatively small five figure increase in value might not be much to a millionaire, but a couple of hundred such increases absolutely does mean something to them. Most people involved in such auctions aren't there because they happen to be interested in one particular piece, they buy up lots of things in lots of auctions as part of a broad investment strategy. It's like saying that someone gambling on the stock market doesn't care about the tiny profit from a single share; the point is that you trade rather more than just one and those tiny amounts quickly add up.

Why machine-learning chatbots find it difficult to respond to idioms, metaphors, rhetorical questions, sarcasm

Cuddles

Not so different

"Unlike most humans, AI chatbots struggle to respond appropriately in text-based conversations when faced with idioms, metaphors, rhetorical questions, and sarcasm."

How, exactly, is this unlike most humans? Hell, you could cut the quote after the word "conversations" and it would still be valid for most humans.

Angling (re)Direct: Criminals net website of Brit fishing tackle retailer, send users straight to smut site

Cuddles

Re: Their fault

"Since I see all the bad puns have already been spoken for, I will jump in and say that this is clearly the fault of the company. If a medium-sized fishing supply company does not have expert information security staff"

While I sense some sarcasm in this post, this is actually entirely correct. This isn't some little corner shop with only a couple of employees, it's a decent size chain with over 40 physical stores in multiple countries, millions of customers, tens of millions in revenue, millions in profit, and listing on a major stock exchange. So yes, they absolutely should have expert IT security staff. If you want to run an online shop serving millions of people, that's just part of the cost of doing business. Obviously punishing lowly shop staff wouldn't be appropriate, but chair and board? Absolutely. It's their responsibility to run things properly, and they clearly have not done so. You can make some allowances for why something like a local church group run by a couple of octogenarians might not have the greatest IT security, but Angling Direct is well past the size where those kinds of excuses hold water.

Samsung releases pair of jeans that can't do anything except cover your legs and hold a Galaxy Z Flip 3

Cuddles

A lot of people

"With the exception of iPhone fans, have you ever bought a mobile and thought, "I'm going to base my entire identity around owning this item of cellular technology"?"

Consider the connection between these two statements - "For a time in 2019, folding phone fanaticism gripped the industry, with world+dog" and "No one cares anymore. We're all a bit haunted by the events of '20/21". In other words, when folding phones first appeared, an awful lot of people were interested in having them. When the opportunity to be seen having one was no longer there, suddenly they all lost interest. Apparently there are quite a lot of people who base their identity on non-Apple tech enough to only want things when they're able to show them off to everyone else.