Posts by Lee D

Re: cashless society

And if I go somewhere that refuses to accept card, same thing. In fact I've done it quite a lot.

Mainly because I don't carry cash (good luck, muggers, even my phone is worthless), secondly because I see no need to convert card into cash to then immediately hand someone when I can just card it, and thirdly because handling cash/change is a pain in the butt (especially in COVID-times - the stuff that always has traces of illicit drugs on because it's been through so many hands, and you want to put it into my hand with your hand? Nope.)

Then there's a fourth - I have a record of every transaction, which I deem to be necessary. It helps my personal accounting (having been living on my own for the last three years, I have been strapped and my spreadsheets were vital for the first year, and having bank data to see what I'm expecting to spend exactly when is a god-send... and the ONE forced cash transaction I had was the exception to the rule), and it helps accountability (no arguing over whether I gave you a ten or a twenty) and it also stops cash-only trades (sorry, Mr Window Cleaner, but I don't have cash... oh look... you're walking away... almost like you don't want to know about declaring your income on a bank statement...)

Even antiques markets and boot sales take card now. Hell, I have a card reader in my car for if someone is desperate to give me money (I do a lot of "I'll buy that online because I'll get the right thing for cheaper, and you have no idea how to use a computer, then you can pay me for it when it arrives" for older friends and relatives who - get this - get such duff deals because they'll only ever deal in cash, but they trust me and I save them money).

The fees thing is really - short of Mastercard massive post-Brexit opportunistic hikes - not a factor. Handling cash, taking the risk, banking it, running a till, etc. is expensive and card fees are pitched at that exact same expense for a reason.

Re: WTD

Literally illegal to even suggest that it's "career-limiting".

My car.

My entrance to the property.

The exterior to the property, including window access.

Let me simplify this for you: If someone is already inside the house, it's game-over, whether you're at home or not.

I manage CCTV as part of my job, and 90+% of cameras are external, the rest are on entrances that you have to cross to get to the internal buildings. Not quite sure what you think recording of the inside of your own house is going to show/do, to be honest.

Or are you one of those people who thinks that a single frame of CCTV will instantly and conclusively identify the burglar with zero investigation needed? Hint: 20 years managing work CCTV systems, a dozen police-related incidents with submitted evidence, zero convictions. It's called a black hoodie and don't-look-at-the-camera.

My own personal home system has a better record than that, with random incidents in its scope like neighbours being burgled and cars damaged, etc.

I managed several hundred Apple tablet/phone devices.

Repairs were so expensive, and so temporary and shite, that we stopped bothering and just binned the lot.

It costs £30 to replace an entire huge Chromebook screen panel, using a small screwdriver.

It was costing us £75 per iPad screen, with specialist repairers, using specialist equipment, which - if the casing was even slightly dented - they could never guarantee and it would fail in time. The record was a device with three repairs, beyond which all the repairers said it wasn't worth their time touching it and it would just fail again.

For iPads: Home buttons, under-screen sensors, power buttons and the corners of the metal cases. Once they were done, forget it.

Yet with the same amount of Android phones, Android tablets, Chromebook Tabs, etc. we've had a tiny handful of repairs, and with MULTIPLE TIMES the amount of Chromebooks, our repairs are all done in-house in about 10 minutes and with a minimal charge for parts only.

Apple devices are just inherently unrepairable. Before COVID, all three of our repairers went bust one after another (and hence we needed to find new repairers) and all told us that there was almost no margin on Apple repairs, even if they used recon or third-party replacements. And we did not deal with fly-by-nights or the guys in the market or anything like that. We're talking established companies specialising - and advertising such - in repairs of (usually) Samsung and Apple devices primarily, with premises, permanent technicians, websites, guarantees, collection/delivery services, contracts, etc.

Re: Looking at the 30 year old ECU design

I think it's more that it's too much to ask that a bulb designed to go into a car 12v electrical system isn't capable of smoothing its own power if it's that sensitive to fluctuations that are inherently present in a car's electrical system.

If you can't handle 10-14v, and more, drops and spikes constantly without failing to perform your primary function (lighting up) then I think the fault is more the bulb.

And this is far from limited to car systems. Any low-voltage lighting made before LEDs will not accept an unballasted LED fitting lightly - it'll flicker and buck like mad. Everyone knows this. The LEDs are so low power that any unregulated DC power supply will go mad and buzz and fizz and fluctuate, and you have to buy a whole new power supply to make them work reliably.

It's not the CAR. It's the BULB. The reason that it doesn't work for you is that you ARE just hardwired to the 12v system, which is NOT smoothed in a car (literally, any automobile component is designed to take this into account - from bulbs and car radios to USB chargers, cigarette lighters, inverters, etc. - go look at any in-car PC enthusiast site... you need smoothers or tolerant and regulated power supplies. You can't just hook up a 12v cable to a car battery and expect it to work, because when starting, charging, air-con, cold weather, etc. kick in that 12v MUST be regulated if you want any kind of consistency. Which is why all the automobile components are either tolerant of it or have on-board regulators to make them tolerant.

Your bulbs obviously don't, and expect you to craft an RC circuit to compensate (which is a cheap, junky way of trying to do that, compared to a single-chip voltage regulator inside the device itself).

Re: It's about the battery

I did the same, but with a Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro.

Removeable battery. And I can get spares.

Wired headset.

USB-C standards.

Clean, up-to-date Android.

Dual SIM (if you buy the right model).

I wonder when companies will realise that "removeable battery" is a feature, not a bug.

Re: They installed fibre in my street last January.

Their official coverage stats go by how many houses are fibre "capable", not by how many actually have it.

By converting your cabinet they can claim hundreds of fibre-capable houses in your area, even if they never hook up a single one, and thus contribute to their whatever-percentage-coverage legal obligation.

Also FTTP is vastly different and they don't really care, because FTTC is so much cheaper for them to implement.

I have FTTC in my road, last time I checked they offered me "up to 4Mbps" on it. I bought a 4G router instead, get 80Mbps+ and unlimited data for £15 a month. Judging by the local Wifi SSIDs, quite a few of my neighbours do the same.

Irony is that I could hit the town centre of a major inside-M25 town with a stone from my bedroom window, and live in a tightly-packed urban environment.

I gave up waiting for BT to provide decent broadband years ago, and have lived in VM-fibred areas or used 4G ever since. To be honest, despite my hatred of Musk, if he manages to get his Starlink thing going, I'd far rather give him money than BT, and at least I could take that with me when I moved house.

Re: Disappointing, but not surprising

Ironically... I paid for a lifetime subscription to the thing.

So as far as I'm concerned, I want my money back.

Re: They can't hit 3 nines

I'm not even joking but they struggled with 2 nines over 2020, and in previous years!

Re: Suicide

And a good way to end up being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Re: This is to punish the UK

"I couldn't believe it when I left my company and they demanded their staff ID card and company devices back".

"I couldn't believe it when I stopped paying for my CostCo subscription and they wouldn't let me in or buy anything any more."

...

The UK punished itself, here, nobody else.

"Hey Cortana! <whatever you do don't> delete my pictures <before I> confirm <that they're backed up>, okay?."

When you start using anything less than 100% accurate, in-context voice, it's really difficult to not fall foul of some quite obvious problems.

And that's before you consider that people are actively crafting phrases that sound nothing like the commands but activate the commands because the voice recognition is so poor that it can't distinguish them.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/uncovered-1000-phrases-that-incorrectly-trigger-alexa-siri-and-google-assistant/

Say "I don't know anything about the <election>" and it'll trigger Alexa to start listening, for example.

I don't really mind, because my 4G gets me the speed I want. Extreme situations are unlikely, rare, and present on all services. The Internet is the first place everyone will go when the phone lines go down whatever, the 4G of a local mast on a leased line is going to be chicken feed compared to everyone trying to Wifi-call, Zoom-call, Whatsapp-call, etc. etc. etc.

Been on 4G only for several years now. Never had a problem. Fastest speeds, more than enough data, and never lost signal. If I do, literal SIM-switch and I'm on another network entirely on entirely different masts.

We're talking home DSL... there's no emergency requirement, there's no power-loss requirement, there's no must-work-in-a-hurricane requirement. For all those things, DSL suffers just as much as 4G.

The vast, vast majority of people wouldn't care that they're using 4G or DSL, is my point. They don't already, and most of them have it on their phones. They don't care if it's Wifi or 4G, it works just the same to them.

The requirements in an emergency are vastly different, and I'll stick to my dual-SIM phone and 4G with an emergency backup of "Can I borrow your wifi?" if the situation ever desperately calls for it.

P.S. most people don't need/use/understand static IP, but I VPN into something that gives me one if I should need it. Which also works from my phone. Stop running services from 4G or DSL though, to be honest. Weirdly my static IP works whoever's connection (Wifi, cabled or 4G) I'm using, and is backed by a computer in an always-on datacenter with redundant backups, which is the true intention of a static IP. So I could pop down the local cafe and do anything that I needed with my static IP, or go abroad and still use it (e.g. for iPlayer), dial into it for VoIP, etc. and it wouldn't have gone off anyway.

Re: I must admit...

Samsung Knox and Android Work Profiles.

Re: Pratchetisms

No, Bloody Stupid Johnson is working elsewhere ruining other bits of the country.

Re: Jolly good show!

Google are one of the few providers who provide absolute guarantees about the location and processing of your data in the EU/UK, update your regularly and were GDPR compliant long before it happened.

If you're gonna poke holes, then I'm afraid that EU/UK DPA is the last thing you could point at Google. And nobody has yet found anything to the contrary, even Google insiders, so you'll have a really hard time proving that it was happening slyly without other people's knowledge.

P.S. the latter situation is a literal description of all international email.

Re: Normally, you can't just "willy nilly" buy/sell as an insider

I was going to say, insider trading laws are a thing for a reason, and though they probably know more than most, they shouldn't know enough that others don't which would make such a sale suspicious.

Re: MAC filtering / access control?

No... because the Amazon device you have allowed via MAC filter is presenting out your connection via Bluetooth LE to all the other nearby Amazon devices and passing traffic on their behalf.

Re: A bad code push ? Really ?

Did you miss the bit where the SSN challenge was actually hidden in the HTML code of the same page anyway?

Re: Shirley...

Yeah, tell Musk that it's stupid and impossible and would require billions and would make him look like Iron Man if he could make it work.

He'll be there tomorrow.

Sometimes, that guy really does have a useful purpose.

Re: "pay back the millions they owe"

Doesn't matter whose name it's in if it's the proceeds of crime.

Re: Wrong Person.

As I live in the UK and used to be married to a barrister:

Your legal action would fall flat on its face almost immediately. This is a perfectly valid debt collection tactic in many countries, including the UK.

Just because they got the wrong person doesn't give you a legal right to any kind of legal action. You say "This isn't me", or "This isn't my debt" or "They've never lived here". Which involves interacting with the collectors.

They can still serve a debt or court order via Facebook, email or carrier pigeon if they want. Pretty much anything. They tend not to, but both UK and US courts can and have literally served people where they have no other guaranteed way of contacting the person, and for things way more important than a debt.

They don't need to know what country the contact lives in... the debt is still owed in the original jurisdiction and they are allowed to chase - but not necessarily enforce - it wherever the debtor happens to be. It's a debt against YOU. No different to you owing US taxes... they'll chase you even if you live in Azerbaijan.

P.S. this is 100% legal in the UK too. And chasing you on Facebook is 100% legal too, even if it wasn't legal in the UK - because their US law gives them the right to do it, and they are immune from your imaginary UK law banning UK debt collectors from doing that.

So... please... for the love of all that is sacred.... never argue with a debt collector without taking legal advice. Because you have absolutely no understanding of the process or law. If a debt collector approaches you, you either dispute the debt, or you pay it. Anything else requires legal advice, which if you have debt collectors after you you almost certainly cannot afford.

You would not, in any way, be able to take legal action against a debt collector pursuing a legitimate debt, even if they got the wrong person. You'd be asked "Did you inform them?" and you'd have to prove persistent and harmful harassment beyond that, and that would be in the jurisdiction of their enforcement.

P.S. Was married to a barrister, was subject to international debt collection for a relative who didn't live with us, including US speeding tickets, US-debt, and UK-debt chasing the guy who'd moved to the US. Oh, and once had a "friend" use our address without consent. You still have to handle it properly, but you have basically zero legal right to do anything in retaliation for their legal debt-collection practices, and your trade union won't give a damn.

Now, harassing you needlessly through Facebook might be something that a UK company could get in trouble for as our laws would prevent that... but repeated contact is not harassment. And it's a damn sight less harassing than two big blokes knocking on your door at 6am waking the neighbours and kids. That's why the UK debt collectors ALREADY have the power to do stuff like this. But they tend to prefer to send an email or letter first.

Re: how we interface with our mailing list provider

Colleagues keep asking me why their <external third party> mass-mailing emails can't come from our proper domain but come from <company name>@massmailing.<external third party>.tv or whatever.

"The same reason that we don't let them telephone our customers directly and claim to be us."

Re: Youtube

The school I work for placed a video on YouTube before the Summer to show our end-of-year speeches, etc.

Out of nearly two hours of footage, YouTube flagged a few seconds of a song (that we had permission for) and blocked the video and gave us a copyright strike (you only get three).

What amazed me was how quickly they did that. It was virtually instantaneous, the song was incidental in the video (i.e. it's not like we slapped the MP3 onto the soundtrack directly, it was playing in the background of a speech), and it was half-way through a long video with other things in it (including other music that was public domain, or performed by us with permission). It also identified the exact song, performer, and timing of it when it notified us.

And yet they often have complete copies of all kinds of movies and content on there that seems to stay on there forever.

I think it has more to do with how hot the copyright owner is, and YouTube complies, not that YouTube are actively beating up every video that passes their way through their own impetus.

Welcome to the cost-fallacy of "that'll never happen, but if it did it would cost us an absolute fortune, so let's not do anything to prevent it".

Re: And the appeal will be?

Data protection doesn't care who's at fault. If you accepted and stored the data in a bad way, it's your fault.

You could have been handing that data entirely to the third party on a secure page, and it's still YOUR fault if it gets out, if the customer was giving their data to you.

There is no "we were just contracting that out" get-out clause in DPA or GDPR. Likely you're both fined, but at minimum the original "collectors" of the data can't escape liability. And if people were putting their data on Ticketmaster's site and one of Ticketmaster's contractors leaked it - tough luck, Ticketmaster are liable first and foremost.

This is one of the (many) things I have to regularly explain about data protection to people. It doesn't matter what promises you get from the other companies you give personal data... if that data was given to you, it's your responsibility if they mess up, just the same as if you'd messed up yourself.

Re: In the same week?

Microsoft own large portions of Apple and Apple own large portions of Microsoft.

It's also incredibly unlikely that the creators of the world's most popular office suite and the creators of a major operating system haven't communicated at some point about the offerings available on the new platform.