Posts by Nick Kew

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

I think the EU is a good idea, but as shown by Angela Merkel's response to David Cameron (no to temp stop on immigration),

At the heart of that is the biggest lie. The part of immigration that everyone hated - the ability to live (partially) on benefits, and to get things like NHS treatment - were never part of EU rules. Cameron never needed Merkel's permission to fix perverse UK rules that had (still have) the side-effect of giving unpopular benefits to EU citizens in the UK.

Paul, glad to hear I'm not the only one.

I used to use and recommend them for years. Then they lost it. Only things still with them are domains awaiting far-future renewal dates to move.

This time, the fact they've notified customers is surely a huge improvement on just breaking a service.

That was probably opportunist spam, from a lawyer having no connection with your minor sporting celebrity. As with any spam it's a numbers game: threaten enough people and someone will let themselves be bullied. C.f. bogus DMCA notices.

@AMBxx

True.

Though having written for various editors (including once upon a time El Reg) I suspect that particularly howler might be editorial (too wordy - chop). I think I'd've picked up on that one, but a journo writing several pieces a day might care less about any one of them.

Re: e-ink?

More than happy to forget animation and video. Colour is dispensable. Scrolling would be missed, and of course other interaction (like typing a comment on El Reg) would be more primitive, but that's a price well worth paying.

Re: Tesco Does Not Know More About Me

Tescos don't know anything about me. But that's just an accident of geography: there's no tesco within range of my food shopping.

So let's substitute Sainsburys, whose superstore is just a mile up the road. They have plenty of data on me: not just the Visa card I normally use to pay, but also (shock, horror) a nectar card they use to pay for my data.

Guess what? I'm not bothered by it. I don't believe Sainsburys are going to do anything nastier to me than to stop stocking something or put a price up[1]. They don't have the power to do anything bad. No police force, no legal system, no apparatus of the State. Dammit, not even influence over relative trivia like a credit score! And I don't begrudge them the information they gather: I think the price they pay is fair enough, and I'm just sorry the information doesn't seem to stop them all-too-often losing things I like enough to pay them for!

Now what GCHQ know about me is much less clear, and that very lack of clarity could be a concern. Their methods of collection are more indirect and therefore likely to be less reliable, which raises concerns over a potential for incorrect data. And the possibility of their data being used by agents of the State with powers to deprive me of life, liberty, or other things of real value, makes their records a whole nother kettle of fish.

[1] Except in December. Then they play muzak, so I go the extra mile to Lidl instead.

Not actually true. The only vote shareholders get is to dismiss (i.e. not reappoint) an auditor recommended by the Directors. Which looks to me rather close to also being a vote of No Confidence in the Directors themselves.

And if you don't know there's anything wrong because the Directors and Auditors are concealing it ...

Um. 10 x 5 + 10 x 10 + 10 x 20 = £350

Um ... don't the Jocks still have £1 notes?

That doesn't give us an explanation of £105, but it does hint at how one might look for it.

For your bonus question, why did I regularly pay between £10000 and £20000 for a pizza in the 1990s?

A German Court

That must have been one of the shortest times on record for a European court to give a US corporation a flea in its ear.

German courts are famous for not taking certain forms of nonsense. They have form.

ICANN went to a German court, the first day of GDPR. That smells of jurisdiction-shopping. They wanted to lose, and they wanted a quick and clean loss. They got it. They even picked on a suitably deep-pocketed victim to be sure that being properly lawyered wouldn't cause undue pain and perhaps a perverse result (like going out of business).

Now they have a result they need to help deal with their own internal politics and shady lobbyists.

Taste is very largely about smell (ask any wine buff about the importance of a big glass which you only half fill).

And the greasy smell of a pie shop sets the tone, even if some of the food itself might be entirely different if taken out of that context.

@Baldrickk Re: QA's Fault?

A little over 30 years ago I encountered similarly-obvious errors in production code, for controlling satellites in Earth orbit.

I fixed an error. Unit tests blew up: my fix caused a fail. Uh-oh, trouble. If I go fixing the unit tests to accommodate my code fix, I'm jeopardising the whole framework: marking my own homework! And when you're the young grad just doing the work, you're not expected to tell your seniors the whole edifice is rotten.

I concluded in retrospect, it was unit tests that effectively caused the problem. Programmer goal had shifted from "get it working" to "get it through the tests". And as the tests were more complex than the code itself, so they were also more error-prone.

Re: What about iMessage?

According to the article, the point is not encrypted communication per se. Rather it's a case of what's actually happened.

Telegram has "defied" a court order by failing to help TPTB to decrypt messages involved in suspected terrorism.

iMessage hasn't done any such thing, perhaps simply because there has been no such court order to defy.

Difference in a nutshell. Though there's also a grey area where a provider chooses whether or not to cooperate so far as it can without the encryption keys, as in the FBI Iphone case. Indeed, that may become a de-facto compromise between legislators and technology in many countries.

Re: Slam dunk

Facebook isn't a teen mag. It aims to target adverts much more effectively than that.

but being on a lone foot patrol he wasn't about to wade into a mini-riot on his own

A proper copper would've defused the situation.

Think Sam Vimes/John Keel.

Re: This will go nowhere in court...

Now that there are a billion or so people using the Facebook platform, and more and more businesses are providing info/services inside the walled garden, 'choice' of whether or not to use the services is less free than it once was.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

I've always resisted facebook. Not because of privacy concerns, but because I have ethical issues with their Enclosure of the Commons. I have come under pressure to join over the years, but it's never been harder to resist than some of the other social pressures, like knowing enough about celebrities (e.g. footballers, pop stars) to follow a mindnumbingly boring conversation on the latest telly nonsense.

Re: I might like this to be blocked

I think we've already had this discussion in Reg comments. You'll need to pick a properly-disreputable patent office, like the US, or the Battistelli wing of the EU.

Re: loads of email about GDPR asking me to sign up

I think we take that for granted.

I've had it from some people who are emailing me legitimately:

- clubs/societies of which I am a member. Yes you can mail me.

- bigcos with whom I do business legitimately. Yeah, that's fine: I've already cut off those who've abused my email address (helped by using a separate custom address for each commercial entity).

- startups in which I've invested through crowdfunding. Hmm, on a case-by-case basis.

Others haven't contacted me, including the big financial institutions (like bank, stockbroker, share registrars) who presumably have the lawyers to tell them their usage re: my accounts is already compliant. Like El Reg, who have our addresses as commentards.

The hardest case is GDPR mails in a grey area. Like my local council, with whom I've presumably corresponded by email sometime in the past without explicitly signing up for mail. They haven't spammed me, so the GDPR mail was probably superfluous. If I say yes, I'm potentially consenting to spam. If I don't then they're removing me from a list that appears never to have been used, but might make sense to stay signed up to in case there's some emergency alert.

Re: Legacy

Legacy has a bit more meaning than that. How about "no longer supported"?

Re: The Real WTF...

One can see use cases for that: you subscribe to an information service you think has value. Anything from stock market or art market events to traffic news might have value to someone.

And once you have the principle, people can add ever more useless things. Think of the utterly useless presents you've given or received that you'd never dream of buying for yourself, but that just serve life's dumb rituals like xmas.

Re: Please, not a captcha

Aren't you fighting yesteryear's battles?

Or is someone out there really still using or advocating the vile things?

You missed a treat there

You should've become a Lawyer.