Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
Well done indeed. Groanworthy in a good way. How did someone with a sense of humour get into corporate PR, and what kind of Red Tape let it through? Congratulations to Tesco for allowing that through without at the same time subjecting the world to a full Bozzersworth of toecurling gaffes.
or someone operating just like them, perhaps deliberately so
US security firm takes the perfect impartial approach. Tells us what it looks like, but reminds us that "false flag" is also entirely plausible.
This is a sharp and refreshing contrast to the nonsense we expect from politicians and TLAs. A welcome reminder that most of the private sector is still capable of existing outside of government conspiracy.
If you want to go down that line of conspiracy theory, individuals within Ernst&Young might turn rogue. After all, that's what appears likely to have happened at Quadriga.
Of course, the difference is circumstantial. The reason we don't suspect someone at E&Y is that it's vanishingly unlikely that the individuals who may have been presented with an opportunity had also engineered the situation where that opportunity arose. They were investigative beancounters tasked with a job they could scarcely have anticipated!
The Register can take whatever line it pleases. It knows very well that commentards will ... erm ... explore different angles on the story. A story that slavishly follows an official line could be seen as stirring the pot.
Except of course those stories where comments are put into a moderation queue before appearing.
This is great. Insights into cockups in a consumer-facing biz, where we can all see ourselves as potential victims!
Obviously this comes from a different era, when there was inadequate separation of testing and production systems. But ... hang on ... a 56k modem dates it to not so very long ago: if I'd read this story when those were current I'd've thought the same - surely such a story must be from the already-distant past ...
For the benefit of readers who've never played with those devices ...
You tell us it counts steps. But if it lives on your wrist, how does it tell the difference between steps and other activity? Such as gesticulating wildly while on the phone, or indulging in the pleasures of the bedroom? What about exercise of the lower body while the wrist is steady - cycling on a good road surface?
Read it again.
His point wasn't about "bugging": that suspicion was merely a symptom. The issue he was concerned with was paranoia.
The idea that pre-HP Autonomy was Not At All Nice is entirely plausible. Though as others have said, the relevance isn't clear, except in that it tends to dispel sympathy for the defendants. If the trial were for cruelty to minions it might look a lot worse for Lynch!
I take the view: he's a hypocrite
That's the most fundamental British value of all (along with self-deception).
If he's calling for fair play, I take it he calls for rejecting the enemies of fair play? In this case, Trump. Leave decisions for or against Huawei to those whose business it is and who have the expertise: Vodafone, BT, etc.
Could be a lifesaver. Like those alarms recommended for old people who get a bit frail, that can summon help if they fall and can't get up.
And therein lies the answer. I'd like to see this widely available, but as an enhancement to those old peoples' alarms. Not in a context like alexa or siri, where surely it's in direct conflict with the expectation that it needs a wakeup keyword before it'll pay attention!
OK, you win. You obviously know a lot more about house-buying than I do.
My point was of course to seek to relate the issues in Due Diligence to something that'll be familiar at first or second hand to commentards. I happen to be going through it right now, at what I understand to be a much older age than most first-time buyers.
@Benson's Cycle - I don't know where you are. But here in Blighty, if you buy a house, your Due Diligence involves a solicitor and a surveyor. You pay good money to both of them, and get a report full of arse-covering: "we were unable to ascertain [...] so you should check it yourself"; "We recommend a Structural Engineer's report on [...]"
The onesidedness is because these are HP's witnesses. So HP's lawyer asks them friendly questions, which will basically amount to confirming a written statement they made in preparation for the case. It's the cross-examining barrister whose questions probing that evidence are likely to produce anything interesting/newsworthy. And the Reg is primarily reporting what happens in court, not all the tedious documents.
That'll reverse when it's defence witnesses.
Of course it could also be that the Reg's coverage tends to focus more on some stories/sub-plots than others ...
And as a critic of some of your efforts, let me add I enjoyed this one. To the point, and you gave credit where it's due in contrasting it to bitcoin.
Though my own gripe with Facebook isn't handing them information[1], rather it's an old fart's objection to their Enclosure of (what used to be) the Commons. I've resisted peer-pressure (from many non-techie friends) and never signed up for it.
[1] I don't, though I'm not obsessive about it. If I cared about the backdoor ways they might learn something of me, what would I be doing posting on El Reg (even anonymously, let alone as myself)?
Industry to Government: Please stop dumping your toxic waste on us, and just let us get on with our business.
When that business is building the communications infrastructure that is a crucial foundation for the nation's competitiveness, you'd've thought government would oblige. After all, it bends over backwards for others whose business is altogether less beneficial.
Trump: America First.. Meaning that when Europe and Asia are pulling ahead with comms infrastructure, they must be held back.
I'm picturing a future headline: "Pranksters hijack insecure NASA space probe, flash insulting messages to alien race investigating the probe, aliens now on the way to destroy Earth"
Better hope the invasion fleet gets eaten by a small dog?
Trump gets away with it 'cos his country has the power. Bozzer is more scary.
... when I used to make planes from balsa wood and tissue paper in the hope they would fly, and wish I had the budget for one with a miniature engine and especially radio control.
Does the kid have to register before or after finding his masterwork won't fly further than he can throw it?
They were talking about this on t'wireless yesterday. They had on an interviewee who is a highly respected editor of one of our biggest personal finance publications. Asked "will you use it?", she answered "probably, yes".
I wonder if the goal is a world where Facebook is custodian of many peoples' money? Not large amounts, but a working balance. Enough that you'd piss off an awful lot of people if you took too heavy-handed action against Facebook in the wake of some scandal?
Never heard of that usage. Is it a brand name or something?
Not sure how far back it goes, but Rome had it as a currency more than 2000 years ago, and it's been a currency (whose symbol £ is of course a fancy L) ever since. Italy used it until the Euro replaced it. Some Roman-influence countries still use it, notably the UK and Turkey.
You say it sold in New York.
Has some 'merkin buyer ponied up that price, and is now being retrospectively denied his/her purchase? That sounds grossly unfair!
Or has the price not yet been paid, and now becomes likely to be cancelled? That would be grossly unfair on a vendor who has gone to the trouble and expense of auctioning it, and could've limited bids to British buyers, or else not tried to sell in the first place.
Either way, shouldn't putting on such restrictions after an auction has taken place render the responsible official liable to compensate someone? Or if not, is Act Of Stooge something you (can) insure against?
Why would you be either for or against? Unless you work for a telco and are evaluating or working with (prospective) suppliers, in which case it's your professional business.
Oh, right. It's because they've been unfairly attacked by a powerful bully. Yes, under that circumstance I'll side with and defend anyone. From Corbyn to Trump via all kinds of thoroughly unpleasant characters like Farage or Galloway. Or even Assange if he gets banged up in the US.
Nick Kew mentioned the GIF format, but
Nick Kew was recollecting off the top of his head. If it had been a more serious issue - for example, if it was going into a book, or if I was due to give evidence in court, I'd have given it more time and effort. In the case of GIF, it became an issue when GIF became a standard for images on the Web. It's true that wasn't an ambush, but for millions of web users putting up pages in a more innocent age, GIF was just something we used without a thought to having to licence the format.
As for SCO, that's a complicated story (even the name itself originally belonged to a different company), but the company that became SCO was itself a Linux distributor and wannabe-Redhat in the 1990s, before it fell into the hands of pirates who saw more money in extortion than in honest work.
I don't know the ending in the particular, except in that it led eventually to MS declaring that it would indemnify folks in future against patent violations in MS products. My main recollection of it was of reports that some third-parties had been stung and actually paid some very large sums to Timeline before that happened. Which seemed particularly ironic at a time when the FUD was telling the corporate world that was a risk with Linux.
There have been a few very silly cases (like BT and the hyperlink, or I-forget-who and XOR, or the now-expired GIF or Compress/Zip patents), and a lot of FUD. Most famously SCO, which might have profoundly affected our history if Novell and IBM hadn't stood up to them over many years in court. For a long time (perhaps even today in some dark places), corporate lawyers would look very suspiciously on *any* open source, for fear of submarine patents. Major open source foundations - like Apache and Mozilla - have been in the vanguard of protecting our developers and users.
Ironically while all the focus was on SCO and Linux (and by extension/FUD, open source in general), it was MS who really came a cropper.
This is akin to a constant issue with software, where holders of patents (or other intellectual property) may seek to sneak something in to widely-used products, then sue for infringement.
Serious developers have strong legal safeguards and audit trails, such as the legal agreements you sign before you get access to commit or contribute to a repo.
It also tells us that fine people were harassed and prosecuted for lifestyles outside the norm. Think Turing for that.
Careful with that. The Turing story is classic revisionist history, in that he'd be more harshly treated in Britain today than in his own time. Homosexuality isn't a problem now[1], but a 40-year-old man having his wicked way with teenagers (of either sex) is.
[1] I'm not clear to what extent it was in his time either: were consenting adult homosexuals actually prosecuted? Britten and Pears were not merely tolerated, they were very highly regarded.
I'd've posted in response to your first wild assertion, but discussion seemed to have moved on from there before I saw it.
Whoever wrote the words you quote was pursuing a different line of argument, not relevant to my point: none of the claims on either side have been tested in court.
The fact that she makes no comments about Due diligence or the disputed Hardware sales (in this article)
Means nothing more than that those were not the focus of the questioning: the court wants to hear from primary sources. Unless she was personally involved in Autonomy's sales, any knowledge she might have would be hearsay and thus irrelevant to the court. Likewise her role in due diligence will have been limited to assessing reports prepared by those directly involved (I guess Autonomy and their auditors and whatever agents HP appointed), and her assessment seems to have balked at the price.
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