"at least a regime to say there are boundaries on what governments should do."
This from an ex NSA lawyer who noted how good Apple are at presenting themselves as the good guys.
32754 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
It's time to turn things around.
Require all large scale brokers of PII to be licensed. Retention of the licence would require a regular audit. Fail audit, lose licence, lose business. That would give them every incentive to remain compliant.
Yes, they can appeal against the failure of audit but the licence is suspended until the appeal is allowed. Comply or appeal? Not a tricky choice.
The terms of the licence should include a regular statement to every data subject of each item of information held giving the subject right to challenge as to consent if required (the ICO report mentions some is public domain) and accuracy with the onus on the broker to prove their legitimacy if they refuse to amend or delete. Is it too expensive (as Experian argue)? Then obviously the business isn't financially viable so why are they running it?
Perhaps the solution is to construct entirely fake data. Any resulting mail shots are handled by the seller of the data. In practice, of course, no mail shots can be sent as the addresses are fake but the profits should be shared with the mail handlers so they don't miss out.
The gullible buy it and are satisfied because they're none the wiser. The public don't get their privacy violated and don't get pissed off with importunate marketers so don't take it out on them by buying elsewhere. Everybody's a winner.
ISTR reading that the application of diplomatic immunity to her was not legally clear as it was her husband who was entitled to it. It needs to be tested in court. Until it is it might be a good idea to suspend pending cases. After all there needs to be, and to be seen to be, some degree of reciprocity.
Agreed that things such as naming conventions etc should make code as self-documenting as possible. The comment should not need to tell you that this is a check on customer balance but it might need to tell you that this is the company standard code to be used everywhere such a check is needed; online ordering, telephone ordering or whatever.
Other things: copyright terms for open source code, why we initialise to 1 or 0 or index from -2*, why we took this approach rather than some other or the fact that this code deals with stuff covered by regulatory requirements and changes should be discussed with and signed off by the appropriate officer of the company.
* I've used indexing from 400 to 700. They were wavelengths in nm for various data points and Pascal allowed such arbitrary indexes.
Let's see what I can see on OSM for my local area. Can I find countours? No, no, oh, yes if I select cycle map. What about field boundaries? None here but plenty over there. They seem to be only inside the National Park boundary. Follow that up a bit & suddenly they appear outside the boundary. Head a bit further up and they stop inside the boundary.
One thing the OS has that OSM doesn't: consistency. Sorry, but that's the way it is. If I want good mapping of the UK I'll stick with OS.
"The busines reason for using Andriod and Google's services is the business reason for shipping PC's with Microsoft Windows."
True, but the reason is that this is what customers have been trained to expect by the efforts of large, dominant corporations imposing their will on the H/W suppliers. The customers are so well trained thet you hear squeals of horror from some of them any time you suggest the alternatives.
I can't help visualising HP's management over the past many years as being like a group of children who've wandered into a control romm full of switches and buttons which they don't understand going "I wonder what happens if we press this".
Alternatively it may be a consequence of the fact that, as most of us know, the reliability of an HP product is proportional to its age so they're trying everything they can to make it difficult to drive the older stuff because that's the only way they'll force us to replace it.
A very quick fix would be to make the legal costs for an invalidated patent recoverable from the USPTO. With a good case the defendant would know their costs would be covered, the plaintiffs would be aware that the cases would be fully defended, there would be far fewer patents granted and the USPTO would have a great incentive to go through the back catalogues, checking each one even if it meant handing back fees. In the meantime the USPTO would probably keep popping up with amicus curiae briefs to stop the expense getting out of hand.
It's not the effort or even lack thereof. It's the niggling worry of what will be broken when it comes up again.
In my case it was the upgraded release refusing to recognise the camera when I plugged it in. It might have been fine with a thousand other camera models but I only had one and it didn't work. Subsequently I read something that suggested it was just a type in a config file. By that time I was long gone, put off, ultimately, not just by the minor typo that should never have been there (the file was working, don't fix it) but also by the process that allowed it to happen undetected.
For all I know Fedora may be have a far more rigorous release process now but I've no great reason to go there (do they even have a systemd-free version?) so I'm never going to find out.
"I was in a supermarket earlier and was stuck six feet away from a dozy old unmasked couple picking up and putting down dozens of ready meals in front of the product I was after. Then an other old dozy unmasked mare shoved her trolley between us and did the same thing. I just left. Most supermarkets have a special hour for NHS workers and old folk when I am barred. I'd like an hour when NHS workers and old folk when are barred."
Rather than the casual ageism (& what do you have against NHS staff) perhaps your ire should go the supermarket for not requiring better behaviour.
Actually the original article didn't do that at all: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54586897
I don't know when the official announcement was mad but by the time the Beeb had their article written (they'd have to spend time getting reactions) it went live about half-past 10 on Saturday evening, well in time to get buried under later stuff by Sunday morning.
Note also that the later article is about the App. The original article deals with sharing data from the test and trace system. The difference being that the App doesn't collect personal data so Dido hasn't got anything to share.
It's a difficult position for T&T given that there is widespread avoidance. However making it a police matter, at least in the first instance, is not the way to go about it, neither is sharing data.
Part of the problem is that T&T for Covid-19 is a centralised operation whilst in the past such operations have been done locally. A local operation could have its own staff going round to check in the first place and only calling on the police if they didn't have the powers to enforce. As it is, the best they can do is to try ringing the contact to see if there's no response in the case of a landline or trying to make some judgement from background sound if it's a mobile.
Another part is that all this depends on a system which determines whether the subject might be infected; I haven;t seen any figures for it but wouldn't be surprised it it were quite low. It's not to be wondered at if members of the public are reluctant to self-isolate on a possibility and even less so if some of them are getting the message several times. Nor is it to be wondered at if the police themselves are unhappy as the Beeb article suggests. A test, trace and test approach would be better.
I suspect there might not be a problem sharing data from border records. It was reported that Burnley had a substantial spike resulting from someone returning from holiday and, instead of self-isolating, going on a pub crawl.
Copyright exists automatically. You don't have to do anything.
That's something that's caught out the unwary by posting something on github or wherever without a licence. They think they're making it public domain by doing that. In fact they're making it unusable because there's no legal way to copy it.
A very quick search reveals that Ace Books used a loophole in US copyright law.
Instead of complaining nobody will do it for you commission someone to provide software to do this. It must, of course, stand up to expert infosec inspection to ensure it actually does keep out miscreants, including ensuring that collected data can't get leaked or misused.
When you've cracked that you can go ahead and get it used.