Posts by Harry

It will be too late for me.

I'm 10 months into a 12Gb/12Month dongle from Three, and have finally decided I'm not getting another one.

Occasional reduced speed I can cope with, but not the continual tendency to drop out completely for usually a couple of minutes at a time but sometimes a lot longer, no matter how "strong" the dongle is reporting the signal to be.

It worked fine for 6 months, but now its trash and at times completely unusable even with a full five bars of signal showing.

Clearly, its not the "last mile" that's having problems, they've just sold too many dongles leaving grossly inadequate capacity in the "wired" part of the network beyond the local mast.

Yes and No ...

"It should be easy for the ushers to spot someone actually using said kit"

Yes, that's easy. Relatively easy at least.

"have have them dealt with"

That's the hard bit. The person is probably sitting in the middle of a row, surrounded front, back, left and right by other people. Short of stopping the film, putting a spotlight on the perpetrator and announcing "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a copyright thief in our midst", how are you going to stop him doing it ?

Re: Full traceability

Would it be so difficult?

For example:

A sends to B purporting to be C.

Before B's ISP delivers it, it pings some sort of datagram to C "did you send MsgID 5436374747 to abc@xyz with 4735 bytes and CRC 43774 ?

If reply is negative, message discarded. If positive, message delivered maybe 500 milliseconds late.

Cuts out the forged sender, but won't immediately catch a compromised PC. Though if a problem is identified in the message the sender has been positively identified -- so if part of the tracebility requirement was a sender registration, that registration could be revoked until the compromise proven to be fixed.

"Then the current "Reader" can be renamed to Adobe Executor ?"

"Adobe Hangman" might give a stronger warning.

Re "I have a 15m long drive"

Though you might be tempted to use 100W of distributed LEDs and leave them on all night, it shouldn't be necessary.

Sensors at each end of the drive could ensure that the drive is lit only when a person or car is in the drive, which would be a tiny fraction of the time.

Actually the same could probably be done with LED streetlights in less-used residential roads, provided you linked the sensors a couple of lights ahead so you could still see a reasonable distance ahead and dimmed the more distant ones up and down slowly so they didn't go on and off with a thud that would cause annoyance to nearby residents.

[The idea mentioned here as a statement of the (blindingly?) obvious, in the hope that it can be used in evidence to ensure nobody will be able to patent it if they haven't already done so].

Re "imagine the outcry among webmasters"

Webmasters should ideally be told -- by law, if necessary -- that they have no right to expect browsers to run scripts and that they must do their job properly and ensure that each and every page works properly (at the functional level, ignoring eye candy and irrelevant material) without it. Leaving a javascript link without a valid non-javascript alternative ought to be a recipe for a mandatory prison sentence!

"This kind of feature would effectively kill all 3rd party analytics tools"

If you want to collect statistics about your customers, do it in your own server. If data protection had any teeth, it wouldn't even *allow* you to use a third party to collect data -- especially a third party which can and *DOES* share the data it collects on your behalf with your COMPETITORS and usually does so completely without the knowledge and consent of the users that it is spying on.

"and advertising networks"

Again, if you want adverts in your page content, serve them from your own server. But step back and consider why you're using adverts at all. In most cases, your users are doing YOU a favour by visiting your site -- it would cost you a lot more to set up showrooms or provide the information in print. Treat your customers with a bit of respect and don't unnecessarily hog their bandwidth (which *they* pay for, not you) with unnecessary matter that probably benefits your competitors more than you.

Except that ...

"it is not government but parents who decide"

... but I wonder how many parents will be puzzled by the instruction manual and need to ask their children to help them set it up.

And though its supposed to be for the parents to decide, it won't be long before some irresponsible individual or organisation with too much clout starts publicly branding those who choose not to enable it as irresponsible.

Oops

"You seem to be suggesting that virus scanning a file when you open it is a bad idea"

No, I'm meaning the whole drive scan, which can take an hour or more and tends to substantially slow the machine if it starts running while you're doing something else. Especially if at the same time the machine decides to start downloading windows updates and simultaneously lets umpteen programs check for updates over a slow wireless broadband. Which you didn't want to do anyway, because they use up expensive airtime and could be done faster and for free when you arrive at your destination and can plug the machine into the LAN.

"That isn't possible in this universe with today's technology. "

It's not possible to guarantee a line to the stated 20Mbps -- true. Which is precisely why we are saying they shouldn't be able to make any claim which they cannot guarantee.

Instead, the line could and SHOULD be sold honestly as a line which guarantees "at least 2 Mbps". Substantially different, but completely truthful.

And in areas where the service is better, they can (again, truthfully) sell lines which guarantee "at least 5 Mbs",

And they can (and SHOULD) be required to charge LESS for those lines for which they can guarantee only 2Mbps.

How about a compromise

How about an autocomplete that only works when the site to which the information will be disclosed is the SAME site that the information was originally submitted to?

I'll continue looking ...

"I'll continue looking for the one that tells me I'll enjoy speeds of "at least"."

And I'll keep defaming OfCom, ASA and OFT until one of them manages to employ somebody with the elementary common sense to insist that is precisely how *all* products have to be advertised.

"some hits and misses from the .NET story"

Biggest miss is the umpteen megabytes that the runtimes take up.

OK, we don't expect coding efficiency from the likes of microsoft. Never use a single bit where a kilobyte could be used.

But what is it that really, really needs more than half a gigabyte? And why, after 250+Mb of 3.x it really shouldn't be necessary to insist on keeping 300+ Mb of the 2.0 version as well?

"capable of storing an unfeasible amount of energy"

I won't ask if unfeasible is a word -- because it isn't (or wasn't when I checked a couple of minutes ago. Perhaps the word you want is "impossible".

Probably the biggest question is: if the device is made to work, then just where are we going to find an impossible amount of energy in order to put in it?

"the bad old days of arrogance and dubious business practices"

They have not ended.

There are probably worse examples, but we still have microsoft giving us inadequate choice. For example, we can "install updates and shut down" or we can "restart" but we cannot choose to "install updates and restart" even though that is precisely what many users will *need* to do, especially in the case of a machine which is remote and therefore cannot easily be restarted once it shuts down.

"NoScript, AdBlock ..." etc

All very essential, but I get the impression that they usually download the blocked material, even though they suppress the display -- which means:

a) they're still hogging our bandwidth and slowing the display of the web page, and

b) third party sites that I haven't asked to visit are nevertheless probably still able to spy on what users do.

By far the greatest requirement for standardisation (and, preferably, legislation) is that any information collected be disclosed and used only to the first party site that the user *chose* to visit.

"And a knife is a lethal weapon."

With a *very* limited range, if it is being held by a bed-ridden person. Especially if it was only a kitchen knife. Any supposed "victim" could and should have avoided any consequences by simply moving further away, until such time as the alleged knife holder could be gently persuaded to drop the knife. But bursting in through a door isn't the way to gain the co-operation of a bed-ridden person.

With or without a knife, pretty much the only excuse for tasering a bed ridden person would be if the person lived in a block of flats and was actively trying to set it on fire.

Unless that was the case, the officers concerned should be barred from further police duty for life.

"The Directive currently does not require an opt-in for cookies"

That sounds like a very good reason for *changing* the directive, rather than arguing about whether it does or doesn't imply something that may or may not be interpreted by courts in the same way that the originator intended.

I'd go strongly for the concept that a first party site (ie, the site you're actually visiting) can save a cookie unless you've expressly told it not to -- but that a *third* party site (eg a spyware site, or any content accessed through the URL of a different subdomain) cannot, unless it has your explicit, annually renewed and not subsequently revoked, consent

Furthermore, I'd suggest it is high time that information about users (whether stored in a cookie or otherwise) be confidential (being prohibited from being sold or used by any other party) and communicated only within the single subdomain.

Similarly, third party sites which obtain any information about the user on the first party site must separately sandbox the information for each of the sites to ensure that such information is only used in relation to the transactions with the same first party site, and again being prohibited from being sold or used by another party.

"Worst. Thing. Ever."

Worst. Thing. Ever? Probably not.

I well remember the backup in one of the earlier versions of windows, which was most of the time effectively a "write-only" backup.

At best, the backup would only restore if you restored to the very same machine that you took the original from. Even changing a hard drive (one of the most likely reasons why you're likely to want to restore) would break the restore unless the new drive had exactly the same geometry and bad sectors as the old one.

"Why does every site have to draft its own terms anyway?"

Precisely. Contracts between companies and the public, and even between companies and small businesses, should be subject only to one contract term -- the law. Any term that attempts to give the seller any additional right should be, by definition, an unfair contract term -- and therefore, any term which attempts to take away a right from the buyer rather than to give an extra right ought to be a criminal offence in its own right.

Consequently, by far the best law would be one that prohibits contract terms altogether.

Instead of telling us where the cameras are ...

... why not have a database of speed limits, and warn when the limit is about to be exceeded?

Satnavs must know the speed limits on roads in order to calculate fastest journeys, so why not use the information to help keep drivers within the limits -- thereby, depriving the camera operators of their income without needing to know where the cameras are.

As for live services, I don't drive enough to merit a subscription but its the cost of tomtom's map updates (and especially that they refuse to let you use even user-contributed updates if you don't buy their own map update too) that means my next satnav will probably not be a tomtom.

Same as raffles

Most raffles are illegal, though I've never heard of one actually being prosecuted.

Some examples:

a) Raffle takes place over two days with the prize being drawn on the second day. Wrong -- the draw has to take place on the day the tickets were sold, so that has to be split into two raffles.

b) One of the prizes is a donated bottle of wine. Usually wrong -- prizes cannot be alcoholic unless the premises are licensed to sell alcohol.

c) Tickets are 25p each or £1 for a strip of five. Wrong -- all tickets must be sold for the SAME price and all tickets must have an equal chance of winning.

d) raffling a car or a house and offering tickets for sale on ebay or elsewhere -- definitely wrong. To qualify for exemption tickets can only be sold at a one-day event, to people physically attending the event and the draw must take place the same day.

Yet I actually reported a particularly severe instance of d) to Edinburgh Trading Standards -- who took no action whatsoever as far as I can see.

"60 per cent of attempted cross-border transactions fail ..."

... " due to non-acceptance of credit cards or legal restrictions."

Hmmm, Germany is the only country I know of where sellers are reluctant to accept credit cards ... and even there, I haven't come across an online retailer that won't accept either a credit card or paypal.

As for legal restrictions, almost the only online sellers that won't ship outside their native country are in the USA not in Europe.