Posts by Alan Brown

Re: I just can't believe for a business service they think just over 1 month is enough notice

"I just can't believe that businesses that depend upon email use a third party email service (and put up with the whims of such)."

You would be completely gobsmacked how many use the email@domain provided by their broadband ISP and end up being vendor-locked as a result

Utterly self-inflicted

Re: "...own domain raises a flag with me"

"to be fair most people are experts in something you and I are not"

Showing a seven-digit local number which plainly WILL NOT WORK if dialled as-is shows a pretty fucking braindead approach to doing business

You start wondering how such companies STAY in business

" but then have an @hotmail as the contact email that bug me ...."

They don't seem to appreciate that hotmail's T&Cs expressly PROHIBIT use for business purposes either

Yes, you can get such addresses cancelled. Ask me how I know.... (evilgrin)

"Have seen too many examples of an organisation paying for a domain via a third party (web designer etc) only to have their domain suspended/cancelled "

I've seen a number of cases where the "third party" then sold the domain to someone else for fun and profit

Good luck getting any happy resolution when that happens.

Re: Cubic metres? cm^3? ?? What is its abbrev.??

"Stow-cum-Wendy" is a real place!

I wonder what the brothel there is called? (and do they have a piano player?)

My mother would do that simply to see the support people squirm

Re: Who the hell uses SSNs as proof of ID?

Yup.

I've seen stories of USA hospitals being assessed for major HIPPA violations after improperly recording patient data (one of the most common apparently is someone going into emergency room and being linked against a previous patent with the same name but a different SSN) and then sending out debt collectors/filing credit reports based on SSN

Re: Never a borrower, nor a lender be...

During the UK crackdowns on payday lenders (ie, when they started forcing them to disclose interest rates but before outright bans) I saw one advert listing a 14,500% APR

Re: GDPR

Mnay US states have privacy laws which this stuff is breaching and their State AGs are more than happy to long-arm such laws

All someone has to do is show the sites have numbers of people from the state in question - and a suitably notified state AG may decide to do that themselves

Re: CC cancelled

"Needless to say, this is no British or US bank. ;-)"

and it shows the lie of "we can't do that" that most banks use

Re: CC cancelled

If you get an unsoolicited call " from your bank", the very first thing they must do is identify themselves in a way that's hard to spoof

Some banks use passwords, some will tell you the last few transactions you had.

Asking YOU to identify yourself is a non-starter. I had a lot of fun with one insissting I give a pin after telling him I'd recorded the call, had the originating phone number and was calling Actionfraud on my other line (and ended up with a grovelling apology letter from the bank abiout a week later - mainly because he got quite sweary at me)

Re: CC cancelled

" They said that once it is deactivated it is dead and no way to reactivate."

I kicked up a huge stink over this and got £200 credited to my account after they agreed they could (and should) have phoned me

It didn't make up for missing the movie I'd driven 20 miles to see, but it made them at least pay a little

If every customer griped louder (and fofrced compensation) they'd treat it diffenetly, You train aomebas not to do things by hurting them as is they only thing that works.

Re: Just try

"Except it doesn't activate until a transaction moves from 'pending' to being on your bill."

Notify Actionfraud and the FCA

Re: Just try

Actionfraud are the people to talk to in such cases (and the FCA)

They take such chicanery on banksites very dimly - making it hard to report is something they _really_ don't like.

Re: Small Claims Court

"I was very pleased when I received a pretty cheque in the mail from said agency for the amount of the invoice minus their fee. "

I assume you altered the contract T&C afterwards to allow for "costs and commissions" to be added onto any owing amount?

Debt collectors love these ones - you get 100% of your money and they get the fees - ALL the fees - which can add up surprisingly quickly when they put their minds to it....

Re: Small Claims Court

"Yes, but if only one in ten claims take the effort to pass to the Bailiffs then overall the company wins."

cookie cutter press releases to local media can make that 1 in 10 start climbing rapidly

Don't forget that whilst you pay a fee to call in the bailiffs, it's clawed back from what's owing so you don't end up out of pocket in the end - and it's usually cleaper than constantly arguing back and forth with their lawyers

Re: Ticket master

"most of the venues have exclusive deals with Ticketmaster"

Once Ticketmaster is shown to be acting in a predatory pricing manner, why aren't regulators looking into this?

"You could do this even if Ticketmaster had been found innocent. Civil law has a lower burden of proof."

The criminal case is more than sufficient in a civil case. Ticketmaster are trying to dupe people into not taking them to court

Re: 3rd party Javascript

I've taken to noting the intrustive js (such as facebook or google on EDF's webpages) then asked pointed questions about GDPR compliance and legal liabilities of the company - including how they thing that giving away data to third parties without permission or notification is remotely GDPR compliant

Re: Ticket master

"endless charges that are only mentioned after you've queued and secured a ticket."

Didn't a certain irish airline get soundly whapped for exactly this behaviour a while back?

if ATG are doing this in Europe then the CMA needs to know

Re: There’s hope yet!

"A few times I had to set off with extra fuel in the form of two 200 l barrels, in addition to the two fuel tanks already in each of the vehicles, for a total of about 600 litres per vehicle."

Leyland P76? That much might get you from Sydney to Melbourne :)

Re: There’s hope yet!

Radiators on EVs tend to be needed to cool the circuitry when charging,not when moving - not having a 50kW+ heater upfront helps a lot in hot climates... :)

(remember, an IC engine - AT BEST - is producing 2kW of heat for every 1kW of traction power - and that's ONLY at full load, wide open throttle. it's not at all uncommon for it to be 5-8kW of heat per kW of work produced under nortmal driving conditions

Re: There’s hope yet!

"Another concern I have (I am happy for it to be proven nothing to worry about or pointers given) is with regards to colder climates."

The standard solution is "webasto" - People who've installed them have found them surprisingly cheap to use as they tend to only be needed for a few minutes at a time

Newer EVs use heat pumps for warming the cabin instead of electric elements

Re: travel distance

Why buy a car which meets 100% of all possible needs when one costing 50% as much can cover 90% of them and you can hire a vehicle (or fly) for the remaining bits yet still have cas left over? (expecially when factoring in that the one covering 100% of your needs costs 3-5 times as much to run for the 80% requirement than the cheaper vehicle (it's not JUST fuel costs))

Re: travel distance

"Synthetic LPG."

Where so you get the energy to make sich a substance?

This is the fundamental problem. Yes, it;s easy to transport but once you have the resources to make the stuff why not add some more carbons and make a room-temperatire liquid fuel wihch is easier to transport and doesn't risk Bleves in a crash?

(Motonui did this. It was an economic disaster due to the energy requirements)

Re: It's not about clean or secure...

1: Chinese labour isnt cheap

2: Huawei's staff are shareholders

3: This has nothing to do with labour laws. "American" equipment is built in China too

4: Huawei have been going hell-for-leather in 5G for a long time and hold a huge patent portfolio worldwide. Even if you don't buy Huawei kit they're still getting significant royalties (which leads into the point that they're cheaper because they don't pay royalties to themselves)

This is mostly about payback to Cisco et al for the back doors we've seen inserted in much of their kit for decades and the USA's fear that it can no longer infiltrate/spy on 3rd country networks using bsckdoors they mandated be installed

"After all" they reason "if we've been doing it, surely China will be doing the same thing too?"

Re: Why 5G ?

I can show you a number of no coverage areas within 35 miles of Tower Bridge and they're in the heart of the stockbroker commuter belt

I suspect that availability of Starlink will be making BT's Openreach sockpuppet clutch its pearls and demand protection and I further suspect that will happen via a ban on network connectivity not subject to IWF filtering

Re: Reads like a Hollywood Movie

As Vetinari points out in one of the Discworld stories, in this arena everyone _thinks_ they're the good guys but the truth is that there are only bad people on both sides

Re: sales rep

> she'd call for help, saying her app had "disappeared".

We had a customer like that - she'd ring us up, blaming our techs for eveything under the sun and her programs disappearing as "nobody else touched her computer, so it must be us"

They'd show up, unminimize the program from the desktop, explain what they did (and demonstrate it) and a few days later the pantomime would repeat

About a year later her husband piped up and admitted to minimising her program so he could run solitaire

Re: Always check everything

with such monitors, a long strip of tape over the controls wasn't such a bad move once the they were set

It was invisible to the user and stopped the things being rotated without _really_ intending to rotate them

Re: Too Many Stories!

"A sign just lit up saying 'do not press this button again'"

I've been tempted on a number of occasions to make "booby trap" buttons

The other side of this is the idiots who hammer repeatedly on doorbells or other knobs making a nuisance of themselves. I used to solve that issue with a monostable. You got one press per minute and that was it (the fun goes out of it very quickly when you don't get the expected response)

Re: In defence

Cluesticks should only ever be applied after standing behind the user and asking them to show you what they did to cause or replicate the problem

"Please show me exactly what you're doing" has solved more problems than I care to think about

Re: Ask any actuary

"Young male drivers are simply worse drivers."

30 years ago my insurer pointed out that young women are just as bad as young men - and that women have MORE claims then men, but they tend to be slow speed paint scrapers (cheap) vs high kinetic energy events (not cheap)

The single most common insurance claim BY FAR was (and is) "Reversed into another vehicle in a supermarket car park"

Re: third change?

00 01 10 11

That's four

Re: Interesting dilemma

believe it or not, it's not just phones that "you own the hardware, but you don't control the device" applies to

The USA retains the "ignition keys" to every F35 sold.

There are rolling codes required to be entered into the flight control computers in order to start the engines and operate the avionics which are keyed to every airframe/engine serial number and are obtained upon request from the Department of State. These codes are valid for a few hours each time

The RAF (as codevelopers of the F35 via BAE) were one of the few air forces which the US was going to sell code generators to, but those plans were axed in the early 2000s in favour of the USA retaining total control over who can fly their F35s today