Posts by Headley_Grange

Re: Never

I sort of agree, but it's the service providers who have created the "everything should be free" mindset by giving their product away to us on the assumption that we'll continue to provide our valuable data for nothing. That implicit contract was never made clear when we signed up and now the likes of Facebook are seriously at risk of being hoist by their own petard because their services aren't valuable enough for most of us users to pay for them and if governments decide that privacy trumps profit then they could be fucked.........

.......except that most people - not denizens of the Register's boards - just put up with ads and don't give a toss about their privacy. I had to spend Christmas with members of the family aged 17 to 80 tapping away at their phones with a loud, audio-accompanied advert shouting out every half-hour or so because someone clicked on it. It wound the fuck out of me but no one else seemed to be that bothered about it.

Re: Paranoia Is Mandatory In 2024!!

No point listening to Belgians - all waffle.

Re: Stupid advice from an "expert."

NI is a very poor example, given that many businesses during the Troubles were also paying protection money to the paramilitaries of both sides.

I think that national standards on data protection, annual audits and criminal offences for bosses that prioritize profits over good practice would be a start. The government would be better off investing in a pen-testing department than bailing out companies.

Re: media on NAS

Assuming you're replying to TFM Reader - I don't understand your post. Why would they want to pay 19.99 a month to listen to music they have already bought?

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

I got a couple of Boots opticians letters for someone else sent to me a few years ago. I've never been to Boots opticians, and I know all the owners of my house going back to 1983 and it wasn't any of them, so maybe Boots are just a bit rubbish.

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"No country has the ability to tell another, "hey, these people that are your citizens and have never set foot in our land, we're arresting them and throwing them in our jail just because""

They can if there's an extradition treaty and the crime they committed falls under the treaty. The fact that the perp might never have set foot in the country doesn't matter. Gary McKinnon appealed his extradition all the way to the ECHR and lost at every stage. His extradtion was only blocked by the government on the grounds that he might kill himself if incarcerated in the US.

Using customers as beta-testers for iPhone code is one thing, but I don't think that satellite makers are going to be happy about it.

Re: Do not Google.

I've tried DDG it for a month or so now. It's OK mostly, but I regularly have to revert to Google because I can't find stuff with DDG that Google has on the first page of results. Its search syntax also seems to be very limited. A query like "Kitchen Aid Blender Coupler -amazon -ebay site:uk" works fine on Google and I don't get any Amazon or eBay results, but on DDG the first dozen or so pages are nearly all Amazon and eBay. I'd prefer not to use Google but the alternative has to tbe good enough and at the moment I'm on the verge of going back.

Re: Penalties of up to 6%

Not one of them has been fined anything close to 6%. I think the biggest is about $1.2bn for Meta who made $108bn profit that year.

Re: Pay grades might be a problem

I think that, unlike industry, it's also uncommon to get to a senior technical position in the forces and be completely useless. Ex-Artificer SMs and the like have all been excellent to work alongside both on my team and on the customers'. Also, with their pension as a backstop, they are less dependent on the company and are less willing to take the shit that the rest of us have to put up with.

On the other hand, I've had a couple of bosses who were ex-officers (a major and a full colonel) and their weakness was that they assumed that the department structure they were dropped into existed and was competent - as it tends to be in the forces. As a result they both had a hard time understanding that just because someone was in the second-top engineering "rank" they couldn't assume that they were good at their job or be trusted to get on with it.

It's a problem that NAS devices like this are sold with great and useful functionality/apps which the manufacturers push and make relatively easy to run without taking security into consideration. I got mine primarily for backups and media, but when I first got it I came close a couple of times to using it for our website, but bottled it at the last minute when it came to opening the ports to incoming traffic. I simply don't know enough about networks and security to convince myself it was safe. This was years ago before these attacks were common, but I'm so glad I didn't. Paying a few quid a month for hosting is worth it just for peace of mind.

Re: Something I have yet to grok...

Makes me think of the Money for Nothing vid.

Re: How *is* this Meta's problem?

I'm not sure about this either. Many of the sites which use my phone for 2FA bug me every few months to confirm my details, which is an annoying-but-good thing. I'm not on any Meta apps, so I don't know, but I think that the only way that Meta could be criticized is if they make it difficult to change your phone number.

It also ignores how much of the development cycle is actual coding. The gains will be much lower if they include user requirements analysis, design, specs writing, code review, unit test, integration, system test, qualification, deployment and support.

Re: a dev

"no one forces you to install the PWA"

Until PWAs are the only apps left because a generic, insecure, mediocre app that works across all platforms will be cheaper to develop, distribute and support than one developed to take advantage of device-specific features.

Send Corrections

You messed up the punctuation in your post (no quotation marks for the quote) but, hey, people make mistakes - no biggy. There's a "Send Corrections" link at the top of the comments page so why not tell them?

Re: Hiring AI

UK's Labour party say they will force AI firms to share their tech's test data. Not much detail yet and "test data" might not mean the same as revealing the training dataset, but it might be a start. Also, they still have to win an election.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/04/labour-force-ai-firms-share-technology-test-data

Re: Patents

Looks like the trolls have found this article's BTL already given the downvoting going on.

Re: Who published your comment, Headley_Grange?

If the law were changed to make El Reg the publisher of its comments then El Reg would be the publisher of my comment and responsible for any criminal or civil offences commited in the comment.

I wasn't suggesting that the law should be changed, just responding to a comment about how it's all too difficult because the AI genie's out of the bottle. If the law were changed to make Facebook, Twitter, etc. a publisher of their content then they would either shut down, moderate every post and therfore publish a lot less or maybe become a decent citizen. I assume they'd shut because although they could still make money, it wouldn't be the obscene amounts they make now due to moderation overhead and massively reduced activity. I wouldn't care if they closed; companies that make money by fucking people's lives shouldn't get cut any slack.

I think that I lean towards making online platforms publishers and responsible for what they put online. The argument that it's too difficult for them is bollocks unless it's extended to everyone so that I can get out of doing my tax return cos it's too difficult.

Re: Root Cause

Apposite - Google's (Alphabet) Q423 figures today (Wed) .....

"The Google parent company reported a miss on predicted advertising revenue at $65.52bn compared to $65.8bn, but beat predictions for overall revenue at $86.31bn compared to $85.36bn" - Graun

..... resulted in a 5% share drop in overnight trading.

That's a miss of 0.43% vs forecast on advertising revernue in spite of overall revenue being up. Not good enough for some "owners" of the company, apparently, who sold their shares as a result.