Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Re: Go for it

It's just not right that you should be able to say you value the work of the donkey sanctuary more than the NHS when spending everyone else's money.

Isn't that more a question of how organizations are defined as charities? Like you, I think it's outrageous that animal sanctuaries get tax benefits which organizations that help people do not. I also object to churches being able to claim charitable status (except perhaps for certain subgroups). I have no such objections for, say, the RNLI.

Re: Go for it

There is very little grievance against tax avoidance

There is actually a lot. Activists would happily lynch an electrician doing cash in hand job and not paying correct tax.

That is not tax avoidance, it is tax evasion and it does, as you say, rightly generate grievance.

Tax avoidance is the perfectly legitimate use of tax law to reduce tax, such as paying pension contributions from income before tax (so that pensions aren't taxed twice), or saving in an ISA. That, quite rightly, does not upset people, it's perfectly legal and there would be a huge outcry if it were changed.

Re: Reciva Radios

What does that mean? Expensive radios (almost) bricked. Mine still works to listen to stations on my 5 presets, but that's it.

Try the folks at Listenlive. They support some discontinued radio types, and there's some (admittedly small) discussion of Reciva there.

Re: I'm surprised

It's also worth remembering that Badenoch worked as a software engineer and systems analyst before going into politics, so she's likely to have more of a clue on internet stuff than Dorries.

Re: inflation... but is expected to drop back again next year.

Which of course is exactly why companies are offering one-off cost of living bonuses, and not agreeing tosilly ongoing pay rises that would guarantee the situation gets worse. If it's still bad next year then things would need to be reviewed, of course.

Re: Profit

Why do people always assume that "profit" means money that just ends up in someone's back pocket?

When a company makes a profit (after tax), it's money that must be used to pay dividends, investment, and all the other things that a company has to spend money on to survive.

Sure, they could structure things to make £1 profit, tell the shareholders to take a running jump, and stop investing in new infrastructures & facilities. They'd be gone in 5 years as their competition left them behind. £1.3bn is really not a large profit for a company the size of BT.

As for pay rises, inflation has taken a sudden jump due to COVID & the war in Ukraine, but is expected to drop back again next year. If greedy unions press for silly pay rises to match peak inflation then inflation will keep rising, and we'll all be worse off.

Re: Larger still

But as long as the chance is >0 we have to keep trying.

Re: I can see this working

The internet will be fine, the Web may become unusable.

Re: re: deleting data from backups

And wouldn't that data also need to be deleted, as being data about you that they asked you to delete?

It's turtles all the way down....

Re: Are you stupid????

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your chances of death are 100% no matter where you are.

Re: shared office phone and the company wants to track the employee it is currently loaned to?

If the phone is owned by the company, it is free to install its own tracking software to locate it at any time.

Ah, but that's a very different scenario. If the employee knows the tracking app is there, then they are implicitly consenting to be tracked if they borrow the phone, and if they don't know it is there you're entering fairly murky waters of employment law.

Neither situation is really covered by GDPR, which explicitly protects the PII of a person, not of an object which they may or may not have with them.

it is still no reason to prevent the owner being granted all location data held by the telco

If the telco definitely has location data on the owner, that would be true, but if the owner can't prove that the data identifies their location I would argue that GDPR doesn't require it to be released. It may be someone elses PII, and that's usually enough for the courts to arguable that there is reasonable doubt.

Re: Start to publish politicians, judges and other "VIP" location data...

I disagree. The court does not have a valid point because the issue is not if it a 1-1 correlation should be established between a phone and a person. The location data is being generated by *my* phone, which *I* own and hence, it is my PII.

I can appreciate your logic, but I'm not sure if GDPR is written to consider data of something you own as being your data. It is explicit that data subjects are natural persons, i.e. not entities like corporations.

As another example, imagine that you, as a conscientious parent, buys a phone for your teenage child so that they can contact you if they need to. You're undoubtedly the owner of the phone, and you pay the bill. Does that entitle you to get the phone's location, which is actually the location (and hence the PII) of your child, who also has rights under GDPR?

I don't think it's a clear-cut issue.

Re: Start to publish politicians, judges and other "VIP" location data...

In this case, though, the argument isn't about publishing or selling the data, it's about providing it to the subscriber himself.

The given argument, that the phone may have been with someone else, does make it trickier. As a few examples, what if the phone in question (or the SIM, which is the same thing) is being used in a car and the subscriber wants to check where some other family member has been? Or if it's a shared office phone and the company wants to track the employee it is currently loaned to?

Essentially, what is being described here is the location data for the phone, not the subscriber, and GDPR does clearly say that it applies to data subjects which are "natural persons". There isn't necessarily a 1:1 correlation, so the court does have a valid point.

Re: Ban Intel from EU systems

Just make the decision to not use any intel chips within the EU institutions.

Ah yes, like the German plans to drop Microsoft for Linux. Then they flipped back again. I can just see all those eurocrats being soooo pleased to be told that their Macs and Lenovos will be replaced by ARM-based Linux models.

Re: Write them down...

Always test that DRP.

Death Response Plan?

Re: Legal issues

Along the lines of "horses sweat, gentlemen perspire, ladies glow" ?