Posts by Nick Kew

Peter, is that illegal now?

I guess that means they must've done away with that most corrupt of kickbacks, airmiles and frequent flyer programmes, that involve personal kickbacks for spending company money.

Re: Blocking Comparison Web Sites And Foundem

Kelkoo still alive? Wow, my blocking of their annoying crap must've been entirely successful over [mumble] years. Something works!

The others you mention don't even ring a bell. Except sue, grabit and foundem: evidently the nastiest of all!

There are documented cases where it *did* work against TFA.

Fraudster walks in to victim's mobile 'phone supplier, claims to be victim, blags a SIM card with the number used for TFA, gets the code. Job done. And variants on the theme.

AIUI, this became such a problem that one bank was persuaded by consumer groups to abandon TFA.

Re: "31 complaints per 100,000 customers"

I'd take a reliable 6Mb/s over a notionally-superfast-but-dysfunctional service any day.

I'd even take an unreliable 6Mb/s over Virgin cable, provided only I could contact the provider and get things fixed when it goes wrong. As in the difference between this story of BT (copper) failure vs this story or this story of Virgin failure.

Re: I wonder how this affects me...

I expect you're running much the same risks as I am with a Motorola. Or others with the rest of the Usual Suspects.

Except, if you're at risk of being snooped on by spooks, they'll be foreign spooks. With no interest in what you're doing, and a very high hurdle to coming after you in the unlikely event that they do find connections between you and suspected terrorists, child-molestors, or general dissidents.

Re: "staff are meant to be protected against retaliation for cooperating"

@Gordon Pryra - the ideal whistleblower is someone with no stake in the job continuing. Someone looking to make a new career, or someone on the brink of retirement (and whose pension is safe).

My favourite whistleblower has to be the former spy known as John le Carré, whose subsequent career proved very successful for him and enriched the world in general. Never even revealed specifics, just blew a whistle on the culture of the spooks and their masters. And he's never stopped blowing that whistle!

Re: Criminal Defence

In the case of those accused of terrorist-related offences, troublesome lawyers won't be troubled in the first place. Just kill them, or ship them to Guantanamo Gulag.

Need? That's not a need, it's a niche. If your objective is to find customers who'll pay for a service, then you market yourself to whoever is likely to buy. As for Wordpress: do we know whether NationBuilder is anything more than wordpress (or other mature open-source system) under the hood? In this day and age, how many wheels should they reinvent?

I first released software to power interactive parts of a website back in December 1995. Sometime in 1996, a search revealed my first declared user. It was the BNP. Not what I'd have chosen, but the software was GPL so they had every right to use it.

Re: Cheaper Option:

Going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're taking the piss

Indeed, I read it as tongue-in-cheek.

There's another AC below for the real downvotes.

Re: Not really dispelling the idea that generally the police are a little dim ..

@JimmyPage - nicely put. With or without the extra dig at Southern Rail.

I saw the article headline and thought for a glorious moment I was being encouraged by the region's chief cop to go after Virgin Media. But no such thing: just another bit of irrelevant nonsense.

Re: Their reply was that they are required by law to deliver the spam

@Andy: Why are Royal Mail so incompetent nowadays?

'twas ever so. Try living somewhere with a similar name to a town big enough for the posties to have heard of it. Back in the 1970s my family lived in a place called Horam, and most of our (correctly addressed and postcoded) mail arrived redirected from Horsham.

@10forcash: Not true, they are required by law to deliver addressed mail

Hmmm, now that you mention it, that figures. I think I may have been particularly concerned with vast volumes of mail addressed to a previous occupant of my address, who appeared to have been running some kind of postal business from home.

Monopolies?

BT and Virgin have monopolies on their respective turf.

The mobile providers don't. Which is no doubt why they compete, and provide a much better service than the monopolies.

Similarly, the regulatory scrutiny on BT will no doubt be why they are nowhere near as bad as Virgin, despite still being worse than the mobile telcos.

Re: Cynical? Moi?

Let's hear more voices raised against May and the Tories helping to kill children in the Yemen.

The UK, as the world's second-largest arms exporter (and with an economy proportionally *more* reliant on it that the US at #1) will be sure to veto anything that damages vital national (economic) interests. Governments of both colours have mongered war after war since the end of the Cold War threatened our vital industries, and with brexit we're looking to double down on it.

Re: It definitely takes

Um, the article talks of the threat as stealing information.

A threat against someone's vital life-support make a serious (and plausible) story, but it's not actually *this story*.

So an ideal candidate for the UK government.

It seems the Danes, unlike the Brits, believe in real evidence when they publicly accuse someone of murder.

or perhaps not tell the whole story

That they should underpay someone for either good or bad reasons - entirely plausible. As in, for example, a "nudge" to seek employment elsewhere.

Happened to her, it seems. I expect it could very well happen to a white male, too.

I expect Intel have some of those seemingly-mandatory forms on which employees declare their race and sex. That could help produce some statistics as to whether there really is pay gap based on race or sex amongst colleagues in the same job and level.

Re: Do they all think they can command the tide?

If you read beyond the headline, they're not prejudging that question. Rather they appear to be asking sensible questions, not least that of whether and in what sense the 'net can be regulated. It might even be worth submitting comments, if you can get past the kneejerk reaction.

Once they've taken evidence, they might even come up with proposals that look better than the status quo. For example, could the Great Firewall (aka IWF) be made more accountable? To what extent does GDPR look fit for purpose, and can lessons be learned from abusers ranging from oldfashioned spammers to Cambridge Analytica? Can we flesh out a policy on encryption that'll stamp on any proposals to damage it?

Re: Whaaat...

3.9 hours probably mixes young kids (no homework) and older kids (with homework). An example of the meaninglessness of statistics with insufficient context. As is indeed the whole of this article.

Maybe it's just something like 3.9 hours of homework online? Excluding offline homework, and excluding online non-homework. A figure like that coming from just asking parents would tell more about the parents perceptions than the kids, but if it came from logging in to a schools' IT system it could actually mean something.

Re: Wait a sec

That this is being proposed strongly implies that autonomous vehicles are a long way from being safe and reliable enough to trust on public roads.

Nonsense.

It's just someone opportunistically looking to create a market in a new snake-oil flavour.

Re: Why would anyone else trust UK cybersecurity firms?

Companies aren't the same as government. I wouldn't let a company's nationality have very much effect on whether I trust them. I'd put much more weight on management and track record.

And I'd be inclined to treat politicians acting against a security company as a vote of confidence in a company that isn't their puppet. C.f. Kaspersky.

Re: #headdesk

Well, we now have a company with the classic anglo-saxon name "De La Rue" throwing a tantrum because it is (probably) not getting a free hand to name its price from the UK taxpayer. Something of the Ryanair business model.

Didn't the old passports have some kind of inspirational slogan on? "Dieu et mon Droit" springs to mind.

Re: Sure you can

Blame is a regular concept in software management. It's even part of the tools: cf "svn blame".

Re: All that hard work...

Normally one asks, what are they distracting attention from?

The ICO may be small fry compared to, say, the government and navy, but the Russian spat and Boris's gratuitous invocation of Godwin's law are by no means small. Is the other story going wrong already?