Posts by Nick Kew

Re: For the FRC to become involved means *epic* levels of s**t auditing to be involved

Or maybe just levels of controversy? As in, ...Oh look, a criminal conviction in the US: we should be seen to be doing something ...

Taste is very largely about smell (ask any wine buff about the importance of a big glass which you only half fill).

And the greasy smell of a pie shop sets the tone, even if some of the food itself might be entirely different if taken out of that context.

@Baldrickk Re: QA's Fault?

A little over 30 years ago I encountered similarly-obvious errors in production code, for controlling satellites in Earth orbit.

I fixed an error. Unit tests blew up: my fix caused a fail. Uh-oh, trouble. If I go fixing the unit tests to accommodate my code fix, I'm jeopardising the whole framework: marking my own homework! And when you're the young grad just doing the work, you're not expected to tell your seniors the whole edifice is rotten.

I concluded in retrospect, it was unit tests that effectively caused the problem. Programmer goal had shifted from "get it working" to "get it through the tests". And as the tests were more complex than the code itself, so they were also more error-prone.

Re: What about iMessage?

According to the article, the point is not encrypted communication per se. Rather it's a case of what's actually happened.

Telegram has "defied" a court order by failing to help TPTB to decrypt messages involved in suspected terrorism.

iMessage hasn't done any such thing, perhaps simply because there has been no such court order to defy.

Difference in a nutshell. Though there's also a grey area where a provider chooses whether or not to cooperate so far as it can without the encryption keys, as in the FBI Iphone case. Indeed, that may become a de-facto compromise between legislators and technology in many countries.

Re: Slam dunk

Facebook isn't a teen mag. It aims to target adverts much more effectively than that.

but being on a lone foot patrol he wasn't about to wade into a mini-riot on his own

A proper copper would've defused the situation.

Think Sam Vimes/John Keel.

Re: This will go nowhere in court...

Now that there are a billion or so people using the Facebook platform, and more and more businesses are providing info/services inside the walled garden, 'choice' of whether or not to use the services is less free than it once was.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

I've always resisted facebook. Not because of privacy concerns, but because I have ethical issues with their Enclosure of the Commons. I have come under pressure to join over the years, but it's never been harder to resist than some of the other social pressures, like knowing enough about celebrities (e.g. footballers, pop stars) to follow a mindnumbingly boring conversation on the latest telly nonsense.

Re: I might like this to be blocked

I think we've already had this discussion in Reg comments. You'll need to pick a properly-disreputable patent office, like the US, or the Battistelli wing of the EU.

Re: loads of email about GDPR asking me to sign up

I think we take that for granted.

I've had it from some people who are emailing me legitimately:

- clubs/societies of which I am a member. Yes you can mail me.

- bigcos with whom I do business legitimately. Yeah, that's fine: I've already cut off those who've abused my email address (helped by using a separate custom address for each commercial entity).

- startups in which I've invested through crowdfunding. Hmm, on a case-by-case basis.

Others haven't contacted me, including the big financial institutions (like bank, stockbroker, share registrars) who presumably have the lawyers to tell them their usage re: my accounts is already compliant. Like El Reg, who have our addresses as commentards.

The hardest case is GDPR mails in a grey area. Like my local council, with whom I've presumably corresponded by email sometime in the past without explicitly signing up for mail. They haven't spammed me, so the GDPR mail was probably superfluous. If I say yes, I'm potentially consenting to spam. If I don't then they're removing me from a list that appears never to have been used, but might make sense to stay signed up to in case there's some emergency alert.

Re: Legacy

Legacy has a bit more meaning than that. How about "no longer supported"?

Re: The Real WTF...

One can see use cases for that: you subscribe to an information service you think has value. Anything from stock market or art market events to traffic news might have value to someone.

And once you have the principle, people can add ever more useless things. Think of the utterly useless presents you've given or received that you'd never dream of buying for yourself, but that just serve life's dumb rituals like xmas.

Re: Please, not a captcha

Aren't you fighting yesteryear's battles?

Or is someone out there really still using or advocating the vile things?

You missed a treat there

You should've become a Lawyer.

Re: And who made copyright possible?

Years ago, I had an entry in an Audio Visual competition.

Heh. I guess that must've been a competition where the music wasn't expected to be the primary focus of your entry. Were there specific rules about copyright?

When I entered a composition competition, the focus was on satisfying them that all the texts I used were permitted. That means, I'd need to supply written permission, in a suitably legalistic form, for anything not out of copyright. Writing to the lawyers who own the rights to Dylan Thomas's works was a lesson in how contemptuous those people are of anyone interested in creating new artistic works that happen to draw on a great legacy. Not only would I have to pay (which I could accept - within reason), I would have to withdraw my entire work before the poem went out of copyright (erm, no chance, I'm not getting into that kind of game with a bunch of shyster lawyers).

Re: Hmmm...

Back in January (before I parted company with them), my Virgin 70Mbps connection was giving me consistently less than 0.5Mbps.

Or I really should say, inconsistently, as it frequently dropped out altogether, leading to regular timeouts on things as routine as web and email, as well as having to use the mobile 'phone for a voice line.

The role of the impossible-to-contact customer service is in keeping me paying over the years of crap service before then. It was simply a line of least resistance. And, to be fair, Virgin's router had a feel of quality by virtue of providing the most solid wifi I've ever had: it was the connection to the outside world that was problematic.

Re: Chewing bandwidth?

A little loudspeaker icon that only becomes visible when there are so few tabs as to have space to display it. Not really useful.

Re: Historic revisionism

I could have forgiven the usage of "google" and glossing over earlier search engines.

A much bigger red flag was the role ascribed to Compuserve, that was wrong on so many levels it would need a whole bloomin' article to fix it.

Re: Pot/Kettle.

That's just the Law of Outrage. When your powers that be are noisily outraged by a foreign power's alleged evil, you just know the accusations hurled are of things they themselves not merely do but take for granted.

I suspect this law applies mostly to those countries that set themselves up as moral entities. It's certainly strong in some of us whose national narrative is "we're the good guys because we beat Hitler".

Re: The one issues could be...

You don't drive on a different set of roads according to whether you have a Ford or a Honda. So why the different set of masts?

The whole competition regulation needs to be completely overhauled, so we can get a signal wherever one is available. Just as we do when travelling abroad and connecting to our provider's local partners.

@Alan Brown

one radio station I worked at had the morning studio staff arrive(*) to a building full of smoke, open a few doors to clear it out and start their breakfast shift after putting a screwdriver through the alarm sounders.

That reminds me of chemistry lessons in my 'teens.

I'm sure that was the norm for mine and earlier generations.

No no no! We had tracking in Blighty in the 1980s, before we ever had GPS. We pensioned it off when GPS and Glonass offered a globalised alternative. But now that we're opting out of globalisation, we can simply revive a national positioning and tracking system.