DoubleGlazing

I look at this from the opposite perspective, the person who doesn't care much for success and prestige but has to deal with the toxic side-effects of those that do.

I grew up an only child in as single parent household where I was taught that it's better to quietly build a stable secure foundation for your life, rather than to put yourself "out there" and hope for the best. My mothers attitude was that it is better to have a boring stable job that provides enough for you and your family than to be rich or famous. For example she implored me to study for a fall-back manual trade in case the computing degree thing didn't work out.

Recently, I decided to go self-employed and do my own thing in my own time. This was driven by the fact that having worked for a few startups I couldn't deal with the success at all costs approach of some of the founders and managers. For example being forced to push out new features before they are ready, knowing that the technical debt is mounting and that it will come back to bite me one day. Trying to explain why stuff like this was a bad idea would be met with a response implying I didn't care for the company and didn't value success. I also got frequently reprimanded for refusing to do overtime on a regular basis, preferring instead to be with my family. Plus all this was usually coupled with some horrific "Fake it till you make it" promotional activities that we'd get roped in to.

One of the founders went out and got himself a Porsche 911 and put an email around the office showing it off and telling us if we worked hard to make the company a success we too could afford a similar car. Lord knows how he paid for it as the company was losing €3million a year at that point.

All the while I would be acutely aware of the fact that the founders had already churned through four or five failed startups. They were trying out ideas in the hope that one was succeed and make them rich and famous. If another failed they wouldn't care for the people being let go as they would just move on to their next idea.

Having ambitions is good, but I think we as a society are pressured in to setting those ambitions far too high. I am worried by the rising suicide rates in many places, are we pressuring people to chase unattainable life goals until they crack? I think that is part of it.

The fact that most of the images are distorted in some way seems significant. Perhaps faulty firmware was sent out?

I know someone who programmed cheap Chinese GPRS printers used in food ordering, he messed up his deployment script and gave every device the same ID - a special test ID that would return every single order no matter which take-away it was destined for. So basically, every order went to every take-away.

This scream of a lack of firmware QA more than anything else.

The scary thing is that the Post Office kept denying there was a problem and stating words the effect of "it is impossible for the system to be broken" and the courts took this as gospel.

Amy developer knows that any piece software can and does have bugs that only cause problems in rare and unusual circumstances. This is something that the Post Office and the courts should have understood and considered, rather than just assume the system was infallible.

Its concerning for the future as we rely more and more on computers. If the courts, police etc just assume the computer is correct then we have a problem. If the computer says something is amiss, how to do prove or disprove it? Especially when AI is thrown in to the mix and the decision process isn't totally clear.

Back int hr 80s it was common for UK libraries to stock the BBC sound effects LPs and cassettes. I used to borrow them occasionally and try to make musical tunes like the Radiophonic Workshop, only in terrible quality.

The library is also useful if you need to worry a sheep.

It's worth noting that your employer will probably have already spoken to a lawyer about this, or will be prepared to if you don't comply with their request.

A 30 minute session with a lawyer will give you much more insight in to how to deal with this situation more than what you can learn from an internet forum.

I don't think I have ever used or developed a system with a login function that did not have the means to allow admins, or someone with appropriate privileges, to reset a password. I would regard that as a basic standard feature.

The UK's "Prevent" scheme is a good example of why school surveillance is a bad thing. It was setup to try and prevent religious radicalization, specifically Islamic. All it did was make Muslim student feel constantly spied upon and afraid to express opinions, lest they and their families find themselves under investigation... But then it spread beyond religion to includes political issues, for example stopping a 14 year old boy from helping out at anti-fracking protests. Truly Orwellian stuff.

As an aside my brother-in-law has been battling his childrens school for several years because he refuses to allow their school issued laptops to connect to his home network. The laptops use a proprietary WiFi setup dialog that states the network password will be saved to the cloud with no option to opt out. The school doesn't understand why he would be concerned with that.

The problem with FAANG jobs is that while the pay is good, they expect a lot out of you. Look at how Googles offices are designed to keep workers on site. Sure the money is good and the perks are nice, but if you're doing 60 hours a week instead of the 40 that you signed up for then the deal doesn't seem all that good in hindsight.

I think unions have been pretty poor at using technology to circumvent corporate spying and interference. If the employer is frustrating attempts by employees to meet and discuss issues, then they should be able to take their discussions online.

An online forum managed by the union is all that would be needed. But crucially, the union would need to be smart about who they give access to and also have good security people analysing usage/IP addresses and the like. Also make users agree to a declaration that they are legitimate users before granting access. If company spy does get access the union should send lawyers after them for accessing a computer system without permission. Of course it wouldn't be perfect, stuff will leak - but it would be a lot more secure that discussing union issues on company premises and on company equipment.

Maybe I'm looking at the issue too simplistically, but I find it odd that in this day and age unions still try to organise and discuss things the way they did decades ago.

Talking through the problem out loud. Ideally with someone else who knows what you're on about, but anyone willing to listen will do.

If you can't find a listener just find a place where you can talk to yourself quietly.

Basically offer up a detailed commentary of the problem and what you have tried so far. The slow, methodical pacing of actually speaking out loud, as opposed to mile-a-minute thinking in my head seems to help my brain spot problems and come up with solutions.

I'd be a bit concerned too. I have got the distinct feeling that over the last ten years or so Lego has been working harder to control both it's image and how the fan community uses its products. Stuff like suing YouTubers for a variety of reasons and being ever stricter about how and when you can use the Lego name.

My concern would be that Lego will make BrickLink the "approved" community and resale site and make it harder for alternatives to exist.

I hope I'm wrong, but I cant help but think that because the resale/collector value of Lego increases it would make sense for Lego to try and control that market.

My almost universal experience has been to simply do a Git revert and let the CI pipeline do its thing. Pros - It's simple. Cons - It's slow, especially in an emergency.

My last job had an extra layer of security. As a .net house all new deployments were sent to Azure in a zip file. We backed those up and maintained FTP access to the Azure app service. If a deployment went really wrong and we couldn't wait the 10-20 mins for the CI pipline to process a revert, we'd just switch off the CI process and FTP upload the contents of the previous last good version.

Of course, if there were database migrations to deal with then all hell could break loose. Reverting a DB migration in production is easier said than done especially if a new table or column has already started being filled with live data.

To be fair though, most of the problems I encountered were usually as the result of penny pinching by management who didn't want to invest in proper deployment infrastructure.

It would be almost impossible to enforce. Publishers have a point of contact, an address or a hosting company, some sort of physical place where you can find whoever is in charge of the site. In other words, somewhere to send legal documents and summonses should a government wish to pursue legal action.

This is only partly true for web browsers. Google, Mozilla and Microsoft have addresses. But what all the browsers that have forked from open source projects? If someone forks Chromium and adds nasty features, how do you track them down if they did everything anonymously?

More to the point, if a law is passed that says "all browsers must do X,Y and Z". How to you enforce that in a world where open source is so prevalent? The big players may add the requirements to their flagship browsers, but if those browsers have open source underpinnings they have no control over the forked versions.

It's the publishers who are abusing browser capabilities, its much easier to force them in to compliance rather than trying to legislate how browsers work.

There are APRS transmitters built for balloons that are not much bigger than a matchbox. It's all line-of-sight at the VHF frequencies and you can get quite a good distance on a surprisingly low amount of power. 50 miles on 200mW what's is doable, longer range on less power is not uncommon if the conditionss are in your favour.

This is where the ham radio APRS protocol would come in handy.

It was designed for position reporting. If course not everywhere would have an APRS receiver, but I'm sure the tracker could cache data until it finds a receiving station.

I worked for a tech support and CS outsourcing company. I was developing the tools they would use for call logging and associated things.

They were growing rapidly by offering support services to all the new dot com startups. Hours were long, the pay was decent and my head was being fried by having to juggle multiple tech platforms and languages thanks to the differing requirements of the clients.

Then came the bust. Within a matter of months we went from having 2000 support people on site to just 400. To survive the company started targeting non dot com clients. For the most part that meant providing CS support for companies like utilities and retail stores. Standards went downhill and ethics became something other companies thought about. We also lost our on-site subsidised canteen.

One of our post bust clients was Comet, the now defunct UK electrical store. We provided technical support for their extended warranty holders. One of the requirements that they insisted upon was requiring the customer to attempt a full re-install of Windows before agreeing to send out an engineer. I thought this was dodgy AF, especially since the support staff were so untrained. They were making customers reformat their drives because they didn't know how to change the keyboard layout from US to UK. Part of the support staffs training was to be told that the DOG debug tool could fix noisy hard drive and they would ask callers to use it to destroy and recreate the FAT. For an IT support company they knew very little. Their head of training, who had no formal IT training of his own, had some crazy ideas about to fix computers.

One day I got a phone call and the caller introduced herself as "Hi, I'm xxx xxxx and I'm a researcher from BBC Watchdog, just to let you know I'm recording this call and it may be broadcast". While I was trying frantically to flag down a manager, the caller was demanding that I answer questions about an 85 year old WWII veteran who spent 10 years scanning photos of his army friends only to lose all his work because someone told him to reinstall Windows. I didn't usually get phone calls seeing as I was an in-house dev, what happened that day was that the everyone else had been told not to answer the number Watchdog called from (there was previous) and the phone system bounced the call around until muggins here picked it up.

I left soon after that.

This is pretty normal, especially when their are lots of rival companies doing the same thing. I used to work for a food ordering company and they felt they had no choice but to advertise their own name as rivals were using their brand name as a keyword. It wasn't cheap either, some weeks it could be as much as a few hundred euro.

Personally, I feel it crosses am ethical line. As a customer if I search for foo.bar and the first couple of result are for rival companies then Google isn't providing me with the service it claims it would. And as a business I would be forced to effectively double spend. Firstly, I would be spending time and effort on SEO to get to the top of the rankings, and then spent again to get to the top of the adverts that are obfuscating the real search results.

I know Google is a for-profit company operating in a free economy, but they still have to be ethical in what they do.

My best friend is a naval architect, for about a decade he was involved in research at a big UK university. He would joke about how the Chinese students hammered the photocopiers like no one else.

A new clean laptop is in itself suspicious, especially if you are on a business trip.

I think the expensive legal brains the company employs decided it is better to simply admit that they do it this way to stop border inspections. Better a deportation of a single employee rather than risk compromising their IT systems and data.

The big 4 consulting firms aren't single entities. Each country has its own independent branch that shares a global brand, set if principles and objectives.

The Irish branch has to comply with EU and Irish law. Think GDPR and various other laws relating to keeping financial data secure. Plus they would also have very strict contracts with their bigger clients guaranteeing the security and privacy of their super sensitive commercial data.

You would be unwise to assume that the data retrieved through a customs search of your laptop or phone wouldn't end up in your rivals possession.

It's worse than that in some cases. I used to work for a big 4 consulting firm and they had some horror stories about border device searches.

The company policy for travel outside the EU was simple... Your own laptop would go into a server room and become a remote desktop host, you'd be given a blank laptop. When you got to your destination safely you'd call up IT who'd tell you where to download the VPN software and provide you login details. If asked why you laptop was blank by border agents you were instructed to give them a copy of the company IT policy.

Which is all well and good border agents demand you go through the above process and log in to the VPN and then remote in to your own laptop. It happened on multiple occasions in several countries and in most cases the employee was deported after refusing to comply.

I think it's interesting to see how hard we've worked on making the web secure by adding all sorts of checks and protocols, but we've neglected to do the same with basic telecoms.

When I first started using web based communication platforms like Twitter and Nexmo I was really surprised to learn that I could put anything in the from field when sending a text message. All I could think was that it was a weakness that was ripe for abuse.

I believe there was a case in Germany a few years back where a group of phishers had online banking login details for several hundred users but couldn't initiate transfers without entering a PIN sent to the account holders phone via SMS. So the phishers set up a fake telephone company so that they could issue SS7 commands and have the account holders phone's temporarily redirected to another number where the PIN could be intercepted.

I think there is a false assumption amongst many people that the telephone system is inherently secure. Stuff like the above and all the robo calls coming from false numbers should warn otherwise.

"The problem with John was not just that he was misinformed, but that he was misinformed and highly motivated."

Oh yes! This rings so true with me.

One of my biggest bug-bears in IT are the leaders who have the gift of the gab and know how to BS their way through life. They have that personality that allows them to talk about any subject and people will listen assuming that they now what they are talking about.

If they know how to use those skills for the betterment of a project then they are fantastic people. In other words listening to the devs and using their skills to manipulate the higher ups to get more time and resources. Usually it works the other way round though by ignoring what the devs say and forcing their own will upon them.

For example by insisting on switching to Scrum 9 months in to a 12 month project that had been happily running on waterfall up to that point.

I posted a paragraph describing the hotel, room and restaurant as being nice and clean and that the food was good.

THen another paragraph starting with "You should be aware of the strange deposit requirement.." and then going into the detail of what happened and ending with me saying that I found the experience soured my opinion of what was otherwise a good stay.

I'm not saying it was a scam. What I am saying something odd was going on.

I booked and prepaid the hotel with my Visa debit card. When I arrived they wanted a deposit for £150, which they would only accept using a Mastercard. I have never encountered any business that only accepts Visa OR Mastercard.

I don't have a Mastercard, so I was told I had to pay the deposit in cash. That was just really odd.

Regarding the chap who had his reviews deleted, I had something very similar happen to me. I booked and prepaid for a room in a decent hotel. Upon arrival they asked for a £150 deposit. I offered them my Visa debit card, but they said they only accepted Mastercard for deposits. This really set my alarm bells ringing, but it was late and I had tired kids with me so I had go look for an ATM to get cash to pay the deposit.

The rest of the stay was Okay, just this weird deposit thing that really jarred me. So I mentioned that in my TripAdvisor review - the review dissapeared and TripAdvisor wouldn't tell me why. Looking at other review sites, plenty of other people had the same experience. It would appear that it was easier for the hotel to get these negative reviews taken off TripAdvisor than from other sites.

But why anyone takes TripAdvisor seriously after the whole "Shed at Dulwich" debacle is beyond me.

I think the extreme opposite equally applies on social media, people who would moderate themselves in real life seem to let it all out on social media. So instead of pretending to be something they are not, they reveal their truest opinions and thoughts.

For example extreme political and religious opinions. I've seen long term real life friendships broken because someone said something extreme about Brexit on facebook. I have a very religious friend who berates me constantly on facebook for being an ex-Catholic, she tells me I need to save myself etc - but she would never say that to me in real life.

Social media is so good at making people say stupid things.

Plus it was only the Ratners brand that was damaged. The Ratners group owned a shed load of other Jewellery brands and they were unaffected. The group renamed itself Signet Group and rebranded some the of Ratners stores and closed the rest.

The group carried on and became one of the biggest jewelery companies on the planet.

The speech scandal was merely a blip in the history of the company.

Sadly, I can't see that happening anytime soon. The organizations who have a vested interest in all this are just too powerful and can afford to pay for better lobbyists.

EDIT: If anything I can see publishers and advertisers trying to lobby for DMCA style laws that will make it an offence to circumvent tracking and profiling. They can spin such techniques as just an attempt to generate revenue and to circumvent them is as bad as music or software piracy.

I just had a look at the article, Privacy Badger told me there was 14 trackers on the page.