tommorris

Also having to have a phone number thing to set up an account sucks (same with Signal, WhatsApp etc.).

Speak for yourself, but the longer the tool has been around, the more I trust it. One of the chief selling points of learning something like Vim or Emacs is precisely that it isn't going to disappear next week and become abandonware (TextMate) or just lose interest from people because something else came along (Sublime Text → Atom/VS Code).

Same with a lot of developer tools. (This is sometimes bad. It is still taking a long time for people to migrate to Python 3.x, and the transition from CVS/SVN to Git and other DVCS was pretty slow.)

From the article:

> The problem is, radio jammers are very illegal in the UK. Deliberate interference—even in a theatre, cinema, library, or examination hall—is an offence under the Wireless Telegraphy Act and can land you in jail for a couple of years, and/or an unlimited fine.

Specific policy page from Ofcom: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/radio-spectrum-and-the-law...

They are legal to use in prisons and have been since the passage of the Prisons (Interference with Wireless Telegraphy) Act 2012. https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/prisonsinterfer...

There's also an issue of EU law. 1999/5/EC, aka. "R&TTE", the Radio and Telecommunications Terminal Equipment Directive, makes it illegal to sell a mobile phone jammer in the EU marketplace. See the last section of https://web.archive.org/web/20140312031150/http://ec.europa....

I'm presuming that this rather ridiculous chief superintendent is suggesting that the law ought to be amended so that wi-fi (and perhaps cellular network) blockers affixed to those convicted of hacking-related offences would be permitted.

There's no reason Parliament couldn't do that if it decided to, even if the likelihood of Parliament and Ofcom agreeing to such an arrangement is highly improbable.

Also, a magical wi-fi and cell blocker that stops some teenage hacker hooking up to the Internet without affecting the people they run in to is going to be impossible to build. Good luck when someone co-opts said blocker to block police AirWave TETRA radio while doing their nefarious deeds over a long piece of Cat 5.

iTunes and other media players have had that exact dilemma...

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...

Awesome, just in time for Britain to leave and for it to no longer apply to us. :(

The flipside of that is the response to the AIDS crisis. If it hadn't been for activists from groups like ACT-UP and Queer Nation screaming, shouting and making a big stink about the need for a response from the FDA, the federal government more generally, and the pharmaceutical industry, there'd be a whole lot of people who wouldn't be alive today.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/27/how-to-survive-a-plagu...

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/ray-filar/silen...

Photo RAW/workflow management:

- Lightroom

- Aperture (now discontinued)

- Darktable (open source, does RAW conversion but not great on library management)

- CaptureOne

- ???

They originate in Taiwan, but they have a company registered in Fountain Valley, California. Company number C1362992, registered since 1986.

http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.as...

Feel free to search for it on the California Secretary of State's website: https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/

If they have legal incorporation in the United States, it is fair game for the FTC to go after their US-based company for failure to protect US consumers. Don't want legal liability in the US for your business activity, don't incorporate in the US.

> the result of this government action is that startups and crowd funded projects are less viable

If those projects are being run by people who are incompetent and unable to consider the importance of protecting user privacy through competent security, maybe that isn't such a bad thing. If FAA rules stop people from crowdfunding new passenger aircraft and leave it to the companies who actually have the skills, expertise and responsibility to build a plane with the relevant safety measures, as an airline passenger, I'm okay with that.

> a foreign corporation

> California-based D-Link Systems, Inc.

If you don't want to be bound by the laws of the United States and the State of California, maybe don't incorporate there.

It's not just about money, it's about tracking.

From the AdNauseam website:

> AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas.

> In light of the industry's failure to self-regulate or otherwise address the excesses of network tracking, AdNauseam allows individual users to take matters into their own hands, fighting back against unilateral surveillance.

AdNauseam's developers want to break the current Big data/surveillance-based advertising model. That is not the only possible model for advertising. Something like The Deck model, where there's no tracking or flashing jumping Punch the Monkey, just a static image link to the advertiser landing page, is a possibility.

The government also have an interest in ensuring that the nation's businesses don't fuck up due to easily preventable infosec failure. Because infosec fails equals lost consumer confidence, lost economic development, lost taxes and much else besides. Governments have wider interests beyond simply sniffing all your traffic.

This is why the UK's National Cyber Security Centre - which is the friendly business-and-civilian-facing side of GCHQ - publish lots of guidance telling people to use TLS.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=20&q=allintext%3Ahttps+s...

Last time I was in Germany, I saw a few homeless men sitting at the side of the road, asking a family who were walking to church if they could have the empty plastic bottles. All three of the children rolled their empty bottles across the street to the homeless men. They had a box with quite a few empty plastic water bottles in it.

One of many things that impressed me in Germany.

When a junior dev tries to refactor said class and accidentally screws around with the behaviour of the setter function, having the tests blow up is handy.

A worrying number of small companies who hire "an IT guy" who will promptly install an unpatched old version of Exchange Server and only turn on POP3. (Yes, paying for Exchange and not having ActiveSync.)

This is why the best thing for most small companies is to just use hosted Google or Microsoft mail.

Strange, I always thought of Hooli as Yahoo, but that might be because I know a lot of programmers who used to work at Yahoo and have heard the dysfunctions first hand over beer more.

Yup, everyone in a country of 200 million people is connected. Just like everyone in Britain knows the Queen.

Dumb is often good enough for big companies and governments. (See: DRM.)

If you are the sort of person who is able to change your DNS, you are also capable enough to use foreign VPNs etc.

Just social media and not Globo TV etc.?

Perfectly legal to charge for public domain photos, just as it is legal to charge for software that's released under open source licenses, so long as you follow the terms of the license.

People are lazy and will pay money so they don't have to think about licensing. If you are a graphic designer working in an ad agency and you have a choice between "go online and download a PD work and not be sure" and "pay Getty $50 and if there's a copyright issue, you can tell your boss that you paid Getty", which do you do? Pop it on the corporate credit card is the easier option.

It's the same reason big companies were suspicious of open source for a long time. And some still are.

London has had the Congestion Charge since 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge

Several million devices sold ≠ several million people buying software for device.

And widely used by millions of people?

That's why Facebook changed their APIs in 2014. Before any app could ask for anything. Now apps can only ask for public profile data, email address and a list of your friends that have also installed the app.

Before you could also get stuff like education and work history, family relationships, relationship status, sexual orientation and a whole load of other stuff that could potentially cause a lot of trouble. And people would happily click OK just to play FarmVille or whatever.

Now Facebook makes it so any app needing advanced permissions data has to be reviewed by Facebook first.

See https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2014/04/30/the-new...

This is the same Steve Jobs who said there would never be an iPod that did video about a year before they did so.

They may have had the app store model planned out from the start for the next version of the iPhone, but didn't want to talk about it when releasing the first version because that would highlight the shortcomings of the existing product and cut into sales. But you still have to have an answer to the question of how you make software for the new product, so they say build web apps.

> I don't want a vendor to get inbetween me and my user audience, but that problem applies equally to iOS devices and gaming consoles.

So, pre-iPhone, the market for downloadable apps for mobile phones was huge and there wasn't any intermediary parties (like, say, network operators) getting in the way of developers, right?

Basically, like with so many things, The Big Lebowski is right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKjBFsyYC0g

I didn't take that from it. See "I'm not endorsing making menus in CSS." I'm endorsing progressive enhancement.

Those that disable JavaScript do have a choice in it, but those who don't have JavaScript because it has been disabled for them, or because they are using a device that doesn't support JavaScript, don't have a choice in the matter.

> 0.001% that doesn't use JS

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...

1.1% of users don't see JavaScript enhancements. Most because it doesn't load, not because they've disabled it. Also, some people use browsers that don't support JavaScript, or their ISP filters JavaScript, or a whole bunch of other things.

I'm not endorsing making menus in CSS. I'm just saying that it isn't "accessibility vs. people who turn JS off".

As the link says: progressive enhancement is the solution to this.

Also, doctors who specialise in hearing loss (given the volume we pump into our ears to block out the noise in open plan offices), as well as pharmaceutical companies making any drugs that deal with increases in stress (another fun side-effect of open plan nonsense).

See https://tommorris.org/posts/9403