I think you might be confusing this Rolls Royce company with... itself. There is only really one Rolls Royce company, they make jet engines, marine engines, nuclear submarine engines, etc. The only confusing thing is they don't make cars, Rolls Royce cars are just a subsidiary of BMW.
From the letter it actually looks like the FDA said that they see no reason not to take the manufacturers word for it that it's safe, not that they have actually concluded for themselves that it is safe. I don't know if that counts as "approval", but I think the distinction is important.
Based on the information that Impossible Foods provided, as well as other information available to FDA, we have no questions at this time regarding Impossible Foods’ conclusion that soy leghemoglobin preparation is GRAS under its intended conditions of use to optimize flavor in ground beef analogue products intended to be cooked. This letter is not an affirmation that soy leghemoglobin preparation is GRAS under 21 CFR 170.35.
Of course I had to call them, I don't just ring the tax man for a chat. They have all the information they need for tax purposes yes, no one is suggesting/expecting that they would delete that, not sure where you got that idea. What they don't need for tax purposes is your voice print. Giving the government this is certainly extra information they didn't have before. They have created a large government-controlled biometric database, of a type never previously collected in the UK, without the informed, legitimate consent of the public and without, as far as we know, any formal consultation or approval at higher levels. As for the "minor bureaucratic cockup" as you put it, yes you could call it that, but you could equally call it a "huge legal cockup" which doesn't sound as good and certainly has more consequences.
Problem is, or at least was, that it was not optional (not when I last called them and was "invited" to enroll anyway). Well, technically it might have been because I simply refused to speak when I was told to and after several prompts it gave up, but there was no indication that you could opt-out and so most people probably did as they were told by the recorded instructions. Consent isn't valid if it's only given under coercion, if people only do it because they have to (or think they have to) then they haven't consented.
Who said anything about an enterprise environment? But even if it were, you buy a key in good faith and that Microsoft validates it, hard to see how you can be considered to be in the wrong.
> Maybe we should check the Microsoft Office licence, but I seriously doubt they would appreciate losing sales to people selling "used" versions.
Not convinced they are used keys. Like I say they activate on the MS website and they work on a single PC only (as I discovered when I tried to move one key to another PC, wouldn't let me activate it a second time). No idea where they get them, but they aren't in short supply. You can also get a lifetime 5 user Office 365 subscriptions for little more money. Haven't bothered with those, because I resent renting software even with a lifetime subscription, but how can they be dodgy?
No problems whatsoever. Keys (5 in total) registered fine on the ms office website and associated with my live account. Product's themselves connected to the net, happily updating themselves and showing as activated.
Maybe you're thinking of older versions of firefox, not the current version. Your unimaginative firefox hatred is a little out of date. Perhaps you could compare it to how firefox no longer support horrendous insecure, slow and buggy plugins any more, even though you never actually used them anyway because you already hated firefox.
You can get genuine office for £5 on eBay. While I like open source, when you can get the "real thing" for that sort of money it's not worth the hassle of using anything else. Obviously if you want to use it on an OS other than Windows then OSS is probably still the best option.
Problem is if they can't fix it in a reasonable time period they can't replace it with a working chip either. As far as I have read so far all their modern chips are affected, new chips with a proper hardware fix don't exist yet. I guess that still leaves the refund route, then you can buy an AMD - not perfect but seems better. In the UK you have up to 6 years warranty. Although the onus is on the purchaser to prove the fault is a result of an inherent defect, which is usually difficult, that won't be hard in this case since Intel has, eventually, admitted it themselves.
What Google did is wrong and they should get some form of punishment. A fine is probably appropriate (locking people up seems like overkill) as long as it is sufficiently large to make them take note. On the other hand there is a good argument for the fine being in proportion to the offence.
IANAL but I rather thought compensation in the UK was based on some actual loss or harm to the victim, it's hard to imagine how anyone affected here was harmed to the tune of a "few hundred pounds". The fact that the group is calling themselves Google You Owe Us tells us a lot about their motives.
Also, there are no technical details in the article, but from what I have seen elsewhere the issue involved not respecting a default block of third party cookies. Given that this was not set by the user, in most cases, it's will be hard to make a legal argument that what google did was against the consent of the user. The user has no way at all to signal that they don't want third party cookies, if that is the default setting, they can only opt back in (so you could argue that Apple is to blame for this whole issue). To make a case they will have to prove that they actually wanted to block them and the defaults were what they wanted. I doubt the average user knew what third party cookies were until they were offered a few hundred pounds to read up on them.
Even if Firefox only downloads a list, it is still giving information about your activity to another web site.
Yes, it tells a site that someone at your ip address (which much of the time is likely to be a DHCP address from your ISP) uses Firefox. I'm struggling to think of a serious enough situation that could arise from that to justify your level of outrage.
The underlying problem? One problem that the management of mozilla.org has is being very poor at communicating. It is common that technically-knowledgeable people don't communicate well. It is common that even people who are especially socially capable make mistakes by communicating in a flawed way.
Funny because you already seem to know all you need to about this functionality (and you clearly don't like it) and it isn't even part of Firefox yet and may well never be.
Another example of poor communication: Mozilla.org management did not handle communicating the move to Firefox 57 well. People use Firefox because of the availability of add-ons, also known as extensions. (Communicate carefully: Don't give 1 thing 2 names.) Preventing use of most add-ons without a careful public explanation tended to cause people to lose confidence in Mozilla.org and begin using Waterfox or Pale Moon browsers.
I wondered when we'd get to WebExtensions - every haters current favourite stick to beat Mozilla with.
You must have been out when they came door to door to tell you about the pending changes, but I'm not sure how you missed the sky writers and the leaflet drops! Seriously, what do you want from them? You're blaming the wrong people here anyway. Mozilla gave developers 2 years warning about support for the old addons system being dropped. They have been marking your addons as legacy to help warn people they need to get them updated for some time too, if you want something more user focused. Then of course there is reading the Mozilla site, update notes, etc. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable suggestion - to occasionally look at the site of, or release notes for, a software product you use on a daily basis.
Unfortunately most addon developers didn't bother to update their addons in a timely manner. That left them scurrying to fix their addons at the last minute to fit around a timetable they knew about for 2 years. I am aware that not everything that could be done with addons can be ported to the new system, but if addon developers had made a bit of effort sooner they could have influenced the WebExtension support and perhaps got additions made to the API. I’m not sure the Mozilla developers have always been as responsive to suggestions as would be liked, but more people getting involved at an earlier stage would almost certainly have worked out better.
It was only by dropping the old addon system that they were able to give us a new, fast, efficient browser to keep up with the likes of Chrome. I'm sure most of the people whining about the change were also whining about how far behind Firefox was getting. And performance wasn't the only problem with the old system - no permissions system, no security, addons breaking from release to release of Firefox, etc.
So now, Firefox will be tracking and harvesting the sites I visit? Wow, Mozilla really is turning Firefox into a Chrome clone.
Having looked at the code: No, it downloads a breach list from here: https://stage.haveibeenpwned.c... It does not send all your browsing history to them. If you enter your email address that will be the sent to the site for checking, but that's obviously optional.
$95 a month!?!?! What on earth are you getting for that? Even after you take $700 off for the phone you're giving your network over $1500 for 2 years of cell phone use. For comparison in the UK I've paid £0.99/month for the last 2 years, on a contract only deal (and after cashback).
For the most part all of that is true in the UK too. Phones are often locked, but the networks will generally unlock them for free, at least once you are out of contract. What I assume is different here vs Belgium is that when people get the phone from the network they aren't paying up front for it, they get it "free" (or almost) on an expensive monthly contract (essentially a hire-purchase agreement, not sure if that term is familiar in Belgium). So there is little point having your phone unlocked at time of purchase, or before the end of your contract, because you're tied in to the network for typically 2 years anyway. Your roaming idea is interesting, but I suspect it will fall down on costs to call you. Certainly from here calling a foreign mobile is very expensive and the EU roaming situation doesn't cover that. I suspect that's not something that will ever be regulated. Also, foreign customer service related issues could be a problem. On the plus side, as a roamer in your own country, you'd have access to all the networks there instead of only being able to connect to your own, potentially giving your much better coverage.
The essential reminds me of the Nexus days, where a flagship class phone could be had for a reasonable price.
The Nexus 4 launched at $300 for the base model and after 8 months went down to $200. That's a big difference, although I think the Essential is more "flagship" (in the sense of higher spec, not so much in the big name sense compared to Google/LG) than the Nexus 4 was at the time.
I've just switched my Nexus 4 (running Android 7.1.2 perfectly well) for a Xiaomi Mi A1. It's not as high spec as the Essential but it's pretty reasonable and only costs $220. While the Nexus hasn't really needed replacing, I've fancied something new for a while (mostly for more space and 4g) but couldn't find anything I thought was an equivalent deal to the Nexus 4 at the time of purchase - decent but not top spec, unlocked (network and bootloader), sensibly priced, no oem bloat and going to get a good user base for roms (hence still able to run latest android). The A1 finally seemed to be the a phone that fit the bill, and so far so good (ok, only on day 2 so far!). Future rom support is of course yet to be seen, but as an android one phone with a promised update to android 8 by the end of the year (which should include Treble) I think the prospects are pretty good.
It doesn't say only sprint stores, it says the only carrier stores are sprint stores, i.e. other networks aren't selling the phone themselves. At least here in the UK a significant proportion of people still get their phones direct from the networks instead of buying them outright.
They ask you to sign up for a free account for full text, so you have to jump through one small hoop, but to describe it as "paywalled" and "not for the public" is simply false.
Perhaps you forgot to read even the summary, this is a hardware maker talking about hardware features. IOS updates, however rapidly and widely distributed, are never going to be able to add any of the features listed above.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what 5G has got to do with this. Not a lot of detail, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't work on 4G, 3G or 2G for that matter.
I think you might be confusing this Rolls Royce company with... itself. There is only really one Rolls Royce company, they make jet engines, marine engines, nuclear submarine engines, etc. The only confusing thing is they don't make cars, Rolls Royce cars are just a subsidiary of BMW.
Yes, but you'll never be able to get a mortgage, loan, new mobile phone contract, insurance, etc. again.
From the letter it actually looks like the FDA said that they see no reason not to take the manufacturers word for it that it's safe, not that they have actually concluded for themselves that it is safe. I don't know if that counts as "approval", but I think the distinction is important.
Based on the information that Impossible Foods provided, as well as other information available to FDA, we have no questions at this time regarding Impossible Foods’ conclusion that soy leghemoglobin preparation is GRAS under its intended conditions of use to optimize flavor in ground beef analogue products intended to be cooked. This letter is not an affirmation that soy leghemoglobin preparation is GRAS under 21 CFR 170.35.
I'm fairly sure the GDPR applies everywhere personal data is collected, not just online.
Of course I had to call them, I don't just ring the tax man for a chat. They have all the information they need for tax purposes yes, no one is suggesting/expecting that they would delete that, not sure where you got that idea. What they don't need for tax purposes is your voice print. Giving the government this is certainly extra information they didn't have before. They have created a large government-controlled biometric database, of a type never previously collected in the UK, without the informed, legitimate consent of the public and without, as far as we know, any formal consultation or approval at higher levels. As for the "minor bureaucratic cockup" as you put it, yes you could call it that, but you could equally call it a "huge legal cockup" which doesn't sound as good and certainly has more consequences.
Problem is, or at least was, that it was not optional (not when I last called them and was "invited" to enroll anyway). Well, technically it might have been because I simply refused to speak when I was told to and after several prompts it gave up, but there was no indication that you could opt-out and so most people probably did as they were told by the recorded instructions. Consent isn't valid if it's only given under coercion, if people only do it because they have to (or think they have to) then they haven't consented.
Who said anything about an enterprise environment? But even if it were, you buy a key in good faith and that Microsoft validates it, hard to see how you can be considered to be in the wrong.
> Maybe we should check the Microsoft Office licence, but I seriously doubt they would appreciate losing sales to people selling "used" versions.
Not convinced they are used keys. Like I say they activate on the MS website and they work on a single PC only (as I discovered when I tried to move one key to another PC, wouldn't let me activate it a second time). No idea where they get them, but they aren't in short supply. You can also get a lifetime 5 user Office 365 subscriptions for little more money. Haven't bothered with those, because I resent renting software even with a lifetime subscription, but how can they be dodgy?
You want to expand on that a bit? What exactly do you think is the issue?
No problems whatsoever. Keys (5 in total) registered fine on the ms office website and associated with my live account. Product's themselves connected to the net, happily updating themselves and showing as activated.
Maybe you're thinking of older versions of firefox, not the current version. Your unimaginative firefox hatred is a little out of date. Perhaps you could compare it to how firefox no longer support horrendous insecure, slow and buggy plugins any more, even though you never actually used them anyway because you already hated firefox.
You can get genuine office for £5 on eBay. While I like open source, when you can get the "real thing" for that sort of money it's not worth the hassle of using anything else. Obviously if you want to use it on an OS other than Windows then OSS is probably still the best option.
Problem is if they can't fix it in a reasonable time period they can't replace it with a working chip either. As far as I have read so far all their modern chips are affected, new chips with a proper hardware fix don't exist yet. I guess that still leaves the refund route, then you can buy an AMD - not perfect but seems better. In the UK you have up to 6 years warranty. Although the onus is on the purchaser to prove the fault is a result of an inherent defect, which is usually difficult, that won't be hard in this case since Intel has, eventually, admitted it themselves.
What Google did is wrong and they should get some form of punishment. A fine is probably appropriate (locking people up seems like overkill) as long as it is sufficiently large to make them take note. On the other hand there is a good argument for the fine being in proportion to the offence.
IANAL but I rather thought compensation in the UK was based on some actual loss or harm to the victim, it's hard to imagine how anyone affected here was harmed to the tune of a "few hundred pounds". The fact that the group is calling themselves Google You Owe Us tells us a lot about their motives.
Also, there are no technical details in the article, but from what I have seen elsewhere the issue involved not respecting a default block of third party cookies. Given that this was not set by the user, in most cases, it's will be hard to make a legal argument that what google did was against the consent of the user. The user has no way at all to signal that they don't want third party cookies, if that is the default setting, they can only opt back in (so you could argue that Apple is to blame for this whole issue). To make a case they will have to prove that they actually wanted to block them and the defaults were what they wanted. I doubt the average user knew what third party cookies were until they were offered a few hundred pounds to read up on them.
Even if Firefox only downloads a list, it is still giving information about your activity to another web site.
Yes, it tells a site that someone at your ip address (which much of the time is likely to be a DHCP address from your ISP) uses Firefox. I'm struggling to think of a serious enough situation that could arise from that to justify your level of outrage.
The underlying problem? One problem that the management of mozilla.org has is being very poor at communicating. It is common that technically-knowledgeable people don't communicate well. It is common that even people who are especially socially capable make mistakes by communicating in a flawed way.
Funny because you already seem to know all you need to about this functionality (and you clearly don't like it) and it isn't even part of Firefox yet and may well never be.
Another example of poor communication: Mozilla.org management did not handle communicating the move to Firefox 57 well. People use Firefox because of the availability of add-ons, also known as extensions. (Communicate carefully: Don't give 1 thing 2 names.) Preventing use of most add-ons without a careful public explanation tended to cause people to lose confidence in Mozilla.org and begin using Waterfox or Pale Moon browsers.
I wondered when we'd get to WebExtensions - every haters current favourite stick to beat Mozilla with.
You must have been out when they came door to door to tell you about the pending changes, but I'm not sure how you missed the sky writers and the leaflet drops! Seriously, what do you want from them? You're blaming the wrong people here anyway. Mozilla gave developers 2 years warning about support for the old addons system being dropped. They have been marking your addons as legacy to help warn people they need to get them updated for some time too, if you want something more user focused. Then of course there is reading the Mozilla site, update notes, etc. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable suggestion - to occasionally look at the site of, or release notes for, a software product you use on a daily basis.
Unfortunately most addon developers didn't bother to update their addons in a timely manner. That left them scurrying to fix their addons at the last minute to fit around a timetable they knew about for 2 years. I am aware that not everything that could be done with addons can be ported to the new system, but if addon developers had made a bit of effort sooner they could have influenced the WebExtension support and perhaps got additions made to the API. I’m not sure the Mozilla developers have always been as responsive to suggestions as would be liked, but more people getting involved at an earlier stage would almost certainly have worked out better.
It was only by dropping the old addon system that they were able to give us a new, fast, efficient browser to keep up with the likes of Chrome. I'm sure most of the people whining about the change were also whining about how far behind Firefox was getting. And performance wasn't the only problem with the old system - no permissions system, no security, addons breaking from release to release of Firefox, etc.
So now, Firefox will be tracking and harvesting the sites I visit? Wow, Mozilla really is turning Firefox into a Chrome clone.
Having looked at the code: No, it downloads a breach list from here: https://stage.haveibeenpwned.c... It does not send all your browsing history to them.
If you enter your email address that will be the sent to the site for checking, but that's obviously optional.
Why am I reading this as "Firefox will share your browsing history with another partner."
Probably because you have a bias.
Is this list downloaded and compared locally? I doubt it too.
Yes, this is exactly how it works. It downloads a list from here: https://stage.haveibeenpwned.c...
The beauty of open source code is you can see how it works, if you aren't too lazy to just not bother.
$95 a month!?!?! What on earth are you getting for that? Even after you take $700 off for the phone you're giving your network over $1500 for 2 years of cell phone use. For comparison in the UK I've paid £0.99/month for the last 2 years, on a contract only deal (and after cashback).
For the most part all of that is true in the UK too. Phones are often locked, but the networks will generally unlock them for free, at least once you are out of contract. What I assume is different here vs Belgium is that when people get the phone from the network they aren't paying up front for it, they get it "free" (or almost) on an expensive monthly contract (essentially a hire-purchase agreement, not sure if that term is familiar in Belgium). So there is little point having your phone unlocked at time of purchase, or before the end of your contract, because you're tied in to the network for typically 2 years anyway.
Your roaming idea is interesting, but I suspect it will fall down on costs to call you. Certainly from here calling a foreign mobile is very expensive and the EU roaming situation doesn't cover that. I suspect that's not something that will ever be regulated. Also, foreign customer service related issues could be a problem. On the plus side, as a roamer in your own country, you'd have access to all the networks there instead of only being able to connect to your own, potentially giving your much better coverage.
The essential reminds me of the Nexus days, where a flagship class phone could be had for a reasonable price.
The Nexus 4 launched at $300 for the base model and after 8 months went down to $200. That's a big difference, although I think the Essential is more "flagship" (in the sense of higher spec, not so much in the big name sense compared to Google/LG) than the Nexus 4 was at the time.
I've just switched my Nexus 4 (running Android 7.1.2 perfectly well) for a Xiaomi Mi A1. It's not as high spec as the Essential but it's pretty reasonable and only costs $220. While the Nexus hasn't really needed replacing, I've fancied something new for a while (mostly for more space and 4g) but couldn't find anything I thought was an equivalent deal to the Nexus 4 at the time of purchase - decent but not top spec, unlocked (network and bootloader), sensibly priced, no oem bloat and going to get a good user base for roms (hence still able to run latest android). The A1 finally seemed to be the a phone that fit the bill, and so far so good (ok, only on day 2 so far!). Future rom support is of course yet to be seen, but as an android one phone with a promised update to android 8 by the end of the year (which should include Treble) I think the prospects are pretty good.
It doesn't say only sprint stores, it says the only carrier stores are sprint stores, i.e. other networks aren't selling the phone themselves. At least here in the UK a significant proportion of people still get their phones direct from the networks instead of buying them outright.
They ask you to sign up for a free account for full text, so you have to jump through one small hoop, but to describe it as "paywalled" and "not for the public" is simply false.
Perhaps you forgot to read even the summary, this is a hardware maker talking about hardware features. IOS updates, however rapidly and widely distributed, are never going to be able to add any of the features listed above.