Sorry to interrupt your little rant of hurt American exceptionalism, but Facebook were issued with the maximum fine for the laws pertaining at the time for something that was actually illegal at the time. GDPR rules would have allowed a much greater fine to be levied but it wasn't because "ex post facto" is simply a figment of your imagination and the offences were committed before those rules came into force.
Why do they need new laws? Because, despite assurances, Facebook is still pushing out swathes of overtly political advertising without effectively identifying the source and appears to be failing miserably to control seriously harmful content that is leading to the children harming and killing themselves. Also, it appears that Facebook seem to accept that they may have been breaking the law and haven't been that concerned about it: the law, if that be true, needs to be made more compelling.
Politics was very reluctant to take on tech - partly because they didn't understand it and partly because they didn't want to be seen to be stifling economic growth. However, they now do understand it - it's not about tech and it's not about beneficial economic growth, it's about an amoral group of rich people making themselves richer still. So they now feel rather more comfortable about legislating.
... and they now have a copy of his passport. Great result!
I'm not sure how the production of a passport gives any assurance of the identity of the requestor, especially if they didn't ask for it when the account was set up in the first place. It does sound very much like a charade to deter people from going through the (otherwise free) process of asking for their data.
The court decided he was a "worker" - that's an intermediate category between being employed and self-employed. You'd think the categories would be aligned for the purposes of employment law and tax law, but that would be too easy...
HMRC are coming after people who were operating through service companies (and paid themselves mostly in dividends therefore avoiding NI altogether). but self-employed people now pay a substantially similar level of NI to the employed for the services they receive (given that they don't get unemployment benefit, for example) so there would be little benefit in trying to make a case.
There are a lot of fixed costs that apply to businesses - rent, property taxes, wages, materials... A business that can't cover its fixed costs and make a decent margin isn't a business, it's simply a poor choice of how to make use of the associated labour and capital.
It isn't illegal to use surveillance on your employees.
That rather depends on the legal jurisdiction of their employment and the type of surveillance. In the EU, employees will normally be entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy. Which raises the interesting question of whether more intrusive surveillance in the US is a matter of "because we should" or simply "because we can".
If that were true, it would be entirely unnecessary to have a huge government apparatus trying to enforce it
That argument holds true only if the same people who profit unequally from and consequently control the current system are prepared to relinquish their relative status. History, however, is littered with examples of huge government apparatuses being used to maintain the privilege of a specific group relative to another, even if everyone would be benefit in absolute terms from that privilege being removed.
The reason people argue against diversity is not that they consciously defy economic sense, but because they don't want that economic sense to benefit someone else more than it benefits them - it's not about the size of the pie but about the current slicing arrangements.
The point about regulation in this case is that it was precisely intended to drive a different outcome to the one that competition would produce. The EU's goal was to provide competition in the provision of phone services rather than competition in the technology for phone services. The view was the GSM was good enough (which it in fact was for the technology of the time) and that it was of more socio-economic value for people to be able to switch easily between different providers, even as they travelled across Europe, than have a potentially more advanced service that locked them into specific suppliers in specific regions.
In that they were reasonably successful and Europe seems to be doing just fine meeting the demand for wireless services at relatively low cost. Competition will deliver a winner, as long as you can constrain the competition to a small number of variables, If not, well - take a look at your nearest peacock,
RISC-V is just an instruction set architecture - and one that simply bundles up some well-established practice into a neater package. It offers nothing that a current processor cannot provide - with the exception of having an IPR-free instruction set. Which would at best a marginal gain because the first thing any of the mainstream chip vendors would do would be to "enhance" it with a bunch of proprietary instructions so they had a distinctive product.
There's nothing in the spec about implementation - you're free to recreate Meltdown and Spectre and be fully compliant as far as I can tell - so I can see no benefit.
What we are going to need going forwards - if we're serious about battling malicious software - are things like more protection rings (or similar) and hence faster mode-switching, better memory protection, container-oriented virtualisation (including better support for DMA), and possibly realising that we now have sufficient memory to run kernels mostly without address translation. That will probably involve some sort of Virtual Memory system in which an Address Space ID is part of the address for both cache efficiency and protection purposes. I don't think we'll get them, because it would involve significant changes, not to the silicon, but to the mindset of Operating System developers, most of whom seem to have been desperately reinventing Multics for the last 50 years.
It's not the policies that are the problem, it's the process of implementing them.
The problem here is that Google opened up those policies for debate and thereby lifted the cover on a cesspit. Rather than realise they'd made a mistake and shut that debate down they let it run and left the impression that their diversity policies were open to influence by their employees, many of whom have underdeveloped social skills, an overdeveloped sense of their own worth and no clue of how a business is run. Cue ill-tempered name-calling.
If you believe you need a diversity policy, you devise it and impose it, you don't debate it with the people who will that assume they're the target of it (whether they are or not) because you want them to be clear they'll be fired if they don't comply.
not a huge deal 20 years ago, when computers with Intel CPUs were almost always single-user machines
20 years ago we'd had Windows 95 OSR 2 and Windows 98 was close to shipping. People were already hooked up to the Internet and all that shoddy code with its buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs was pristine and untroubled by fuzzers and static analysis. It wasn't a huge deal because writing remote exploits hadn't yet become popular, not because such exploits were impossible.
And, of course, there was a hacky sort of OS mitigation.
If only there was some sort of Police Work that could be done to solve these crimes
Worse than that, the crime is essentially solved already - the name and whereabouts of the perpetrator are not in question. This would seem to be part of the same desperate search that played out in Las Vegas to "find a motive" and the only apparent reason why they would be doing that is to somehow prove that there is something more to mass killings than the fact that an individual with a grudge has access to an unlimited supply of weaponary.
There really aren't. I grew up with vinyl and it was better than shellac, but that's as far as it goes. Leaving aside the mechanical noise from the groove walls and dust and scratches, mastering a vinyl record is a delicate balance between dynamic range and playing time which means the engineer doing it has his hand on the compression knob to stop one groove opening up into another. If you look at the type of devices that people are playing vinyl on, they'd have been considered cheap and shoddy when vinyl was all you could get and they're largely comparing the sound with what they get from their mobile phones.
A decent digital source will always be better, given the same amplification chain, and most stuff put onto vinyl will now have come from a digital master anyway at some point. The people who buy vinyl are mostly the same people who would buy massively expensive audio cables or rework their digital pictures to look like Polaroids.
Between them, Samsung and LG make a third of the world's TV sets. Regional players like Vestel make a lot of the rest. You don't really get much of a choice of supplier.
More to the point, why should these serious "mistakes" be possible at all.
If these errors keep occurring, you have to stop blaming the web developers and start blaming the technology. There is no good reason that cross-site scripting or session hacking should even be possible. It's a mad idea to turn user input into a human-readable SQL command string when no human needs to read it.
The problem is that we stared off with insecure shoddy hacks and there has been a whole slew of incremental mitigations, none of which happens by default in order not to break further the already-broken crap that's out there. That's not the fault of the application developers, that's the fault of the browser and server developers.
I'm so old I remember when tech companies used to hire individuals based on their ability to do the work..
No. You simply remember the times you were hired and your self-belief makes you assume that you were the most qualified applicant. It's not true now and never has been.
Basically nobody that criticizes him has actually read what he wrote.
Not true. I've read every sorry, whining word of it.
He mentions nothing about actual outcomes - whether women are delivering value for their salary - and simply assumes that getting through the employment process is an accurate proxy for their relative value to the corporation. It only matters if women are predisposed to be more co-operative or sympathetic and if this is a genetic rather than a social trait if this leads them to perform less (or indeed more) effectively in the work they are employed to do - and about this he is silent.
What he does assert is that women have biological traits that make them less likely to get through employment interviews and then decries positive discrmination that biases the employment process in their favour. Now it seems to me that if, once employed, a particular segment of society performs just as well as another but that the employment process favours a different segment of society then you would want to fix your employment process because it was clearly failing to identify the full gamut of potential hires, not simply claim that one segment of society was genetically programmed to fail the employment process and there wasn't anything to be done about it.
So, if he'd produced any evidence that his female colleagues perform less well, he might have a point. Although, maybe not even then, as some research shows that men will underestimate the achievements of female colleages and overestimate the achievements of male colleagues, so it would rather depend on who collected the evidence and how. But he didn't. And the most likely reason he didn't was that he has a prejudice masquerading as a political view and wasn't really interested in the only evidence that's relevant.
What's going on is an over-zealous application of an Anton Piller Order. Its intent is to allow a Plaintiff in a civil case to secure vital evidence before it is destroyed by the Defendant. It is effectively a court order to the Defendant to deliver up any relevant evidence and failure to do so is a Contempt of Court. The only relevant questions that a Defendant may be asked relate to the existence or whereabouts of evidential material. They were judicially invented in the mid 70s in the UK. Even if they are used precisely for the purpose for which they are granted they are extremely controversial and have been the subject of challenges in the various common-law jurisdictions where they are applied.
For that reason, there are very clear rules in Canada about how searches may be conducted and those rules were clearly violated in this case, but that doesn't invalidate the evidence itself.
Firstly, the Swedish Prosecution Authority is not politically appointed in the way, say, a US District Attorney is.
Secondly, it's the duty of the law enforcement authorities to investigate complaints and bring prosecutions where there is reasonable grounds to do so.
All that has happened here is that the prosecutor has said there's nothing further to be done with the case at present as the investigation is effectively stalled while one party is inaccessible as he is refugee from justice abetted by a nation state. It's Ecuador that's playing politics here, not Sweden.
You're an Uber exec. You have access to billions of dollars (literally) of other people's money and they've demonstrated, by tolerating the whacky antics of the company to date, that they really don't care how you spend it and don't ever expect to see it back.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do they need new laws? Because, despite assurances, Facebook is still pushing out swathes of overtly political advertising without effectively identifying the source and appears to be failing miserably to control seriously harmful content that is leading to the children harming and killing themselves. Also, it appears that Facebook seem to accept that they may have been breaking the law and haven't been that concerned about it: the law, if that be true, needs to be made more compelling.
Politics was very reluctant to take on tech - partly because they didn't understand it and partly because they didn't want to be seen to be stifling economic growth. However, they now do understand it - it's not about tech and it's not about beneficial economic growth, it's about an amoral group of rich people making themselves richer still. So they now feel rather more comfortable about legislating.
I'm not sure how the production of a passport gives any assurance of the identity of the requestor, especially if they didn't ask for it when the account was set up in the first place. It does sound very much like a charade to deter people from going through the (otherwise free) process of asking for their data.
... Apple truly understands.
That right to bear arms is sure working wonders for the liberty of the individual.
The court decided he was a "worker" - that's an intermediate category between being employed and self-employed. You'd think the categories would be aligned for the purposes of employment law and tax law, but that would be too easy...
HMRC are coming after people who were operating through service companies (and paid themselves mostly in dividends therefore avoiding NI altogether). but self-employed people now pay a substantially similar level of NI to the employed for the services they receive (given that they don't get unemployment benefit, for example) so there would be little benefit in trying to make a case.
This hit low margin businesses hard.
There are a lot of fixed costs that apply to businesses - rent, property taxes, wages, materials... A business that can't cover its fixed costs and make a decent margin isn't a business, it's simply a poor choice of how to make use of the associated labour and capital.
It isn't illegal to use surveillance on your employees.
That rather depends on the legal jurisdiction of their employment and the type of surveillance. In the EU, employees will normally be entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy. Which raises the interesting question of whether more intrusive surveillance in the US is a matter of "because we should" or simply "because we can".
If that were true, it would be entirely unnecessary to have a huge government apparatus trying to enforce it
That argument holds true only if the same people who profit unequally from and consequently control the current system are prepared to relinquish their relative status. History, however, is littered with examples of huge government apparatuses being used to maintain the privilege of a specific group relative to another, even if everyone would be benefit in absolute terms from that privilege being removed.
The reason people argue against diversity is not that they consciously defy economic sense, but because they don't want that economic sense to benefit someone else more than it benefits them - it's not about the size of the pie but about the current slicing arrangements.
the EU mandating GSM
The point about regulation in this case is that it was precisely intended to drive a different outcome to the one that competition would produce. The EU's goal was to provide competition in the provision of phone services rather than competition in the technology for phone services. The view was the GSM was good enough (which it in fact was for the technology of the time) and that it was of more socio-economic value for people to be able to switch easily between different providers, even as they travelled across Europe, than have a potentially more advanced service that locked them into specific suppliers in specific regions.
In that they were reasonably successful and Europe seems to be doing just fine meeting the demand for wireless services at relatively low cost. Competition will deliver a winner, as long as you can constrain the competition to a small number of variables, If not, well - take a look at your nearest peacock,
Maybe it's just a cover for bugs in the mapping software...
There's nothing in the spec about implementation - you're free to recreate Meltdown and Spectre and be fully compliant as far as I can tell - so I can see no benefit.
What we are going to need going forwards - if we're serious about battling malicious software - are things like more protection rings (or similar) and hence faster mode-switching, better memory protection, container-oriented virtualisation (including better support for DMA), and possibly realising that we now have sufficient memory to run kernels mostly without address translation. That will probably involve some sort of Virtual Memory system in which an Address Space ID is part of the address for both cache efficiency and protection purposes. I don't think we'll get them, because it would involve significant changes, not to the silicon, but to the mindset of Operating System developers, most of whom seem to have been desperately reinventing Multics for the last 50 years.
If you believe you need a diversity policy, you devise it and impose it, you don't debate it with the people who will that assume they're the target of it (whether they are or not) because you want them to be clear they'll be fired if they don't comply.
not a huge deal 20 years ago, when computers with Intel CPUs were almost always single-user machines
20 years ago we'd had Windows 95 OSR 2 and Windows 98 was close to shipping. People were already hooked up to the Internet and all that shoddy code with its buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs was pristine and untroubled by fuzzers and static analysis. It wasn't a huge deal because writing remote exploits hadn't yet become popular, not because such exploits were impossible. And, of course, there was a hacky sort of OS mitigation.
Would you like some tissues? I can recommend Kleenex...
Yes, I thought Tim had a year or two left before the HRT...
If only there was some sort of Police Work that could be done to solve these crimes
Worse than that, the crime is essentially solved already - the name and whereabouts of the perpetrator are not in question. This would seem to be part of the same desperate search that played out in Las Vegas to "find a motive" and the only apparent reason why they would be doing that is to somehow prove that there is something more to mass killings than the fact that an individual with a grudge has access to an unlimited supply of weaponary.
There's arguments to be made about sound quality
There really aren't. I grew up with vinyl and it was better than shellac, but that's as far as it goes. Leaving aside the mechanical noise from the groove walls and dust and scratches, mastering a vinyl record is a delicate balance between dynamic range and playing time which means the engineer doing it has his hand on the compression knob to stop one groove opening up into another. If you look at the type of devices that people are playing vinyl on, they'd have been considered cheap and shoddy when vinyl was all you could get and they're largely comparing the sound with what they get from their mobile phones.
A decent digital source will always be better, given the same amplification chain, and most stuff put onto vinyl will now have come from a digital master anyway at some point. The people who buy vinyl are mostly the same people who would buy massively expensive audio cables or rework their digital pictures to look like Polaroids.
Between them, Samsung and LG make a third of the world's TV sets. Regional players like Vestel make a lot of the rest. You don't really get much of a choice of supplier.
If these errors keep occurring, you have to stop blaming the web developers and start blaming the technology. There is no good reason that cross-site scripting or session hacking should even be possible. It's a mad idea to turn user input into a human-readable SQL command string when no human needs to read it.
The problem is that we stared off with insecure shoddy hacks and there has been a whole slew of incremental mitigations, none of which happens by default in order not to break further the already-broken crap that's out there. That's not the fault of the application developers, that's the fault of the browser and server developers.
I'm so old I remember when tech companies used to hire individuals based on their ability to do the work..
No. You simply remember the times you were hired and your self-belief makes you assume that you were the most qualified applicant. It's not true now and never has been.
Basically nobody that criticizes him has actually read what he wrote.
Not true. I've read every sorry, whining word of it.
He mentions nothing about actual outcomes - whether women are delivering value for their salary - and simply assumes that getting through the employment process is an accurate proxy for their relative value to the corporation. It only matters if women are predisposed to be more co-operative or sympathetic and if this is a genetic rather than a social trait if this leads them to perform less (or indeed more) effectively in the work they are employed to do - and about this he is silent.
What he does assert is that women have biological traits that make them less likely to get through employment interviews and then decries positive discrmination that biases the employment process in their favour. Now it seems to me that if, once employed, a particular segment of society performs just as well as another but that the employment process favours a different segment of society then you would want to fix your employment process because it was clearly failing to identify the full gamut of potential hires, not simply claim that one segment of society was genetically programmed to fail the employment process and there wasn't anything to be done about it.
So, if he'd produced any evidence that his female colleagues perform less well, he might have a point. Although, maybe not even then, as some research shows that men will underestimate the achievements of female colleages and overestimate the achievements of male colleagues, so it would rather depend on who collected the evidence and how. But he didn't. And the most likely reason he didn't was that he has a prejudice masquerading as a political view and wasn't really interested in the only evidence that's relevant.
For that reason, there are very clear rules in Canada about how searches may be conducted and those rules were clearly violated in this case, but that doesn't invalidate the evidence itself.
It sounds like Ny playing politics.
Firstly, the Swedish Prosecution Authority is not politically appointed in the way, say, a US District Attorney is.
Secondly, it's the duty of the law enforcement authorities to investigate complaints and bring prosecutions where there is reasonable grounds to do so.
All that has happened here is that the prosecutor has said there's nothing further to be done with the case at present as the investigation is effectively stalled while one party is inaccessible as he is refugee from justice abetted by a nation state. It's Ecuador that's playing politics here, not Sweden.
Perhaps there's also the fact that Danes are brought up believing that there may be advantages to speaking more than one language...
You're an Uber exec. You have access to billions of dollars (literally) of other people's money and they've demonstrated, by tolerating the whacky antics of the company to date, that they really don't care how you spend it and don't ever expect to see it back.
Why would you NOT spend it on flying cars?