Exactly, although many primary school kids nowadays want more than a simple phone that stops at SMS-ing. Technically speaking you can get new cheap Androids in the €100 range, and prepaid (PAYG) SIMs can be quite cheap (1000 minutes, 1000 SMS, 1GB in the range of €10 chargeup monthly), OTOH, contracts from discount providers can be quite okay too, our daughter switched to a contract while in primary school:)
Well, the only "provider" that does this here would by McDonalds WLAN, but lucky for them, you can just switch to Google-Mobile view, and they don't catch that at all:)
In other news the sun raises usually somewhere in the east.
What are mobiles useful for kids? Coordinate with their parents. E.g. call parents after school, I'm meeting now friend X. Or I'm stuck there and there, could you please come pick me up [happened when our daughter used first public transport to get to school], please hurry today after school home, we've got a doctor's appointment, Hi kid, we are out doing XY, don't wonder if nobody is home, we'll be home in an hour.
That's probably why even kids from poor families/single parent households have mobiles usually in primary school here around, because these are that need usually the most coordination to manage the day.
Now, for a 10 years old, some mobile will not do, the minimum is a low end Android, with a surprising number of kids carrying high end Androids and iPhones 4, at least at the school of my daughter. (And no it's not private run for rich people, it's just a normal state-run middle school, despite being called Junior Highschool) OTOH, the Galaxy SII is cool enough that I managed to wean my daughter of the evil products of the iFruit salad company.
Considering confiscations, her school has a very pragmatic approach, phones are to be turned off and left in the locker in the morning and are turned on again when leaving the school. That serves quite well the coordination thing => one can call the school if something needs immediate action during the day, all other coordination can be sent via SMS, hence the kid gets the message when it turns on the phone,... Naturally that does not work everywhere, because it assumes that each kid has his own safe locker.
And that one is hard to beat, on easyness to remember (4x8 is easy to remember), so one tends to use it often when one just needs a DNS server and don't want the work to look up the local DNS up.
Wonder how static typing manages to keep the developer from querying the day-of-death field instead of the day-of-birth field he wanted in the first place.
Hmmm, it does not, but most developers don't bother with this edge case bug, I mean the compiler catches it if I use the data wrongly, right?
Well, technically what many US companies have been doing has been strictly illegal in the EU. Germany traditionally has a tendency to be strict on privacy protection, but technically the law is just a local reenactment of the EU data protection directive. Worse, for US lobbies and politicians, the "Datenschutzbeauftragte" is position that is hard to pressure. Basically if you do a business with person X, you are by law required to do it with the minimal data collection possible. Or you let the user opt-in in more complicated Furthermore users have right to retrieve data associated with them, demand deletion (withdraw the permission to collect/use data on them == deletion), and correct obviously wrong facts.
Now the EU does not arrest visiting company officials (at least not as often as the US do), and the fines are pocket change for Google, Facebook, and company. OTOH, the German authorities have taken the stance that sites that include code from Facebook are sending data to Facebook without consent from the user. And for many small/midsize companies or private persons in Germany a 5-6 figures fine is enough to think twice about Facebook. So while the German authorities cannot fine the EU subsidiaries of Google/Facebook directly, and the Irish authorities are way less strict on this (before anyone complains about this, the same thing happens in the US, where different states kind of can take a different stance on things). But they can issue almost automatically fines to Facebook partners. (Technically it's simple, run Firefox with Firebug, and check what your browser talks with Facebook.com, guess this could be even easily automated. Ghostery e.g. does this for a couple of 100 information collecting sites.)
Btw, the no comments comment above is bullshit, all local sites I frequent for news do have such. Although, some news site prefer to turn it off for specific articles where "Click here only wearing Asbestos, Flame War is assured" seems to be a given.
Operating a comment section/forum is not a problem from the point of view of privacy laws: your registered users had to acknoweledge your ToS that probably should contain an explanation of your data storage policies. And unregistered users usually get a paragraph of legalese before pressing the post button. (Technically the question is an IPv4 address a person identifying piece of data. German authorities tend to think so, but it's not completely yet clear. Anyway as a system designer you better assume it is so, because IPv6 addresses are person identifying [actually device identifying, but that's often enough person identifying for legal purposes].)
What is illegal is collecting data about users without informing them and letting them opt-in.
Again, this is not about power users, because they don't need necessarily the protection of the law. (Slashdot btw forwards data to AddThis, DoubleClick and Google Analytics. Well not in my case, these get suppressed by my browser addons). It's about what the average dork can expect. And sadly for most of these people Adblock+ looks like magic. Yeah, there are still many many persons out there that say Internet and mean the IE icon, not even understanding the concept "browser". And the law, and German courts especially usually say that expectation of privacy is the default. Actually the constitutional court of Germany has ruled that the expectation of privacy is a basic human right, protected by the constitution. They have also a tendency to shred police laws that would allow an indiscriminate data collection to sift through for interesting tidbits.
heise.de btw is probably the biggest web news provider in the fields of IT/tech stuff, but they are not a general news provider. Might not look like so in the first moment, but they report of general news usually only the IT/technology related parts.
Okay, have anyone here experienced flash wear out? Hmmm, no hands raised. Performance issues with modern OS and modern (as in last year introduced stuff) SSD? No hands again.
It's absolutely correct, that flash can wear out. Flash as in flash memory cells. Modern SSDs have quite a bit of controller logic to handle this. Plus replacement blocks. So yes, if you use it extremely intensively, e.g. as swap, SSD may (or not) give up after 2 years or so. Hint: I'm used to swapping hdds once per year, to avoid data loss. Wonder where the durability problem of flash is?
-) it's random access. The huge impact of seeking (measured in ms) is gone. -) it's relatively fast at reading/writing too, compared to normal hdd.
So yes, it's obvious that adding flash for swap makes sense.
Now if flash-swap can substitute RAM depends naturally a little bit on the workload.
But 2x4GB DIMMs cost your around 44€ here around. A small SSD in 230-270MB/s range costs 62€ for 32GB.
So you get about 2.8x as much "capacity" for SSD compared to RAM, per monetary unit.
Ah, one important point, most motherboards are limited to at most 16GB RAM in practice (4 DIMM slots), and many users might have a setup where they cannot add RAM without at least throwing away some (4x2GB DIMMs is a popular setup for 8GB some time ago, implies that to upgrade to 16GB you need to replace the complete memory). SATA connectors are usually not as scarce, plus you can stuff 300GB SSD swap into a common PC, while anything more than 16GB will take you into the realm of expensive server/workstation motherboards.
So the benefits for SSD swap are: -) it's much better swap than hdd. -) it allows to run workloads that need more than 16GB RAM neatly. (it's more than a magnitude faster than hdd, and it's random access, which makes it many magnitudes better in that discipline. Actually, with highend SSDs you can get into a range of being only about a magnitude slower than RAM)
The benefits of RAM OTOH. -) it's directly addressable, it's faster, it's RAM. -) it's clearly faster than SSD swap, if you can get enough RAM into the box to run your job.
If the attacker matches an existing MAC address, there will be nothing suspicious going on. And if he uses a random MAC without DHCP nothing will show either.
For WEP there is not much you can do, especially if it's a neighbor that wants your skin => there are ways to crack WEP completely passively. OTOH, by injecting carefully designed packets, the time to crack a WEP key goes down into seconds. (Cynically, it's so fast that WEP key cracking could be included in consumer devices and the consumer would not notice the delay).
Well, living in a country with more than 80% of it's area being mountains, I can only wonder. The normal expectation is that I have HSPA mobile access anywhere, no matter if I'm sitting in the subway in the city, or skiing somewhere crazy. I mean how do you keep your kids quiet if they cannot surf youtube while you drive?
So if you have no highspeed mobile access on some mountain in the Rockies, your mobile providers are cheapskates. Or more correctly your politicians are better bought. Our carriers not only paid a ghastly sum for the UMTS frequencies, the license also included a condition that they have to bring coverage to 95% of the population (after a number of years for sure), or loose the license and forfeit the license fee. Guess your politicians did not think about including such a condition, right?
(The expectations are so that my daughter's school for her last school trip explicitly noted that the shelter on the mountain where they will be staying has no mobile coverage. That's kind of a definition that they'll be going to the end of the world and beyond,..., here around.)
And the law would probably not pass constitutional review. E.g. Austria does not extradite it's own citizens, nor does it extradite if there is the risk of the capital punishment. Btw, if I got that right, the most stringent view has Portugal that does not recognize life sentences and does not extradite if there is a risk of such a sentence.
They didn't go far enough. They could ensure even better success rates by dropping the requirements for courses, and issue B.Sc to anyone that manages to find the registration, M.Sc for all dummies that managed to spell their names correctly the first time, Ph.D for all that manage to fill out the registration form correctly on first try.
Be serious, any IT/CS degrees offered need to consist of:
1.) practical programming experience (hard to teach, so it should be more in the sense of encouraging students to do it for the fun of it. No programming course will be able to bring the student past basic literacy in environment X, but the fluency needed for professional work is practically never learned in a classroom.) And please stop telling students that enlist for CS that they don't need any pre-knowledge, e.g. yeah, our classes will even teach you how to power on a PC.
2.) Theoretical CS knowledge. While many people take this as very unsexy, the math and CS theory are the base of all that stuff we do. How can you develop/design anything if you have no basic concept of algorithms and datastructures? (O-notion, classification of algorithms,...) Same applies to math (I'd hope that every CS at the BS level can explain what the problems are with floats, and why it's critical to sort an array of floats before adding them.) => you need it basic knowledge, or all the fun parts of our profession (designing systems, be it databases, pattern matching, clever data mining) are not really possible.
3.) Some generic classes for a certain level of professional behavior, I mean, it's really fantastic if somebody is able to write an email that is mostly grammar-correct. Depending upon your environment secondary schools might provide that generic knowledge or not. Here around, it's difficult because there is no standardized exit exam at the secondary level, so for example CS maths include more or less the complete secondary school content in 1-2 semesters. (Which leads to a situation where students that know the stuff, but still want to sit in to see if they miss some basics are nicely asked to use headphones while playing games/surfing/...)
Thumbing down education standards won't help anybody that needs to work the profession, AFAIK, drag and drop programming has not yet arrived in the work place. And it's only of limited fun if you need to teach the new VBA "developer" the concept of loops. (Not the syntax of loops in VB. The CONCEPT).
Lol, you mean the US constitution that is bended (and arguably broken) by the Federal government every day? (I mean everything is in-scope for the federal government, because it's clearly visible that a hot dog stand could engage in interstate commerce, right? Fresh Hot Dogs delivered via FedEX anyone?)
Worse, never show what you can do if working at 110% in an emergency.
These 110% will become your expected performance every day, every hour. If you try to keep that "emergency"-level performance, you burn out rather quickly. If you try to go back to more reasonable levels of performance, you are lazy, and might end without a job.
Simple to solve that one. Express the fine as a percentage of global revenues, like the EU does for anti-competitive practices. Notice how US companies do try to appease EU regulations in this area. Notice that the US companies most affected, e.g. ad networks, are already trying to appease the EU privacy regulations. (E.g. masking IP addresses in data collected and so on.)
Not exactly. Privacy does not exist in the US because neither the businesses nor the government wants it. The business like to collect whatever they want, ignoring some percentage of wrong data (so who cares that Mr. Smith cannot get a cable subscription, because of some wrong data somewhere), because it's more economical to ignore that than to allow the persons affected to correct it.
And the government loves it because between Patriot Act,...., and legal interpretation (e.g. emails stored on an external email server loose the expectation of privacy), the government gets access to stuff they would not be able get normally.
As I said, only wording and tiny details are different from the EU data protection directive, which is as it happens the source where the UK act got cloned from. (The UK actually being one of the countries that do not care much about privacy, IMHO, so I guess they basically choose the most basic implementation allowed)
Guess the sky has not fallen on the heads of the Brits yet, so one can quite well prosper with privacy.
The law not only makes it illegal to transfer the data out of country (which makes that electronic access problematic), it also makes it illegal to use the data at all if you do not have the explicit consent of the person. Not much an issue for companies that want to outsource their customer handling (because they have that consent usually through the contract with their customers), but an issue for companies storing information about persons they have no reasonable interaction with.
So in such privacy regime it's usually quite legal to process data about Joe Doe and his new PC, but it's getting more hairy about storing the browsing history of Joe Doe, but storing Jane Does browsing habits who has never had business with Dell, is a definite no-go.
Slashdot Mirror
2 in decimal :-P
Actually it's not only the UK, mobiles for 6 years old kids are normal in Austria too.
Exactly, although many primary school kids nowadays want more than a simple phone that stops at SMS-ing. Technically speaking you can get new cheap Androids in the €100 range, and prepaid (PAYG) SIMs can be quite cheap (1000 minutes, 1000 SMS, 1GB in the range of €10 chargeup monthly), OTOH, contracts from discount providers can be quite okay too, our daughter switched to a contract while in primary school :)
Well, the only "provider" that does this here would by McDonalds WLAN, but lucky for them, you can just switch to Google-Mobile view, and they don't catch that at all :)
In other news the sun raises usually somewhere in the east.
What are mobiles useful for kids? Coordinate with their parents. E.g. call parents after school, I'm meeting now friend X. Or I'm stuck there and there, could you please come pick me up [happened when our daughter used first public transport to get to school], please hurry today after school home, we've got a doctor's appointment, Hi kid, we are out doing XY, don't wonder if nobody is home, we'll be home in an hour.
That's probably why even kids from poor families/single parent households have mobiles usually in primary school here around, because these are that need usually the most coordination to manage the day.
Now, for a 10 years old, some mobile will not do, the minimum is a low end Android, with a surprising number of kids carrying high end Androids and iPhones 4, at least at the school of my daughter. (And no it's not private run for rich people, it's just a normal state-run middle school, despite being called Junior Highschool) OTOH, the Galaxy SII is cool enough that I managed to wean my daughter of the evil products of the iFruit salad company.
Considering confiscations, her school has a very pragmatic approach, phones are to be turned off and left in the locker in the morning and are turned on again when leaving the school. That serves quite well the coordination thing => one can call the school if something needs immediate action during the day, all other coordination can be sent via SMS, hence the kid gets the message when it turns on the phone, ... Naturally that does not work everywhere, because it assumes that each kid has his own safe locker.
Licenses? cygwin is GPL last time I checked.
And that one is hard to beat, on easyness to remember (4x8 is easy to remember), so one tends to use it often when one just needs a DNS server and don't want the work to look up the local DNS up.
Actually there is Modula-3 too, where quite some of the Java ideas have come from. (Admittingly without a VM and non-C-ish syntax)
Wonder how static typing manages to keep the developer from querying the day-of-death field instead of the day-of-birth field he wanted in the first place.
Hmmm, it does not, but most developers don't bother with this edge case bug, I mean the compiler catches it if I use the data wrongly, right?
Well, technically what many US companies have been doing has been strictly illegal in the EU. Germany traditionally has a tendency to be strict on privacy protection, but technically the law is just a local reenactment of the EU data protection directive. Worse, for US lobbies and politicians, the "Datenschutzbeauftragte" is position that is hard to pressure. Basically if you do a business with person X, you are by law required to do it with the minimal data collection possible. Or you let the user opt-in in more complicated Furthermore users have right to retrieve data associated with them, demand deletion (withdraw the permission to collect/use data on them == deletion), and correct obviously wrong facts.
Now the EU does not arrest visiting company officials (at least not as often as the US do), and the fines are pocket change for Google, Facebook, and company. OTOH, the German authorities have taken the stance that sites that include code from Facebook are sending data to Facebook without consent from the user. And for many small/midsize companies or private persons in Germany a 5-6 figures fine is enough to think twice about Facebook. So while the German authorities cannot fine the EU subsidiaries of Google/Facebook directly, and the Irish authorities are way less strict on this (before anyone complains about this, the same thing happens in the US, where different states kind of can take a different stance on things). But they can issue almost automatically fines to Facebook partners. (Technically it's simple, run Firefox with Firebug, and check what your browser talks with Facebook.com, guess this could be even easily automated. Ghostery e.g. does this for a couple of 100 information collecting sites.)
Btw, the no comments comment above is bullshit, all local sites I frequent for news do have such. Although, some news site prefer to turn it off for specific articles where "Click here only wearing Asbestos, Flame War is assured" seems to be a given.
Operating a comment section/forum is not a problem from the point of view of privacy laws: your registered users had to acknoweledge your ToS that probably should contain an explanation of your data storage policies. And unregistered users usually get a paragraph of legalese before pressing the post button. (Technically the question is an IPv4 address a person identifying piece of data. German authorities tend to think so, but it's not completely yet clear. Anyway as a system designer you better assume it is so, because IPv6 addresses are person identifying [actually device identifying, but that's often enough person identifying for legal purposes].)
What is illegal is collecting data about users without informing them and letting them opt-in.
Again, this is not about power users, because they don't need necessarily the protection of the law. (Slashdot btw forwards data to AddThis, DoubleClick and Google Analytics. Well not in my case, these get suppressed by my browser addons). It's about what the average dork can expect. And sadly for most of these people Adblock+ looks like magic. Yeah, there are still many many persons out there that say Internet and mean the IE icon, not even understanding the concept "browser". And the law, and German courts especially usually say that expectation of privacy is the default. Actually the constitutional court of Germany has ruled that the expectation of privacy is a basic human right, protected by the constitution. They have also a tendency to shred police laws that would allow an indiscriminate data collection to sift through for interesting tidbits.
heise.de btw is probably the biggest web news provider in the fields of IT/tech stuff, but they are not a general news provider. Might not look like so in the first moment, but they report of general news usually only the IT/technology related parts.
Okay, have anyone here experienced flash wear out? Hmmm, no hands raised. Performance issues with modern OS and modern (as in last year introduced stuff) SSD? No hands again.
It's absolutely correct, that flash can wear out. Flash as in flash memory cells. Modern SSDs have quite a bit of controller logic to handle this. Plus replacement blocks. So yes, if you use it extremely intensively, e.g. as swap, SSD may (or not) give up after 2 years or so. Hint: I'm used to swapping hdds once per year, to avoid data loss. Wonder where the durability problem of flash is?
Well, it's obvious, that Flash is superior swap:
-) it's random access. The huge impact of seeking (measured in ms) is gone.
-) it's relatively fast at reading/writing too, compared to normal hdd.
So yes, it's obvious that adding flash for swap makes sense.
Now if flash-swap can substitute RAM depends naturally a little bit on the workload.
But 2x4GB DIMMs cost your around 44€ here around. A small SSD in 230-270MB/s range costs 62€ for 32GB.
So you get about 2.8x as much "capacity" for SSD compared to RAM, per monetary unit.
Ah, one important point, most motherboards are limited to at most 16GB RAM in practice (4 DIMM slots), and many users might have a setup where they cannot add RAM without at least throwing away some (4x2GB DIMMs is a popular setup for 8GB some time ago, implies that to upgrade to 16GB you need to replace the complete memory). SATA connectors are usually not as scarce, plus you can stuff 300GB SSD swap into a common PC, while anything more than 16GB will take you into the realm of expensive server/workstation motherboards.
So the benefits for SSD swap are:
-) it's much better swap than hdd.
-) it allows to run workloads that need more than 16GB RAM neatly. (it's more than a magnitude faster than hdd, and it's random access, which makes it many magnitudes better in that discipline. Actually, with highend SSDs you can get into a range of being only about a magnitude slower than RAM)
The benefits of RAM OTOH.
-) it's directly addressable, it's faster, it's RAM.
-) it's clearly faster than SSD swap, if you can get enough RAM into the box to run your job.
yacc
Which catches again only the noobs.
If the attacker matches an existing MAC address, there will be nothing suspicious going on. And if he uses a random MAC without DHCP nothing will show either.
For WEP there is not much you can do, especially if it's a neighbor that wants your skin => there are ways to crack WEP completely passively. OTOH, by injecting carefully designed packets, the time to crack a WEP key goes down into seconds. (Cynically, it's so fast that WEP key cracking could be included in consumer devices and the consumer would not notice the delay).
Well, living in a country with more than 80% of it's area being mountains, I can only wonder. The normal expectation is that I have HSPA mobile access anywhere, no matter if I'm sitting in the subway in the city, or skiing somewhere crazy. I mean how do you keep your kids quiet if they cannot surf youtube while you drive?
So if you have no highspeed mobile access on some mountain in the Rockies, your mobile providers are cheapskates. Or more correctly your politicians are better bought. Our carriers not only paid a ghastly sum for the UMTS frequencies, the license also included a condition that they have to bring coverage to 95% of the population (after a number of years for sure), or loose the license and forfeit the license fee. Guess your politicians did not think about including such a condition, right?
(The expectations are so that my daughter's school for her last school trip explicitly noted that the shelter on the mountain where they will be staying has no mobile coverage. That's kind of a definition that they'll be going to the end of the world and beyond, ..., here around.)
And the law would probably not pass constitutional review. E.g. Austria does not extradite it's own citizens, nor does it extradite if there is the risk of the capital punishment. Btw, if I got that right, the most stringent view has Portugal that does not recognize life sentences and does not extradite if there is a risk of such a sentence.
They didn't go far enough. They could ensure even better success rates by dropping the requirements for courses, and issue B.Sc to anyone that manages to find the registration, M.Sc for all dummies that managed to spell their names correctly the first time, Ph.D for all that manage to fill out the registration form correctly on first try.
Be serious, any IT/CS degrees offered need to consist of:
1.) practical programming experience (hard to teach, so it should be more in the sense of encouraging students to do it for the fun of it. No programming course will be able to bring the student past basic literacy in environment X, but the fluency needed for professional work is practically never learned in a classroom.) And please stop telling students that enlist for CS that they don't need any pre-knowledge, e.g. yeah, our classes will even teach you how to power on a PC.
2.) Theoretical CS knowledge. While many people take this as very unsexy, the math and CS theory are the base of all that stuff we do. How can you develop/design anything if you have no basic concept of algorithms and datastructures? (O-notion, classification of algorithms, ...) Same applies to math (I'd hope that every CS at the BS level can explain what the problems are with floats, and why it's critical to sort an array of floats before adding them.) => you need it basic knowledge, or all the fun parts of our profession (designing systems, be it databases, pattern matching, clever data mining) are not really possible.
3.) Some generic classes for a certain level of professional behavior, I mean, it's really fantastic if somebody is able to write an email that is mostly grammar-correct. Depending upon your environment secondary schools might provide that generic knowledge or not. Here around, it's difficult because there is no standardized exit exam at the secondary level, so for example CS maths include more or less the complete secondary school content in 1-2 semesters. (Which leads to a situation where students that know the stuff, but still want to sit in to see if they miss some basics are nicely asked to use headphones while playing games/surfing/...)
Thumbing down education standards won't help anybody that needs to work the profession, AFAIK, drag and drop programming has not yet arrived in the work place. And it's only of limited fun if you need to teach the new VBA "developer" the concept of loops. (Not the syntax of loops in VB. The CONCEPT).
Lol, you mean the US constitution that is bended (and arguably broken) by the Federal government every day? (I mean everything is in-scope for the federal government, because it's clearly visible that a hot dog stand could engage in interstate commerce, right? Fresh Hot Dogs delivered via FedEX anyone?)
Even without applying this to persons outside the US, just consider the persons mentioned visiting, ....
So anything pro-Christian will be fined, because Muslim fundamentalists will offended.
To try to express it generically:
For any X: Anti-X content in form of an image is illegal, because a person member of X will be offended.
Pro-Y content is illegal in most cases because Pro-Y usually equals Anti-(Opponents-of-Y).
Now the question is, if you take a text, and prerender it into an image does the law apply too?
Worse, never show what you can do if working at 110% in an emergency.
These 110% will become your expected performance every day, every hour. If you try to keep that "emergency"-level performance, you burn out rather quickly. If you try to go back to more reasonable levels of performance, you are lazy, and might end without a job.
Simple to solve that one. Express the fine as a percentage of global revenues, like the EU does for anti-competitive practices. Notice how US companies do try to appease EU regulations in this area. Notice that the US companies most affected, e.g. ad networks, are already trying to appease the EU privacy regulations. (E.g. masking IP addresses in data collected and so on.)
Not exactly, because transfering the data out of India to the US will be illegal.
Not exactly. Privacy does not exist in the US because neither the businesses nor the government wants it. The business like to collect whatever they want, ignoring some percentage of wrong data (so who cares that Mr. Smith cannot get a cable subscription, because of some wrong data somewhere), because it's more economical to ignore that than to allow the persons affected to correct it.
And the government loves it because between Patriot Act, ...., and legal interpretation (e.g. emails stored on an external email server loose the expectation of privacy), the government gets access to stuff they would not be able get normally.
To be more precise it's basically an EU directive that forces a similar privacy regime on all EU member states.
As I said, only wording and tiny details are different from the EU data protection directive, which is as it happens the source where the UK act got cloned from.
(The UK actually being one of the countries that do not care much about privacy, IMHO, so I guess they basically choose the most basic implementation allowed)
Guess the sky has not fallen on the heads of the Brits yet, so one can quite well prosper with privacy.
Not really.
The law not only makes it illegal to transfer the data out of country (which makes that electronic access problematic), it also makes it illegal to use the data at all if you do not have the explicit consent of the person. Not much an issue for companies that want to outsource their customer handling (because they have that consent usually through the contract with their customers), but an issue for companies storing information about persons they have no reasonable interaction with.
So in such privacy regime it's usually quite legal to process data about Joe Doe and his new PC, but it's getting more hairy about storing the browsing history of Joe Doe, but storing Jane Does browsing habits who has never had business with Dell, is a definite no-go.