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mjr

@ mjr @infosec.pub

Posts
10
Comments
372
Joined
4 mo. ago

  • Peter Mandelson Sold Off Britain to the Super-Rich. He’s Not the Only One

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  • The deal is probably described in some media response from Network Rail or Transport for London. Global Counsel won't be mentioned. I guess Chase Bank is part of JP Morgan still.

  • Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email

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  • You may be relying on Big Tech to provide your Outlook or Gmail account, but you can switch easily if you don’t like it any more.

    Microsoft and Google's "spam" filters (that downscore anyone who isn't them) make that less easy. I had to jump through hoops to email my mother this week because Microsoft say one of my email hosts has a poor reputation and nothing stops hosts bouncing or shadowbanning any emails they choose.

  • Japan’s newest Shinkansen has no seats…or passengers

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  • In the west, this would be the other way around.

    France, Italy and Spain are upset not to be called Western countries. Even if Spanish station security checks try their best to make it slower.

  • Oatly banned from using word ‘milk’ to market plant-based products in UK

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  • Only if it stays the hell away from my coffee! 🤮

  • Peter Mandelson Sold Off Britain to the Super-Rich. He’s Not the Only One

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  • Through lobbying firm Global Counsel, Mandelson sold what really matters in modern Britain – access. Global Counsel’s client list reads like a directory of corporate power: JP Morgan, Accenture, Palantir, Shell, Nestlé, Anglo American.

    And the government will be reassessing those companies' contracts Real Soon Now. /s

  • Alton Towers bans people with anxiety from using disability pass

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  • Merlin run lots of stuff, including Sealife and Warwick Castle. I'll avoid the lot.

  • Alton Towers bans people with anxiety from using disability pass

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  • So Merlin Entertainment basically thinks it knows better than doctors, some disabilities aren't real and it's fine to make people with severe anxiety stand in line until they suffer an attack. Lovely(!) Somewhere mistreating people with mental health issues is not a place I'll go for fun.

  • Facial recognition error: Customer misidentified by Sainsbury's

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  • And the dataset is prbably racist, although in the reported case, it sounds like good old unreliable cross-race recognition by humans, with the evil eye pinging because it spotted someone and the store staff then telling the wrong person to naff off. It seems like a process or training failure if they don't ask the evil eye to confirm they've got the person it flagged before upsetting them.

  • Should I be using Debian?

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  • In the stable repo, but there are backports, testing and unstable repos too, if you want later versions and accept more risk of bugs.

  • Coastal road swept away into the sea in Devon

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  • Because that's a freshwater lake on the inland side with interesting wildlife. Letting the sea in is a big call.

  • 'It is jaw-dropping': Ian Hislop on Mandelson and Epstein

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  • "there was no justification, knowing what he knew, for appointing him as ambassador" (03:22)

    I disgree with Ian Hislop there. The justification was pretty obvious: appoint a friend of Jeffrey to work with the friend of Jeffrey that is US president and maybe spare us some of Trump's strange attacks. It's not a great justification and probably shouldn't have been enough, though. The way his appointment insults Epstein's victims should have been enough to stop it, and the risk of it failing like it has was just a cherry on the cake.

  • The BBC’s proposal to switch off Freeview is a threat to its universal service | Letter

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  • Except they don't, which is why they're losing ground. Also, the BBC mission is "to serve all audiences" and "inform, educate and entertain" and not simply to give people whatever junk TV gets the biggest audiences: that's more ITV/STV and 5.

  • The BBC’s proposal to switch off Freeview is a threat to its universal service | Letter

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  • Why would the BBC, which believes in the benefit of its output, suggest closing itself?

    It won't, but if the primary aim of change is to save money, then it's the logical conclusion of that argument. This is proof by absurdity that the argument is flawed.

    Right, I’m sure the BBC advertising iPlayer is why YouTube is now the second-most-watched “broadcaster” in the UK.

    It's not the whole reason, but it is part of it. The public have been told repeatedly by Auntie that being tracked and studied is fine.

    This change in habits has been gradual but inexorable. The reason for it is obvious: because streaming at any convenient time is more convenient than being locked into a broadcaster’s schedule.

    But we're not locked into a broadcaster's schedule! We have recording devices that now perfectly display any broadcast programme at a later time of our choosing. Maybe you didn't realise that and I can't blame you: the BBC haven't been advertising it regularly for the last 15+ years.

    The biggest benefit of streaming is that you can watch things that haven't been broadcast or that your device didn't store, but the cost of that is your privacy.

    Your privacy objection is bogus. Here is the relevant section of the privacy policy.

    That's not the privacy policy, but it does link to it. It's a misleading partial summary of some of it. If you click through to the full policy, you'll find the stuff I quoted.

  • Ex-Tory Home Secretary Braverman defects to Reform UK

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  • Read what I said again: we’ll be using gas in 50 years.

    We'll have to wait 50 years to know, but even if we are, it'll be much much less under any sane government, but it would be more if left to Reform.

    Your cherry picked statistics for a windy day at 22:30 are a poor example. Check again at 17:00.

    It's absurd to accuse someone of cherry-picking and then cherry-pick a time when the National Energy System Operator has invited bids for the Demand Flexibility Service because the price of gas-generated electricity is too high.

    Maybe have a think about the majority of homes central heating.

    A majority, but not a supermajority. Only about 60% of UK homes burn gas for heating despite all the encouragement and inducement since the 1970s in a scandal that makes promotion of diesel cars look like playschool stuff, and a farcical and pathetic target-missing attempt to encourage heat pumps in the last 10 years (target: 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028, latest number I've seen: 91,000 per year and no, that's not missing a digit).

    Oh and we have never been a major importer of Russian gas.

    So? Buying gas and thereby driving the market price up is enough to benefit Russia. When you hear a gas boiler roar, it's helping fund Putin.

  • Ex-Tory Home Secretary Braverman defects to Reform UK

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  • You're just showboating because we've had nine Putin-friendly Reform UK policies so far:

    1. building more gas turbine power stations
    2. cutting stamp duty on the biggest properties
    3. pulling out of the European Defence Fund
    4. cancelling our human rights act
    5. repealing the Equalities Act
    6. “scrapping” the BBC
    7. stopping the boats (any method that really does it will be basically either impossible or illegal)
    8. defending our borders (more insular isolationism is what Putin really loves)
    9. deporting illegal migrants (which would quickly become an ICE-style scandal deporting natives who look different and dwarf the Windrush scandal)

  • The BBC’s proposal to switch off Freeview is a threat to its universal service | Letter

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  • What are you talking about? Whose argument should be that? The BBC’s? Why would they say that broadcast is worth user privacy, when they aren’t violating anyone’s privacy?

    They might not be violating it, in the sense that they operate within the law, but they do invade your privacy if you use iPlayer by collecting "your name and contact details, your date of birth or financial details [...] your email address and age. Device information [...] Location information [..] Information on your activities outside the BBC [...] the articles you read and the programmes you watch." They use it, among other things "to check if you're using BBC iPlayer and to keep the licensing database accurate [...] to personalise services and give you things more tailored to your tastes [...] to show you relevant advertising on another company's site [...] to help us understand what kind of services you might use And sometimes how you might share things with other people g. to recommend things we think might interest you [..] to show you advertising when you access a BBC service from outside the UK". They share it with other companies "When we use other companies to power our services [...] When you use another company's service that connects to us [...] When we do collaborative research" (all quotes from the BBC Privacy and Cookies Policy).

    I don't think most viewers realise the broad consent that the BBC demands before it will let you watch iPlayer. Just the privacy section of their terms is 20 screenfuls on my laptop: it'll be more than that on a smart TV, so it's obviously going to be "too long: didn't read" for most people. It's not an informed choice. Once upon a time, the BBC would have been educating the public about these privacy drawbacks with streaming, not only marketing its own streaming services.

    The BBC would say that some broadcast costs are worth more viewer privacy if they cared about public benefit.

    It’s even cheaper for the BBC to close what? iPlayer?

    No, close the BBC. If the BBC want to say that cost is the main problem with broadcasting, then the next step is to say we close BBC TV entirely (or maybe except for one or two news channels) and save even more. Saying it's cheaper to close things that deliver public benefit is an absurd argument for them to use.

    But the proportion of video content being watched by streaming is increasing; cutting it makes no sense at all. Maybe you meant something else, in which case you should be more precise.

    The proportion of video content being watched by streaming is increasing because even the BBC is advertising and marketing streaming over all else. There are numerous adverts/trailers for its programmes shown on its broadcast services which don't give a time or date of broadcast, but simply say "watch on BBC iPlayer" at the end. Unsurprisingly, if you have something the size of the BBC saying repeatedly to do something, the number of people doing it will increase.

    Broadcasts still have value and should be the core of the BBC. It's not the BSC, after all.

  • The BBC’s proposal to switch off Freeview is a threat to its universal service | Letter

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  • That doesn't make sense because that would be a really stupid and dangerous line of argument for them. It's even cheaper for the BBC to close, if that's the logic they want to pretend they're using.

    The argument should be that the cost of broadcasting is worth the benefit of viewer privacy.

  • The BBC’s proposal to switch off Freeview is a threat to its universal service | Letter

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  • Companies hate broadcasts because they can't track viewers as easily and gather data on them to use or sell.

  • DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI

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  • It's the one where I clicked "No AI" and the results page thanked me for voting yes!