Lots of coverage around the time of the Queen's death and unsurprisingly in the news now given the coronation. Little to no media coverage at any other time and has very little public support albeit growing support in certain demographics.
I don't think the article is sarcastic given the nature of their app.
Where does one draw the line though? ESG[1] is becoming increasingly important to investors and I already see financial institutions instituting controls in their apps around gambling [2].
When should large companies with sufficient reach implement opportunities to address social harms?
It is not and it is worrying. I think Apple is doing a great job about privacy, but it’s a fine line the one between user advocacy and the ethical state model…
I am just waiting to hear back from a customer on a support ticket request where functionality in my app is not working as expected.
They sent me a screenshot of what should be a form in a modal but the modal has failed to load so it has loaded just the form in a new page looking pretty unstyled. The JS for the modal uses fetch() so possibly why it broke.
I'm 95% sure that the browser in the screenshot is IE10. I pointed them to this announcement if only to make them aware of the security risks in running IE10 but it beggars belief that anyone would choose to run IE10, individual or enterprise.
Not accusing you of this, but the primary reason people run outdated software is a really problematic insistence, mostly by front-end people, on using the new-and-shiny instead of the tried-and-true. Breaking changes galore - so people stick with the past as much as possible.
Example: Office 365 OWA doesn't work well on modern browsers other than the latest version of Edge on Windows. But it does work fine on browsers that are older or pretend to be older! I'm technical enough to spoof my user agent, but Mom & Pop are just going to say "I don't like the new one, it broke stuff" and that will be that.
Pretty sure the primary reason people stayed stuck in IE for so long was that Microsoft shipped it by default until very, very recently (even in home editions of windows).
You can add on top of that the rebranding they went through. If they had just done what they did now, and shipped the old rendering engine inside the new one as some kind “legacy mode” that sites could request then everyone else could have moved forward years ago and not had to deal with a stagnant browser.
For me, and maybe this is just my organization, but the new O365 OWA interface is extremely slow. Latency is so bad that typing results in only 1 in every 4-5 keystrokes not failing to register.
If I pretend my user agent is from circa 2012-2013 (e.g., Internet Explorer 10), it will default to an older interface that has marginally fewer features and is much, much more performant.
I'll link up Stripe's docs for SCA[1] as they have been very helpful for me in getting Leavetrack[2] set up for SCA.
PSD2 is the Second Payment Services Directive from the EU. A directive is required to be implemented in national law no more than two years after it is passed and whilst there have been delays, the past 12 months have seen a ramping up of banks implementing Strong Customer Authentication.
3DS (3D Secure) is like 2FA for debit/credit cards. In my case, I bank with Monzo and if a transaction requires 3DS, I have to open the Monzo app on my phone and confirm it. There are other aspects to SCA e.g. if I have used contactless payment frequently, I am more likely to be prompted to enter my PIN to confirm I still have my card.
The Post Office knew Horizon had faults and had a legal duty to disclose its knowledge to the defendants when prosecuting them. They failed to do so.
Paragraphs 81-90 are frankly unbelievable and I question what Post Office's own lawyers were doing.
Paragraph 91(iii):
A memorandum dated 22 October 2010 by a senior lawyer in POL’s Criminal Law Division reported the successful prosecution of Seema Misra. The memorandum complained that the case had involved “an unprecedented attack on the Horizon system” which, the author said, the prosecution team had been able to “destroy”. He ended the memorandum, which was copied to the Press Office, by expressing the hope that “the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon bashing bandwagon”.
The prosecution team had "destroyed" it because they had withheld crucial evidence supporting the allegations against the Horizon system.
The Seema Misra case is what started the unravelling because her husband called a journalist, Nick Wallis [1], who has spent 10 years investigating and reporting on this case.
It's a scandal of immense proportions and three convicted individuals died before seeing their convictions quashed. It is very sad.
I find it hard to believe that the approach taken - to prosecute sub post masters in this way - didn't make it to board level (indeed if it didn't then that by itself would be a corporate failure).
Individual managers may have had incentives that would lead to take this approach but the PO Board should have had an overview and have been able to correct this.
In any event a great scandal and very sad as you say.
For a crown court, anyone with an adjusted household income over £22345 is expected to pay in part. Anyone with a household income (unadjusted) over £37500 gets no help. You can also be caught if you have more than about 30k in assets (including equity in your home so anyone who owns in the southeast is screwed).
I only discovered this 2y ago when I was arrested. My solicitor in the police station explained he was free but only on that day. I'd have to pay in advance if the police choose to prosecute (they didn't, I was released without charge).
A lot of people don't realise how expensive it is to be innocent in the UK sadly.
Quite - the criminal justice system is woefully underfunded and COVID has only exacerbated the problem. The means testing leaves many people facing no choice but to plead guilty or risk bankruptcy.
The answer to this question is that senior executives within the Post Office knew that Horizon had faults and deliberately withheld the information when prosecuting the sub-postmasters.
This is a fundamental breach of the prosecutor's duty to disclose any evidence that undermines the prosecution case or supports the defence case. This duty continues to exist after conviction so timing of knowledge is irrelevant.
The judgment is telling in that there are records in which Post Office officials made statements that minutes of meetings about faults in the Horizon system should not be taken so as to avoid having to disclose them in proceedings.
It is corporate failure on an unimaginable scale and three convicted individuals have died before having their convictions quashed.
Yesterday's judgment is long but very readable. I would anticipate further fallout and understand there may be a live police investigation on the basis that several individuals may have perverted the course of justice by either proceeding with prosecutions or omitting material evidence from testimony.
The OP asked, "doesn't there need to be evidence beyond just 'a computer said so'?".
You said the answer is that "the computer said so" and then the operator of the computer said "I agree with the computer".
In my mind, the question still remains. Isn't there any requirement to show where the money went, what account it went into, give dates and details about how they stole the money, etc?
Of course, hiding the known bugs in the software is a scandal and worth talking about, but it doesn't answer the original question I think.
I'm not advocating for anything. Just saying that "Why isn't there a higher legal standard for proof?" answered with "The Post Office management knew about the bugs." isn't a satisfying question/answer exchange.
A big part of the problem is that the post office is not accountable as it's a government organization. A private company would be bankrupted by this, but the post office will just be bailed out by taxpayers.
At one point the Post Office's own barrister had to tell them in no uncertain terms that their attempts to prevent disclosure might amount to a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice (a pretty serious crime).
The Post Office might not be bankrupted, but I don't think this is going to go well for many of the people involved in the prosecution. The wheels of justice run slow but grind exceedingly fine etc.
You're conveniently overlooking the role that Fujitsu, the software contractor, played.
The issue is concentration of power at large organizations, relative to the rights of individuals in society.
It is problematic when any organization accumulates too much power and runs roughshod over an individual citizen, whether that organization is government or private enterprise.
The UK post office was privatized in the middle of the period in question, so your assertion is half-true. Of course, even as a private entity it retains an aura of state authority which may have swayed perceptions of juries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail#Privatisation
No, this is not accurate. The Post Office was split from Royal Mail; Royal Mail was privatised while the Post Office remained (and still remains) in the public sector.
Instead of viewing the problem as "bailing out", maybe it should be viewed at mitigated and fixed - because a system that people rely upon, one that needs to work, should be kept working - there are no better alternatives.
With private companies, everyone else is often left holding the bag - esp e.g. with mining and drilling companies. But with private corruption companies too - the bankruptcy of the company typically involves all of those being owed money taking a hit if not losing their money completely.
> owed money taking a hit if not losing their money completely.
You mention that as if it’s a bad thing? Wiping out bad investments is one of the major tenets of free market approaches. It’s the negative feedback loop for bad investments.
If something is unsustainable, it should go out of business and the investors should take a loss.
I agree with the grandparent. Externalities should be born by the company making the profits.
Example: imagine an oil company that can pump toxic fluids into the ground in order to cheaply extract lots of oil. Those toxic fluids render miles of ground as wasteland far into the future. The owners of the company should not be allowed to take the profits now, then allow the company to go bankrupt so they don't have to pay back and repair the damage they did.
The limited liability company should be eliminated as it encourages terrible behaviors.
> I agree with the grandparent. Externalities should be born by the company making the profits.
You ignored what I wrote. Wiping out investors is making externalities born by the company.
My statement has nothing to do with externalities. It’s about investors being on the hook a good thing.
The grandparent implied that poor investors lose their money on one hand and complain about externalities going to public on the other, which makes no sense. Holding companies, and subsequently shareholders, accountable for all of the company liabilities is the capitalist way.
For things that are private goods, it's fine to have a process of elimination - but only if that elimination doesn't leave even more public obligations to clean up (like pollution).
However the post office is a public good, so just letting it disappear is something that needs to be prefaced by an actual public discussion to do so.
> "In the UK and the EU, the GDPR requires organisations to inform recipients of the pixels, and in most cases to obtain consent for them. It’s not enough to just have a privacy policy somewhere that details this."
No it doesn't and yes it is.
Nowhere in the GDPR or in the UK implementation does it say that recipients need to be informed of pixels in and of themselves.
What it does say is that when you obtain the recipients' personal details you must provide them with a privacy notice setting out what data you collect and what you do with it. The privacy notice needs to be provided on collection of their data (when directly collected) or within 30 days of collection if from a third party.
There is no reason to not obtain consent to tracking but to suggest it's the only lawful basis on which to process the data is not correct. Subject to completion of an impact assessment, one could make a case that it falls under legitimate interests depending on the degree of processing of the tracking data e.g. the more that such data is used to inform further targeting of the individual vs. say aggregation of data for improving engagement.
I agree with your underlying point though - I turned off tracking (I use Postmark for transactional emails) because I don't really care about open rate and click rate etc. If my customers want to ignore the emails from the service it's up to them.
„Consent of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.
[...]
4. When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.“
An email address is always personal and tracking if the email was opened ties it to that personal data.
GDPR is a nightmare and a case study in how regulations can terrorize entire industries or the abilities of individuals to innovate freely. Just read the chronology of events in that link above and try playing devils advocate that the CNIL did not amend those laws to specifically target these two companies. It's scary.
They amended "rules", not "laws", which is what rulemakers do when they discover behaviors that violate the law (subject to interpretation, as intended) but not the rules.
^Are you seriously making this argument? It seems you either have not read the linked story, or you don't understand that the CNIL issues guidelines that are the "law";
The decision to overrule an earlier revision by the Counseil D'etat alludes to the guidelines themselves as a measure of "Soft law".
Regardless, making an argument on the semantics of a word instead of the glaring arrogance on display where Government agencies or lawmakers can retroactively change the rules to seemingly target individual companies is ridiculous.
This was explained on the feed. It's from a lower-res safety camera mainly used for object avoidance on the ground. High definition images will be available later.
