Every so often, I get a glimpse into the thought processes of someone who has a very different view of the world to me. I don't deal with people's personal information often. So I was surprised to receive an email with a multi-megabyte spreadsheet called "Pay and Bonuses 2020". The email contained this doozy of a sentence: “Due to GDPR the attached file is password protected, I will send the p…
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I'm increasingly concerned with the power that CDNs wield - and CloudFlare in particular. So I decided to delete my CloudFlare account. While they claim to have removed my account, they still seem to count me as an active customer. I wonder how many people bought shares in their IPO based on inaccurate customer numbers? Timeline 2019-08-04 I raised a support ticket to close my account.…
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A quick report into a nasty privacy vulnerability I found with the CAB. Unusually for me, this has no Internet component. Regular readers will know about my recent court visit. As part of that, I had to telephone the CAB Volunteers at the court who look after witnesses. I called, and was put on hold, then asked to leave a message. There's a popular myth that you can trick phone systems to…
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Hello, it's me - the idiot who helped inspire the HTTP 451 status code. I graciously allowed Tim Bray to do the hard work of getting it through the IETF process, and now it is an official RFC. Recently, I've seen lots of people getting het up about its "misuse" - so I want to clarify a few things. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) gives people in the EU strong data protection…
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I'm going to tell you an anecdote which is a gross oversimplification of a complex topic. In the early half of the twentieth century, certain physicists made breakthroughs in relativity, quantum mechanics, and nuclear energy. Many of these scientists were Jewish. The Nazis called these heretical ideas "Jewish Science" and suppressed their teaching. Jewish physicists based in Germany fled the…
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