New regulations set out circumstances in which the Secretary of State can intervene in the running of internet domain registries for UK-related domains
This somewhat lengthy blogpost about The Internet Domain Registry (Prescribed Practices and Prescribed Requirements) Regulations 2024 is probably of most interest to people running domain registries, and domain registrars, for .uk, .scot, .wales., .cymru, and .london.
To be honest, until yesterday, I had no idea that the Secretary of State had these kind of powers...
@Neil Brown Idly wondering if .io is "UK-related" under s.124O(8) of CA2003 - "the last element of its name is likely to cause users of the internet, or a class of such users, to believe that the domain and its sub-domains are connected with the United Kingdom"
Wondering how this applies to registries that provide / manage UK domains but are themselves outside the UK (or do they *have* to have a UK subsidiary to trade?). Those powers seem unlikely to work with say Microsoft or Amazon!
Just getting started on the OU Contract Law module. It's talked about some software terms and conditions being contractual. I wonder how EULAs work as contracts for software you bought in a box from a shop. How is there consideration? Is it "reused" from the purchase contract with the retailer somehow?
As I understand it's a contractual licence, or at least the people selling you would like you to think that, but it's questionable whether that's truly the case for software you buy for a one off fee. The license terms are probably best understood as consideration for the provision of the service of providing access to the software, or alternatively an implied term of the purchase contract that it is sold subject to your agreement to the licence and can be returned if not agreed.
none of this fits very well into the standard framework of offer and acceptance though, but it's not my field. Mostly, like much in the world of contracts it's about creating expectations as to rights as opposed to accurately defining them and may contain a whole load of rubbish that is in practice unenforceable, due to the UTCCRs (or maybe they are part of the CRA now - I learnt all this before the law changed, and it's not really my field).
If you see this post... Quote post a bridge. (If you can be bothered emulating a quote post). This is the Bridge of Sighs in Oxford, presumably so called in despair at how much less good it is than Cambridge’s queer.party/@sparrowsion/11335…
Sounds similar nuisance to that suffered by residents around Whalley's quarry waste site in Staffordshire. Turns out the monitoring equipment wasn't working properly so the amount of nuisance was under estimated too.
The revolving door between regulators and regulated needs to be addressed. It is too easy for corporations to parachute loyal lobbyists into 'regulators' and reward them with promotion when they return to the fold.
U+FE80 is the unicode hex value of the character Arabic Letter Hamza Isolated Form. Char U+FE80, Encodings, HTML Entitys:ﺀ,ﺀ, UTF-8 (hex), UTF-16 (hex), UTF-32 (hex)
I'm really really really not that upset if Iran tried to assassinate Bibi tbh. Given that preserving his political career and saving his ass from jail has been a not-insignificant part of the horrors unfolding across palestine. And Isreal's own assassinations have involved leveling city blocks...
Israel's longest running paper, Haaretz, just confirmed that Netanyahu actively blocked every hostage deal since 10/7, Netanyahu meanwhile is openly planning to annex Gaza—& the conversation is still "why won't Hamas agree to a deal?"😐
Israel News - Israel News, Analysis and Opinion on Israeli Politics, Business, Culture and Travel. With In-depth Coverage of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem News and All the Latest News From the Israel-Palestinian Conflict and the Jewish World.
'Torpedo the Deal': Israel's Channel 12 News exclusive report features new documents and previously unheard conversations showing Netanyahu's efforts to sabotage any hostage deal
The long overdue killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, 21 days after the assassination of Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah, should be the opportunity for Israel to negotiate a hostage deal and a wider regional political settlement.
@Ben Evans This then means I have unlawfully consumed alcohol and still have an open container of alcohol. Granted the gin may make me care less at this point whether an empty open container of alcohol is still an open container of alcohol.
@kittylyst I am not a lawyer, but I'd assume that the defining feature of a container of alcohol is that it's got alcohol in it. If it was the printing on the label then it would be legal to drink your gin so long as you put it in a milk bottle or whatever first.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from Miradouro da Cordoama near Cape st Vincent, iPhone 16 pro, fusion camera, ProRaw, processed in Adobe Lightroom. 10 second exposure.
This is not surprising at all and I don't understand why anyone had to waste time and resources on demonstrating a self-evident fact that was known before the research even started.
@anderspuck As long as you can define "simple" as it applies to the LLM because some basic stuff it cannot do due to the lack of cognition. When I say that it cannot do these things I mean it needs to be able to do said tasks unaided (as in no further prompts or guiding prompts) with complete accuracy, if it can't do those things then it's not doing the task even if it's partially right.
@jwcph Let’s see how it develops. Ollama is working great for me, but it does require a fairly good computer. So yes, either taht processing power has to be local with the user or somewhere centralized.
@anderspuck Not to mention they are insanely expensive to operate. The cost-to-benefit ratio is not sustainable, even for most of the tasks they *can* do.
@anderspuck because they're expected to solve complex tasks, they're being sold as if they can solve complex tasks, and that they have a fail and error rate enough that they're not safe
They want these things to drive cars and make decisions that involve human lives.
@anderspuck No, it doesn't matter what kind of energy they're consuming, because energy always has a cost to produce, and again the cost-to-benefit ratio isn't there. LLMs are creating scarcity for relatively little actual positive benefit.
It's also not strictly about power; the same arguement applies to water consumption as well.
@anderspuck @dalias LLMs are NOT doing *speech to text* translation -- doing transcripts from audio (podcast). That's a different set of AI technologies.
The industry has been developing "AI" technologies since before I was born. Some are quite useful.
It's the "Generative AI" subset (which includes LLMs, chatbots) that is so misleading, mostly useless, and incredibly wasteful.
@JeffGrigg @dalias True. I kind of bundled ChatGTP and Whisper in that statement. I don’t find generative AI useless, though. There are many tasks for which it is very good, but probably not those flashy ones many people are thinking about. For example an LLM is much better at sentiment analysis than older methods.
The payroll calculation service I use for the pub company is closing down at the end of the tax year.
I'm looking for recommendations for a replacement. It needs to have a decent API that isn't gated behind "become a partner and put your app in our store" (so that rules out Xero).
Pricing that's transparent and would work for a company of ~50 people would also be nice! I'm currently paying about £55/month.
SO many companies in this space seem to be "call us for pricing"! Really puts me off...
when a company says "call us for pricing" what they mean is "give us adequate information for us to work out how hard we can f*** you over". It's an inherently untrustworthy model.
I am using Freeagent, who are either free if you use Natwest or pretty decently priced with no fees for the API (which we don't use so I can't say if it works well).
paiyroll® is an automated cloud payroll software powered by artificial intelligence. Reducing payroll processing time by 75% and saving you 3 days a week.
fwiw I am using the Xero API without publishing my application - I do have to pay a £5/month custom connection fee but other than it works ok. This is not an endorsement of Xero though :-)
What I really like about the Greater Anglia trains that do the run from Cambridge North to Liverpool Street? The seat back trays have little grooves in for your phone or tablet (or here, Kindle).
Two years ago I painted anthracnose lesions on apples, strawberries and mango. The symptoms are caused by related fungi within the genus Colletotrichum.
“Non passibus aequis” was my mother’s favourite phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid. Literally “not with equal paces”, it describes Aeneas’ son Iulus as he escapes Troy with his father, and immediately brings the scene to life. Who hasn’t seen a parent hurrying with a small child, after all?
Thought brought to you by a section of Travis Baldree’s “Bookshops and Bonedust” where our protagonist’s dwarf friend is walking “two strides to every one of Viv’s”
With the future of .io coming into question this week, with the news that the UK will return sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, I thought it would be a good time to see how ICANN has treated disappearing countries and ter…
This blog is a continuation of our earlier collaboration (which can be found here and here). These posts focused on our first efforts to set up a workflow to image 5.25-inch floppy disks using a…
Handing the Chagos islands to Mauritius means the sun will set on the British Empire (on the 21st of March 2025, when British Antarctic Territory passes equinox, assuming the treaty is signed by then): reddit.com/r/geography/comment…
It's actually hilarious how many plants we cultivate specifically for their defense mechanisms
Alliums: We have nasty sulfur compounds that turn into literal tear gas when our cell walls are broken! No animals are getting at our sugar stores! Humans: Mmm tasty sulfur compounds, I'm gonna eat you with everything
Tea and coffee: Haha, bugs die when they try to eat us because we grow our own pesticide! Humans: Ugh don't talk to me until I've had my pesticide
All manner of herbs and spices: Nice try, critters! But we are filled with volatile oils that are dangerous and offputting! Humans: Ooo this one is good with my pesticides, this one tastes great with the sulfur compounds, this one makes amazing desserts, oh my god yes.
Spicy peppers: Fucking mammals grinding up our seeds in their gross molars! No more! Only birds can tolerate our heat! Humans: I'm gonna dry you up, grind you into a powder, and use you as a staple seasoning for entire continents' worth of cuisine
Cannabis: The hell with all of those other plants screwing with the birds and the bees and the bunnies. We're going straight for those apes that wanna get stoned and make clothing and rope!
And the really ironic thing is that. They evolved these traits because it helped them survive and reproduce. Having the offputting defense mechanisms be really attractive to a species smart enough to do agriculture is a really funny "task failed successfully" moment
colonialism in scare quotes and calling protestors "tech bros" is an incredibly contemptuous way to describe a successful movement for independence. vanity TLDs associated with country codes are one of my least favorite fashion statements mendeddrum.org/@fanf/113244393…
The future of the .io ccTLD is up in the air today with the announcement that the UK is to hand over the British Indian Ocean Territory, also known as the Chagos Archipelago, to Mauritius.
An interesting question arising from today’s deal to hand the Chagos islands back to Mauritius is: what happens to the .io ccTLD with the dissolution of the British Indian Ocean Territory? Presumably it passes to Mauritius, but do they keep it or scrap it, or change how the registry works?
@Ben Harris Their current procedure seems to be documented at iana.org/help/cctld-retirement and is pretty clear cut that if BIOT dies so does .io “Any preferences to retain the domain, or otherwise delay transition to the maximum extent possible, will not be considered a factor in any analysis”
Shout out to everyone on here who feels total dismay about the state of the world this morning. I can’t stand having to hear again and again that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and “has our full support”. I hope one day the havoc that this stance alone has wreaked will be fully recognised.
It's all a colossal DARVO on the part of Israel and the tame media are regurgitating the propaganda. PM Starmer says "We stand with Israel and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression". No, no we don't. The aggression has been disproportionately that of Israel and could be curtailed by cutting Israel's supply of arms and military support, not least that of the UK.
"We've tried everything we can do to try to bring Peace to the Middle East, except stopping the supply of weapons....please dont be mean to us" -Western Governments
‘World of horrors’: families huddle on Beirut’s streets amid the (US) bombs
The force of the explosion brought Faisal’s wife to the streets, barefoot, with two children in tow. Eventually she found Faisal and they headed to the square, following others going in the same direction who hoped the Christian demographic of the area would protect them from Israeli bombs.
Hundreds of families from Dahieh crammed into the wide forum, a sea change from the farmers’ markets and running events the square usually usually hosts. Many fled after the first airstrikes hit Dahieh on Friday afternoon, the largest explosions in Beirut since the conflict started. Others fled hours later, after the Israeli military issued maps with buildings they would soon hit, urging residents to flee immediately.
Families remained in the square overnight, tucking into street corners and laying their heads on each other’s laps in an attempt to get some sleep. The dawn found most still awake, the sound of Israeli bombing by their homes still audible from downtown
... show more
‘World of horrors’: families huddle on Beirut’s streets amid the (US) bombs
The force of the explosion brought Faisal’s wife to the streets, barefoot, with two children in tow. Eventually she found Faisal and they headed to the square, following others going in the same direction who hoped the Christian demographic of the area would protect them from Israeli bombs.
Hundreds of families from Dahieh crammed into the wide forum, a sea change from the farmers’ markets and running events the square usually usually hosts. Many fled after the first airstrikes hit Dahieh on Friday afternoon, the largest explosions in Beirut since the conflict started. Others fled hours later, after the Israeli military issued maps with buildings they would soon hit, urging residents to flee immediately.
Families remained in the square overnight, tucking into street corners and laying their heads on each other’s laps in an attempt to get some sleep. The dawn found most still awake, the sound of Israeli bombing by their homes still audible from downtown Beirut. People were strewn across the Square, some in nearby parks, others propped up against walls.
Mike Coats 🏴🇪🇺🌍♻️
in reply to Neil Brown • • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Neil Brown • •Neil Brown likes this.
Neil Brown reshared this.
Bruno Girin
in reply to Neil Brown • • •Bruno Girin
Unknown parent • • •Phil Ashby :marmite: 🍵
in reply to Neil Brown • • •ahnlak
in reply to Phil Ashby :marmite: 🍵 • • •@phlash that seems to be talking about *registries*, rather than *registrars*.
So if I'm reading that right, it's powers over Nominet, rather than Namecheap.
ahnlak
Unknown parent • • •