I asked for recommendations for good Zigbee temperature sensors, and lots of people recommended the Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC (which is Bluetooth ra...| blog.nexusuk.org
We've recently moved house, and have needed to do an outrageous number of address updates and things like banks, insurers, etc. Pets like ca...| blog.nexusuk.org
Going to court is always an interesting and educational experience, and to some extent I quite like it because judges are generally methodical impartial people who are just trying to come to reasonable conclusions and aren't trying to prove a point.| Steve's Blog
The Information Commissioner's Office has an income of about £62m per year. I receive about 1000 spam emails a year - most are from anonymous foreign actors, but a significant proportion are from registered UK businesses who are flouting the rules. As a point of comparison, in the past year the ICO have taken "enforcement action" against just 2 organisations with respect to email marketing: Join the Triboo Limited, and Monetise Media Limited. In both cases, the organisations were sent ...| Steve's Blog
I have two significant examples showing why companies have basically no incentive to protect personal data. In both cases the companies have clearly broken data protection legislation, but the ICO don't see why they should intervene:| Steve's Blog
As I've mentioned many times before, spamming is unlawful (except in some specific circumstances), but the Information Commissioner's Office is useless and generally doesn't do anything about it. Thankfully, the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (PECR) and the UK GDPR both allow you to take civil action to protect your personal data from misuse.| Steve's Blog
Maintaining control of my personal data is important, and companies who spam me usually end up on the receiving end of a nasty email exercising my rights under GDPR to find out what data they have about me, where they got it and to demand that they stop using it.| Steve's Blog
It is unlawful for an organisation to send unsolicited marketing email / SMS messages to personal email addresses / telephone numbers, except in some specific circumstances:| Steve's Blog
We're doing some modernisation work at the moment, and part of that is| Steve's Blog
Whether you think we should leave or remain, as far as I can see these are the facts:| Steve's Blog
I've been doing some work estimating the carbon footprint of running servers with the aim to offset our products. There are obviously two main parts to this: the emissions caused by manufacturing, supplying (and, at the end of its life, disposing of) the hardware, and those caused by actually running the hardware. The former is a one-off cost each time you buy a new server, whereas the latter is the ongoing cost (e.g. electricity for powering the server, the air conditioning to keep it co...| Steve's Blog
People who use Linux for firewalling tend to use iptables to set up their rules. The subsystem in the Linux kernel that actually does the firewalling is called Netfilter.| Steve's Blog
Scroll down for English.| Steve's Blog
I find the whole Brexit thing very frustrating, and thought I would get some thoughts down to at least get things clear in my own head. I'm going to try and keep this post free of partisan views as much as possible and just concentrate on the facts rather than debating whether or not leaving the EU is the right thing to do.| Steve's Blog
So, a quick one this morning. One of our customers has been having problems accessing Lloyds Bank's corporate payments gateway.| Steve's Blog
I don't usually talk much about our customers, but sometimes things happen which truly beggar belief.| Steve's Blog
I've already managed to upset someone on Facebook because I apparently said that women are worth less than men (I didn't). I don't regard myself as a feminist, but rather an equalist. Discrimination of all forms is bad - women shouldn't be discriminated against based on their gender, but similarly men shouldn't be discriminated against in order to give women an advantage.| Steve's Blog
I have two CurrentCost power monitors - a CC128 EnviR panel in the living room which monitors our entire electricity usage, and an old white first generation panel in the office which monitors the office's electricity usage.| Steve's Blog
Some background history| Steve's Blog
So following my complaint about spamming, Village Hotels responded to my Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act. In short, the DPA deems personal data to be owned by the person whome it regards. A Subject Access Request allows the owner of some personal data to request information about it from a company that is holding it.| Steve's Blog
Despite never being a customer of De Vere Venes, they sent me hundreds of spam emails, ignored my requests to stop and I eventually complained to the Information Commissioner's Office. De Vere were instructed to stop spamming me and they admitted they had no idea where they got my details from. Since the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 require the sender of unsolicited emails to have obtained informed consent directly from the recipient, they're on pr...| Steve's Blog
We've got a wireless doorbell which is fairly unreliable. Also, I can't hear it from my office, and the 433MHz transmitter built into the doorbell button doesn't have enough range for me to put a sounder in the office. The unreliability problem could probably be fixed by just buying a new wireless doorbell, but that probably wouldn't help with the range problem.| Steve's Blog
Its been a week of frustration, but also success. We always have a perennial problem of broken apps, which work ok on the average home network, but as soon as you try to secure things you hit problems. Although there is a good argument for keeping school networks fairly permissive, realistically schools can't just turn off their firewall and let everyone at it - not only would the school be failing in their duty of care, but it would be a security nightmare too.| Steve's Blog
I'm reading through the BBC's summary of the Queen's speech. I have to say a lot of this seems a bit ill thought out...| Steve's Blog
In a speech last week, The Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham said: The internet was not designed for children, but we know the ben...| blog.nexusuk.org