UK opinion here:

Liability is not the only concern.

We have child protection to take into account (in the UK, if you're under 18, you're a child even if the age of consent is 16 - so it's possible a photo of yourself performing a legal sex act with a consenting adult is actually illegal in itself!) and, no, we can't force you or your parents to take similar actions at home. However, we don't run child protection and eSafety workshops for the sake of it, nor are we required to do so in many cases.

It's not about liability. It's about protection. I can no more stop you from jumping railings or smoking outside of school that I can stop you getting on Facebook or Snapchat outside of school. But while you're in our property, under our "duty of care", and we have the ability to limit your behaviour and put in safeguards, we will.

I don't block Facebook / Snapchat for the fun of it. I block it because you're in school. You're not SUPPOSED to be on it. In some cases, you're not ALLOWED to be on it (e.g. if under 13, etc.). You're in school to learn, not to post selfies. If you want to just talk to your mates there are a million and one ways to do so, and each one I discover I will block. Because you're not supposed to be chatting to your mates in school for the majority of the time and we're under no obligation to provide the resources for you to do so at the expense of, say, lessons going on and staff getting to online resources.

In the same way I block game websites, violent or not, cartoons and funny websites, offensive or not, and other time-wasting crap. I have no legal obligation to *block* some of the above. But I do. Because a) it's safer for the younger kids, b) you're supposed to be using my (limited) resources for working towards an education and not distracting others, and c) because the parents would go ape-shit if they found out you were on Facebook / Snapchat (by whatever access) all day while you were at school.

Now, in the UK, school has a different meaning, but I've worked in primary (3-11), secondary (11-16/18) and sixth form (17/18 when it existed separately) schools, both state and private. And I can see no reason why even a college /university (18+) would be obliged - under liability or not - to actually block most such websites. They are worried about misuse of their resources as well as what you go on, but we don't want you going on that crap and we CERTAINLY don't want you bypassing our systems to go on that crap. Hell, it's all logged and monitored whether we block it or not.

This is possibly the worst article ever. No, I do not, would not, and never would - even under anonymity - suggest that you should be doing this stuff on your phone so that I'm not liable. Fuck that. This is about child protection, and getting your school work done. Neither of those factors are aided by your doing it on some other device or illicitly. But whether it's banned or not... that sends a message.

Fucking Americans. Everything is about not getting sued. Protect the damn kids, not by suggesting they can avoid child pornography charges by doing things on ephemeral systems but by NOT TAKING PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES.

Don't think of the easy solution, think of the worst-case scenario.

For instance, now you have gun-cases juried only by people knowledgeable about - and presumably pro - weapons. Or finance cases juried only by people who work in finance. Or cases against the judiciary juried by the judiciary themselves.

The idea of a jury is to be "the man on the street". If you can't explain the crime committed to the man on the street, when he's forced to do nothing BUT listen to you for weeks on end, then maybe that law is too complex to enforce anyway.

Juries are, and always have been, required to understand things way out of their normal scopes. Any half-decent defence/prosecution will get them to the level of knowledge they need quickly. Imagine juries on complex financial fraud cases, or in cases steeped in the interpretation of thousands of separate by-laws. It has to be done, it can be done, and if you can't do it then you won't find much of a career as a lawyer.

If you can't explain the crime committed in simple enough terms for average people to get their head around within a matter of weeks, how do you expect average people to stay on the right side of the law in their daily lives?

Tor can be explained quite quickly. I could get a bunch of schoolkids to understand it in an hour, with zero computing knowledge at all. To get that into the heads of a bunch of non-computing 60-year-olds will take longer but not THAT much longer.

And, at the end of the day, even the judge has to understand what case they are trying. If they don't, they can't possibly guide the jury if they are ever required to.

If you or your opposition can't explain why what you did was, or was not, illegal in a matter of weeks to the majority of a bunch of average people, then the case is so grey-area that it's likely to collapse anyway.

The problem I have with VR and 3D movies is that it's not immersive enough. If I do want to put myself into the game/movie then it has to be convincing. Sound has to move around too (rather than appearing to come from a fixed set of points). If I can't dip my head and have top-originating sounds come from "above" my head, it's not immersive.

This is the problem with 3D - it might be 3D from where you are, but it's not actually 3D. You can't walk around it. It's a 2D window onto a 3D world. The guy that jumps out of the screen can never be behind me, I can never be behind him, etc.

VR suffers similar problems with audio, etc.

But I believe one day we'll sort most of those things and it will be the perfect escape - come home exhausted from work and immerse yourself in games completely, forgetting the outside world and work in the process.

Unfortunately, we're decades away from that still.

Most Olympic coaches are former Olympians themselves.

The problem is not whether they can keep on the cutting edge of IT now, it's whether they have knowledge worth imparting to students. Years of experience in Perl will carry you further than having played with Logo once, many years ago - no matter WHAT language you're teaching the kids.

In the same way I don't expect an Olympic coach to do the 100m in under 10, I don't expect the IT teachers to be able to know the ins-and-outs of every cutting edge technology. But if they don't know more than the students, in the areas of the curriculum that they are supposed to be teaching, quite who is doing the teaching and of what? They then become - like many parents when their kids bring home homework they couldn't do themselves - a babysitter while the kids do the work. That's not what you pay teachers for (or, at least, shouldn't be).

And though the kids might know more about Whatsapp, Facebook and how to swipe on an iPad, it doesn't mean they have greater grasp of the subject itself. That's what's worrying - not that a teacher has never used Office 365 before, but that they can't learn how to do so before they have to teach their students to - with years of education, a degree, and years of experience of similar programs advantage.

Additionally, if you're lucky your class may have that special pupil who pushes even your limits, but you should still know more than they do - generally and from experience. You might not have as in-depth knowledge of their particular niche passion, but we're talking extra-curricular work anyway, and you can surely benefit from your experience to aid their path. Without such experience, that's not really possible.

You can be a babysitter, or a teacher. To teach, you need something worth teaching. The problem here is that, for years, teaching "IT" was about teaching "Computing". How to use Word. Now all kids have grown up with it and submit their homework in it, so it's a core skill, not a particular subject. And so a lot of "Computing" teachers have suddenly realised that their skills are obsolete unless they decide to update their knowledge into more "IT" side of things. And that's not easy.

Hell, I pushed all my teachers limits when I was younger. I broke and then fixed the school network for them. I took my own A-Level computer science classes because the teacher recognised I knew more than them when it came to programming (and not just "had done it more" but actually was aware of theory they'd never encountered). But, still, they had something to offer in the other areas of teaching IT that I'd not been exposed to. And, still, they were able to keep up with what I did and were interested in it. They were just confident that I knew enough to help everyone else in the class, the same as them.

The problem is that people are teaching "beyond their means", and have been coasting for many years. Now they are being asked to actually update their skills.

Imagine a maths teacher that had never taught calculus and was suddenly asked to - you either learn / revise your calculus, or get out of teaching it.

I got there by recovering state schools from ludicrous amounts of IT poverty, despite legal requirements for computer:pupil ratios on the order of 1:4 or 1:2 depending on the school.

I also got there by, in the process of that employment, SAVING them more money than I ever cost to employ (by reusing kit, getting rid of consultants, stopping them paying extortionate amounts of money on worthless IT services, offering free alternatives - not even necessarily open source, etc. - and bailing them out when they had crises). I have a clear conscience. I've also worked with every age group, every type of school, every IT teacher along the way.

There's nothing to distinguish independent from state education in this respect. Sure, independent schools are 2-3 years AHEAD of the state schools in terms of intellectual prowess among the kids. But they are 5-10 years BEHIND in the IT because they don't believe it improves education and aren't bound by stupid computer:pupil ratios. Additionally, although they may be "ahead", their teachers are the same amount ahead, not necessarily geniuses. I've worked with one Dr and she was a librarian. Everyone else has Bachelor's or - at absolute best - Masters.

It's not about independent vs state. I can argue and prove all sides of any argument in that case if you like (I am state-school educated from one of the poorest and most working-class areas of London, I thought the same as you once. Fact is, independent education is merely a head-start, not an ongoing advantage). It's about having appropriate teaching staff. An independent school teacher is just teaching the state-school Year 8 stuff to their Year 5. That's all. Mainly because of zero discipline problems and pupils/parents having a vested interest in their education (cash!).

But even in a state school, a Year 8 IT teacher needs to know - at minimum - how to teach Year 8. And in any sensible school Years 7-11/13 are the same IT teacher, so you need to be able to be several years ahead of almost all the pupils anyway. Not only that, you should really be several years ahead of the top-set of the highest years, otherwise how do you expect to make a difference?

Please note, my current place being an exception, some of the best IT teaching staff I've seen have been state. One of my previous independent schools, the IT was fine technically but the IT teaching was a shower. Kids copying/pasting into Word was considered as high as Year 7 could ever attain, the lesson plans were 15+ years old (had URL's in them that nobody noticed had stopped working 6 years previously, according to archive.org), etc.

So, please, attack me all you want - but we're not talking funds and facilities here. Often the more IT-literate staff are the staff that refuse to conform to curricula, hate teaching the out-of-date stuff, want to go off-topic all the time, and get frustrated with both state and independent schools that adhere too tightly to "the known" from 20 years ago.

Hell, one of the places I worked in with one of the best IT teachers I know couldn't afford exercise books one year. Literally. They were shutdown the next year and merged with another school. Don't know where that guy went, but wherever it was I bet he's driving the curriculum forward whether he has zero budget or unlimited.

Then stop teaching.

Seriously, I work in schools - I'm an IT Manager for independent (private) schools. The good teachers are the ones that have knowledge to impart to the kids, the other type generally do not know anything until they have to teach it and then they learn it badly and, thus, teach it badly. Can you imagine being a science or maths teacher and never having done "chemical reactions" or "simultaneous equations"? Sure, there's always an answer that even the teacher won't know but it shouldn't be something so far out of your reach that you can't a) take an educated guess on the spot and b) come back the next day with the properly researched answer.

With the best IT teachers, I can discuss electronics, computer science and mathematics at a level where neither of us need explain ourselves. They've probably done my job in the past, for the most part, too. And, very deliberately, they will refer to themselves as IT teachers or CS teachers and not ICT teacher (which involves using a computer to do word processing, not anything the kids couldn't pick up on their own in ten minutes).

The last lot of students that went through the school I'm at were building drones running on Raspberry Pi's and .NET Gadgeteer, they were cobbling together Z80 and 6502 circuits in their lunch break, and they were programming in C#, C and assembler. Some of it wasn't stuff we'd done before, but we managed to teach them new stuff all the way through, based on extensive knowledge of the subject and actually SITTING AND LEARNING the stuff they wanted to learn in advance so they could be taught effectively. And, there, it's really more of a "I've never done C# but it's a programming language that I just need to learn the quirks and syntax of and all my old knowledge then comes back into play".

If you can't do this, as an IT teacher, then you probably should go back to school yourself. This is no more insulting than suggesting that a French teacher know French, or a Maths teacher know Maths.

If you're not the one teaching, why bother to have you there?

Er... yes they can.

And if they do not want to make money is not the same as if they want to lose the money they have.

Releasing things anything near recent versions of Windows or Office will destroy all their future sales overnight.

Besides, they already offer the source, and developers will be around to make patches for it. Just not for free, not under open licences, and not from Microsoft. When you tell people that, they tend to think that a migration to a supported OS is probably better for them.

That said, 7 is supported for several years yet, just not mainstream support. XP has ONLY JUST just come out of extended support itself and that was long overdue. 7 will be in extended support for ages yet. And by then, Windows 8 will be old, Windows 10 will be available generally and Windows 11 will be on the horizon anyway.

Sorry, I'm not a proprietary software fan, but suggesting that MS just destroy their biggest revenue stream overnight so that you can get a security patch either while it's still being security-patched or MANY years after it was released, is just ridiculous.

Microsoft no longer care what version you use. All their big customers have annual renewals nowadays anyway. The consumer market is tiny and mostly get their Windows via their OEM anyway. Nobody "buys" a box at a store with Windows disks in it any more.

If they don't care what version you use, they have no need to keep dragging on old software past what they've already promised.

Useless.

Because then the software would just refuse to operate until you included those files, or would bundle a tiny innocuous file that it would then execute on first run to do the same job.

These people don't care about your experience downloading, they just want to entice you to download something that makes them money (usually off the back of some shareware/freeware author's work).

That said, why all Windows MSI's can't have this functionality is beyond me - they pretty plainly list every file, registry entry, etc. that they intend to install. But to edit them is a nightmare, to create them is worse, and (as above) there is no guarantee that the software won't do it at a later stage anyway.

Just stop using places and software that include that sort of junk. They don't have your interests at heart and don't care that it's annoying or dangerous for you.

malware = stuff designed to do nothing more than harm your computer.

adware / junkware = stuff not specifically designed to do that, but a pain in the butt, extremely annoying, probably unwanted but not necessarily "evil" as such.

No malware doesn't mean it's "safe" or won't fill your computer with unwanted junk. Hell, even some AAA paid-for game titles will fill your computer with junk given half a chance.

That said, download.com has been dead to me for a number of years. Precisely because, like a text conversation I had with an old friend just now, people eventually have to ask me to clean their machines after touching it. Sure, it's not doing damage, but slowing your machine, popping up junk, intercepting your default search etc. is not "malicious" so much as downright rude and annoying, if you've agreed to it.

It's like the difference between posting some junk mail through my door, and posting some dog excrement. One is clearly intended to harm. The other's just a pain in the butt that I never really wanted (even if I "volunteered" for it at some point, somehow).

Sorry, but I remove (and have more trouble removing) more "adware" / "junkware" in my professional life than I ever do malware. It doesn't mean it's okay, still, but it's not malware. It's not exploiting security holes, stealing your passwords,avoiding your antivirus,etc. Most of it will remove itself if you ask it to. But that doesn't mean that anyone actually WANTS it either.

Sorry, the second you bundle unnecessary junk into your downloads, I stop using you. I've had to abandon several good pieces of freeware because of that (yes, I'm looking at you IZArc and lots of your friends because you just can't resist bundling some unwanted junk with a lovely freeware util that I'd gladly give you £10 for if it didn't have that stuff).

For personal stuff? Yes, I have the same.

"Old laptop files" etc. feature heavily on any new disk I buy.

Similarly, for email, I can query nearly 15 years worth of email from the narrow-down search in my mail browser. You don't even notice - given how quickly it can do it - but, damn it's useful when you've forgotten the login to that website you signed up to years ago and never thought you'd need ever again.

But at work, disk space is always tight because hundreds of users try to do the same on one network. So I keep to the official retention periods, then have a bunch of encrypted disks in the basement should the extraordinary be required. Never been asked for it (have been asked if I can ditch some of it, to which the answer is "throw out what you want from that room, just start with the oldest first").

Hell, first job of making a new personal RAID array? Copy all the old one onto it, then retire the old one and file the disks somewhere safe.

Retain everything.

Just make sure that anything past your legal retention limit is only retained offline.

How hard is that? Standard practice as far as I'm concerned - when you hit the limit on what you need to store, archive it to get your space back but keep the archives around just in case you need them later (e.g. lawsuits, etc.). There's nothing stopping you putting your old tapes, or old NAS disks, into storage because by the time the data is about to retire, so are the old units that stored it.

Not saying keep them around forever, but just keep what you don't NEED to keep offline. Otherwise you're just chewing disk space for no good reason anyway.

Then when you do come across your (encrypted) backup tapes in the archives in a few years time, you know you can safely ditch anything there should you be short of space, and that you can probably restore anything that might be there if the lawyers send you in. And nobody can access it but you. Hell you could store it live, but encrypted, and just archive the encryption key for each year that you don't need.

Air gap and encryption, people. Seems like it should be pretty basic stuff to a company as HUGE as Sony.

Chances are, the hairless homo sapien came about BECAUSE it could be hairless. Not the other way around (becoming hairless and then finding a way to cope with that).

That means either warm climates where they mainly were, or already having the knowledge on how to keep warm, or both.

And, to be honest, plenty of hairless animals survive without having to wrap themselves in lion-skins. And if you do wrap yourself in lion skin, the shape barely matters as you can always do enough to cope with very mild climates with the barest scrap of clothing (Newcastle, UK, on a Saturday night).

Very few places are going to be dealing in UTF-32 just because of the performance.

And certainly not Nethack.

In all my projects, I use UTF-8. Any performance hit is so far off the radar, it's just not worth worrying about.

I hereby sue you for breaking the English obscenity laws while you were sitting at home yesterday.

See the problem now?

Why would it put car companies out of business?

What a ridiculous statement.

Cars ran for decades without ECUs at all, all due to proper engineering. ECU have been around for decades too. The first were literally nothing more than simple circuits on a PCB. Modern ones are not that much more complicated. The ECU in your car can be interfaced and controlled with by a £5 bluetooth adaptor and a free app.

You can get ECU replacement chips for almost any model of car, and even switches to switch between genuine ECU and your own custom one. The ECU isn't doing much, it's just doing it fast enough that simple engineering on its own couldn't manage. But even a couple of MHz is way within the range of a viable "homebrew" ECU for almost any vehicle if you want to spend the time on it.

Even if ECU's were dirt cheap (and they already are), the car industry isn't going collapse because of it (proof - they're still here). Few people would ever replace an ECU, replacing an ECU voids your warranty, and garages aren't going to start voiding your warranty for you to save a pittance. Even if you could, what do you think you'll gain? A handful of stats and you'd burn a lot more fuel.

ECU's are LIMITING your engine to legal emission levels. That's their primary purpose and the reason they exist. They are not necessary to build a working car, just one that meets the emission requirements. And they do it by being more efficient about how much fuel you actually end up burning.

You can get better performance by replacing the ECU (which is why there are kits to do so and people doing it every day, and ECU switches so you can pass the emission tests and then put your car back into illegal "boy-racer" mode), you can't spend less on fuel (in fact, the opposite).

Put the car companies out of business? What a ridiculous statement. And ECU's used to not exist for many decades of the automobile industry.