This section is for posts that do not fit the other sections.
Some are one-off fixes or small experiments. Others step back from the hardware and look at the wider picture.
These posts cover whatever came up:
- Problems that took long enough to solve that the answer is worth keeping.
- Small experiments, including the ones that did not work.
- The business and policy side of running infrastructure: suppliers, licensing and dependency.
If a topic here grows into a set of related posts, it gets its own section and moves out.
Newsquest, National World, Reach and others send your browser the complete article with its stylesheets, then run commercial anti-adblock and consent code that blanks the page, deletes every stylesheet every 100ms or covers it with a choice between 1,467 tracking partners and £2.99 a month. This walks through what that code does, the four reasons I call it malware, and the Chrome extension I built over one day to keep the page: pinning Newsquest’s adLight flag before the wall builds, dropping the timers scheduled from eval, killing the stylesheet stripper at schedule time, and refusing consent properly by answering the TCF API with no, pressing the vendor’s own reject button and never storing the record. Then the fixes that made things worse, the probe that said a broken page was fine, share buttons and the MSN feed, and what the extension will not do.
Part 1 of 3. Some are lying. Most never have to, because they are paid by the vendor whose product they are recommending and nobody has to tell you. The tells that say you are being sold to rather than engineered for, and what never makes it onto the shortlist.
Part 2 of 3. What actually gets built once the paperwork is signed: cloud for a business with one building, the box they will not be talked out of, the basics that were the thing you bought, and the agent on every machine that answers to somebody else’s console.
Part 3 of 3. Response times instead of outcomes, a liability cap set at the fees you already paid, and a provider whose excuses eventually arrive at you. The questions that flush it out, what a genuine one does instead, and what it takes to get rid of a bad one.
Twenty years back you bought software and the copy was yours. Now you rent it, and the supplier sets the terms. Part 1 of 8 walks through how that happened, and why every step made it harder to go elsewhere.
Once moving supplier is hard, the costs change shape. The price follows your exit cost. Profit is declared in one country and earned in another. The law follows who owns the company, not where the building stands. Part 2 of 8, in plain language.
The first 2 posts looked at what dependency costs you. This one looks at who else foots the bill: the volunteers keeping software going for very large companies, and the businesses bought, borrowed against and stripped back. Part 3 of 8, in plain language.
Picking a supplier means guessing how they will behave later. The fairest basis for that guess is what courts and regulators have already decided. Part 4 of 8 sets out the findings, includes the cases regulators lost, and draws the pattern.
Part 2 covered the law that reaches your data. Part 5 of 8 covers the law that reaches your company: large penalties under American law, a French parliamentary report on whether that works as a commercial weapon, trade pressure applied to tax law and to regulators, and products carrying one market’s assumptions everywhere.
Shutting a supplier out on security grounds needs a standard, applied evenly. Part 6 of 8 sets out what has been established about weakened products and interception, including a Swiss parliamentary inquiry, and shows why a built-in way in belongs to whoever reaches it.