HR rubbish and Java

Moved here away from Announcements.

Since then, no Java in the browser, so again not sure what you refer to.

Just because you (and I) have left Java behind ages ago, it doesn’t mean the rest of the world has caught up.

When I was “learning French” in a nearby learning-for-the-disadvantaged centre, in 2006, their computer was a 486 running Windows 3.10.

I bet there are still systems in use that require ActiveX and MSIE6.

Hell, if I want to run my IPcam in a browser, I see this:

(your browser may refuse to show this if you have mixed mode content blocked)

Notice the lower right. Download Plug-in. In a camera with firmware from 2015 that is quite happy to stream H.264 at 720p via rtsp to VLC…

the software has to be written with care to properly support accessibility.

In my limited experience, it seems to me that software support for disabled people is either cutting edge stuff, or so appallingly outdated it’s a surprise it still functions. I’m sure you can guess the more common eventuality.

after you’ve read the micro text occupying about one tenth of the screen with all the text in long, long sentences with no line break formatting done in some kind of micro text.

Sounds like Apple’s flagrant abuse of the law. Upon updating from iOS6 to iOS7, the updater installed and unpacked the new OS. As it started up, there was a licence that one had to agree to. A little box in the middle of the screen with a lot of legalese gibberish, and something like fifty box-fulls to wade through. Of course, the two available buttons were to either accept the licence, or to email a copy to you.
There was no opportunity to say “no, I don’t agree, I’ll stick with iOS6”. By this point iOS7 had been installed, so I wonder if – given no choice – the licence would even be enforcable in non-crazy jurisdictions such as the right hand side of the ocean.
As for emailing, well, probably not so great if your iThingy is where your email is, right? It wasn’t in my case, but I can well imagine for some people it would be. Meaning you would need to agree in order to get in to see what you’ve agreed to.

But, then, far to many program licences (even in our little world) will tell you that it is illegal to decompile and/or reverse engineer the software. There’s two flaws right there…

if everyone has to do this annually, then surely it is mandatory?

You’re expecting logic out of HR?

The company I work for has switched to a fancy on-line portal for completing our annual/bi-annual interviews (one is job progression and the other is job performance, or something).
The tutor said that how long it takes to fill in depends upon what you actually want to say, but expect anything between half an hour and two hours.

My commentary:

• Is this GDPR compliant? I note, particularly, that it doesn’t bother to follow the legislation with respect to cookie permissions.
• Where is this data actually stored (as in, what country)?
• Who has access to it?
• Who has the ability to have access to it? (not the same answer as the previous question)

And, finally:

• Why are we spending 30-120 minutes of unpaid time doing HR’s job for them?

I’m awaiting answers on all of the above. The next day I handed the tutor a form from CNIL (the French data protection guys) and will wait a bit longer before raising it with HR directly.

Sadly, that which is considered essential to the functioning of a business gets a lot of leeway with respect to GDPR. I’m aware that they use Microsoft and some sort of cloud-based office thingy (as in, all the pencil pushers had literally nothing to do when the broadband went down last month). If it’s Microsoft, then doesn’t that put our data within reach of a hostile regime? After all, Safe Harbor II has just recently been shot down. I’m sure the diplomats will hastily patch together a Safe Harbor III until that too gets torn down, because the problem is the very attitude of the foreign government to the concepts of privacy and sovereignty. No amount of carefully worded legislation is going to fix that.

So, yet another external company has been handed our personal data. I was expected to log in with my initial and surname, and they sent a link to my email address (including the data leak of confirming that an email had been sent to xyz@email.address; which means I can easily get anybody’s email address by using the “Forgot password” link; they’ll get the email but I’ll know their address). GDPR, hello? Dumbasses.
Thankfully in my case, it’s an address only used for the company.

Just logged in, they have all the usual HR stuff (address, length of employment, DOB, etc). It does not cope with mobile devices, it seems hardwired to some insanely wide screen resolution (and blocks the browser from being able to resize/zoom). And it is unbelievably SLOW. Seriously, if I commissioned this crap, I’d hand it back and say “nope”. It should not take forty seven seconds to display the welcome page.

In other words, typical HR rubbish.

I bet there are still systems in use that require ActiveX and MSIE6.

There’s at least one item that needs IE11 because of a smart card plugin¹, another claims it ONLY works with IE, but if you get the browser to lie about what it is it works better in any other.

You’re expecting logic out of HR?

ROFL. Er, no.

¹ Everything uses the new (browser independent) smart card software, except one item. Which would be a real pain if that was the patient record system. Ah, yes…