These improvements get a lot of attention because they connect with long (and expensive) international flights. What about those of us in the flying public who rarely fly that far? I've flown less than 1,000 total miles in the last 18 months myself, and I can't recall the time I last flew more than 3 hours nonstop. On these flights we're happy if we have a power outlet to charge our laptop or phone, and we are lucky if we get a back of pretzels as a snack.
Will these upgrades trickle down or will we be left out?
No city officials informed anyone on the NY City Council about the network failure and apparent lack of preparation for the rollover. Some council members only became aware of it when the Times called to ask for comment on the situation.
Let's put this in the context we use for other segments of our government and see if we're being reasonable here.
If this was the federal government - especially the Trump administration - we would say something like "it's too complex, and the administration was too stupid to understand it" and we'd move on. Yet because it is the government of the largest city in the US, we expect for some reason that they will have a deeper understanding of technical matters that we would place "beyond the pay grade" of other politicians. Why is that? Why is stupidity now acceptable at some levels of government and not others (to say nothing of how the Trump administration is trying to tell us that other people are too stupid to understand a tax return)?
I don't see how they are supporting their claim of the City trying to keep people from knowing about this. Just because the government isn't jumping up and down declaring "we failed!" doesn't mean they are actively trying to oppress people from reaching that conclusion.
FWIW I haven't considered my old hotmail address to be valuable for anything for a long, long time. I mostly used it to register on geocities and other unimportant things (and some things that a younger version of myself thought were important at the time). It is highly unlikely that anyone who I would want to be in contact with would have ever attempted to contact me at that address, received no reply, and given up - while I'm not on facebook I am found in enough other places that finding a current email address for me is pretty trivial.
I was really just trying to get in to my old hotmail address just for curiosity. I wouldn't expect that my old emails from 1997 would be valuable enough to microsoft for them to have bothered to retain them.
I've been trying to get back into my old hotmail address (really just out of curiosity at this point) for years now. I had a hotmail address back in the stone age of the service (before Microsoft had even bee rumored to be interested in buying it) and then I walked away from it. However the address still exists (emails can go there, and Microsoft won't let anyone sign up with it as a new address) but the password recovery / password reset tool doesn't work for it. If I try to reset the password I end up stuck in a loop of "your username does not exist" "please reset the password for your username" that never gets anywhere.
Of course, an email address that is easily over 20 years old - that hasn't had any meaningful email sent to it in well over 15 years - is not of great value. I searched online for it and found a couple really old forum posts I put up back then where I referenced it but nothing else mentioning it. Being as it was named for a minor character in a video game that most people have forgotten about, it isn't a name in high demand.
I wondered the same about Perl: An easy check is a job search. It doesn't look good.
I generally advise nobody ever apply to a job that lists a specific programming language as an absolute requirement, it is usually just a pathway to obsolescence. Find a posting instead that describes the types of problems they are looking to solve and then present to them why you are the best person to help solve them. The language choice is not critical, and never should be.
Just because it isn't listed as a job requirement doesn't mean it's not used, either. This shitty website still runs primarily on Perl.
Actually, under Trump the investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein child prostitution ring is being reopened. You know, Jeffrey Epstein of "lolita express" fame, which Bill Clinton was a regular flyer?
You're conveniently ignoring the fact that Epstein also has ties to Trump, and the underage girl who accused Trump of rape during the presidential campaign.
In case you didn't notice, Hillary is not president. In fact someone who rarely passes on a chance to publicly attack Hillary is president. Why would that person want the government to take any action against someone who did something to expose Hillary? He could have made this all a non-issue long ago if he wanted to. Instead it's likely that if Assange were brought to trial in the US, Trump would almost certainly be out of office before the trial was over.
I was previously getting on average 2-3 robocalls per day. Now I get fewer than 3 per week. I've had the same phone number for over 20 years, and the same carrier for most of that. I didn't change a damned thing, they just don't call as much. I didn't answer them before if I didn't recognize the number (or have a reason for a call to come from an unrecognized number at that time), and don't answer them now either. I just have far far fewer calls. The drop in frequency doesn't correlate with any particular event here in the US either (as I would get lots of calls around election season).
Has anyone else seen this as well? I'm certainly not complaining but I'm wondering why I'm seeing this. When the robocalls do ring my number they still often get the tag "scam likely" from T-Mobile, and they almost never leave a message.
My understanding is that Tmobile simply shows "scam likely" as caller id and puts through the call, unless you choose to reject them.
Indeed that is what they do. However in my case, the past few weeks now I've even seen fewer of those. I used to see around 5 "scam likely" calls every day. Now I see fewer than 2 per week. The shift happened abruptly, just a few weeks ago now.
I suspect that someone found away around the screening, and then Tmobile figured it out.
I do happen to be a TMobile customer, but I would think it would be awfully dangerous for Tmobile to play around with a technical approach to this problem - especially without warning customers. While the robocalling is overwhelmingly used for obnoxious (and sometimes outright illegal) purposes, there are also times when number masking is actually useful and legal. They're playing with fire if they are doing this.
That's what I've been wondering. The coincidence of the timing is interesting though.
Facebook, Google, and Uber had technical problems recently.
I've never used Facebook or Uber in any way, shape or form. Facebook of course has been known to build profiles of non-users but they've never had my phone number or any other information that I would enter in to it in the process of starting a profile. Uber should know little to nothing of me as I've never signed up for them or installed their app on any phone I've ever owned.
I've seen a dramatic drop in robocalls to my cell phone over the past two weeks. Prior to last Monday my average was ~ 5 robocalls per day. Last week I had 2 all week. This week I've had 2 so far. I haven't changed anything - I've had the same phone number for 20+ years and same carrier for 10+ years - so I don't know what happened.
As much as I would like to think that John Oliver's move might have something to do with it, I still don't expect the FCC guys have any concern for us poor bastards on our regular consumer-grade cell phone plans.
The only way to fight this in Russia is to completely disregard this law, however I believe many people will self censor instead.
When you are thousands of miles away from any place where a law you disagree with can be enforced, it is really easy to encourage people to disregard it. When you have actual skin in the game and your own future is on the line, it becomes a totally different matter. Maybe you should instead be encouraging people to do something that you would actually be willing to do yourself if you were in their shoes.
Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
My question on this is how do you determine which phone company is at fault? If the call originated with company ABC but my carrier is DEF, would DEF have had the ability to tell that the information was misrepresented? When multiple carriers are involved who gets the bill?
Maybe a few spammers wake up to a Seal Team 6 visit, or inside a CIA black site?
That would be a pointless waste of energy. Even if you executed every spammer who robocalled you today, there would still be thousands more waiting to call you starting tomorrow - none of whom would give the slightest shit about the dead ones. In other words:
Your post advocates a
approach to fighting (robocalls) spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(X ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for (the phone system) email
(X ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X ) Blacklists suck
(X ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(X ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
In other words, you're trying to take the emotions attached
There are few - if any - companies still making cassette tape players now. I haven't seen them sold in any obvious places in retail stores for years. If people have to mostly resort to buying used hardware to listen to these new releases, that sounds a bit short-sighted. At least I can still pick up a CD player at Best Buy or WalMart (or play a CD in a Blu-Ray player if I want), and most cars on the road today still have CD players as well. I can't say the same for cassette.
I recall that back in the 80 (and slightly less so in the 90s) it seemed like almost every intersection in the country had broken strands of tape fluttering about from people who had given up on a broken cassette. Yards after yards of that crap, tangled up on everything. Let's hope production on this revival doesn't reach high enough levels to see that again. At least a broken CD or vinyl record stays in (mostly) one place.
I used to go there just to pick up the stack of AOL CDs at the front, and feed them into the demo shredders in the back. I think they hated me.
I can tell you first hand that we made no money on the CDs or the decisions people made after taking them. AOL paid a small fee for us to put the display up in the store and that was it. You could do whatever you want with them and it would make no difference to the staff. Hell some days it was so dead that the staff was probabyl happy just to have a customer come in to talk with.
That said I don't remember ever selling shredders in our store. Are you sure you weren't at OfficeMax? They had red uniform shirts as well.
The place where I could buy a mouse pad and get a 3 foot long receipt
I found the fact that "the place where America buys technology(TM)" was also one of the last retailers in America to take physical imprints of credit cards (which was part of why the receipts were 3 feet long) to be rather delicious irony. We were also one of the first retailers to use the clear - and cash register sealable - shopping bags for security as well. And then the security detector at the exit - our store had detectors but not designated security guards - would go off if someone had too many keys in their pockets or surgical metal in their body anywhere (I had a colleague who had pins in his legs from an accident and set it off every time until he finally quit).
If you spend too much time in the shop you can't get it out of your head. The staff must be hearing it in their dreams.
To play devil's advocate here, I also worked for a while in a major regional grocery store as a cashier when I was in high school. We had no music whatsoever there. The main sound the cashiers heard was the beep of the register telling us we had successfully scanned an item. After working a shift and going home, I would still hear the same beep for hours while trying to get to sleep. I'm not fully sure which is worse, crappy music or endless beeping.
I worked through 2 years of retail service at CompUSA (remember them? back when they were still American owned?). We had the same deal there; I specifically remember that for a while by the time I had finished an 8 hour shift I would usually have heard Believe by Cher at least 4 times on the intercom. Sometimes if the store was dead enough we would overhead page each other just to interrupt the music (or just initiate an overhead page and leave the phone off the hook for a few minutes to accomplish the same). Some of my colleagues would often take their smoke breaks at the same song every day, some of the songs made me want to start smoking myself.
Slashdot Mirror
These improvements get a lot of attention because they connect with long (and expensive) international flights. What about those of us in the flying public who rarely fly that far? I've flown less than 1,000 total miles in the last 18 months myself, and I can't recall the time I last flew more than 3 hours nonstop. On these flights we're happy if we have a power outlet to charge our laptop or phone, and we are lucky if we get a back of pretzels as a snack.
Will these upgrades trickle down or will we be left out?
No city officials informed anyone on the NY City Council about the network failure and apparent lack of preparation for the rollover. Some council members only became aware of it when the Times called to ask for comment on the situation.
Let's put this in the context we use for other segments of our government and see if we're being reasonable here.
If this was the federal government - especially the Trump administration - we would say something like "it's too complex, and the administration was too stupid to understand it" and we'd move on. Yet because it is the government of the largest city in the US, we expect for some reason that they will have a deeper understanding of technical matters that we would place "beyond the pay grade" of other politicians. Why is that? Why is stupidity now acceptable at some levels of government and not others (to say nothing of how the Trump administration is trying to tell us that other people are too stupid to understand a tax return)?
I don't see how they are supporting their claim of the City trying to keep people from knowing about this. Just because the government isn't jumping up and down declaring "we failed!" doesn't mean they are actively trying to oppress people from reaching that conclusion.
FWIW I haven't considered my old hotmail address to be valuable for anything for a long, long time. I mostly used it to register on geocities and other unimportant things (and some things that a younger version of myself thought were important at the time). It is highly unlikely that anyone who I would want to be in contact with would have ever attempted to contact me at that address, received no reply, and given up - while I'm not on facebook I am found in enough other places that finding a current email address for me is pretty trivial.
I was really just trying to get in to my old hotmail address just for curiosity. I wouldn't expect that my old emails from 1997 would be valuable enough to microsoft for them to have bothered to retain them.
I've been trying to get back into my old hotmail address (really just out of curiosity at this point) for years now. I had a hotmail address back in the stone age of the service (before Microsoft had even bee rumored to be interested in buying it) and then I walked away from it. However the address still exists (emails can go there, and Microsoft won't let anyone sign up with it as a new address) but the password recovery / password reset tool doesn't work for it. If I try to reset the password I end up stuck in a loop of "your username does not exist" "please reset the password for your username" that never gets anywhere.
Of course, an email address that is easily over 20 years old - that hasn't had any meaningful email sent to it in well over 15 years - is not of great value. I searched online for it and found a couple really old forum posts I put up back then where I referenced it but nothing else mentioning it. Being as it was named for a minor character in a video game that most people have forgotten about, it isn't a name in high demand.
I wondered the same about Perl: An easy check is a job search. It doesn't look good.
I generally advise nobody ever apply to a job that lists a specific programming language as an absolute requirement, it is usually just a pathway to obsolescence. Find a posting instead that describes the types of problems they are looking to solve and then present to them why you are the best person to help solve them. The language choice is not critical, and never should be.
Just because it isn't listed as a job requirement doesn't mean it's not used, either. This shitty website still runs primarily on Perl.
I don't see Perl anywhere on the list. Not popular, not hated, not paid, not used. I can't be the only person still regularly using it.
Actually, under Trump the investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein child prostitution ring is being reopened. You know, Jeffrey Epstein of "lolita express" fame, which Bill Clinton was a regular flyer?
You're conveniently ignoring the fact that Epstein also has ties to Trump, and the underage girl who accused Trump of rape during the presidential campaign.
You don't expose Hillary and just walk away.
In case you didn't notice, Hillary is not president. In fact someone who rarely passes on a chance to publicly attack Hillary is president. Why would that person want the government to take any action against someone who did something to expose Hillary? He could have made this all a non-issue long ago if he wanted to. Instead it's likely that if Assange were brought to trial in the US, Trump would almost certainly be out of office before the trial was over.
Great question. I don't really see what this gets you for $5/month that you don't get for free with google voice.
I was previously getting on average 2-3 robocalls per day. Now I get fewer than 3 per week. I've had the same phone number for over 20 years, and the same carrier for most of that. I didn't change a damned thing, they just don't call as much. I didn't answer them before if I didn't recognize the number (or have a reason for a call to come from an unrecognized number at that time), and don't answer them now either. I just have far far fewer calls. The drop in frequency doesn't correlate with any particular event here in the US either (as I would get lots of calls around election season).
Has anyone else seen this as well? I'm certainly not complaining but I'm wondering why I'm seeing this. When the robocalls do ring my number they still often get the tag "scam likely" from T-Mobile, and they almost never leave a message.
My understanding is that Tmobile simply shows "scam likely" as caller id and puts through the call, unless you choose to reject them.
Indeed that is what they do. However in my case, the past few weeks now I've even seen fewer of those. I used to see around 5 "scam likely" calls every day. Now I see fewer than 2 per week. The shift happened abruptly, just a few weeks ago now.
I suspect that someone found away around the screening, and then Tmobile figured it out.
I do happen to be a TMobile customer, but I would think it would be awfully dangerous for Tmobile to play around with a technical approach to this problem - especially without warning customers. While the robocalling is overwhelmingly used for obnoxious (and sometimes outright illegal) purposes, there are also times when number masking is actually useful and legal. They're playing with fire if they are doing this.
I could be technical problems.
That's what I've been wondering. The coincidence of the timing is interesting though.
Facebook, Google, and Uber had technical problems recently.
I've never used Facebook or Uber in any way, shape or form. Facebook of course has been known to build profiles of non-users but they've never had my phone number or any other information that I would enter in to it in the process of starting a profile. Uber should know little to nothing of me as I've never signed up for them or installed their app on any phone I've ever owned.
I've seen a dramatic drop in robocalls to my cell phone over the past two weeks. Prior to last Monday my average was ~ 5 robocalls per day. Last week I had 2 all week. This week I've had 2 so far. I haven't changed anything - I've had the same phone number for 20+ years and same carrier for 10+ years - so I don't know what happened.
As much as I would like to think that John Oliver's move might have something to do with it, I still don't expect the FCC guys have any concern for us poor bastards on our regular consumer-grade cell phone plans.
The only way to fight this in Russia is to completely disregard this law, however I believe many people will self censor instead.
When you are thousands of miles away from any place where a law you disagree with can be enforced, it is really easy to encourage people to disregard it. When you have actual skin in the game and your own future is on the line, it becomes a totally different matter. Maybe you should instead be encouraging people to do something that you would actually be willing to do yourself if you were in their shoes.
Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
My question on this is how do you determine which phone company is at fault? If the call originated with company ABC but my carrier is DEF, would DEF have had the ability to tell that the information was misrepresented? When multiple carriers are involved who gets the bill?
Maybe a few spammers wake up to a Seal Team 6 visit, or inside a CIA black site?
That would be a pointless waste of energy. Even if you executed every spammer who robocalled you today, there would still be thousands more waiting to call you starting tomorrow - none of whom would give the slightest shit about the dead ones. In other words: Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( XXX) vigilante
approach to fighting (robocalls) spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(X ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for (the phone system) email
(X ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X ) Blacklists suck
(X ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. (X ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
In other words, you're trying to take the emotions attached
There are few - if any - companies still making cassette tape players now. I haven't seen them sold in any obvious places in retail stores for years. If people have to mostly resort to buying used hardware to listen to these new releases, that sounds a bit short-sighted. At least I can still pick up a CD player at Best Buy or WalMart (or play a CD in a Blu-Ray player if I want), and most cars on the road today still have CD players as well. I can't say the same for cassette.
I recall that back in the 80 (and slightly less so in the 90s) it seemed like almost every intersection in the country had broken strands of tape fluttering about from people who had given up on a broken cassette. Yards after yards of that crap, tangled up on everything. Let's hope production on this revival doesn't reach high enough levels to see that again. At least a broken CD or vinyl record stays in (mostly) one place.
I used to go there just to pick up the stack of AOL CDs at the front, and feed them into the demo shredders in the back. I think they hated me.
I can tell you first hand that we made no money on the CDs or the decisions people made after taking them. AOL paid a small fee for us to put the display up in the store and that was it. You could do whatever you want with them and it would make no difference to the staff. Hell some days it was so dead that the staff was probabyl happy just to have a customer come in to talk with.
That said I don't remember ever selling shredders in our store. Are you sure you weren't at OfficeMax? They had red uniform shirts as well.
The place where I could buy a mouse pad and get a 3 foot long receipt
I found the fact that "the place where America buys technology(TM)" was also one of the last retailers in America to take physical imprints of credit cards (which was part of why the receipts were 3 feet long) to be rather delicious irony. We were also one of the first retailers to use the clear - and cash register sealable - shopping bags for security as well. And then the security detector at the exit - our store had detectors but not designated security guards - would go off if someone had too many keys in their pockets or surgical metal in their body anywhere (I had a colleague who had pins in his legs from an accident and set it off every time until he finally quit).
If you spend too much time in the shop you can't get it out of your head. The staff must be hearing it in their dreams.
To play devil's advocate here, I also worked for a while in a major regional grocery store as a cashier when I was in high school. We had no music whatsoever there. The main sound the cashiers heard was the beep of the register telling us we had successfully scanned an item. After working a shift and going home, I would still hear the same beep for hours while trying to get to sleep. I'm not fully sure which is worse, crappy music or endless beeping.
I worked through 2 years of retail service at CompUSA (remember them? back when they were still American owned?). We had the same deal there; I specifically remember that for a while by the time I had finished an 8 hour shift I would usually have heard Believe by Cher at least 4 times on the intercom. Sometimes if the store was dead enough we would overhead page each other just to interrupt the music (or just initiate an overhead page and leave the phone off the hook for a few minutes to accomplish the same). Some of my colleagues would often take their smoke breaks at the same song every day, some of the songs made me want to start smoking myself.
Well I am certainly glad you have never invited me to your house then, as your world sounds like a terrifying place to inhabit.