Is paypal prohibiting the existence of competitors? Just because they are well known doesn't mean that others cannot exist. The AC reply also suggested several others (including google pay and apple pay) that do exist and seem to be doing OK.
Paypal can choose not to associate with Gab - or any other network - if they want. Nobody can force them to do business with them. Similarly if people don't like that paypal doesn't want to work with Gab any more, they are free to find another way to move money to Gab (or orthogonal to them if they encounter paypal too often in regular transactions for their own liking). There is no free speech issue here when one company decides they don't want to do business with another one.
I suspect there could be some overlap in those sets but I wouldn't expect them to be one and the same. Plenty of people are concerned about companies peeking in on their email but don't want to (or have the technical knowledge to) manage their own email server. The fact that this little appliance does that is somewhat novel as well IMHO as it would likely use less power than what many people would likely set up for an email server (or any time they think of "server").
I was making a joke about the title here, as it says
some electric car drivers might spew more CO2 than diesel cars
(emphasis mine), as it can be read to suggest that the CO2 is coming directly from the drivers themselves rather than from their vehicles or the processes that make and run them.
I can envision a market for that, particularly for people who want to keep their email and calendar data away from google but don't want to manage their own server completely on their own. I won't be lining up to give them any of my money, but I suspect plenty of other people might.
I remember when South Park accused the drivers themselves of creating "smug", but what is the basis behind the drivers actually spewing more CO2? Are they hyperventilating? They might want to see a doctor about that...
I happen to own an Epson printer (which I just bought new ink for). Is there a way to know if my printer has been known to show this behavior before I install the new ink cartridges? I looked at the filing on the EFF page but it didn't list specific printers.
While one solution to the problem would be "throw the printer away and buy one from some other company", I'd prefer a solution that does not involve spending more money - after all, reduced consumer cost was supposed to be part of the goal here wasn't it?
Stop injecting common sense and education into the slashdot conspiracy theorists.....
(emphasis mine)
Inject it straight into the conspiracy theorists themselves? I must admit I hadn't considered that. I'm pretty sure I don't have the time and travel budget to find them all myself though.
do you not realise
that most of the worlds cattle are grown on pasture?
However the American consumer consumes more beef than any other consumer in the world. Which is why we grow the majority of our cattle on
US 'feed lot' mentality
In order to get more beef in less time for less money. I don't know where you live but I can tell you that I can buy grass-fed beef at the grocery store where I live but it comes at a significant premium over the feed lot produced.
But no, I'm sure from your city appartment you spend hours pouring over PETA horror stories of US feed lots (which are both terrible, and stupid).
Still, whatever makes you feel morally superior I guess. As we know your bicycle directly converts CO2 to kittens, so you are doing your bit.
I'll continue to maintain my 5 acres of green trees and gardens around the house, which as we know do nothing but rape the earth mother.
You've gone well past hyperbolic there, friend. I eat meat. I live in the suburbs. I drive a car. I'm not trying to tell anyone to change their diet, I'm merely saying there is a good chance that eventually market forces will force all of us to do that.
This is really simple math here. To feed livestock, we have to first raise plants. To raise those plants we have to invest time, water, space, fertilizer, etc. Then we have to get the plants to the animals to feed them. We know that in most cases we get about 1 pound of meat from an animal for every 10 pounds of plants we put into them, and that's completely ignoring the economic costs of getting the plants to them and everything else that goes in to that.
If we're lucky though we'll be able to scale up lab-grown meat within the next few decades and we can get the benefits of meat without the costs of raising entire animals. While we do a good job of using a lot of the parts of the animals that are not usually considered edible, we still lose out on the deal.
And this is coming from someone who really would love a good steak. I eat a fair bit of meat but I realize we may reach a tipping point here.
Slashdot only hires millennials who don't know anything that happened before about 2003
I seriously doubt slashdot would have any success in hiring millennials. Why would they want to work for a decaying husk of a website that predates facebook by over a decade? They'd be just as well off working for a local 7/11; at least that is a job that is likely to still exist for more than a few months.
I have to disagree. I spent time in Upstate New York, and the drivers seemed courteous & respectful
My hypothesis is that all communities of drivers lie on a continuum between courteous and skilled. Upstate NY drivers are very courteous but woefully unskilled. Drivers in other parts of the country are on the other end and many are somewhere in the middle.
Spend some more time Upstate (particularly in the Syracuse area) and you'll see just how unskilled they are. On beautiful, clear, dry summer days you can count on seeing several vehicle roll-overs nearly every day (often single-vehicle roll-overs no less). Rolling a sedan takes a significant amount of stupidity yet people do it all the time there. When the snow flies the interstate looks like a demolition derby (even though they can count on it every year). People seem to be unaware of the laws of physics in that area, the best thing one could do would be to just separate them from their driving privileges. As best I could tell it seemed that there was no such thing as driver's education there or an actual driving test, or at least if there was it was a total joke when viewed through the prism of how awful the drivers themselves were.
The thing that saves the area from itself is also something that could make it very attractive for testing autonomous cars, though. There is vastly more road infrastructure there than is needed. The cities and towns are mostly on the decline (population-wise) while the roads are reasonably well cared for. Watch a morning traffic report there some time and you'll see what I'm talking about; they call 12 cars on a quarter mile of four-lane interstate "morning traffic". If they had traffic in that area and the drivers didn't improve they'd have to use half the county as a cemetery.
I've lived and visited some places where many of the locals really shouldn't be licensed to drive, ever (Upstate New York in particular). It would be a great place to test self-driving cars as it couldn't possibly make their situation worse.
I know this is about government abuses and the like here, but I would support more power of law enforcement to go after registrars (with a warrant, of course - not just on a whim). The companies that make the most money off of spamvertising - if you discount the spammers and the spambot armies themselves - are the domain name registrars. They are one of - if not the - most critical component in the chain of actually making money off of spam. Without a registrar, a spammer can't obfuscate the address of the spamvertised domain, and can't move it around when an ISP cracks down on their server. The registrars themselves have been playing hide-and-seek with domain owner information for years now, making it increasingly more difficult to figure out who owns the domains that are sending spam and directing spam business to. The registrars are happily spread all over the world (including plenty in foreign countries that don't give a shit about complaints from Americans) which means you need Interpol to get anything done (good luck with that!).
If we could get some ability to go after the registrars - and don't let them pretend they don't know what's going on or that they somehow aren't making bank in the process - we could have a useful tool towards slowing down spam. Instead, ICANN and the like have moved us in exactly the opposite direction.
police can get customer info from 3rd parties without a warrant
I've said it in a few other replies, and I'll say it again here. The NYT article plainly states that the police did obtain a warrant for the fitbit info. The USA Today writeup did not mention that.
There is a much simpler way to handle it - don't give out your information if you cannot control how it is used.
Which is why I'm not on facebook.
That said there are other places where one can make some decisions on the matter. I'm not familiar with fitbit as I don't own one; how much personal information does it really hold? Do you have to register with all your personal information in order to use it or does it just use a name and email address? I definitely agree that you are justified in being concerned about the information being leaked to insurance companies, who indeed seek out any excuse they can to increase the cost (or decrease availability) of healthcare to customers.
I am not foolish enough to think that these days you can realistically do that in every case, but that is a long way from saying "oh well, everyone has all my information anyway, so go ahead and track my every movement like a wild coyote"
I couldn't seem to find it today but I recall there was an article here several years ago (probably around 2009 or so) where someone was trying to make their own personal information worthless by releasing it themselves. IIRC they were interested in foiling someone who was clearly tracking them, though I don't recall how it went in the end. I think that is an interesting tack one could take with some of these; if you tied more of this stuff to a throwaway account and mined it manually could you get the benefit without some of the risk? The corollary to that though would possibly be whether or not it would be much less work than just doing all of it analog.
While the fitbit is not marketed as a crime-fighting device, it was a useful tool in this investigation. I don't really see what the problem here is. There is no indication that the victim was wearing the fitbit against her own will.
Where I work, our health insurance company penalizes you for not using these trackers. Um, I mean you get a discount if you do. So almost everyone I work with went out and bought one of those things and sync it up with our healthcare provider. "Hey, look how many steps I took today!" You can actually track the data manually on a website, but people are willing to sell their information for convenience. And to an insurance company! If they can find any reason to use that information against you, they most certainly will. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but you've given them the ammunition.
Sure, but that is a decision that an individual is making. The device is designed to do a certain function, and the individual chooses to use that device or not. Is it the fault of the fitbit or the manufacturer of the fitbit that this happened?
I don't own a fitbit (or anything like one) but doesn't it come with a EULA that specifies this data is being retained by the manufacturer? If you don't like that, you can always get an analog pedometer instead (which of course won't track when your heart stops) since it seems people are more often concerned with counting steps than anything else it can do.
Someone suggested that you can sometimes get by the paywalls by browsing in cognito; if the cookies aren't saved it is less likely that they'll know how many articles you've read.
Of course I always support journalists, so I wouldn't do that myself. No sir.
The key is the warrant. At any time, those access needs to be done with a warrant, signed by a judge and the warrant need to be made publicly accessible once resolved. We can't never trust at 100% any system to be always fair. Someone will misuse it, we need to be able to catch that.
While the USA Today article did not mention it, the NYT article plainly stated that indeed the police did obtain a warrant for the fitbit data.
I hope they checked the time on the fitness tracker. It says she died shortly before the guy left... Assuming that the fitness tracker data was correctly timestamped.
The NYT article mentions that the fitbit was using NTP, as was the camera that showed what time he left. The USA Today summary left that (and arguably more importantly the fact that the police obtained a warrant to get the fitbit data) out.
Tech companies are not, will not, and cannot be your friends.
A certain amount of paranoia is certainly warranted in technology any time it harvests your information, for sure.
However in this case a device that the victim owned and activated was used to obtain information on her last moments alive. The NYT article shows that the police obtained a warrant to get the data, as they should. The data then was used to construct a timeline to determine what happened, when.
While the fitbit is not marketed as a crime-fighting device, it was a useful tool in this investigation. I don't really see what the problem here is. There is no indication that the victim was wearing the fitbit against her own will.
When I press the windows button, windows redraws my entire damned display with useless icons and grinds to a halt while it tries to predict what I'm typing. We used to push the windows button to pop up a quick an unobtrusive start menu, from where I could easily hit "r" for run.
Did your machine default to tablet mode for some reason?
Being as this is Windows server 12 that I'm most often subjected to this "experience", so I would hope my server doesn't think it's a tablet. Sorry if I wasn't clear on that, to me Server 12, Server 16, and W10 are interchangeable disasters.
Slashdot Mirror
Is paypal prohibiting the existence of competitors? Just because they are well known doesn't mean that others cannot exist. The AC reply also suggested several others (including google pay and apple pay) that do exist and seem to be doing OK.
Paypal can choose not to associate with Gab - or any other network - if they want. Nobody can force them to do business with them. Similarly if people don't like that paypal doesn't want to work with Gab any more, they are free to find another way to move money to Gab (or orthogonal to them if they encounter paypal too often in regular transactions for their own liking). There is no free speech issue here when one company decides they don't want to do business with another one.
Ah. Right. Zoom. That was that feeling of my hair flapping about as that went over my head. Sorry for ruining the joke.
No worries. It wasn't that great of a joke, and it doesn't look like many people were reading this thread by the time I wrote it.
I suspect there could be some overlap in those sets but I wouldn't expect them to be one and the same. Plenty of people are concerned about companies peeking in on their email but don't want to (or have the technical knowledge to) manage their own email server. The fact that this little appliance does that is somewhat novel as well IMHO as it would likely use less power than what many people would likely set up for an email server (or any time they think of "server").
some electric car drivers might spew more CO2 than diesel cars
(emphasis mine), as it can be read to suggest that the CO2 is coming directly from the drivers themselves rather than from their vehicles or the processes that make and run them.
I can envision a market for that, particularly for people who want to keep their email and calendar data away from google but don't want to manage their own server completely on their own. I won't be lining up to give them any of my money, but I suspect plenty of other people might.
I remember when South Park accused the drivers themselves of creating "smug", but what is the basis behind the drivers actually spewing more CO2? Are they hyperventilating? They might want to see a doctor about that ...
I happen to own an Epson printer (which I just bought new ink for). Is there a way to know if my printer has been known to show this behavior before I install the new ink cartridges? I looked at the filing on the EFF page but it didn't list specific printers.
While one solution to the problem would be "throw the printer away and buy one from some other company", I'd prefer a solution that does not involve spending more money - after all, reduced consumer cost was supposed to be part of the goal here wasn't it?
We all remember the newest justice telling us how much he still likes beer.
Stop injecting common sense and education into the slashdot conspiracy theorists.....
(emphasis mine)
Inject it straight into the conspiracy theorists themselves? I must admit I hadn't considered that. I'm pretty sure I don't have the time and travel budget to find them all myself though.
do you not realise that most of the worlds cattle are grown on pasture?
However the American consumer consumes more beef than any other consumer in the world. Which is why we grow the majority of our cattle on
US 'feed lot' mentality
In order to get more beef in less time for less money. I don't know where you live but I can tell you that I can buy grass-fed beef at the grocery store where I live but it comes at a significant premium over the feed lot produced.
But no, I'm sure from your city appartment you spend hours pouring over PETA horror stories of US feed lots (which are both terrible, and stupid). Still, whatever makes you feel morally superior I guess. As we know your bicycle directly converts CO2 to kittens, so you are doing your bit. I'll continue to maintain my 5 acres of green trees and gardens around the house, which as we know do nothing but rape the earth mother.
You've gone well past hyperbolic there, friend. I eat meat. I live in the suburbs. I drive a car. I'm not trying to tell anyone to change their diet, I'm merely saying there is a good chance that eventually market forces will force all of us to do that.
This is really simple math here. To feed livestock, we have to first raise plants. To raise those plants we have to invest time, water, space, fertilizer, etc. Then we have to get the plants to the animals to feed them. We know that in most cases we get about 1 pound of meat from an animal for every 10 pounds of plants we put into them, and that's completely ignoring the economic costs of getting the plants to them and everything else that goes in to that.
We may recall that for a while we tried feeding the fattiest part of the cows back to other cows to speed up development, it turned out that didn't work out very well (economics not even considered in that part).
If we're lucky though we'll be able to scale up lab-grown meat within the next few decades and we can get the benefits of meat without the costs of raising entire animals. While we do a good job of using a lot of the parts of the animals that are not usually considered edible, we still lose out on the deal.
And this is coming from someone who really would love a good steak. I eat a fair bit of meat but I realize we may reach a tipping point here.
Slashdot only hires millennials who don't know anything that happened before about 2003
I seriously doubt slashdot would have any success in hiring millennials. Why would they want to work for a decaying husk of a website that predates facebook by over a decade? They'd be just as well off working for a local 7/11; at least that is a job that is likely to still exist for more than a few months.
I have to disagree. I spent time in Upstate New York, and the drivers seemed courteous & respectful
My hypothesis is that all communities of drivers lie on a continuum between courteous and skilled. Upstate NY drivers are very courteous but woefully unskilled. Drivers in other parts of the country are on the other end and many are somewhere in the middle.
Spend some more time Upstate (particularly in the Syracuse area) and you'll see just how unskilled they are. On beautiful, clear, dry summer days you can count on seeing several vehicle roll-overs nearly every day (often single-vehicle roll-overs no less). Rolling a sedan takes a significant amount of stupidity yet people do it all the time there. When the snow flies the interstate looks like a demolition derby (even though they can count on it every year). People seem to be unaware of the laws of physics in that area, the best thing one could do would be to just separate them from their driving privileges. As best I could tell it seemed that there was no such thing as driver's education there or an actual driving test, or at least if there was it was a total joke when viewed through the prism of how awful the drivers themselves were.
The thing that saves the area from itself is also something that could make it very attractive for testing autonomous cars, though. There is vastly more road infrastructure there than is needed. The cities and towns are mostly on the decline (population-wise) while the roads are reasonably well cared for. Watch a morning traffic report there some time and you'll see what I'm talking about; they call 12 cars on a quarter mile of four-lane interstate "morning traffic". If they had traffic in that area and the drivers didn't improve they'd have to use half the county as a cemetery.
... to sue Ben Affleck . I think my rights might still not be fully realized.
I've lived and visited some places where many of the locals really shouldn't be licensed to drive, ever (Upstate New York in particular). It would be a great place to test self-driving cars as it couldn't possibly make their situation worse.
I know this is about government abuses and the like here, but I would support more power of law enforcement to go after registrars (with a warrant, of course - not just on a whim). The companies that make the most money off of spamvertising - if you discount the spammers and the spambot armies themselves - are the domain name registrars. They are one of - if not the - most critical component in the chain of actually making money off of spam. Without a registrar, a spammer can't obfuscate the address of the spamvertised domain, and can't move it around when an ISP cracks down on their server. The registrars themselves have been playing hide-and-seek with domain owner information for years now, making it increasingly more difficult to figure out who owns the domains that are sending spam and directing spam business to. The registrars are happily spread all over the world (including plenty in foreign countries that don't give a shit about complaints from Americans) which means you need Interpol to get anything done (good luck with that!).
If we could get some ability to go after the registrars - and don't let them pretend they don't know what's going on or that they somehow aren't making bank in the process - we could have a useful tool towards slowing down spam. Instead, ICANN and the like have moved us in exactly the opposite direction.
police can get customer info from 3rd parties without a warrant
I've said it in a few other replies, and I'll say it again here. The NYT article plainly states that the police did obtain a warrant for the fitbit info. The USA Today writeup did not mention that.
There is a much simpler way to handle it - don't give out your information if you cannot control how it is used.
Which is why I'm not on facebook.
That said there are other places where one can make some decisions on the matter. I'm not familiar with fitbit as I don't own one; how much personal information does it really hold? Do you have to register with all your personal information in order to use it or does it just use a name and email address? I definitely agree that you are justified in being concerned about the information being leaked to insurance companies, who indeed seek out any excuse they can to increase the cost (or decrease availability) of healthcare to customers.
I am not foolish enough to think that these days you can realistically do that in every case, but that is a long way from saying "oh well, everyone has all my information anyway, so go ahead and track my every movement like a wild coyote"
I couldn't seem to find it today but I recall there was an article here several years ago (probably around 2009 or so) where someone was trying to make their own personal information worthless by releasing it themselves. IIRC they were interested in foiling someone who was clearly tracking them, though I don't recall how it went in the end. I think that is an interesting tack one could take with some of these; if you tied more of this stuff to a throwaway account and mined it manually could you get the benefit without some of the risk? The corollary to that though would possibly be whether or not it would be much less work than just doing all of it analog.
While the fitbit is not marketed as a crime-fighting device, it was a useful tool in this investigation. I don't really see what the problem here is. There is no indication that the victim was wearing the fitbit against her own will.
Where I work, our health insurance company penalizes you for not using these trackers. Um, I mean you get a discount if you do. So almost everyone I work with went out and bought one of those things and sync it up with our healthcare provider. "Hey, look how many steps I took today!" You can actually track the data manually on a website, but people are willing to sell their information for convenience. And to an insurance company! If they can find any reason to use that information against you, they most certainly will. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but you've given them the ammunition.
Sure, but that is a decision that an individual is making. The device is designed to do a certain function, and the individual chooses to use that device or not. Is it the fault of the fitbit or the manufacturer of the fitbit that this happened?
I don't own a fitbit (or anything like one) but doesn't it come with a EULA that specifies this data is being retained by the manufacturer? If you don't like that, you can always get an analog pedometer instead (which of course won't track when your heart stops) since it seems people are more often concerned with counting steps than anything else it can do.
Someone suggested that you can sometimes get by the paywalls by browsing in cognito; if the cookies aren't saved it is less likely that they'll know how many articles you've read.
Of course I always support journalists, so I wouldn't do that myself. No sir.
The key is the warrant. At any time, those access needs to be done with a warrant, signed by a judge and the warrant need to be made publicly accessible once resolved. We can't never trust at 100% any system to be always fair. Someone will misuse it, we need to be able to catch that.
While the USA Today article did not mention it, the NYT article plainly stated that indeed the police did obtain a warrant for the fitbit data.
I hope they checked the time on the fitness tracker. It says she died shortly before the guy left... Assuming that the fitness tracker data was correctly timestamped.
The NYT article mentions that the fitbit was using NTP, as was the camera that showed what time he left. The USA Today summary left that (and arguably more importantly the fact that the police obtained a warrant to get the fitbit data) out.
Tech companies are not, will not, and cannot be your friends.
A certain amount of paranoia is certainly warranted in technology any time it harvests your information, for sure.
However in this case a device that the victim owned and activated was used to obtain information on her last moments alive. The NYT article shows that the police obtained a warrant to get the data, as they should. The data then was used to construct a timeline to determine what happened, when.
While the fitbit is not marketed as a crime-fighting device, it was a useful tool in this investigation. I don't really see what the problem here is. There is no indication that the victim was wearing the fitbit against her own will.
When I press the windows button, windows redraws my entire damned display with useless icons and grinds to a halt while it tries to predict what I'm typing. We used to push the windows button to pop up a quick an unobtrusive start menu, from where I could easily hit "r" for run.
Did your machine default to tablet mode for some reason?
Being as this is Windows server 12 that I'm most often subjected to this "experience", so I would hope my server doesn't think it's a tablet. Sorry if I wasn't clear on that, to me Server 12, Server 16, and W10 are interchangeable disasters.