I read a lot of stuff on Slashdot about how bad it is that Facebook knows everything about us, but y'all haven't successfully articulated just what I should fear. What are the potential negative consequences if Facebook knows my real name and where and when I went to high school?
So, let's start by correcting the inaccurate belief that all they know about you is the information you explicitly gave them. What they actually know is FAR greater than that.
For instance, what about the information that others have shared about you? If any of your friends, colleagues, coworkers, or classmates uploaded their contacts list to make finding contacts easier, Facebook now knows everything your buddy had on you: all of your phone numbers, all of your e-mail addresses, all of your instant messaging handles, and all other information your pal may have made note of in their contact entry for you (e.g. if I have it, I'll fill in the standard fields in iOS's Contacts app for birthdays, employer/position, spouse's names, kids' names, etc.). Oh, and don't forget that many contact entries also include pictures, so they know what you look like too, even if you never uploaded a photo of yourself. Likewise, if you've been tagged in a photo by a friend they'll know what you look like, even if they didn't before, and they then have the ability to use facial recognition to link you to various other people and places, associating you with events and places that you may have never told them about. And there's nothing stopping them from then scanning public records (which it's believed they do) or news reports to see if you or your picture appears anywhere else.
And what about how you access Facebook? If you use the mobile app they'll know what phone you use, which tells them which ecosystem you're in, which has strong correlations to a number of other factors (e.g. willingness to spend and likelihood to use certain other products and services). Depending on OS and version, they have a list of every single app you have installed on your phone, which is a treasure trove for understanding your interests, connections, and routines. We know that they've also exploited issues in OSes to collect more information than what their users should have reason to expect. For instance, an older version of the Facebook app on iOS exploited the ability of audio players to run in the background by playing a silent audio track at all times, enabling the app to silently keep running in the background. We also know that up until recently apps were capable of seeing all available WiFi networks, which can be trivially mapped back to geographic locations, so even if you had location services turned off they still would have had the ability to map your location anytime you had your phone on you, even if the Facebook app wasn't running in the foreground. And, of course, if you turned on location services, then all bets are off.
Between the location data they may very well have on you and their ability to recognize you in data they collect from elsewhere, they then have the ability to map you back to the people and events that they know were at those locations, whether that's something mundane like who your coworkers are, or something that could be controversial, inflammatory, or misunderstood, like a PETA protest, the person with whom you're having an affair, a church/religious group, a bar where you spend far too much time, an abortion clinic, a rehab clinic, a gun club, a Pride parade, a Dungeons & Dragons group, a political rally, Alcoholics Anonymous, or whatever else. We see some of this stuff in practice when they make suggestions for friends based on your physical proximity to other people throughout the day. One story that stuck out to me was of a prosecutor who had a friend suggestion for a criminal they had seen (or maybe tried? can't remember) in the courthouse the day before, despite having no mutual friends or other connections.
Did you use the mobile website one day? Congrats, you now have a tr
There's no need to gut, abolish, or eliminate it. This is a modern problem that only began a few decades ago. This problem exists because a group of people did exactly what you're saying we shouldn't do: they ignored the intent of the amendment.
Here's the most salient bit from the linked article (emphasis in the original):
From 1888, when law review articles first were indexed, through 1959, every single one on the Second Amendment concluded it did not guarantee an individual right to a gun. The first to argue otherwise, written by a William and Mary law student named Stuart R. Hays, appeared in 1960. He began by citing an article in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine and argued that the amendment enforced a “right of revolution,” of which the Southern states availed themselves during what the author called “The War Between the States.”
At first, only a few articles echoed that view. Then, starting in the late 1970s, a squad of attorneys and professors began to churn out law review submissions, dozens of them, at a prodigious rate. Funds—much of them from the NRA—flowed freely. [...]
This fusillade of scholarship and pseudo-scholarship insisted that the traditional view—shared by courts and historians—was wrong. There had been a colossal constitutional mistake. Two centuries of legal consensus, they argued, must be overturned.
All of which is to say, it wasn't until 1960 that anyone in legal circles even suggested that the Second Amendment was intended to protect the rights of everyone to have guns, and even then, it was just a (clearly biased) law student floating the notion. It was only in the late 1970s that the idea gained traction as the NRA started to put their marketing might behind it.
So the big question then is, when did the school shooting epidemic start? Well, take a look at the list of school shootings in the US and decide for yourself. At a glance though, I'd say that there seems to be a marked jump in the number of shootings at pretty much the exact same time that the public was being fed this dangerous new interpretation of the Second Amendment. Correlation != causation, of course, but it's interesting nonetheless, and might be an encouragement to return to the original intent and interpretation of the amendment.
There's nothing much to really open source here. This is a HID standard that manufacturers implement in their USB devices. How they implement it will always be device-specific, but this change means that they won't have to deal with the other side of the wire any longer, since Apple and Microsoft are now baking the necessary support in on their ends, with Linux almost sure to follow.
For anyone who doesn't know what this is all about, there are HID standards for a number of classes of device, such as mice, keyboards, and gamepads. While you may need device-specific drivers to unlock functionality particular to a device, having a HID standard means that you should be able to plug any HID compliant device from any manufacturer into any modern computer and expect that the standard functionality will work the same across all of them. That's why you can plug virtually any USB mouse into any computer and expect that left click, right click, and the wheel will just work, even if you don't install drivers specific to that mouse. Likewise, you can take your keyboard, plug it into any computer, and expect that all of the standard keys will just work.
Up to now, braille displays haven't enjoyed that same level of compatibility. It'd be like (or, actually, is the same as) if prior to using your preferred monitor on any given computer, you first had to somehow install the necessary drivers to run that monitor...without being able to use the monitor to see what you were doing. And yet, that's what low vision users have had to deal with up to now.
Going forward, however, the hope is that it will be cheaper and easier for braille display manufacturers to make devices since they won't have to devote much/any time to custom drivers. It'll also be the first time for low vision users that they'll be able to take their braille display and plug it into pretty much any computer with a realistic expectation that it will actually work. That's a huge win.
That actually happened to me. I got on one knee, pulled out the ring, proposed, and then couldn’t put the ring on her finger. I had ordered the right size, as attested to by my receipt and the jewler’s notes, but the jeweler had a brain fart and made it a full size too small (i.e. she could only wear it on her smallest finger), and neither they nor I had thought to check it before I proposed. They were able to rush a quick resizing of it over the weekend though, so other than being a funny little thing that happened to us, there wasn’t anything more to it.
Going back to what the GP said though, my wife actually did opt for the smaller diamond. I asked her what she wanted, and other than some design ideas for what the band should look like, her only advice on the diamond was to keep it under a particular weight, since she had no interest in having a stone larger than that. It’d be too much hassle and too much worry for her. To say the least, I was fine with that, yet store after store kept trying to upsell me instead of listening to what I was saying.
My disagreement was with regards to the claim that the bureaucracy only took 3 days. I understand where the 3 days came from as a reference, and I also agree with your assessment about the potential dangers in giving the Chinese a reason to invest in their own chip tech, but the implication of those previous statements was clearly inaccurate.
That's some strange math you have there. By my count, the bureaucracy took 12 days, since that's the amount of time from May 13th, when Trump told the Commerce Department to lift the sanctions, to May 25th, when the Commerce Department announced their plans for doing so.
The only things that happened during the three days you seem to be talking about are that the Chinese deposited a check, it cleared, and Trump found the time to announce (via Twitter, of course) a sudden and unexpected about-face with regards to his publicly stated views towards trade policy with China.
YouTube already serves up RSS feeds for every channel (e.g. Postmodern Jukebox's feed). You can find the link in the page source for any channel. They also have feeds for playlists and likely some other pages as well, though I haven't seen them in a casual glance through the source. Thankfully, I can drop a link to any random channel or playlist on my RSS client of choice and it'll parse the link to that channel or playlist from the page, allowing me to manage my subscriptions on a more granular level than what YouTube itself offers. For instance, BuzzFeed puts out a ton of videos that I have zero interest in (nearly all of their videos and content, in fact!), but their weekly Worth It series of videos are something that my wife and I find entertaining to watch together, and that feed lets me subscribe to just those videos, without having to mess with any sort of filtering or other stuff.
In the end, I find that managing my subscriptions via RSS is easier (one place to manage all subscriptions), more configurable (Feedbin has some powerful filtering actions that can be applied if there isn't a playlist/channel with the specific content I want), and it's also better at protecting my privacy to boot, thanks to the fact that my subscriptions to that feed is now aggregated with everyone else using the RSS service, meaning that YouTube/Google has way less visibility into my interests and preferences.
There’s a big difference between “a few statistical accidents” and “engaging in reckless behavior”, which is effectively what Uber has been doing. Their incident rate is known to be several orders of magnitude worse than their competitor’s, yet they’ve been testing their vehicles on public streets nonetheless. The reason they were in Arizona to begin with is because they got kicked out of California after running red lights and operating without a license. While Google and others are responsibly testing their vehicles, and yes, will have some accidents along the way, Uber is endangering the public by putting these vehicles on the road far too early.
I’m fine with having some accidents, but these guys are doing pre-alpha tests on public roads. That isn’t something we should be supporting when the device being tested is a one ton machine capable of causing death at any moment.
The 1st Amendment says NOTHING about "citizenship". [...] Where in the phrase "no law" does it say that laws abridging the freedom of speech of non-citizens are permitted?
As with most contracts, it comes back to how you define your terms. The Constitution starts with "We the People of the United States", which some have argued implicitly defines "people" as "citizens of the United States". Following that train of thought, all succeeding clauses and amendments would then be interpreted through that same lens, suggesting that the First Amendment's protections may not apply to non-citizens.
Mind you, I don't agree with that line of reasoning, but you asked, so there it is.
You do realize that Clyburn is a she, right? Even says so in the second sentence of the summary.
And the rest of your comment goes downhill from there. You're linking to the public policy page of a wolf who is lauding the current shepherd while condemning the previous one as "proof" that the current shepherd's policies are in the best interests of the sheep. I was about to say "never mind that the wolf has ulterior motives", but there's nothing ulterior about this wolf's motivations.
Interesting points. The law does seem to point towards the call only qualifying for protection if any party had reason to believe their communication would be private. Google clearly has no expectation of privacy, so it’s all on the recipient of the call, in which case it depends on their circumstances.
On one end of the spectrum the salon could be in a mall with an open storefront, answering the calls from the front desk where anyone could overhear. On the other end, they may only answer calls from a back office on private property with “no recording allowed” signs posted.
Either way, it’s not a good idea for Google to make assumptions. Disclosing that they’re recording is the only way this can safely work. And even then, it may run afoul of robocall laws.
1) The actual law refers to communications, not conversations, so the fact that there was a biological person on only one side of the call doesn’t matter. Communication still occurred.
2) Duplex acts on Google’s behalf and Google falls under the definition of “person” according to the law. It’s no different than when you work through an automated phone system and they warn you that the call may be recorded. Whether it’s an AI or a simple automated system, it’s still just a tool being used by the “person” on that end of the line.
But that actually raises an interesting point to consider: are these robocalls, and if so, do they run afoul of federal regulations against robocalls?
Precisely. We know they’re flawed because he himself wrote stories to highlight their flaws. Anyone suggesting we can use them as they are has clearly only read about Asimov, rather than reading what he actually wrote.
If you’re going to take the argument back to the idea that the authority wasn’t Congress’ to delegate in the first place (which is a good topic to explore, I think), the response I typically hear is that they have the authority under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution. While I personally believe that the ICC is frequently applied too broadly, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable application when it comes to interstate communications for business purposes, such as ISPs.
That said—and as your link accurately suggests—that doesn’t mean that the FCC has the authority to limit the laws that states pass, nor to limit the ability of states to control how ISPs operate within their borders. As such, while I do believe the FCC has the authority to classify ISPs under Title I or Title II and then regulate them accordingly (which is what I was addressing in my last comment), I’ll heartily agree with you that they do NOT have the authority to limit states as Pai’s FCC did when it—in the same act that repealed the Obama-era Title II classification—stipulated that states were disallowed from making laws contrary or in addition to what the FCC had done.
That was certainly a step beyond their authority, and I am very eager to see various states sue the asses off the FCC for trying it.
A password manager is a single point of failure that is hardened against attack and difficult to access unless an adversary has specific knowledge about your and your situation. Moreover, the payoff is low, since any given individual is not a valuable target, generally speaking.
A set of credentials used across multiple sites and services is a multitude of points of failure, the failure of any one of which will result in ALL being compromised. Many of them will not be properly hardened against attack, all of them have locations that are known to attackers, and the payoff for compromising any one is high, since an attacker can acquire credentials for millions or billions of users.
So no, you're not more vulnerable. You're far less vulnerable.
As for it not being an Act of Congress yet, I wasn't talking about in it current state, I was talking about after the House gets around to it. Disjointed replies may have obscured that.
No, that's on me. I was being an argumentative, hypocritical ass (e.g. I gave you a hard time for calling it an Act of Congress when it wasn't yet, but then proceeded to give myself a pass by referring to it as a law when it isn't yet). Thanks for assuming better of me, but I knew what you meant, so I apologize for railing against you as I did.
This isn't a law, it's an Act of Congress (enabled by an existing law). The President has as much legal right to veto it as you or I do.
Aside from the parenthetical statement, pretty much everything you said is factually incorrect.
TL;DR: Yes, it is a law; no, it is not an Act of Congress; no, being an Act of Congress isn't to the exclusion of being a law; and yes, the President can veto it.
Getting into the specifics... 1) The House hasn't voted on it yet, so it's not a law yet if we want to get technical, but it will be if it successfully goes through the rest of the political process, the same as any other law that began in Congress. As such, it's fair to colloquially refer to it as a "law" (e.g. "The Senate passed a law"), just as you might with a bill or whatnot (more on the "whatnot" in a minute), even though those aren't technically laws yet either.
2) By that same token, it's not an Act of Congressyet either, since it needs to pass both chambers of Congress to be an Act of Congress.
3) Of note, laws are Acts of Congress, so saying, "This isn't a law, it's an Act of Congress" makes about as much sense as saying that an orange isn't an orange because it's a fruit. The one isn't to the exclusion of the other.
4) What passed today was technically an accelerated joint resolution per the Congressional Review Act (the "existing law" you referred to). Joint resolutions are basically just bills by another name, so far as you and I are concerned. Both are used to pass laws using virtually identical procedures. They get used in different situations, but otherwise the only everyday difference is that bills create laws known as Acts (e.g. Congressional Review Act), whereas joint resolutions create laws known as Resolutions (e.g. Iraq Resolution). Again, both of them create laws.
5) As with bills, the President absolutely can veto this, since joint resolutions cross his desk the same as bills do after they pass both chambers of Congress with a simple majority (with one notable exception: a joint resolution to amend the US Constitution does not cross the President's desk). Should he veto it, Congress can override him with a 2/3 supermajority of both chambers, again, the same as with bills.
How do you figure? The FCC's congressional charter and subsequent amendments specifically authorize them to classify services under Title I and Title II and then regulate them accordingly, and the courts specifically upheld the FCC's authority to either enforce (or not enforce) Net Neutrality via Title II regulation. While I stridently disagree with what the FCC has done under Pai with regards to Net Neutrality, it's still well within their authority (though perhaps contrary to their purpose and mandate) to have done it, just as Wheeler's FCC was well within its authority to have classified the ISPs in a different manner.
Hell my first thought when reading the headline was "how would they use scooters in Venice".
Same here. Venice, Italy (the islands in the lagoon that everyone thinks of when you say "Venice", as opposed to mainland Venice where people locals live and work and tourists stay in hotels) is beautiful, but incredibly crowded during the day. There's no way you'd be able to ride a scooter of this sort more than a few meters at a time, so it puzzled me how it could have ever become the nuisance they were suggesting it is in the summary.
During the evening the story is quite different, since the islands empty out as the tourists head back to their hotels on the mainland. My wife and I enjoyed an evening stroll through the city around 11pm when we visited back in 2016 (we had done a dinner cruise that dropped us off on the Giudecca Canal on the south side of the city, but the water bus back to our hotelon the neighboring island of Murano picked up on the north side of the city at that time of night), and once we got away from the Giudecca Canal and into the interior of the city, I don't recall seeing anyone else until we got back to our hotel on Murano. I suppose you could use scooters at that point, but why would you? The city is asking to be stared at. There are great views everywhere you look, day or night.
For your edification, "slowing sales" is commonly understood as synonymous with "slowing growth".
Perhaps among armchair know-it-alls on Slashdot who feel a need to move the goalposts. Actual professionals don’t conflate acceleration with velocity if they want to keep their jobs for long.
And there’s been “worry” about Apple for as long as there’s been an Apple. Pointing out that someone is worrying about Apple’s future just means today is a day of the week. Which isn’t to say that all worry is unjustified. But those of you routinely declaring the imminent doom of Apple are like a meteorologist who always predicts that a hurricane will hit the New York coast “soon”. Past experience (e.g. Sandy) tells us that one day you could be right, but are we supposed to let you off the hook for being wrong every day until then? The broken clock doesn’t get to say, “I told you so!” during the two minutes it’s correct each day.
Also, contrary to your assertions, what the quarterlies revealed dispelled quite a few false notions regarding the sentiment that the iPhone is slowing. For one, it revealed that the low OLED display sales numbers that Samsung reported a few weeks prior weren’t because of flagging iPhone X sales, which was the widely held belief going into Apple’s earnings report. Rather, the numbers revealed that the iPhone X sold more units than expected, indicating that the poor OLED numbers were due to flagging sales of Samsung’s own phones: numbers which they conveniently didn’t break out. Relatedly, the ASP across the iPhone line skyrocketed, indicating that interest in the X is more ongoing and widespread than expected (i.e. it’s not just early adopters). It also demonstrated that Apple has a means by which to continue growing their profits—which is what investors are really looking for—despite the market reaching saturation. That they raked in an estimated 86% of all profits in the market this last quarter is proof of their ongoing success.
Which again, is not to say that they’ll stay on top forever. No one except the most zealous of Apple fanboys believes that. But recognizing that the mighty eventually fall doesn’t take any special insight, nor do you get to claim credit for being right if you started predicting that the end was nigh far before it actually comes to pass.
The funny thing here is that they’ve managed to twist a record-breaking quarter into a bad thing. Check the summary and you’ll see that it contradicts the headline. The summary makes it clear that it’s slowing iPhone sales growth, not slowing iPhone sales. Sales are still up, they’re just not up by as much as they were before the market became saturated.
Among the people using a device like that, wouldn't you guess that most people access the phone at least once a week to change the track or source, or else play/pause the audio? If you're already doing that, you'll never see this security feature in action. And among those that don't even look at the screen once a week, how many of them bother keeping a passcode enabled in the first place?
So if I hook the phone up to the car stereo via a usb cable, or to the Windows laptop via a usb cable, I'd be outta luck?
iOS already requires that you use your passcode to unlock the device if it's been more than a week since the last time you used it, as well as after 24 hours if you haven't unlocked it using TouchID or FaceID during that time, and those have been true for several years now. So, if you wanted to control your music on, say, your car stereo, you'd already need to unlock your phone. This wouldn't change that.
All this is doing is making it necessary to enter your passcode if you haven't unlocked the phone in the last 7 days before you can sync to a computer, put it into DFU mode, or do other things of that sort. If you're not already unlocking it on a regular basis, you're already having to enter your passcode anyway, so you won't even notice the difference. And if you are entering your passcode regularly, you won't ever receive this prompt in the first place.
On the other hand, if you're talking about reading the music files directly off the iPhone as if it was an external drive with MP3s on it, then that's a bit of a manufactured complaint, given that iOS doesn't support that option in the first place.
Except for the part where the feature is entirely optional? Settings > Apple ID > iCloud > iCloud Backup. Toggle the setting Off if you don't want it. Or, hell, if that's too hard, just do a search for "Backup" as soon as you get into Settings and it'll take you straight to the toggle for it.
And you answered your own question: they cross the line when they are clearly aiming their product at use in criminal activities, rather than merely making a product that criminals use. Making a better safe for data is something that millions of us are clamoring for use in everyday life, so Apple is nowhere close to the line.
Given that the passcode itself is still optional, and that this feature requires that you use a passcode, you shouldn't see any change in how you use your device.
For the rest of us, however, this simply brings the Lightning connector's functionality more in line with the rest of the system, though there's still room for improvement. iOS already forces you to re-enter your passcode on a weekly basis, as well as forcing you to do so if you ever go more than 24 hours without unlocking it. The fact that the Lightning connector wasn't being similarly locked down prior to now strikes me as odd.
Also worth pointing out since many people are missing it: this only locks out data access, not power. So if you have an old iOS device dedicated to playing music over Bluetooth while sitting on a shelf, you can still access the music widget on the home screen and can still keep it plugged into power on a continual basis without ever needing to enter the passcode.
Slashdot Mirror
I read a lot of stuff on Slashdot about how bad it is that Facebook knows everything about us, but y'all haven't successfully articulated just what I should fear.
What are the potential negative consequences if Facebook knows my real name and where and when I went to high school?
So, let's start by correcting the inaccurate belief that all they know about you is the information you explicitly gave them. What they actually know is FAR greater than that.
For instance, what about the information that others have shared about you? If any of your friends, colleagues, coworkers, or classmates uploaded their contacts list to make finding contacts easier, Facebook now knows everything your buddy had on you: all of your phone numbers, all of your e-mail addresses, all of your instant messaging handles, and all other information your pal may have made note of in their contact entry for you (e.g. if I have it, I'll fill in the standard fields in iOS's Contacts app for birthdays, employer/position, spouse's names, kids' names, etc.). Oh, and don't forget that many contact entries also include pictures, so they know what you look like too, even if you never uploaded a photo of yourself. Likewise, if you've been tagged in a photo by a friend they'll know what you look like, even if they didn't before, and they then have the ability to use facial recognition to link you to various other people and places, associating you with events and places that you may have never told them about. And there's nothing stopping them from then scanning public records (which it's believed they do) or news reports to see if you or your picture appears anywhere else.
And what about how you access Facebook? If you use the mobile app they'll know what phone you use, which tells them which ecosystem you're in, which has strong correlations to a number of other factors (e.g. willingness to spend and likelihood to use certain other products and services). Depending on OS and version, they have a list of every single app you have installed on your phone, which is a treasure trove for understanding your interests, connections, and routines. We know that they've also exploited issues in OSes to collect more information than what their users should have reason to expect. For instance, an older version of the Facebook app on iOS exploited the ability of audio players to run in the background by playing a silent audio track at all times, enabling the app to silently keep running in the background. We also know that up until recently apps were capable of seeing all available WiFi networks, which can be trivially mapped back to geographic locations, so even if you had location services turned off they still would have had the ability to map your location anytime you had your phone on you, even if the Facebook app wasn't running in the foreground. And, of course, if you turned on location services, then all bets are off.
Between the location data they may very well have on you and their ability to recognize you in data they collect from elsewhere, they then have the ability to map you back to the people and events that they know were at those locations, whether that's something mundane like who your coworkers are, or something that could be controversial, inflammatory, or misunderstood, like a PETA protest, the person with whom you're having an affair, a church/religious group, a bar where you spend far too much time, an abortion clinic, a rehab clinic, a gun club, a Pride parade, a Dungeons & Dragons group, a political rally, Alcoholics Anonymous, or whatever else. We see some of this stuff in practice when they make suggestions for friends based on your physical proximity to other people throughout the day. One story that stuck out to me was of a prosecutor who had a friend suggestion for a criminal they had seen (or maybe tried? can't remember) in the courthouse the day before, despite having no mutual friends or other connections.
Did you use the mobile website one day? Congrats, you now have a tr
There's no need to gut, abolish, or eliminate it. This is a modern problem that only began a few decades ago. This problem exists because a group of people did exactly what you're saying we shouldn't do: they ignored the intent of the amendment.
Here's the most salient bit from the linked article (emphasis in the original):
From 1888, when law review articles first were indexed, through 1959, every single one on the Second Amendment concluded it did not guarantee an individual right to a gun. The first to argue otherwise, written by a William and Mary law student named Stuart R. Hays, appeared in 1960. He began by citing an article in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine and argued that the amendment enforced a “right of revolution,” of which the Southern states availed themselves during what the author called “The War Between the States.”
At first, only a few articles echoed that view. Then, starting in the late 1970s, a squad of attorneys and professors began to churn out law review submissions, dozens of them, at a prodigious rate. Funds—much of them from the NRA—flowed freely. [...]
This fusillade of scholarship and pseudo-scholarship insisted that the traditional view—shared by courts and historians—was wrong. There had been a colossal constitutional mistake. Two centuries of legal consensus, they argued, must be overturned.
All of which is to say, it wasn't until 1960 that anyone in legal circles even suggested that the Second Amendment was intended to protect the rights of everyone to have guns, and even then, it was just a (clearly biased) law student floating the notion. It was only in the late 1970s that the idea gained traction as the NRA started to put their marketing might behind it.
So the big question then is, when did the school shooting epidemic start? Well, take a look at the list of school shootings in the US and decide for yourself. At a glance though, I'd say that there seems to be a marked jump in the number of shootings at pretty much the exact same time that the public was being fed this dangerous new interpretation of the Second Amendment. Correlation != causation, of course, but it's interesting nonetheless, and might be an encouragement to return to the original intent and interpretation of the amendment.
There's nothing much to really open source here. This is a HID standard that manufacturers implement in their USB devices. How they implement it will always be device-specific, but this change means that they won't have to deal with the other side of the wire any longer, since Apple and Microsoft are now baking the necessary support in on their ends, with Linux almost sure to follow.
For anyone who doesn't know what this is all about, there are HID standards for a number of classes of device, such as mice, keyboards, and gamepads. While you may need device-specific drivers to unlock functionality particular to a device, having a HID standard means that you should be able to plug any HID compliant device from any manufacturer into any modern computer and expect that the standard functionality will work the same across all of them. That's why you can plug virtually any USB mouse into any computer and expect that left click, right click, and the wheel will just work, even if you don't install drivers specific to that mouse. Likewise, you can take your keyboard, plug it into any computer, and expect that all of the standard keys will just work.
Up to now, braille displays haven't enjoyed that same level of compatibility. It'd be like (or, actually, is the same as) if prior to using your preferred monitor on any given computer, you first had to somehow install the necessary drivers to run that monitor...without being able to use the monitor to see what you were doing. And yet, that's what low vision users have had to deal with up to now.
Going forward, however, the hope is that it will be cheaper and easier for braille display manufacturers to make devices since they won't have to devote much/any time to custom drivers. It'll also be the first time for low vision users that they'll be able to take their braille display and plug it into pretty much any computer with a realistic expectation that it will actually work. That's a huge win.
That actually happened to me. I got on one knee, pulled out the ring, proposed, and then couldn’t put the ring on her finger. I had ordered the right size, as attested to by my receipt and the jewler’s notes, but the jeweler had a brain fart and made it a full size too small (i.e. she could only wear it on her smallest finger), and neither they nor I had thought to check it before I proposed. They were able to rush a quick resizing of it over the weekend though, so other than being a funny little thing that happened to us, there wasn’t anything more to it.
Going back to what the GP said though, my wife actually did opt for the smaller diamond. I asked her what she wanted, and other than some design ideas for what the band should look like, her only advice on the diamond was to keep it under a particular weight, since she had no interest in having a stone larger than that. It’d be too much hassle and too much worry for her. To say the least, I was fine with that, yet store after store kept trying to upsell me instead of listening to what I was saying.
My disagreement was with regards to the claim that the bureaucracy only took 3 days. I understand where the 3 days came from as a reference, and I also agree with your assessment about the potential dangers in giving the Chinese a reason to invest in their own chip tech, but the implication of those previous statements was clearly inaccurate.
That's some strange math you have there. By my count, the bureaucracy took 12 days, since that's the amount of time from May 13th, when Trump told the Commerce Department to lift the sanctions, to May 25th, when the Commerce Department announced their plans for doing so.
The only things that happened during the three days you seem to be talking about are that the Chinese deposited a check, it cleared, and Trump found the time to announce (via Twitter, of course) a sudden and unexpected about-face with regards to his publicly stated views towards trade policy with China.
YouTube already serves up RSS feeds for every channel (e.g. Postmodern Jukebox's feed). You can find the link in the page source for any channel. They also have feeds for playlists and likely some other pages as well, though I haven't seen them in a casual glance through the source. Thankfully, I can drop a link to any random channel or playlist on my RSS client of choice and it'll parse the link to that channel or playlist from the page, allowing me to manage my subscriptions on a more granular level than what YouTube itself offers. For instance, BuzzFeed puts out a ton of videos that I have zero interest in (nearly all of their videos and content, in fact!), but their weekly Worth It series of videos are something that my wife and I find entertaining to watch together, and that feed lets me subscribe to just those videos, without having to mess with any sort of filtering or other stuff.
In the end, I find that managing my subscriptions via RSS is easier (one place to manage all subscriptions), more configurable (Feedbin has some powerful filtering actions that can be applied if there isn't a playlist/channel with the specific content I want), and it's also better at protecting my privacy to boot, thanks to the fact that my subscriptions to that feed is now aggregated with everyone else using the RSS service, meaning that YouTube/Google has way less visibility into my interests and preferences.
There’s a big difference between “a few statistical accidents” and “engaging in reckless behavior”, which is effectively what Uber has been doing. Their incident rate is known to be several orders of magnitude worse than their competitor’s, yet they’ve been testing their vehicles on public streets nonetheless. The reason they were in Arizona to begin with is because they got kicked out of California after running red lights and operating without a license. While Google and others are responsibly testing their vehicles, and yes, will have some accidents along the way, Uber is endangering the public by putting these vehicles on the road far too early.
I’m fine with having some accidents, but these guys are doing pre-alpha tests on public roads. That isn’t something we should be supporting when the device being tested is a one ton machine capable of causing death at any moment.
The 1st Amendment says NOTHING about "citizenship". [...] Where in the phrase "no law" does it say that laws abridging the freedom of speech of non-citizens are permitted?
As with most contracts, it comes back to how you define your terms. The Constitution starts with "We the People of the United States", which some have argued implicitly defines "people" as "citizens of the United States". Following that train of thought, all succeeding clauses and amendments would then be interpreted through that same lens, suggesting that the First Amendment's protections may not apply to non-citizens.
Mind you, I don't agree with that line of reasoning, but you asked, so there it is.
You do realize that Clyburn is a she, right? Even says so in the second sentence of the summary.
And the rest of your comment goes downhill from there. You're linking to the public policy page of a wolf who is lauding the current shepherd while condemning the previous one as "proof" that the current shepherd's policies are in the best interests of the sheep. I was about to say "never mind that the wolf has ulterior motives", but there's nothing ulterior about this wolf's motivations.
Interesting points. The law does seem to point towards the call only qualifying for protection if any party had reason to believe their communication would be private. Google clearly has no expectation of privacy, so it’s all on the recipient of the call, in which case it depends on their circumstances.
On one end of the spectrum the salon could be in a mall with an open storefront, answering the calls from the front desk where anyone could overhear. On the other end, they may only answer calls from a back office on private property with “no recording allowed” signs posted.
Either way, it’s not a good idea for Google to make assumptions. Disclosing that they’re recording is the only way this can safely work. And even then, it may run afoul of robocall laws.
So, two things:
1) The actual law refers to communications, not conversations, so the fact that there was a biological person on only one side of the call doesn’t matter. Communication still occurred.
2) Duplex acts on Google’s behalf and Google falls under the definition of “person” according to the law. It’s no different than when you work through an automated phone system and they warn you that the call may be recorded. Whether it’s an AI or a simple automated system, it’s still just a tool being used by the “person” on that end of the line.
But that actually raises an interesting point to consider: are these robocalls, and if so, do they run afoul of federal regulations against robocalls?
Precisely. We know they’re flawed because he himself wrote stories to highlight their flaws. Anyone suggesting we can use them as they are has clearly only read about Asimov, rather than reading what he actually wrote.
If you’re going to take the argument back to the idea that the authority wasn’t Congress’ to delegate in the first place (which is a good topic to explore, I think), the response I typically hear is that they have the authority under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution. While I personally believe that the ICC is frequently applied too broadly, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable application when it comes to interstate communications for business purposes, such as ISPs.
That said—and as your link accurately suggests—that doesn’t mean that the FCC has the authority to limit the laws that states pass, nor to limit the ability of states to control how ISPs operate within their borders. As such, while I do believe the FCC has the authority to classify ISPs under Title I or Title II and then regulate them accordingly (which is what I was addressing in my last comment), I’ll heartily agree with you that they do NOT have the authority to limit states as Pai’s FCC did when it—in the same act that repealed the Obama-era Title II classification—stipulated that states were disallowed from making laws contrary or in addition to what the FCC had done.
That was certainly a step beyond their authority, and I am very eager to see various states sue the asses off the FCC for trying it.
A password manager is a single point of failure that is hardened against attack and difficult to access unless an adversary has specific knowledge about your and your situation. Moreover, the payoff is low, since any given individual is not a valuable target, generally speaking.
A set of credentials used across multiple sites and services is a multitude of points of failure, the failure of any one of which will result in ALL being compromised. Many of them will not be properly hardened against attack, all of them have locations that are known to attackers, and the payoff for compromising any one is high, since an attacker can acquire credentials for millions or billions of users.
So no, you're not more vulnerable. You're far less vulnerable.
As for it not being an Act of Congress yet, I wasn't talking about in it current state, I was talking about after the House gets around to it. Disjointed replies may have obscured that.
No, that's on me. I was being an argumentative, hypocritical ass (e.g. I gave you a hard time for calling it an Act of Congress when it wasn't yet, but then proceeded to give myself a pass by referring to it as a law when it isn't yet). Thanks for assuming better of me, but I knew what you meant, so I apologize for railing against you as I did.
This isn't a law, it's an Act of Congress (enabled by an existing law). The President has as much legal right to veto it as you or I do.
Aside from the parenthetical statement, pretty much everything you said is factually incorrect.
TL;DR: Yes, it is a law; no, it is not an Act of Congress; no, being an Act of Congress isn't to the exclusion of being a law; and yes, the President can veto it.
Getting into the specifics...
1) The House hasn't voted on it yet, so it's not a law yet if we want to get technical, but it will be if it successfully goes through the rest of the political process, the same as any other law that began in Congress. As such, it's fair to colloquially refer to it as a "law" (e.g. "The Senate passed a law"), just as you might with a bill or whatnot (more on the "whatnot" in a minute), even though those aren't technically laws yet either.
2) By that same token, it's not an Act of Congress yet either, since it needs to pass both chambers of Congress to be an Act of Congress.
3) Of note, laws are Acts of Congress, so saying, "This isn't a law, it's an Act of Congress" makes about as much sense as saying that an orange isn't an orange because it's a fruit. The one isn't to the exclusion of the other.
4) What passed today was technically an accelerated joint resolution per the Congressional Review Act (the "existing law" you referred to). Joint resolutions are basically just bills by another name, so far as you and I are concerned. Both are used to pass laws using virtually identical procedures. They get used in different situations, but otherwise the only everyday difference is that bills create laws known as Acts (e.g. Congressional Review Act), whereas joint resolutions create laws known as Resolutions (e.g. Iraq Resolution). Again, both of them create laws.
5) As with bills, the President absolutely can veto this, since joint resolutions cross his desk the same as bills do after they pass both chambers of Congress with a simple majority (with one notable exception: a joint resolution to amend the US Constitution does not cross the President's desk). Should he veto it, Congress can override him with a 2/3 supermajority of both chambers, again, the same as with bills.
How do you figure? The FCC's congressional charter and subsequent amendments specifically authorize them to classify services under Title I and Title II and then regulate them accordingly, and the courts specifically upheld the FCC's authority to either enforce (or not enforce) Net Neutrality via Title II regulation. While I stridently disagree with what the FCC has done under Pai with regards to Net Neutrality, it's still well within their authority (though perhaps contrary to their purpose and mandate) to have done it, just as Wheeler's FCC was well within its authority to have classified the ISPs in a different manner.
Hell my first thought when reading the headline was "how would they use scooters in Venice".
Same here. Venice, Italy (the islands in the lagoon that everyone thinks of when you say "Venice", as opposed to mainland Venice where people locals live and work and tourists stay in hotels) is beautiful, but incredibly crowded during the day. There's no way you'd be able to ride a scooter of this sort more than a few meters at a time, so it puzzled me how it could have ever become the nuisance they were suggesting it is in the summary.
During the evening the story is quite different, since the islands empty out as the tourists head back to their hotels on the mainland. My wife and I enjoyed an evening stroll through the city around 11pm when we visited back in 2016 (we had done a dinner cruise that dropped us off on the Giudecca Canal on the south side of the city, but the water bus back to our hotelon the neighboring island of Murano picked up on the north side of the city at that time of night), and once we got away from the Giudecca Canal and into the interior of the city, I don't recall seeing anyone else until we got back to our hotel on Murano. I suppose you could use scooters at that point, but why would you? The city is asking to be stared at. There are great views everywhere you look, day or night.
For your edification, "slowing sales" is commonly understood as synonymous with "slowing growth".
Perhaps among armchair know-it-alls on Slashdot who feel a need to move the goalposts. Actual professionals don’t conflate acceleration with velocity if they want to keep their jobs for long.
And there’s been “worry” about Apple for as long as there’s been an Apple. Pointing out that someone is worrying about Apple’s future just means today is a day of the week. Which isn’t to say that all worry is unjustified. But those of you routinely declaring the imminent doom of Apple are like a meteorologist who always predicts that a hurricane will hit the New York coast “soon”. Past experience (e.g. Sandy) tells us that one day you could be right, but are we supposed to let you off the hook for being wrong every day until then? The broken clock doesn’t get to say, “I told you so!” during the two minutes it’s correct each day.
Also, contrary to your assertions, what the quarterlies revealed dispelled quite a few false notions regarding the sentiment that the iPhone is slowing. For one, it revealed that the low OLED display sales numbers that Samsung reported a few weeks prior weren’t because of flagging iPhone X sales, which was the widely held belief going into Apple’s earnings report. Rather, the numbers revealed that the iPhone X sold more units than expected, indicating that the poor OLED numbers were due to flagging sales of Samsung’s own phones: numbers which they conveniently didn’t break out. Relatedly, the ASP across the iPhone line skyrocketed, indicating that interest in the X is more ongoing and widespread than expected (i.e. it’s not just early adopters). It also demonstrated that Apple has a means by which to continue growing their profits—which is what investors are really looking for—despite the market reaching saturation. That they raked in an estimated 86% of all profits in the market this last quarter is proof of their ongoing success.
Which again, is not to say that they’ll stay on top forever. No one except the most zealous of Apple fanboys believes that. But recognizing that the mighty eventually fall doesn’t take any special insight, nor do you get to claim credit for being right if you started predicting that the end was nigh far before it actually comes to pass.
The funny thing here is that they’ve managed to twist a record-breaking quarter into a bad thing. Check the summary and you’ll see that it contradicts the headline. The summary makes it clear that it’s slowing iPhone sales growth, not slowing iPhone sales. Sales are still up, they’re just not up by as much as they were before the market became saturated.
Among the people using a device like that, wouldn't you guess that most people access the phone at least once a week to change the track or source, or else play/pause the audio? If you're already doing that, you'll never see this security feature in action. And among those that don't even look at the screen once a week, how many of them bother keeping a passcode enabled in the first place?
So if I hook the phone up to the car stereo via a usb cable, or to the Windows laptop via a usb cable, I'd be outta luck?
iOS already requires that you use your passcode to unlock the device if it's been more than a week since the last time you used it, as well as after 24 hours if you haven't unlocked it using TouchID or FaceID during that time, and those have been true for several years now. So, if you wanted to control your music on, say, your car stereo, you'd already need to unlock your phone. This wouldn't change that.
All this is doing is making it necessary to enter your passcode if you haven't unlocked the phone in the last 7 days before you can sync to a computer, put it into DFU mode, or do other things of that sort. If you're not already unlocking it on a regular basis, you're already having to enter your passcode anyway, so you won't even notice the difference. And if you are entering your passcode regularly, you won't ever receive this prompt in the first place.
On the other hand, if you're talking about reading the music files directly off the iPhone as if it was an external drive with MP3s on it, then that's a bit of a manufactured complaint, given that iOS doesn't support that option in the first place.
iOS backs everything up to iCloud, like it or not
Except for the part where the feature is entirely optional? Settings > Apple ID > iCloud > iCloud Backup. Toggle the setting Off if you don't want it. Or, hell, if that's too hard, just do a search for "Backup" as soon as you get into Settings and it'll take you straight to the toggle for it.
And you answered your own question: they cross the line when they are clearly aiming their product at use in criminal activities, rather than merely making a product that criminals use. Making a better safe for data is something that millions of us are clamoring for use in everyday life, so Apple is nowhere close to the line.
Given that the passcode itself is still optional, and that this feature requires that you use a passcode, you shouldn't see any change in how you use your device.
For the rest of us, however, this simply brings the Lightning connector's functionality more in line with the rest of the system, though there's still room for improvement. iOS already forces you to re-enter your passcode on a weekly basis, as well as forcing you to do so if you ever go more than 24 hours without unlocking it. The fact that the Lightning connector wasn't being similarly locked down prior to now strikes me as odd.
Also worth pointing out since many people are missing it: this only locks out data access, not power. So if you have an old iOS device dedicated to playing music over Bluetooth while sitting on a shelf, you can still access the music widget on the home screen and can still keep it plugged into power on a continual basis without ever needing to enter the passcode.