I get the point you're making, but it's worth pointing out for others that it doesn't just unlock when it thinks it sees you. Rather, it waits for you to focus your attention on it first. It's also worth mentioning that the false positive rate on Touch ID was 1 in 50,000, which was fine for the vast majority of their customers, whereas Face ID is 1 in 1,000,000. If you were already okay with Touch ID's level of accuracy, or else were on the fence before and just wanted it to be a bit better, Face ID may be the leap forward in accuracy that you wanted, even if it seems weirdly different at first glance.
...is about to occur, as if millions of fanboy voices* will suddenly cry out in outrage and were silenced by the dull realization that no one on the other side is listening. I fear something terrible has happened**.
* From both sides of this incessant debate, just to be clear. **...for the rest of us who aren't participating in this little war but who will nonetheless be subjected to its atrocities.
I don't think its pedantry to point out that someone is wrong about the time, location, and company that the protestors work for when those pieces of information are foundational to the person's argument that the protestors chose that (incorrect) time and that (incorrect) location specifically to cause the most damage to their (incorrect) employer.
I have no problem with them protesting, and I think they're smart to do so where and when they actually are protesting, since they know it'll get bigger headlines. What I have a problem with are sites getting suckered into posting "news" that wouldn't otherwise be worth the ink it takes to print, just because a protestor figured out a creative way to force "Apple" into the headline. I thought I made all of this pretty clear when I said said "shame on you" in the OP with regards to Slashot's involvement in authoring the headline.
Thankfully I have an Anonymous Coward to correct me. Please, feel free to do so. I actually do accept reproof when I (quite frequently) get things wrong, so if I did get something wrong in this case I would welcome any correction you might be willing to offer.
Their busiest day is a random Tuesday when no new products are launching? This is the iPhone announcement, not launch. Perhaps if you had understood that, the remainder of my post would have made more sense to you.
On the day that there will be people camped out in front of the store relying on the striking employees to get them their precious iPhone 8s, that is the day the retailers really need all hands on deck.
So, while that seems intelligent at a glance, it's factually incorrect in ways that completely undermine what you're saying. For instance: 1) No one is camping. This is an product announcement, not a product launch. 2) No one currently needs all hands on deck. Again, it's a product announcement, not a product launch. 3) Perhaps most important: Apple Stores don't rely on the employees who are striking, since AT&T employees don't work at Apple. 4) Given that Apple hasn't announced an iPhone 7s or 8 yet, it's unlikely that they'd skip two generations by going straight to 8s.
Moreover, even if the AT&T employees decide to protest outside of Apple Stores on launch day, which is admittedly something they may decide to do one day, I seriously doubt that they'd manage to do anything other than get dwarfed by the size of the lines they're standing next to...which, again, will be filled with people who will be served by the Apple employees working without protest in the Apple Store.
Yup, I believe it was nVidia that spoiled the surprise, and Jobs yanked their cards entirely from all Macs. Apple seems to have softened a bit since then. I've seen other CEOs announce things before Apple on a handful of occasions without Apple dropping them entirely, but Apple does seem to take punitive measures still.
For instance, you'll see estimates suggesting that the mix of supplies for a particular part will be 80-20 from companies A and B. When A then says something before Apple is ready, you'll hear a few weeks later that the mix ended up being closer to 50-50 between companies A and B, rather than the 80-20 that was originally thought.
I'm guessing Apple either bakes it into their contracts or else has enough wiggle room in their contracts that they can punish their suppliers in those sorts of ways.
It's not about the competition. It's about controlling the narrative. If you control the narrative, you get to be the one who starts off in control of setting expectations and reactions, which can have a massive impact on how your products are perceived by the public.
Consider, for instance, how differently the release of information about specs can go. Apple's iPhones aren't known for having the best specs, but they generally seem to punch above their weight, which is to say that despite their specs frequently being worse on paper, user benchmarks and real-world usage suggest iPhones are generally able to get more performance out of lesser hardware.
Now image a few scenarios, one where they control the news, and some others where they don't:
A) Apple announces the new device, but doesn't mention most of the specs, instead merely presenting some pretty graphs that show a massive year-over-year gain in terms of performance, battery life, and the other metrics that users care about. The headline news will be that "great" just became "even better!". If anyone tries to air concerns about the specs, their voice will be drowned by mainstream coverage of headline features. If anyone has questions about the device's performance, they'll be shown the pretty graphs. The actual specs won't come out until the phones are in people's hands. At that point the tech sites will do their usual comparisons against the competition, but any concerns about unflattering comparisons will be rendered moot by the benchmarks and firsthand accounts that will also be coming out at that time. Apple maximizes the number of people who believe their phone to perform well with great battery life, resulting in great unit sales.
-- or --
B) The specs leak in the months before the official announcement. Tech sites do their usual deep dive on the specs, but without any performance charts, firsthand accounts, or benchmarks to go by, all they'll report are the by-the-numbers comparisons that are likely to be unflattering for Apple. With blood in the water and nothing coming out of Apple to the contrary, mainstream sites will start reporting on the growing concern over the performance of upcoming models. The longer it goes without an answer from Apple, the more news cycles these concerns will be stretched across, thus reaching more people. By the time the iPhone is actually announced, everyone from your grandparents to your sister's cousin's roommate will have heard that the new iPhones perform poorly and have worse battery life. The pretty graphs, real-world usage, and benchmarks all showing otherwise will eventually assuage most concerns, but not before some damage will have been done. People that would have bought the new iPhone now won't.
-- or --
C) The specs leak just a few days before the announcement. While not as bad for Apple as (B), this one results in less enthusiastic reporting about the headline features as the surprise has already been spoiled. Additionally, nearly every report will be damped by a perfunctory mention of the leaks. The new iPhones will sell fine, but the overall reaction will be less enthusiastic than it would have been otherwise.
Sure, Apple "leaks" stuff all the time, as most large organizations do, but those mostly follow the same few patterns that you see at all large organizations: - They use "leaks" to clear out details that they'd rather not have sharing a news cycle with their big announcements - They use "leaks" to prepare the media and the public for a shock it won't like (e.g. higher prices, no headphone jack, etc.) - They use "leaks" to get people excited about products by hinting at features
What the "leaks" NEVER do is spoil events by stealing thunder from their keynote addresses, which is exactly what happened here when you look into exactly how much got out. In fact, this one gets even worse, since it... ...spoils nearly all of the major news for their annual iPhone launch ...spoils the first event at the brand new location they spent billions of dollars building ...spoils the event that coincides with the 10th anniversary of the iPhone ...spoiled details about an updated Apple TV that wasn't on most radars ...spoiled everything just two days before the event, utterly deflating it
So yes, Apple "leaks" things, but as a company that directly or indirectly employs hundreds of thousands of employees, they occasionally actually leak things too, and this DEFINITELY falls into that latter case.
Eventually it will all leak but not before much of it is quite stale.
While I wish that was true... - Birth dates never go stale - SSNs VERY rarely go stale (I know they can be changed, but I've never actually heard of it being done) - First names, rarely go stale - Last names probably only go stale once or twice per lifetime on average
The stuff that actually will go stale (e.g. addresses, driver's license number, phone numbers, etc.) is the stuff that's least important.
That said, you are correct about this stuff already being available to people who knew to ask and who were willing to pay a higher price. All of which should point us towards finally fixing the system that depends on an assumption of secrecy for a number that was never intended to be a secret and that is regularly shared as a routine matter of business.
As someone who actually lived in Florida for nearly a decade (1990-1999) and weathered a number of hurricanes (e.g. Andrew), what makes you think they're not already spending that money?
For instance, contrary to your claims that they're building with "sticks and paper", all of the homes around where we lived (along the Atlantic Coast in south Florida, pretty much in the path of every storm) were required to be cinderblock construction with steel reinforcement, rather than the wood frame construction that's common in the rest of the country. The roofs on the homes were designed with reduced eaves, few gables, steel ties to the framing, and low slopes in order to prevent hurricanes from getting a grip that'd let them rip the roof off. To reduce the risk of high winds knocking over walls, they'd break up the geometry of exterior walls so that no one surface would receive excessive force. Where there were tall walls or gables, codes required them to be structurally reinforced (e.g. our home had a reinforced chimney). Homes were built with an interior room, typically a bathroom or closet under the stairs, that was reinforced with plumbing or other structural elements to act as a shelter in case the rest of the home fell apart. As we were leaving, I believe that windows were being required to use the glass that can take a direct hit from a 2x4 at hurricane speeds.
To put it bluntly, all new homes were built like bunkers.
But therein lies the crux: all new homes. Much of Florida was built before those codes were in place, so it's only after a big storm clears a path that new homes go up or old homes are brought up to code. Once that occurs, these sorts of problems tend to stop happening.
Ask yourself: if they decided to run with your idea starting today, would things actually look any different in 20 years? 40 years? Or would we instead still be seeing occasional reports of old homes being destroyed when a major storm hits an area that tends not to get hit often, just like we see today?
All of which is to say, unless you're suggesting that we should forcibly evict people so we can tear down and rebuild their old homes (which I don't think your "mere 20%" estimate took into account), you're not saying anything new. Quite the opposite, in fact, since Florida officials beat you to the punch by several decades and put the codes in place way back then to ensure that people would build things appropriately.
So, AT&T employees are protesting AT&T's business practices. Nothing they're protesting has anything to do with the iPhone 8 or Apple at large. Nonetheless, they're protesting at the launch of the new iPhone, simply because they know that places like Slashdot can't resist posting clickbait articles that mention Apple in the headline, thus bringing attention to their cause, despite the fact that nothing they're doing has anything to do with Apple.
Even worse, it looks like Slashdot is "breaking" this news, since I don't see a link or article mentioned anywhere, so that means that Slashdot is solely responsible for authoring the headline. Shame on you.
And how exactly does a freeze help, if the next credit bureau hack obtains all those freeze PINs?
You don't seem to realize what you're asking, since you're basically questioning the value of setting up passwords (PINs) for accounts that currently don't have them, and you're suggesting that there's no point in bothering with passwords in the first place since subsequent attacks may suck them up.
Never mind that freezing your accounts (i.e. locking it behind a password): 1) Makes the currently leaked data useless to bad actors until and unless they succeed in capturing your PIN via a hypothetical second hack.
2) Limits the damage from a hypothetical second hack to a single credit bureau, since PINs are unique to each credit bureau.
3) May buy you time to reset the protection on your account if a second hack occurs, since the PINs are hopefully hashed and salted, meaning that bad actors won't have an immediate ability to act on them.
4) Increases the time, complexity, and cost necessary to attack you, making it more likely that they'll skip you and go for an easier target.
Put differently: it's as if you never bothered installing a lock on the front door to your house and you live in a city where a roaming band of thieves robs anyone whose house they find out is unlocked. They just heard your door had no lock and they just found out where you live. They're coming. There's nothing stopping them from showing up at any moment, walking in, and taking everything from you. And, knowing all of those facts, your response is to question what the point is in installing a lock, since it's possible that they may steal your keys later.
Sure, fine, maybe they will, but in the meantime you can stop this attack by just installing a lock, so maybe we postpone the discussion about the inherent brokenness of the system until after you lock your door?
My apologies. What I had intended to baselessly assert was that you're a no-good Commie intent on the destruction of our wholesome, American values. After all, every decent American hates the DMCA, so it's clearly responsible for the evils being perpetuated here. The fact that you would dare imply otherwise suggests you're the sort of treasonous person who enjoys clubbing baby seals between attending Nazi rallies and crafting your next astroturf post against net neutrality.
Admittedly, it wasn't specified which form of IP they were dealing with, so it could have been trademark or patent, I suppose. Other comments revolved around the DMCA and copyright on account of their prominent role in these sorts of situations, and I apparently allowed myself to be sucked into framing the entire discussion in those terms. Thanks for calling me on that.
That could work. Right now, service providers like YouTube have to "expeditiously" remove infringing content if they want to maintain their safe harbor status that keeps them from being held liable for that content. But if we removed that requirement for takedowns that aren't bonded, it'd give hosts a means to vet the claims that are more likely to be abusive, while also incentivizing the big players to play nice.
Social Security numbers are fine. The problem is that organizations have foolishly been using them for authentication ("Prove you are you!"), rather than merely identification ("Who are we talking about?"), which was all they were ever designed to do. As a means for identification, it generally still works just as well today as it did when it began. As a method for authentication, it was lousy from the start and has been getting worse by the day.
The onus in these cases should be on Amazon to expend the resources to properly vet these claims before acting on them.
FTFY, but the problem is that the DMCA doesn't work that way (though I wish it did).
In fact, it's been structured to incentivize Amazon to NOT expend any resources at all, since doing so may open them up to legal liability. Under the terms of the DMCA, service providers like Amazon enjoy a limited immunity against being held liable for copyright infringement on their service that took place at the direction of their users. In order to maintain their safe harbor status, service providers are required to act "expeditiously" to remove allegedly infringing content in response to a takedown notice. I.e. The DMCA presumes the recipient of a takedown notice is guilty and is structured such that it places the burden of proof nearly entirely on them.
Vetting the claim has the potential to open Amazon up to liability for their users' misdeeds, since either taking too long to vet or outright denying the claim would mean that they failed to act expeditiously. Google has given up their safe harbor status on a few occasions to defend users who were CLEARLY in the right, but that sort of thing is the exception, not the rule, and no service provider can currently be reasonably expected to do otherwise in all cases.
Instead of a fine, which is difficult to collect in the case of a fictitious entity, what about requiring a bond?
We already see bonds being used in legal disputes over intellectual property. For instance, if Apple sues Samsung and asks the court for an injunction against the sale of Samsung products, Apple will be forced to put up a bond. If it later turns out that Samsung was in the right all along, that bond will be used to compensate Samsung for the sales lost during the injunction.
Given that a DMCA takedown acts as an injunction, why not require that anyone filing a DMCA takedown request provide proof that they are bonded? If it later turns out that they perjured themselves, filed a false claim, or otherwise abused the system, the victim of the takedown notice won't have to hunt down the abuser to receive compensation. Instead, they can simply go to the surety company to collect their compensation, just like you would with a bonded contractor.
This also has the benefit of slowing down or at least discouraging any given company's ability to abuse the system. After all, if they maintain the minimum bond allowed and it was just paid out to a victim, they won't be able to use it to secure a future takedown notice until they pay it back, effectively preventing them from filing any more takedown notices. And if they keep a bond for more than the minimum, they'll potentially be out quite a bit of money if they start abusing the system.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get around the biggest problem with this idea: if the minimum bond is too large, say, $100K, normal people wouldn't be able to protect their work since they couldn't afford the minimum bond, while if the minimum bond was too small, say, $10, it wouldn't be useful in the least in compensating victims for their loss. Maybe there's a way around it, but I haven't figured out a way to make it both fair to big companies and Joe Schmoes while still discouraging abusers in the few minutes it took to type this comment.
having 4 companies control wireless telephone system over the entire United States, and absurdly high barriers of entry, is enough to make them a monopoly IMHO.
I'll disagree with your take on this, and I mean this in the kindest of ways, but your use of "monopoly" makes me question whether you know what it means. Yes, they're huge, yes, they're dug in, and yes, I wish there was more competition, but, monopolies are defined by their exclusive (or near-exclusive) control over a market, so none of those factors means these companies are monopolies. It just means that the market has high barriers to entry and that the current players are entrenched. If anything, the fact that there are four of them competing with one another points towards a lack of a monopoly.
T-Mobile is a monopoly. They have exclusive rights to certain frequencies, granted to them by the US government.
Now that's a far more interesting point to make, and one I hadn't heard before. Even so, it still doesn't make them a monopoly (at least in any meaningful sense of the word) for one simple reason: individual frequencies are not a market. Individual frequencies are part of a much larger market, of which T-Mobile only controls a small portion.
Think of it this way: any given apple farmer has the exclusive right to use their farmland (which, like a frequency, is a limited resource) to grow their apples, but that doesn't mean they have a monopoly over either the market for farmland or the market for apples. Yes, their patch of dirt is different than everyone else's, and yes, they have exclusive control over their unique location, but that doesn't mean they have a monopoly (again: exclusive control of a market), since there's plenty of other farmland that's just as useful and plenty of other farmers producing apples.
Likewise, there are plenty of other frequencies that are just as useful for cell phone use, and plenty of other carriers providing cell service over those other frequencies. As such, T-Mobile neither has a monopoly over the market for frequencies nor over the market for cell services. That may change in the future, but for the moment, that's where things stand.
As for whether Netflix being bundled is a good or bad thing, so long as consumers have alternatives to T-Mobile and T-Mobile doesn't prioritize Netflix's traffic, things should shake out acceptably, though I'll admit that the market may go in directions we may not like along the way, in much the same way that most of us loathe cable TV bundles.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll be happy to know that someone has you covered.
I get the point you're making, but it's worth pointing out for others that it doesn't just unlock when it thinks it sees you. Rather, it waits for you to focus your attention on it first. It's also worth mentioning that the false positive rate on Touch ID was 1 in 50,000, which was fine for the vast majority of their customers, whereas Face ID is 1 in 1,000,000. If you were already okay with Touch ID's level of accuracy, or else were on the fence before and just wanted it to be a bit better, Face ID may be the leap forward in accuracy that you wanted, even if it seems weirdly different at first glance.
...is about to occur, as if millions of fanboy voices* will suddenly cry out in outrage and were silenced by the dull realization that no one on the other side is listening. I fear something terrible has happened**.
* From both sides of this incessant debate, just to be clear. ...for the rest of us who aren't participating in this little war but who will nonetheless be subjected to its atrocities.
**
I don't think its pedantry to point out that someone is wrong about the time, location, and company that the protestors work for when those pieces of information are foundational to the person's argument that the protestors chose that (incorrect) time and that (incorrect) location specifically to cause the most damage to their (incorrect) employer.
I have no problem with them protesting, and I think they're smart to do so where and when they actually are protesting, since they know it'll get bigger headlines. What I have a problem with are sites getting suckered into posting "news" that wouldn't otherwise be worth the ink it takes to print, just because a protestor figured out a creative way to force "Apple" into the headline. I thought I made all of this pretty clear when I said said "shame on you" in the OP with regards to Slashot's involvement in authoring the headline.
Thanks for the correction. Could've sworn it was big green. Not sure how I got it confused.
Thankfully I have an Anonymous Coward to correct me. Please, feel free to do so. I actually do accept reproof when I (quite frequently) get things wrong, so if I did get something wrong in this case I would welcome any correction you might be willing to offer.
Their busiest day is a random Tuesday when no new products are launching? This is the iPhone announcement, not launch. Perhaps if you had understood that, the remainder of my post would have made more sense to you.
On the day that there will be people camped out in front of the store relying on the striking employees to get them their precious iPhone 8s, that is the day the retailers really need all hands on deck.
So, while that seems intelligent at a glance, it's factually incorrect in ways that completely undermine what you're saying. For instance:
1) No one is camping. This is an product announcement, not a product launch.
2) No one currently needs all hands on deck. Again, it's a product announcement, not a product launch.
3) Perhaps most important: Apple Stores don't rely on the employees who are striking, since AT&T employees don't work at Apple.
4) Given that Apple hasn't announced an iPhone 7s or 8 yet, it's unlikely that they'd skip two generations by going straight to 8s.
Moreover, even if the AT&T employees decide to protest outside of Apple Stores on launch day, which is admittedly something they may decide to do one day, I seriously doubt that they'd manage to do anything other than get dwarfed by the size of the lines they're standing next to...which, again, will be filled with people who will be served by the Apple employees working without protest in the Apple Store.
Yup, I believe it was nVidia that spoiled the surprise, and Jobs yanked their cards entirely from all Macs. Apple seems to have softened a bit since then. I've seen other CEOs announce things before Apple on a handful of occasions without Apple dropping them entirely, but Apple does seem to take punitive measures still.
For instance, you'll see estimates suggesting that the mix of supplies for a particular part will be 80-20 from companies A and B. When A then says something before Apple is ready, you'll hear a few weeks later that the mix ended up being closer to 50-50 between companies A and B, rather than the 80-20 that was originally thought.
I'm guessing Apple either bakes it into their contracts or else has enough wiggle room in their contracts that they can punish their suppliers in those sorts of ways.
It's not about the competition. It's about controlling the narrative. If you control the narrative, you get to be the one who starts off in control of setting expectations and reactions, which can have a massive impact on how your products are perceived by the public.
Consider, for instance, how differently the release of information about specs can go. Apple's iPhones aren't known for having the best specs, but they generally seem to punch above their weight, which is to say that despite their specs frequently being worse on paper, user benchmarks and real-world usage suggest iPhones are generally able to get more performance out of lesser hardware.
Now image a few scenarios, one where they control the news, and some others where they don't:
A) Apple announces the new device, but doesn't mention most of the specs, instead merely presenting some pretty graphs that show a massive year-over-year gain in terms of performance, battery life, and the other metrics that users care about. The headline news will be that "great" just became "even better!". If anyone tries to air concerns about the specs, their voice will be drowned by mainstream coverage of headline features. If anyone has questions about the device's performance, they'll be shown the pretty graphs. The actual specs won't come out until the phones are in people's hands. At that point the tech sites will do their usual comparisons against the competition, but any concerns about unflattering comparisons will be rendered moot by the benchmarks and firsthand accounts that will also be coming out at that time. Apple maximizes the number of people who believe their phone to perform well with great battery life, resulting in great unit sales.
-- or --
B) The specs leak in the months before the official announcement. Tech sites do their usual deep dive on the specs, but without any performance charts, firsthand accounts, or benchmarks to go by, all they'll report are the by-the-numbers comparisons that are likely to be unflattering for Apple. With blood in the water and nothing coming out of Apple to the contrary, mainstream sites will start reporting on the growing concern over the performance of upcoming models. The longer it goes without an answer from Apple, the more news cycles these concerns will be stretched across, thus reaching more people. By the time the iPhone is actually announced, everyone from your grandparents to your sister's cousin's roommate will have heard that the new iPhones perform poorly and have worse battery life. The pretty graphs, real-world usage, and benchmarks all showing otherwise will eventually assuage most concerns, but not before some damage will have been done. People that would have bought the new iPhone now won't.
-- or --
C) The specs leak just a few days before the announcement. While not as bad for Apple as (B), this one results in less enthusiastic reporting about the headline features as the surprise has already been spoiled. Additionally, nearly every report will be damped by a perfunctory mention of the leaks. The new iPhones will sell fine, but the overall reaction will be less enthusiastic than it would have been otherwise.
Sure, Apple "leaks" stuff all the time, as most large organizations do, but those mostly follow the same few patterns that you see at all large organizations:
- They use "leaks" to clear out details that they'd rather not have sharing a news cycle with their big announcements
- They use "leaks" to prepare the media and the public for a shock it won't like (e.g. higher prices, no headphone jack, etc.)
- They use "leaks" to get people excited about products by hinting at features
What the "leaks" NEVER do is spoil events by stealing thunder from their keynote addresses, which is exactly what happened here when you look into exactly how much got out. In fact, this one gets even worse, since it...
...spoils nearly all of the major news for their annual iPhone launch
...spoils the first event at the brand new location they spent billions of dollars building
...spoils the event that coincides with the 10th anniversary of the iPhone
...spoiled details about an updated Apple TV that wasn't on most radars
...spoiled everything just two days before the event, utterly deflating it
So yes, Apple "leaks" things, but as a company that directly or indirectly employs hundreds of thousands of employees, they occasionally actually leak things too, and this DEFINITELY falls into that latter case.
Eventually it will all leak but not before much of it is quite stale.
While I wish that was true...
- Birth dates never go stale
- SSNs VERY rarely go stale (I know they can be changed, but I've never actually heard of it being done)
- First names, rarely go stale
- Last names probably only go stale once or twice per lifetime on average
The stuff that actually will go stale (e.g. addresses, driver's license number, phone numbers, etc.) is the stuff that's least important.
That said, you are correct about this stuff already being available to people who knew to ask and who were willing to pay a higher price. All of which should point us towards finally fixing the system that depends on an assumption of secrecy for a number that was never intended to be a secret and that is regularly shared as a routine matter of business.
"Shits" and "sharts" are different—though related—things. The latter is a portmanteau of obvious origin.
You really need to put a Poe's Law warning on your post, since I nearly mistook it for the real deal.
As someone who actually lived in Florida for nearly a decade (1990-1999) and weathered a number of hurricanes (e.g. Andrew), what makes you think they're not already spending that money?
For instance, contrary to your claims that they're building with "sticks and paper", all of the homes around where we lived (along the Atlantic Coast in south Florida, pretty much in the path of every storm) were required to be cinderblock construction with steel reinforcement, rather than the wood frame construction that's common in the rest of the country. The roofs on the homes were designed with reduced eaves, few gables, steel ties to the framing, and low slopes in order to prevent hurricanes from getting a grip that'd let them rip the roof off. To reduce the risk of high winds knocking over walls, they'd break up the geometry of exterior walls so that no one surface would receive excessive force. Where there were tall walls or gables, codes required them to be structurally reinforced (e.g. our home had a reinforced chimney). Homes were built with an interior room, typically a bathroom or closet under the stairs, that was reinforced with plumbing or other structural elements to act as a shelter in case the rest of the home fell apart. As we were leaving, I believe that windows were being required to use the glass that can take a direct hit from a 2x4 at hurricane speeds.
To put it bluntly, all new homes were built like bunkers.
But therein lies the crux: all new homes. Much of Florida was built before those codes were in place, so it's only after a big storm clears a path that new homes go up or old homes are brought up to code. Once that occurs, these sorts of problems tend to stop happening.
Ask yourself: if they decided to run with your idea starting today, would things actually look any different in 20 years? 40 years? Or would we instead still be seeing occasional reports of old homes being destroyed when a major storm hits an area that tends not to get hit often, just like we see today?
All of which is to say, unless you're suggesting that we should forcibly evict people so we can tear down and rebuild their old homes (which I don't think your "mere 20%" estimate took into account), you're not saying anything new. Quite the opposite, in fact, since Florida officials beat you to the punch by several decades and put the codes in place way back then to ensure that people would build things appropriately.
So, AT&T employees are protesting AT&T's business practices. Nothing they're protesting has anything to do with the iPhone 8 or Apple at large. Nonetheless, they're protesting at the launch of the new iPhone, simply because they know that places like Slashdot can't resist posting clickbait articles that mention Apple in the headline, thus bringing attention to their cause, despite the fact that nothing they're doing has anything to do with Apple.
Even worse, it looks like Slashdot is "breaking" this news, since I don't see a link or article mentioned anywhere, so that means that Slashdot is solely responsible for authoring the headline. Shame on you.
And how exactly does a freeze help, if the next credit bureau hack obtains all those freeze PINs?
You don't seem to realize what you're asking, since you're basically questioning the value of setting up passwords (PINs) for accounts that currently don't have them, and you're suggesting that there's no point in bothering with passwords in the first place since subsequent attacks may suck them up.
Never mind that freezing your accounts (i.e. locking it behind a password):
1) Makes the currently leaked data useless to bad actors until and unless they succeed in capturing your PIN via a hypothetical second hack.
2) Limits the damage from a hypothetical second hack to a single credit bureau, since PINs are unique to each credit bureau.
3) May buy you time to reset the protection on your account if a second hack occurs, since the PINs are hopefully hashed and salted, meaning that bad actors won't have an immediate ability to act on them.
4) Increases the time, complexity, and cost necessary to attack you, making it more likely that they'll skip you and go for an easier target.
Put differently: it's as if you never bothered installing a lock on the front door to your house and you live in a city where a roaming band of thieves robs anyone whose house they find out is unlocked. They just heard your door had no lock and they just found out where you live. They're coming. There's nothing stopping them from showing up at any moment, walking in, and taking everything from you. And, knowing all of those facts, your response is to question what the point is in installing a lock, since it's possible that they may steal your keys later.
Sure, fine, maybe they will, but in the meantime you can stop this attack by just installing a lock, so maybe we postpone the discussion about the inherent brokenness of the system until after you lock your door?
My apologies. What I had intended to baselessly assert was that you're a no-good Commie intent on the destruction of our wholesome, American values. After all, every decent American hates the DMCA, so it's clearly responsible for the evils being perpetuated here. The fact that you would dare imply otherwise suggests you're the sort of treasonous person who enjoys clubbing baby seals between attending Nazi rallies and crafting your next astroturf post against net neutrality.
A pox on you and your kind, good sir!
Admittedly, it wasn't specified which form of IP they were dealing with, so it could have been trademark or patent, I suppose. Other comments revolved around the DMCA and copyright on account of their prominent role in these sorts of situations, and I apparently allowed myself to be sucked into framing the entire discussion in those terms. Thanks for calling me on that.
That could work. Right now, service providers like YouTube have to "expeditiously" remove infringing content if they want to maintain their safe harbor status that keeps them from being held liable for that content. But if we removed that requirement for takedowns that aren't bonded, it'd give hosts a means to vet the claims that are more likely to be abusive, while also incentivizing the big players to play nice.
Social Security numbers are fine. The problem is that organizations have foolishly been using them for authentication ("Prove you are you!"), rather than merely identification ("Who are we talking about?"), which was all they were ever designed to do. As a means for identification, it generally still works just as well today as it did when it began. As a method for authentication, it was lousy from the start and has been getting worse by the day.
...which I specifically mentioned as a problem that I didn't know how to get around.
The onus in these cases should be on Amazon to expend the resources to properly vet these claims before acting on them.
FTFY, but the problem is that the DMCA doesn't work that way (though I wish it did).
In fact, it's been structured to incentivize Amazon to NOT expend any resources at all, since doing so may open them up to legal liability. Under the terms of the DMCA, service providers like Amazon enjoy a limited immunity against being held liable for copyright infringement on their service that took place at the direction of their users. In order to maintain their safe harbor status, service providers are required to act "expeditiously" to remove allegedly infringing content in response to a takedown notice. I.e. The DMCA presumes the recipient of a takedown notice is guilty and is structured such that it places the burden of proof nearly entirely on them.
Vetting the claim has the potential to open Amazon up to liability for their users' misdeeds, since either taking too long to vet or outright denying the claim would mean that they failed to act expeditiously. Google has given up their safe harbor status on a few occasions to defend users who were CLEARLY in the right, but that sort of thing is the exception, not the rule, and no service provider can currently be reasonably expected to do otherwise in all cases.
Instead of a fine, which is difficult to collect in the case of a fictitious entity, what about requiring a bond?
We already see bonds being used in legal disputes over intellectual property. For instance, if Apple sues Samsung and asks the court for an injunction against the sale of Samsung products, Apple will be forced to put up a bond. If it later turns out that Samsung was in the right all along, that bond will be used to compensate Samsung for the sales lost during the injunction.
Given that a DMCA takedown acts as an injunction, why not require that anyone filing a DMCA takedown request provide proof that they are bonded? If it later turns out that they perjured themselves, filed a false claim, or otherwise abused the system, the victim of the takedown notice won't have to hunt down the abuser to receive compensation. Instead, they can simply go to the surety company to collect their compensation, just like you would with a bonded contractor.
This also has the benefit of slowing down or at least discouraging any given company's ability to abuse the system. After all, if they maintain the minimum bond allowed and it was just paid out to a victim, they won't be able to use it to secure a future takedown notice until they pay it back, effectively preventing them from filing any more takedown notices. And if they keep a bond for more than the minimum, they'll potentially be out quite a bit of money if they start abusing the system.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get around the biggest problem with this idea: if the minimum bond is too large, say, $100K, normal people wouldn't be able to protect their work since they couldn't afford the minimum bond, while if the minimum bond was too small, say, $10, it wouldn't be useful in the least in compensating victims for their loss. Maybe there's a way around it, but I haven't figured out a way to make it both fair to big companies and Joe Schmoes while still discouraging abusers in the few minutes it took to type this comment.
having 4 companies control wireless telephone system over the entire United States, and absurdly high barriers of entry, is enough to make them a monopoly IMHO.
I'll disagree with your take on this, and I mean this in the kindest of ways, but your use of "monopoly" makes me question whether you know what it means. Yes, they're huge, yes, they're dug in, and yes, I wish there was more competition, but, monopolies are defined by their exclusive (or near-exclusive) control over a market, so none of those factors means these companies are monopolies. It just means that the market has high barriers to entry and that the current players are entrenched. If anything, the fact that there are four of them competing with one another points towards a lack of a monopoly.
T-Mobile is a monopoly. They have exclusive rights to certain frequencies, granted to them by the US government.
Now that's a far more interesting point to make, and one I hadn't heard before. Even so, it still doesn't make them a monopoly (at least in any meaningful sense of the word) for one simple reason: individual frequencies are not a market. Individual frequencies are part of a much larger market, of which T-Mobile only controls a small portion.
Think of it this way: any given apple farmer has the exclusive right to use their farmland (which, like a frequency, is a limited resource) to grow their apples, but that doesn't mean they have a monopoly over either the market for farmland or the market for apples. Yes, their patch of dirt is different than everyone else's, and yes, they have exclusive control over their unique location, but that doesn't mean they have a monopoly (again: exclusive control of a market), since there's plenty of other farmland that's just as useful and plenty of other farmers producing apples.
Likewise, there are plenty of other frequencies that are just as useful for cell phone use, and plenty of other carriers providing cell service over those other frequencies. As such, T-Mobile neither has a monopoly over the market for frequencies nor over the market for cell services. That may change in the future, but for the moment, that's where things stand.
As for whether Netflix being bundled is a good or bad thing, so long as consumers have alternatives to T-Mobile and T-Mobile doesn't prioritize Netflix's traffic, things should shake out acceptably, though I'll admit that the market may go in directions we may not like along the way, in much the same way that most of us loathe cable TV bundles.