Having grown up with the internet and watching it degrade from a place of uncensored anonymous sharing of information where the reputation means nothing and the idea is what holds value, To the e-commerce slums , carefully curated and censored propaganda machine, it has become,. It would be naive not to expect the US to break the internet on purpose, for governmental interests.
What you're overlooking is that it was grown out of US governmental interests to begin with, and exploded under American tutelage. Russian, Chinese, and other bad-state actions in the last 5-7 years really highlights how horrible a decision it really was for the Obama Administration to allow ICANN to be moved out from the under the ultimate authority of the Department of Commerce.
The Internet has been a battleground for years, and the history of the last century points to Americans being better Guarantors of Last Resort than facially neutral entities like your average UN commission when it comes to being a force for liberty in the world.
There's a bit of confusion here I think... There are tons of IoT devices, which may or may not have GPS problems of their own, but isn't the main issue just the network being down? Once that's back up, what remains of individual firmware rollouts for various types of devices can be addressed.
I'm assuming the NYCWiN has some sort of mesh topology? Maybe with scrambled GPS data it's now trying to reconnect to devices far away from where it actually is and is this failing to converge any routes? I'm a bit curious on the tech details here. Hope we learn more.
DARPA seem to be putting security front and center, and the description of the project claims that "compromised system data and associated networked communications should not be helpful for comprising any additional parts of the system," meaning that DARPA are keen that one breach shouldn't also give them a leg up on access to other parts of the system. So, will we soon be using a U.S government branded DARPA?
"The Left is arguably OK with kicking the right off of platforms"
No; the left is ok with kicking the trolls/nazis/etc off of THEIR platform because that's their RIGHT. They do not owe you a platform. Don't like it, goto gab or 8chan.
And there you, Anonymous Coward, have identified the problem. You want to kick a bona-fide Nazi off the platform? Fine. The problem is that the left has convinced itself that everyone on the right are Nazis, because the left seems to have gone insane. As a result, now we have to have a "when push comes to shove" discussion about how the final say is regulated on large-scale comms platforms.
First rampant Libertarianism and Tech Utopianism, then Socialism and... Progressive Tech Utopianism.
I think everyone in the Bay Area would do well to spend time in the rest of the country -- like, several years of time -- where it's blindingly obvious in day-to-day life that neither approach will work.
We've spent so much time and energy in this industry catering to the residents of, and solving problems that basically only exist in, the Bay Area. Imagine if some of this had been crafted by those with more sense.
The "Big Data" companies of the day have all become heavily regulated in what they can store, how they can store, how long they can store, and have transparency laws about providing consumers access to their own data reports and challenging information in them.
It's time for this to extend to all large-scale person-identification projects, and if the data brokers have to be torn apart to do so, so be it.
all of the major companies have long ago abandoned any pretense to being neutral platforms, and all should be excluded from 230 protections.
Nancy Pelosi is not interested in making them more neutral. Her goal is to impose more political correctness and censorship.
Protections for free speech should be strengthened, not removed.
Well, this goes both ways. The Left is arguably OK with kicking the right off of platforms (and a big chunk of Silicon Valley's tech workers are on the left), but it would prefer to use anti-free speech laws instead of regulation to do it. (Centralized power is useful when you're trying to Progress, after all.) The Right thinks free speech is free speech, but but is starting to be of the mindset that once you're a mass communications platform oligopoly, *some* regulation is needed to prevent abuse. (We don't let ILECs simply refuse to give someone a phone line because they dislike their viewpoint.)
Frankly, I think they're both right. The hyper-growth phase of the internet juggernauts has completed, and we're left now with both vertical monopolies and horizontal oligopolies. It's time to break everything and everyone up.
Separate out the advertising platforms, public clouds, ecommerce, and data brokering, and give social media sites a choice: stay relatively small and private and retain 230 protection and your bona-fide "community", or get big and public and be forced to carry content they may not agree with and disallow arbitrary "censorship".
We're already past the point of market failure when it comes to Alphabet and Amazon in general, and the data and advertising brokering of Facebook is also highly suspect, especially as it touches such a huge chunk of the publishing industry now.
I'm reminded of similar statements by scientists that an EMP or another Carrington event will have minimal effects on humans or animal life. In both cases (and in this), the problem isn't the direct effects, it's the secondary ones. An EMP will mostly pass through biological tissue just fine, and might not even permanently disable some older cars -- but if the US is out of power for 14 months because no one can get the transformers rebuilt, that particular aspect doesn't really matter, now does it?
For a pole flip, I'm not really concerned about the biosphere (except maybe birds), for precisely the reasons indicated. Rather, how does a magnetic flip affect GPS? Compasses? Does it induce current in the process of the flip? That sort of thing.
iTunes has needed a haircut for ages, but I have a strong suspicion Apple will find a way to make the sum-total of these new apps somehow *worse* overall.
Hopefully they don't completely kibosh the original iTunes for a release (or five)... Given that it still is what provides legacy support for older iDevices. My iPod Classic 160G isn't going anywhere any time soon, and I'm sure a new Apple Music desktop app will have basically no support for it because it will be written by Silicon Valley 22 y/o techies who don't remember life before 4G LTE.
Exit question: What happens with the Windows version? Although I have Macs now, I went through a very long period with just Windows and Android, so I've kept my PC as my "primary" system for managing all music and taking care of synchronizing and whatnot, even as iDevices have come and gone. Hopefully nothing changes any time soon there.
your browser communicates via bluetooth with your phone
Hard pass.
Why? This is very good for security. Uses a separate, non-Internet and inherently local (in the absence of sophisticated relay attacks), channel significantly increases security. Do you have a problem with bluetooth in particular, or some other aspect?
I generally don't have bluetooth enabled on any computer I control, for security reasons. If or when I enable it, I certainly wouldn't give my browser access to local bluetooth functionality! Websites don't need to be poking around there.
I appreciate that Google is thinking in terms of local connectivity, but running everything through a Google(tm) browser is about the least attractive way to do it.
Now a good but tiny and cheap MSP might be able to skate the edge where reselling AWS is more profitable than reselling inhouse gear, but a good MSP doesn't stay tiny, isnt cheap and a big one doesn't stay good.
That's basically exactly my point. Every broke, 18 year old HS grad or college student starts out renting. You should be, in life, trying to grow to a point where you can take advantage of not-renting.
This is the MSP equivalent of giving up capital investment in exchange for op-ex avocado experiences.
As the AC has pointed out, the reality is that many people aren't going to be able to afford the subscription based model we are moving into.
People already are having a hard enough time paying their cell bill.
The subscription model is doable for those of us who can afford it, but even then it is a suckers game, having to pay all these monthly costs for various services, content, etc; The American public is getting milked dry.
I don't disagree, but the younger generation right now is taking longer than expected to realize that.
And it's not just consumers. When you have to tell an IT person that TCO for actually having server hardware you run is less than renting container time from AWS, you're pushing them the same way.
The main problem however stands: People are more willing to pay a one time fee to own something than to add another line to a bill. This is simply a sociological and psychological phenomena, more so when Cloud Service adds ISP shenanigans into the mix which everyone is already pissed enough about because that adds another variable to a monthly bill which is also an unstable variable that the user has no control over.
This is all well and good for our generation, but in case you haven't noticed, later-day Millennials and most of Gen-Z are growing up without an ownership mindset. However much this is due to economics and however much is a self-fulfilling prophecy for making the best of a bad economy is debatable, but the fact remains that the trend is *away* from ownership and *toward* services and this will continue until interrupted (no pun intended).
Urban millennials are convincing themselves that Ubering around is better than owning a car, that subscription music services are better than buying purchase rights (let alone buying a CD), Blu-ray collections are composed of only the best-of-the-absolutely-best favorites, and "experiences" like avocado toast flights are still being pushed intra-generationally above things like investing and home ownership.
This is a not a culture that sees any need for a desktop. For most, there's no need for anything more than a Chromebook, and for a great many their needs can be met by a tablet or reliable phablet/smartphone.
Programmers and hackers in the traditional sense are a rounding error (and frankly, many young programmers today have a cloud-only mindset too). Creatives might need processing power, but they really don't... they just need good bandwidth to where the processing power is.
What killed the desktop form factor? Wi-Fi. What killed desktop *operating systems*? 4G.
Link shorteners have ALWAYS been a shitty, stupid idea. They're a great way to trick people into visiting some shitty malware site, but more importantly they break a fundamental part of the web- the fucking URL itself.
That depends on what your intent is -- if you're using them to spread malware, then it's you who suck, not the code.
What you call "link shorteners" actually have three distinct uses: 1) Bona-fide link shortening -- If you have a 200 character link that's awkward to paste around (especially in small text display areas), this seriously does help 2) Analytics and tracking -- If you need to track outbound links or for some reason need to analytic who's getting to your destination, this helps. 3) A permanent URL for content that may move in the future.
But the OP is wrong. At least as far as #3 is concerned, the tech behind a link shortener is at least as old as pURLs.
I've played Fortnite a few times... I follow the industry, so I know how big it's gotten.
What I don't quite get is whether there's some qualitative difference here between it and -- to pick two random examples -- Evercrack or WoW at their respective peaks. It seems like people are putting in some slight Second Life elements into it, with live concerts and so forth, but isn't that really it? What am I missing?
Or is this next generation now officially Too Young To Remember either of those two games at their peak and we're going to have to go through this whole thing again?
Except that its a failure. Recycling centers are shutting down because there is no profit in it anymore, and the deposits aren't bringing in enough money to keep it all running long term.
Well, the bigger issue in California is that you've got fixed incomes coming in ($.0x/bottle for whatever the local residents are using) but we've increased the minimum wage by 50% in the last five years (since 2012). Those employee operational costs don't disappear.
While there's obviously risk in something like this making the situation *worse*, it's a shame they weren't able to test out various mitigation strategies for something like this this time.
Inevitably, one of these will hit a(nother) heavily populated area, and it would be comforting to note that we might have a mechanism for doing something about it if we can predict it 30-90 minutes in advance.
In this case, something exploding over the Bering Strait might have been a candidate for testing re-direction efforts that could - if not disintegrate it higher up - push the most energetic sections due South into the Pacific.
Whomever wrote this story speaks with the voice of someone who seems like they couldn't possibly understand why *anyone* would prioritize data-stays-on-device, non-cloud, privacy-related living.
Is this what the new generation of tech journalists is like? With no conception of out-dated functions like data locality and operational independence? Someone who couldn't imagine why someone would download local audio instead of streaming it from their cloud service?
In a properly-engineering life-critical situation you'd have an industrial-quality 2g/3g modem device interacting directly with the cell network to send SMS (ideally located in the roof closet with a large antenna on it), but during the mid-2000's email-to-text was often seen as "good enough". Direct web submission gateways became an option, but SMTP whitelists did a pretty good job at handling issues where a provider's web gateway may be unreliable.
Of course, numeric pagers could reached with a Linux box, a modem, and a POTS line. If you want to remove failure points, a hospital getting POTS service from the CO is about as reliable as you're gonna get. (I recall being quite a bit more worried about the 2.2 kernel back in the day).
Traditional pagers are not un-common in US hospitals, but it depends on a number of factors. Reliability, vendor contracts, urban/rural, and plenty of other things. Doctors usually don't need smartphones moment to moment absent some other check-in app.
I used to work for an RTLS provider in hospitals that worked with a distinct radio protocol for telemetry tracking, and was running into problems at times converting to low-powered Bluetooth because there was a lot of other RF stuff running. There was a mobile interface to the data, but wired stations were always where the critical communication was happening.
The hospitals I know of that have moved away from traditional paging have simply replaced them with on-site paging -- same kind of system you'd have to know your table was ready at a restaurant, but souped up. People really only migrated if/when they felt the last remaining local pager service was on its last legs, since there was a capital cost and not much reason to switch otherwise.
But if the person already has a working smart phone, what's the point? They are going to keep the smart phone charged anyway. And if they are out of cell phone range in this day and age paging them isn't likely to be of much value. By the time they run back down the mountain to use the phone in the small town pub the emergency is over since some doctor near the hospital with a smart phone already responded.
Naw, you'd be surprised how crap cell phone coverage can be even in this day and age. Remember hospitals have to work even with degraded service, and if the cell tower near you goes down for some reason you may have 3 bars of 3G coverage for a while instead. Works fine, but go one floor down into the basement and you're at no signal (whereas a pager will get through fine).
That brings up the other importance: Eliminating common failure modes. If you only have one way of reaching your life-saving employee, dependent on one network and one tech layer, you're not doing safety-critical reliability engineering properly.
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds like the sort of comically evil plot Montgomery Burns might try, sending Smithers to tap kids' arms while they sleep?
Mr. Burns falls ill with hypohemia (a fictional life-threatening condition in which the body starts failing to produce enough blood, though it is akin to a real condition called hypovolemia) and needs a blood transfusion. His blood type, double O negative, is very rare, however, and none of the employees at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant have it. Homer discovers that Bart has double O negative blood and urges his son to donate, promising that he will be handsomely rewarded. Bart reluctantly agrees and his blood donation saves Mr. Burns' life. Mr. Burns is rejuvenated by the blood and he sends the Simpson family a thank you card. Enraged at Mr. Burns' paltry gesture, Homer writes an insulting reply, but Marge convinces him at the last minute not to send it. The next morning, Homer discovers that the letter is gone as Bart has mailed it.
Bart explains that he knew Homer would probably change his mind, and decided to send the letter before that could happen. Homer desperately tries to prevent the letter from reaching Mr. Burns, but fails. Mr. Burns becomes furious and demands that Homer be punished. However, Smithers calls off the beating on the grounds, meaning that it's no way to thank the man who saved Mr. Burns' life. But soon, Mr. Burns soon realizes the favor Homer did for him was something good, and comes to his senses. He shakes hands with Smithers and tells him not to punish Homer, but to reward the Simpsons instead.
Browser default HSTS lists mandate that all connections to.dev are over HTTPS.
That has nothing to do with the TLD though and everything to do with Google's Chrome monopoly. Quite frankly, this is a great reason *not* to let companies do that: advertise one feature as something when it's actually provided by a distinct unit, and the only reason nobody cares is because it's at monopoly scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Having grown up with the internet and watching it degrade from a place of uncensored anonymous sharing of information where the reputation means nothing and the idea is what holds value, To the e-commerce slums , carefully curated and censored propaganda machine, it has become,. It would be naive not to expect the US to break the internet on purpose, for governmental interests.
What you're overlooking is that it was grown out of US governmental interests to begin with, and exploded under American tutelage. Russian, Chinese, and other bad-state actions in the last 5-7 years really highlights how horrible a decision it really was for the Obama Administration to allow ICANN to be moved out from the under the ultimate authority of the Department of Commerce.
The Internet has been a battleground for years, and the history of the last century points to Americans being better Guarantors of Last Resort than facially neutral entities like your average UN commission when it comes to being a force for liberty in the world.
There's a bit of confusion here I think... There are tons of IoT devices, which may or may not have GPS problems of their own, but isn't the main issue just the network being down? Once that's back up, what remains of individual firmware rollouts for various types of devices can be addressed.
I'm assuming the NYCWiN has some sort of mesh topology? Maybe with scrambled GPS data it's now trying to reconnect to devices far away from where it actually is and is this failing to converge any routes? I'm a bit curious on the tech details here. Hope we learn more.
What?
"The Left is arguably OK with kicking the right off of platforms"
No; the left is ok with kicking the trolls/nazis/etc off of THEIR platform because that's their RIGHT. They do not owe you a platform. Don't like it, goto gab or 8chan.
And there you, Anonymous Coward, have identified the problem. You want to kick a bona-fide Nazi off the platform? Fine. The problem is that the left has convinced itself that everyone on the right are Nazis, because the left seems to have gone insane. As a result, now we have to have a "when push comes to shove" discussion about how the final say is regulated on large-scale comms platforms.
tl;dr: This is why we can't have nice things.
First rampant Libertarianism and Tech Utopianism, then Socialism and ... Progressive Tech Utopianism.
I think everyone in the Bay Area would do well to spend time in the rest of the country -- like, several years of time -- where it's blindingly obvious in day-to-day life that neither approach will work.
We've spent so much time and energy in this industry catering to the residents of, and solving problems that basically only exist in, the Bay Area. Imagine if some of this had been crafted by those with more sense.
The "Big Data" companies of the day have all become heavily regulated in what they can store, how they can store, how long they can store, and have transparency laws about providing consumers access to their own data reports and challenging information in them.
It's time for this to extend to all large-scale person-identification projects, and if the data brokers have to be torn apart to do so, so be it.
all of the major companies have long ago abandoned any pretense to being neutral platforms, and all should be excluded from 230 protections.
Nancy Pelosi is not interested in making them more neutral. Her goal is to impose more political correctness and censorship.
Protections for free speech should be strengthened, not removed.
Well, this goes both ways. The Left is arguably OK with kicking the right off of platforms (and a big chunk of Silicon Valley's tech workers are on the left), but it would prefer to use anti-free speech laws instead of regulation to do it. (Centralized power is useful when you're trying to Progress, after all.) The Right thinks free speech is free speech, but but is starting to be of the mindset that once you're a mass communications platform oligopoly, *some* regulation is needed to prevent abuse. (We don't let ILECs simply refuse to give someone a phone line because they dislike their viewpoint.)
Frankly, I think they're both right. The hyper-growth phase of the internet juggernauts has completed, and we're left now with both vertical monopolies and horizontal oligopolies. It's time to break everything and everyone up.
Separate out the advertising platforms, public clouds, ecommerce, and data brokering, and give social media sites a choice: stay relatively small and private and retain 230 protection and your bona-fide "community", or get big and public and be forced to carry content they may not agree with and disallow arbitrary "censorship".
We're already past the point of market failure when it comes to Alphabet and Amazon in general, and the data and advertising brokering of Facebook is also highly suspect, especially as it touches such a huge chunk of the publishing industry now.
I'm reminded of similar statements by scientists that an EMP or another Carrington event will have minimal effects on humans or animal life. In both cases (and in this), the problem isn't the direct effects, it's the secondary ones. An EMP will mostly pass through biological tissue just fine, and might not even permanently disable some older cars -- but if the US is out of power for 14 months because no one can get the transformers rebuilt, that particular aspect doesn't really matter, now does it?
For a pole flip, I'm not really concerned about the biosphere (except maybe birds), for precisely the reasons indicated. Rather, how does a magnetic flip affect GPS? Compasses? Does it induce current in the process of the flip? That sort of thing.
iTunes has needed a haircut for ages, but I have a strong suspicion Apple will find a way to make the sum-total of these new apps somehow *worse* overall.
Hopefully they don't completely kibosh the original iTunes for a release (or five)... Given that it still is what provides legacy support for older iDevices. My iPod Classic 160G isn't going anywhere any time soon, and I'm sure a new Apple Music desktop app will have basically no support for it because it will be written by Silicon Valley 22 y/o techies who don't remember life before 4G LTE.
Exit question: What happens with the Windows version? Although I have Macs now, I went through a very long period with just Windows and Android, so I've kept my PC as my "primary" system for managing all music and taking care of synchronizing and whatnot, even as iDevices have come and gone. Hopefully nothing changes any time soon there.
your browser communicates via bluetooth with your phone
Hard pass.
Why? This is very good for security. Uses a separate, non-Internet and inherently local (in the absence of sophisticated relay attacks), channel significantly increases security. Do you have a problem with bluetooth in particular, or some other aspect?
I generally don't have bluetooth enabled on any computer I control, for security reasons. If or when I enable it, I certainly wouldn't give my browser access to local bluetooth functionality! Websites don't need to be poking around there.
I appreciate that Google is thinking in terms of local connectivity, but running everything through a Google(tm) browser is about the least attractive way to do it.
Now a good but tiny and cheap MSP might be able to skate the edge where reselling AWS is more profitable than reselling inhouse gear, but a good MSP doesn't stay tiny, isnt cheap and a big one doesn't stay good.
That's basically exactly my point. Every broke, 18 year old HS grad or college student starts out renting. You should be, in life, trying to grow to a point where you can take advantage of not-renting.
This is the MSP equivalent of giving up capital investment in exchange for op-ex avocado experiences.
As the AC has pointed out, the reality is that many people aren't going to be able to afford the subscription based model we are moving into.
People already are having a hard enough time paying their cell bill.
The subscription model is doable for those of us who can afford it, but even then it is a suckers game, having to pay all these monthly costs for various services, content, etc; The American public is getting milked dry.
I don't disagree, but the younger generation right now is taking longer than expected to realize that.
And it's not just consumers. When you have to tell an IT person that TCO for actually having server hardware you run is less than renting container time from AWS, you're pushing them the same way.
The main problem however stands: People are more willing to pay a one time fee to own something than to add another line to a bill. This is simply a sociological and psychological phenomena, more so when Cloud Service adds ISP shenanigans into the mix which everyone is already pissed enough about because that adds another variable to a monthly bill which is also an unstable variable that the user has no control over.
This is all well and good for our generation, but in case you haven't noticed, later-day Millennials and most of Gen-Z are growing up without an ownership mindset. However much this is due to economics and however much is a self-fulfilling prophecy for making the best of a bad economy is debatable, but the fact remains that the trend is *away* from ownership and *toward* services and this will continue until interrupted (no pun intended).
Urban millennials are convincing themselves that Ubering around is better than owning a car, that subscription music services are better than buying purchase rights (let alone buying a CD), Blu-ray collections are composed of only the best-of-the-absolutely-best favorites, and "experiences" like avocado toast flights are still being pushed intra-generationally above things like investing and home ownership.
This is a not a culture that sees any need for a desktop. For most, there's no need for anything more than a Chromebook, and for a great many their needs can be met by a tablet or reliable phablet/smartphone.
Programmers and hackers in the traditional sense are a rounding error (and frankly, many young programmers today have a cloud-only mindset too). Creatives might need processing power, but they really don't... they just need good bandwidth to where the processing power is.
What killed the desktop form factor? Wi-Fi.
What killed desktop *operating systems*? 4G.
Link shorteners have ALWAYS been a shitty, stupid idea. They're a great way to trick people into visiting some shitty malware site, but more importantly they break a fundamental part of the web- the fucking URL itself.
That depends on what your intent is -- if you're using them to spread malware, then it's you who suck, not the code.
What you call "link shorteners" actually have three distinct uses:
1) Bona-fide link shortening -- If you have a 200 character link that's awkward to paste around (especially in small text display areas), this seriously does help
2) Analytics and tracking -- If you need to track outbound links or for some reason need to analytic who's getting to your destination, this helps.
3) A permanent URL for content that may move in the future.
But the OP is wrong. At least as far as #3 is concerned, the tech behind a link shortener is at least as old as pURLs.
I've played Fortnite a few times... I follow the industry, so I know how big it's gotten.
What I don't quite get is whether there's some qualitative difference here between it and -- to pick two random examples -- Evercrack or WoW at their respective peaks. It seems like people are putting in some slight Second Life elements into it, with live concerts and so forth, but isn't that really it? What am I missing?
Or is this next generation now officially Too Young To Remember either of those two games at their peak and we're going to have to go through this whole thing again?
Except that its a failure. Recycling centers are shutting down because there is no profit in it anymore, and the deposits aren't bringing in enough money to keep it all running long term.
Well, the bigger issue in California is that you've got fixed incomes coming in ($.0x/bottle for whatever the local residents are using) but we've increased the minimum wage by 50% in the last five years (since 2012). Those employee operational costs don't disappear.
While there's obviously risk in something like this making the situation *worse*, it's a shame they weren't able to test out various mitigation strategies for something like this this time.
Inevitably, one of these will hit a(nother) heavily populated area, and it would be comforting to note that we might have a mechanism for doing something about it if we can predict it 30-90 minutes in advance.
In this case, something exploding over the Bering Strait might have been a candidate for testing re-direction efforts that could - if not disintegrate it higher up - push the most energetic sections due South into the Pacific.
Whomever wrote this story speaks with the voice of someone who seems like they couldn't possibly understand why *anyone* would prioritize data-stays-on-device, non-cloud, privacy-related living.
Is this what the new generation of tech journalists is like? With no conception of out-dated functions like data locality and operational independence? Someone who couldn't imagine why someone would download local audio instead of streaming it from their cloud service?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky - try to take out the target at 250 yards from a protected location.
"SMS relied on email"
Was?
In a properly-engineering life-critical situation you'd have an industrial-quality 2g/3g modem device interacting directly with the cell network to send SMS (ideally located in the roof closet with a large antenna on it), but during the mid-2000's email-to-text was often seen as "good enough". Direct web submission gateways became an option, but SMTP whitelists did a pretty good job at handling issues where a provider's web gateway may be unreliable.
Of course, numeric pagers could reached with a Linux box, a modem, and a POTS line. If you want to remove failure points, a hospital getting POTS service from the CO is about as reliable as you're gonna get. (I recall being quite a bit more worried about the 2.2 kernel back in the day).
Traditional pagers are not un-common in US hospitals, but it depends on a number of factors. Reliability, vendor contracts, urban/rural, and plenty of other things. Doctors usually don't need smartphones moment to moment absent some other check-in app.
I used to work for an RTLS provider in hospitals that worked with a distinct radio protocol for telemetry tracking, and was running into problems at times converting to low-powered Bluetooth because there was a lot of other RF stuff running. There was a mobile interface to the data, but wired stations were always where the critical communication was happening.
The hospitals I know of that have moved away from traditional paging have simply replaced them with on-site paging -- same kind of system you'd have to know your table was ready at a restaurant, but souped up. People really only migrated if/when they felt the last remaining local pager service was on its last legs, since there was a capital cost and not much reason to switch otherwise.
But if the person already has a working smart phone, what's the point? They are going to keep the smart phone charged anyway. And if they are out of cell phone range in this day and age paging them isn't likely to be of much value. By the time they run back down the mountain to use the phone in the small town pub the emergency is over since some doctor near the hospital with a smart phone already responded.
Naw, you'd be surprised how crap cell phone coverage can be even in this day and age. Remember hospitals have to work even with degraded service, and if the cell tower near you goes down for some reason you may have 3 bars of 3G coverage for a while instead. Works fine, but go one floor down into the basement and you're at no signal (whereas a pager will get through fine).
That brings up the other importance: Eliminating common failure modes. If you only have one way of reaching your life-saving employee, dependent on one network and one tech layer, you're not doing safety-critical reliability engineering properly.
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds like the sort of comically evil plot Montgomery Burns might try, sending Smithers to tap kids' arms while they sleep?
You're probably subconsciously thinking of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Feud_(The_Simpsons)
Browser default HSTS lists mandate that all connections to .dev are over HTTPS.
That has nothing to do with the TLD though and everything to do with Google's Chrome monopoly. Quite frankly, this is a great reason *not* to let companies do that: advertise one feature as something when it's actually provided by a distinct unit, and the only reason nobody cares is because it's at monopoly scale.
... for building Skynet, and it'll be Lisp or perl.
And we all know which one the Lord used: https://xkcd.com/224/