The only winning move is not to play. Seriously, I've never had a Facebook account and I pity those millions who do.
You're probably playing to some extent, whether you realize it or not. I run No Script and an ad blocker, and I also don't have a Facebook account, so I'm probably better off than Joe Average when it comes to being tracked. I also do my best to make sure that friends and acquaintances don't post my name or picture. Even at that, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that FB knows a lot about me. If you think your abstinence from social media means you're not being tracked and commoditized, you're being naive.
I suspect there isn't one. The market is saturated, and the service is mature. When people are your only product, and there are no more people signing on to become your products, you're fucked. Earlier on they should have tried out a subscription service model to see if it would fly. It's probably too late for that now - nobody is going to pay for Facebook, because the company has already added pretty well all the features that they might have had a chance of charging subscribers for.
After the Internet itself, Facebook might be the next thing that really needs to be put under public control. The 'net is already critical infrastructure, and should have been taken over in the public interest long ago. Facebook is starting to look pretty infrastructure-ish - it's getting harder for people to land jobs without having an active account there, and travel into and out of the US may soon be difficult for those who don't have a social media presence. Not that Facebook, (or the Internet), will ever become part of the commons; but it's nice to dream those liberal dreams...
First, I find it hard to believe that there's only one group of scammers running th Microsoft Support con. Second, TFS says "the poor overseas callers working from scripts and, presumably, not really aware they're doing anything hugely wrong". From my many experiences with these callers, I would say that they're VERY aware that they're at least pretty far over on the shady side of the street. Some of them I wouldn't want to meet unless I was armed, judging by the things they said after I strung them along for a few minutes by describing what I was seeing on my Xubuntu machine...:)
'Cause this is just one more step toward turning travellers into cattle. I won't be surprised if ear tags and/or embedded RFID chips are next.
I miss the days when the States was a relatively safe and sane travel destination. The way things are now, I'll probably never cross the border again. Dammit, I miss New Orleans - it sucks to realize that I may never go there again.
Or is it 'Appledot'? As I'm writing this post there are currently six Apple summaries on the front page. Four of their subject lines begin with "Apple Announces"; another, (msmash was clearly feeling adventurous here), starts with "Apple unveils", while another begins with "Apple's New". If an Apple (story) a day keeps the doctor away, then thanks, Appledot, for taking such good care of my health!
'Appledot. News for annoyeds - stuff that natters'.
why things in the Middle East are so fucked up. American leaders' current obsession with instantaneous retribution at almost any cost, is an object lesson in how that kind of insanity comes into being.
Engineering, leadership, R&D, sales and customer support -- those are roles that don't lend themselves very well to remote work.
I really don't understand why ANY of the above requires more than a maximum of one day a week at the office. Engineering and R&D? I'll grant those for hardware work, where physical presence is the only way for multiple people to work on the same platform / prototype at the same time. But for software engineering and R&D, e-conferences and Git can take care of most of the requirements. Sure, sometimes there's no substitute for sweating it out together in a conference room with a whiteboard and someone taking notes - but if that's needed more than one day a week on the average, then you're doing it wrong. Leadership? What is that anyway, other than an HR talking point and a spurious justification for PHB's? In my experience it's seldom more than that. But if you must, do it remotely. If it really requires the 'charisma factor', (which is the only thing a physical presence adds to the process), one day a week should be more than enough. If not,then the process and/or the cast of characters needs to be tweaked. And FFS, why do sales and support staff need to be in the office more than once a MONTH? Most of the sales guys will get together in the evenings anyway to drink and measure their dicks, and the support staff can get the mutual support they need from their co-workers electronically.
In some sense I suppose I'm being sarcastic, because I DO understand that there is a dimension to work relationships that requires direct contact as a reminder that "we're a team", with all the complexities that implies. But corporations have gutted their workplaces of much of their humanity anyway, with cube farms, draconian policies, "right-sizing", and flavour-of-the-month management-speak bullshit. Given that, I suspect it's often both more humane and more productive to have people working at home.
We're talking here about a state-issued engineering license for the title of Professional Engineer, not simply a degree.
Just substitute "province-issued" for "state-issued", and we're talking about the same thing. The guy who mistook thermal compound for a heatsink was an APEO-licensed Professional Engineer. He wouldn't have been working on a project for the Canadian military if he hadn't had that license.
Not meaning to offend any 'official' engineers here - I understand the work that goes into an engineering degree, and I understand the legal and ethical need to protect the title from pretenders. What I really don't get is that people automatically place more trust in the opinions of an engineer, (or a doctor, etc), than people who don't hold the title, yet have similar or greater accomplishments in the field.
I've spent my life working in the electronics field. I once worked for a degreed electrical engineer whose idea of heatsinking a component on a PCB was blobbing some heatsink compound on it. (No, I'm not kidding). This same engineer casually implemented some resistor-diode logic between 74HC logic inputs and the outside world, without so much as a couple of protection diodes from the inputs to the supply rails. In this case the 'outside world' happened to be various points in the noisy, spikey electrical system of a large military vehicle. The design was being field-tested just prior to production. 'Nuff said. A bit later in my career, I worked for a guy who, (thankfully), actually merited his engineer's title. But he told me about an engineer who once worked for him, who couldn't understand why trying to start his car with a 12-volt lantern battery wasn't working.
There are smart, knowledgeable, competent people, and there are incompetent fools. In my experience, a degree, (or lack thereof), is no kind of an indication of which category a given person falls into.
... Treat state sponsored hacking like an act of war, and make sure everyone knows you will respond with devastating force.
And then devastating force is met with devastating force, and so on, until a victor emerges. But by that time the victor may only have hours to live on a planet no longer fit for life. And the victor may not even be the horse you backed...
The monoculture is unavoidable in industry unless you want to spend an exorbitant amount on service contracts and staff training. Latest trends tend towards reducing the different number of systems and the different platforms not only because of costs but also due to reliability reasons as a variety of different systems work in different ways and experts which are too thinly spread across platforms tend to make more mistakes.
Pay me now, or pay me later. As usual, the cost of the 'later' option is likely to be much higher - perhaps as much as your life is worth.
Is this the best we can do? Rely on economically obsolete systems as a backup for cyberattacks?
Calling it 'economically obsolete' indicates that you've fallen for the propaganda of the voodoo economists whose 'live for today / profit is king' attitudes have already fucked us over so badly. There is nothing 'economically obsolete' about having that spare tire in your trunk, (and knowing how to change a tire), because it could save your ass in some nasty circumstances. It's incredibly old-school and seems almost quaint in this era of cell phones, auto clubs, and urban sprawl - and it costs the manufacturers money, and you might be able to put the space now occupied by it to good use. But do you really want to see it disappear?
If you're thinking it's 'technically obsolete', I agree. But then, we're back to economics. And the same voodoo economists who want to rip out the POTS infrastructure because it can fatten their bottom line, aren't about to install a vast, multi-homed, hardened-hardware, no-wireless-links, redundant fibre communication network that runs independently of the Internet. That would be WAY more expensive than maintaining copper and filling the gaps that have been ripped out in digital chunks.
As usual, the bean counters will win, and everyone, including them, will eventually lose as a result, because (short-term) profit.
I just ran out of mod points, but your comment is so insightful I decided to quote it just to give it +2 visibility.
Why would you dismantle the copper phone network?
Perhaps because it is (or seems to beancounters) expensive to maintain. The cables are quite old and do break and then need fixing. The thing is of course that it provides something you previously got "for free" as in you were paying for the network anyway and its resilience got taken for granted. Now, we're paying for something else, like computer networks, and don't see why we're still having to pay for "something we don't use" all that often. These people are saying the resilience we used to get for free (because the network was just that well-made) is important enough that we should keep the thing around.
Me, I think that simply saying "keep the old stuff" isn't good enough. Instead, realise that traditional telco engineering is wildly different from the computer networks techie engineering, as can be seen from comparing, say, atm and ethernet. I'm not talking about bitrates, I'm talking about the other guarantees that atm does provide and ethernet hardware expects higher layers to "fix it in software" in spite of its best efforts to thwart it. It's a mindset difference.
Computer network "engineering" is quite frequently "marginal in the best case is good enough", where telco engineering is more like "full service in the worst case and we'll reluctantly call it a day". I'm not talking telco management stupidity and incessant price gauging, I'm talking engineering mind-set. Traditionally-engineered telephone service will continue during black-outs, despite the hardware obviously needing power to do so. Modern, "converged" telephone service very likely won't, for so many reasons it's not funny any longer.
So I think that in the long run it's going to be cheaper and more functional to remember how and why the POTS was engineered like it was, and do something similar with modern technology. Perhaps as a second network for critical infrastructure, since you really should keep it separate from the other networks anyway, "converged" or not.
But do it with tech that's closer to what's being used for the other network, like glass, only with much less complexity and more hard service guarantees, like battery backups, truly geographically diversified redundant routes, easily manufacturable parts, and low-power hardware so the batteries last longer, perhaps with solar panels to power distribution points, and so on, and so forth. You can do a lot here beyond relying on century-old tech. But if that old tech truly is the best, then we'll use that. It's about functionality that the modern stuff simply doesn't provide and isn't really designed for, not clinging to times past.
I wonder if this would help football players. Something to keep concussions from happening with such frequency.
This specific development? Probably not. It sounds as though this material is about as hard as current football helmets, and perhaps harder. Impact causes concussions because sudden acceleration or deceleration of the head causes the brain to hit the inside of the skull. But perhaps the knowledge and techniques gained here might allow them create padding for football helmets that absorbs impacts better than the current materials.
... we need much, much stronger standards for security and privacy than now exist.
Yes we do - but standards are meaningless without consistent, effective, swift, and powerful enforcement. We now live in an era where it's increasingly difficult for the average citizen to persuade authorities to enforce even laws when it comes to offenses committed by corporations. In that kind of climate, the only useful standard is "take your 'ambient computing' and shove it up your ass". Unfortunately, as a species we seem hopelessly addicted to convenience and shininess, even at the cost of various yokes around our necks - so here we go yet again, surrendering autonomy for comfort.
Does this mean Google owns the Web if they own Chrome? No. Absolutely not.
Google already owns the web to a large extent, and that was in the cards before Chrome came on the scene. As for Chrome, it's not designed to "own the web", it's designed as part of a strategy to "own the filters" that stand between Google and their produc... err, I mean their users.
Basically Theresa May has fascist tendencies she wants to enforce.
Yup, time to Godwin this discussion and start calling the British PM "Theresa Maydolf".
The thing that gets me is how few people among the 'general public' understand that every single time a country enacts measures like this, it's an unqualified win for the terrorists. But you can be sure that the leaders of those countries are aware of that fact, and welcome terrorist attacks as excuse and justification for fulfilling their darkest fantasies of domination and subjugation.
The other thing that many people don't stop to think about is that if their governments hadn't insisted on on interfering with other countries' governments and ways of life, we wouldn't have nearly so big a problem with terrorism.
You have wifi disabled? They mapped all those SSID's for a reason...
Why yes, yes I do! Both data and WiFi are turned off on my phone unless I need to check my email, (via K-9 Mail and on my own domain - screw Gmail), or do a web search or a SoundHound search. As soon as I'm done, I turn them off again. The stores I go into get SFA from my phone. Even when data is on, location is disabled, so their best fix on me is via tower triangulation; and I only use WiFi at home or at friends' houses.
Yes, they can still track me, but they can track other people a lot more easily and with much greater granularity. I try not to be the low-hanging fruit among all of the living, breathing, oblivious 'products' that surround me.
ought to include tarring, feathering, and dragging those responsible out of town on a rail - first in effigy, then on the living, breathing offenders themselves if the measures applied to their effigies don't convince them to do the right thing. It's time for beleaguered citizens to hand these fuckers their asses - literally if necessary.
By forcing people to register, DJI can alter the drone’s settings dependant on where the customer lives. That means it can make sure drones are flying by rules set by each nation.
Soon, phone and tablet manufacturers will push out updates to prevent you from taking pictures that might be considered pornographic, sacrilegious, or disrespectful to God or some other supreme leader in the jurisdiction you happen to be in. And when you move to a different jurisdiction, any such 'violations' already on your device will automatically be erased.
Many commenters so far have talked about how DJI is going to have their asses handed to them by their current and potential customers. What most here are missing is that this is the wave of the very near future - it's a trend, and it shows no signs of reversing. We truly live in a corporatocracy, and it's getting more and more entrenched, more invasive, and bolder by the day. Even if DJI loses this one, it's just a skirmish in a much bigger war that we are currently losing, and losing badly. When we lose control over the things we buy, we lose ownership, and everything we have is rented. Losing control over our own lives and our own destinies won't be far behind.
... resorting to lawfare generally precedes the decline of all the other company products and services. I hope PayPal is an exception to this.
Personally, I hope PayPal is an exemplar of this. I would very much like to see them go down in flames and be replaced by something less evil and assholish.
"... an estimated minimum of 37.7 million items weighing 17.6 tons. This represents the total amount of plastic that is produced in the world every 1.98 seconds".
If that's true, then it's a staggering and sobering statistic. In nice round numbers, call it 8 tons per second. That's over 690,000 tons of plastic produced per day! Given that plastic is largely made from a non-renewable resource, and that it takes a huge amount of energy to produce, and that much of it is used frivolously... Talk about fouling our own nest! As a species we are remarkably good at choosing short term gain that causes long term pain. Sadness...
Slashdot Mirror
The only winning move is not to play. Seriously, I've never had a Facebook account and I pity those millions who do.
You're probably playing to some extent, whether you realize it or not. I run No Script and an ad blocker, and I also don't have a Facebook account, so I'm probably better off than Joe Average when it comes to being tracked. I also do my best to make sure that friends and acquaintances don't post my name or picture. Even at that, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that FB knows a lot about me. If you think your abstinence from social media means you're not being tracked and commoditized, you're being naive.
I suspect there isn't one. The market is saturated, and the service is mature. When people are your only product, and there are no more people signing on to become your products, you're fucked. Earlier on they should have tried out a subscription service model to see if it would fly. It's probably too late for that now - nobody is going to pay for Facebook, because the company has already added pretty well all the features that they might have had a chance of charging subscribers for.
After the Internet itself, Facebook might be the next thing that really needs to be put under public control. The 'net is already critical infrastructure, and should have been taken over in the public interest long ago. Facebook is starting to look pretty infrastructure-ish - it's getting harder for people to land jobs without having an active account there, and travel into and out of the US may soon be difficult for those who don't have a social media presence. Not that Facebook, (or the Internet), will ever become part of the commons; but it's nice to dream those liberal dreams...
First, I find it hard to believe that there's only one group of scammers running th Microsoft Support con. Second, TFS says "the poor overseas callers working from scripts and, presumably, not really aware they're doing anything hugely wrong". From my many experiences with these callers, I would say that they're VERY aware that they're at least pretty far over on the shady side of the street. Some of them I wouldn't want to meet unless I was armed, judging by the things they said after I strung them along for a few minutes by describing what I was seeing on my Xubuntu machine... :)
'Cause this is just one more step toward turning travellers into cattle. I won't be surprised if ear tags and/or embedded RFID chips are next.
I miss the days when the States was a relatively safe and sane travel destination. The way things are now, I'll probably never cross the border again. Dammit, I miss New Orleans - it sucks to realize that I may never go there again.
Or is it 'Appledot'? As I'm writing this post there are currently six Apple summaries on the front page. Four of their subject lines begin with "Apple Announces"; another, (msmash was clearly feeling adventurous here), starts with "Apple unveils", while another begins with "Apple's New". If an Apple (story) a day keeps the doctor away, then thanks, Appledot, for taking such good care of my health!
'Appledot. News for annoyeds - stuff that natters'.
why things in the Middle East are so fucked up. American leaders' current obsession with instantaneous retribution at almost any cost, is an object lesson in how that kind of insanity comes into being.
Engineering, leadership, R&D, sales and customer support -- those are roles that don't lend themselves very well to remote work.
I really don't understand why ANY of the above requires more than a maximum of one day a week at the office. Engineering and R&D? I'll grant those for hardware work, where physical presence is the only way for multiple people to work on the same platform / prototype at the same time. But for software engineering and R&D, e-conferences and Git can take care of most of the requirements. Sure, sometimes there's no substitute for sweating it out together in a conference room with a whiteboard and someone taking notes - but if that's needed more than one day a week on the average, then you're doing it wrong. Leadership? What is that anyway, other than an HR talking point and a spurious justification for PHB's? In my experience it's seldom more than that. But if you must, do it remotely. If it really requires the 'charisma factor', (which is the only thing a physical presence adds to the process), one day a week should be more than enough. If not,then the process and/or the cast of characters needs to be tweaked. And FFS, why do sales and support staff need to be in the office more than once a MONTH? Most of the sales guys will get together in the evenings anyway to drink and measure their dicks, and the support staff can get the mutual support they need from their co-workers electronically.
In some sense I suppose I'm being sarcastic, because I DO understand that there is a dimension to work relationships that requires direct contact as a reminder that "we're a team", with all the complexities that implies. But corporations have gutted their workplaces of much of their humanity anyway, with cube farms, draconian policies, "right-sizing", and flavour-of-the-month management-speak bullshit. Given that, I suspect it's often both more humane and more productive to have people working at home.
We're talking here about a state-issued engineering license for the title of Professional Engineer, not simply a degree.
Just substitute "province-issued" for "state-issued", and we're talking about the same thing. The guy who mistook thermal compound for a heatsink was an APEO-licensed Professional Engineer. He wouldn't have been working on a project for the Canadian military if he hadn't had that license.
Not meaning to offend any 'official' engineers here - I understand the work that goes into an engineering degree, and I understand the legal and ethical need to protect the title from pretenders. What I really don't get is that people automatically place more trust in the opinions of an engineer, (or a doctor, etc), than people who don't hold the title, yet have similar or greater accomplishments in the field.
I've spent my life working in the electronics field. I once worked for a degreed electrical engineer whose idea of heatsinking a component on a PCB was blobbing some heatsink compound on it. (No, I'm not kidding). This same engineer casually implemented some resistor-diode logic between 74HC logic inputs and the outside world, without so much as a couple of protection diodes from the inputs to the supply rails. In this case the 'outside world' happened to be various points in the noisy, spikey electrical system of a large military vehicle. The design was being field-tested just prior to production. 'Nuff said. A bit later in my career, I worked for a guy who, (thankfully), actually merited his engineer's title. But he told me about an engineer who once worked for him, who couldn't understand why trying to start his car with a 12-volt lantern battery wasn't working.
There are smart, knowledgeable, competent people, and there are incompetent fools. In my experience, a degree, (or lack thereof), is no kind of an indication of which category a given person falls into.
... Treat state sponsored hacking like an act of war, and make sure everyone knows you will respond with devastating force.
And then devastating force is met with devastating force, and so on, until a victor emerges. But by that time the victor may only have hours to live on a planet no longer fit for life. And the victor may not even be the horse you backed...
The monoculture is unavoidable in industry unless you want to spend an exorbitant amount on service contracts and staff training. Latest trends tend towards reducing the different number of systems and the different platforms not only because of costs but also due to reliability reasons as a variety of different systems work in different ways and experts which are too thinly spread across platforms tend to make more mistakes.
Pay me now, or pay me later. As usual, the cost of the 'later' option is likely to be much higher - perhaps as much as your life is worth.
Is this the best we can do? Rely on economically obsolete systems as a backup for cyberattacks?
Calling it 'economically obsolete' indicates that you've fallen for the propaganda of the voodoo economists whose 'live for today / profit is king' attitudes have already fucked us over so badly. There is nothing 'economically obsolete' about having that spare tire in your trunk, (and knowing how to change a tire), because it could save your ass in some nasty circumstances. It's incredibly old-school and seems almost quaint in this era of cell phones, auto clubs, and urban sprawl - and it costs the manufacturers money, and you might be able to put the space now occupied by it to good use. But do you really want to see it disappear?
If you're thinking it's 'technically obsolete', I agree. But then, we're back to economics. And the same voodoo economists who want to rip out the POTS infrastructure because it can fatten their bottom line, aren't about to install a vast, multi-homed, hardened-hardware, no-wireless-links, redundant fibre communication network that runs independently of the Internet. That would be WAY more expensive than maintaining copper and filling the gaps that have been ripped out in digital chunks.
As usual, the bean counters will win, and everyone, including them, will eventually lose as a result, because (short-term) profit.
I just ran out of mod points, but your comment is so insightful I decided to quote it just to give it +2 visibility.
Why would you dismantle the copper phone network?
Perhaps because it is (or seems to beancounters) expensive to maintain. The cables are quite old and do break and then need fixing. The thing is of course that it provides something you previously got "for free" as in you were paying for the network anyway and its resilience got taken for granted. Now, we're paying for something else, like computer networks, and don't see why we're still having to pay for "something we don't use" all that often. These people are saying the resilience we used to get for free (because the network was just that well-made) is important enough that we should keep the thing around.
Me, I think that simply saying "keep the old stuff" isn't good enough. Instead, realise that traditional telco engineering is wildly different from the computer networks techie engineering, as can be seen from comparing, say, atm and ethernet. I'm not talking about bitrates, I'm talking about the other guarantees that atm does provide and ethernet hardware expects higher layers to "fix it in software" in spite of its best efforts to thwart it. It's a mindset difference.
Computer network "engineering" is quite frequently "marginal in the best case is good enough", where telco engineering is more like "full service in the worst case and we'll reluctantly call it a day". I'm not talking telco management stupidity and incessant price gauging, I'm talking engineering mind-set. Traditionally-engineered telephone service will continue during black-outs, despite the hardware obviously needing power to do so. Modern, "converged" telephone service very likely won't, for so many reasons it's not funny any longer.
So I think that in the long run it's going to be cheaper and more functional to remember how and why the POTS was engineered like it was, and do something similar with modern technology. Perhaps as a second network for critical infrastructure, since you really should keep it separate from the other networks anyway, "converged" or not.
But do it with tech that's closer to what's being used for the other network, like glass, only with much less complexity and more hard service guarantees, like battery backups, truly geographically diversified redundant routes, easily manufacturable parts, and low-power hardware so the batteries last longer, perhaps with solar panels to power distribution points, and so on, and so forth. You can do a lot here beyond relying on century-old tech. But if that old tech truly is the best, then we'll use that. It's about functionality that the modern stuff simply doesn't provide and isn't really designed for, not clinging to times past.
I wonder if this would help football players. Something to keep concussions from happening with such frequency.
This specific development? Probably not. It sounds as though this material is about as hard as current football helmets, and perhaps harder. Impact causes concussions because sudden acceleration or deceleration of the head causes the brain to hit the inside of the skull. But perhaps the knowledge and techniques gained here might allow them create padding for football helmets that absorbs impacts better than the current materials.
... we need much, much stronger standards for security and privacy than now exist.
Yes we do - but standards are meaningless without consistent, effective, swift, and powerful enforcement. We now live in an era where it's increasingly difficult for the average citizen to persuade authorities to enforce even laws when it comes to offenses committed by corporations. In that kind of climate, the only useful standard is "take your 'ambient computing' and shove it up your ass". Unfortunately, as a species we seem hopelessly addicted to convenience and shininess, even at the cost of various yokes around our necks - so here we go yet again, surrendering autonomy for comfort.
when you can just steal somebody else's?
Does this mean Google owns the Web if they own Chrome? No. Absolutely not.
Google already owns the web to a large extent, and that was in the cards before Chrome came on the scene. As for Chrome, it's not designed to "own the web", it's designed as part of a strategy to "own the filters" that stand between Google and their produc... err, I mean their users.
Basically Theresa May has fascist tendencies she wants to enforce.
Yup, time to Godwin this discussion and start calling the British PM "Theresa Maydolf".
The thing that gets me is how few people among the 'general public' understand that every single time a country enacts measures like this, it's an unqualified win for the terrorists. But you can be sure that the leaders of those countries are aware of that fact, and welcome terrorist attacks as excuse and justification for fulfilling their darkest fantasies of domination and subjugation.
The other thing that many people don't stop to think about is that if their governments hadn't insisted on on interfering with other countries' governments and ways of life, we wouldn't have nearly so big a problem with terrorism.
You have wifi disabled? They mapped all those SSID's for a reason...
Why yes, yes I do! Both data and WiFi are turned off on my phone unless I need to check my email, (via K-9 Mail and on my own domain - screw Gmail), or do a web search or a SoundHound search. As soon as I'm done, I turn them off again. The stores I go into get SFA from my phone. Even when data is on, location is disabled, so their best fix on me is via tower triangulation; and I only use WiFi at home or at friends' houses.
Yes, they can still track me, but they can track other people a lot more easily and with much greater granularity. I try not to be the low-hanging fruit among all of the living, breathing, oblivious 'products' that surround me.
ought to include tarring, feathering, and dragging those responsible out of town on a rail - first in effigy, then on the living, breathing offenders themselves if the measures applied to their effigies don't convince them to do the right thing. It's time for beleaguered citizens to hand these fuckers their asses - literally if necessary.
and soon you're talking about REAL money...
Fuck. Off.
By forcing people to register, DJI can alter the drone’s settings dependant on where the customer lives. That means it can make sure drones are flying by rules set by each nation.
Soon, phone and tablet manufacturers will push out updates to prevent you from taking pictures that might be considered pornographic, sacrilegious, or disrespectful to God or some other supreme leader in the jurisdiction you happen to be in. And when you move to a different jurisdiction, any such 'violations' already on your device will automatically be erased.
Many commenters so far have talked about how DJI is going to have their asses handed to them by their current and potential customers. What most here are missing is that this is the wave of the very near future - it's a trend, and it shows no signs of reversing. We truly live in a corporatocracy, and it's getting more and more entrenched, more invasive, and bolder by the day. Even if DJI loses this one, it's just a skirmish in a much bigger war that we are currently losing, and losing badly. When we lose control over the things we buy, we lose ownership, and everything we have is rented. Losing control over our own lives and our own destinies won't be far behind.
... resorting to lawfare generally precedes the decline of all the other company products and services. I hope PayPal is an exception to this.
Personally, I hope PayPal is an exemplar of this. I would very much like to see them go down in flames and be replaced by something less evil and assholish.
"... an estimated minimum of 37.7 million items weighing 17.6 tons. This represents the total amount of plastic that is produced in the world every 1.98 seconds".
If that's true, then it's a staggering and sobering statistic. In nice round numbers, call it 8 tons per second. That's over 690,000 tons of plastic produced per day! Given that plastic is largely made from a non-renewable resource, and that it takes a huge amount of energy to produce, and that much of it is used frivolously... Talk about fouling our own nest! As a species we are remarkably good at choosing short term gain that causes long term pain. Sadness...
and if it moves her nation towards totalitarianism, she probably Will.