How do we know the larger brains don't cause the more complex social interactions, rather then the complex social interactions like peer-pressure causing the brain to grow? Correlation doesn't equal causation. I'm no psychologist, but the cause and effect seems reversed here - small brain, no peer pressure to cause the brain to grow in order to create peer-pressure, no?
Exactly this. All cable companies I've ever been with rely on raising rates pennies at a time, but it adds up over a year or more. Some moron at Comcast gets a bonus because he made them money by raising everyone's rate by a quarter - the only way the cable company seems to be able to increase their revenue nowadays. I don't mean the promotional rates expiring, that I fully understand. I mean the prices they claim to be fixed for 1 or 2 years, yet the bill keeps on going up $0.50 to $2.00 every month. They blame it on raising fees, taxes, etc. I once questioned how one of the taxes on my bill went from $0.25 to $0.54, they claimed taxes have more than doubled but could not tell me what tax exactly that was so I could follow up with local government to confirm. Total BS. I had Comcast twice in our current residence, the first time they kept raising the rates, I would call threaten to cancel, they would give me some new "promotional rate" for next 6 months, then rate would climb every month. I got tired of having to call every 6 months to threaten, so I cut the service completely. Few years later, a sales guy came to the door to tell me how Comcast has chances, so he convinced me to sign up again for a fixed rate service for 2 years, I made sure in the comments he put down that if the bill goes up a penny, unless it is in fact verifiable tax increase, I will cancel. 6 moths later, I called him to say my bill went up $1. So he credited it back, next month it went up another $0.28. So I cancelled the service - done. I went back to HD antenna an internet for all of family content. It's not that I cannot afford it, we have 2 Tesla's in our garage, it's just that I despise doing business with dishonest companies.
So their breach just put the entire population at significantly increased risk of identify theft. There definitely should be consequences and the government is the only recourse the consumers have since they are not direct customers of Equifax, nor will anyone ever be able to prove their identify theft was directly due to Equifax's breach, so they cannot individually sue Equifax.
Maybe the fines should be whatever it costs to re-issue new social security (or social insurance in Canada) numbers to everyone, including costs of managing the transition. Yea, I know this may sink Equifax as a company, so be it - lesson for the other guys to secure the data or maybe to not collect it in the first place. Maybe there is such a thing as too dangerous to collect and keep in one company. Kind of like banks and companies that are too big to fail.
So basically Equifax just exposed all of the adults in USA and Canada to the danger of identify theft. Of course the victims can never prove their identity theft was caused by a specific breach, such as this one, so Equifax will never be found directly liable. HOWEVER, this is where the government should step in and impose massive fines for endangering the public. Those fines to be pooled into funds that help with identify theft. The fines should be in the billions, even if that means the company goes bankrupt. If it does, it will make other companies spend more money on securing their data and/or not holding onto data they don't need, simply to avoid being fined billions of dollars.
Follow my example of an airplane shedding parts causing properties below. There is no implied trust between an air transport company and a homeowner who had a piece of landing gear fall through his roof. There is no business relationship between the air transport company and the homeowner either. Yet, I bet if an engine fell off of a FedEx airplane and damaged someone's home, FedEx would be held liable. IANAL, so you tell me, what would be the grounds FedEx would be held liable for damage their engine caused to a home when if fell off their plane passing overhead - assume the homeowner never did ANY business with FedEx. Is it the the FAA regulation, or some other laws that kick in? My point was that we need similar regulation and laws that hold companies like Equifax liable for damages they cause, whether the damaged party is a customer or not.
Carriers in the US sell you the phones. Some require that you use their device exclusively. If a carrier sells me a phone, and that phone has a bug that causes my data usage to go beyond what I am using, it's the carrier's problem, not mine. I they attempt to bill me for it knowing that the device they sold me is causing this phantom data usage, they are the ones committing fraud. I see a class action lawsuit coming against carriers who choose to bill for data usage caused purely by a defect in a product they sell.
Typically when a company screws its clients, they risk clients no longer using their service, so usual market forces apply. This is not the case here. Most of their customers never chose to use Equifax or even given any explicit permission for them to collect their data. Yet, they do collect it and sell credit scores. The problem is that market forces don't work here, i.e. those customers who got hurt are not really paying, or even willing, customers and have no choice to opt out of the service, and those who buy credit scores are not really affected much.
As much as I am generally against regulation, this is one area I think they should be held fully liable, including compensating any affected customers for ALL of their expenses, including their time at some reasonable rate at or above what that customer usually makes per hour - that includes any waiting on hold while calling any of the companies to clear things out. Maybe this would cost Equifax its life, so be it, the next company will be much more careful what they do with the data. This would be no different than an airline being held liable for damaging property of killing people because their planes are shedding parts - the people hurt are not airline customers, they are the homeowners who had an aircraft parts crash through their roof into their living room.
What protection do people have against the IRS mistakenly connecting someone else's social media posts to them? It's not like all the social media posts are authenticated, especially if you ONLY look at publicly available social media information.
Whenever collecting data and visualizing it in various reports, there usually is an intended purpose, i.e. who's going to be looking at the reports and what actions and/or decisions will be made based on those reports. Those actions/decisions should in turn change the next iteration of the report, closing the control loop.
Can I someone enlighten me what exactly is this hate reporting expected to accomplish? Who is the intended audience and what decisions are they expected to make based on this report?
I see. If the $10M is the average or maybe median value people are willing to give up their life for, then I get it, but that is neither direct or indirect loss to the economy. It is a subjective self-worth amplified by self-preservation instinct, which is very likely inflated by orders of magnitude vs. actual replacement cost. I bet the average life insurance people buy is not $10M, meaning they cannot actually financially justify this worth.
First, I doubt the baby bonus was anywhere near $100K per year per child. Second, if each child really represented $10M in economic opportunity, it would make sense to do both, invest in baby bonus and bring in already educated adults. My point is, I sincerely doubt the $10M figure is anywhere near that. Most people will not even make $10M in their lifetime, forget time value and other such things.
If that cost is really true, government would have a case to pay people to have kids. If each day kid is $10M return, paying parents $100K per kid per year from birth to 18 should be a no brainer - great return on investment.
"between 3,000 and 12,700 premature deaths have been averted because of air quality benefits over the last decade or so, creating a total economic benefit between $30 billion and $113 billion."
So, averting one premature death costs the economy $10M? Not sure why the benefit goes down per person if more deaths are averted, but where on earth are they getting anywhere near $10M per person?
I think you missed my point. I didn't say you workers don't need protection, but simply that this role has been taken on by the government, just like the regulations you are talking about. So no, I don't want some drugs union taking over for the FDA regulating the pharma industry, etc, etc.
I see a lot of apathy for Unions. Very sad. They gave you: Weekends off, eight hour work day, Holidays off. And a safer workplace. People died in the fight to start unions for you. If you like working 60 hours a week on a regular basis; keep on disliking unions.. Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/1886...
You are right, but most if not all of these things are today covered by labor laws. Unions had their place and time. Today, they simply have outlived their usefulness, and on more than few occasions are actually causing more damage than good.
Isn't the idea behind the union that everyone's equal?
My goodness, you don't know the first thing about labor unions, do you? They do not seek "equality", they seek the best wage for their members. They seek seniority rules, benefits guarantees and worker safety. And they've got an amazing record of success in these areas.
A union seeks to aggregate labor for leverage in the workplace the same way corporations aggregate capital in the marketplace..
Anyone who believes that unions are the cause of the problems in the US auto industry over the past 50 years just doesn't know much about unions or the auto industry.
You are correct that unions seek seniority rules (compensation based on how long you've been a member, rather than based on your skill and/or productivity). That said, they also seek equality. Here is an example: my father worked for an auto workers union. There was a maintenance worker there with large seniority who was taking 3hr+ lunches most days. When he finally got written up, the union went to bat for him saying the company cannot give the guy a warning because it is singling him out and in order to write him up they needed to show that other people don't do that - i.e. equality. So, in order to do that, the company had to implement timecard type system, tracking everyone's break times (used to be a mostly honor system) and hard, non-negotiable, computer enforced rules that for example stated if you were late 60+ seconds or more on 3 occasions in a single month, you'd get fired. A line in the bathroom would cause people stress, but I guess that's ok by the union because everyone was treated equally.
The moral of the story is that unions tend to create hostile workplaces where the employees hate the employer and vice versa. Both sides think the other side is is out to get them. Employer is hostile because of things like the unions prevent them from rewarding high-performing workers and/or firing non-performers with seniority (heck, even shift allocation cannot be skill based, has to be seniority based). The employees are hostile because the employer treats them like they are all lazy slackers, but that's because the union requires this - if you have any lazy slackers in the company, especially if they have high seniority, the employer is forced to treat all employees as if they were lazy slacker because unions require everyone be treated equally.
Then there is the unfair legal advantage that unions get, which vary from place to place, but basically boil down to laws that prevent employers to hire non-union worked when union worked decide to go on strike, or even the fact that unions can enforce contract terms that would prevent the employer from hiring non-union workers. Why don't individual workers get the same protections? If I decide not to work you cannot hire anyone to replace me, or if you hire me you cannot hire anyone else? If you go to the store to buy bread and the baker is on strike, you should not be allowed to buy bread from anywhere else, right? If the unions were simply groups of people who all volunteered to bargain as a collective, no problem, but they shouldn't have any special rights - for example if a worker prefers not to belong to a union and negotiate individually, they should not have that right taken away from them by the union.
Tesla is a public company. Any options vested can be exercised and sold immediately, so I completely don't get how on earth you think their lawyers would take them away from employees. You heard something somewhere, maybe about startups where employee stock options are not liquid and often end up being worth nothing, but that doesn't apply to large publicly traded companies. So either you are majorly confused or are just spreading FUD.
"Reed, whose administration has promised that the city of Atlanta will use 100% renewable energy by 2035" What is that commitment here is nothing, other than the administration who committed to it will long gone by then and will be liable for nothing. In 2035 you can ask, hey, why isn't Atlanta 100% on renewables, and the answer will be "what are you talking about, we didn't commit to anything, go talk to the retired politicians who made you this promise".
Commitments backed by nothing are meaningless publicity stunts. It's like taking an unsecured loan with zero payments until well after your death. In this case what they are borrowing is popular votes.
If it really saved money to the manufacturer, why would the manufacturer cheat? You need to legislate that they have to save money? And if it saved money to the consumers, why would consumers buy a more expensive product? There are laws in place preventing false advertising, so no need for more laws there And as far as legislating the definition of terms, sure, no problem there but how far do you go? You'll tell me I cannot paint the air conditioner green and call it green because someone somewhere may think it saves energy? I know California like legislating everything, which is why you can't swing a dead cat there without seeing a warning about how there are materials around you that are known to cause cancer - so completely meaningless since the warnings is in every single business. So why don't doesn't California just legislate the redefinition of the word green as "not a color" but "uses less than x energy" and get it over with, rather than expecting the federal government to do it? The other states can just copy their legislation. Hey, new source of revenue! Ticket anyone trying to sell a green SUV;-)
Ok, I see "save businesses and consumers billions of dollars", so everybody wins, nobody loses, right? So why exactly does this need to be legislated? If the business making the product saves billions, the consumers save billions, why do you have to enforce this profit making by all with laws? Even if the manufacturer doesn't save billions, why wouldn't consumers choose to buy the product that will net cost less? Or is it "it will save consumers billions, but cost them few more billions?".
You evidently believe that facts can do no harm to your understanding.
Except they can. Only a fool treats carefully selected facts the same as if they were impartially selected, but there are quite evidently a lot of fools out there.
If you can't understand the importance of considering the selection and arrangement of information, you are utterly helpless in the face of a simple product testimonial. Even if the testimonial is completely factual, it gives you no useful information.
Agreed that incomplete and carefully selected facts can provide a distorted picture. That said, how exactly did the Russians stopped the Clinton campaign from releasing all the relevant facts to provide the complete and impartial picture?
So the free world will fall apart if everyone in it knows the truth about their government? I find it interesting how US government justifies spying on their own citizens with "if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" and yet calls anyone who informs the people they serve with what the government does an enemy of the state. It's not like they hacked the personal sex videos of the Clinton, or some embarrassing comments made off-the-record; what they allegedly exposed were facts that have to do with her profession and potential corruption. I get that exposing those possibly affected the outcome of the election, but shouldn't the voters be entitled to know what the politicians they vote for actually do?
Since we know, thanks to various whistle-blowers, that the NSA and other US government organizations have hacked most is not all US citizens, this bill would now give any citizen a reasonable belief they were hacked, therefore a legal right to hack back. Where do I sign?
The fact that traffic flow pattern contains potentially sensitive information is not at all new. I built a product that solved this problem for some companies all most two decades ago. There is something new to this problem that didn't emerge until the recent boom in machine learning capabilities. Machine learning is really good at one thing - pattern recognition. When applied to this problem, it really opens up the depth of information that can be gathered from data flow patterns. For starters, it can identify what flow belongs to what device, then it can identify what could cause this traffic, then it can combine all the devices behavior looking for more complex patterns. Just looking at your home Internet, it's not hard to identify who is home, are they awake or sleeping or exercising or watching TV or doing taxes or whatever. Products using this are just emerging, but it's amazing what can be gleaned from just Internet traffic pattern, or electricity usage pattern (or combined!).
Slashdot Mirror
How do we know the larger brains don't cause the more complex social interactions, rather then the complex social interactions like peer-pressure causing the brain to grow? Correlation doesn't equal causation. I'm no psychologist, but the cause and effect seems reversed here - small brain, no peer pressure to cause the brain to grow in order to create peer-pressure, no?
Exactly this. All cable companies I've ever been with rely on raising rates pennies at a time, but it adds up over a year or more. Some moron at Comcast gets a bonus because he made them money by raising everyone's rate by a quarter - the only way the cable company seems to be able to increase their revenue nowadays. I don't mean the promotional rates expiring, that I fully understand. I mean the prices they claim to be fixed for 1 or 2 years, yet the bill keeps on going up $0.50 to $2.00 every month. They blame it on raising fees, taxes, etc. I once questioned how one of the taxes on my bill went from $0.25 to $0.54, they claimed taxes have more than doubled but could not tell me what tax exactly that was so I could follow up with local government to confirm. Total BS. I had Comcast twice in our current residence, the first time they kept raising the rates, I would call threaten to cancel, they would give me some new "promotional rate" for next 6 months, then rate would climb every month. I got tired of having to call every 6 months to threaten, so I cut the service completely. Few years later, a sales guy came to the door to tell me how Comcast has chances, so he convinced me to sign up again for a fixed rate service for 2 years, I made sure in the comments he put down that if the bill goes up a penny, unless it is in fact verifiable tax increase, I will cancel. 6 moths later, I called him to say my bill went up $1. So he credited it back, next month it went up another $0.28. So I cancelled the service - done. I went back to HD antenna an internet for all of family content. It's not that I cannot afford it, we have 2 Tesla's in our garage, it's just that I despise doing business with dishonest companies.
So their breach just put the entire population at significantly increased risk of identify theft. There definitely should be consequences and the government is the only recourse the consumers have since they are not direct customers of Equifax, nor will anyone ever be able to prove their identify theft was directly due to Equifax's breach, so they cannot individually sue Equifax.
Maybe the fines should be whatever it costs to re-issue new social security (or social insurance in Canada) numbers to everyone, including costs of managing the transition. Yea, I know this may sink Equifax as a company, so be it - lesson for the other guys to secure the data or maybe to not collect it in the first place. Maybe there is such a thing as too dangerous to collect and keep in one company. Kind of like banks and companies that are too big to fail.
So basically Equifax just exposed all of the adults in USA and Canada to the danger of identify theft. Of course the victims can never prove their identity theft was caused by a specific breach, such as this one, so Equifax will never be found directly liable. HOWEVER, this is where the government should step in and impose massive fines for endangering the public. Those fines to be pooled into funds that help with identify theft. The fines should be in the billions, even if that means the company goes bankrupt. If it does, it will make other companies spend more money on securing their data and/or not holding onto data they don't need, simply to avoid being fined billions of dollars.
Follow my example of an airplane shedding parts causing properties below. There is no implied trust between an air transport company and a homeowner who had a piece of landing gear fall through his roof. There is no business relationship between the air transport company and the homeowner either. Yet, I bet if an engine fell off of a FedEx airplane and damaged someone's home, FedEx would be held liable. IANAL, so you tell me, what would be the grounds FedEx would be held liable for damage their engine caused to a home when if fell off their plane passing overhead - assume the homeowner never did ANY business with FedEx. Is it the the FAA regulation, or some other laws that kick in? My point was that we need similar regulation and laws that hold companies like Equifax liable for damages they cause, whether the damaged party is a customer or not.
Carriers in the US sell you the phones. Some require that you use their device exclusively. If a carrier sells me a phone, and that phone has a bug that causes my data usage to go beyond what I am using, it's the carrier's problem, not mine. I they attempt to bill me for it knowing that the device they sold me is causing this phantom data usage, they are the ones committing fraud. I see a class action lawsuit coming against carriers who choose to bill for data usage caused purely by a defect in a product they sell.
Typically when a company screws its clients, they risk clients no longer using their service, so usual market forces apply. This is not the case here. Most of their customers never chose to use Equifax or even given any explicit permission for them to collect their data. Yet, they do collect it and sell credit scores. The problem is that market forces don't work here, i.e. those customers who got hurt are not really paying, or even willing, customers and have no choice to opt out of the service, and those who buy credit scores are not really affected much.
As much as I am generally against regulation, this is one area I think they should be held fully liable, including compensating any affected customers for ALL of their expenses, including their time at some reasonable rate at or above what that customer usually makes per hour - that includes any waiting on hold while calling any of the companies to clear things out. Maybe this would cost Equifax its life, so be it, the next company will be much more careful what they do with the data. This would be no different than an airline being held liable for damaging property of killing people because their planes are shedding parts - the people hurt are not airline customers, they are the homeowners who had an aircraft parts crash through their roof into their living room.
What protection do people have against the IRS mistakenly connecting someone else's social media posts to them? It's not like all the social media posts are authenticated, especially if you ONLY look at publicly available social media information.
Whenever collecting data and visualizing it in various reports, there usually is an intended purpose, i.e. who's going to be looking at the reports and what actions and/or decisions will be made based on those reports. Those actions/decisions should in turn change the next iteration of the report, closing the control loop.
Can I someone enlighten me what exactly is this hate reporting expected to accomplish? Who is the intended audience and what decisions are they expected to make based on this report?
I see. If the $10M is the average or maybe median value people are willing to give up their life for, then I get it, but that is neither direct or indirect loss to the economy. It is a subjective self-worth amplified by self-preservation instinct, which is very likely inflated by orders of magnitude vs. actual replacement cost. I bet the average life insurance people buy is not $10M, meaning they cannot actually financially justify this worth.
First, I doubt the baby bonus was anywhere near $100K per year per child. Second, if each child really represented $10M in economic opportunity, it would make sense to do both, invest in baby bonus and bring in already educated adults. My point is, I sincerely doubt the $10M figure is anywhere near that. Most people will not even make $10M in their lifetime, forget time value and other such things.
If that cost is really true, government would have a case to pay people to have kids. If each day kid is $10M return, paying parents $100K per kid per year from birth to 18 should be a no brainer - great return on investment.
"between 3,000 and 12,700 premature deaths have been averted because of air quality benefits over the last decade or so, creating a total economic benefit between $30 billion and $113 billion."
So, averting one premature death costs the economy $10M? Not sure why the benefit goes down per person if more deaths are averted, but where on earth are they getting anywhere near $10M per person?
I think you missed my point. I didn't say you workers don't need protection, but simply that this role has been taken on by the government, just like the regulations you are talking about. So no, I don't want some drugs union taking over for the FDA regulating the pharma industry, etc, etc.
I see a lot of apathy for Unions. Very sad. They gave you: Weekends off, eight hour work day, Holidays off. And a safer workplace. People died in the fight to start unions for you. If you like working 60 hours a week on a regular basis; keep on disliking unions.. Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/1886...
You are right, but most if not all of these things are today covered by labor laws. Unions had their place and time. Today, they simply have outlived their usefulness, and on more than few occasions are actually causing more damage than good.
My goodness, you don't know the first thing about labor unions, do you? They do not seek "equality", they seek the best wage for their members. They seek seniority rules, benefits guarantees and worker safety. And they've got an amazing record of success in these areas.
A union seeks to aggregate labor for leverage in the workplace the same way corporations aggregate capital in the marketplace. .
Anyone who believes that unions are the cause of the problems in the US auto industry over the past 50 years just doesn't know much about unions or the auto industry.
You are correct that unions seek seniority rules (compensation based on how long you've been a member, rather than based on your skill and/or productivity). That said, they also seek equality. Here is an example: my father worked for an auto workers union. There was a maintenance worker there with large seniority who was taking 3hr+ lunches most days. When he finally got written up, the union went to bat for him saying the company cannot give the guy a warning because it is singling him out and in order to write him up they needed to show that other people don't do that - i.e. equality. So, in order to do that, the company had to implement timecard type system, tracking everyone's break times (used to be a mostly honor system) and hard, non-negotiable, computer enforced rules that for example stated if you were late 60+ seconds or more on 3 occasions in a single month, you'd get fired. A line in the bathroom would cause people stress, but I guess that's ok by the union because everyone was treated equally.
The moral of the story is that unions tend to create hostile workplaces where the employees hate the employer and vice versa. Both sides think the other side is is out to get them. Employer is hostile because of things like the unions prevent them from rewarding high-performing workers and/or firing non-performers with seniority (heck, even shift allocation cannot be skill based, has to be seniority based). The employees are hostile because the employer treats them like they are all lazy slackers, but that's because the union requires this - if you have any lazy slackers in the company, especially if they have high seniority, the employer is forced to treat all employees as if they were lazy slacker because unions require everyone be treated equally.
Then there is the unfair legal advantage that unions get, which vary from place to place, but basically boil down to laws that prevent employers to hire non-union worked when union worked decide to go on strike, or even the fact that unions can enforce contract terms that would prevent the employer from hiring non-union workers. Why don't individual workers get the same protections? If I decide not to work you cannot hire anyone to replace me, or if you hire me you cannot hire anyone else? If you go to the store to buy bread and the baker is on strike, you should not be allowed to buy bread from anywhere else, right? If the unions were simply groups of people who all volunteered to bargain as a collective, no problem, but they shouldn't have any special rights - for example if a worker prefers not to belong to a union and negotiate individually, they should not have that right taken away from them by the union.
Tesla is a public company. Any options vested can be exercised and sold immediately, so I completely don't get how on earth you think their lawyers would take them away from employees. You heard something somewhere, maybe about startups where employee stock options are not liquid and often end up being worth nothing, but that doesn't apply to large publicly traded companies. So either you are majorly confused or are just spreading FUD.
"Reed, whose administration has promised that the city of Atlanta will use 100% renewable energy by 2035"
What is that commitment here is nothing, other than the administration who committed to it will long gone by then and will be liable for nothing. In 2035 you can ask, hey, why isn't Atlanta 100% on renewables, and the answer will be "what are you talking about, we didn't commit to anything, go talk to the retired politicians who made you this promise".
Commitments backed by nothing are meaningless publicity stunts. It's like taking an unsecured loan with zero payments until well after your death. In this case what they are borrowing is popular votes.
Ans sleazeballs don't like saving money so you have to force them?
If it really saved money to the manufacturer, why would the manufacturer cheat? You need to legislate that they have to save money? And if it saved money to the consumers, why would consumers buy a more expensive product? There are laws in place preventing false advertising, so no need for more laws there And as far as legislating the definition of terms, sure, no problem there but how far do you go? You'll tell me I cannot paint the air conditioner green and call it green because someone somewhere may think it saves energy? I know California like legislating everything, which is why you can't swing a dead cat there without seeing a warning about how there are materials around you that are known to cause cancer - so completely meaningless since the warnings is in every single business. So why don't doesn't California just legislate the redefinition of the word green as "not a color" but "uses less than x energy" and get it over with, rather than expecting the federal government to do it? The other states can just copy their legislation. Hey, new source of revenue! Ticket anyone trying to sell a green SUV ;-)
Ok, I see "save businesses and consumers billions of dollars", so everybody wins, nobody loses, right? So why exactly does this need to be legislated? If the business making the product saves billions, the consumers save billions, why do you have to enforce this profit making by all with laws? Even if the manufacturer doesn't save billions, why wouldn't consumers choose to buy the product that will net cost less? Or is it "it will save consumers billions, but cost them few more billions?".
You evidently believe that facts can do no harm to your understanding.
Except they can. Only a fool treats carefully selected facts the same as if they were impartially selected, but there are quite evidently a lot of fools out there.
If you can't understand the importance of considering the selection and arrangement of information, you are utterly helpless in the face of a simple product testimonial. Even if the testimonial is completely factual, it gives you no useful information.
Agreed that incomplete and carefully selected facts can provide a distorted picture. That said, how exactly did the Russians stopped the Clinton campaign from releasing all the relevant facts to provide the complete and impartial picture?
So the free world will fall apart if everyone in it knows the truth about their government? I find it interesting how US government justifies spying on their own citizens with "if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" and yet calls anyone who informs the people they serve with what the government does an enemy of the state. It's not like they hacked the personal sex videos of the Clinton, or some embarrassing comments made off-the-record; what they allegedly exposed were facts that have to do with her profession and potential corruption. I get that exposing those possibly affected the outcome of the election, but shouldn't the voters be entitled to know what the politicians they vote for actually do?
Since we know, thanks to various whistle-blowers, that the NSA and other US government organizations have hacked most is not all US citizens, this bill would now give any citizen a reasonable belief they were hacked, therefore a legal right to hack back. Where do I sign?
The fact that traffic flow pattern contains potentially sensitive information is not at all new. I built a product that solved this problem for some companies all most two decades ago. There is something new to this problem that didn't emerge until the recent boom in machine learning capabilities. Machine learning is really good at one thing - pattern recognition. When applied to this problem, it really opens up the depth of information that can be gathered from data flow patterns. For starters, it can identify what flow belongs to what device, then it can identify what could cause this traffic, then it can combine all the devices behavior looking for more complex patterns. Just looking at your home Internet, it's not hard to identify who is home, are they awake or sleeping or exercising or
watching TV or doing taxes or whatever. Products using this are just emerging, but it's amazing what can be gleaned from just Internet traffic pattern, or electricity usage pattern (or combined!).