Nowadays dialup and dsl user ranges (DULs) are commonly blacklisted, by orgs such as Sorbs who look at what the IP addresses reverse-resolve to and list them if they appear to be dynamic.
As a result... without control of your reverse DNS records, you can't reliably run a SMTP server in the first place, without getting branded a spammer.
(Before even considering BLs that just blanket list known DSL user ip ranges)
Oh, and it's still possible to run a SMTP server on your network, but you need to MSP over a port other than 25, either to your ISP's mail server, or to an outside mail server you have an agreement with for mail transport.
Botnet nodes participating in a DDoS are innocent computer users, far too massive for the CRTC to go knocking on everyone's door, and seize their computers.
And many attacks will originate from an international source or target an international destination.
The spoofed manner of IP-based attacks makes identifying perpetrators on a large computer network almost impossible.
Certainly there is nothing the CRTC can do to help, not in a usable timeframe.
It shouldn't up to the ISPs to decide what is and/or to take care of DDoS attacks or spam bots.
Um.. That proposition is lunacy. The customers are downstream on the ISP's network, using the ISP's IP address space to commit their abuse.
If the ISP doesn't do something, other providers will de-peer them, or block their traffic in the end, to their detriment.
Also, contrary to the suggestion above, the CRTC is not equipped to deal with DDoS attacks. If many customers are involved, it can shutdown the ISP, until something is done.
If they had to wait for CRTC action, the ISP might be down for months, to the detriment of their revenue, and none of their customers having usable service.
I suppose it's especially important that they reveal to customers they participate in the traffic management practice called "Spam and virus Filtering" or "Bulk Mail filtering", including references to such things as spam folders, deletion/quarantine, etc, etc.
Otherwise, I see spammers going straight to the CRTC and raising complaints against ISPs for blocking or degrading their network performance (ability to deliver spam e-mail to their customers).
A similar issue exists for other types of internet abusers (that the ISP may blackhole or block access from to customers, for whatever reason)
Rulings in favor of Net Neutrality don't just benefit content providers that customers want access to/from.
The bad guys (even the ones offering spam, malware, viruses, adware, scams, etc) are content providers also
At a glance, the issue didn't appear to be very limiting.
"Traffic management practice" could include null routing or rate-limiting a flood source, or capping a link that a specific flooding event is coming from...
E.g. A bunch of customers with infected computers participating in an unexpected DDoS attack against a target outside their network, causing the ISP's backhauls or other interconnections to be saturated (and thus seriously impairing connectivity for customers).
So will ISPs be not allowed to mitigate DoS attacks if they cannot anticipate them within 90 days?
Will the customer whose PC got infected and got shutdown or rate-limited be able to take the matter to the CRTC and recieve renumeration, while fining the ISP for protecting the quality of service for their other subscribers?
Anecdote dropping won't make MySQL or Oracle the corporate standard either. They are popular in some places, and certain types of apps, but far from 'standard'.
I see more developers in enterprises building applications that run against Microsoft SQL Server than OracleDB.
The fact of the matter is there aren't large-scale open source CRM, HR, accounting, and other products that are suitable for meeting large enterprises needs.
Almost always Enterprises buy in closed source apps. Typically the apps use SAPDB, IBM DB2, MS SQL, or Oracle.
Very few enterprise apps, in fact support open source DBMs.
However, I can think of some examples off hand: OpenNMS, which is a network infrastructure monitoring app designed specifically for enterprises, is widely used, and even won SourceForge community choice award in 2008, for the category of Enterprise Applications.
And guess what, it supports only PostgreSQL.
Oh yeah... and Firebird SQL won in the category of Enterprise Apps in 2009.
Strange that MySQL wasn't even nominated (eh?)
I am not suggesting MySQL is not popular. Only that "MySQL + Oracle" is not 100% of the market, and it's not even close to 100%.
What does free market tell you, when the same or approximately equivalent product is available for free from another source?
PostgreSQL is probably the best example, primarily because there is no GPL encumberance (otherwise, an OSS fork of MySQL would count, but developers of commercial applications that embed MySQL do need a commercial license).
Because they want to own 100% of the OSS database enterprise market.
So where are Oracle buyouts of PostgreSQL-related companies?
In case you were unaware, PostgreSQL, and some other OSS DBs are closer to OracleDB than MySQL.
And they are a significant proportion of the Enterprise OSS DB market. MySQL is by no means all the OSS market, it's only a decent sized chunk of it.
The rest is controlled by other SQL-based databases (such as HSQLDB, SQLite, PG, Firebird, SAPDB, Apache DB, Ingres, BlackRay, CSQL )
And the massive number of non-SQL RDBMS used in Enterprises. CouchDB, MonetDB, BDB, HBase, OpenQM, GNU GDBM, H2, GNOMEDB, GT.M, GladiusDB, C-Store, Hypertable
Mnesia, Perst, ZopeDB
There is basically 0% chance of Oracle owning 100% of the OSS Enterprise Database market, because there are so many databases needed.
MySQL certainly doesn't work for all enterprise applications.
Or the RIAA... (assuming said shared volume contains MP3s).. not only do they have it indexed for you, but they'll conveniently mail the list to you in the form of a letter with a bunch of legal sounding junk at no upfront cost to you.
Not exactly.. how it works is each message has a "More" link, you click the link, you choose "Embed" or "Email" from the menu, and it either prompts you for an e-mail address to send the link to, or for Embed, it displays some HTML code to allow you to embed the message on your web site, for Email you check a box "include a link to this message".
Google gives each voicemail a secret URL. If you choose publish the secret URL of one of your voicemail messages, then the voicemail message is no longer secret.
Google's search service was just making URLs of messages that has been published searchable.
Any search engine could and (does) index the very same.
GoogleBot doesn't have any privileged access to index Google Voicemail messages that the account holder didn't make public (by publishing URLS to)
If you ask me, however: I think Google Voice should default to only allowing the account owner to see messages.
If you want to "share" a message, there should be a flag you need to set on the message to make it publicly visible (that you can later revoke), or an account-wide setting you need to turn on before you can share messages.
This way, people who don't normally share their messages will have a protection more like what they are familiar with re. E-mail.
As far as I know, you can't (yet) publish a Gmail.com URL online and let other people read one of your e-mail messages... what justification is there for Google Voice to be different by default?
Most people do not commonly publish their voicemail messages, although some might wish to share with friends.
An issue is that voicemail messages generally include phone numbers, and these are generally considered personal/private.
It is poor etiquette to publish someone else's phone number without permission.....
Therefore, a (suitable) privacy default for shared voicemail, should in some manner censor phone numbers (such as by replacing with a handle, alias, or nickname)
The average parent isn't in that great a shape either, with regards to understanding financial concepts such as compound interest.
Witness the mortgage meltdown, as evidence of a large number of subprine loan holders, a large number of Americans who did not understand the mathematics of the situation, or simply did not make a good decision...
The average student genuinely seeking an advanced education, who's doing what they can to learn on their own... has a better shot of learning this on their own than relying on a parent.
The trouble is they first need to (somehow) figure out that they need to learn about this before being able to competently sign loan papers, and fully understand the mathematics of the position they are placing themselves in, with a particular loan agreement.
I have never encountered any evidence whatsoever that any objective measurement of education quality correlates with an institution's exclusivity.
There is a limited supply of very good professors, and they are expensive to hire.
And an unlimited supply of students who want to go to schools where classes are taught by very good professors.
Quality education demands personal attention from professors.
Personal attention is very difficult when there are a large number of students per professor.
Maintaining a small number of students per professor requires either increasing the number of professors in relation to the number of students, or reducing the number of students.
But there is a limited supply of professors, and limited funds available to hire them.
On the other hand, controlling the number of students is easily done, by only accepting a proper number of students, and by charging them a high enough tuition to pay the best professors to take on the job.
Students (and I am an undergraduate) have no credit history or employment history. Further, you don't even know that they'll graduate, and they'll likely change their intended major once they get to college.
Getting a co-signer is just about as good as the loan being to that co-signer.
Some students have no credit or employment history. Many do.
And yes... a percentage of students never graduate, many drop out in their first or second year, but these students don't incur as large a debt as those who borrow 4 years worth of tuition.
Most will get some type of job, even if they fail to graduate, and have the means to pay the loan.
Not all students have a 720 credit score and will repay all their loans on time. However, in this case... precise timing is unimportant, even if the student gets late on payments, what matters is that they pay it.
With all the rights and protections creditors have for this type of loan (government will pay), and in many cases subsidize interest, they are getting a fairly sweet deal --- and if interest subsidies are available, why not charge as much interest as possible?.
The bank's unlikely to lose any principal in the matter. My conjecture is they charge 8% to milk the favorable situation for all its worth, since students applying for these loans have very limited options (if they could qualify for a more favorable type of loan, that is presumably what they would use), they gotta take or leave the 8%.
False. How is this different than Adobe writing Flash plugin software for Firefox? Adobe Flash is proprietary and contains a lot of their own "standards".
Microsoft has Internet Explorer.
What was the name of Adobe's competing Web browser, again, that they would switch people to by removing Flash from FF and thus killing it?
The analogy totally falls apart when you consider the fact that Adobe is browser-neutral. They don't have a browser of their own, and they give equal support to all major browsers.
So no, Adobe flash doesn't disprove that.NET WPF/XAML plugins are EEE.
this is an attempt to allow people to use an alternative browser while still having access to their other Microsoft-centric technologies (.NET in this case). Isn't this a good thing?
In this case, providing access to MS-centric technologies that hardly anyone is using, and simply don't have any credibility among developers at the present time. Microsoft needs FF users to have access to the technology for the technology to have a hope of their new.NET technologies attaining any traction.
Yes, I'm suggesting that XAML is in its infancy and not widely adopted by anyone.
On the other hand, the plugin is widespread, due to MS silently installing the plugin without user knowledge or informed consent.
So essentially, by issuing this patch, Mozilla is doing nothing but hurting its business customers.
It's not a patch, it's an update to a published blocklist. Mozilla has no business customers that I know of, who pay for support of X copies of FF. People who download free copies of FF for business use are not "business customers", are they?
Certainly they can use custom browser configurations and provide their own addon blocklists, by populating the browser configuration with a custom base URL, and serving up suitable.XML files for all browser versions. The blocklist and how it works are not a secret. It is not as if this is the first time a plugin has been blocklisted due to security issues.
Mozilla is protecting its users who don't necessarily use Windows update, against a plugin that is not part of the browser, and was installed without users' control or knowledge.
Certainly a third-party plugin is not a supported component; Mozilla doesn't have to fix third-party plugins, they can block them if there are issues.
Allowing the user to run a plugin with known stability or security issues is a bad idea, a compulsory blocklist (with URL schema that can be customized by IT) is a very good idea.
I wonder if MS will eventually make an ActiveX plugin for FF to bring MSIE-style ActiveX control support, sort of like the "Google Chrome Frame" concept, but for FF, and automatically added behind the scenes, whether the user is interested or not.
It's a security move. They're blocking only the Windows Presentation Foundationplugin that has the vulnerability, not the addon, they are leaving other components MS put in, intact.
The plugin is different from the addons.
It's actually not just one thing MS adds to FF, it's a bunch of things.
Including "the plugin", some DLLs in the FF plugins directory (that actually won't even be disabled if you use Tools > Addons > disable, since the Addon is separate from the Plugin).
Yes, but did they understand what the papers they signed meant, before they took the accounting classes?
Students are a gullible group.. if the banks convince them they need an 8% student loan, because for some reason they "are a poor credit risk", then the students who don't have the education yet are likely to sign, not even realizing there may be a possibility of finding another deal (or maybe there's not another option).
The claim students are a poor credit risk is one of the strangest... with a debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, has no statute of limitations, has a government guarantee behind it, including an ability to garnish wages, and these people taking out student loans are generally young people....
It seems like student loan debt is less of a credit risk than most other types of even secured debt.
I declare that: "students are a credit-unworthy lot who should thank their lucky stars that rates aren't 12% or higher."
Is basically nonsense.
It makes no more sense than saying "30 year olds are an uncreditworthy lot."
It's credit history that relates to creditworthiness, not being a student or not.
A civilized nation should provide free education to the highest level each person wishes to attain, because that's part of believing that the nation's most most important resource is its people.
But when a government just wants dumb consumers, then it's a very different matter.
Why should it be free and open?
Certainly it's not in the best interests of these institutions, nor in the interests of people who actually are committed to getting an education, for all students to get in free of tuition and admission selection requirements. As such a thing massively dilutes the quality of the institution, and the quality of the education that is available.
What's wrong with students having to work to earn money to obtain the education they feel they want? And to earn the money for room and board..
Keep in mind, even when a university education is not free there are a lot of people who go to school, not because they really have a commitment in getting an education, but because they think they will earn more money with a college degree, because statistics tell them they will.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is "3" such a magic number? Doesn't it pave the way for 0 strike or 1 strike policies too?
Doesn't it make sense to not allow suspected possible future downloaders to connect to the internet in the first place?
And why wait til the third strike before making it permanent, why not disconnect the first or second time?
Why not allow at least 4 chances, or probation, ec? Where does the idea come from that "3 times," and you're permanently disconnected is a good idea?
Nowadays dialup and dsl user ranges (DULs) are commonly blacklisted, by orgs such as Sorbs who look at what the IP addresses reverse-resolve to and list them if they appear to be dynamic.
As a result... without control of your reverse DNS records, you can't reliably run a SMTP server in the first place, without getting branded a spammer.
(Before even considering BLs that just blanket list known DSL user ip ranges)
Oh, and it's still possible to run a SMTP server on your network, but you need to MSP over a port other than 25, either to your ISP's mail server, or to an outside mail server you have an agreement with for mail transport.
The perpetrator is anonymous and unavailable.
Botnet nodes participating in a DDoS are innocent computer users, far too massive for the CRTC to go knocking on everyone's door, and seize their computers.
And many attacks will originate from an international source or target an international destination.
The spoofed manner of IP-based attacks makes identifying perpetrators on a large computer network almost impossible.
Certainly there is nothing the CRTC can do to help, not in a usable timeframe.
It shouldn't up to the ISPs to decide what is and/or to take care of DDoS attacks or spam bots.
Um.. That proposition is lunacy. The customers are downstream on the ISP's network, using the ISP's IP address space to commit their abuse.
If the ISP doesn't do something, other providers will de-peer them, or block their traffic in the end, to their detriment.
Also, contrary to the suggestion above, the CRTC is not equipped to deal with DDoS attacks. If many customers are involved, it can shutdown the ISP, until something is done.
If they had to wait for CRTC action, the ISP might be down for months, to the detriment of their revenue, and none of their customers having usable service.
I suppose it's especially important that they reveal to customers they participate in the traffic management practice called "Spam and virus Filtering" or "Bulk Mail filtering", including references to such things as spam folders, deletion/quarantine, etc, etc.
Otherwise, I see spammers going straight to the CRTC and raising complaints against ISPs for blocking or degrading their network performance (ability to deliver spam e-mail to their customers).
A similar issue exists for other types of internet abusers (that the ISP may blackhole or block access from to customers, for whatever reason)
Rulings in favor of Net Neutrality don't just benefit content providers that customers want access to/from.
The bad guys (even the ones offering spam, malware, viruses, adware, scams, etc) are content providers also
At a glance, the issue didn't appear to be very limiting.
"Traffic management practice" could include null routing or rate-limiting a flood source, or capping a link that a specific flooding event is coming from...
E.g. A bunch of customers with infected computers participating in an unexpected DDoS attack against a target outside their network, causing the ISP's backhauls or other interconnections to be saturated (and thus seriously impairing connectivity for customers).
So will ISPs be not allowed to mitigate DoS attacks if they cannot anticipate them within 90 days?
Will the customer whose PC got infected and got shutdown or rate-limited be able to take the matter to the CRTC and recieve renumeration, while fining the ISP for protecting the quality of service for their other subscribers?
Anecdote dropping won't make MySQL or Oracle the corporate standard either. They are popular in some places, and certain types of apps, but far from 'standard'.
I see more developers in enterprises building applications that run against Microsoft SQL Server than OracleDB.
The fact of the matter is there aren't large-scale open source CRM, HR, accounting, and other products that are suitable for meeting large enterprises needs.
Almost always Enterprises buy in closed source apps. Typically the apps use SAPDB, IBM DB2, MS SQL, or Oracle.
Very few enterprise apps, in fact support open source DBMs.
However, I can think of some examples off hand: OpenNMS, which is a network infrastructure monitoring app designed specifically for enterprises, is widely used, and even won SourceForge community choice award in 2008, for the category of Enterprise Applications.
And guess what, it supports only PostgreSQL.
Oh yeah... and Firebird SQL won in the category of Enterprise Apps in 2009.
Strange that MySQL wasn't even nominated (eh?)
I am not suggesting MySQL is not popular. Only that "MySQL + Oracle" is not 100% of the market, and it's not even close to 100%.
What does free market tell you, when the same or approximately equivalent product is available for free from another source?
PostgreSQL is probably the best example, primarily because there is no GPL encumberance (otherwise, an OSS fork of MySQL would count, but developers of commercial applications that embed MySQL do need a commercial license).
Because they want to own 100% of the OSS database enterprise market.
So where are Oracle buyouts of PostgreSQL-related companies?
In case you were unaware, PostgreSQL, and some other OSS DBs are closer to OracleDB than MySQL.
And they are a significant proportion of the Enterprise OSS DB market. MySQL is by no means all the OSS market, it's only a decent sized chunk of it.
The rest is controlled by other SQL-based databases (such as HSQLDB, SQLite, PG, Firebird, SAPDB, Apache DB, Ingres, BlackRay, CSQL )
And the massive number of non-SQL RDBMS used in Enterprises. CouchDB, MonetDB, BDB, HBase, OpenQM, GNU GDBM, H2, GNOMEDB, GT.M, GladiusDB, C-Store, Hypertable
Mnesia, Perst, ZopeDB
There is basically 0% chance of Oracle owning 100% of the OSS Enterprise Database market, because there are so many databases needed.
MySQL certainly doesn't work for all enterprise applications.
Does it do the public any good, if the regulatory agency kills the competitor being acquired, by delaying a decision?
By the time the acquisition is approved or rejected, Sun will be basically dead, and barely have any role as the competitor, anyways.
A human analyst looking for similarities never noticed many strings in common, over 500 years? How could that be?
Or the RIAA... (assuming said shared volume contains MP3s).. not only do they have it indexed for you, but they'll conveniently mail the list to you in the form of a letter with a bunch of legal sounding junk at no upfront cost to you.
Not exactly.. how it works is each message has a "More" link, you click the link, you choose "Embed" or "Email" from the menu, and it either prompts you for an e-mail address to send the link to, or for Embed, it displays some HTML code to allow you to embed the message on your web site, for Email you check a box "include a link to this message".
Other websites provided links to the voice mails.
Google gives each voicemail a secret URL. If you choose publish the secret URL of one of your voicemail messages, then the voicemail message is no longer secret.
Google's search service was just making URLs of messages that has been published searchable.
Any search engine could and (does) index the very same.
GoogleBot doesn't have any privileged access to index Google Voicemail messages that the account holder didn't make public (by publishing URLS to)
If you ask me, however: I think Google Voice should default to only allowing the account owner to see messages.
If you want to "share" a message, there should be a flag you need to set on the message to make it publicly visible (that you can later revoke), or an account-wide setting you need to turn on before you can share messages.
This way, people who don't normally share their messages will have a protection more like what they are familiar with re. E-mail.
As far as I know, you can't (yet) publish a Gmail.com URL online and let other people read one of your e-mail messages... what justification is there for Google Voice to be different by default?
Most people do not commonly publish their voicemail messages, although some might wish to share with friends.
An issue is that voicemail messages generally include phone numbers, and these are generally considered personal/private.
It is poor etiquette to publish someone else's phone number without permission.....
Therefore, a (suitable) privacy default for shared voicemail, should in some manner censor phone numbers (such as by replacing with a handle, alias, or nickname)
1234
The average parent isn't in that great a shape either, with regards to understanding financial concepts such as compound interest.
Witness the mortgage meltdown, as evidence of a large number of subprine loan holders, a large number of Americans who did not understand the mathematics of the situation, or simply did not make a good decision...
The average student genuinely seeking an advanced education, who's doing what they can to learn on their own... has a better shot of learning this on their own than relying on a parent.
The trouble is they first need to (somehow) figure out that they need to learn about this before being able to competently sign loan papers, and fully understand the mathematics of the position they are placing themselves in, with a particular loan agreement.
I have never encountered any evidence whatsoever that any objective measurement of education quality correlates with an institution's exclusivity.
There is a limited supply of very good professors, and they are expensive to hire.
And an unlimited supply of students who want to go to schools where classes are taught by very good professors.
Quality education demands personal attention from professors.
Personal attention is very difficult when there are a large number of students per professor.
Maintaining a small number of students per professor requires either increasing the number of professors in relation to the number of students, or reducing the number of students.
But there is a limited supply of professors, and limited funds available to hire them.
On the other hand, controlling the number of students is easily done, by only accepting a proper number of students, and by charging them a high enough tuition to pay the best professors to take on the job.
Students (and I am an undergraduate) have no credit history or employment history. Further, you don't even know that they'll graduate, and they'll likely change their intended major once they get to college.
Getting a co-signer is just about as good as the loan being to that co-signer.
Some students have no credit or employment history. Many do.
And yes... a percentage of students never graduate, many drop out in their first or second year, but these students don't incur as large a debt as those who borrow 4 years worth of tuition. Most will get some type of job, even if they fail to graduate, and have the means to pay the loan.
Not all students have a 720 credit score and will repay all their loans on time. However, in this case... precise timing is unimportant, even if the student gets late on payments, what matters is that they pay it.
With all the rights and protections creditors have for this type of loan (government will pay), and in many cases subsidize interest, they are getting a fairly sweet deal --- and if interest subsidies are available, why not charge as much interest as possible?.
The bank's unlikely to lose any principal in the matter. My conjecture is they charge 8% to milk the favorable situation for all its worth, since students applying for these loans have very limited options (if they could qualify for a more favorable type of loan, that is presumably what they would use), they gotta take or leave the 8%.
The blocklist can be overriden, of course. Type "about:config" search for extensions.blocklist
Disabling it or changing the blocklist URL schema is fairly straightforward.
False. How is this different than Adobe writing Flash plugin software for Firefox? Adobe Flash is proprietary and contains a lot of their own "standards".
Microsoft has Internet Explorer.
What was the name of Adobe's competing Web browser, again, that they would switch people to by removing Flash from FF and thus killing it?
The analogy totally falls apart when you consider the fact that Adobe is browser-neutral. They don't have a browser of their own, and they give equal support to all major browsers.
So no, Adobe flash doesn't disprove that .NET WPF/XAML plugins are EEE.
this is an attempt to allow people to use an alternative browser while still having access to their other Microsoft-centric technologies (.NET in this case). Isn't this a good thing?
In this case, providing access to MS-centric technologies that hardly anyone is using, and simply don't have any credibility among developers at the present time. Microsoft needs FF users to have access to the technology for the technology to have a hope of their new .NET technologies attaining any traction.
Yes, I'm suggesting that XAML is in its infancy and not widely adopted by anyone. On the other hand, the plugin is widespread, due to MS silently installing the plugin without user knowledge or informed consent.
So essentially, by issuing this patch, Mozilla is doing nothing but hurting its business customers.
It's not a patch, it's an update to a published blocklist. Mozilla has no business customers that I know of, who pay for support of X copies of FF. People who download free copies of FF for business use are not "business customers", are they?
Certainly they can use custom browser configurations and provide their own addon blocklists, by populating the browser configuration with a custom base URL, and serving up suitable .XML files for all browser versions. The blocklist and how it works are not a secret. It is not as if this is the first time a plugin has been blocklisted due to security issues.
Mozilla is protecting its users who don't necessarily use Windows update, against a plugin that is not part of the browser, and was installed without users' control or knowledge.
Certainly a third-party plugin is not a supported component; Mozilla doesn't have to fix third-party plugins, they can block them if there are issues.
Allowing the user to run a plugin with known stability or security issues is a bad idea, a compulsory blocklist (with URL schema that can be customized by IT) is a very good idea.
I wonder if MS will eventually make an ActiveX plugin for FF to bring MSIE-style ActiveX control support, sort of like the "Google Chrome Frame" concept, but for FF, and automatically added behind the scenes, whether the user is interested or not.
It's a security move. They're blocking only the Windows Presentation Foundation plugin that has the vulnerability, not the addon, they are leaving other components MS put in, intact.
The plugin is different from the addons.
It's actually not just one thing MS adds to FF, it's a bunch of things.
Including "the plugin", some DLLs in the FF plugins directory (that actually won't even be disabled if you use Tools > Addons > disable, since the Addon is separate from the Plugin).
Yes, but did they understand what the papers they signed meant, before they took the accounting classes?
Students are a gullible group.. if the banks convince them they need an 8% student loan, because for some reason they "are a poor credit risk", then the students who don't have the education yet are likely to sign, not even realizing there may be a possibility of finding another deal (or maybe there's not another option).
The claim students are a poor credit risk is one of the strangest... with a debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, has no statute of limitations, has a government guarantee behind it, including an ability to garnish wages, and these people taking out student loans are generally young people....
It seems like student loan debt is less of a credit risk than most other types of even secured debt.
I declare that: "students are a credit-unworthy lot who should thank their lucky stars that rates aren't 12% or higher."
Is basically nonsense.
It makes no more sense than saying "30 year olds are an uncreditworthy lot."
It's credit history that relates to creditworthiness, not being a student or not.
A civilized nation should provide free education to the highest level each person wishes to attain, because that's part of believing that the nation's most most important resource is its people.
But when a government just wants dumb consumers, then it's a very different matter.
Why should it be free and open?
Certainly it's not in the best interests of these institutions, nor in the interests of people who actually are committed to getting an education, for all students to get in free of tuition and admission selection requirements. As such a thing massively dilutes the quality of the institution, and the quality of the education that is available.
What's wrong with students having to work to earn money to obtain the education they feel they want? And to earn the money for room and board..
Keep in mind, even when a university education is not free there are a lot of people who go to school, not because they really have a commitment in getting an education, but because they think they will earn more money with a college degree, because statistics tell them they will.