Sadly, I don't think this will be changed anytime soon. Identity theft doesn't really hurt credit card companies or credit agencies. The credit card companies just close the card and write off the fraudulent purchases. At best. At worst, they'll send collection agencies after you for years until you prove that "you" wasn't really you. (The credit card company in my case had various "suggestions" as to what happened including that my wife opened the account with my information without my knowledge. Finally, since my wife was right there and denied it, they conceded the fraud.) Even if they have to admit the fraud, they can push the charges back on the retailers or just eat the few thousand dollars.
Credit agencies, on the other hand, make their money by selling information about people. (They hate that my credit is frozen because they can't sell my information. ) To them, identity theft is a non-issue. So more people are opening lines of credit on your credit file? Who cares. They'll just adjust your credit score accordingly and demand mountains of proof if you claim that items on your credit report aren't from you. After all, they wouldn't be on your credit report if they weren't yours and they are on your credit report so that means they are obviously yours. There was a bill in Congress at one point to let people freeze/thaw their credit files for free, but the credit agencies lobbied to kill it. Because when the interests of ordinary citizens and giant credit agencies collide, they with the most money (aka the big credit agencies) win.
The businesses who need to change their practices won't do it on their own because identity theft doesn't really hurt them. Meanwhile, the government won't act to force them to change thanks to lobbyist pressure.
With a person's name, SSN, and date of birth (somewhat easy to obtain), you can steal that person's identity and open lines of credit in their name. Add in address (pretty easily obtained) and you can do a lot of damage to their credit - while racking up thousands in purchases to enjoy. I wish I could add the caveat that you'd only enjoy this stuff until the police arrested you but many identity theft cases don't result in arrest because 1) the local police are unprepared to investigate online crimes that span multiple districts/states/countries, 2) the local police don't want to spend resources on an investigation that will just lead to another district having jurisdiction/getting the arrest credit, 3) the federal authorities only care about your case if it is big enough. A single credit card opened in your name will get shrugs from them.
Step 1: Put on a dress shirt (or any shirt with a pocket on the front). Step 2: Start your camera video recording and put it on your pocket (camera facing out, of course). Step 3: Wait in line behind the person and position yourself so that you have a good view but also so that it's not obvious what you are doing. Pretend to be looking at something else. (Look at your watch or a book or something.) Step 4: Review the footage later and get the person's password or PIN.
I've been through identity theft. It's not fun. And I was lucky enough to catch it quick enough that little damage was done. Capital One approved a card for "me" based on an online form where the thieves had my name, address, DOB, and SSN. Mother's maiden name was wrong, but that didn't stop the approval process. The thieves paid for rush delivery of the card and then changed the address on it. This meant that the card was sent to me BEFORE the address change went through. If this hadn't happened, I would have only known about it once the bill collectors came barging down my door.
On a side note: Capital One was not helpful at all. They stonewalled both me ("If we tell you the address on the card and you go and kill the person, we're liable" = what they actually told me) and the police (gave them a phone number linked to an answering machine and never called back). The combination of their approval of the card, missing all of the red flags along the way, and refusing to help beyond canceling the card means Capital One will NEVER be "what's in my wallet."
For those who think they have bad credit and thus wouldn't be victims, it doesn't take much. Remember, the thieves don't care about whether you can pay back the bills they are generating. All it takes is one credit card company to approve a card and they'll tear through the balance leaving you with thousands in debt that you'll need to prove wasn't your doing. In addition, there's another form of identity theft where a criminal is arrested and gives your name/SSN/DOB instead of their own. Then your name goes into the police databases and you'll be harassed as an assumed criminal. Removal of your name can take years during which time you'll flunk any background checks.
There's no protection that I know of from the latter form of identity theft, but you can freeze your credit to protect against the former. This means that nobody - not even you - can open new lines of credit unless you first thaw the credit files. The downside is that you need to pay to freeze and for each thaw. The upside is that you have a handy retort for all of those "You can save $5 if you open up a credit account with us" offers at the cash register. "No, thanks. My credit file is frozen." I've found these people stop their sales push the minute they hear you were a victim of identity theft. (I don't think that's in the script they are supposed to read to customers.;-) )
The problem was in the story telling. Every writer would put Superman in a perilous situation and then invent a new power to get him out of it. Eventually, they found it hard to write for Superman. After all, when you have a guy who can juggle planets around for fun, what can threaten him enough that readers would think "this could conceivably kill Superman?" (We all know that Threat Of The Week won't kill Superman, but the villain needs to have a reasonable chance of winning or there's no suspense in the story.)
They tried correcting this when they reset the DC Universe and lowered his power levels, but the writers keep doing the same power ramp-up.
Then again, some depictions of Superman work nicely with an uber-powerful Supes. The final episode of Justice League, for example. Superman is beating up on Darkseid and notes that he feels like he lives in a world made of cardboard. He needs to be careful of his every action lest he hurt someone or break something. For the first time in a long time, he feels comfortable in just letting go instead of worrying that hitting the villain would result in needless death and destruction.
SETI is trying to pick up alien signals. These might not be "Hi there humans, we are here" messages. Instead, they might be more mundane messages that alien civilizations "leak" out right after they learn how to use radio signals to communicate. Of course, if they encrypt those radio signals (using a purely alien encryption sequence, of course), we might not be able to tell that encrypted data from random noise.
That's why I made that mistake. The word "Austrian" appears once in the title and once in the summary. My brain skimmed the "where" and focused on the "what" - Tor exit node operator ruled guilty of facilitating a crime as if he had been in on the crime. When I commented, I repeated the wrong country. Which just goes to show you should never skim! That being said, I probably will still skim more posts in the future. I don't have time to read everything there is online!
Modern ciphertext is indistinguishable from random noise.
This is a big reason why I think SETI-type programs are doomed to fail. If it would be hard to tell the difference between encrypted data and random data, how much harder would it be to tell the difference between an alien encryption scheme and random noise?
Comcast is turning users' cable modems into public hotspots. So anyone could connect to a user's modem and use it for any purpose that one might connect to the Internet for. If said use is illegal, would the person who owned (or leased it from Comcast as the case may be) be liable as an accomplice? After all, if you provide open Internet access, you've got to expect that someone is going to do something illegal with it.
(I know that the story is in Australia and this is in the US, but this sounds like a valid comparison.)
Ah, but the ISPs and backbone providers are likely big companies with lawyers. So they can't possibly be accomplices and must be completely innocent angels. This individual with no team of lawyers on retainer is obviously guilty of helping out nasty criminals.
If all rights are absolute, how do you balance it when two people's rights conflict? Person A has a right to freedom of speech. So they put a soap box on the sidewalk in front of my house and start shouting religious diatribes 24/7 at my family for not following the "right" religion. Any time I try to leave my house, they block my driveway and shout at me until I go back inside - or until I convert to their religion. There's nothing in the Constitution that says they can't do this so should they be free to do this? What about my right to practice my own religion (or no religion) without being harassed? If I call the police on this person, am I (or the police) violating his freedom of speech by making him stop shouting at us 24/7?
To give another example, I have freedom of speech. Suppose I publish an editorial stating, as fact, that someone committed some serious crimes - crimes that would lead to their being fired from their current job (e.g. claiming a teacher was "touching" her students). Now suppose I had no proof of these allegations. Perhaps I made them up to get at the teacher for giving my kid a bad grade or maybe the teacher cut me off on the road one day. Whatever the reason, I publish these false allegations and the teacher is fired and her life is ruined. Since I have absolute, unrestricted freedom of speech, I can't be sued for libel, right?
Making everyone's freedoms unrestrained would just lead to chaos. There have to be some boundaries where the freedoms intersect. It's just a matter of where do you draw the line.
Your freedom to swing your fist wildly about ends at my face.
People's freedom to not have their constitutional rights violated is in no way equivalent to them punching your face. Try to keep it relevant, yes?
I believe he was referring to the previous poster's comment about the government restricting freedom of speech by saying you couldn't yell "fire" in a theater. The point being that all of our rights have limits. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I can say untrue things about you in a newspaper. That would be libel and would be against the law. You wouldn't be able to get out of a libel lawsuit by claiming "Freedom of Speech." Likewise, you couldn't declare "everyone should track down So-And-So and kill him" and then say "Free Speech!" to get out of it.
We have our freedoms but they aren't carte blanche, they have limits. Typically, the limits of your freedoms ("the right to swing your fist") are when they impede someone else's freedoms ('ends at my face").
Of course, the government is taking these reasonable restrictions and is building upon them until they become unreasonable. (e.g. "Free Speech Zones" to keep protests far from the people they are protesting against.) This doesn't mean that all restrictions are unreasonable, just that we've got to rein in the government's overreach until the restrictions are reasonable again.
The government even has a system where, for cases where time is of the essence and the threat is high, they can take the action first and get a retroactive warrant later from a court that will essentially rubber stamp anything. However, the government's law enforcement divisions are complaining that even this is too much work. They sound like my pre-teen when he's told to do his homework: "It's too hard! I don't want to do it! I'll do it later! I don't have to do it!!!"
There is a corollary to the first law of Superpowerdynamics. If you are a young man, but out of shape, you can get superpowers which will immediately give you a perfect physique even if your powers have nothing to do with muscle tone/burning fat. Unless your power is akin to The Blob in which case you're physique will grow ever larger until, by all rights, you should die of a heart attack from your heart trying to pump blood across your fat-laden body.
Just because a DVD can hold 7GB doesn't mean that a DVD quality movie takes up 7GB. Usually room is left for extras, trailers for other movies from the same studio, etc. 1.6 - 1.8GB sounds about right for just the DVD movie (which is all Netflix streams). Blu-Ray movie files would obviously be bigger, but I doubt they'd take up the entire 50GB that a Blu-Ray disc can hold.
Government bans competition. You can't very well expect an agency that claims a "natural monopoly" to not consider other "natural monopolies" both wise and judicious.
Not true. Anyone can start an ISP as long as they are willing to pay for the infrastructure to deliver the last mile connection to their customers.
And in instances where under-served areas tried to create their own municipal broadband network, the ISPs that weren't serving them sued to stop them or got their lobbied state officials to pass laws declaring that illegal.
Community fiber is still the answer - there are just so many hurdles that make it slow in coming.
You just criticized both the government and lack of competition and your answer is to eliminate competition and let the government run it?
If a community isn't being served by an existing ISP, why is municipal broadband "eliminating competition"? If an area has an ISP but they are refusing to improve service, how is adding a municipal broadband option eliminating competition? Is the presence of the USPS eliminating competition from FedEx and UPS?
Because we have monopolies (or duopolies) in most regions of the US when it comes to ISPs. I have Time Warner Cable where I live. No FIOS or any other wired, high speed ISP. What incentive does Time Warner Cable have to improve their infrastructure when they can just raise my rates, give me the same service they've always given me, and make more money knowing I have no other choice?
I was actually going to add another example where life is interesting - just not UFO/Bigfoot/Ghost interesting, but didn't. Yes, Himalayan Polar Bears qualifies as interesting. Just not the same kind of interesting as finding actual evidence of Bigfoot or of a ghost would be.
Including the bones? And what if one Bigfoot is wandering the woods, gets injured and dies alone? Do the other Bigfoot hunt his corpse down (knowing where it is due to psychic abilities or something) for the sole purpose of eating him? Even if Bigfoot did eat their own dead, there would still be traces.
Some of the people might be reasonable but just with bad evidence that they don't know is proven false. Many more, though, are thoroughly mentally committed to the proven-false phenomenon and will take any debunking of their theory as propaganda from The Conspiracy that wants to keep everyone in the dark about it. (See: The Moon Landing Deniers.)
Actually, I think reality is far more interesting than we think it is. It just isn't "interesting" in the area of Bigfoot, UFOs, and ghosts. Look to astronomy, though, and we're constantly finding weird planets/stars/etc that challenge our current understandings of the Universe.
I used to wear a watch all the time. I felt naked if I wasn't wearing one and would compulsively look at my wrist to see what time it was. Then I realized just what you said and I decided to try going without one. I haven't worn one in months except for one day where I knew I wouldn't have access to my smartphone and I was going to need to see what time it was. During that time, it felt just wrong to have this "thing" on my wrist. I don't miss my watch at all and if I needed to see something that a "smart watch" would show, I'll just look at my smart phone.
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Sadly, I don't think this will be changed anytime soon. Identity theft doesn't really hurt credit card companies or credit agencies. The credit card companies just close the card and write off the fraudulent purchases. At best. At worst, they'll send collection agencies after you for years until you prove that "you" wasn't really you. (The credit card company in my case had various "suggestions" as to what happened including that my wife opened the account with my information without my knowledge. Finally, since my wife was right there and denied it, they conceded the fraud.) Even if they have to admit the fraud, they can push the charges back on the retailers or just eat the few thousand dollars.
Credit agencies, on the other hand, make their money by selling information about people. (They hate that my credit is frozen because they can't sell my information. ) To them, identity theft is a non-issue. So more people are opening lines of credit on your credit file? Who cares. They'll just adjust your credit score accordingly and demand mountains of proof if you claim that items on your credit report aren't from you. After all, they wouldn't be on your credit report if they weren't yours and they are on your credit report so that means they are obviously yours. There was a bill in Congress at one point to let people freeze/thaw their credit files for free, but the credit agencies lobbied to kill it. Because when the interests of ordinary citizens and giant credit agencies collide, they with the most money (aka the big credit agencies) win.
The businesses who need to change their practices won't do it on their own because identity theft doesn't really hurt them. Meanwhile, the government won't act to force them to change thanks to lobbyist pressure.
With a person's name, SSN, and date of birth (somewhat easy to obtain), you can steal that person's identity and open lines of credit in their name. Add in address (pretty easily obtained) and you can do a lot of damage to their credit - while racking up thousands in purchases to enjoy. I wish I could add the caveat that you'd only enjoy this stuff until the police arrested you but many identity theft cases don't result in arrest because 1) the local police are unprepared to investigate online crimes that span multiple districts/states/countries, 2) the local police don't want to spend resources on an investigation that will just lead to another district having jurisdiction/getting the arrest credit, 3) the federal authorities only care about your case if it is big enough. A single credit card opened in your name will get shrugs from them.
Step 1: Put on a dress shirt (or any shirt with a pocket on the front).
Step 2: Start your camera video recording and put it on your pocket (camera facing out, of course).
Step 3: Wait in line behind the person and position yourself so that you have a good view but also so that it's not obvious what you are doing. Pretend to be looking at something else. (Look at your watch or a book or something.)
Step 4: Review the footage later and get the person's password or PIN.
Wouldn't be hard to do, really.
I've been through identity theft. It's not fun. And I was lucky enough to catch it quick enough that little damage was done. Capital One approved a card for "me" based on an online form where the thieves had my name, address, DOB, and SSN. Mother's maiden name was wrong, but that didn't stop the approval process. The thieves paid for rush delivery of the card and then changed the address on it. This meant that the card was sent to me BEFORE the address change went through. If this hadn't happened, I would have only known about it once the bill collectors came barging down my door.
On a side note: Capital One was not helpful at all. They stonewalled both me ("If we tell you the address on the card and you go and kill the person, we're liable" = what they actually told me) and the police (gave them a phone number linked to an answering machine and never called back). The combination of their approval of the card, missing all of the red flags along the way, and refusing to help beyond canceling the card means Capital One will NEVER be "what's in my wallet."
For those who think they have bad credit and thus wouldn't be victims, it doesn't take much. Remember, the thieves don't care about whether you can pay back the bills they are generating. All it takes is one credit card company to approve a card and they'll tear through the balance leaving you with thousands in debt that you'll need to prove wasn't your doing. In addition, there's another form of identity theft where a criminal is arrested and gives your name/SSN/DOB instead of their own. Then your name goes into the police databases and you'll be harassed as an assumed criminal. Removal of your name can take years during which time you'll flunk any background checks.
There's no protection that I know of from the latter form of identity theft, but you can freeze your credit to protect against the former. This means that nobody - not even you - can open new lines of credit unless you first thaw the credit files. The downside is that you need to pay to freeze and for each thaw. The upside is that you have a handy retort for all of those "You can save $5 if you open up a credit account with us" offers at the cash register. "No, thanks. My credit file is frozen." I've found these people stop their sales push the minute they hear you were a victim of identity theft. (I don't think that's in the script they are supposed to read to customers. ;-) )
The problem was in the story telling. Every writer would put Superman in a perilous situation and then invent a new power to get him out of it. Eventually, they found it hard to write for Superman. After all, when you have a guy who can juggle planets around for fun, what can threaten him enough that readers would think "this could conceivably kill Superman?" (We all know that Threat Of The Week won't kill Superman, but the villain needs to have a reasonable chance of winning or there's no suspense in the story.)
They tried correcting this when they reset the DC Universe and lowered his power levels, but the writers keep doing the same power ramp-up.
Then again, some depictions of Superman work nicely with an uber-powerful Supes. The final episode of Justice League, for example. Superman is beating up on Darkseid and notes that he feels like he lives in a world made of cardboard. He needs to be careful of his every action lest he hurt someone or break something. For the first time in a long time, he feels comfortable in just letting go instead of worrying that hitting the villain would result in needless death and destruction.
SETI is trying to pick up alien signals. These might not be "Hi there humans, we are here" messages. Instead, they might be more mundane messages that alien civilizations "leak" out right after they learn how to use radio signals to communicate. Of course, if they encrypt those radio signals (using a purely alien encryption sequence, of course), we might not be able to tell that encrypted data from random noise.
That's why I made that mistake. The word "Austrian" appears once in the title and once in the summary. My brain skimmed the "where" and focused on the "what" - Tor exit node operator ruled guilty of facilitating a crime as if he had been in on the crime. When I commented, I repeated the wrong country. Which just goes to show you should never skim! That being said, I probably will still skim more posts in the future. I don't have time to read everything there is online!
D'oh! Read the headline too quickly and thought it said Australia.
This is a big reason why I think SETI-type programs are doomed to fail. If it would be hard to tell the difference between encrypted data and random data, how much harder would it be to tell the difference between an alien encryption scheme and random noise?
Comcast is turning users' cable modems into public hotspots. So anyone could connect to a user's modem and use it for any purpose that one might connect to the Internet for. If said use is illegal, would the person who owned (or leased it from Comcast as the case may be) be liable as an accomplice? After all, if you provide open Internet access, you've got to expect that someone is going to do something illegal with it.
(I know that the story is in Australia and this is in the US, but this sounds like a valid comparison.)
Ah, but the ISPs and backbone providers are likely big companies with lawyers. So they can't possibly be accomplices and must be completely innocent angels. This individual with no team of lawyers on retainer is obviously guilty of helping out nasty criminals.
If all rights are absolute, how do you balance it when two people's rights conflict? Person A has a right to freedom of speech. So they put a soap box on the sidewalk in front of my house and start shouting religious diatribes 24/7 at my family for not following the "right" religion. Any time I try to leave my house, they block my driveway and shout at me until I go back inside - or until I convert to their religion. There's nothing in the Constitution that says they can't do this so should they be free to do this? What about my right to practice my own religion (or no religion) without being harassed? If I call the police on this person, am I (or the police) violating his freedom of speech by making him stop shouting at us 24/7?
To give another example, I have freedom of speech. Suppose I publish an editorial stating, as fact, that someone committed some serious crimes - crimes that would lead to their being fired from their current job (e.g. claiming a teacher was "touching" her students). Now suppose I had no proof of these allegations. Perhaps I made them up to get at the teacher for giving my kid a bad grade or maybe the teacher cut me off on the road one day. Whatever the reason, I publish these false allegations and the teacher is fired and her life is ruined. Since I have absolute, unrestricted freedom of speech, I can't be sued for libel, right?
Making everyone's freedoms unrestrained would just lead to chaos. There have to be some boundaries where the freedoms intersect. It's just a matter of where do you draw the line.
I believe he was referring to the previous poster's comment about the government restricting freedom of speech by saying you couldn't yell "fire" in a theater. The point being that all of our rights have limits. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I can say untrue things about you in a newspaper. That would be libel and would be against the law. You wouldn't be able to get out of a libel lawsuit by claiming "Freedom of Speech." Likewise, you couldn't declare "everyone should track down So-And-So and kill him" and then say "Free Speech!" to get out of it.
We have our freedoms but they aren't carte blanche, they have limits. Typically, the limits of your freedoms ("the right to swing your fist") are when they impede someone else's freedoms ('ends at my face").
Of course, the government is taking these reasonable restrictions and is building upon them until they become unreasonable. (e.g. "Free Speech Zones" to keep protests far from the people they are protesting against.) This doesn't mean that all restrictions are unreasonable, just that we've got to rein in the government's overreach until the restrictions are reasonable again.
The government even has a system where, for cases where time is of the essence and the threat is high, they can take the action first and get a retroactive warrant later from a court that will essentially rubber stamp anything. However, the government's law enforcement divisions are complaining that even this is too much work. They sound like my pre-teen when he's told to do his homework: "It's too hard! I don't want to do it! I'll do it later! I don't have to do it!!!"
There is a corollary to the first law of Superpowerdynamics. If you are a young man, but out of shape, you can get superpowers which will immediately give you a perfect physique even if your powers have nothing to do with muscle tone/burning fat. Unless your power is akin to The Blob in which case you're physique will grow ever larger until, by all rights, you should die of a heart attack from your heart trying to pump blood across your fat-laden body.
Making an amputee regrow a limb would be too obvious. Remember: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
Just because a DVD can hold 7GB doesn't mean that a DVD quality movie takes up 7GB. Usually room is left for extras, trailers for other movies from the same studio, etc. 1.6 - 1.8GB sounds about right for just the DVD movie (which is all Netflix streams). Blu-Ray movie files would obviously be bigger, but I doubt they'd take up the entire 50GB that a Blu-Ray disc can hold.
And in instances where under-served areas tried to create their own municipal broadband network, the ISPs that weren't serving them sued to stop them or got their lobbied state officials to pass laws declaring that illegal.
If a community isn't being served by an existing ISP, why is municipal broadband "eliminating competition"? If an area has an ISP but they are refusing to improve service, how is adding a municipal broadband option eliminating competition? Is the presence of the USPS eliminating competition from FedEx and UPS?
Because we have monopolies (or duopolies) in most regions of the US when it comes to ISPs. I have Time Warner Cable where I live. No FIOS or any other wired, high speed ISP. What incentive does Time Warner Cable have to improve their infrastructure when they can just raise my rates, give me the same service they've always given me, and make more money knowing I have no other choice?
Reverse that and you have the Dune shields. Block fast moving items but let slow moving ones through.
I was actually going to add another example where life is interesting - just not UFO/Bigfoot/Ghost interesting, but didn't. Yes, Himalayan Polar Bears qualifies as interesting. Just not the same kind of interesting as finding actual evidence of Bigfoot or of a ghost would be.
Including the bones? And what if one Bigfoot is wandering the woods, gets injured and dies alone? Do the other Bigfoot hunt his corpse down (knowing where it is due to psychic abilities or something) for the sole purpose of eating him? Even if Bigfoot did eat their own dead, there would still be traces.
Some of the people might be reasonable but just with bad evidence that they don't know is proven false. Many more, though, are thoroughly mentally committed to the proven-false phenomenon and will take any debunking of their theory as propaganda from The Conspiracy that wants to keep everyone in the dark about it. (See: The Moon Landing Deniers.)
Actually, I think reality is far more interesting than we think it is. It just isn't "interesting" in the area of Bigfoot, UFOs, and ghosts. Look to astronomy, though, and we're constantly finding weird planets/stars/etc that challenge our current understandings of the Universe.
I used to wear a watch all the time. I felt naked if I wasn't wearing one and would compulsively look at my wrist to see what time it was. Then I realized just what you said and I decided to try going without one. I haven't worn one in months except for one day where I knew I wouldn't have access to my smartphone and I was going to need to see what time it was. During that time, it felt just wrong to have this "thing" on my wrist. I don't miss my watch at all and if I needed to see something that a "smart watch" would show, I'll just look at my smart phone.