You might assume that people in the most oppressive regimes wouldn't use the Tor anonymity network because of severe restrictions on technology or communication. On the other hand, you might think that people in the most liberal settings would have no immediate need for Tor
People who live in oppressive regimes need anonymity. People who live in free countries know the value of their liberty and anonymity because they see the threats to it.
I'm afraid I don't see this as particularly shocking.
People who live in places like the UK where they've already said "you don't really get privacy or anonymity because we said so" have likely just accepted that as a fact, because they already don't have it.
People who have more freedom, and people who have less freedom, have a much more immediate sense of what they have, stand to lose, or don't have.
Especially since increasingly the governments of those "liberal" countries are trying to assert that, no, you don't get to have privacy and anonymity, because they'd really prefer if they had 100% access to your life.
If the national police forces of most Western countries had their way, we'd all give up these freedoms so that assholes could pretend they're protecting our freedoms.
Sorry, telling me I no longer have those freedoms isn't protecting them. It's the fucking opposite.
Look, we were already over this earlier this week, with the story that lied about them bricking the hubs
The product will 100% stop working as sold. Period.
They don't even dance around it, here is Revolv's FAQ.
"What happens to my Revolv service?
As of May 15, 2016, Revolv service will no longer be available. The Revolve app won't open and the hub won't work"
Sure, it's not technically bricking the device, but they're throwing all functionality away, telling you it won't work, and basically saying you could feel free to replicate the service by writing your own app, server, and re-engineering the protocol to recreate what you have to recreate the functionality.
But it's a completely dishonest thing to claim that article lied about bricking the device.
You will 100% end up with a non-functioning device, and none of the parts to make it work without a considerable amount of engineering going into it. Like, a massive bit of engineering and creation of infrastructure.
This is kind of like Boeing saying they'll no longer support your aircraft, but you're free to go and build your own aircraft maintenance program by reverse engineering the plane you have. It's pretty much bullshit.
The product has neither functionality nor value without the stuff which makes it work, so for all intents and purposes, they really have bricked the damned thing, because it will entirely cease to function as sold to you.
The hub will DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING after that date. That's not just remote functionality, that's all of the damned functionality. And that's what Revolv's own FAQ says.
How you can claim that making it 100% useless is any different isn't the same as bricking is beyond me.
Low quality products exist because of low quality consumers.
Bullshit, low quality products exist because of low quality laws.
What you're suggesting is the worst possible case of "caveat emptor" in which consumers are responsible for companies which make shitty products.
That will NEVER SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Consumers don't have perfect knowledge, they may not have any knowledge.
I'm not going to do engineering assessments of every product I buy to take responsibility for the manufacturer not making garbage.
You don't outlaw stupidity, you outlaw companies making garbage products which aren't suitable for the purpose they're actually sold for... you sure as fuck don't blame the consumer for low quality products.
This is exactly why all those claims about "letting the market fix it" are bullshit, the market doesn't fix this kind of problem, because the market intrinsically assumes some greed, lying asshole can cheat and leave it up to the consumers to discover that.
The market just assumes that a large amount of people with perfect information are making good decisions, which is a complete lie. And that's why the "free market" is utterly incapable of solving this kind of problem.
1) The manufacturers of products are lazy and incompetent, and carry no liability for that; 2) Organizations take short cuts from within, and don't realize just how vital security is; 3) Entities like the FBI want to undermine our security so they can be assured access to our stuff, while stupidly refusing to accept they're causing security to suck even more;
As long as these things keep happening, we basically live in a world where security is an afterthought, or too complicated, or something to be actively undermined to allow idiots to bypass it.
And all three of those combine to more or less ensure that having real security is almost impossible. Because no matter what the assholes who want to spy on us say, leaving it open for them also leaves it open for everyone else.
The people who claim to be protecting are as much fault for this as anybody else. Only they're too stupid to accept that the world doesn't recognize that only the good guys will bypass security when it's been built to have holes in it.
I see being an idiot who apologizes for corporations being assholes and pretending like losing all functionality is the same as still working is your normal operation.
You're the one who made the stupid claim the product still works perfectly even though the product will no longer work at all.
Do you have a different set of facts to support the product still works? Or is all you have being a snide asshole?
Way to over-react without having a brain there or even bothering to read past the headline....
Oh do kindly go fuck yourself, okay?
I read TFA, and I've read the archive.org thing.
TFA says:
What happens to my Revolv service?
As of May 15, 2016, Revolv service will no longer be available. The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.
The product most certainly WILL NOT WORK PERFECTLY. In fact, it won't work at all.
The Archive.org of the company website said:
Free lifetime service subscription
I define lifetime as "as long as I still have the product", not when the company arbitrarily decides the lifetime has ended and the product no longer still functions.
Oooh, the product works fine, but it relies on the service, and there's no service so therefore there's no product. But the product works just fine. Yeah, right.
Sorry, but you can cram that bit of semantic bullshit up your ass until your ears bleed, because what they've said is "the product you bought will no longer work because we said so". You can't claim the product still works the company straight up says it won't work.
This is exactly the problem with this IoT shit. You're dependent on them to not suck at security and to keep the service running. If they're incompetent you get hacked, and if they're bastards you no longer have a product.
This is yet another reason why I have no interest in any product which relies on the vendor to keep a service running to let me use the product, and why I will never buy any of this IoT shit. I'm not prepared to have some asshole say my fridge no longer works because they've decided to stop supporting it and I should buy a new one.
And I'm not willing to accept the intellectual bullshit that a product which no longer works "will still work perfectly", because that's a complete fucking lie. It works just fine, except it no longer does anything is some horseshit lie I'd expect from someone in marketing, and if that's you, well, then you really are full of shit.
Tony believes he has the right to reach into your home and pull the plug on your Nest products
So, we buy the product, and they just decide when they'll kill it off, and they'll do it by remotely destroying it?
Yeah, enjoy your IoT bullshit, where other people decide what happens to products you purchase, decide they can do it without recourse, and just do it remotely.
Fuck that. This is yet another reason why this whole IoT thing is a completely terrible idea. If I bought it, it's MINE, not yours. Unless you plan on compensating for it, or replacing it, YOU do not get to destroy it.
And if they can reach in and destroy it, they're a hack or two away from someone else being able to do it just for the hell of it.
"Your friendly reminder that without open standards, you're not "buying" smarthome hardware, you're renting it."
Nope, I'm neither buying it nor renting it... because I'm not interested, because I don't trust the competence of the manufacturer, and now because you simply can't trust them to not be assholes.
Sorry, but unilaterally bricking a piece of consumer hardware is a dick move, and it basically says you don't give a crap about your customers. I sincerely hope this makes people realize they shouldn't give a crap about Nest.
Destroying someone else's property should be illegal. Oh, wait, without a bullshit EULA, it would be.
It re-enfrobulates the flux of the, er, doo-hicky causing the doo-dad to re-distrube the, umm, polarity of the charge of the base pairs leading to a, err, dispersion of the charge across an, um, er, tensor field exhibiting Jacobian properties and cancelling out the, um, potentiation of the matrix. Yeah, that's is, potentiation of the matrix.
The technology wasn't ready for what Newton promised at that time.
Which is very often the problem when people make these claims about being The Next Big Thing.
Often the technology IS just a toy, and is a proof of concept of something which might be useful in a bunch of years.
So, yeah, you have a seed of a kernel of a nugget of an idea which points to some Really Cool Things down the road. But your cobbled together demo which doesn't, at present, actually DO anything is a long way from changing the world, and you'll excuse us if we roll our eyes and think that you're getting a little ahead of yourself.
I mean, the flying car has been coming Real Soon Now since, what, the mid 60s? Nuclear fusion as cheap energy? Routine trips to space for all of us?
He, we want the cool new future. We're just seldom convinced when the guy in marketing tells us that he has it; because we pretty much know he's full of shit, and he will claim to have The Next Big Thing pretty much for everything he ever tries to tell us about.
Well, strangely the author of TFA actually says "It can be said that being labeled a toy is necessary, but not sufficient, to become the next big thing."
I mean, that's a completely unsubstantiated and meaningless claim.
It's like the entire article is intended to make the bullshit argument that being labelled as a toy is a strong indicator you're onto something.
Being labelled a toy is neither necessary nor sufficient to become the next big thing. The entire article is drivel.
Some things which have been game changers have been dismissed as toys. Just because your shit was dismissed as being a toy doesn't make it a game changer either.
All that shit Microsoft said was a game changer but nobody gave a damn about? Not game changers.
The only thing which differentiates the two is reality of what has actually happened. But the history of people saying "this will revolutionize the world", or "in 5 years we'll all be doing X" -- well, the pundits seem to have a far worse track record of telling us what will happen than what won't.
How many of us have spent decades seeing the stuff the pundits and futurists said would change our lives, only to have them fizzle out into nothing?
If we stamped 100% of all ideas as "toy" or "garbage", I bet we'd be right 80% of the time. People suck at predicting the future.
As it turns out, the extension was sold off to an unnamed buyer who started adding malicious code that would redirect the user's traffic through a proxy, showing ads and collecting analytics on the user's traffic habits.
That really sucks, because basically it means malicious assholes can take control of these things.
But, I think it points to a broader problem: EULAs.
The notion that a product can be sold, have the EULA changed giving the new company the ability to ignore any limitations they don't like, and then have it be "too bad, it's in the license".
There need to be real privacy laws, with real penalties, and real restrictions about what you can do with it once you've collected it.
Shit like this should be illegal. And if people won't make it illegal (because lawmakers are on the payroll of large corporations who want this), then some of the black hats should be looking to burn you to the ground for being such douchebags.
So they want to bypass any proof of wrong-doing, any proper due process, and just be able to assert you infringed and you need to pay.
Sorry, but that is complete bullshit.
Rightscorp isn't in a legal position to impose "fines".
This is a shakedown racket, pure and simple, and Rightscorp wants the right to have ISPs act as the collection muscle with absolutely ZERO standard of proof.
I'm sorry, but we'd trust the assholes at Rightscorp to make these assertions without backing them up with proof, why, exactly?
This isn't a fine, it's fucking protection money which comes with it an implicit admission of guilt. No way in hell there is any legal basis for that.
Doing anything to legitimize these lying bastards is a terrible idea.
Wow vigilante hacking with no legal burden of proof and so they can run a shakedown racket?
Sorry, this is an asshole copyright troll, who has consistently demonstrated they lie about owning copyrights, who make illegal shakedown requests, and expect to do this with zero evidentiary standard, and have ISPs put in the infrastructure to support it.
Sorry, assholes. You have no legal basis to do this, and if you do it's hard to see how this won't get you some actual criminal charges. They want to make claims for which there is no basis in law, and for which they do not have a legal right to make.
Then again, putting these clowns in jail under a RICO conviction would be awesome.
These guys can't even convince judges they're not a scam, because they are a scam. The idiots who run Rightscorp are nothing more than crooks and thieves abusing the legal process to send shakedown notices about infringements they aren't in a legal position to be pursuing.
They're lying bastards, and any ISP which lets them tie into anything is likely going to open themselves to some major legal action.
This is just delusional bullshit PR by a company who greatly overstates their legal position here.
This mostly sounds like BB trying like hell to stay relevant.
Which is pretty much what they've been trying to do since Apple and Android phones came onto the market.
They may have created the smart phone, but they've subsequently had their market share taken away by other companies with products consumers want more.
I'm just not convinced they're succeeding at staying relevant. The only people I know who use BB stuff have been using it so long they're saturated with the koolaid.
Once they rolled over and started caving on security to governments around the world, their claims about bring more secure can't be trusted.
I'm just not seeing them recovering enough to matter much.
What they fail to tell you is they have no intention of letting you use those speeds for anything more than a trivial amount of data.
The ad campaign is always "look at all the super awesome stuff you'll be able to to", and the fine print basically says "well, you can only do a little of that before we change our minds and restrict it".
They say "wow, you can totally stream 4K movies" or whatever the lie is this week, followed by "well, streaming on 4K movie will go over your cap in the first 12 minutes and then you'll need to spend hundreds of extra dollars".
They do it with broadband. They do it with mobile.
Your average telco marketing is lying bullshit which makes it look like they're selling you far more than they really are. Followed by the other shoe dropping and them saying "OK, not really, that's just marketing, we're not actually giving you that".
Which is why every time they roll out new networking technology and tell us a) how awesome it is, and b) that we should splash out on a new phone to use it... that I have no choice but to think "yeah, sure, in theory, but you'll never upgrade your system to allow anything like the demo".
Every time they tell us how awesome the network is, how fast it will be, and all of the cool things we'll be able to do with it, they then turn around and say "but you can't really use it because if everybody did that the network would collapse".
This stuff is pure marketing lies. They're never going to give you even a fraction of what the marketing campaign about how awesome it is tells you you're going to get.
If they showed you what you'd really be getting, they'd be advertising a Ferrari, and giving you a Ford Pinto. It's all lies. I just have no idea how such blatantly false advertising is even legal.
The bad news is provisions in the USA FREEDOM Act actually allow the US government to tap digital encrypted communications
Which should be limited to empowering, but not to include forcing companies to make the technology or make technology which even they can't crack.
The problem is that what they say will only be used for national security today, will in a short time be used for every form of law enforcement some asshole deems "legitimate"... because that's exactly what they've been doing already. This week's "only in case of national emergency" is next week's "well, or drug charges, or tax evasion, or copyright infringement".
Giving this to them now pretty much guarantees they'll demand it all of the time.
And without someone putting very hard limits on this, you will have a situation in which the government can demand any and all records just because they feel they need it.
At that point, the US will have truly become a country with its own Stasi, and you can give up any pretense of living in a free society... and don't give us that bullshit that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
Oh, and if the US keeps on this path, every US tech company might suddenly find the rest of the world has to start pulling back and saying "sorry, we can't use your shit because you're the enemy of freedom and liberty and we can't trust your asshole government".
We wouldn't trust Iraq, Russia, or North Korea with this stuff. Don't act like we should trust the US.
Mark my words, this will become something police forces just expect to demand and get without oversight. Because that's what they've done with every other form of information which was supposed to be highly restricted due to how it breaks civil liberties and bypasses the law.
Slashdot Mirror
People who live in oppressive regimes need anonymity. People who live in free countries know the value of their liberty and anonymity because they see the threats to it.
I'm afraid I don't see this as particularly shocking.
People who live in places like the UK where they've already said "you don't really get privacy or anonymity because we said so" have likely just accepted that as a fact, because they already don't have it.
People who have more freedom, and people who have less freedom, have a much more immediate sense of what they have, stand to lose, or don't have.
Especially since increasingly the governments of those "liberal" countries are trying to assert that, no, you don't get to have privacy and anonymity, because they'd really prefer if they had 100% access to your life.
If the national police forces of most Western countries had their way, we'd all give up these freedoms so that assholes could pretend they're protecting our freedoms.
Sorry, telling me I no longer have those freedoms isn't protecting them. It's the fucking opposite.
The product will 100% stop working as sold. Period.
Sure, it's not technically bricking the device, but they're throwing all functionality away, telling you it won't work, and basically saying you could feel free to replicate the service by writing your own app, server, and re-engineering the protocol to recreate what you have to recreate the functionality.
But it's a completely dishonest thing to claim that article lied about bricking the device.
You will 100% end up with a non-functioning device, and none of the parts to make it work without a considerable amount of engineering going into it. Like, a massive bit of engineering and creation of infrastructure.
This is kind of like Boeing saying they'll no longer support your aircraft, but you're free to go and build your own aircraft maintenance program by reverse engineering the plane you have. It's pretty much bullshit.
The product has neither functionality nor value without the stuff which makes it work, so for all intents and purposes, they really have bricked the damned thing, because it will entirely cease to function as sold to you.
The hub will DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING after that date. That's not just remote functionality, that's all of the damned functionality. And that's what Revolv's own FAQ says.
How you can claim that making it 100% useless is any different isn't the same as bricking is beyond me.
Bullshit, low quality products exist because of low quality laws.
What you're suggesting is the worst possible case of "caveat emptor" in which consumers are responsible for companies which make shitty products.
That will NEVER SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Consumers don't have perfect knowledge, they may not have any knowledge.
I'm not going to do engineering assessments of every product I buy to take responsibility for the manufacturer not making garbage.
You don't outlaw stupidity, you outlaw companies making garbage products which aren't suitable for the purpose they're actually sold for ... you sure as fuck don't blame the consumer for low quality products.
This is exactly why all those claims about "letting the market fix it" are bullshit, the market doesn't fix this kind of problem, because the market intrinsically assumes some greed, lying asshole can cheat and leave it up to the consumers to discover that.
The market just assumes that a large amount of people with perfect information are making good decisions, which is a complete lie. And that's why the "free market" is utterly incapable of solving this kind of problem.
From the sounds of TFS, the "size of the largest flaw" is the sheer volume of flaws; this router sounds like it's pretty much garbage.
Semantics about which aspect of it is shittiest seems pointless when the whole thing is a steaming pile of a turd of bad security.
Sex dolls, Real Dolls, and various other things tell me people are willing believe that far more than you realize.
Close, Trump is a pig's heart in a baboon's ass. ;-)
LOL, why am I suddenly picturing millions of horny guys getting blown off by a porn AI which has developed attitude?
Except for the people into that whole humiliation thing, I just don't see that being a big selling point. :-P
I think sentient porn is the last thing we want.
God these self-aggrandizing titles are annoying.
He's not the "Cyber Commander", he's in charge of an entity whose purview is things related to the interwebs.
But let's stop treating him like he's the fucking Field Marshall of the internet.
We're getting this stuff from three directions:
1) The manufacturers of products are lazy and incompetent, and carry no liability for that;
2) Organizations take short cuts from within, and don't realize just how vital security is;
3) Entities like the FBI want to undermine our security so they can be assured access to our stuff, while stupidly refusing to accept they're causing security to suck even more;
As long as these things keep happening, we basically live in a world where security is an afterthought, or too complicated, or something to be actively undermined to allow idiots to bypass it.
And all three of those combine to more or less ensure that having real security is almost impossible. Because no matter what the assholes who want to spy on us say, leaving it open for them also leaves it open for everyone else.
The people who claim to be protecting are as much fault for this as anybody else. Only they're too stupid to accept that the world doesn't recognize that only the good guys will bypass security when it's been built to have holes in it.
This is why we can't have nice things.
You don't even need a different source.
The linked article says nothing at all about humans, so why does the headline?
I see being an idiot who apologizes for corporations being assholes and pretending like losing all functionality is the same as still working is your normal operation.
You're the one who made the stupid claim the product still works perfectly even though the product will no longer work at all.
Do you have a different set of facts to support the product still works? Or is all you have being a snide asshole?
Oh do kindly go fuck yourself, okay?
I read TFA, and I've read the archive.org thing.
TFA says:
The product most certainly WILL NOT WORK PERFECTLY. In fact, it won't work at all.
The Archive.org of the company website said:
I define lifetime as "as long as I still have the product", not when the company arbitrarily decides the lifetime has ended and the product no longer still functions.
Oooh, the product works fine, but it relies on the service, and there's no service so therefore there's no product. But the product works just fine. Yeah, right.
Sorry, but you can cram that bit of semantic bullshit up your ass until your ears bleed, because what they've said is "the product you bought will no longer work because we said so". You can't claim the product still works the company straight up says it won't work.
This is exactly the problem with this IoT shit. You're dependent on them to not suck at security and to keep the service running. If they're incompetent you get hacked, and if they're bastards you no longer have a product.
This is yet another reason why I have no interest in any product which relies on the vendor to keep a service running to let me use the product, and why I will never buy any of this IoT shit. I'm not prepared to have some asshole say my fridge no longer works because they've decided to stop supporting it and I should buy a new one.
And I'm not willing to accept the intellectual bullshit that a product which no longer works "will still work perfectly", because that's a complete fucking lie. It works just fine, except it no longer does anything is some horseshit lie I'd expect from someone in marketing, and if that's you, well, then you really are full of shit.
So, we buy the product, and they just decide when they'll kill it off, and they'll do it by remotely destroying it?
Yeah, enjoy your IoT bullshit, where other people decide what happens to products you purchase, decide they can do it without recourse, and just do it remotely.
Fuck that. This is yet another reason why this whole IoT thing is a completely terrible idea. If I bought it, it's MINE, not yours. Unless you plan on compensating for it, or replacing it, YOU do not get to destroy it.
And if they can reach in and destroy it, they're a hack or two away from someone else being able to do it just for the hell of it.
Nope, I'm neither buying it nor renting it ... because I'm not interested, because I don't trust the competence of the manufacturer, and now because you simply can't trust them to not be assholes.
Sorry, but unilaterally bricking a piece of consumer hardware is a dick move, and it basically says you don't give a crap about your customers. I sincerely hope this makes people realize they shouldn't give a crap about Nest.
Destroying someone else's property should be illegal. Oh, wait, without a bullshit EULA, it would be.
It re-enfrobulates the flux of the, er, doo-hicky causing the doo-dad to re-distrube the, umm, polarity of the charge of the base pairs leading to a, err, dispersion of the charge across an, um, er, tensor field exhibiting Jacobian properties and cancelling out the, um, potentiation of the matrix. Yeah, that's is, potentiation of the matrix.
It's quite simple, really. ;-)
Hmmm ... I'm not that old, but I'm pretty fucking sure both sound and color pre-dated the use of computer screens. ;-)
Which is very often the problem when people make these claims about being The Next Big Thing.
Often the technology IS just a toy, and is a proof of concept of something which might be useful in a bunch of years.
So, yeah, you have a seed of a kernel of a nugget of an idea which points to some Really Cool Things down the road. But your cobbled together demo which doesn't, at present, actually DO anything is a long way from changing the world, and you'll excuse us if we roll our eyes and think that you're getting a little ahead of yourself.
I mean, the flying car has been coming Real Soon Now since, what, the mid 60s? Nuclear fusion as cheap energy? Routine trips to space for all of us?
He, we want the cool new future. We're just seldom convinced when the guy in marketing tells us that he has it; because we pretty much know he's full of shit, and he will claim to have The Next Big Thing pretty much for everything he ever tries to tell us about.
By about the 10th time, you stop listening.
Well, strangely the author of TFA actually says "It can be said that being labeled a toy is necessary, but not sufficient, to become the next big thing."
I mean, that's a completely unsubstantiated and meaningless claim.
It's like the entire article is intended to make the bullshit argument that being labelled as a toy is a strong indicator you're onto something.
Being labelled a toy is neither necessary nor sufficient to become the next big thing. The entire article is drivel.
Some things which have been game changers have been dismissed as toys. Just because your shit was dismissed as being a toy doesn't make it a game changer either.
All that shit Microsoft said was a game changer but nobody gave a damn about? Not game changers.
The only thing which differentiates the two is reality of what has actually happened. But the history of people saying "this will revolutionize the world", or "in 5 years we'll all be doing X" -- well, the pundits seem to have a far worse track record of telling us what will happen than what won't.
How many of us have spent decades seeing the stuff the pundits and futurists said would change our lives, only to have them fizzle out into nothing?
If we stamped 100% of all ideas as "toy" or "garbage", I bet we'd be right 80% of the time. People suck at predicting the future.
That really sucks, because basically it means malicious assholes can take control of these things.
But, I think it points to a broader problem: EULAs.
The notion that a product can be sold, have the EULA changed giving the new company the ability to ignore any limitations they don't like, and then have it be "too bad, it's in the license".
There need to be real privacy laws, with real penalties, and real restrictions about what you can do with it once you've collected it.
Shit like this should be illegal. And if people won't make it illegal (because lawmakers are on the payroll of large corporations who want this), then some of the black hats should be looking to burn you to the ground for being such douchebags.
So they want to bypass any proof of wrong-doing, any proper due process, and just be able to assert you infringed and you need to pay.
Sorry, but that is complete bullshit.
Rightscorp isn't in a legal position to impose "fines".
This is a shakedown racket, pure and simple, and Rightscorp wants the right to have ISPs act as the collection muscle with absolutely ZERO standard of proof.
I'm sorry, but we'd trust the assholes at Rightscorp to make these assertions without backing them up with proof, why, exactly?
This isn't a fine, it's fucking protection money which comes with it an implicit admission of guilt. No way in hell there is any legal basis for that.
Doing anything to legitimize these lying bastards is a terrible idea.
Wow vigilante hacking with no legal burden of proof and so they can run a shakedown racket?
Sorry, this is an asshole copyright troll, who has consistently demonstrated they lie about owning copyrights, who make illegal shakedown requests, and expect to do this with zero evidentiary standard, and have ISPs put in the infrastructure to support it.
Sorry, assholes. You have no legal basis to do this, and if you do it's hard to see how this won't get you some actual criminal charges. They want to make claims for which there is no basis in law, and for which they do not have a legal right to make.
Then again, putting these clowns in jail under a RICO conviction would be awesome.
These guys can't even convince judges they're not a scam, because they are a scam. The idiots who run Rightscorp are nothing more than crooks and thieves abusing the legal process to send shakedown notices about infringements they aren't in a legal position to be pursuing.
They're lying bastards, and any ISP which lets them tie into anything is likely going to open themselves to some major legal action.
This is just delusional bullshit PR by a company who greatly overstates their legal position here.
Which is pretty much what they've been trying to do since Apple and Android phones came onto the market.
They may have created the smart phone, but they've subsequently had their market share taken away by other companies with products consumers want more.
I'm just not convinced they're succeeding at staying relevant. The only people I know who use BB stuff have been using it so long they're saturated with the koolaid.
Once they rolled over and started caving on security to governments around the world, their claims about bring more secure can't be trusted.
I'm just not seeing them recovering enough to matter much.
Well, except it's not FUD. It's fact.
What they fail to tell you is they have no intention of letting you use those speeds for anything more than a trivial amount of data.
The ad campaign is always "look at all the super awesome stuff you'll be able to to", and the fine print basically says "well, you can only do a little of that before we change our minds and restrict it".
They say "wow, you can totally stream 4K movies" or whatever the lie is this week, followed by "well, streaming on 4K movie will go over your cap in the first 12 minutes and then you'll need to spend hundreds of extra dollars".
They do it with broadband. They do it with mobile.
Your average telco marketing is lying bullshit which makes it look like they're selling you far more than they really are. Followed by the other shoe dropping and them saying "OK, not really, that's just marketing, we're not actually giving you that".
Which is why every time they roll out new networking technology and tell us a) how awesome it is, and b) that we should splash out on a new phone to use it ... that I have no choice but to think "yeah, sure, in theory, but you'll never upgrade your system to allow anything like the demo".
Every time they tell us how awesome the network is, how fast it will be, and all of the cool things we'll be able to do with it, they then turn around and say "but you can't really use it because if everybody did that the network would collapse".
This stuff is pure marketing lies. They're never going to give you even a fraction of what the marketing campaign about how awesome it is tells you you're going to get.
If they showed you what you'd really be getting, they'd be advertising a Ferrari, and giving you a Ford Pinto. It's all lies. I just have no idea how such blatantly false advertising is even legal.
Which should be limited to empowering, but not to include forcing companies to make the technology or make technology which even they can't crack.
The problem is that what they say will only be used for national security today, will in a short time be used for every form of law enforcement some asshole deems "legitimate" ... because that's exactly what they've been doing already. This week's "only in case of national emergency" is next week's "well, or drug charges, or tax evasion, or copyright infringement".
Giving this to them now pretty much guarantees they'll demand it all of the time.
And without someone putting very hard limits on this, you will have a situation in which the government can demand any and all records just because they feel they need it.
At that point, the US will have truly become a country with its own Stasi, and you can give up any pretense of living in a free society ... and don't give us that bullshit that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
Oh, and if the US keeps on this path, every US tech company might suddenly find the rest of the world has to start pulling back and saying "sorry, we can't use your shit because you're the enemy of freedom and liberty and we can't trust your asshole government".
We wouldn't trust Iraq, Russia, or North Korea with this stuff. Don't act like we should trust the US.
Mark my words, this will become something police forces just expect to demand and get without oversight. Because that's what they've done with every other form of information which was supposed to be highly restricted due to how it breaks civil liberties and bypasses the law.
This will be no different.