A few years back (2009?) Yahoo rebuilt their site from scratch including their email. Several users complained about the buggy code and some even had emails that suddenly came up missing. One of their designers even was quoted as saying that people need to be kicked in the groin to appreciate good design. Many complained about features that were eliminated in the new design and that it looked too much like google and was full of bugs. Like others I got tired of the Yahoo's buggy interfaces and left Yahoo a few of years ago. From what I've heard from the few Yahoo users who didn't leave yahoo there are still problems and now they cannot get hold of anyone at Yahoo to report a bug or even unlock their account. It sounds like Yahoo doesn't listen to their customers and I think it isn't wise to drop QA.
You swerve to avoid a deer, skid off the road and nearly go into a ditch. You calmly back your car out and pull back onto the road thankful you avoided the deer and didn't go into the ditch. As you are pulling off a voice asks:
"Sir, are you okay?"
You say:
"Yes, I'm okay."
the voice then says: "What happened?"
you explain: "I swerved to avoid a deer and nearly ended up in a ditch?"
The voice asks: "Are you really sure this is what happened?"
You ask: "Why?"
the voice explains: "You sound like you are drunk and I don't believe your story that you swerved to avoid a deer. I'm notifying the police."
You plead: "I'm not making this up, this really happened and I haven't been drinking. Why do you think I sound drunk?"
The voice doesn't answer. A few minutes later a police car pulls behind you and turns on it's lights and you pull over. The officer asks for your license and registration then says: "How much have you been drinking tonight?"
You tell the cop that you haven't been drinking and the officer asks you to explain your story of the deer. The officer asks if you haven't been drinking then why did the dispatcher think you have been drinking. You tell the cop you have no idea. Since nobody else is there to confirm that there was indeed a deer in the road and the officer didn't observe any deer in the area he decides that your story is fabricated and notices an empty beer can in your car and explains to you that in your state there is an open container law that says if there is an open container in your vehicle he can automatically arrest you for DUI. You didn't drink this beer prior to driving and forgot to get rid of the can as you were working on your car a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to a deer being in the road, deciding to have auto-alert in the event you crash, a 911 dispatcher and police officer not believing your story, and your own stupidity of forgetting to remove a beer can from your car, you are now arrested for DUI even though you didn't drink.
Just wait until the devices report your location and after you go to a bar with friends and the system contacts the dispatch center that you were at a bar and may be drunk. The operator asks "How much have you had to drink?" you tell the operator that you're a designated driver and the person at the dispatch center decides you are a liar and calls your local police. You get pulled over and because this person claims he/she believes you are intoxicated, the officer uses the statement from the operator as evidence that you have been drinking and you are arrested for suspicion of drunk driving. Another scenario, you are driving along and avoid hitting a deer and the sensors detect the changes in motion. The dispatcher calls you to ask what happened and you tell the dispatcher that you just avoided a deer. The dispatcher tells you that this will not trigger the sensors and calls your local police. You then have to explain to a police officer that you didn't crash into a deer or another car and didn't leave the scene of an accident. This is an assumption the dispatcher made after your car called to report a possible accident. Such a device would be handy to investigate crimes with the location information. Suppose there was a hit and run accident and the police pulled up GPS information and found your car was in this particular area. You are interviewed by police and they decide since your car was the only car in this area that you are the prime suspect and because you voluntarily gave out GPS information, you are the one who gets arrested for leaving the scene of the accident because you have unexplained damage to your vehicle such as you were hit in a parking a month ago but since the damage was minor you didn't file a police report and you just happened to be in the area where this happened. The person who did leave the scene gets away since the police are convinced you are their hit and run suspect.
So what happens if a sensor is bad and incorrectly detects an accident and calls the dispatch center and the person at the dispatch center decides that the driver is lying to them and calls the police. The police arrive and realize after wasting their time to respond that indeed the driver was right in telling the person on the other end that there wasn't an accident and there was just a bad sensor? Will the person who responded and asked the driver what happened and assumed the driver was lying when they said there wasn't an accident get in trouble for making a false police report? Will car owners be fined for false alarms like some cities do for home burglary systems that send out false alarms that the police respond to?
This will eventually result in censoring any thought that may not be popular. How would a terrorist be identified and what is stopping politicians from changing the definition to meet their own personal agenda? It will eventually lead to anyone criticizing politicians, the US Government, or even corporations to be censored from sharing their thoughts. It's hard to define who is a terrorist. For example some people see people who attack planned parenthood clinics as heroes while others see them as domestic terrorists. What would be considered a hateful thought? Some believe that people who criticize the President or other politicians are committing hate speech. Some see people who criticize policies of the US Government as committing hate speech. This filter will be similar to filtering "thought crime" in the book 1984. Such a filter will render the First Amendment null and void. In addition, terrorist groups will simply use other means to recruit members off of the Internet.
Isn't she a member of the house intelligence committee and a strong supporter of the Patriot Act? We need to protect the children? Right! If you're concerned who your children are talking to install a key logger, restrict their access, keep computers and gaming consoles they use in the front room, and watch their activity. I'm sure this is an attempt to add back door to encryption and it will be expanded to not just protect children just like all other federal regulations. With a warrant, law enforcement could probably install spyware on the suspects computer to capture information before it is encrypted or determine the password they are using to encrypt their communications. Back doors only weaken encryption and it is bad enough that companies don't encrypt information and it ends up stolen by hackers or foreign governments. With a back door, these same hackers will be able to steal information even if it is encrypted. In addition, law enforcement will abuse such a back door key. To illustrate how a back door breaks encryption, look at those "TSA approved" locks that are easy to unlock and are useless since not only can the TSA open them, others have found out how to open them too. In my case I was able to use another key to open a "TSA approved" lock by just jiggling the key until it opened the lock. I didn't realize I was using the wrong key and wondered why I initially had troubles opening locks. People have created master keys with 3-D printers to open any TSA approved lock. Will this happen to all encryption? Most likely it will.
How is it possible that the CIA and other intelligence agencies have been watching ISIS closely and were unable to capture non-encrypted communications from these terrorists? Since they didn't use encryption or other "evil" technology to hide what they were doing this should have been easy for the CIA and others to intercept communications and connect the dots that they are planning an attack in Paris. This is just another failure by the US intelligence community who could have connected the dots and warned French officials. In the Boston Marathon bombings they received warnings from Russian intelligence on one of the brothers and this brother even called his mom back home talking about attacking the USA but this didn't raise a single eyebrow in the US intelligence community. Snowden's revelations and encryption had nothing to do with this attack. This is an attempt by the US to use this tragedy to gain an upper hand in the war on encryption and pass legislation that they otherwise would be unable to do. Just like the Patriot Act and many other acts were passed right after the 9/11 attacks that again US intelligence failed to connect the dots even though intelligence sources warned that Al Qaeda planned some attack involving hijacked airliners and flight instructors expressed concern over students from the middle east taking flight lessons. If they connected the dots they could have stopped 9/11 and the Boston Marathon Bombings as well.
I think a lot of companies have a clause in their terms of service saying that these terms can change at any time which should be illegal in my opinion. In addition a lot of the terms of service don't specifically say that your real name won't remain anonymous meaning they can decide to post your real name at any time. Even if it specifically stated that names won't be published, someone like Facebook can come along and either buy their company or take over the comment board and decide that for "civil" dialog, they will publish real names. This only destroys comment boards since people lose trust in the newspaper and people are unwilling to post under their real name even if the comment isn't "uncivil" since they don't want a friend, prospective employer, or company to see their post. For example, someone could criticize a company and be concerned the company will try to sue them for making a negative comment about their company in a news story. Others will simply use fake names since it doesn't take much to create a fake email account. People who comment should have a reasonable expectation of privacy and shouldn't have to contact the newspaper to have their comments removed if they don't want their names to appear in past comments.
This is another example of how you data that you wish to remain anonymous can easily change. For example a company could initially say that they will not reveal anything about your name and require you to enter a phone number, email address, and other information in order to register and say that they will not share this information and even indicate this in their terms of service. They could change their Terms of Service at any time or another company can come along such as Facebook and buy out this company and decide that your real name should be on your comments and sell your name and other information to data brokers and telemarketers to make money.
Looks like even more yahoo users will become former yahoo users in another exodus that may be as bad as the first mass exodus of users when they changed their email interface and didn't listen to user complaints. Who will Marissa Mayers blame this time? As Mr. Bonnefarte (or whatever his name is) said when they changed their email interface and customers complained "Some people need to be kicked in the groin to appreciate good software design". Could Mr. Bonnefarte be next to be fired or forced to resign? Are they going to help users who get infected with malware from a flash advertisement? A lot of users disable flash and ads not only for the ads being annoying but also because of security concerns. In addition, animated ads steal precious bandwidth that some people cannot spare since they are stuck with a 1.5 Mpbs internet connection or even a dial-up connection.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years back (2009?) Yahoo rebuilt their site from scratch including their email. Several users complained about the buggy code and some even had emails that suddenly came up missing. One of their designers even was quoted as saying that people need to be kicked in the groin to appreciate good design. Many complained about features that were eliminated in the new design and that it looked too much like google and was full of bugs. Like others I got tired of the Yahoo's buggy interfaces and left Yahoo a few of years ago. From what I've heard from the few Yahoo users who didn't leave yahoo there are still problems and now they cannot get hold of anyone at Yahoo to report a bug or even unlock their account. It sounds like Yahoo doesn't listen to their customers and I think it isn't wise to drop QA.
You swerve to avoid a deer, skid off the road and nearly go into a ditch. You calmly back your car out and pull back onto the road thankful you avoided the deer and didn't go into the ditch. As you are pulling off a voice asks: "Sir, are you okay?" You say: "Yes, I'm okay." the voice then says: "What happened?" you explain: "I swerved to avoid a deer and nearly ended up in a ditch?" The voice asks: "Are you really sure this is what happened?" You ask: "Why?" the voice explains: "You sound like you are drunk and I don't believe your story that you swerved to avoid a deer. I'm notifying the police." You plead: "I'm not making this up, this really happened and I haven't been drinking. Why do you think I sound drunk?" The voice doesn't answer. A few minutes later a police car pulls behind you and turns on it's lights and you pull over. The officer asks for your license and registration then says: "How much have you been drinking tonight?" You tell the cop that you haven't been drinking and the officer asks you to explain your story of the deer. The officer asks if you haven't been drinking then why did the dispatcher think you have been drinking. You tell the cop you have no idea. Since nobody else is there to confirm that there was indeed a deer in the road and the officer didn't observe any deer in the area he decides that your story is fabricated and notices an empty beer can in your car and explains to you that in your state there is an open container law that says if there is an open container in your vehicle he can automatically arrest you for DUI. You didn't drink this beer prior to driving and forgot to get rid of the can as you were working on your car a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to a deer being in the road, deciding to have auto-alert in the event you crash, a 911 dispatcher and police officer not believing your story, and your own stupidity of forgetting to remove a beer can from your car, you are now arrested for DUI even though you didn't drink.
Just wait until the devices report your location and after you go to a bar with friends and the system contacts the dispatch center that you were at a bar and may be drunk. The operator asks "How much have you had to drink?" you tell the operator that you're a designated driver and the person at the dispatch center decides you are a liar and calls your local police. You get pulled over and because this person claims he/she believes you are intoxicated, the officer uses the statement from the operator as evidence that you have been drinking and you are arrested for suspicion of drunk driving. Another scenario, you are driving along and avoid hitting a deer and the sensors detect the changes in motion. The dispatcher calls you to ask what happened and you tell the dispatcher that you just avoided a deer. The dispatcher tells you that this will not trigger the sensors and calls your local police. You then have to explain to a police officer that you didn't crash into a deer or another car and didn't leave the scene of an accident. This is an assumption the dispatcher made after your car called to report a possible accident. Such a device would be handy to investigate crimes with the location information. Suppose there was a hit and run accident and the police pulled up GPS information and found your car was in this particular area. You are interviewed by police and they decide since your car was the only car in this area that you are the prime suspect and because you voluntarily gave out GPS information, you are the one who gets arrested for leaving the scene of the accident because you have unexplained damage to your vehicle such as you were hit in a parking a month ago but since the damage was minor you didn't file a police report and you just happened to be in the area where this happened. The person who did leave the scene gets away since the police are convinced you are their hit and run suspect.
So what happens if a sensor is bad and incorrectly detects an accident and calls the dispatch center and the person at the dispatch center decides that the driver is lying to them and calls the police. The police arrive and realize after wasting their time to respond that indeed the driver was right in telling the person on the other end that there wasn't an accident and there was just a bad sensor? Will the person who responded and asked the driver what happened and assumed the driver was lying when they said there wasn't an accident get in trouble for making a false police report? Will car owners be fined for false alarms like some cities do for home burglary systems that send out false alarms that the police respond to?
This will eventually result in censoring any thought that may not be popular. How would a terrorist be identified and what is stopping politicians from changing the definition to meet their own personal agenda? It will eventually lead to anyone criticizing politicians, the US Government, or even corporations to be censored from sharing their thoughts. It's hard to define who is a terrorist. For example some people see people who attack planned parenthood clinics as heroes while others see them as domestic terrorists. What would be considered a hateful thought? Some believe that people who criticize the President or other politicians are committing hate speech. Some see people who criticize policies of the US Government as committing hate speech. This filter will be similar to filtering "thought crime" in the book 1984. Such a filter will render the First Amendment null and void. In addition, terrorist groups will simply use other means to recruit members off of the Internet.
Let me add that criminals (including terrorist groups) will simply develop their own encryption to avoid the back door keys.
Isn't she a member of the house intelligence committee and a strong supporter of the Patriot Act? We need to protect the children? Right! If you're concerned who your children are talking to install a key logger, restrict their access, keep computers and gaming consoles they use in the front room, and watch their activity. I'm sure this is an attempt to add back door to encryption and it will be expanded to not just protect children just like all other federal regulations. With a warrant, law enforcement could probably install spyware on the suspects computer to capture information before it is encrypted or determine the password they are using to encrypt their communications. Back doors only weaken encryption and it is bad enough that companies don't encrypt information and it ends up stolen by hackers or foreign governments. With a back door, these same hackers will be able to steal information even if it is encrypted. In addition, law enforcement will abuse such a back door key. To illustrate how a back door breaks encryption, look at those "TSA approved" locks that are easy to unlock and are useless since not only can the TSA open them, others have found out how to open them too. In my case I was able to use another key to open a "TSA approved" lock by just jiggling the key until it opened the lock. I didn't realize I was using the wrong key and wondered why I initially had troubles opening locks. People have created master keys with 3-D printers to open any TSA approved lock. Will this happen to all encryption? Most likely it will.
How is it possible that the CIA and other intelligence agencies have been watching ISIS closely and were unable to capture non-encrypted communications from these terrorists? Since they didn't use encryption or other "evil" technology to hide what they were doing this should have been easy for the CIA and others to intercept communications and connect the dots that they are planning an attack in Paris. This is just another failure by the US intelligence community who could have connected the dots and warned French officials. In the Boston Marathon bombings they received warnings from Russian intelligence on one of the brothers and this brother even called his mom back home talking about attacking the USA but this didn't raise a single eyebrow in the US intelligence community. Snowden's revelations and encryption had nothing to do with this attack. This is an attempt by the US to use this tragedy to gain an upper hand in the war on encryption and pass legislation that they otherwise would be unable to do. Just like the Patriot Act and many other acts were passed right after the 9/11 attacks that again US intelligence failed to connect the dots even though intelligence sources warned that Al Qaeda planned some attack involving hijacked airliners and flight instructors expressed concern over students from the middle east taking flight lessons. If they connected the dots they could have stopped 9/11 and the Boston Marathon Bombings as well.
I think a lot of companies have a clause in their terms of service saying that these terms can change at any time which should be illegal in my opinion. In addition a lot of the terms of service don't specifically say that your real name won't remain anonymous meaning they can decide to post your real name at any time. Even if it specifically stated that names won't be published, someone like Facebook can come along and either buy their company or take over the comment board and decide that for "civil" dialog, they will publish real names. This only destroys comment boards since people lose trust in the newspaper and people are unwilling to post under their real name even if the comment isn't "uncivil" since they don't want a friend, prospective employer, or company to see their post. For example, someone could criticize a company and be concerned the company will try to sue them for making a negative comment about their company in a news story. Others will simply use fake names since it doesn't take much to create a fake email account. People who comment should have a reasonable expectation of privacy and shouldn't have to contact the newspaper to have their comments removed if they don't want their names to appear in past comments.
This is another example of how you data that you wish to remain anonymous can easily change. For example a company could initially say that they will not reveal anything about your name and require you to enter a phone number, email address, and other information in order to register and say that they will not share this information and even indicate this in their terms of service. They could change their Terms of Service at any time or another company can come along such as Facebook and buy out this company and decide that your real name should be on your comments and sell your name and other information to data brokers and telemarketers to make money.
Looks like even more yahoo users will become former yahoo users in another exodus that may be as bad as the first mass exodus of users when they changed their email interface and didn't listen to user complaints. Who will Marissa Mayers blame this time? As Mr. Bonnefarte (or whatever his name is) said when they changed their email interface and customers complained "Some people need to be kicked in the groin to appreciate good software design". Could Mr. Bonnefarte be next to be fired or forced to resign? Are they going to help users who get infected with malware from a flash advertisement? A lot of users disable flash and ads not only for the ads being annoying but also because of security concerns. In addition, animated ads steal precious bandwidth that some people cannot spare since they are stuck with a 1.5 Mpbs internet connection or even a dial-up connection.