Even Microsoft had the foresight to just start fresh and develop AV on their own instead of buying a pile of steaming poo to polish.
MSAV in 1993 was a branded Central Point Software anti-virus (tech that would later go into early Symantec and then Norton AV products). Microsoft AntiSpyware (renamed to Windows Defender) came from buying the GIANT Company Anti-spyware program. So Microsoft has both borrowed other poo and purchased a steaming pile to polish before here.
What they're current using started as Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and kept picking up features until it became viable as the standalone Microsoft Security Essentials. I don't know how much of the older piles of poo were added to this new thing. I think it is fair to credit Microsoft for saying "let's start over" with experience learned to build something better at that time, something the other AV vendors seemingly never do. They only got there after polishing at least one pile first though.
Intel's early SSDs such as the Intel X25-E were the last time I really got screwed by SATA drives that screwed this up very badly. See the PostgreSQL page on Reliable Writes for a lot more details on this subject.
Except on the many Linux versions where O_DIRECT doesn't work properly. I have kernels where it works as expected; ones where it quietly fails to sync to disk; and ones where using it causes a PANIC. It's never been a priority for that API to function correctly given that Linus thinks direct IO is totally braindamaged.
Whether this sort of thing works correctly can change based on drive firmware. So even a given model/serial number combination can change which type of results it gives over time. There is no substitute for testing yourself.
Michael Jordan is not rich on the scale Bill Gates is. He's also not the CEO of a company that's been convicted of illegal tactics all around the world. Athletes, musicians, and people like your other examples are a bit rich and earned it. To become massively rich on the sort of world's richest man scale takes shady tactics. The appropriate rich people pile to sort Gates with is next to people like the trading firm CEOs who paid themselves massively while defrauding their customers.
You should learn how to separate legitimate business success from very profitable business activity due to illegal tactics. I was talking about the tactics of rich family dynasties in that regard, not rags to (some) riches stories like NBA players.
As the simplest example, deposit over $10,000 into a business bank account in the US and the IRS will come looking for that company one day. Just went through that recently.
The monitoring works fine. If you're money laundering, you trigger the monitors but then generate a convincing pile of accounting paperwork that make the transactions look legitimate and free of taxation. The same complexity that makes a small company overwhelmed with regulation turns into a giant set of places to hide things for a creative laundering accountant.
We are not an aristocratic society where the son of a rich man automatically is entitled to all he wants.
We are now. Our rich aristocrats set up family trusts and similar mechanisms to protect their children that the rest of the country has no access to to ensure exactly that. For example, only poor and middle-class people pay estate taxes and circulate their money back toward the public upon death if they've accumulated a moderate amount of it. Get a lot of money together and you can afford to start avoiding that with a trust, start moving assets off-shore to avoid paying taxes, and shift income away from regular income and toward things treated as capital gains.
Bill Gates is the founder of a company convicted of monopoly power abuse (US), competition abuse (EU), and that's just major cases they were obviously guilty of. The fact that he's now distributing his wealth is not reason to ask "is the Gates Foundation spending its money wisely?". The real questions should be around who all that money was stolen from to get so rich, because it's usually someone. All of his assets should have been seized as a criminal, and then we'd really have some cash to fund education with.
The reality of our country is that the poor kids who become innovators will still be poor adults as long as they're being ripped off by rich guys who are the songs of earlier rich guys. Gates is at least 3rd generation money, one who started with piles of banking and law related income to protect him and make him feel (rightly) above the law. The way the rich consider it acceptable to flaunt the rules that limit everyone else is at least as big of a problem as the education gap.
The "free" market where nothing can happen without government approval being described here is the US. Our Federal Trade Commission regulates what can and can't be sold, and heavily regulates advertising too. We also have money exchanges being monitored by the Internal Revenue Service to make sure it's being taxed fully, which helps prevent transactions that aren't regulated by the FTC from happening. Also, the minute you want to pay people to work for you, compliance with a giant list of Social Security and unemployment rules becomes mandatory, among others.
Start a company here and do any amount of business, and more government agencies will come looking for you every day, each with their own giant set of rules for what you can and can't do. There's a whole additional class of regulations for companies that can easily kill a small one, around obtaining financing for expansion, privacy rules, intellectual property, and the impact of your company on the environment. The Small Business Administration gives a good short picture of just how regulated even the smallest company is here in the US.
Describing the US using words like "capitalism" or "free market" is good for a big laugh from anyone who has started a business here.
You're assuming perfect distribution of MAC-48 AKA EUI-48 addresses among manufacturers and their products, which is far away from true. 1/2 of the 48 bits here are assigned to a manufacturer. 24 bits there make about 16M unique addresses available to each manufactured device. The flip side to that is that every manufactured device gobbles up 16M addresses, whether they use them all or not. Every time someone releases a new device assigned its own NIC address, another 16M addresses die, even if they only sell 1 of them.
That means the important part then is that there are only ~16M Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) blocks, the other 24 bits here. Those are getting consumed at some rate, bigger manufacturers will need more than one of them, and therefore want to ask for a larger block of them. The IEEE is already aiming to reclaim them after 100 years and otherwise tightening standards for keeping companies from getting more OUI "space" than they need. As they state there, "The total number of EUI-48 identifiers available, while large, is NOT inexhaustible.". It's similar to the situation with IPv4 addresses, where the capacity looked practically infinite at first, but waste forced the size of the average block allocations down hard over time to keep from running out. Now you have to use 95% of the addresses you've already got before you can get more OUIs.
MAC addresses have started to move from 48 bits to 64 in order to make this problem go away, because then you're at a "atoms in the universe" scale. I believe that's going about as well as the IPv6 migration. We're a long time from the 48 bits running out, but it's not as impossible as you might think just from computing against 2^48.
Several problems with assuming a dumb AP saves you. First off, who can be sure "last known SIM card ID" isn't cached by your phone and transmitted to your carrier sometimes even when only connected with WiFi? Geo-locating by IP address can be shockingly accurate or useful, especially if you enough other data to match it against. If you and your buddies who are suspected of being involved in something together all go off the cell grid around the same time, and then all get IP addresses from the same block somewhere, that's more evidence of something going with you all--even if they can't figure out exactly where you met that specific time from that particular IP address.
Second, the article was framed in the context of a protest that the police might be monitoring. If they are willing to bring in a IMSI catcher as suggested in the article to such things, a honeypot access point that logs all DHCP requests can easily come on for the ride. Assuming that DHCP logs of wi-fi APs are transitory is true in most cases; the situations the author is most worried about are exactly the sort of cases where that will not be true though.
And if you think your phone might be rooted as part of routine monitoring on a suspicious individual, which the author clearly is, there's all kinds of backdoors that will make removing your SIM not good enough too. If I were writing such a thing, I'd consider situations where the phone was running without a SIM card as suspicious, log all IP addresses obtained during that period, and upload them to a server periodically--at the time if IP connectivity is available, later when the phone was reconnected if not. Then we're back to geo-locating or cross-checking data issues again. It's the potential of the rooted phone situation that inspires "leave your cellphone at home" levels of paranoia as being appropriate for protesters.
The average monthly salary in Estonia is about 800 EU or $1000 USD. That's why the Raspberry Pi is relevant and Apple systems that be useful to do development are not to them. Would you give a 6 year old a computer that cost you a full month of income to buy? No one who's ever watched a 6 year old in action would.
The same economics are true in the majority of the world. Apple's products are relevant only to the best developed countries in the world. Estonia is some distance from being one of them. It's simple math. Try it some time; I think there's an app for it.
Say a small group of slashdotters sit down and dream up how we want gnome3 to be and listed those features somewhere private. Then, we try to come up with the opposite of those featuDX
But someone have that, the roadmap and goals for GNOME3; this work is accomplished.I think all we really need to do is tell the GNOME developers "job well done, keep doing exactly what you're done already" and that will be enough to redirect the entire project's goals. They won't stand for that.
I maintain a utility named peg that makes it straightforward to install a local copy of PostgreSQL in your home directory. It's aimed at developers who want a local copy they can tinker with as a non-root user. It even includes shell aliases for starting and stopping the server. If you have all the necessary development tools to compile PostgreSQL, you can have a working install in four lines of typing:
mkdir -p pgwork peg init test . peg build psql
I haven't made things like building from one of the stable release versions easy yet, but that's mainly because my users so far use peg to hack on the PostgreSQL code and write/test new features. That would be easy enough to add if I saw any demand for it.
Compilation might see over the line of not being an "out of the box" install. Packaging the software takes far too much build and QA time for the people involved in that to bother for this fairly small niche, people who want home directory, non-root installs.
Note that while I mainly targeted peg at Linux systems, I've tested it and it can work just fine from OS X too. When I last used Homebrew to get all the development tools on the system on that platform, peg Just Worked after that.
At this point the Unicomp keyboards are a medicore Model M clone as far as I'm concerned. The build quality of the Model M keyboards was already slipping while being released under the Lexmark name. There is a noticable drop in keyboard feel if you compare a 1994 and 1995 model; there was a 1995 redesign to lower costs. And judging from the two Unicomp samples I've tried, the quality kept dropping under their watch.
If you want to be able to switch from the video mode the system boots in, which is certainly some sort of memory-mapped VGA-era thing, into the fancier modes, the driver needs to worry about this. The fact that it doesn't likely do very much at all with the VGA memory before moving into something else is probably why the code is buggy; presumably it's not like they ever review this part of it anymore.
Every SVGA implementation I'm aware of still maps the display buffer into main memory and then has low-level software twiddle the bits manually. Any laptop that doesn't do that I would say isn't even a "PC Compatible" anymore. If it has a BIOS, it almost certainly has memory-mapped I/O into the "VGA window" alluded to here. There might be some UEFI systems that have broken this part. But a company like NVIDIA surely has to still deal with at least bootstrapping BIOS-based system in their driver.
VGA works fine in Windows and in Linux. See Linux framebuffer as a relatively modern implementation. (I say relatively modern because I'd been using Linux for a long time before it was added, and it's new compared to things like X-Windows) PC hardware is certainly not so abstracted away by useful APIs that the drivers can ignore this level of detail, to be protected from them. Manipulating this sort of thing is exactly what a driver is written to do.
Your suggestion that this shouldn't have been exposed to the user is missing the point: this is an exploit. The driver itself needs to know all these details to properly initialize itself and support old-school text/VGA modes during boot. The user was likely never intended to have access to them, but an exploit isn't limited to what the user is supposed to do. Whether or not the path is protected or not is irrelevant if the path is bypassed.
VGA maps the video card's memory into the regular CPU address space so that applications can read and write directly to it. That's the VGA window being referenced here. Removing that is further complicated by waiting to retain compatibility with older video standards (CGA, EGA).
One of the points of arbitration is that it is more efficient on both sides than small-claims court. Suing an entity for a small amount of money is fundamentally unsatisfying, in terms of getting something worth the time and money it takes to do. And that doesn't get better by doing lots of claims in bulk, class action style--the efficiency in terms of returning something to the people with the problem gets worse.
Anyway, your example is not novel--that is in fact exactly the setup for the AT&T case this ruling was made on. A small amount of sales tax was being charged on a phone that was claimed to be free. I maintain my position that I'd rather see every customer band together and force arbitration on them than trust a laywer and our slow judicial system to do anything in this sort of situation.
Working link. It's worth reading the rendered opinion of the court here. AT&T was providing these arbitration rules:
In the event the parties proceed to arbitration, the agreement specifies that AT&T must pay all costs for nonfrivolous claims; that arbitration must take place in the county in which the customer is billed; that, for claims of $10,000 or less, the customer may choose whether the arbitration proceeds in person, by telephone, or based only on submissions; that either party may bring a claim in small claims court in lieu of arbitration; and that the arbitrator may award any form of individual relief, including injunctions and presumably punitive damages. The agreement, more over, denies AT&T any ability to seek reimbursement of its attorney’s fees, and, in the event that a customer receives an arbitration award greater than AT&T’s last written settlement offer, requires AT&T to pay a $7,500 minimum recovery and twice the amount of the claimant’s attorney’s fees.
To anyone who thinks there exists a class action lawsuit that is going to provide more compelling terms for AT&T to fix a customer issue than this, I'd say nonsense. I have a small pile of "won" class action suits, where I got $20 to $50 for abusive behavior that cost me far more than that, years after it was irrelevant. In each and every case, I would have preferred swift abritration over the option to sue if the option were available. That's the point the SCOTUS was trying to make here--that had a class action suit proceeded, people would have been far less likely to get satisfaction.
The idea of a class-action lawsuit is ridiculous, unsatisfying nonsense perpetuated by the lawyers who profit from them. If companies want to push for abritration instead, the right response isn't to say "no, we want the right to be screwed over by our lawyers". What saavy people should be thinking about is doing the same thing--punishing companies on a large scale for their mistakes--via large-scale, coordinated abitration. I'm far more confident that crowdsourcing abitration will provide a useful benefit to consumers than any of the broken legal processes for suing companies we have now.
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Even Microsoft had the foresight to just start fresh and develop AV on their own instead of buying a pile of steaming poo to polish.
MSAV in 1993 was a branded Central Point Software anti-virus (tech that would later go into early Symantec and then Norton AV products). Microsoft AntiSpyware (renamed to Windows Defender) came from buying the GIANT Company Anti-spyware program. So Microsoft has both borrowed other poo and purchased a steaming pile to polish before here.
What they're current using started as Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and kept picking up features until it became viable as the standalone Microsoft Security Essentials. I don't know how much of the older piles of poo were added to this new thing. I think it is fair to credit Microsoft for saying "let's start over" with experience learned to build something better at that time, something the other AV vendors seemingly never do. They only got there after polishing at least one pile first though.
Intel's early SSDs such as the Intel X25-E were the last time I really got screwed by SATA drives that screwed this up very badly. See the PostgreSQL page on Reliable Writes for a lot more details on this subject.
Except on the many Linux versions where O_DIRECT doesn't work properly. I have kernels where it works as expected; ones where it quietly fails to sync to disk; and ones where using it causes a PANIC. It's never been a priority for that API to function correctly given that Linus thinks direct IO is totally braindamaged.
Whether this sort of thing works correctly can change based on drive firmware. So even a given model/serial number combination can change which type of results it gives over time. There is no substitute for testing yourself.
We're there right now. This is the time.
Let me get this right: this is the Year of the Linux Desktop? Finally, it's said for the first time, and the wait is over. Victory is assured
Michael Jordan is not rich on the scale Bill Gates is. He's also not the CEO of a company that's been convicted of illegal tactics all around the world. Athletes, musicians, and people like your other examples are a bit rich and earned it. To become massively rich on the sort of world's richest man scale takes shady tactics. The appropriate rich people pile to sort Gates with is next to people like the trading firm CEOs who paid themselves massively while defrauding their customers.
You should learn how to separate legitimate business success from very profitable business activity due to illegal tactics. I was talking about the tactics of rich family dynasties in that regard, not rags to (some) riches stories like NBA players.
As the simplest example, deposit over $10,000 into a business bank account in the US and the IRS will come looking for that company one day. Just went through that recently.
The monitoring works fine. If you're money laundering, you trigger the monitors but then generate a convincing pile of accounting paperwork that make the transactions look legitimate and free of taxation. The same complexity that makes a small company overwhelmed with regulation turns into a giant set of places to hide things for a creative laundering accountant.
We are not an aristocratic society where the son of a rich man automatically is entitled to all he wants.
We are now. Our rich aristocrats set up family trusts and similar mechanisms to protect their children that the rest of the country has no access to to ensure exactly that. For example, only poor and middle-class people pay estate taxes and circulate their money back toward the public upon death if they've accumulated a moderate amount of it. Get a lot of money together and you can afford to start avoiding that with a trust, start moving assets off-shore to avoid paying taxes, and shift income away from regular income and toward things treated as capital gains.
Bill Gates is the founder of a company convicted of monopoly power abuse (US), competition abuse (EU), and that's just major cases they were obviously guilty of. The fact that he's now distributing his wealth is not reason to ask "is the Gates Foundation spending its money wisely?". The real questions should be around who all that money was stolen from to get so rich, because it's usually someone. All of his assets should have been seized as a criminal, and then we'd really have some cash to fund education with.
The reality of our country is that the poor kids who become innovators will still be poor adults as long as they're being ripped off by rich guys who are the songs of earlier rich guys. Gates is at least 3rd generation money, one who started with piles of banking and law related income to protect him and make him feel (rightly) above the law. The way the rich consider it acceptable to flaunt the rules that limit everyone else is at least as big of a problem as the education gap.
The "free" market where nothing can happen without government approval being described here is the US. Our Federal Trade Commission regulates what can and can't be sold, and heavily regulates advertising too. We also have money exchanges being monitored by the Internal Revenue Service to make sure it's being taxed fully, which helps prevent transactions that aren't regulated by the FTC from happening. Also, the minute you want to pay people to work for you, compliance with a giant list of Social Security and unemployment rules becomes mandatory, among others.
Start a company here and do any amount of business, and more government agencies will come looking for you every day, each with their own giant set of rules for what you can and can't do. There's a whole additional class of regulations for companies that can easily kill a small one, around obtaining financing for expansion, privacy rules, intellectual property, and the impact of your company on the environment. The Small Business Administration gives a good short picture of just how regulated even the smallest company is here in the US.
Describing the US using words like "capitalism" or "free market" is good for a big laugh from anyone who has started a business here.
Subject line has no Enough college.
You're assuming perfect distribution of MAC-48 AKA EUI-48 addresses among manufacturers and their products, which is far away from true. 1/2 of the 48 bits here are assigned to a manufacturer. 24 bits there make about 16M unique addresses available to each manufactured device. The flip side to that is that every manufactured device gobbles up 16M addresses, whether they use them all or not. Every time someone releases a new device assigned its own NIC address, another 16M addresses die, even if they only sell 1 of them.
That means the important part then is that there are only ~16M Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) blocks, the other 24 bits here. Those are getting consumed at some rate, bigger manufacturers will need more than one of them, and therefore want to ask for a larger block of them. The IEEE is already aiming to reclaim them after 100 years and otherwise tightening standards for keeping companies from getting more OUI "space" than they need. As they state there, "The total number of EUI-48 identifiers available, while large, is NOT inexhaustible.". It's similar to the situation with IPv4 addresses, where the capacity looked practically infinite at first, but waste forced the size of the average block allocations down hard over time to keep from running out. Now you have to use 95% of the addresses you've already got before you can get more OUIs.
MAC addresses have started to move from 48 bits to 64 in order to make this problem go away, because then you're at a "atoms in the universe" scale. I believe that's going about as well as the IPv6 migration. We're a long time from the 48 bits running out, but it's not as impossible as you might think just from computing against 2^48.
Several problems with assuming a dumb AP saves you. First off, who can be sure "last known SIM card ID" isn't cached by your phone and transmitted to your carrier sometimes even when only connected with WiFi? Geo-locating by IP address can be shockingly accurate or useful, especially if you enough other data to match it against. If you and your buddies who are suspected of being involved in something together all go off the cell grid around the same time, and then all get IP addresses from the same block somewhere, that's more evidence of something going with you all--even if they can't figure out exactly where you met that specific time from that particular IP address.
Second, the article was framed in the context of a protest that the police might be monitoring. If they are willing to bring in a IMSI catcher as suggested in the article to such things, a honeypot access point that logs all DHCP requests can easily come on for the ride. Assuming that DHCP logs of wi-fi APs are transitory is true in most cases; the situations the author is most worried about are exactly the sort of cases where that will not be true though.
And if you think your phone might be rooted as part of routine monitoring on a suspicious individual, which the author clearly is, there's all kinds of backdoors that will make removing your SIM not good enough too. If I were writing such a thing, I'd consider situations where the phone was running without a SIM card as suspicious, log all IP addresses obtained during that period, and upload them to a server periodically--at the time if IP connectivity is available, later when the phone was reconnected if not. Then we're back to geo-locating or cross-checking data issues again. It's the potential of the rooted phone situation that inspires "leave your cellphone at home" levels of paranoia as being appropriate for protesters.
The average monthly salary in Estonia is about 800 EU or $1000 USD. That's why the Raspberry Pi is relevant and Apple systems that be useful to do development are not to them. Would you give a 6 year old a computer that cost you a full month of income to buy? No one who's ever watched a 6 year old in action would.
The same economics are true in the majority of the world. Apple's products are relevant only to the best developed countries in the world. Estonia is some distance from being one of them. It's simple math. Try it some time; I think there's an app for it.
Say a small group of slashdotters sit down and dream up how we want gnome3 to be and listed those features somewhere private. Then, we try to come up with the opposite of those featuDX
But someone have that, the roadmap and goals for GNOME3; this work is accomplished.I think all we really need to do is tell the GNOME developers "job well done, keep doing exactly what you're done already" and that will be enough to redirect the entire project's goals. They won't stand for that.
Even though it's terrible to match their latest design preferences, If one of the users suggests that feature the GNOME developers will never add it.
I maintain a utility named peg that makes it straightforward to install a local copy of PostgreSQL in your home directory. It's aimed at developers who want a local copy they can tinker with as a non-root user. It even includes shell aliases for starting and stopping the server. If you have all the necessary development tools to compile PostgreSQL, you can have a working install in four lines of typing:
I haven't made things like building from one of the stable release versions easy yet, but that's mainly because my users so far use peg to hack on the PostgreSQL code and write/test new features. That would be easy enough to add if I saw any demand for it.
Compilation might see over the line of not being an "out of the box" install. Packaging the software takes far too much build and QA time for the people involved in that to bother for this fairly small niche, people who want home directory, non-root installs.
Note that while I mainly targeted peg at Linux systems, I've tested it and it can work just fine from OS X too. When I last used Homebrew to get all the development tools on the system on that platform, peg Just Worked after that.
At this point the Unicomp keyboards are a medicore Model M clone as far as I'm concerned. The build quality of the Model M keyboards was already slipping while being released under the Lexmark name. There is a noticable drop in keyboard feel if you compare a 1994 and 1995 model; there was a 1995 redesign to lower costs. And judging from the two Unicomp samples I've tried, the quality kept dropping under their watch.
If you want to be able to switch from the video mode the system boots in, which is certainly some sort of memory-mapped VGA-era thing, into the fancier modes, the driver needs to worry about this. The fact that it doesn't likely do very much at all with the VGA memory before moving into something else is probably why the code is buggy; presumably it's not like they ever review this part of it anymore.
Every SVGA implementation I'm aware of still maps the display buffer into main memory and then has low-level software twiddle the bits manually. Any laptop that doesn't do that I would say isn't even a "PC Compatible" anymore. If it has a BIOS, it almost certainly has memory-mapped I/O into the "VGA window" alluded to here. There might be some UEFI systems that have broken this part. But a company like NVIDIA surely has to still deal with at least bootstrapping BIOS-based system in their driver.
VESA is a standard for settings modes and the like. Under that hood there is still the same old memory mapped I/O as always.
VGA works fine in Windows and in Linux. See Linux framebuffer as a relatively modern implementation. (I say relatively modern because I'd been using Linux for a long time before it was added, and it's new compared to things like X-Windows) PC hardware is certainly not so abstracted away by useful APIs that the drivers can ignore this level of detail, to be protected from them. Manipulating this sort of thing is exactly what a driver is written to do.
Your suggestion that this shouldn't have been exposed to the user is missing the point: this is an exploit. The driver itself needs to know all these details to properly initialize itself and support old-school text/VGA modes during boot. The user was likely never intended to have access to them, but an exploit isn't limited to what the user is supposed to do. Whether or not the path is protected or not is irrelevant if the path is bypassed.
VGA maps the video card's memory into the regular CPU address space so that applications can read and write directly to it. That's the VGA window being referenced here. Removing that is further complicated by waiting to retain compatibility with older video standards (CGA, EGA).
One of the points of arbitration is that it is more efficient on both sides than small-claims court. Suing an entity for a small amount of money is fundamentally unsatisfying, in terms of getting something worth the time and money it takes to do. And that doesn't get better by doing lots of claims in bulk, class action style--the efficiency in terms of returning something to the people with the problem gets worse.
Anyway, your example is not novel--that is in fact exactly the setup for the AT&T case this ruling was made on. A small amount of sales tax was being charged on a phone that was claimed to be free. I maintain my position that I'd rather see every customer band together and force arbitration on them than trust a laywer and our slow judicial system to do anything in this sort of situation.
Working link. It's worth reading the rendered opinion of the court here. AT&T was providing these arbitration rules:
In the event the parties proceed to arbitration, the agreement specifies that AT&T must pay all costs for nonfrivolous claims; that arbitration must take place in the county in which the customer is billed; that, for claims of $10,000 or less, the customer may choose whether the arbitration proceeds in person, by telephone, or based only on submissions; that either party may bring a claim in small claims court in lieu of arbitration; and that the arbitrator may award any form of individual relief, including injunctions and presumably punitive damages. The agreement, more over, denies AT&T any ability to seek reimbursement of its attorney’s fees, and, in the event that a customer receives an arbitration award greater than AT&T’s last written settlement offer, requires AT&T to pay a $7,500 minimum recovery and twice the amount of the claimant’s attorney’s fees.
To anyone who thinks there exists a class action lawsuit that is going to provide more compelling terms for AT&T to fix a customer issue than this, I'd say nonsense. I have a small pile of "won" class action suits, where I got $20 to $50 for abusive behavior that cost me far more than that, years after it was irrelevant. In each and every case, I would have preferred swift abritration over the option to sue if the option were available. That's the point the SCOTUS was trying to make here--that had a class action suit proceeded, people would have been far less likely to get satisfaction.
The idea of a class-action lawsuit is ridiculous, unsatisfying nonsense perpetuated by the lawyers who profit from them. If companies want to push for abritration instead, the right response isn't to say "no, we want the right to be screwed over by our lawyers". What saavy people should be thinking about is doing the same thing--punishing companies on a large scale for their mistakes--via large-scale, coordinated abitration. I'm far more confident that crowdsourcing abitration will provide a useful benefit to consumers than any of the broken legal processes for suing companies we have now.
That fist zerohedge graphic is literally the dumbest thing ever cast into pixels!
Looks like someone has literally never visited I Can Has Cheezburger?