All great, but expect a new frontier of fake SIM swap messages to hit your phone pretty soon. You and I might be smart enough not to accept, but you can bet there's a whole raft of people who aren't.
In the Beginning, Man created the phone. European Man insisted on a sim card, whereas American man did not. American man's phones were crap, and his networks were worse. European man's phones were better, networks were better and lo, American man saw the error of his ways and started using sim cards.
Now we're going back to not having them again. Yes yes, I know there's a slot for a secondary sim, but no one thought they'd get rid of the headphone jack, and yet that's gone. Just wait... not long now you'll be happily buying the new Apple phone with no buttons and no holes in it anywhere.
I also wonder how the polar seas would react to having a giant ice cube removed from them. Presumably they'd warm up, even faster than they are already.
I'm glad I saw the email here, because we sure didn't get one in our inbox. We had a card suddenly show some weird $1 transactions in the US while we're in the UK, and we booked a flight during the 'window' of the attack. No emails from BA though.
BA have two speeds of IT. On the one hand, they have some excellent ideas and design - ba.com went from being a waste of space to being the best airline booking system anywhere (at the time, others have caught up now). They've got some really good build quality on some of the walls, windows and roofs of their building. They seem to have outsourced all the foundations and utilities to Bodge it and Leggit though, so occasionally bits of the walls collapse, and turning on a light switch sometimes turns on a light, sometimes the bulb explodes, and sometimes nothing at all happens.
I'm waiting to see how GDPR plays out on this one. the ICO has to "been seen" to do something here, so it remains to be seen exactly what they do.
Well, take my Amazon Prime, for example. The European stuff on there has mostly already been on TV, so I've already had all of that, and don't watch it. There's Comrade Detective, but that got dubbed into American accents (shame, IMHO), and then every last Amazon original is 'American'. Thus, if you looked at my Prime viewing profile, you would conclude I'm keen to 'consume' more American content.
However, that's not really true - there are loads of good British films which will never compete with Hollywood, mainly because Americans can't stand to watch anything that doesn't have American people in it. That doesn't mean any of these films aren't good though. From Amazon/Netflix/whomever's point of view they're not going to be terribly expensive to buy, and probably don't have overbearing licensing either. They *could* have them in their catalogues, but don't because they don't see the point.
I'm not sure if quotas are the answer, but France has had this sort of thing for years, and anecdotally it seems to have done them some good (or at least no harm).
WileyFox makes phones for about £200 - any they're decent specs. The haterz will argue they're not 100% brilliant, which they're not, but there are plenty of things wrong with the top-end dick-extension phones too.
As for Samsung - the day they make their crappy bundled apps uninstallable is the day I'll consider buying any of their products ever again.
That's the crazy thing - AWS has the concept of a "VPC", and it has the concept of "public" and "private" subnets inside your VPC. If you put a VM in "private", it won't get an internet IP, and so instantly becomes inaccessible to the Internet. You don't need any fancy reviews or certifications for that - just a modicum of common sense. Hell, even if they'd used their app server as a jumpbox to get to their Mongo server, that would have been better than this.
This wasn't an issue of an "incorrectly configured MongoDB" - this was an issue of utter incompetence at setting up the system in the first place, followed by the same incompetence setting up MongoDB.
Then of course, Wang... There's a joke about them opening an office in Cologne (Germany), but no one wanted to work there because no one wanted to go to Wang Cologne.
But they did (so I'm told by an ex-employee) try to set up their global support programme. The region director for Europe had to explain to Dr. Wang personally why they'd changed the name from Wang Care.
I used to work with a guy called Paul Mycock (who also had a doctorate). Go look him up on linkedin for a list of other great names in the "people also viewed..." section.
Yeah, TRS-80 here too. Then replaced with an Acorn BBC B (then a Master, but by then everyone else had given up on it by then, and so it was as good as just mine).
Agreed - except the Facebook managers didn't get the memo. They think they're the centre of everyone's world and so if you're not part of that, you're on the way downwards.
Ultimately, they're playing a bluff game here. They're talking tough because what they say might be true (or mostly/partly true, at least in the minds of the people they're talking to). What they really want is "design in" so that they can slow down their own descent into obscurity. Clever on their part, although a bit too easy to see through. It remains to be seen how the publishers deal with it - from their point of view, getting FB exposure may be a valuable source of revenue, but getting tied into FB could be their undoing.
I'd trust voice 'assistants' in about this order: - Amazon - Apple - Google - Just about anyone else - The dodgy repair shop down the street that knocked together their own from spare parts - Uber - Samsung
As for the other comments about getting 'smart' fridges - oh man, that would drive me nuts. I'm annoyed enough that our wine fridge has a light that insists on staying on for 10 minutes after you close the door.
Are voice assistants the new "clocks". It used to be that every blooming device insisted on having a clock on it. At the start and end of summer you'd have two dozen clocks to change around your kitchen. At least voice assistants don't need that, but if you shout "Bixby Alexa Google" in the average kitchen, how many devices are going to say "yes, how can I help?"
If they were scientists, they wouldn't be peddling their wares on Channel 5.
Channel 5 is, how shall we say, "a the lower end" of the TV market in the UK. That probably pegs it in the up quartile of US TV, but that's really nothing to boast about. Typical Channel 5 programming includes Big Brother (because none of the other channels want it any more), those 'Building Megastructures' shows that advertise a few building contractors and a bunch of other, really terrible reality TV. Tonight it looks like even that level of quality might be tough to maintain: http://www.channel5.com/tv-gui...
As I hear it, the insurance industry (corporate stuff, not the end-user stuff) has yet to allow remote working, so it'll be a while before they think about automating out the endless lunches and afternoon drinking.
Not so here in the UK - we get ripped off for everything.
Right now, if you buy an electric car, you can get £500 towards the purchase of a charge unit (from the government). Guess what!? all charge units magically cost £499. After that you need to fit the thing, and for that you'll need a 16A armoured cable from a dedicated RCD on your fuse board. We got ours fitted for free by Mitsubishi, but they'll only really run the cable and connect it up - if your fuse board isn't new enough, isn't big enough or accessible enough, then you'll need your own spark to come and fix up all of that before the "free" connection comes along (our "free" guy said he's move the stuff off the RCD he used "on the quiet" because he's not even supposed to do that - the RCD has to be literally empty when he shows up). Our install was simple, but I'd say you could get charged a couple of hundred quid for it, if you got your own spark to do it.
If this regulation mandated that you had to have a 16A feed to your garage or driveway or to your allocated parking space or whatever then it would make a lot of sense. The cost of the charge units would come down to real levels rather than inflated ones, and people would be free to buy a good looking charge unit rather than the utter mingers a lot of the companies force on you. Further, you'd get the charger right for your car, could get a 'smart' one if you want, can get one that will alternate between two cars or whatever.
If the regulation went further and said you need a 32A feed, then things get really funky. The usual properly-wide fuse in the UK is 60A, so if your car is pulling the full 32A, you can blow the fuse by boiling the kettle while straightening your hair (pretty much). Some newish properties in the UK have no gas, so they use electric heating - again, that 32A feed is going to be a real problem there. I seriously doubt any of the grid can really cope with 50% of the houses pulling the full 60A at the same time, never mind all of them doing so. In practical terms, the only way we're ever really going to have 32A feeds is if we have some sort of battery storage for it - and there's no way these regulations will demand all of that.
So... expect some terrible legislation that will be (ab)used by the charge point manufacturers to inflate their profits, whilst charging the house-buyer and consumer for it. Expect the regulations to be woefully out of date in a matter of years, but not updated to reflect that, so you'll have to have a charge point you can't use as well as putting in one yourself that you can. Can't wait.
I agree, but it's possible that you may have some legacy code somewhere that maybe costs a lot to replace with better. For that, you want a decently reliable VM to run it on - not necessarily "up 100% of the time", but not manually taken down without some notice. That doesn't seem like a crazy requirement of a cloud vendor.
I can't say with any qualification that Amazon probably is not a good place to run such a server. It's great for 'destroy it and let the auto-scaling fire up a new one', but I wouldn't trust it for high uptime servers. No particular 'red flags' to justify that feeling, but also nothing to 'give me the warm and fuzzies' about it either.
A previous client switched to Google - I asked them about 'high uptime VMs', and they talked about how a hardware failure would mean the VM would be migrated to new hardware. They did of course suggest we built in some redundancy, but didn't dissuade me in any way. To date, there was one server which rebooted mysteriously during the weekend. Support regurgitated the need for redundancy, but also told us how quickly the server became available again.
...or you have a provider that you've paid for a "storage SLA' with. When you point out that your storage falls below the SLA, they tell you that no, the *storage* was within SLA, just your access to it which wasn't, and the access to it is not covered by your SLA.
(I has this problem with an EMC-backed VM hypervisor at a provider we'll call 'crapface'. The storage was running slow, and after 4 months of convincing, the provider conceded there was a problem with the 'director' CPU which was running at 100%. When I pointed a the SLA, they welched out of it because the underlying storage was all well within thresholds).
I signed a previous client up for Google Cloud services. I did so using the company credit card. I was in touch with Google pre-sales people throughout, and spoke to some account management as well. In other words, I did it correctly, with their oversight throughout.
What I'm saying is... you *can* pay for 'enterprise' services from Google with a credit card. Why anyone would want to is another matter, but to get invoice billing does take a few additional steps, which my client actually failed because of a change of business address at about the same time as we were doing the application. It all got resolved, as my client was in generally good standing, but I guess if your company is a bit flaky you might not pass such checks.
By the looks of things though, this particular company was using a consumer account, which is of course the source of the problem. If it also happened more than once, you'd think they'd have learned by now.
I'm going to pick in you because you're at +5, but my comment goes for pretty much anyone who has a "simple" method of frustrating HFTs:
Whatever you can think of will be scrutinised by rooms full of very bright, very specialised and very motivated people, who'll spend 8-10 hours per day, 5+ days per week thinking about how to work around whatever you propose. You may well find that the 'workaround' makes HFT way worse to you than whatever you think they're doing to you today.
Some examples of ways this could end up biting you/us in the backside include: - Stopping trading in the markets you care about. Wider spreads and lower liquidity will result, which generally leads to faster, broader 'swings' in price - that's a nice way of saying 'instability'. Good luck with your pension investments. - Moving trading abroad. This is pretty obvious, and in some sense may achieve what you want ("well, at least they're not f-ing up my country!"). The thing is, you'll probably find it's ultimately detrimental to have other countries doing things that you're not. Think along the lines of (say) stem cell research - either you're at the forefront of it, or you're not. And not being might just hurt you a lot more than the pride of saying "we're not playing god".
I'm not trying to say that HFTs should be allowed to exist unencumbered by the wishes of The People (played out through governments). I'm just saying that unless it's got some global reach, whatever ideas you've got for regulation will probably have some unintended consequences.
My information is second hand, but I'm told about 10 years ago that Getty spent a load of money buying up "all" of the photo libraries around the world and then renegotiating the contracts they had with photographers. Ultimately, it meant that photographers got paid a pittance for their images, and guess what... Getty did nicely out of the deal. It used to be that one good picture could pay for a week or two week's trip to wherever. Under Getty, you'd need several top-sellers to achieve the same sort of return.
In response, a few new libraries sprang up. They're naturally smaller than what Getty can deliver, but they're considerably more personalised to their customers, have some very dedicated and skilled photographers and pass on more of the sale price to the people doing the actual work. As a rule of thumb, you won't get as much accepted, you won't sell as much, but you'll get a decent return.
In short - Getty are 'monopolists' in photography, muscling the industry to their own ends. Be very careful of that before getting into bed with them in any way.
Aside from us already having 4 separate bins in the kitchen and one for glass in the garage, I'm all for a bit more separation. However, I'd suggest some legislation to:
- Mandate that all plastic packaging for a single product should be a single type of plastic (so a bottle with a different type of lid is out, for example) - Mandate that the type of plastic be permanently inscribed on the plastic in some way and should occupy (say) 10% of the total area of the plastic - Plastic products must have the type of plastic(s) permanently inscribed on them somewhere too so we stand a chance to take 'em to bits and put the pieces in the right bins
That way, us 'normals' stand a chance of actually putting things in the right bins (and gives some hope to sorters for those still using mixed bins). As things stand today, we don't even know which plastics can go in the recycling and which can't - we know the microwavable plastics can't, but what about the 'takeaway' sort of plastics? What about broken tupperware or the kids plastic cups and plates? Honestly, I couldn't tell you - so it all tends to go in, vaguely hoping someone else will sort it out for us. That may not be "right", but realistically, how do we do better?
Maybe... but that approach leads to "keep everything, just in case we need it" - which of course GDPR really doesn't like (even the old school Data Protection Act didn't like it either, for that matter).
As things stand, you could probably make some reasonable guesses about what technology might look like in the future. I don't really know much about audio fingerprinting, but lets say you take 20 samples and do some maths on them to end up with the fingerprints. It's not too hard to do that 100 times instead, but only use 20 of them during verification. That gives you some headroom if you need to tighten up later.
Particularly with voice though, if they really did need to throw out their whole system and recreate, they could just wait for all the active users to phone up and authenticate - you have to give the entire audio to do so, which they could re-record and re-sample. This would have the effect of eventually deactivating all the accounts of people who don't use them - which is of course good practice. It also highlights the problem with 'my voice is my password' as a concept too, but I doubt they'd spot that flaw in such an exercise.
The over-arching problem is that governments are terrible at specifying what they want, and suppliers are terrible at saying 'no'. That means that the government ends up asking for all kinds of things that are unnecessary (in the 'big picture'), and confine the solution into places that it shouldn't ever have got into. No supplier can realistically architect their way out of those problems, and can't tell the government to do a better job of it either - thus we end up with utter shit for government IT. In this case, there was (probably) a specification to keep the original audio forever and a day, and so now the system can't operate without it.
Slashdot Mirror
By far the best proposal so far - and should come with an "either use this, or stick with master/slave and STFU" clause ;-)
All great, but expect a new frontier of fake SIM swap messages to hit your phone pretty soon. You and I might be smart enough not to accept, but you can bet there's a whole raft of people who aren't.
In the Beginning, Man created the phone. European Man insisted on a sim card, whereas American man did not. American man's phones were crap, and his networks were worse. European man's phones were better, networks were better and lo, American man saw the error of his ways and started using sim cards.
Now we're going back to not having them again. Yes yes, I know there's a slot for a secondary sim, but no one thought they'd get rid of the headphone jack, and yet that's gone. Just wait... not long now you'll be happily buying the new Apple phone with no buttons and no holes in it anywhere.
I also wonder how the polar seas would react to having a giant ice cube removed from them. Presumably they'd warm up, even faster than they are already.
This has got crazy written all over it.
I'm glad I saw the email here, because we sure didn't get one in our inbox. We had a card suddenly show some weird $1 transactions in the US while we're in the UK, and we booked a flight during the 'window' of the attack. No emails from BA though.
BA have two speeds of IT. On the one hand, they have some excellent ideas and design - ba.com went from being a waste of space to being the best airline booking system anywhere (at the time, others have caught up now). They've got some really good build quality on some of the walls, windows and roofs of their building. They seem to have outsourced all the foundations and utilities to Bodge it and Leggit though, so occasionally bits of the walls collapse, and turning on a light switch sometimes turns on a light, sometimes the bulb explodes, and sometimes nothing at all happens.
I'm waiting to see how GDPR plays out on this one. the ICO has to "been seen" to do something here, so it remains to be seen exactly what they do.
Well, take my Amazon Prime, for example. The European stuff on there has mostly already been on TV, so I've already had all of that, and don't watch it. There's Comrade Detective, but that got dubbed into American accents (shame, IMHO), and then every last Amazon original is 'American'. Thus, if you looked at my Prime viewing profile, you would conclude I'm keen to 'consume' more American content.
However, that's not really true - there are loads of good British films which will never compete with Hollywood, mainly because Americans can't stand to watch anything that doesn't have American people in it. That doesn't mean any of these films aren't good though. From Amazon/Netflix/whomever's point of view they're not going to be terribly expensive to buy, and probably don't have overbearing licensing either. They *could* have them in their catalogues, but don't because they don't see the point.
I'm not sure if quotas are the answer, but France has had this sort of thing for years, and anecdotally it seems to have done them some good (or at least no harm).
WileyFox makes phones for about £200 - any they're decent specs. The haterz will argue they're not 100% brilliant, which they're not, but there are plenty of things wrong with the top-end dick-extension phones too.
As for Samsung - the day they make their crappy bundled apps uninstallable is the day I'll consider buying any of their products ever again.
That's the crazy thing - AWS has the concept of a "VPC", and it has the concept of "public" and "private" subnets inside your VPC. If you put a VM in "private", it won't get an internet IP, and so instantly becomes inaccessible to the Internet. You don't need any fancy reviews or certifications for that - just a modicum of common sense. Hell, even if they'd used their app server as a jumpbox to get to their Mongo server, that would have been better than this.
This wasn't an issue of an "incorrectly configured MongoDB" - this was an issue of utter incompetence at setting up the system in the first place, followed by the same incompetence setting up MongoDB.
Not sure, but it's not far from Peniston
Then of course, Wang... There's a joke about them opening an office in Cologne (Germany), but no one wanted to work there because no one wanted to go to Wang Cologne.
But they did (so I'm told by an ex-employee) try to set up their global support programme. The region director for Europe had to explain to Dr. Wang personally why they'd changed the name from Wang Care.
I used to work with a guy called Paul Mycock (who also had a doctorate). Go look him up on linkedin for a list of other great names in the "people also viewed..." section.
Yeah, TRS-80 here too. Then replaced with an Acorn BBC B (then a Master, but by then everyone else had given up on it by then, and so it was as good as just mine).
"You may never have heard of Transport Layer Security -- TLS for short"
Sheesh... what site do the editors think they're on?
Dang - I've been getting this wrong too. For beheading videos, I've been going to ebay.
Honestly, FB's 'standards' are somewhat baffling sometimes.
Agreed - except the Facebook managers didn't get the memo. They think they're the centre of everyone's world and so if you're not part of that, you're on the way downwards.
Ultimately, they're playing a bluff game here. They're talking tough because what they say might be true (or mostly/partly true, at least in the minds of the people they're talking to). What they really want is "design in" so that they can slow down their own descent into obscurity. Clever on their part, although a bit too easy to see through. It remains to be seen how the publishers deal with it - from their point of view, getting FB exposure may be a valuable source of revenue, but getting tied into FB could be their undoing.
I'd trust voice 'assistants' in about this order:
- Amazon
- Apple
- Google
- Just about anyone else
- The dodgy repair shop down the street that knocked together their own from spare parts
- Uber
- Samsung
As for the other comments about getting 'smart' fridges - oh man, that would drive me nuts. I'm annoyed enough that our wine fridge has a light that insists on staying on for 10 minutes after you close the door.
Are voice assistants the new "clocks". It used to be that every blooming device insisted on having a clock on it. At the start and end of summer you'd have two dozen clocks to change around your kitchen. At least voice assistants don't need that, but if you shout "Bixby Alexa Google" in the average kitchen, how many devices are going to say "yes, how can I help?"
If they were scientists, they wouldn't be peddling their wares on Channel 5.
Channel 5 is, how shall we say, "a the lower end" of the TV market in the UK. That probably pegs it in the up quartile of US TV, but that's really nothing to boast about. Typical Channel 5 programming includes Big Brother (because none of the other channels want it any more), those 'Building Megastructures' shows that advertise a few building contractors and a bunch of other, really terrible reality TV. Tonight it looks like even that level of quality might be tough to maintain: http://www.channel5.com/tv-gui...
No - you're done. However, the person playing Pole Position that crashed your car gets to pick another one and control that instead.
As I hear it, the insurance industry (corporate stuff, not the end-user stuff) has yet to allow remote working, so it'll be a while before they think about automating out the endless lunches and afternoon drinking.
Not so here in the UK - we get ripped off for everything.
Right now, if you buy an electric car, you can get £500 towards the purchase of a charge unit (from the government). Guess what!? all charge units magically cost £499. After that you need to fit the thing, and for that you'll need a 16A armoured cable from a dedicated RCD on your fuse board. We got ours fitted for free by Mitsubishi, but they'll only really run the cable and connect it up - if your fuse board isn't new enough, isn't big enough or accessible enough, then you'll need your own spark to come and fix up all of that before the "free" connection comes along (our "free" guy said he's move the stuff off the RCD he used "on the quiet" because he's not even supposed to do that - the RCD has to be literally empty when he shows up). Our install was simple, but I'd say you could get charged a couple of hundred quid for it, if you got your own spark to do it.
If this regulation mandated that you had to have a 16A feed to your garage or driveway or to your allocated parking space or whatever then it would make a lot of sense. The cost of the charge units would come down to real levels rather than inflated ones, and people would be free to buy a good looking charge unit rather than the utter mingers a lot of the companies force on you. Further, you'd get the charger right for your car, could get a 'smart' one if you want, can get one that will alternate between two cars or whatever.
If the regulation went further and said you need a 32A feed, then things get really funky. The usual properly-wide fuse in the UK is 60A, so if your car is pulling the full 32A, you can blow the fuse by boiling the kettle while straightening your hair (pretty much). Some newish properties in the UK have no gas, so they use electric heating - again, that 32A feed is going to be a real problem there. I seriously doubt any of the grid can really cope with 50% of the houses pulling the full 60A at the same time, never mind all of them doing so. In practical terms, the only way we're ever really going to have 32A feeds is if we have some sort of battery storage for it - and there's no way these regulations will demand all of that.
So... expect some terrible legislation that will be (ab)used by the charge point manufacturers to inflate their profits, whilst charging the house-buyer and consumer for it. Expect the regulations to be woefully out of date in a matter of years, but not updated to reflect that, so you'll have to have a charge point you can't use as well as putting in one yourself that you can. Can't wait.
I agree, but it's possible that you may have some legacy code somewhere that maybe costs a lot to replace with better. For that, you want a decently reliable VM to run it on - not necessarily "up 100% of the time", but not manually taken down without some notice. That doesn't seem like a crazy requirement of a cloud vendor.
I can't say with any qualification that Amazon probably is not a good place to run such a server. It's great for 'destroy it and let the auto-scaling fire up a new one', but I wouldn't trust it for high uptime servers. No particular 'red flags' to justify that feeling, but also nothing to 'give me the warm and fuzzies' about it either.
A previous client switched to Google - I asked them about 'high uptime VMs', and they talked about how a hardware failure would mean the VM would be migrated to new hardware. They did of course suggest we built in some redundancy, but didn't dissuade me in any way. To date, there was one server which rebooted mysteriously during the weekend. Support regurgitated the need for redundancy, but also told us how quickly the server became available again.
...or you have a provider that you've paid for a "storage SLA' with. When you point out that your storage falls below the SLA, they tell you that no, the *storage* was within SLA, just your access to it which wasn't, and the access to it is not covered by your SLA.
(I has this problem with an EMC-backed VM hypervisor at a provider we'll call 'crapface'. The storage was running slow, and after 4 months of convincing, the provider conceded there was a problem with the 'director' CPU which was running at 100%. When I pointed a the SLA, they welched out of it because the underlying storage was all well within thresholds).
I signed a previous client up for Google Cloud services. I did so using the company credit card. I was in touch with Google pre-sales people throughout, and spoke to some account management as well. In other words, I did it correctly, with their oversight throughout.
What I'm saying is... you *can* pay for 'enterprise' services from Google with a credit card. Why anyone would want to is another matter, but to get invoice billing does take a few additional steps, which my client actually failed because of a change of business address at about the same time as we were doing the application. It all got resolved, as my client was in generally good standing, but I guess if your company is a bit flaky you might not pass such checks.
By the looks of things though, this particular company was using a consumer account, which is of course the source of the problem. If it also happened more than once, you'd think they'd have learned by now.
I'm going to pick in you because you're at +5, but my comment goes for pretty much anyone who has a "simple" method of frustrating HFTs:
Whatever you can think of will be scrutinised by rooms full of very bright, very specialised and very motivated people, who'll spend 8-10 hours per day, 5+ days per week thinking about how to work around whatever you propose. You may well find that the 'workaround' makes HFT way worse to you than whatever you think they're doing to you today.
Some examples of ways this could end up biting you/us in the backside include:
- Stopping trading in the markets you care about. Wider spreads and lower liquidity will result, which generally leads to faster, broader 'swings' in price - that's a nice way of saying 'instability'. Good luck with your pension investments.
- Moving trading abroad. This is pretty obvious, and in some sense may achieve what you want ("well, at least they're not f-ing up my country!"). The thing is, you'll probably find it's ultimately detrimental to have other countries doing things that you're not. Think along the lines of (say) stem cell research - either you're at the forefront of it, or you're not. And not being might just hurt you a lot more than the pride of saying "we're not playing god".
I'm not trying to say that HFTs should be allowed to exist unencumbered by the wishes of The People (played out through governments). I'm just saying that unless it's got some global reach, whatever ideas you've got for regulation will probably have some unintended consequences.
My information is second hand, but I'm told about 10 years ago that Getty spent a load of money buying up "all" of the photo libraries around the world and then renegotiating the contracts they had with photographers. Ultimately, it meant that photographers got paid a pittance for their images, and guess what... Getty did nicely out of the deal. It used to be that one good picture could pay for a week or two week's trip to wherever. Under Getty, you'd need several top-sellers to achieve the same sort of return.
In response, a few new libraries sprang up. They're naturally smaller than what Getty can deliver, but they're considerably more personalised to their customers, have some very dedicated and skilled photographers and pass on more of the sale price to the people doing the actual work. As a rule of thumb, you won't get as much accepted, you won't sell as much, but you'll get a decent return.
In short - Getty are 'monopolists' in photography, muscling the industry to their own ends. Be very careful of that before getting into bed with them in any way.
Aside from us already having 4 separate bins in the kitchen and one for glass in the garage, I'm all for a bit more separation. However, I'd suggest some legislation to:
- Mandate that all plastic packaging for a single product should be a single type of plastic (so a bottle with a different type of lid is out, for example)
- Mandate that the type of plastic be permanently inscribed on the plastic in some way and should occupy (say) 10% of the total area of the plastic
- Plastic products must have the type of plastic(s) permanently inscribed on them somewhere too so we stand a chance to take 'em to bits and put the pieces in the right bins
That way, us 'normals' stand a chance of actually putting things in the right bins (and gives some hope to sorters for those still using mixed bins). As things stand today, we don't even know which plastics can go in the recycling and which can't - we know the microwavable plastics can't, but what about the 'takeaway' sort of plastics? What about broken tupperware or the kids plastic cups and plates? Honestly, I couldn't tell you - so it all tends to go in, vaguely hoping someone else will sort it out for us. That may not be "right", but realistically, how do we do better?
Maybe... but that approach leads to "keep everything, just in case we need it" - which of course GDPR really doesn't like (even the old school Data Protection Act didn't like it either, for that matter).
As things stand, you could probably make some reasonable guesses about what technology might look like in the future. I don't really know much about audio fingerprinting, but lets say you take 20 samples and do some maths on them to end up with the fingerprints. It's not too hard to do that 100 times instead, but only use 20 of them during verification. That gives you some headroom if you need to tighten up later.
Particularly with voice though, if they really did need to throw out their whole system and recreate, they could just wait for all the active users to phone up and authenticate - you have to give the entire audio to do so, which they could re-record and re-sample. This would have the effect of eventually deactivating all the accounts of people who don't use them - which is of course good practice. It also highlights the problem with 'my voice is my password' as a concept too, but I doubt they'd spot that flaw in such an exercise.
The over-arching problem is that governments are terrible at specifying what they want, and suppliers are terrible at saying 'no'. That means that the government ends up asking for all kinds of things that are unnecessary (in the 'big picture'), and confine the solution into places that it shouldn't ever have got into. No supplier can realistically architect their way out of those problems, and can't tell the government to do a better job of it either - thus we end up with utter shit for government IT. In this case, there was (probably) a specification to keep the original audio forever and a day, and so now the system can't operate without it.