1) Join the IGDA. Notify the IGDA. 2) Join the EFF. Notify the EFF. 3) Join the FSF. Notify the FSF. 4) Find the other Tetris clones who were shut down and pass this same advice to them. 5) With legal assistance, file a DMCA counter-claim. That will get your app back-up in the store. (Side-effect: once you are back up on the store, you will likely be the only one for a while. So whoever fights back gets the most downloads).
Hopefully, one or all of the above can provide legal aid.
It is difficult to make scientific statements using only the ambiguous language we use every day. So much of science is semantics. Both sets of scientists might be correct: their research right, their methods correct, their data and conclusions spot on. But when the reporter asks "So is high fructose corn syrup healthy?" the scientist has to say "yes" or "no" not "An increase of 15% in intake of HFCS results in a a 99.5% correlation to an increased lipid growth in the lining of the..." One scientist says "yes" and the other says "no." Then they both go chug a Mountain Dew.:-)
That's a great example actually, because the # of planets in the solar system isn't really science, it is semantics. Astronomers didn't lose a planet, or realize that Pluto was actually a peanut someone dropped onto the lens of their telescope (doh!). They revised the definition of planet to clarify the meaning. The word was ambiguous from the start. No facts actually changed.
But to the lay person, the scientists were wrong. That's really unfortunate, and I'm not sure what can be done about it.
Truth isn't slippery. Truth is absolute. The problem is that things are presented as truth when they are not. A scientist does a study and finds that cows fed fatty diets die of heart attacks more often than regular cows. That is truth. But that study is published, and by the time it gets to the ordinary human it comes out as a health book explaining why all fat is bad. That isn't truth. It is an interpretation: a generalization from a subset of scientific information summarized and handed down.
The pseudo-scientists, news reporters, and pundits purport to offer truth when they offer interpretation. And after a while, the average person doesn't know what to believe any more.
We see this on Slashdot all the time. A paper published in Nature, summarized by a reporter, published, blogged, and respun until "I found a way to improve transistor density 2.5%" becomes a Slashdot headline like "AI robots will take over the world by next Tuesday." Somewhere... there was a grain of truth behind that headline.
I work at a company that operates exactly as you specify. Some intranet software requires IE6. And sometimes particular versions of it too. Then some department installs an app that requires IE7 and the intranet app breaks. In one case, a manager suggested everyone install a virtual machine to run the apps that require IE6. That's just ridiculous.
For some reason, corporate intranet software is always the worst-designed garbage. Killing IE6 will force these imbeciles to stop writing these garbage ASP+VB6 ActiveX apps.
middle of a recession isn't the best time to ask companies to upgrade core infrastructure that still works.
But the infrastructure doesn't work. Companies keep paying more IT staff to come-up with complex workarounds rather than fixing miniscule bugs. This will force the issue. It is happening anyway - soon we won't be able to get XP machines anymore. Already we have to pay to downgrade from Windows 7. Soon the hardware won't support Windows XP drivers.
IMHO, it is never worth converting audio files from one lossy format to another. Suppose you do that, and your files are now half the size but 1% noisier. But by the time you have re-encoded your 5 bzillion gigs of data, storage prices have dropped in half. So you could have had better results by sitting around doing nothing.
I theorize this is for the same reason that lights don't work. You aren't seeing with your eyes, or hearing with your ears. You are thinking the sound and the image, and it bypasses all those silly analog devices.
When I saw this article, I thought my RSS reader was broken and it was returning feeds from really old articles. I figured I'd click on it and see some clever use of Windows batch files... but no. I read the summary and thought "LOL: it really is returning old articles!" Then I saw the comments... and the date... holy moly.
I wrote a batch file last week. It copied some files from point A to point B. When it had to conditionally copy one, I wrote a C# app because I didn't have time to learn powershell. But writing a batch file to deal with a printer? Does that work with LAN printers? Did you have to map an LPT port? Dear Lord! Get your skills up to date before you find yourself sitting on your front porch with a shotgun, trying to get kids off your lawn!
My wife and I decided to have our child at a birthing center, and this was one of the reasons.
I was very skeptical of not delivering in a hospital, but after doing some research I was intrigued. We went to the orientations at both a local hospital, and at a local birthing center. In both orientations I asked how long they leave the umbilical cord attached. The hospital doctors didn't see any reason not to cut it immediately, and kind of looked at me like "oh, you are one of THOSE people." The midwife at the birthing center said something like "We follow the most recent lifelong study completed by in which recommends leaving the cord on for due to the increased supply of stem cells." where X was something between 2 and 5 minutes, I forget the number now.
The linked article does a great job of pointing out that this isn't new. What is shocking is that most OBs don't know it. The only disadvantage of this is that it makes it harder to harvest fetal stem cells from the placenta. In our case, I don't think our donation met the minimum requirements (although we sent it in anyway). I love the idea that our son got a head start because we did what science has already known to be correct, and that perhaps someone else's life could be saved by the donation.
If you plan on having a child, it is worth every moment to do your research. And don't blindly trust the doctors.
I'd bet that if you check your credit card agreement, you'd find...
Probably so.
As to keeping the CC# on file: the approval number is only half the transaction.
Perhaps that's the issue right there. The point of a transaction is that you need a certain amount of information to perform it, but once the transaction is complete, you don't need all that information. You only need the transaction ID - which is the authorization #, in this case.
Why does the merchant need to keep all materials that lead to the transaction? What benefit does that provide the merchant, other than the possibility of fraud? Since the auth# proves that they had the CC# at some point, so they don't need it as "proof" of anything. As others pointed out in the discussion, they can do a return with just the authorization #. I just don't see why they keep it at all.
This kinda gets back to the start of things. Under the system I proposed, they actually would legally not be permitted to give this information to the FBI. Which is how it should be.
Right now, warrants are only needed if the company refuses to give the information. What we have learned today is that if the government comes asking, you probably should give. Even if you aren't allowed to, they will just grant you immunity retroactively. I would rather the law say that they legally can't give the information out unless there is a warrant, rather than making it an option.
I dunno. I was surprised. Not sure if I like that or not. I certainly don't like when they scan IDs since they store and scrape over information off of them. But checking a picture seems reasonable. That's why I had the picture added to my card, although no one even looks at the card.
Granted, that is part of it. But I know several people who were affected by fraud, and it costs a lot. It is often tough to get the charges taken off. Then you have to get new card numbers, file police reports, check your credit scores. Everyone I've known paid for their own credit reporting after the free year that they get - so it definitely costs them. It's a major pain in the butt.
I bet it is awful after you defrag it. The drive will see a lot of random reads and writes, which probably thrashes the Flash and randomizes the contents of the cache.
Just playing devil's advocate here, since this is a privacy discussion: How did the FBI find out about your hypothetical $4999 transactions? Should I assume they went to a judge and obtained a warrant?
What innovation is going to fix this? You can't just blithely say that innovation, or technology, or the free market will solve whatever problem is happening. That's the same as those who say that the government will solve it. Just pushing responsibility to someone else.
I made a proposal. You obviously prefer a free market solution. I'm open, let me know what it is.
and the Track-9 data from your card is the only real proof that you were there for the transaction.
I can see how the number was needed before the systems were electronic. But now, they get an authorization number right away. The Auth# and signature should be sufficient for them to go back and prove the transaction was valid.
I agree with your definition of "private data" and I think that is where we need to go. Private, unless otherwise stated.
Also, food for thought:
Actually, your name and credit card number are both encoded on the mag stripe on your card.
Several people pointed this out to me. I think people assumed that I didn't know because I said that the credit card company gave it to the merchant. In my opinion, they did. I never told the merchant my name. And the cashier never looked at my card to read it. So the fact that the credit card company encoded it onto a magnetic stripe, and then I scanned the card into the machine, should not mean that *I* gave the information. That would allow a big loophole.
Now, if it was printed on the card and they physically saw my card then one could argue that I knew it was on there and I gave it to the merchant. But I think the definition needs to be such that the companies can't do an end-run around me by putting my marital status on the card, then making me scan the card, and thus concluding that I told the cashier my marital status. (Or replace "marital status" with "address" or "purchasing history" or whatever other information should be protected).
Granted. The contradiction was because of my wording. I should have said "There is no benefit to the consumer for companies to be giving this stuff out."
It's also nothing new...
I never said it was. It is just much more dangerous now, due to the scale of it.
hate to break it to you, but your credit card # is your 'user #'
Exactly. That is the part that needs to be changed. Automatically generated numbers, smart cards, etc. solve that problem. But common-sense when handling transactions can minimize it. The store only needs to keep the authorization number, not the credit card number.
...they must know your name because presumably you carry ID against which they could verify that you are who you claim you are.
Actually, in my state, it is illegal to ask for a driver's license when using a credit card. I know that sounds crazy, but it is the case. After a very cool and understanding manager at a Lowes explained this to me, I switched to a credit card with my picture on it.
The reason companies don't care is that their customers don't care.
From my experience, they do. When credit cards first came out, people were afraid to use them because of fraud concerns. Same with the internet. It was only 10 years ago that my grandfather would not enter his credit card into a web site. But today, people take the technology for granted and no longer think it through.
But if you talk to someone, and educate them on the issues, they respond like "what can you do?" And when I explain that a simple change to the credit system, such as generating disposable credit card numbers, or smart chips - they get interested, and then angry that no one is doing it. So people definitely care, but they don't know, and don't think they have any control over it.
Has it ever occurred to you that some customers actually like that kind of customer service?
Nothing I've said decreases the level of customer service. The return could have been done without them saving the credit card number.
Letting the free market sort it out, with some companies offering convenience and others dedicated to privacy, is in my mind the best solution.
I always prefer free market solutions, but I don't see how to make one work here. The free market only works when the buyer is aware. Companies don't tell me what information they disclose about me. I only find out when I suddenly get charges on my credit card because the store clerk got all my credit information, or because some hacker broke into the stores and took it. I would be open to laws that require them to disclose it to me, but I don't want to read a 25-page legal document to buy something from a store. Since there is no benefit to me from them keeping the information (see the first paragraph for the explanation of why) the restrictive solution is the best one.
I think they *could* do it from the authorization number, but I am skeptical that they actually did it that way. I find that places that use the authorization number ask me for my credit card and punch that number in when doing the return. So I think they just store it. Considering that all the online stores do this too, I don't find it unlikely that retail chains are starting that practice.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Join the IGDA. Notify the IGDA.
2) Join the EFF. Notify the EFF.
3) Join the FSF. Notify the FSF.
4) Find the other Tetris clones who were shut down and pass this same advice to them.
5) With legal assistance, file a DMCA counter-claim. That will get your app back-up in the store. (Side-effect: once you are back up on the store, you will likely be the only one for a while. So whoever fights back gets the most downloads).
Hopefully, one or all of the above can provide legal aid.
Define "healthy."
It is difficult to make scientific statements using only the ambiguous language we use every day. So much of science is semantics. Both sets of scientists might be correct: their research right, their methods correct, their data and conclusions spot on. But when the reporter asks "So is high fructose corn syrup healthy?" the scientist has to say "yes" or "no" not "An increase of 15% in intake of HFCS results in a a 99.5% correlation to an increased lipid growth in the lining of the..." One scientist says "yes" and the other says "no." Then they both go chug a Mountain Dew. :-)
That's a great example actually, because the # of planets in the solar system isn't really science, it is semantics. Astronomers didn't lose a planet, or realize that Pluto was actually a peanut someone dropped onto the lens of their telescope (doh!). They revised the definition of planet to clarify the meaning. The word was ambiguous from the start. No facts actually changed.
But to the lay person, the scientists were wrong. That's really unfortunate, and I'm not sure what can be done about it.
The truth is very slippery.
Truth isn't slippery. Truth is absolute. The problem is that things are presented as truth when they are not. A scientist does a study and finds that cows fed fatty diets die of heart attacks more often than regular cows. That is truth. But that study is published, and by the time it gets to the ordinary human it comes out as a health book explaining why all fat is bad. That isn't truth. It is an interpretation: a generalization from a subset of scientific information summarized and handed down.
The pseudo-scientists, news reporters, and pundits purport to offer truth when they offer interpretation. And after a while, the average person doesn't know what to believe any more.
We see this on Slashdot all the time. A paper published in Nature, summarized by a reporter, published, blogged, and respun until "I found a way to improve transistor density 2.5%" becomes a Slashdot headline like "AI robots will take over the world by next Tuesday." Somewhere... there was a grain of truth behind that headline.
Is this case part of why they are rethinking the libel laws?
NNNnnoooooo!!!!!!!!! ...death..gurgle...
I work at a company that operates exactly as you specify. Some intranet software requires IE6. And sometimes particular versions of it too. Then some department installs an app that requires IE7 and the intranet app breaks. In one case, a manager suggested everyone install a virtual machine to run the apps that require IE6. That's just ridiculous.
For some reason, corporate intranet software is always the worst-designed garbage. Killing IE6 will force these imbeciles to stop writing these garbage ASP+VB6 ActiveX apps.
middle of a recession isn't the best time to ask companies to upgrade core infrastructure that still works.
But the infrastructure doesn't work. Companies keep paying more IT staff to come-up with complex workarounds rather than fixing miniscule bugs. This will force the issue. It is happening anyway - soon we won't be able to get XP machines anymore. Already we have to pay to downgrade from Windows 7. Soon the hardware won't support Windows XP drivers.
IMHO, it is never worth converting audio files from one lossy format to another. Suppose you do that, and your files are now half the size but 1% noisier. But by the time you have re-encoded your 5 bzillion gigs of data, storage prices have dropped in half. So you could have had better results by sitting around doing nothing.
Sound volume levels don't change either.
I theorize this is for the same reason that lights don't work. You aren't seeing with your eyes, or hearing with your ears. You are thinking the sound and the image, and it bypasses all those silly analog devices.
When I saw this article, I thought my RSS reader was broken and it was returning feeds from really old articles. I figured I'd click on it and see some clever use of Windows batch files... but no. I read the summary and thought "LOL: it really is returning old articles!" Then I saw the comments... and the date... holy moly.
I wrote a batch file last week. It copied some files from point A to point B. When it had to conditionally copy one, I wrote a C# app because I didn't have time to learn powershell. But writing a batch file to deal with a printer? Does that work with LAN printers? Did you have to map an LPT port? Dear Lord! Get your skills up to date before you find yourself sitting on your front porch with a shotgun, trying to get kids off your lawn!
(Mods - yes, this post was meant to be funny)
My wife and I decided to have our child at a birthing center, and this was one of the reasons.
I was very skeptical of not delivering in a hospital, but after doing some research I was intrigued. We went to the orientations at both a local hospital, and at a local birthing center. In both orientations I asked how long they leave the umbilical cord attached. The hospital doctors didn't see any reason not to cut it immediately, and kind of looked at me like "oh, you are one of THOSE people." The midwife at the birthing center said something like "We follow the most recent lifelong study completed by in which recommends leaving the cord on for due to the increased supply of stem cells." where X was something between 2 and 5 minutes, I forget the number now.
The linked article does a great job of pointing out that this isn't new. What is shocking is that most OBs don't know it. The only disadvantage of this is that it makes it harder to harvest fetal stem cells from the placenta. In our case, I don't think our donation met the minimum requirements (although we sent it in anyway). I love the idea that our son got a head start because we did what science has already known to be correct, and that perhaps someone else's life could be saved by the donation.
If you plan on having a child, it is worth every moment to do your research. And don't blindly trust the doctors.
If they had reasons, they didn't need excuses.
I'd bet that if you check your credit card agreement, you'd find...
Probably so.
As to keeping the CC# on file: the approval number is only half the transaction.
Perhaps that's the issue right there. The point of a transaction is that you need a certain amount of information to perform it, but once the transaction is complete, you don't need all that information. You only need the transaction ID - which is the authorization #, in this case.
Why does the merchant need to keep all materials that lead to the transaction? What benefit does that provide the merchant, other than the possibility of fraud? Since the auth# proves that they had the CC# at some point, so they don't need it as "proof" of anything. As others pointed out in the discussion, they can do a return with just the authorization #. I just don't see why they keep it at all.
Does your boss know you just identified him?
ohhhhh... *snap*
This kinda gets back to the start of things. Under the system I proposed, they actually would legally not be permitted to give this information to the FBI. Which is how it should be.
Right now, warrants are only needed if the company refuses to give the information. What we have learned today is that if the government comes asking, you probably should give. Even if you aren't allowed to, they will just grant you immunity retroactively. I would rather the law say that they legally can't give the information out unless there is a warrant, rather than making it an option.
I dunno. I was surprised. Not sure if I like that or not. I certainly don't like when they scan IDs since they store and scrape over information off of them. But checking a picture seems reasonable. That's why I had the picture added to my card, although no one even looks at the card.
Granted, that is part of it. But I know several people who were affected by fraud, and it costs a lot. It is often tough to get the charges taken off. Then you have to get new card numbers, file police reports, check your credit scores. Everyone I've known paid for their own credit reporting after the free year that they get - so it definitely costs them. It's a major pain in the butt.
I bet it is awful after you defrag it. The drive will see a lot of random reads and writes, which probably thrashes the Flash and randomizes the contents of the cache.
Just playing devil's advocate here, since this is a privacy discussion: How did the FBI find out about your hypothetical $4999 transactions? Should I assume they went to a judge and obtained a warrant?
What innovation is going to fix this? You can't just blithely say that innovation, or technology, or the free market will solve whatever problem is happening. That's the same as those who say that the government will solve it. Just pushing responsibility to someone else.
I made a proposal. You obviously prefer a free market solution. I'm open, let me know what it is.
and the Track-9 data from your card is the only real proof that you were there for the transaction.
I can see how the number was needed before the systems were electronic. But now, they get an authorization number right away. The Auth# and signature should be sufficient for them to go back and prove the transaction was valid.
I agree with your definition of "private data" and I think that is where we need to go. Private, unless otherwise stated.
Also, food for thought:
Actually, your name and credit card number are both encoded on the mag stripe on your card.
Several people pointed this out to me. I think people assumed that I didn't know because I said that the credit card company gave it to the merchant. In my opinion, they did. I never told the merchant my name. And the cashier never looked at my card to read it. So the fact that the credit card company encoded it onto a magnetic stripe, and then I scanned the card into the machine, should not mean that *I* gave the information. That would allow a big loophole.
Now, if it was printed on the card and they physically saw my card then one could argue that I knew it was on there and I gave it to the merchant. But I think the definition needs to be such that the companies can't do an end-run around me by putting my marital status on the card, then making me scan the card, and thus concluding that I told the cashier my marital status. (Or replace "marital status" with "address" or "purchasing history" or whatever other information should be protected).
You contradict yourself:
Granted. The contradiction was because of my wording. I should have said "There is no benefit to the consumer for companies to be giving this stuff out."
It's also nothing new...
I never said it was. It is just much more dangerous now, due to the scale of it.
hate to break it to you, but your credit card # is your 'user #'
Exactly. That is the part that needs to be changed. Automatically generated numbers, smart cards, etc. solve that problem. But common-sense when handling transactions can minimize it. The store only needs to keep the authorization number, not the credit card number.
...they must know your name because presumably you carry ID against which they could verify that you are who you claim you are.
Actually, in my state, it is illegal to ask for a driver's license when using a credit card. I know that sounds crazy, but it is the case. After a very cool and understanding manager at a Lowes explained this to me, I switched to a credit card with my picture on it.
They insist that you send them not only the total but a list of what the person is buying.
Part of that is for their fraud detection algorithm. (Which would not be as necessary if they didn't give out the information).
As for the other stuff - sounds like you should have sued them.
I think that was his point. :-)
The reason companies don't care is that their customers don't care.
From my experience, they do. When credit cards first came out, people were afraid to use them because of fraud concerns. Same with the internet. It was only 10 years ago that my grandfather would not enter his credit card into a web site. But today, people take the technology for granted and no longer think it through.
But if you talk to someone, and educate them on the issues, they respond like "what can you do?" And when I explain that a simple change to the credit system, such as generating disposable credit card numbers, or smart chips - they get interested, and then angry that no one is doing it. So people definitely care, but they don't know, and don't think they have any control over it.
Has it ever occurred to you that some customers actually like that kind of customer service?
Nothing I've said decreases the level of customer service. The return could have been done without them saving the credit card number.
Letting the free market sort it out, with some companies offering convenience and others dedicated to privacy, is in my mind the best solution.
I always prefer free market solutions, but I don't see how to make one work here. The free market only works when the buyer is aware. Companies don't tell me what information they disclose about me. I only find out when I suddenly get charges on my credit card because the store clerk got all my credit information, or because some hacker broke into the stores and took it. I would be open to laws that require them to disclose it to me, but I don't want to read a 25-page legal document to buy something from a store. Since there is no benefit to me from them keeping the information (see the first paragraph for the explanation of why) the restrictive solution is the best one.
I think they *could* do it from the authorization number, but I am skeptical that they actually did it that way. I find that places that use the authorization number ask me for my credit card and punch that number in when doing the return. So I think they just store it. Considering that all the online stores do this too, I don't find it unlikely that retail chains are starting that practice.