I agree. I still think that the iPhone SE is the "right size" for a cell phone. It also has a better design, from before Apple decided it needed round edges to everything or that camera bumps were acceptable. I wouldn't mind an updated design, maybe with less bezel and more screen, but I wish Apple would stop making their products worse.
the more mature implementations of SMTP and IMAP servers run on Linux and much more robustly
Exchange isn't just about transferring mail. It's a full groupware package, with email, calendars, contacts, and tasks. And then they may be using software that has Exchange integrations or Outlook plugins.
And just to be clear, I'm not arguing that they made the right choice. I'm just saying that throwing SMTP and IMAP onto a Linux box doesn't begin to replicate the full feature set of Exchange.
In fairness, the quality of biometric security isn't wholly dependent on the information being secret. As much as anything, it's a question of how easily the sensors can be fooled.
I'm not too sure that a lot of people just don't realize the scale of the abuse. I've talked to people I know about online privacy and how their information is used against them. Most of those I've talked to think I'm paranoid and they could care less that their privacy is compromised.
But then you use your wife as an example:
My wife doesn't get it and doesn't care... She can't get it through her head that the only way to reach Facebook is on the internet. She thinks it is on her phone. Physically on her phone.
I'd posit that your wife is actually a good example of my claim that people don't realize the scale of the problem. Even when they say that they don't care, the real problem is that they don't understand.
I don't know if that's true. I think they might just not be aware of how these things work, and how much information is being gathered on them. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Granted, that's not about Facebook. Still, even when there's public information that their privacy is being violated, people still don't realize the scale of the problem.
What surprises me more is that people don't consider geolocation. Many many facebook users share their location with Facebook. It's then trivial for facebook to see that you are repeatedly in the same location at the same time as another person.
I've actually been suspicious for a while that Facebook is doing something with geolocation.
I have a Facebook account. The main reason I have it because of friends and family who expect you to have it. I look at it sometimes, but almost never post anything. A couple of years ago, Facebook got pretty aggressive in sending notifications suggesting that I "friend" people that I might know-- not like I was looking for people that I might know, but they were actively sending me notifications. At first, it gave me a bunch of people that I did in fact know, and I friended some of them and it all seemed normal.
But then, within about a month, they got even more aggressive with the notifications, and a lot of the notifications were for people that I did not know. It seemed odd to me. Of the ones that I didn't know, some of them did seem a little familiar, like maybe I'd met them before. I was looking at the profile picture for one of those suggestions, and it clicked: It was someone who worked in the same building as I do. Not the same company, or on the same floor, but it was someone I'd seen in the elevator multiple times.
I looked through the other suggestions again, and realized some lived in the same apartment building. Over the next couple of weeks, I seemed to get a lot of suggestions to be friends with people who lived or worked in areas that I frequently visited. There was a girl who worked at a coffeeshop near my office, and a guy I sometimes saw walking around my neighborhood.
I spent a while trying to figure out how it would have made the connection, and the only thing I could think of was location. There were no Facebook friends in common, and no other connection I could find. I hadn't put my work or home address into Facebook. I'm pretty sure it had to be going off the GPS, noticing that I spent a lot of time in the same location they had, and made a connection that way. I'm still convinced that must be the explanation.
What's a bit disturbing to me is that I don't use the Facebook app much, and like I said, I almost never post anything. It's possible that the couple of things that I've posted were posted at home and at work, and it made the link based on that, but I'm still left wondering when Facebook is gathering location information. Does it gather information whenever you look at Facebook, whether you post or not? Does it gather location information from your phone, even when the Facebook app isn't open?
3. why does slashdot still require me to type br / to make a new line?
What I find more frustrating, personally, is that it still makes you type out the numbers if you want to do a ordered list. It also won't put in bullets if you do an unordered list.
Yes, there is the phenomenon of the "shower thought". I think there's a scientific term for it, but I don't remember what it is and couldn't find it with a quick google. The basic phenomenon is this: When you're intensely focused on a problem, you can't figure out a solution. Then you take a break, go for a walk, take a shower, and occupy yourself with something mundane. Suddenly, a solution comes to you.
Supposedly there's some science behind it. Focusing intensely on something can actually prevent your brain from engaging in looser more lateral thinking. When you stop thinking about it, your unconscious mind continues to play with the idea, and discovers a solution while you're not consciously thinking about it.
However, I see the problem as something larger than that. People want to treat work as happening in the factor model, where each worker is expected to churn out widgets at a certain rate. If they churn out fewer widgets with more defects, they're bad workers. If they churn out more widgets with fewer defects, they're good workers. As a manager, you deal with them purely on the functional level of production, and you don't care if they're happy. You don't care if they're good, honest, smart people. There are easy metrics for their job performance, and as long as they're performing, that's all you care about.
Many jobs don't work that way. If you have a collaborative job that requires dealing with other people, then being good at collaboration might be just as important as your own productivity. If you work at a creative job, being able to spur other people to have good ideas might be just as important as having good ideas yourself. If your work in customer service, then having good interactions with customers might be the most important thing, and having good interactions is dependent (at least somewhat) on your worker being happy.
I know for myself, my job can be mentally/emotionally taxing, and I've discovered that taking certain kinds of breaks can help me be productive. For example, thinking about and writing Slashdot posts can give me a chance to recharge a bit, and lets me have those "shower thoughts". Plus, working in a technical position, I occasionally stumble across some information relevant to my job, and that's a nice little bonus. If my boss were spying on my activity right now, as I write this, they might think I'm just slacking off, but it's definitely more complicated than that.
I just don't think these kinds of monitoring and metrics make sense for most jobs. If you want to run a simple factory, you might be able to get away with dehumanizing people, but it makes more sense to have robots do that work, and robots don't mind being dehumanized. Increasingly, the jobs people do require a bit more nuanced judgement to assess performance.
Yeah, I think it's also worth mentioning that "explaining things to children" might not work the way people think it does.
I'm not sure how to explain for those who don't already know what I'm talking about, but a 5 year old isn't going to be able to understand certain kinds of things. Kids memorize things that they hear, and they try to mimic adults and say the "right thing". They'll parrot back the things they've been told, and so a lot of people think that the kids have taken in the information and understand what it means. Often, it's not the case. Kids get very focused, and are sometimes very good, at figuring out which thing you want them to say, and then saying it to get approval.
So when you explain to a child "cartoons and monsters aren't real," young children will be able to tell you, from then on, that cartoons and monsters aren't real. That doesn't mean that they understand what that means.
And honestly, a lot of adults have a hard time figuring out the difference between "real" and "not real".
I'll add a reason for why I like going into the office: While for some people, the lack of distinction between "work" and "home" leads them to do more personal tasks when they should be working, I have the opposite problem. When I work from home, I tend to work longer hours because my desk is just right there and I have more work that needs to be done.
I prefer maintaining the separation between work-life and personal-life, so that at the end of the day, I can go home and be done for the day.
That solution is simple. Fire them. Promote good workers, fire bad; same as it's always been. In my experience you can't make a bad employee good by any means.
As someone who's had a fair bit of management experience, I wish it were that simple. I'm wondering if you've actually been in a management position.
The reality is, it's hard to find good people. It's hard to find even decent people. And when you do find good workers, that doesn't mean that they're perfect workers. They're people, each one with his or her own quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. And though it's probably true that "You can't make a bad employee good by any means," it's not true that a good manager can't get an employee to perform better than they would under bad management.
And that also ignores all kinds of peripheral issues. Hiring a new employee will be much more expensive, at least in the near-term, than keeping an employee that's doing a somewhat poor but passable job. Being quick to fire people hurts morale and puts people on edge. Contrary to what you may have heard from amateur economists, having people constantly concerned about their jobs doesn't generally cause them to perform better.
So no, firing people is not a simple solution. It's trading one probably for another.
I know, right? Speaking as another Internet commentator who has no understanding of satellite design, I also assume that there must be a very low cost alternative that would work just as well. I once built a rocket using a soda bottle, baking soda, and vinegar. How hard could it be?
Yeah, honestly I think there are a couple of types of people who think that there's no reason to actually come into the office:
* Young people severely lacking in experience.
* People who have jobs that require no physical presence, and who can work without much collaboration (email and IM are generally sufficient), and assume everyone's job is like that.
For the second item, I'm sure I'll get some people yelling at me saying, "I'm a programmer, and I collaborate all day long! There are a bunch of other programmers working on my project, and we're constantly sending IMs back and forth. We even do Hangouts." Yeah, but still, the information you get from collaboration is largely that: information. You get the information you need, and then you can go on doing fairly isolated work.
There's something else that happens when you get a bunch of people in a room together, where you can read body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. A person's physical presence changes things. There are times where I'm having an IM or even phone conversation with someone, and the message just isn't getting across, and so I go and walk over to their office. The direct, face-to-face communication allows for something that just doesn't happen over phone or video chat. In person brainstorming sessions can be more productive than conference calls. It might be purely psychological, but if so, the psychological effect is real and not to be discounted.
Some jobs don't need that. A lot of jobs don't need that all the time, every day. But for some jobs, it's important that it happens.
We only need two things before most white collar people leave the crowded and expensive cities and move to the countryside
You'll need a third thing: People will have to want to move to the countryside. A lot of people don't.
The reason people are moving to cities right now isn't that they're being forced as much as, that's where the stuff is. There are places to go and things to do. Some people actually like being part of civilization, rather than retreating to a cabin in the middle of nowhere.
Sure, it's a problem, but that doesn't mean it's a disqualifying problem. People lose their keys sometimes, but that doesn't lead us to say, "Well we can't use keys anymore!" People's wallets gat stolen sometimes, but they're still generally a decent solution to a problem. People forget passwords, passwords get compromised, but we still use them.
There are going to be problems and flaws with every security scheme, but the purpose of security is not to be perfect. If you set out to create a security scheme that always 100% provides authorized users with access while always 100% denying access to unauthorized attackers, you're going to fail. The point is to balance "ease of access by authorized users" against "making unauthorized access difficult and dangerous". And that balance needs to be determined by the danger of security being compromised, which is to say that it might be appropriate to force someone with clearance to jump through a bunch of hoops to view a top-secret document, but I probably shouldn't have to jump through as many hoops to access my own MP3 collection.
So yes, "something you have" can be lost or stolen, but that's ok. You just need to make sure you can get a new copy of the "something you have" and revoke authorization from the one that was lost. For systems that needs a high level of security, you might want to have additional factors for authentication (e.g. biometrics and/or passwords).
In fairness, it's much easier to remember one password for your password manager than 150 unique strong passwords, so IT would be getting fewer calls. Plus, a big part of the problem is that people won't remember hundreds of unique passwords, so they instead reuse passwords, which is one of the major ways that accounts get compromised.
I'm not saying that this isn't an advertisement in disguise, but they're not wrong.
My point is, it doesn't happen to any particular person every day. If you're losing your wallet and keys every day, then you're going to have all sorts of problems.
Oh, if so, that's still not really a fair criticism. I owned that phone. It made phone calls just fine. I get that some people had some problems with it, but it was definitely blown out of proportion, and it was not at all a "smartphone which couldn't make phone calls".
Can someone please explain to me how "people of color" are more likely to have the same name and birthdate as people in other states?
There might be various reasons. Maybe people of color are more likely to have collisions in names/birthdays for some reason. I'm not sure and I haven't RTFA.
Sometimes, when they say it disproportionately impacts people of color, it's not necessarily that it happens more likely in those populations, but that those populations have a harder time dealing with it when it happens. Like maybe it happens equally in all populations, but minority populations have less access to challenge their de-registration, for some reason.
Also, sometimes what's really going on is that there's selective enforcement. Like maybe people can be de-registered or not, depending on the judgement of some official, and that official chooses to de-register minorities more often than white people. That's what used to happen with literacy tests, and that's what still happens with some photo-ID requirements. Poll workers are allowed to use their own judgement as to whether to enforce the requirement, and the poll workers enforce it more often among minorities.
Also, how is "same name and birthdate" considered to be "vague criteria"?
Again, I haven't RTFA, but there are two obvious possibilities: (1) Maybe there are other criteria used in addition to having the same name and birthdate, and those criteria are vague; or (2) Maybe they don't actually mean that the criteria are vague, but that the criteria used leave it vague as to whether the person should be de-registered.
This was the first thing that popped into my mind...what magical object must I always have available that isn't susceptible to being lost or stolen? And the answer is....nothing.
I can see a bunch of problems with this idea, but I don't think what you're saying is a serious problem. Any authentication method that's "something you have" has the danger of being lost or stolen. I carry my keys, wallet, and cell phone with me everywhere, and I've never had any of those things get lost or stolen. Admittedly, I may just be lucky that I never ran into a good pick-poket, but still, those things don't get lost or stolen every day.
Also, the object could get stolen, or you could break it and it might get damaged in such a way that it no longer registered.
Plus, it's a bit conspicuous to take a picture of something, so other people are going to figure out what your token is. Once I know you're using your watch as your token, could I buy an identical watch and spoof it? Could I use a picture of your watch instead of the actual watch? Could I just use a picture of the same watch model, without having to buy an identical watch or stealthily take a picture of your watch?
Again, it's really no different than hysterical claims that Clinton must have been committing crimes because some messages were deleted from her mail server. They also had similar explanations for how the guy who deleted the emails wasn't notified in time. It's understandable how people can get swept up in these conspiracy theories, but they should stop jumping to conclusions.
It seems to be because of a new animation in the calculator app, where a button briefly fades to white when you press it. The result is that if you press an operator button (i.e., the plus sign) before the short animation finishes, the app ignores it. So, 1 + 2 + 3 accidentally gets read as 1 + 23.
It's not doing math wrong. It does a brief animation when you press a button, and it doesn't necessarily read the next button you press while the animation is happening. Therefore, if you press the calculator buttons too quickly, it won't register all the things you pressed. Based on the buttons you do press, it does the math correctly.
So if you press "1+2+3" it might miss the second "+" and register "1+23" and give you "24" as an answer.
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I agree. I still think that the iPhone SE is the "right size" for a cell phone. It also has a better design, from before Apple decided it needed round edges to everything or that camera bumps were acceptable. I wouldn't mind an updated design, maybe with less bezel and more screen, but I wish Apple would stop making their products worse.
the more mature implementations of SMTP and IMAP servers run on Linux and much more robustly
Exchange isn't just about transferring mail. It's a full groupware package, with email, calendars, contacts, and tasks. And then they may be using software that has Exchange integrations or Outlook plugins.
And just to be clear, I'm not arguing that they made the right choice. I'm just saying that throwing SMTP and IMAP onto a Linux box doesn't begin to replicate the full feature set of Exchange.
In fairness, the quality of biometric security isn't wholly dependent on the information being secret. As much as anything, it's a question of how easily the sensors can be fooled.
You say this:
I'm not too sure that a lot of people just don't realize the scale of the abuse. I've talked to people I know about online privacy and how their information is used against them. Most of those I've talked to think I'm paranoid and they could care less that their privacy is compromised.
But then you use your wife as an example:
My wife doesn't get it and doesn't care ... She can't get it through her head that the only way to reach Facebook is on the internet. She thinks it is on her phone. Physically on her phone.
I'd posit that your wife is actually a good example of my claim that people don't realize the scale of the problem. Even when they say that they don't care, the real problem is that they don't understand.
Our society doesn't give a shit about privacy.
I don't know if that's true. I think they might just not be aware of how these things work, and how much information is being gathered on them. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Granted, that's not about Facebook. Still, even when there's public information that their privacy is being violated, people still don't realize the scale of the problem.
What surprises me more is that people don't consider geolocation. Many many facebook users share their location with Facebook. It's then trivial for facebook to see that you are repeatedly in the same location at the same time as another person.
I've actually been suspicious for a while that Facebook is doing something with geolocation.
I have a Facebook account. The main reason I have it because of friends and family who expect you to have it. I look at it sometimes, but almost never post anything. A couple of years ago, Facebook got pretty aggressive in sending notifications suggesting that I "friend" people that I might know-- not like I was looking for people that I might know, but they were actively sending me notifications. At first, it gave me a bunch of people that I did in fact know, and I friended some of them and it all seemed normal.
But then, within about a month, they got even more aggressive with the notifications, and a lot of the notifications were for people that I did not know. It seemed odd to me. Of the ones that I didn't know, some of them did seem a little familiar, like maybe I'd met them before. I was looking at the profile picture for one of those suggestions, and it clicked: It was someone who worked in the same building as I do. Not the same company, or on the same floor, but it was someone I'd seen in the elevator multiple times.
I looked through the other suggestions again, and realized some lived in the same apartment building. Over the next couple of weeks, I seemed to get a lot of suggestions to be friends with people who lived or worked in areas that I frequently visited. There was a girl who worked at a coffeeshop near my office, and a guy I sometimes saw walking around my neighborhood.
I spent a while trying to figure out how it would have made the connection, and the only thing I could think of was location. There were no Facebook friends in common, and no other connection I could find. I hadn't put my work or home address into Facebook. I'm pretty sure it had to be going off the GPS, noticing that I spent a lot of time in the same location they had, and made a connection that way. I'm still convinced that must be the explanation.
What's a bit disturbing to me is that I don't use the Facebook app much, and like I said, I almost never post anything. It's possible that the couple of things that I've posted were posted at home and at work, and it made the link based on that, but I'm still left wondering when Facebook is gathering location information. Does it gather information whenever you look at Facebook, whether you post or not? Does it gather location information from your phone, even when the Facebook app isn't open?
3. why does slashdot still require me to type br / to make a new line?
What I find more frustrating, personally, is that it still makes you type out the numbers if you want to do a ordered list. It also won't put in bullets if you do an unordered list.
Yes, there is the phenomenon of the "shower thought". I think there's a scientific term for it, but I don't remember what it is and couldn't find it with a quick google. The basic phenomenon is this: When you're intensely focused on a problem, you can't figure out a solution. Then you take a break, go for a walk, take a shower, and occupy yourself with something mundane. Suddenly, a solution comes to you.
Supposedly there's some science behind it. Focusing intensely on something can actually prevent your brain from engaging in looser more lateral thinking. When you stop thinking about it, your unconscious mind continues to play with the idea, and discovers a solution while you're not consciously thinking about it.
However, I see the problem as something larger than that. People want to treat work as happening in the factor model, where each worker is expected to churn out widgets at a certain rate. If they churn out fewer widgets with more defects, they're bad workers. If they churn out more widgets with fewer defects, they're good workers. As a manager, you deal with them purely on the functional level of production, and you don't care if they're happy. You don't care if they're good, honest, smart people. There are easy metrics for their job performance, and as long as they're performing, that's all you care about.
Many jobs don't work that way. If you have a collaborative job that requires dealing with other people, then being good at collaboration might be just as important as your own productivity. If you work at a creative job, being able to spur other people to have good ideas might be just as important as having good ideas yourself. If your work in customer service, then having good interactions with customers might be the most important thing, and having good interactions is dependent (at least somewhat) on your worker being happy.
I know for myself, my job can be mentally/emotionally taxing, and I've discovered that taking certain kinds of breaks can help me be productive. For example, thinking about and writing Slashdot posts can give me a chance to recharge a bit, and lets me have those "shower thoughts". Plus, working in a technical position, I occasionally stumble across some information relevant to my job, and that's a nice little bonus. If my boss were spying on my activity right now, as I write this, they might think I'm just slacking off, but it's definitely more complicated than that.
I just don't think these kinds of monitoring and metrics make sense for most jobs. If you want to run a simple factory, you might be able to get away with dehumanizing people, but it makes more sense to have robots do that work, and robots don't mind being dehumanized. Increasingly, the jobs people do require a bit more nuanced judgement to assess performance.
Yeah, I think it's also worth mentioning that "explaining things to children" might not work the way people think it does.
I'm not sure how to explain for those who don't already know what I'm talking about, but a 5 year old isn't going to be able to understand certain kinds of things. Kids memorize things that they hear, and they try to mimic adults and say the "right thing". They'll parrot back the things they've been told, and so a lot of people think that the kids have taken in the information and understand what it means. Often, it's not the case. Kids get very focused, and are sometimes very good, at figuring out which thing you want them to say, and then saying it to get approval.
So when you explain to a child "cartoons and monsters aren't real," young children will be able to tell you, from then on, that cartoons and monsters aren't real. That doesn't mean that they understand what that means.
And honestly, a lot of adults have a hard time figuring out the difference between "real" and "not real".
I'll add a reason for why I like going into the office: While for some people, the lack of distinction between "work" and "home" leads them to do more personal tasks when they should be working, I have the opposite problem. When I work from home, I tend to work longer hours because my desk is just right there and I have more work that needs to be done.
I prefer maintaining the separation between work-life and personal-life, so that at the end of the day, I can go home and be done for the day.
That solution is simple. Fire them. Promote good workers, fire bad; same as it's always been. In my experience you can't make a bad employee good by any means.
As someone who's had a fair bit of management experience, I wish it were that simple. I'm wondering if you've actually been in a management position.
The reality is, it's hard to find good people. It's hard to find even decent people. And when you do find good workers, that doesn't mean that they're perfect workers. They're people, each one with his or her own quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. And though it's probably true that "You can't make a bad employee good by any means," it's not true that a good manager can't get an employee to perform better than they would under bad management.
And that also ignores all kinds of peripheral issues. Hiring a new employee will be much more expensive, at least in the near-term, than keeping an employee that's doing a somewhat poor but passable job. Being quick to fire people hurts morale and puts people on edge. Contrary to what you may have heard from amateur economists, having people constantly concerned about their jobs doesn't generally cause them to perform better.
So no, firing people is not a simple solution. It's trading one probably for another.
I know, right? Speaking as another Internet commentator who has no understanding of satellite design, I also assume that there must be a very low cost alternative that would work just as well. I once built a rocket using a soda bottle, baking soda, and vinegar. How hard could it be?
Yeah, honestly I think there are a couple of types of people who think that there's no reason to actually come into the office:
* Young people severely lacking in experience.
* People who have jobs that require no physical presence, and who can work without much collaboration (email and IM are generally sufficient), and assume everyone's job is like that.
For the second item, I'm sure I'll get some people yelling at me saying, "I'm a programmer, and I collaborate all day long! There are a bunch of other programmers working on my project, and we're constantly sending IMs back and forth. We even do Hangouts." Yeah, but still, the information you get from collaboration is largely that: information. You get the information you need, and then you can go on doing fairly isolated work.
There's something else that happens when you get a bunch of people in a room together, where you can read body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. A person's physical presence changes things. There are times where I'm having an IM or even phone conversation with someone, and the message just isn't getting across, and so I go and walk over to their office. The direct, face-to-face communication allows for something that just doesn't happen over phone or video chat. In person brainstorming sessions can be more productive than conference calls. It might be purely psychological, but if so, the psychological effect is real and not to be discounted.
Some jobs don't need that. A lot of jobs don't need that all the time, every day. But for some jobs, it's important that it happens.
We only need two things before most white collar people leave the crowded and expensive cities and move to the countryside
You'll need a third thing: People will have to want to move to the countryside. A lot of people don't.
The reason people are moving to cities right now isn't that they're being forced as much as, that's where the stuff is. There are places to go and things to do. Some people actually like being part of civilization, rather than retreating to a cabin in the middle of nowhere.
Great. Disregard any security measures that don't offer perfect security. See how far that gets you.
Sure, it's a problem, but that doesn't mean it's a disqualifying problem. People lose their keys sometimes, but that doesn't lead us to say, "Well we can't use keys anymore!" People's wallets gat stolen sometimes, but they're still generally a decent solution to a problem. People forget passwords, passwords get compromised, but we still use them.
There are going to be problems and flaws with every security scheme, but the purpose of security is not to be perfect. If you set out to create a security scheme that always 100% provides authorized users with access while always 100% denying access to unauthorized attackers, you're going to fail. The point is to balance "ease of access by authorized users" against "making unauthorized access difficult and dangerous". And that balance needs to be determined by the danger of security being compromised, which is to say that it might be appropriate to force someone with clearance to jump through a bunch of hoops to view a top-secret document, but I probably shouldn't have to jump through as many hoops to access my own MP3 collection.
So yes, "something you have" can be lost or stolen, but that's ok. You just need to make sure you can get a new copy of the "something you have" and revoke authorization from the one that was lost. For systems that needs a high level of security, you might want to have additional factors for authentication (e.g. biometrics and/or passwords).
In fairness, it's much easier to remember one password for your password manager than 150 unique strong passwords, so IT would be getting fewer calls. Plus, a big part of the problem is that people won't remember hundreds of unique passwords, so they instead reuse passwords, which is one of the major ways that accounts get compromised.
I'm not saying that this isn't an advertisement in disguise, but they're not wrong.
those things don't get lost or stolen every day.
Yes, they do.
My point is, it doesn't happen to any particular person every day. If you're losing your wallet and keys every day, then you're going to have all sorts of problems.
Oh, if so, that's still not really a fair criticism. I owned that phone. It made phone calls just fine. I get that some people had some problems with it, but it was definitely blown out of proportion, and it was not at all a "smartphone which couldn't make phone calls".
Can someone please explain to me how "people of color" are more likely to have the same name and birthdate as people in other states?
There might be various reasons. Maybe people of color are more likely to have collisions in names/birthdays for some reason. I'm not sure and I haven't RTFA.
Sometimes, when they say it disproportionately impacts people of color, it's not necessarily that it happens more likely in those populations, but that those populations have a harder time dealing with it when it happens. Like maybe it happens equally in all populations, but minority populations have less access to challenge their de-registration, for some reason.
Also, sometimes what's really going on is that there's selective enforcement. Like maybe people can be de-registered or not, depending on the judgement of some official, and that official chooses to de-register minorities more often than white people. That's what used to happen with literacy tests, and that's what still happens with some photo-ID requirements. Poll workers are allowed to use their own judgement as to whether to enforce the requirement, and the poll workers enforce it more often among minorities.
Also, how is "same name and birthdate" considered to be "vague criteria"?
Again, I haven't RTFA, but there are two obvious possibilities: (1) Maybe there are other criteria used in addition to having the same name and birthdate, and those criteria are vague; or (2) Maybe they don't actually mean that the criteria are vague, but that the criteria used leave it vague as to whether the person should be de-registered.
This was the first thing that popped into my mind...what magical object must I always have available that isn't susceptible to being lost or stolen? And the answer is ....nothing.
I can see a bunch of problems with this idea, but I don't think what you're saying is a serious problem. Any authentication method that's "something you have" has the danger of being lost or stolen. I carry my keys, wallet, and cell phone with me everywhere, and I've never had any of those things get lost or stolen. Admittedly, I may just be lucky that I never ran into a good pick-poket, but still, those things don't get lost or stolen every day.
Also, the object could get stolen, or you could break it and it might get damaged in such a way that it no longer registered.
Plus, it's a bit conspicuous to take a picture of something, so other people are going to figure out what your token is. Once I know you're using your watch as your token, could I buy an identical watch and spoof it? Could I use a picture of your watch instead of the actual watch? Could I just use a picture of the same watch model, without having to buy an identical watch or stealthily take a picture of your watch?
Typical Apple. Form over function.
It's a bug. A stupid bug, but I'm sure it wasn't intentional and that they'll fix it.
They already made smartphones which couldn't make phone calls
I'm not sure what this is referring to. The iPod touch? If so, that's not really a fair criticism. It's not meant to be a smartphone.
Again, it's really no different than hysterical claims that Clinton must have been committing crimes because some messages were deleted from her mail server. They also had similar explanations for how the guy who deleted the emails wasn't notified in time. It's understandable how people can get swept up in these conspiracy theories, but they should stop jumping to conclusions.
How does this happen?
It explains how it happened in the summary:
It seems to be because of a new animation in the calculator app, where a button briefly fades to white when you press it. The result is that if you press an operator button (i.e., the plus sign) before the short animation finishes, the app ignores it. So, 1 + 2 + 3 accidentally gets read as 1 + 23.
It's not doing math wrong. It does a brief animation when you press a button, and it doesn't necessarily read the next button you press while the animation is happening. Therefore, if you press the calculator buttons too quickly, it won't register all the things you pressed. Based on the buttons you do press, it does the math correctly.
So if you press "1+2+3" it might miss the second "+" and register "1+23" and give you "24" as an answer.