Because we live in urban areas where panhandlers are a daily occurrence. A generous welfare state smooths out the most dire cases, and makes it easier to ignore the beggars. It also makes it less likely that a group of them will get together and kill you for the contents of your wallet.
We'd rather pay the state to take care of the homeless than do it ourselves (or pay bible bashers to do it).
I went to Vegas once, hated it. Too many kids. too many ads directed at cis males. Too many beggars. Too many people trying to hand you cards for various bullshit. They didn't have Uber back then, the taxis sucked, and walking was impossible because the Strip is "automotive scale". (and the monorail is very slow)
However, given that this might now start happening at other hotels: - I'm getting a couple of those door wedges with alarms - I might actually try the 'cover the card reader with a message stating you don't consent' thing. Though I usually prefer hotels that have switched to the RFID cards, my phone and wallet tend to demagnetize the old swipe cards. - I'd like someone to start selling a security camera with built-in LTE. A portable, self-contained unit would be perfect. It won't use much data if it only uploads when it detects motion. I'm willing to pay $200-300, maybe as much as $400.
Did you see that IP-based location is flat out wrong for me? It's off by about 700 miles as the crow flies. I'm not using a VPN, GeoIP data is just wrong for my ISP, and a lot of other residential ISPs. It might be good enough for rough statistics, but it's not accurate enough for an alert system.
Making the assumption that you're watching Netflix on a mobile device is a bit strange - there's already an alert system for cell phones.
If you're watching in a browser, the next frontier for ad blockers will be blocking government alerts. If Netflix burns the alert into the video stream, there will be a Chrome extension to fake your location.
The current alert systems are tower-based. A particular set of towers are told to transmit the alert and that determines the area it covers.
Netflix doesn't know where I am. My IP appears to be near Seattle instead of San Francisco (my ISP is small and happens to be based in Seattle). My Apple TV doesn't have a GPS chip AFAIK. I pay for Netflix through iTunes so Netflix also doesn't have a billing address. I don't use Spotify.
So what are they going to do? Ask for my Zip code so I can receive alerts?
It's time to start making voter registration information private. Political parties and candidates aren't using the data to build convincing, well-meaning campaigns. They're just trying shout empty slogans louder than the other guy. My "representative", Nancy Pelosi, just uses the data to spam people using government-owned servers, complete with fake unsubscribe links.
Soon data brokers will get in on this and set up fake campaigns just to grab the voter records from the source and sell them to the IRS scammers.
Public image is everything for a bank like Wells Fargo. They allowed a cancer to grow in the most visible section of their business.
They had 3 options: 1. Close their retail business and pivot to working only with high-value clients, drastically reducing their public image.
2. Do everything they can to ensure that every single employee that opened an account fraudulently, and their managers, are prosecuted to the fullest extent. At minimum every single one of them should have received lifetime bans from the financial industry. Instead of just firing some executives, they should have acted as if Wells Fargo was a victim of these criminals, and done whatever they could prosecute and recover damages from the criminals (including turning evidence over to AGs). It's worth noting that WF also filed fraudulent U5 documents against former employees who objected or refused to participate in the fraud. The people who wrote and signed off on those documents should have likewise been terminated for cause, and the "new" WF should have helped those affected file defamation suits.
3. Clean out the executives, send everyone to "training", and wait for people to forget that they're basically still a criminal organization.
If WF is/was really 95% good with 5% of the employees being bad apples, they would have gone with option 2. Going with option 3 means that, as a corporation, they don't see that what they did was wrong.
Personally, I'm still hoping that Wells Fargo gets caught violating their deferred prosecution agreement (I guarantee you they're already violating it), and ends up getting dismantled by the courts.
Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Erase Data [toggle]
Description: "Erase all data on this iPhone after 10 failed passcode attempts"
WTF are you talking about? My iPad had this setting disabled, and somehow got into a state where it wouldn't accept the passcode while charging over lightning (thus resulting in many 'failed passcode attempts'). It eventually locked me out for an hour after multiple failed attempts, but it never erased the device. The lock-out is temporary, no data was lost.
Oh, and backup isn't a paid service. My iPhone and iPad are both backed up to iCloud, and (combined) they're using less than 1GB of the free 5GB plan. If you really want a full backup of the phone (including the binaries of the apps), then you have to backup to a computer using iTunes, also free.
I do wish iOS had the capability to backup directly to a NAS (with encryption) like Time Machine, but I doubt Android has that capability either.
It can accelerate from 55 to 100 faster than a container lorry can merge into a lane. The deceleration happened after I was in front of the lorry (there was plenty of space ahead of it)
Situation: - You're going 55 (the speed limit, or maybe slightly faster) in the middle lane - A container lorry (18 wheeler) alongside you begins merging into your lane without checking their mirrors (you can see the driver in their mirrors) at 50 mph (5 mph over the legal limit for large trucks on this highway). The road has a minimum speed limit of 40.
The cars ahead of you in the middle lane just merged into other lanes, leaving space ahead of you. Other cars are merging into your lane behind you.
Given the speed differential, it will take roughly 3 seconds at current speed for you to pass the truck. It will collide with you before that happens.
Do you: A) Slam on the brakes, attempting to come to a complete stop on a highway to avoid the collision, and probably causing a multi-car collision or B) Punch the accelerator, taking you to 100mph for a few seconds, allowing you to clear the truck before decelerating to legal speed again
I was damn glad my car wasn't limited to 65mph that day.
What if you charge a $10 (or 10 euro) "cover charge" on nights when games are being shown? What if the league has a payment tier for home users and a higher tier for bars that want to show their games?
How about if the bar is streaming the game from a "pirate" site and isn't even paying what a normal cable subscriber would pay for access to the live game?
Granted, I think it's absolutely ridiculous to expect people to spy for you, especially if you're burning their battery power to do it, but sports leagues can put whatever stupid restrictions they want on their broadcasts. Maybe they'll make it illegal to watch the games at all and rioting will be reduced.
He's talking to the wrong people. Technology companies aren't equipped to verify the identities of billions of people all over the world. If governments are willing to issue digitally-verifiable IDs that they'll back with their own laws, then the problem space would be reduced.
If Digital IDs were available, tech companies wouldn't have to require them. Just make them optional, and give people the ability to filter out messages from anyone who isn't IDd. I doubt it would take long for users to choose to filter out anonymous users.
If you think that goes against the "ideals" of the internet, remember that people have been using the internet to filter their view of the world for as long as it has existed.
I believe you can still do a full reset of the device by connecting it to iTunes in recovery mode. This doesn't allow you to access anything stored on the device, but you can erase everything on the phone. Of course, activation lock still prevents it from being activated again unless you have access to the Apple ID previously used on the phone.
If it's during work hours, I've got things I'm trying to accomplish, too. A phone call takes much longer than an e-mail. I could answer 2-3 e-mails in the time a call takes. If I let the one idiot who calls instead of e-mailing through, I'm punishing the others who now have to wait longer. I've found generally that phone calls don't come people doing productive work, they come from marketing/sales types that want to create a sense of "urgency" and don't want to communicate on the record.
If a business asks for my phone number, I usually give them 000-000-0000 (or 911-911-9111 to see if their system is dumb enough to dial 911). If I'm talking to a real person and they want my number, I give them a stern warning that calling me will lose my business immediately. In the last five years, I haven't had a case where a business had a legitimate reason to call me unless it was for a delivery or a prescheduled call.
As for calling a business, I only call as an absolute last resort. I e-mail their support. If it's a dispute over a transaction, a service not working properly, etc. it doesn't have to be solved in the next hour, it can wait a couple of days if needed. The only problem is when the support drones don't read the e-mail and simply reply with boilerplate.
It's election season in California right now, so most of the calls are political robocalls. They're dumb enough to leave a message, so I'm keeping a list of politicians that robocall me, to ensure I never vote for them. In the case of robocalls about referendums, I note the name of the charity/business that paid for the call to ensure they never receive my money. This year, the American Heart Association and American Lung Association went on the list.
I don't blame them. I've been working on a project that uses WebCrypto, and the bugs there are just unacceptable. It can't export PKCS8 ECDSA keys (though you'd never guess from the useless error messages). Even worse, exporting an ECDSA key to spki format, it uses the wrong OID. I ended up writing custom JavaScript to generate the binary formats, not difficult when you're already generating X.509 certificates, but complicated if you're trying to use WebCrypto to improve security on a normal app. Debugging is far more difficult on Firefox because the debugger does not seem to work properly.
The first issue has been pending for 3 years. The other has been pending for 8 months. Neither bug is documented in MDN. Both operations work perfectly in Chrome and Safari. Things just don't get fixed in Firefox. I don't blame a complex app like Discord for not supporting it properly.
A couple of years ago I was thinking about how payphones had gone the way of the dodo, then I realized there was one right in front of me. They're in most BART stations. They seem to be less than 20 years old, and in working order, though I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually use one. I can't imagine who's actually paying to maintain them.
I live in SF now and I don't have a car, but when self-driving cars are available I'll want one, not for driving around SF but for driving out to areas where public transit is scarce, like Napa or Yosemite (or LA). Under Uber/Lyft's proposal, I wouldn't be allowed to own such a car because I live in the city. As a Lyft customer, this pisses me off to no end.
Frankly, I don't see why someone living in Fremont should be allowed to own a car if I can't.
It's not immoral for investors in a bankrupt company to lose their investment. It doesn't matter if the company went bankrupt due to lack of sales, civil judgements, or criminal penalties. If the investors want to seek damages they can sue the board members, executives, and managers who oversaw the criminal activities.
Credit Unions are fine, too. So long as they don't act like the big banks. I've seen CUs with ridiculously high overdraft fees (and pushy attempts to get people to opt-in to "overdraft protection service"), for instance. I dealt with one CU that I considered opening an HSA at, they dropped the ball repeatedly and even misrepresented their services (I wanted an HSA that wouldn't require faxing/mailing a form for each deposit).
I'm sure there are plenty of good CUs out there, but I think people do put too much faith in the idea of a credit union. When you look at their actual fees, policies, and service, they're not always as good as they should be.
That being said, my primary "bank" account is an FDIC insured sweep at a brokerage firm with free checks, free ATM access (any ATM), and no fees.
When banks merge, they're sometimes forced to transfer some of their customers to other banks. Take all of Wells Fargo's customer accounts and do that, parcel them off to other banks. Sell off the assets and loans to other banks. Take the proceeds, and any remaining liabilities and put them in a government owned "bad bank" to close out Wells Fargo's business.
Take the bank records and hand them to the justice department and state AGs, have them start combing through for fraudulently opened accounts, find the bankers who opened the accounts and charge them with fraud and identity theft. Sure, the executives and managers are responsible (and should be charged and imprisoned) for creating a criminal environment and doing nothing to stop it, even encouraging it - but the individual bankers are still responsible for fraud and should be held accountable with prison time.
Finally - nothing for the investors, they invested in a criminal organization, they voted for a criminal board, and so they get nothing. All Wells Fargo stock is cancelled. All assets and proceeds from sales go to the aforementioned "bad bank".
It's all doable, it's all possible. For my money, Wells Fargo will try to somehow weasel out of this penalty. First they'll try to get a Fed chairman appointed who will drop the penalty. Then, when that doesn't work, they'll try to hide assets and continued criminality in shell companies and subsidiaries. In about a year when that comes to light, maybe we'll finally see a big bank go down.
In the meantime, if you're trusting your money to Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, HSBC, Citibank, or any of the other big banks, stop. Go find a bank that won't charge you a monthly fee, won't charge $35 for an overdraft, and isn't trying to defraud you. They're out there, they're not difficult to find.
Agreed, if the U.S. government had been informed first, they might have shown up with NSLs and forced Intel et al to keep the exploit under wraps for years while the NSA exploited it.
Don't forget, the US Government needs to be considered an adversary in all security analyses. You don't tell a well-funded adversary about security exploits before you tell the public.
First of all, if npm is having a lot of issues with package deletion, they need a "staging" repo and a promotion policy, to protect the production repo from breaking changes.
Also, as is industry practice with maven central, it sounds like any company using npm needs to run their own caching mirror, to keep permanent copies of the artifacts your company is using. Unfortunately, I don't think npm's support for private mirrors is as good as maven's.
Google's AMP breaks a central rule - it breaks the back button completely. Also, on Safari on iOS, it prompts you to enable location services every. single. time. Google is not a shining example at mobile web experiences. I absolutely hate AMP and I always avoid results with that lightning bolt.
It's actually quite easy to hide criminal activity conducted through a tiny, concealed, "burner" phone that can't be traced to you and can be quickly disposed of. I understand your argument about how isolation from society makes re-integration more difficult (and thus probably increases recidivism), but there is a strong need to prevent criminal activity as well.
The solution is probably prison-provided internet access with strong monitoring (i.e. a proxy that logs sites, blocks access to restricted sites, and VNC running showing everyone's screen at a central guard station). To make that work, you still need to make sure unauthorized cell phones aren't making it into prisons.
It sounds like these phones also have a semi-legitimate purpose - allowing people to use phones at workplaces that try to ban them. Of course, there's probably also people that want these phones just for the novelty of it, but that's probably not a big enough market to make manufacture worthwhile.
I doubt the EU actually try to ban these phones, prisons will probably have to come up with a more technical solution - like using something similar to Stingrays to essentially MITM the cell network.
Slashdot Mirror
Because we live in urban areas where panhandlers are a daily occurrence. A generous welfare state smooths out the most dire cases, and makes it easier to ignore the beggars. It also makes it less likely that a group of them will get together and kill you for the contents of your wallet.
We'd rather pay the state to take care of the homeless than do it ourselves (or pay bible bashers to do it).
I went to Vegas once, hated it. Too many kids. too many ads directed at cis males. Too many beggars. Too many people trying to hand you cards for various bullshit. They didn't have Uber back then, the taxis sucked, and walking was impossible because the Strip is "automotive scale". (and the monorail is very slow)
However, given that this might now start happening at other hotels:
- I'm getting a couple of those door wedges with alarms
- I might actually try the 'cover the card reader with a message stating you don't consent' thing. Though I usually prefer hotels that have switched to the RFID cards, my phone and wallet tend to demagnetize the old swipe cards.
- I'd like someone to start selling a security camera with built-in LTE. A portable, self-contained unit would be perfect. It won't use much data if it only uploads when it detects motion. I'm willing to pay $200-300, maybe as much as $400.
The New York State Court of Appeals
Did you see that IP-based location is flat out wrong for me? It's off by about 700 miles as the crow flies. I'm not using a VPN, GeoIP data is just wrong for my ISP, and a lot of other residential ISPs. It might be good enough for rough statistics, but it's not accurate enough for an alert system.
Making the assumption that you're watching Netflix on a mobile device is a bit strange - there's already an alert system for cell phones.
If you're watching in a browser, the next frontier for ad blockers will be blocking government alerts. If Netflix burns the alert into the video stream, there will be a Chrome extension to fake your location.
The current alert systems are tower-based. A particular set of towers are told to transmit the alert and that determines the area it covers.
Netflix doesn't know where I am. My IP appears to be near Seattle instead of San Francisco (my ISP is small and happens to be based in Seattle). My Apple TV doesn't have a GPS chip AFAIK. I pay for Netflix through iTunes so Netflix also doesn't have a billing address. I don't use Spotify.
So what are they going to do? Ask for my Zip code so I can receive alerts?
What's the Zip of that town that has 1 resident?
It's time to start making voter registration information private. Political parties and candidates aren't using the data to build convincing, well-meaning campaigns. They're just trying shout empty slogans louder than the other guy. My "representative", Nancy Pelosi, just uses the data to spam people using government-owned servers, complete with fake unsubscribe links.
Soon data brokers will get in on this and set up fake campaigns just to grab the voter records from the source and sell them to the IRS scammers.
Public image is everything for a bank like Wells Fargo. They allowed a cancer to grow in the most visible section of their business.
They had 3 options:
1. Close their retail business and pivot to working only with high-value clients, drastically reducing their public image.
2. Do everything they can to ensure that every single employee that opened an account fraudulently, and their managers, are prosecuted to the fullest extent. At minimum every single one of them should have received lifetime bans from the financial industry. Instead of just firing some executives, they should have acted as if Wells Fargo was a victim of these criminals, and done whatever they could prosecute and recover damages from the criminals (including turning evidence over to AGs). It's worth noting that WF also filed fraudulent U5 documents against former employees who objected or refused to participate in the fraud. The people who wrote and signed off on those documents should have likewise been terminated for cause, and the "new" WF should have helped those affected file defamation suits.
3. Clean out the executives, send everyone to "training", and wait for people to forget that they're basically still a criminal organization.
If WF is/was really 95% good with 5% of the employees being bad apples, they would have gone with option 2. Going with option 3 means that, as a corporation, they don't see that what they did was wrong.
Personally, I'm still hoping that Wells Fargo gets caught violating their deferred prosecution agreement (I guarantee you they're already violating it), and ends up getting dismantled by the courts.
Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Erase Data [toggle]
Description: "Erase all data on this iPhone after 10 failed passcode attempts"
WTF are you talking about? My iPad had this setting disabled, and somehow got into a state where it wouldn't accept the passcode while charging over lightning (thus resulting in many 'failed passcode attempts'). It eventually locked me out for an hour after multiple failed attempts, but it never erased the device. The lock-out is temporary, no data was lost.
Oh, and backup isn't a paid service. My iPhone and iPad are both backed up to iCloud, and (combined) they're using less than 1GB of the free 5GB plan. If you really want a full backup of the phone (including the binaries of the apps), then you have to backup to a computer using iTunes, also free.
I do wish iOS had the capability to backup directly to a NAS (with encryption) like Time Machine, but I doubt Android has that capability either.
It can accelerate from 55 to 100 faster than a container lorry can merge into a lane. The deceleration happened after I was in front of the lorry (there was plenty of space ahead of it)
Situation:
- You're going 55 (the speed limit, or maybe slightly faster) in the middle lane
- A container lorry (18 wheeler) alongside you begins merging into your lane without checking their mirrors (you can see the driver in their mirrors) at 50 mph (5 mph over the legal limit for large trucks on this highway). The road has a minimum speed limit of 40.
The cars ahead of you in the middle lane just merged into other lanes, leaving space ahead of you. Other cars are merging into your lane behind you.
Given the speed differential, it will take roughly 3 seconds at current speed for you to pass the truck. It will collide with you before that happens.
Do you:
A) Slam on the brakes, attempting to come to a complete stop on a highway to avoid the collision, and probably causing a multi-car collision
or
B) Punch the accelerator, taking you to 100mph for a few seconds, allowing you to clear the truck before decelerating to legal speed again
I was damn glad my car wasn't limited to 65mph that day.
What if you charge a $10 (or 10 euro) "cover charge" on nights when games are being shown? What if the league has a payment tier for home users and a higher tier for bars that want to show their games?
How about if the bar is streaming the game from a "pirate" site and isn't even paying what a normal cable subscriber would pay for access to the live game?
Granted, I think it's absolutely ridiculous to expect people to spy for you, especially if you're burning their battery power to do it, but sports leagues can put whatever stupid restrictions they want on their broadcasts. Maybe they'll make it illegal to watch the games at all and rioting will be reduced.
He's talking to the wrong people. Technology companies aren't equipped to verify the identities of billions of people all over the world. If governments are willing to issue digitally-verifiable IDs that they'll back with their own laws, then the problem space would be reduced.
If Digital IDs were available, tech companies wouldn't have to require them. Just make them optional, and give people the ability to filter out messages from anyone who isn't IDd. I doubt it would take long for users to choose to filter out anonymous users.
If you think that goes against the "ideals" of the internet, remember that people have been using the internet to filter their view of the world for as long as it has existed.
I believe you can still do a full reset of the device by connecting it to iTunes in recovery mode. This doesn't allow you to access anything stored on the device, but you can erase everything on the phone. Of course, activation lock still prevents it from being activated again unless you have access to the Apple ID previously used on the phone.
If it's during work hours, I've got things I'm trying to accomplish, too. A phone call takes much longer than an e-mail. I could answer 2-3 e-mails in the time a call takes. If I let the one idiot who calls instead of e-mailing through, I'm punishing the others who now have to wait longer. I've found generally that phone calls don't come people doing productive work, they come from marketing/sales types that want to create a sense of "urgency" and don't want to communicate on the record.
If a business asks for my phone number, I usually give them 000-000-0000 (or 911-911-9111 to see if their system is dumb enough to dial 911). If I'm talking to a real person and they want my number, I give them a stern warning that calling me will lose my business immediately. In the last five years, I haven't had a case where a business had a legitimate reason to call me unless it was for a delivery or a prescheduled call.
As for calling a business, I only call as an absolute last resort. I e-mail their support. If it's a dispute over a transaction, a service not working properly, etc. it doesn't have to be solved in the next hour, it can wait a couple of days if needed. The only problem is when the support drones don't read the e-mail and simply reply with boilerplate.
It's election season in California right now, so most of the calls are political robocalls. They're dumb enough to leave a message, so I'm keeping a list of politicians that robocall me, to ensure I never vote for them. In the case of robocalls about referendums, I note the name of the charity/business that paid for the call to ensure they never receive my money. This year, the American Heart Association and American Lung Association went on the list.
I don't blame them. I've been working on a project that uses WebCrypto, and the bugs there are just unacceptable. It can't export PKCS8 ECDSA keys (though you'd never guess from the useless error messages). Even worse, exporting an ECDSA key to spki format, it uses the wrong OID. I ended up writing custom JavaScript to generate the binary formats, not difficult when you're already generating X.509 certificates, but complicated if you're trying to use WebCrypto to improve security on a normal app. Debugging is far more difficult on Firefox because the debugger does not seem to work properly.
The first issue has been pending for 3 years. The other has been pending for 8 months. Neither bug is documented in MDN. Both operations work perfectly in Chrome and Safari. Things just don't get fixed in Firefox. I don't blame a complex app like Discord for not supporting it properly.
References:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410403
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1133698
A couple of years ago I was thinking about how payphones had gone the way of the dodo, then I realized there was one right in front of me. They're in most BART stations. They seem to be less than 20 years old, and in working order, though I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually use one. I can't imagine who's actually paying to maintain them.
I live in SF now and I don't have a car, but when self-driving cars are available I'll want one, not for driving around SF but for driving out to areas where public transit is scarce, like Napa or Yosemite (or LA). Under Uber/Lyft's proposal, I wouldn't be allowed to own such a car because I live in the city. As a Lyft customer, this pisses me off to no end.
Frankly, I don't see why someone living in Fremont should be allowed to own a car if I can't.
It's not immoral for investors in a bankrupt company to lose their investment. It doesn't matter if the company went bankrupt due to lack of sales, civil judgements, or criminal penalties. If the investors want to seek damages they can sue the board members, executives, and managers who oversaw the criminal activities.
Credit Unions are fine, too. So long as they don't act like the big banks. I've seen CUs with ridiculously high overdraft fees (and pushy attempts to get people to opt-in to "overdraft protection service"), for instance. I dealt with one CU that I considered opening an HSA at, they dropped the ball repeatedly and even misrepresented their services (I wanted an HSA that wouldn't require faxing/mailing a form for each deposit).
I'm sure there are plenty of good CUs out there, but I think people do put too much faith in the idea of a credit union. When you look at their actual fees, policies, and service, they're not always as good as they should be.
That being said, my primary "bank" account is an FDIC insured sweep at a brokerage firm with free checks, free ATM access (any ATM), and no fees.
Bullshit. Revoke their charter.
When banks merge, they're sometimes forced to transfer some of their customers to other banks. Take all of Wells Fargo's customer accounts and do that, parcel them off to other banks. Sell off the assets and loans to other banks. Take the proceeds, and any remaining liabilities and put them in a government owned "bad bank" to close out Wells Fargo's business.
Take the bank records and hand them to the justice department and state AGs, have them start combing through for fraudulently opened accounts, find the bankers who opened the accounts and charge them with fraud and identity theft. Sure, the executives and managers are responsible (and should be charged and imprisoned) for creating a criminal environment and doing nothing to stop it, even encouraging it - but the individual bankers are still responsible for fraud and should be held accountable with prison time.
Finally - nothing for the investors, they invested in a criminal organization, they voted for a criminal board, and so they get nothing. All Wells Fargo stock is cancelled. All assets and proceeds from sales go to the aforementioned "bad bank".
It's all doable, it's all possible. For my money, Wells Fargo will try to somehow weasel out of this penalty. First they'll try to get a Fed chairman appointed who will drop the penalty. Then, when that doesn't work, they'll try to hide assets and continued criminality in shell companies and subsidiaries. In about a year when that comes to light, maybe we'll finally see a big bank go down.
In the meantime, if you're trusting your money to Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, HSBC, Citibank, or any of the other big banks, stop. Go find a bank that won't charge you a monthly fee, won't charge $35 for an overdraft, and isn't trying to defraud you. They're out there, they're not difficult to find.
Agreed, if the U.S. government had been informed first, they might have shown up with NSLs and forced Intel et al to keep the exploit under wraps for years while the NSA exploited it.
Don't forget, the US Government needs to be considered an adversary in all security analyses. You don't tell a well-funded adversary about security exploits before you tell the public.
First of all, if npm is having a lot of issues with package deletion, they need a "staging" repo and a promotion policy, to protect the production repo from breaking changes.
Also, as is industry practice with maven central, it sounds like any company using npm needs to run their own caching mirror, to keep permanent copies of the artifacts your company is using. Unfortunately, I don't think npm's support for private mirrors is as good as maven's.
Anyone know of a good solution to this?
No, that sounds like a different issue.
Google's AMP breaks a central rule - it breaks the back button completely. Also, on Safari on iOS, it prompts you to enable location services every. single. time. Google is not a shining example at mobile web experiences. I absolutely hate AMP and I always avoid results with that lightning bolt.
It's actually quite easy to hide criminal activity conducted through a tiny, concealed, "burner" phone that can't be traced to you and can be quickly disposed of. I understand your argument about how isolation from society makes re-integration more difficult (and thus probably increases recidivism), but there is a strong need to prevent criminal activity as well.
The solution is probably prison-provided internet access with strong monitoring (i.e. a proxy that logs sites, blocks access to restricted sites, and VNC running showing everyone's screen at a central guard station). To make that work, you still need to make sure unauthorized cell phones aren't making it into prisons.
It sounds like these phones also have a semi-legitimate purpose - allowing people to use phones at workplaces that try to ban them. Of course, there's probably also people that want these phones just for the novelty of it, but that's probably not a big enough market to make manufacture worthwhile.
I doubt the EU actually try to ban these phones, prisons will probably have to come up with a more technical solution - like using something similar to Stingrays to essentially MITM the cell network.