"Let's just be clear here, what are you saying, that when you lease allowance to use their servers, they have permission to do whatever they want to your local machine and define what software you can and can't run on it?" Yup.
It's called access control. No they can't take over use of your machine "without permission" but they can mandate patch level, security settings, limitation of other apps that integrate with their systems or cause load on their servers.
A person is reasonably expected to be capable of a max number of online hours (as an average). The monthe fee is based on that basis. The bot apps allow user to be online VAST amounts more time in a day than is typically otherwise possible, causing them additional loads and typing up resources for real people.
It also sets those without the knowledge to use those bots at a significant disadvantage to those who do, people who as part of their use fees expect to play in a relatively fair and balanced world for their money.
I think this is open and shut. This is essentially a subscription service running on remote systems. Your app, if you want to even argue it;s yours, is only a portion of the code, not a wholly owned app (you don't launch your copy on their servers, they launch their code and allow the app you bought to connect). Without your continuing subscription (or even a free use agreement if it ever goes Free-to-play, not likely), the app you bought is simply nothing more than an activation fee...
They have every right to maintain balance and fairness for the Masses playing, and base availability on predictable numbers. I'd perhaps be OK if, for example only, they said an average player is estimated at 20 hours per week, but a bot runner is estimated at 40, and thus charge a "premium rate" equal to double the base rate to be able to use a bot... but then also limit PvP for bot players only to other players that also used a bot for their game, since I'd really care less as an average player.
You agreed to a contract to play online. It's a subscription. They absolutely can control the access rules.
I worked in the DR industry for years, and supperted DR syystems as a consultant for hundreds of different clients for a decade. I've done thousands of restores on dozens of tape technologies.
yes, newer tape systems are more resilient. however, the tape itself is not. magnetic metal media exposed to the open air in a cartridge can not possible be as stable as a hermetically sealed drive system in a disk.
tape mis-alignment due to sagging spindles (where the tape in the spool slides against itself due to vibration, and creates a conical shape inside of the drive instead of a flat real, later when read, or even just retention ed, can cause the tape to rub against the inside of the cartridge and heat, causing data loss.
A tape itself, without heads, may technically be capable of surviving more Gs of force in a drop (though the plastic corners, not to much), but a disk drive can easily survive a drop from the server to the floor if you're not careful and drop it. In a caddy in a shipping case, we've thrown them from 5th story windows to concrete, repeatedly, and had no issues. We've even frozen a drive in a block of ice and read from it (still frozen!). In a fire safe, a HDDs control board will melt away, but the spindles inside the drive chassis will be fine beyond 250 degrees and the disk can be rebuilt and read fine, but a tape will simply melt, even inside a fire safe (which are only designed to keep internal temperatures below the combustion point of paper, a "media safe" is a whole different thing, and VERY expensive).
HDDs are fast, have parity across disk sets, don;t require expensive robotics and drive heads, and run on common (not arcane, ancient SCSI protocols like MTX), and have better longevity. Disks can alsdo be reused hundreds of times, a tape 10-20 if you;re lucky.
Many of my clients use disk for the rotational and daily backups, as well as the local and remote archive live copies (so restores are from in-house disk, and only archives are offsite, saving time). Long term archives are often to tape still as it CAN be cheaper, but I'd only trust it in weather controlled facilities.
The last firm i worked for shipped over 15,000 hard drives to be used for D2D backup. Drives do fail occasionally, and they're warranty replaced on a regular basis, but never in the 3.5 year history of working for them had a single backup not been recoverable, aside 1 we suspected was due to a backup not having been truly complete when the disk was removed (user did not run the command to spin down the SATA slot, they just pulled the drive).
Boards, controllers, that has nothing to do with data loss from archives, that would only cause the active JOB to fail. Fix the issue and run it again. When a tape drive fails, it costs thousands to replace (if you can get a compatible model). When an array controller fails, they're $500...
I was a skeptic for D2D when i heard about it in 2001. After working for a firm for years that worked with it, I've never looked back. My current employer has a massive IBM infrastructure, almost all tape, more than 20,000 tapes in storage. no way is that going away, there's legal hold data we simple have to keep, and thousands of terrabytes in archive we could not afford to migrate to disk (nor do we have time). However, we're addding D2D capacity to TSM constantly, and in a year if we're lucky, won't be using tape at all anymore. They think that will save us about 500K a year, and provide for near instant restores of files (current recovery of a single file can take 12-36 hours depending on where it comes from) That migration started before i got here, and I've kept silent on my opinion siting conflict of interest (I'm in a position to make purchase decisions, and my former employer is a bidder, so I abstain from comment entirely).
Red flag rules as well as HIPAA and PCI regulations do leave the doctor responsible for accurate billing practices, the intermediary is only a billing agent that handles transactions. Pissed off customers ARE likely to leave a doctor with an ineffective billing agent. Insurance issues are still handled first party by the doctor, not through the intermediary (the bill can only be sent to a customer after the HIPAA statement is generated and returned to the doctor clarifying coverage. In the end, you have rights, and guaranteed protections, and improper billing practices come with STIFF penalties for both the billing agency, the doctor, and the insurance company.
Now a "collections" agency is a different matter altogether...
I've also been in a 2.5 year fight over a bill for child birth with the insurance company. The doctor's bills are in order, as is the intermediary's bills to me, the only issue is the INSURANCE company not doing the math right, claiming things common to child birth are not covered, miscalculating my out-of-pocket maximum, and more. This has NOTHING to do with the doctor's correct belief that the insurance company paid X, I thus owe Y.
I do agree, the iPhone needs a more impressive lock screen notification system, notification aggregation, and a good home screen. They're reportedly working on that, and they've taken a step forward on notifications. Keep in mind, 2 years ago, there were no apps, and 18 months ago, no notifications. The OS was never intended to do that,so they've got a lot more back end work to do to make it seamless while also not breaking other apps. the OS constantly moves forward, with regular interval, and for little issue with older devices (though the 2G is getting very little of OS 4 at all, it is getting SOME features).
We'll see improvement here over the next year. Android added what people saw missing from iPhone OS. iPhone is catching up to user demand while remaining stable and true to form, Android is fragmenting, having device compatibility and manufacturer will issues, and virus problems. I'll take slow over questionable any day. (not to mention, there's probably patent/license issues Apple has to work around here too).
I've been using D2D offsite backups for 7 years. Shipping disks every day. 1 time we had an issue recovering from 1 disk, and best we could tell it was because the backup actually never finished, the disk was 100% fine.
I've used tapes for 20 years. I have at best 20% success rate recovering entire systems from a tape thats been offsite for more than 1 week, and maybe 60% success recovering single files or folders, and if the drive heads have been changed since the tape was made, recovery likelyhood drops to about 10%.
A 5 year old tape is very hard to find a reader for. A SATA port can be added to even the oldest boards, and an IDE port can be added the the newest. No special hardware or software is required to read my disk backups.
If a tape drive breaks (had that happen many many times in my career) old tapes rarely read on the new drive (even same model). If my server farm is destroyed, i don't even need the same legacy teck, I can use the insurance money on shiny new hardware and still read my offsite disks with no issues.
Backups tapes are cheap plastic and exposed to air, and are a linear set. one bad tape equals an entire bad dataset. Disks we archive in 4 disk RAID 5 sets, are hermetically sealed, and far more resilient. Drisk inside of rail kists that use rubber grommets for better protection packed into hard cases of foam liner. We've dropped them off a 5th story roof to a driveway as a test, and the plastic casing on the rails was instact and we got 100% successful bit read across 8 disks. I've dropped tapes 6 incheas onto a table and fail bit verifies (I used to do that as an example in a demo of how unreliable tape is).
HDDs can be rebuilt, easy, and relatively cheap. The MTBF of an unused disk on a shelf is measured in years, and the "stuck spindle" issue is a forgone issue and no longer applies to modern disks (even a slight vibration overrides locked disks). Tapes settle, unspool, are open to the air and bacteria and corrosion, and the tiny chip in the tape is critical to it being readable, the chips in a HDD can be replaced with no trouble.
Metalic tape has a MTBF of 30 days for bit failure. Their long terms storage is entirely dependent on their parity algorithm. MTBF of a bit on a physical disk is measured in YEARS. Also, a single tape failure in a backup set can ruin the entire set, where a disk failure in a striped RAID disk archive means NOTHING (its a RAID!).
1) a good D2D system uses RAID 5 data sets across disk sets, not individual disks. Tapes don;t do parity striping scross sets so loosing jkust 1 tape in a job set can ruin the entire backup set. Loosing 1 disk means nothing. 2) i used to do DR demos, and I'd drop a bit verified tape just 6 inches and watch it fail a bit level verify, while I had a hard disk I made the team play hot-potato with for 10 minutes, then pass a bit verify.
HDDs are designed for 300G shocks, and when not in use can survive freezing and fairly extreme heat, and are immune to basic environmental issues (even rain if allowed to dry, worst case you replace the board...).
When shipping HDDs, typically they''re in sleeves, bubble wrap, or a foam case. Tapes are stacked in a box.
If you;re telling me cheap plastic and an open air medium is more resilient than a metal casing and hermetic sealing, i want what you smoke.
A HDD can survive a 300G shock, and is atmosphere nuetral. Tapes can't survive 20G shocks, are open exposed to the environment, and even LIGHTING can degrade their state.
MTBF at the bit level on a tape is measured at 30 days, for optical it's about 90 days, for HDD platters its measured in years. HDDs also can easily be rebuilt if there are head issues in an old drive, and data recovery is easy. With a tape, it's virtually impossible to even read a good tape in a drive it was not made on.
Compared to a $100 1.5TB HDD, that's 3TB compressed vs your 2 tapes to meet the same, so the cost is nearly a wash on media, and the HDD caddy for 16 drives is under $1K, but the tape drive to read 1 tape at a time in that capacity is probably $4K, and only accepts that capacity and some limited older tape support (not larger in the future, or 10 year old SATA disks from the past).
But, lets look at some REAL numbers: a) what actually IS your compression ratio? b) what actually is the max capacity of your tapes in reality (check your logs).
1.6Tb is the max theoretical storage at 2:1 compression, but that assumes no write failures, and assumes your hardware based compression (oh, that costs extra?), actually meets 2:1. See, with a disk, if there's a write failure during backup (rare on spinning disk), it rewrites to the same disk sector. If a tape has a write failure on backup, just 1 bit, it markes a whole tape block with a hash and keeps running. Your cleaning light comes on when you have between 8 and 16 write failures IN A ROW on more than 3 separate places on the same tape, imagine how much tape your wasting when those failures are not all in a row... I've seen 400GB native tapes have a validated capacity under 80GB after a "successful" backup.
Check your tape logs and see just how much tape you are ACTUALLY using, vs the tape your wasting.
Tapes can be cheaper, if you use LOTS of them every day, and have a ridiculous regiment for storing all tapes indefinitely, and rarely if ever overwrite tapes with new backups. however, if your drives are aging, tapes are heavily used, you're wasting money rotating and disposing of them (no tape should ever be used more than 15 times, tapes for long term archive should be brand new and never part of a rotation, a mistake most people make only archiving their oldest tapes, dumb). You're loosing tape storage, your compression ratio is likely nowhere near reality (especially if its not hardware based), and a 1.6Tb tape, just like a HDD, doesn't store 1.6TB of compressed data (most 800s are lucky to get 600GB native 1,000-1100 compressed)....and that doesn't factor tape hardware costs, chip-in-tape costs, cleaning tape costs (oh, btw, how often are you using/replacing your cleaning tapes?) and more.
SATA ports have been on mainboards for nearly 10 years. IDE is a near 20 year old technology and IDE drives are still available. The format methods for disks are current, and data is EASILY migrated from one partition format to another. SATA 6 is backward compatible with SATA I drives and PCI IDE adapters cost about $15. (or USB external adapters)
Backups should not do 10 years without being migrated, and disk hardware 10m years from now is practically guaranteed to be available to read your disks, and legacy hardware is cheap and easily acquired. Tape hardware migrates to new formats every few years, can only be read in proprietary devices by proprietary software in most cases. Acquiring even a 5 year old legacy tape drive is near impossible, and new tape drives have significant issues reading any more than 1 previous tape generation. Migration to new tapes should happen every 3 years, at a cost of about $80/tape. HDD can go 7-10 years between migrations, at a cost of about the same per drive, but with greater capacity in most cases, easier migration tools, readily available, and drive sets can be RAID sets adding reliability and parity on inexpensive hardware.
Mean time between bit failure on a linear tape is 30 days.
That means 1 bit on that tape will be unreadable, or flipped, within 30 days. Assuming your tape uses parity writing, that's not much of an issue, but data failure may occur after a few months. This assumes lab quality storage conditions and treatment of the tape. imagine the same tape traveling in an iron box across town and back, and all the shuffling in warehouses and back to you eventually, not to mention the magnetic interference going up/down a few elevator shafts...
MTBF for bits on a HDD platter are measured in years, not days.
...and that's why offline HDD storage should equally be in RAID format.
That said, I worked for a D2D disaster recovery provider, and one time only we had issues recovering data from an archive drive due to disk failure. Suspicion was the drives were pulled before the job actually finished.
Now, HDDs sitting idle have a bit failure decay measured in years. Worst case, if the drive mechanism failes, the platters are still fully readable and easily recovered. Data being pulled from legal hold usually has no timeframe recovery requirements (unlike disaster recovery, there's no SLA for court requests of data), and worst case, HDD repair is a viable option.
Tapes have a bit failure rate measured in days, typically 30 for most tapes, and once data decays from the tape, it can not be recovered. Also, most typically, a tape recorded on one set of drives can not be read by another set of identical drives. often, the very same drive has trouble reading its own tapes if they've been shuffled out of the building and back in months later. I used to do an experiment in a classroom teaching DR methods where I'd perform a backup and bit-level verify (and only 3 in 10 pass verify at the bit level, but assuming it passed I'd continue, then I'd take the tape out of the drive, drop it just 6 inches to a table, flat, then put it back in the drive and repeat verify, and it would predictably fail 100% of the time. I'd repeat that with a hard disk backup of the same data set, let each person in the room drop the drive from shoulder height to the floor, then repeat the verify, and I never once had a failure (though once I had trouble getting the drive back in the tray slot).
Huh? the red flag rules are almost all covered already by HIPAA and Sox. There's immense overlap between them, red flag just applies to a lot more than medical and legal records... Doctors already are required to obey these rules, and most small doctors, due to the cost, already use intermediary companies to handle billing and colelction eliminating them from direct responsibility (and the creditor lablel).
1) When where the initial 3 versions released each? If the first version was approved long before Apple overhauled their internal scanning practices, it might have slipped through, and continued to do so until someone caught it on a much later update. 2) what new features did 1.2 add, or bring light to that may have been latent or underutilized? Did each revision add something new, and make it more "widget like" eventually ending up as a desktop-style application? 3) where did this app get its "overlay" data, and did someone else complain about this app pulling from their servers for commercial purposes? 4) were any of the data connections the app made in violation of other apple policies? Did it take user data and preferences and send them to central servers outside of the user and Apple's control (potential privacy or identity theft issues)? 5) Was there something else in this app that was a concern? Anyone have it before it got pulled to really look? 6) Were any of this companies other apps pulled or rejected at the same time? Perhaps this "harmless" app is being used as a media example, when in reality, other apps get the dev itself banned. 7) the "no widget" rule is actually fairly well defined. Apps are to access a content resource, or their own data, but "aggregator" apps that provide multi-functions doing little more then pulling from other sources fall under the "no real value" category. A new application is one thing, pulling data from other sites together and making it look like it;s your data, or a unique app is half pointless, and a disservice to users, and those apps get banned, including any that provide desktop like functionality.
i don;t know. Out of 200,000 apps, apple's made a few mistakes, but this app seems half fishy to start with, no genuine content of it's own, and a shady dev who goes running to blogs over 1 app that, lets face it, doesn't really sound like an "investment" a company would be behind?
You know what prevents the dissemination of fingerprints to authorities? THE LAW. a) the scan itself is only a hash, not an image, and certainly not from an evidence admissible source or quality process, so in the first place, no legal authority even cares. b) request of that data would have to be mandated by a judge in an active case and after a search warrant was issued. c) exporting the has of specific students is probably not even possible. d) this data is protected by law the same as any other PII on file with any company or entity. e) the courts can mandate you as a citizen provide your fingerprints or DNA at any time, in association with any active case, in order to compare such to already collected evidence, or anytime you are processed by a prison system for any reason, but if there's no case associated with that data (you, for instance, are suspect of stealing something from school property, and for SOME reason can't be otherwise positively ID'd?). f) this is not a malicious dictatorship with drones who do what the government says, we live in a world of people appointed by US to do their jobs, and where they're held accountable to be themselves imprisoned if the agencies we made them commission to watch their backs find them screwing up.
If some cop requests a fingerprint of my kid, and forced the school to hand it over (and I promise, that is NOT something a school would do without a warrant, they don't give data to anyone unless forced), then that cop would be sent to prison, that judge disbarred, and I;d get a nice half a million payday. I'm OK with those checks and balkanbces such that i believe that system would not be abused (especially given it's lack of any real value to a government agency, being nothing more than a hash in a database, and completely useless without the finger itself to verify the hash).
Your student record must be kept by law in most states after you leave the school until your death in some places or beyond X years in others, which nowhere do i believe that is less than 40 years. A pin access or fingerprint is not part of your student record, its just an access system used to validate your ID, so it has no reason to be kept. That said, is your fingerprint private? PII (Personally Identifiable information) is by court ruling NOT private, it's just illegal to share that information or to provide unauthorized access, or fail to secure it to current government standards.
details? As in the fingerprints in the scanning system? Yes, they're deleted. in fact, the entire system is reseeded every year of enrollment, and purged automatically! Why? simple biometric system like this are only accurate enough to get a "good guess" based on fingerprints in a database. The more prints, the less accurate the response.... They remove the old data to make current data more reliable BY DESIGN.
As for all the OTHER student data, I don't know about there, but here in this state, it has to be kept INDEFINITELY by law. My old high school in NY was just forced to go dig out my records from my time there as part of a government background check. It took them 2 weeks, but they had the data in hardcopy in a warehouse (yea, nothing was on computer back then, at least at a common high school level, I'm old). They have to keep that data at least until my death, released only on request by certain agencies, (not even directly to me, because my record contains confidential information from counselors) and will never become publicly accessible data, but its there, and will never be deleted. A fingerprint of a child is barely valid for a few years, its in constant flux, and generally useless to anyone, and is not at-risk data.
Also, everyone seems to have jumped on this system as something that can be easily abused. Did anybody bother to ask what the second factor of authentication was? a pin number, student ID, anything? i doubt very highly simply the thumb print alone is full and valid identification.
We use a similar system at our grocery store. Enter out phone number, thumb print, then a pin number, and we don't need to have our key-fob store discount card, or any credit cards handy, we select the stored method of payment (we can have several) and the pin number for that card (only works with pin, not signature, as they'll have no card to cross validate), and the transaction is done without taking out a card or wallet.
The odds of someone having my fingerprint, knowing my phone number, system pin, and card pin all at the same time, pretty slim. The store backs it up with a guarantee, and the data and card information is stored to federal PCI network standards.
My kid's fingerprint can be lifted almost anywhere. I really don't care if some database stores it for part of an ID validation, so long as validation requires MORE than the finger. Personally identifiable information (PII) is by law defined as not-private information, its just illegal to SHARE that information.
Your speech IS free on a phone. They need a warrant to tap it otherwise since the government's little illegal tap operations have been stopped (unless your number pops up on a terrorist watch list associated with an active terrorist investigation; do you frequently make calls to terrorists?)
Anonymity is NOT a guaranteed right, nor is it a liberty. What comes out of your mouth, in public or otherwise, can not be held against you, unless of course its in the form of direct threats against the public, specific individuals, or in the act of organizing criminal activity. That speech is NOT protected.
In the rare cases where the government HAS tried to silence someone, someone who spoke out in public, it has gone VERY bad for the government, and the person was extremely overcompensated, because paranoids like you sat on the jury, and awarded them more money than god could make.
There's no "asshole" running the government, there's a group of people YOU PUT THERE, people like you, with families and designs on their own privacy. WTF would they go after someone on a private phone line unless that person was an identified threat to freedom and happiness and safety of others?
People who want to speak out an remain anonymous have a hundred other ways to do so. The use on an anonymous phone is NOT required for that (they can use a payphone for fucks sake!). taking away mobile phones from this list of hundreds of ways does NOt prevent the speech or anonymity, but it DOES prevent crime, drug trade, black market activity, even government corruption which you think is so rampant.
Your "liberties." perhaps you don;t know the definition of that word... you seem to be comfused.
Liberty (n): - personal freedom from servitude or confinement or oppression. Nope, them having your phone number is no different then them having your address, you job info, your vehicle registration, its just one more piece of data, and no correlation to imprisonment or servitude...
- freedom of choice; "liberty of opinion"; "liberty of worship"; "liberty--perfect liberty--to think or feel or do just as one pleases"; "at liberty to choose whatever occupation one wishes" Hmm, you can still get any phone and plan you want, just need to provide ID. This doesn't reduce my choice in buying alcohol, or getting a loan, it;s just a step in a process. It eliminates no options that are available other than having an unregistered device, which only a criminal or someone with something to hide would want.
- the quality or state of being free: a : the power to do as one pleases b : freedom from physical restraint c : freedom from arbitrary or despotic control d : the positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges e : the power of choice. Yea, again, them being able to back trace to your identity in relation to an active criminal investigation, following due process, and after acquiring a warrant, has NO impact on any of your personal liberties.
People confuse freedom, liberty, expression, and ANONYMITY. You are NOT anonymous to the government. you have the right to your beliefs, habits, and more, but they have a right to IDENTIFY you, and when necessary contact you, and when involved in a crime, collect evidence as per due process, and that is NOT disputed.
Hiding a phone number from the government only means you;re going to piss them off when they have to waste money and man hours to track down the device in your hand if they want you. They can still record the calls either way with a warrant, they can still follow location data and find you, they can still catch you in the act of a crime, they can still come to your house and ask to see your phone, hiding the number to name association only makes their job harder, and buys you NO protection other than what already exists in law.
The biggest impact will be to smalltime drug dealers who simply won't be able to afford unlocked devices, but even more so to their clients who themselves can't get easy access to such a phone without big-time criminal connections and underground associations, so it;s actually going to eliminate drug crime simply because they can not longer have clients call them....
yea, you know how you validate that? It's called "proof of address" The BILL for the service can't be sent to an address other than that of the registered owner of the phone, and you can't pay online with a credit card not registered to that address either. No way to add minutes means no useful device. Purchasing minute cards in a store will require the same ID validation as getting a phone in the first place.
Then, we move further, into making it VERY illegal to resell an activated prepaid phone without contacting the phone company to de-activate it. the person who gets it next needs proof of ID and address to turn it on. Anyone illegally reselling such phones could face prosecution similar to drug trafficking, and that should quickly discriminate such a market.
This has been done already in over a dozen countries, its not a new policy, and it does mostly work.
...And you can't buy a car without giving the government this information DIRECTLY, in the form of vehicle registration, no different from a handgun. At least with pre-paid phones, the number association is in the hands of a 3rd party, bound by law not to publish that information to other 3rd parties, or even the government, without due process.
The government already has your name, ID, address, they know your cars, your job, and more. If they want you, they'll come get you. I'm MUCH more willing to let them do that EASILY, and without warrants and door-busting or multiple man hours and expense. If they want me, they can come find me, i have nothing to hide other than my personal beliefs, habits, and feelings. the government knowing my phone number in NO WAY intrudes on my liberty, and privacy (in the form of staying "off the grid") is in fact NOT guaranteed by our constitution (only in limited cases per appellate laws that have established such).
They need a warrant to tap my phone, but they need nothing more than due process to pull my call records, and phone numbers should be matters of public record like any other address (so long as no-solicitation rules can be improved and enforced).
People who explicitly WANT to hide from the government are hiding what exactly? "the government" is just a group of peopole, people you elected and they appointed, and they jobs change continuously. There's no Illuminati, no underground organization bend on control pulling strings, and no trillion dollar computer system tracking every habbit every american has. You;re only watched if you show up on the rader, and you're only scrutinized and investigated if they believe you are actually breaking the law. Cops are WARY of accessing what they should not because theres both internal and external organizations folks that are overly paranoid put in place to ENSURE they don;t access what they should not, and they put COPS in JAIL for violating that, and cost the city (and taxpayers) billions when it happens.
Cops are not evil (some are power hungry, and get a trip on making others jump), they're honestly trying to improve the world. Don't show up on their radar, and you have nothing to fear. hide from them, and they get suspicions (as they're PAID to do).
The VAST majority of anonymous phones are used on some level for illegal activity. This is a SIMPLE thing to change. the government already likely knows all about you, giving them your phone number hurts no one (unless you commit a crime).
"plenty of case" sure, numbering in the dozens tops each year, mostly physical violence or poor treatment of a prisoner (aka, you already have been accused and arrested for a crime!) but very rarely a case of violation of warrant or rights, and out of hundreds of thousands of cops and a million cases a year.
cops don;t need a warrant to access the phone records of a specific number associated with a criminal investigation, no, but that does NOT eliminate due process. Due Process simply means a judge doesn't have to PREAPPROVE the search for that data, but it DOES have to be DOCUMENTED THOURAGGLY why it was accessed and in association with a case, otherwise when you find out your number was accessed, ir if a judge or lawyer wuestions why it was, THAT COP GOES TO JAIL, and very well so will his supervisor.
Why do we know cops don't willy-nilly look up this data? because the PHONE COMAPNY BILLS FOR EACH ACCESS, and that access it audited by various state and federal agencies explicity to look for such behavior, and that lookup better damned well be tied to a case. I know a LOT of cops. There's NO WAY any of them would access phone record information (or ANY information that is not public record in a tax office or DMV) without documented just cause. It's simply not worth years in prison and the loss of a job (a job that supprots a cop's family) to see if a buddy's wife has been cheating on him...
They don't TRACK this data, they don't LOG this data. they only look it up IN ASSOCIATION WITH A CASE FILE. If a cop IDs a number associated with a known criminal, and he wants to track that criminal's association with other people, a phone is the quickest and easiest method, and it also, thanks to location data, moves to time line and alibi. If you have anonymous numbers, you give criminals the power to bypass this process. If you give the government your name associated with a phone number, you;re only giving them ONE MORE way to contact you (since they ALREADY have your address, place of work, vehicle ID, and other information, or they could just ask a local utility for your phone number. If they want you already, they have enough ways to find you already in PUBLIC data. If they have a number, they should be ABLE to find WHO it belongs to, as anyone wanting to keep that private is clearly trying to live off the grid for one reason or another, and if THAT person becomes associated with another KNOWN criminal, we SHOULD have the ability to investigate.
So long as you use the same install key, and the same battle.net account login, no, re-installation on multiple machines should not be prevented. blizzard in the past has openly supported "clone" installations of other games, there's no reason they won't do that here.
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"Let's just be clear here, what are you saying, that when you lease allowance to use their servers, they have permission to do whatever they want to your local machine and define what software you can and can't run on it?"
Yup.
It's called access control. No they can't take over use of your machine "without permission" but they can mandate patch level, security settings, limitation of other apps that integrate with their systems or cause load on their servers.
A person is reasonably expected to be capable of a max number of online hours (as an average). The monthe fee is based on that basis. The bot apps allow user to be online VAST amounts more time in a day than is typically otherwise possible, causing them additional loads and typing up resources for real people.
It also sets those without the knowledge to use those bots at a significant disadvantage to those who do, people who as part of their use fees expect to play in a relatively fair and balanced world for their money.
I think this is open and shut. This is essentially a subscription service running on remote systems. Your app, if you want to even argue it;s yours, is only a portion of the code, not a wholly owned app (you don't launch your copy on their servers, they launch their code and allow the app you bought to connect). Without your continuing subscription (or even a free use agreement if it ever goes Free-to-play, not likely), the app you bought is simply nothing more than an activation fee...
They have every right to maintain balance and fairness for the Masses playing, and base availability on predictable numbers. I'd perhaps be OK if, for example only, they said an average player is estimated at 20 hours per week, but a bot runner is estimated at 40, and thus charge a "premium rate" equal to double the base rate to be able to use a bot... but then also limit PvP for bot players only to other players that also used a bot for their game, since I'd really care less as an average player.
You agreed to a contract to play online. It's a subscription. They absolutely can control the access rules.
I worked in the DR industry for years, and supperted DR syystems as a consultant for hundreds of different clients for a decade. I've done thousands of restores on dozens of tape technologies.
yes, newer tape systems are more resilient. however, the tape itself is not. magnetic metal media exposed to the open air in a cartridge can not possible be as stable as a hermetically sealed drive system in a disk.
tape mis-alignment due to sagging spindles (where the tape in the spool slides against itself due to vibration, and creates a conical shape inside of the drive instead of a flat real, later when read, or even just retention ed, can cause the tape to rub against the inside of the cartridge and heat, causing data loss.
A tape itself, without heads, may technically be capable of surviving more Gs of force in a drop (though the plastic corners, not to much), but a disk drive can easily survive a drop from the server to the floor if you're not careful and drop it. In a caddy in a shipping case, we've thrown them from 5th story windows to concrete, repeatedly, and had no issues. We've even frozen a drive in a block of ice and read from it (still frozen!). In a fire safe, a HDDs control board will melt away, but the spindles inside the drive chassis will be fine beyond 250 degrees and the disk can be rebuilt and read fine, but a tape will simply melt, even inside a fire safe (which are only designed to keep internal temperatures below the combustion point of paper, a "media safe" is a whole different thing, and VERY expensive).
HDDs are fast, have parity across disk sets, don;t require expensive robotics and drive heads, and run on common (not arcane, ancient SCSI protocols like MTX), and have better longevity. Disks can alsdo be reused hundreds of times, a tape 10-20 if you;re lucky.
Many of my clients use disk for the rotational and daily backups, as well as the local and remote archive live copies (so restores are from in-house disk, and only archives are offsite, saving time). Long term archives are often to tape still as it CAN be cheaper, but I'd only trust it in weather controlled facilities.
The last firm i worked for shipped over 15,000 hard drives to be used for D2D backup. Drives do fail occasionally, and they're warranty replaced on a regular basis, but never in the 3.5 year history of working for them had a single backup not been recoverable, aside 1 we suspected was due to a backup not having been truly complete when the disk was removed (user did not run the command to spin down the SATA slot, they just pulled the drive).
Boards, controllers, that has nothing to do with data loss from archives, that would only cause the active JOB to fail. Fix the issue and run it again. When a tape drive fails, it costs thousands to replace (if you can get a compatible model). When an array controller fails, they're $500...
I was a skeptic for D2D when i heard about it in 2001. After working for a firm for years that worked with it, I've never looked back. My current employer has a massive IBM infrastructure, almost all tape, more than 20,000 tapes in storage. no way is that going away, there's legal hold data we simple have to keep, and thousands of terrabytes in archive we could not afford to migrate to disk (nor do we have time). However, we're addding D2D capacity to TSM constantly, and in a year if we're lucky, won't be using tape at all anymore. They think that will save us about 500K a year, and provide for near instant restores of files (current recovery of a single file can take 12-36 hours depending on where it comes from) That migration started before i got here, and I've kept silent on my opinion siting conflict of interest (I'm in a position to make purchase decisions, and my former employer is a bidder, so I abstain from comment entirely).
You know not of what you speak.
Red flag rules as well as HIPAA and PCI regulations do leave the doctor responsible for accurate billing practices, the intermediary is only a billing agent that handles transactions. Pissed off customers ARE likely to leave a doctor with an ineffective billing agent. Insurance issues are still handled first party by the doctor, not through the intermediary (the bill can only be sent to a customer after the HIPAA statement is generated and returned to the doctor clarifying coverage. In the end, you have rights, and guaranteed protections, and improper billing practices come with STIFF penalties for both the billing agency, the doctor, and the insurance company.
Now a "collections" agency is a different matter altogether...
I've also been in a 2.5 year fight over a bill for child birth with the insurance company. The doctor's bills are in order, as is the intermediary's bills to me, the only issue is the INSURANCE company not doing the math right, claiming things common to child birth are not covered, miscalculating my out-of-pocket maximum, and more. This has NOTHING to do with the doctor's correct belief that the insurance company paid X, I thus owe Y.
I do agree, the iPhone needs a more impressive lock screen notification system, notification aggregation, and a good home screen. They're reportedly working on that, and they've taken a step forward on notifications. Keep in mind, 2 years ago, there were no apps, and 18 months ago, no notifications. The OS was never intended to do that,so they've got a lot more back end work to do to make it seamless while also not breaking other apps. the OS constantly moves forward, with regular interval, and for little issue with older devices (though the 2G is getting very little of OS 4 at all, it is getting SOME features).
We'll see improvement here over the next year. Android added what people saw missing from iPhone OS. iPhone is catching up to user demand while remaining stable and true to form, Android is fragmenting, having device compatibility and manufacturer will issues, and virus problems. I'll take slow over questionable any day. (not to mention, there's probably patent/license issues Apple has to work around here too).
I've been using D2D offsite backups for 7 years. Shipping disks every day. 1 time we had an issue recovering from 1 disk, and best we could tell it was because the backup actually never finished, the disk was 100% fine.
I've used tapes for 20 years. I have at best 20% success rate recovering entire systems from a tape thats been offsite for more than 1 week, and maybe 60% success recovering single files or folders, and if the drive heads have been changed since the tape was made, recovery likelyhood drops to about 10%.
A 5 year old tape is very hard to find a reader for. A SATA port can be added to even the oldest boards, and an IDE port can be added the the newest. No special hardware or software is required to read my disk backups.
If a tape drive breaks (had that happen many many times in my career) old tapes rarely read on the new drive (even same model). If my server farm is destroyed, i don't even need the same legacy teck, I can use the insurance money on shiny new hardware and still read my offsite disks with no issues.
Backups tapes are cheap plastic and exposed to air, and are a linear set. one bad tape equals an entire bad dataset. Disks we archive in 4 disk RAID 5 sets, are hermetically sealed, and far more resilient. Drisk inside of rail kists that use rubber grommets for better protection packed into hard cases of foam liner. We've dropped them off a 5th story roof to a driveway as a test, and the plastic casing on the rails was instact and we got 100% successful bit read across 8 disks. I've dropped tapes 6 incheas onto a table and fail bit verifies (I used to do that as an example in a demo of how unreliable tape is).
HDDs can be rebuilt, easy, and relatively cheap. The MTBF of an unused disk on a shelf is measured in years, and the "stuck spindle" issue is a forgone issue and no longer applies to modern disks (even a slight vibration overrides locked disks). Tapes settle, unspool, are open to the air and bacteria and corrosion, and the tiny chip in the tape is critical to it being readable, the chips in a HDD can be replaced with no trouble.
Metalic tape has a MTBF of 30 days for bit failure. Their long terms storage is entirely dependent on their parity algorithm. MTBF of a bit on a physical disk is measured in YEARS. Also, a single tape failure in a backup set can ruin the entire set, where a disk failure in a striped RAID disk archive means NOTHING (its a RAID!).
1) a good D2D system uses RAID 5 data sets across disk sets, not individual disks. Tapes don;t do parity striping scross sets so loosing jkust 1 tape in a job set can ruin the entire backup set. Loosing 1 disk means nothing.
2) i used to do DR demos, and I'd drop a bit verified tape just 6 inches and watch it fail a bit level verify, while I had a hard disk I made the team play hot-potato with for 10 minutes, then pass a bit verify.
HDDs are designed for 300G shocks, and when not in use can survive freezing and fairly extreme heat, and are immune to basic environmental issues (even rain if allowed to dry, worst case you replace the board...).
When shipping HDDs, typically they''re in sleeves, bubble wrap, or a foam case. Tapes are stacked in a box.
If you;re telling me cheap plastic and an open air medium is more resilient than a metal casing and hermetic sealing, i want what you smoke.
A HDD can survive a 300G shock, and is atmosphere nuetral. Tapes can't survive 20G shocks, are open exposed to the environment, and even LIGHTING can degrade their state.
MTBF at the bit level on a tape is measured at 30 days, for optical it's about 90 days, for HDD platters its measured in years. HDDs also can easily be rebuilt if there are head issues in an old drive, and data recovery is easy. With a tape, it's virtually impossible to even read a good tape in a drive it was not made on.
oh, 1.6TB compressed? Really?
Compared to a $100 1.5TB HDD, that's 3TB compressed vs your 2 tapes to meet the same, so the cost is nearly a wash on media, and the HDD caddy for 16 drives is under $1K, but the tape drive to read 1 tape at a time in that capacity is probably $4K, and only accepts that capacity and some limited older tape support (not larger in the future, or 10 year old SATA disks from the past).
But, lets look at some REAL numbers:
a) what actually IS your compression ratio?
b) what actually is the max capacity of your tapes in reality (check your logs).
1.6Tb is the max theoretical storage at 2:1 compression, but that assumes no write failures, and assumes your hardware based compression (oh, that costs extra?), actually meets 2:1. See, with a disk, if there's a write failure during backup (rare on spinning disk), it rewrites to the same disk sector. If a tape has a write failure on backup, just 1 bit, it markes a whole tape block with a hash and keeps running. Your cleaning light comes on when you have between 8 and 16 write failures IN A ROW on more than 3 separate places on the same tape, imagine how much tape your wasting when those failures are not all in a row... I've seen 400GB native tapes have a validated capacity under 80GB after a "successful" backup.
Check your tape logs and see just how much tape you are ACTUALLY using, vs the tape your wasting.
Tapes can be cheaper, if you use LOTS of them every day, and have a ridiculous regiment for storing all tapes indefinitely, and rarely if ever overwrite tapes with new backups. however, if your drives are aging, tapes are heavily used, you're wasting money rotating and disposing of them (no tape should ever be used more than 15 times, tapes for long term archive should be brand new and never part of a rotation, a mistake most people make only archiving their oldest tapes, dumb). You're loosing tape storage, your compression ratio is likely nowhere near reality (especially if its not hardware based), and a 1.6Tb tape, just like a HDD, doesn't store 1.6TB of compressed data (most 800s are lucky to get 600GB native 1,000-1100 compressed). ...and that doesn't factor tape hardware costs, chip-in-tape costs, cleaning tape costs (oh, btw, how often are you using/replacing your cleaning tapes?) and more.
SATA ports have been on mainboards for nearly 10 years. IDE is a near 20 year old technology and IDE drives are still available. The format methods for disks are current, and data is EASILY migrated from one partition format to another. SATA 6 is backward compatible with SATA I drives and PCI IDE adapters cost about $15. (or USB external adapters)
Backups should not do 10 years without being migrated, and disk hardware 10m years from now is practically guaranteed to be available to read your disks, and legacy hardware is cheap and easily acquired. Tape hardware migrates to new formats every few years, can only be read in proprietary devices by proprietary software in most cases. Acquiring even a 5 year old legacy tape drive is near impossible, and new tape drives have significant issues reading any more than 1 previous tape generation. Migration to new tapes should happen every 3 years, at a cost of about $80/tape. HDD can go 7-10 years between migrations, at a cost of about the same per drive, but with greater capacity in most cases, easier migration tools, readily available, and drive sets can be RAID sets adding reliability and parity on inexpensive hardware.
Mean time between bit failure on a linear tape is 30 days.
That means 1 bit on that tape will be unreadable, or flipped, within 30 days. Assuming your tape uses parity writing, that's not much of an issue, but data failure may occur after a few months. This assumes lab quality storage conditions and treatment of the tape. imagine the same tape traveling in an iron box across town and back, and all the shuffling in warehouses and back to you eventually, not to mention the magnetic interference going up/down a few elevator shafts...
MTBF for bits on a HDD platter are measured in years, not days.
...and that's why offline HDD storage should equally be in RAID format.
That said, I worked for a D2D disaster recovery provider, and one time only we had issues recovering data from an archive drive due to disk failure. Suspicion was the drives were pulled before the job actually finished.
Now, HDDs sitting idle have a bit failure decay measured in years. Worst case, if the drive mechanism failes, the platters are still fully readable and easily recovered. Data being pulled from legal hold usually has no timeframe recovery requirements (unlike disaster recovery, there's no SLA for court requests of data), and worst case, HDD repair is a viable option.
Tapes have a bit failure rate measured in days, typically 30 for most tapes, and once data decays from the tape, it can not be recovered. Also, most typically, a tape recorded on one set of drives can not be read by another set of identical drives. often, the very same drive has trouble reading its own tapes if they've been shuffled out of the building and back in months later. I used to do an experiment in a classroom teaching DR methods where I'd perform a backup and bit-level verify (and only 3 in 10 pass verify at the bit level, but assuming it passed I'd continue, then I'd take the tape out of the drive, drop it just 6 inches to a table, flat, then put it back in the drive and repeat verify, and it would predictably fail 100% of the time. I'd repeat that with a hard disk backup of the same data set, let each person in the room drop the drive from shoulder height to the floor, then repeat the verify, and I never once had a failure (though once I had trouble getting the drive back in the tray slot).
Huh? the red flag rules are almost all covered already by HIPAA and Sox. There's immense overlap between them, red flag just applies to a lot more than medical and legal records... Doctors already are required to obey these rules, and most small doctors, due to the cost, already use intermediary companies to handle billing and colelction eliminating them from direct responsibility (and the creditor lablel).
1) When where the initial 3 versions released each? If the first version was approved long before Apple overhauled their internal scanning practices, it might have slipped through, and continued to do so until someone caught it on a much later update.
2) what new features did 1.2 add, or bring light to that may have been latent or underutilized? Did each revision add something new, and make it more "widget like" eventually ending up as a desktop-style application?
3) where did this app get its "overlay" data, and did someone else complain about this app pulling from their servers for commercial purposes?
4) were any of the data connections the app made in violation of other apple policies? Did it take user data and preferences and send them to central servers outside of the user and Apple's control (potential privacy or identity theft issues)?
5) Was there something else in this app that was a concern? Anyone have it before it got pulled to really look?
6) Were any of this companies other apps pulled or rejected at the same time? Perhaps this "harmless" app is being used as a media example, when in reality, other apps get the dev itself banned.
7) the "no widget" rule is actually fairly well defined. Apps are to access a content resource, or their own data, but "aggregator" apps that provide multi-functions doing little more then pulling from other sources fall under the "no real value" category. A new application is one thing, pulling data from other sites together and making it look like it;s your data, or a unique app is half pointless, and a disservice to users, and those apps get banned, including any that provide desktop like functionality.
i don;t know. Out of 200,000 apps, apple's made a few mistakes, but this app seems half fishy to start with, no genuine content of it's own, and a shady dev who goes running to blogs over 1 app that, lets face it, doesn't really sound like an "investment" a company would be behind?
You know what prevents the dissemination of fingerprints to authorities? THE LAW. a) the scan itself is only a hash, not an image, and certainly not from an evidence admissible source or quality process, so in the first place, no legal authority even cares. b) request of that data would have to be mandated by a judge in an active case and after a search warrant was issued. c) exporting the has of specific students is probably not even possible. d) this data is protected by law the same as any other PII on file with any company or entity. e) the courts can mandate you as a citizen provide your fingerprints or DNA at any time, in association with any active case, in order to compare such to already collected evidence, or anytime you are processed by a prison system for any reason, but if there's no case associated with that data (you, for instance, are suspect of stealing something from school property, and for SOME reason can't be otherwise positively ID'd?). f) this is not a malicious dictatorship with drones who do what the government says, we live in a world of people appointed by US to do their jobs, and where they're held accountable to be themselves imprisoned if the agencies we made them commission to watch their backs find them screwing up.
If some cop requests a fingerprint of my kid, and forced the school to hand it over (and I promise, that is NOT something a school would do without a warrant, they don't give data to anyone unless forced), then that cop would be sent to prison, that judge disbarred, and I;d get a nice half a million payday. I'm OK with those checks and balkanbces such that i believe that system would not be abused (especially given it's lack of any real value to a government agency, being nothing more than a hash in a database, and completely useless without the finger itself to verify the hash).
Bingo.
Your student record must be kept by law in most states after you leave the school until your death in some places or beyond X years in others, which nowhere do i believe that is less than 40 years. A pin access or fingerprint is not part of your student record, its just an access system used to validate your ID, so it has no reason to be kept. That said, is your fingerprint private? PII (Personally Identifiable information) is by court ruling NOT private, it's just illegal to share that information or to provide unauthorized access, or fail to secure it to current government standards.
details? As in the fingerprints in the scanning system? Yes, they're deleted. in fact, the entire system is reseeded every year of enrollment, and purged automatically! Why? simple biometric system like this are only accurate enough to get a "good guess" based on fingerprints in a database. The more prints, the less accurate the response.... They remove the old data to make current data more reliable BY DESIGN.
As for all the OTHER student data, I don't know about there, but here in this state, it has to be kept INDEFINITELY by law. My old high school in NY was just forced to go dig out my records from my time there as part of a government background check. It took them 2 weeks, but they had the data in hardcopy in a warehouse (yea, nothing was on computer back then, at least at a common high school level, I'm old). They have to keep that data at least until my death, released only on request by certain agencies, (not even directly to me, because my record contains confidential information from counselors) and will never become publicly accessible data, but its there, and will never be deleted. A fingerprint of a child is barely valid for a few years, its in constant flux, and generally useless to anyone, and is not at-risk data.
Also, everyone seems to have jumped on this system as something that can be easily abused. Did anybody bother to ask what the second factor of authentication was? a pin number, student ID, anything? i doubt very highly simply the thumb print alone is full and valid identification.
We use a similar system at our grocery store. Enter out phone number, thumb print, then a pin number, and we don't need to have our key-fob store discount card, or any credit cards handy, we select the stored method of payment (we can have several) and the pin number for that card (only works with pin, not signature, as they'll have no card to cross validate), and the transaction is done without taking out a card or wallet.
The odds of someone having my fingerprint, knowing my phone number, system pin, and card pin all at the same time, pretty slim. The store backs it up with a guarantee, and the data and card information is stored to federal PCI network standards.
My kid's fingerprint can be lifted almost anywhere. I really don't care if some database stores it for part of an ID validation, so long as validation requires MORE than the finger. Personally identifiable information (PII) is by law defined as not-private information, its just illegal to SHARE that information.
Your speech IS free on a phone. They need a warrant to tap it otherwise since the government's little illegal tap operations have been stopped (unless your number pops up on a terrorist watch list associated with an active terrorist investigation; do you frequently make calls to terrorists?)
Anonymity is NOT a guaranteed right, nor is it a liberty. What comes out of your mouth, in public or otherwise, can not be held against you, unless of course its in the form of direct threats against the public, specific individuals, or in the act of organizing criminal activity. That speech is NOT protected.
In the rare cases where the government HAS tried to silence someone, someone who spoke out in public, it has gone VERY bad for the government, and the person was extremely overcompensated, because paranoids like you sat on the jury, and awarded them more money than god could make.
There's no "asshole" running the government, there's a group of people YOU PUT THERE, people like you, with families and designs on their own privacy. WTF would they go after someone on a private phone line unless that person was an identified threat to freedom and happiness and safety of others?
People who want to speak out an remain anonymous have a hundred other ways to do so. The use on an anonymous phone is NOT required for that (they can use a payphone for fucks sake!). taking away mobile phones from this list of hundreds of ways does NOt prevent the speech or anonymity, but it DOES prevent crime, drug trade, black market activity, even government corruption which you think is so rampant.
Your "liberties." perhaps you don;t know the definition of that word... you seem to be comfused.
Liberty (n):
- personal freedom from servitude or confinement or oppression. Nope, them having your phone number is no different then them having your address, you job info, your vehicle registration, its just one more piece of data, and no correlation to imprisonment or servitude...
- freedom of choice; "liberty of opinion"; "liberty of worship"; "liberty--perfect liberty--to think or feel or do just as one pleases"; "at liberty to choose whatever occupation one wishes" Hmm, you can still get any phone and plan you want, just need to provide ID. This doesn't reduce my choice in buying alcohol, or getting a loan, it;s just a step in a process. It eliminates no options that are available other than having an unregistered device, which only a criminal or someone with something to hide would want.
- the quality or state of being free: a : the power to do as one pleases b : freedom from physical restraint c : freedom from arbitrary or despotic control d : the positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges e : the power of choice. Yea, again, them being able to back trace to your identity in relation to an active criminal investigation, following due process, and after acquiring a warrant, has NO impact on any of your personal liberties.
People confuse freedom, liberty, expression, and ANONYMITY. You are NOT anonymous to the government. you have the right to your beliefs, habits, and more, but they have a right to IDENTIFY you, and when necessary contact you, and when involved in a crime, collect evidence as per due process, and that is NOT disputed.
Hiding a phone number from the government only means you;re going to piss them off when they have to waste money and man hours to track down the device in your hand if they want you. They can still record the calls either way with a warrant, they can still follow location data and find you, they can still catch you in the act of a crime, they can still come to your house and ask to see your phone, hiding the number to name association only makes their job harder, and buys you NO protection other than what already exists in law.
but it will be MUCH harder.... MUCH.
The biggest impact will be to smalltime drug dealers who simply won't be able to afford unlocked devices, but even more so to their clients who themselves can't get easy access to such a phone without big-time criminal connections and underground associations, so it;s actually going to eliminate drug crime simply because they can not longer have clients call them....
yea, you know how you validate that? It's called "proof of address" The BILL for the service can't be sent to an address other than that of the registered owner of the phone, and you can't pay online with a credit card not registered to that address either. No way to add minutes means no useful device. Purchasing minute cards in a store will require the same ID validation as getting a phone in the first place.
Then, we move further, into making it VERY illegal to resell an activated prepaid phone without contacting the phone company to de-activate it. the person who gets it next needs proof of ID and address to turn it on. Anyone illegally reselling such phones could face prosecution similar to drug trafficking, and that should quickly discriminate such a market.
This has been done already in over a dozen countries, its not a new policy, and it does mostly work.
...And you can't buy a car without giving the government this information DIRECTLY, in the form of vehicle registration, no different from a handgun. At least with pre-paid phones, the number association is in the hands of a 3rd party, bound by law not to publish that information to other 3rd parties, or even the government, without due process.
The government already has your name, ID, address, they know your cars, your job, and more. If they want you, they'll come get you. I'm MUCH more willing to let them do that EASILY, and without warrants and door-busting or multiple man hours and expense. If they want me, they can come find me, i have nothing to hide other than my personal beliefs, habits, and feelings. the government knowing my phone number in NO WAY intrudes on my liberty, and privacy (in the form of staying "off the grid") is in fact NOT guaranteed by our constitution (only in limited cases per appellate laws that have established such).
They need a warrant to tap my phone, but they need nothing more than due process to pull my call records, and phone numbers should be matters of public record like any other address (so long as no-solicitation rules can be improved and enforced).
People who explicitly WANT to hide from the government are hiding what exactly? "the government" is just a group of peopole, people you elected and they appointed, and they jobs change continuously. There's no Illuminati, no underground organization bend on control pulling strings, and no trillion dollar computer system tracking every habbit every american has. You;re only watched if you show up on the rader, and you're only scrutinized and investigated if they believe you are actually breaking the law. Cops are WARY of accessing what they should not because theres both internal and external organizations folks that are overly paranoid put in place to ENSURE they don;t access what they should not, and they put COPS in JAIL for violating that, and cost the city (and taxpayers) billions when it happens.
Cops are not evil (some are power hungry, and get a trip on making others jump), they're honestly trying to improve the world. Don't show up on their radar, and you have nothing to fear. hide from them, and they get suspicions (as they're PAID to do).
The VAST majority of anonymous phones are used on some level for illegal activity. This is a SIMPLE thing to change. the government already likely knows all about you, giving them your phone number hurts no one (unless you commit a crime).
"plenty of case" sure, numbering in the dozens tops each year, mostly physical violence or poor treatment of a prisoner (aka, you already have been accused and arrested for a crime!) but very rarely a case of violation of warrant or rights, and out of hundreds of thousands of cops and a million cases a year.
cops don;t need a warrant to access the phone records of a specific number associated with a criminal investigation, no, but that does NOT eliminate due process. Due Process simply means a judge doesn't have to PREAPPROVE the search for that data, but it DOES have to be DOCUMENTED THOURAGGLY why it was accessed and in association with a case, otherwise when you find out your number was accessed, ir if a judge or lawyer wuestions why it was, THAT COP GOES TO JAIL, and very well so will his supervisor.
Why do we know cops don't willy-nilly look up this data? because the PHONE COMAPNY BILLS FOR EACH ACCESS, and that access it audited by various state and federal agencies explicity to look for such behavior, and that lookup better damned well be tied to a case. I know a LOT of cops. There's NO WAY any of them would access phone record information (or ANY information that is not public record in a tax office or DMV) without documented just cause. It's simply not worth years in prison and the loss of a job (a job that supprots a cop's family) to see if a buddy's wife has been cheating on him...
They don't TRACK this data, they don't LOG this data. they only look it up IN ASSOCIATION WITH A CASE FILE. If a cop IDs a number associated with a known criminal, and he wants to track that criminal's association with other people, a phone is the quickest and easiest method, and it also, thanks to location data, moves to time line and alibi. If you have anonymous numbers, you give criminals the power to bypass this process. If you give the government your name associated with a phone number, you;re only giving them ONE MORE way to contact you (since they ALREADY have your address, place of work, vehicle ID, and other information, or they could just ask a local utility for your phone number. If they want you already, they have enough ways to find you already in PUBLIC data. If they have a number, they should be ABLE to find WHO it belongs to, as anyone wanting to keep that private is clearly trying to live off the grid for one reason or another, and if THAT person becomes associated with another KNOWN criminal, we SHOULD have the ability to investigate.
So long as you use the same install key, and the same battle.net account login, no, re-installation on multiple machines should not be prevented. blizzard in the past has openly supported "clone" installations of other games, there's no reason they won't do that here.
I could be wrong...