Here's a handy list of valid uses for IP addresses:
1. Packet routing.
edit: typo corrected, thanks.
Alas, watching Gilliam's other films gets more and more difficult, even though he tries to make the same movie again and again, for almost forty years now. But ‘Brazil’ was a home run on the first attempt.
Besides, you might be unfamiliar with the fact that Gilliam referred to ‘Bandits’, ‘Brazil’ and ‘Munchausen’ as a trilogy about the same thing. Which trilogy evidently ended up having at least nine films in it, excepting ‘F&L’ and me having not watched ‘Quixote’ yet (the latter's theme obviously follows the rest, though).
Perhaps Tom Stoppard is the missing ingredient.
I don't think I fully appreciate the assignments to read Kafka in college until these algorithmic bans, ousting from app stores, automated support, etc came along. Before that I figured the human element could, in most cases even if it required extreme difficulty, sort things out eventually. Then came these heuristic algorithms that have practically become the platonic ideal if Kafka-esque systems.
Edit: While Amazon is very far from perfect and has dropped several notches in customer service, I will say that they are still very good compared to others. I can still get ahold of a real person that has some leeway for professional judgement when addressing a problem.
For standard run of the mill customer support they're still pretty great. I was shopping for new wireless earbuds last fall and tried out a few different ones. 2 of the 3 were defective and I didn't like the third-- they hurt my ears to wear them.
For the two defective ones, I'm not sure why but the normal return button wasn't available and I had to go through chat support. I explained they were defective and I wanted to return them. They told me they'd issue the refund, no need to actually mail them back, so I didn't have to go through that hassle. And these were high end ear buds, a total of $400 worth of tech.
Amazon sucks. It should be broken up.
[1] https://artofelectronics.net/the-book/counterfeit-editions/
I expect them to at least collect the information that I received, or suspect I have, a counterfeit item, when I go for a return. They don't even bother to do that.
You're asked to comment on so many things that you haven't heard of. 19th century English class anxiety, extreme poverty in London, slavery and race relations in America, midcentury dystopias (global) and unreasonable justice systems in central Europe (?). All things an ordinary Scandinavian teenager at the end of the 21st century is not going to have a whole lot of perspective on until they've lived a little bit longer.
But then when you have lived that little bit longer it makes sense, and Kafka is probably the one that will come closest, having travelled quite nicely into the modern world and having a corporate version that most people will run into. Next is the dystopias that we see on the news but don't recognise when living in.
Offering a false dichotomy between "be forced to allow those malicious actors an[d, sic] account" and "take actions to protect myself and my other paying customers" that have adverse impacts (many times with severe monetary damages) is externalizing the cost of poor gating control in the first place in the pursuit of pumping up subscriber numbers chasing the next funding round or quarterly call to brag upon. This is similar to financial services institutions flailing around "identity theft" to cover for gating control of their transactions implemented in pursuit of transaction liquidity over security.
Both take the externalized costs out of customer hides as both uncompensated time and monies spent to make good on unwinding transactions, and in making the aggregate customers pay for the direct costs of fixing the problematic transactions on the way, way back end. Both are a result of implementing poor security practices.
Both also will not scale to the coming era of hyper-converged global financial services. First mover advantage accrues to the one who fixes this challenge at the front end where they gate the transactions, cutting out the majority of the costs of fixing this on the back end after the transaction has been compiled and deployed into production so to speak, not coincidentally speeding up settlement, increasing liquidity, and grab the significant network effects that come with establishing such an infrastructure.
It's important, though, to not listen to the introduction for too long, because it gives away the ending.
On the consumer side it would be hard to market the advantage though because everyone thinks it won't won't happen to them (and as long as they are average enough, it probably won't), and the cost of being banned from eBay is not that big if you're just a casual user.
>> so it’s possible that eBay has been scanning customers’ computers for almost seven years without too many people noticing.
Can't one check the archive.org for signup.ebay.com & verify this? Saying ebay has been port-scanning for 7 years and proving so, would be a much stronger point. Surprised the OP did not check.
I was banned the same way as the OP, few months ago. They(humans)collected my Id, bank details, personal address, original invoice of the items I was selling, some calls, to finally ban my 15+ year user.
In effect, it lets you revoke your consent for the company to store and process your data. But it also provides for cases where your data can be processed without your consent. It's not an unlimited carte blanche, but fraud prevention is explicitly given as an example of a legitimate purpose.
Businesses are allowed to retain information necessary to operate. Which would include things like names, email addresses, IP addresses, etc of people who are banned (to prevent them from returning).
If GDPR required a company to delete everything, it would be impractical. (E.g. imagine you request a company delete your info, and then you immediately sue them for something that happened while using their product/service… the company wouldn’t be able to defend themselves unless they retained a record/logs of your usage.
You can submit a deletion request, but in most cases much of your data won’t actually be deleted.
I'm not sure about that. The company might reason it needs this data to operate, but you should be able to contest that with a data protection authority.
The data that you can not request to delete is for example money transaction data, which the company has to retain for 10 years or so due to other laws.
The spam stopped.
A bit over 10% (and probably somewhat higher than 10% on HN) of Americans do have something like GDPR. California Consumer Privacy Act. I'm not including Colorado, Virginia, or Utah because I'm not sure how equivalent their laws are.
GDPR applies to all individuals in the EU, not just citizens.
At the very least, I'm sure eBay lawyers would be happy to argue the point.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
Mind you, there's nothing to stop eBay from having someone now look at your data and go 'nope'.
GDPR specifically carves out keeping data for "legitimate business needs" including fraud prevention and so on. Whatever data Ebay (thinks it) has about this person that they are using to enforce the ban would be data that they would argue falls under this clause.
You might have a chance to successfully challenge the termination by legal means, if you actually did not violate Ebay's terms and conditions.
In this context the more relevant aspect of GDPR, which I think receives too little attention and more so enforcement, is article 22 (Automated individual decision-making, including profiling)
But when you see it again you have personally identified the individual have you not? Doesn’t that by definition mean it is identifiable if you are able to determine the identity later?
This is something that advertisers/supermarket points schemes etc used to do when they didn’t have consent to share personal data, hash it and align it with what they already had so effectively they shared the subsets of interest anyway. I remember at university when some guys from yahoo sponsored a hack event, they literally gave a guest lecture boasting about doing this with Sainsbury’s to squeeze through a legal loophole back in 2013.
If your original delete request was followed so that everything they knew about you was deleted, they would not be able to relink everything that GUID linked to. It should be gone now. However, if that hashed value lives in a BANNED_ACCOUNTS table, then all they have to do is create the hash, check the table, disallow new account. You can even do it in good faith by not storing any of the new info rather than storing it and forcing a new delete request.
In a large entity such as Google, you almost need to outsource ID verification to ensure it's not abused by other (advertising/marketing) parts of Google. Of course all of this requires good faith on the part of the implementing entity, which is certainly not guaranteed.
They banned me and no recourse/way to appeal.
I even sent them a physical letter without much luck.
Pitty, I loved the app, but stopped using it due to their unnecessary/strict no-VPN rule.
0. https://blog.nem.ec/2020/05/24/ebay-port-scanning/