throwaway160303

I understand. But understand that from their perspective, as a business deciding whether or not to stay in a particular market, it's also not their problem. They're going to act in their own interest; if the incentives are aligned as they are, the resulting behaviors shouldn't be surprising. Whether they should be condemned or whatnot is perhaps something interested people could debate, but interested they are not.

And, with a $2.2m settlement, the incentives are still solidly weighted towards behavior like this.

A cheaper TV - or to go a level deeper, still having the manufacturer in question in the business of making TVs. TVs, and more generally high-unit-volume embedded hardware products, are incredibly competitive. This is particularly true at the price points where Vizio moves significant volume. Margins were squeezed to zero years ago.

I'm unclear on something - you've said that these are "clearly" criminal acts. What would the charge be?

The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. Facebook can't 404 your posts on Reddit, and none of them and none of them can stop you from standing on the sidewalk with a sandwich board.

Saying that social media platforms should be subject to "scrutiny" (which is pretty vague and non-actionable), or are somehow beholden to public opinion, is nonsense. They're beholden to users, at most. And it's not like Google shut down the blog of of someone saying "GOOG's target price should be about $12". Let's see how much backlash they gets from their users over this, ha.

I've gotta say, I just read through the OVH DDOS mitigation docs, and for me the upshot is that if my servers were targeted, I'm in for an unspecified increase in latency, which for a rather large cross-section of use cases is one and the same as the service being unavailable due to the direct action of the DDOS (which is kinda still what would be happening).

It's also not something you can disable; it's mandatory, so as to not impact other customers. I (my employer) use AWS pretty heavily, and we've never noticed our ability to access our resources being impaired by a DDOS on other nodes, so... is it not rather obvious that AWS (and in general, the set of "cloud providers without constant outages on their status pages") have basically the same setup - network is rationed, a given resource will only be allowed so much of the pipe, and your service is unavailable until and unless you have the capacity to handle it. It's not as if it could be any other way.

The other danger seems to be in unexpected bills. Does this happen to people? Are there companies going bankrupt because they didn't notice a DDOS for a couple weeks? I've had AWS support reach out to me several times - without ever having had a paid support subscription - when my costs have gone up, just in the course of adding new functionality and expanding capacity. It's not like you set up one instance and can start egressing petabytes.

AWS does monitor their infrastructure. All accounts have limits from the get-go; you can't run up a bankruptcy-inducing bill without your phone ringing. And in all cases, your exposure below that level is rather directly under your control.

If I happen to have a use case that involves a bunch of random hosts sending me a lot of data, I expect to be able to pay the bill for the bandwidth and the capacity I provisioned to handle it. Or, if I didn't, I max out the bandwidth reserved for my resources and I don't end up seeing all the traffic. I don't see why it'd be helpful (or even meaningful) to differentiate between DDOS vs. legitimate traffic. Wouldn't a published policy on any cost or functionality difference when a DDOS is occurring provide a malicious actor with information they would need to avoid triggering that clause, so as to maximize the damage they're able to cause to your business?

I guess I'll likely change my tune if and when I'm targeted and have to deal with a DDOS (and this sentence is why i went to the throwaway, which is a shame; I'd be happy to put my name to the actual content of this post. But fate is not to be tempted.). In the meantime, though, I'm skeptical of the need, and even the desirability, of service-provider policies that have anything to do classifying the "nature" of traffic flows. It just seems completely out-of-scope for them, and in-scope for myself as the person doing the provisioning.

So. You want prevent, through the use of force and the rule of law, private citizens from taking photographs of people in public places and comparing those photographs with a voluntarily provided corpus?

Enforcing such rules would take nothing short of a totalitarian state.

There was no privacy when we lived in villages, and we will return to that state in the mid-term future. The anonymity of the modern metropolis and the accompanying sensation of privacy in our day-to-day lives is but a temporary aberration in the history of the human experience.

Do not get used to it. It is not long for this world.

How are the dopamine hits from a nicotine-delivery product different from the dopamine hits from a glucose-delivery product?

I'm with you, and I also don't want to breathe the halitosis-infused mist expelled by my coworkers. Seems reasonable to me to have some legislation on the books to require people who work in a shared workplace to brush their teeth.

If enough users disagree with that, let them take over maintenance of homebrew.

But nobody actually cares that much, only enough to complain. At length.

Yes they have, yes it does, they think the world would be better if everyone Just Said No to DRM and the W3C isn't going along with their grand plan, yes, and because they (correctly) think it'll sound convincing to the target audience (mostly other Just Say No-ers, probably consisting mostly of the EFF and Mozilla. And that's it.)

I'm really getting tired of what seems to be the EFF's somewhat-newfound mission (it's been getting steadily worse over the last couple years) to push the limits of "shrill squawking about nonsense" to new heights.

The constitution sets forth very real protections for the accused, for defendants. I see very little that could be stretched to apply to a third party that chooses not to comply with a lawfully obtained order because they disagree with it.

Frankly I doubt the Founding Fathers would ever have conceived of a third party daring to issue a bare-faced refusal to comply with a lawfully obtained order. They would surely have expected that this would immediately turn that individual (or corporate person, as the case may well be in this age) into another defendant, for a new crime.

I really don't know what Apple is thinking. They should have set a line in the sand when they legitimately could do nothing to gain access to the data, as they're so close to having completed in recent hardware/OS revs. That would force congress to pass legislation outlawing secure crypto, or give up. That would be an interesting thing to see, no doubt.

But this? They're playing a very dangerous game for very low stakes, and the only obvious rationale for doing it is the one that the government can and probably will argue is at work, which is as a PR move.

And a judge's signature outweighs your stock price any damn day of the week. Stupid/reckless is my first impression, or maybe it is just brilliant PR. But as a general rule, don't fight city hall for bragging rights. The real fight will happen once you say "tough luck, nothing anybody can do, you want to break in, go talk to to the quantum cryptographers".

I suspect the fees+interest thing is mostly a cover story. As unflattering as it seems, I'd be unsurprised to learn that the three pages of fine print are a calculated display, to make it seem as though they're merely not-entirely-oriented-to-the-public-good but otherwise aboveboard private corporations. And it's not as if they don't get some income from putting the screws to those short on cash, but if that were the extent of it then I should never get a credit card offer, ever. My only credit history is on-time rent payments, and my employment history + no dependents + no college loans should make it obvious that I would never generate any income from late-payment fees or interest. And yet, I've received offers throughout my adult life.

But even if they never saw a penny of income directly from me, what they would still get out of it would be the data. And insight into the purchase habits of consumers with plenty of expendable income - the same people that would otherwise be a losing proposition for a business that actually relied on failure to pay on time to stay afloat - seems like it'd be far more valuable than the entirety of what they'd be able to squeeze out of the already-cash-strapped.

I'm actually highly impressed at the extent to which they're completely successful in focusing the public discussion on their "outrageous" and exploitative policies. They put on a thoroughly convincing show of fighting tooth-and-nail against regulations to reign in that behavior. But I think it's because, if it ever got seriously done, people would start asking how it was they were still in business - and they would definitely still be in business. But the finance operation is just how they collect the raw material for their actual product.

While adding another piece of state and another UI control to an interface that, AIUI, did not require any changes to support this feature, which would have delayed shipping and getting this functionality into the hands of their end-users.

But making an opt-in, allow-negative-feedback control is not feedback I think they'd be wise to listen to. Users can edit issues. I'm finding it exhausting just to think through the implications of either allowing editing of the flag, or deciding that users have to get it right the first time. I can't imagine I'd find it easier to use - in fact I am sure I would be intimidated, plain and simple, by the fear of who-knows-what happening if I did the wrong thing.

(...but then, that's the most git-like thing I can imagine doing! something-like-a-VCS that you can build entire new companies' worth of brand-new development practices around and still be utterly impenetrable without first unlearning 30 years of perfectly functional version-control experience and collective wisdom. I can't express how glad I am that I don't make things for developers. Truth is, most user bases are a joy to work with. Developers... insist on dysfunction, it's non-negotiable. I think it's part of the whole, "we still don't know how to do good software engineering" schtick. It wouldn't matter if it were a solved problem to the point of a mathematical proof, nobody would allow it anywhere near their mysterious uncharted edge-blurring code artisanship. We really, really suck, both professionally, and at being adults. For the most part, anyway.)

hahahaha this place is going downhill. In fairness, maybe it's always been like this during the too-early/way-too-late timeframes.

Sorry, but the world ain't full of copyleft warriors. People put their name on patents, in no small part because they immediately subsequently put that patent on their resumes. Nobody is denying themselves earning power - cash money - in order to protect the public interest from their big bad provider of paychecks. Especially since the public interest, here, means "the companies competing with my provider of paychecks".

Chill out. AnthonyMouse makes a perfectly valid and well-expressed point. Pulling a "wow" at someone else's "naive little worldview" is neither convincing nor constructive.

I don't know about a 94%/6% breakdown, but I know that if truck drivers are paid as described, by-the-mile, the workforce must skew heavily male, since pay will be higher for physically stronger individuals. It is not that women are not physically strong enough - it is that stronger people are paid more for doing this job, and therefore the people most incentivized to pick truck driving will be those who are strongest, and the upper echelons of that measure are exclusively male. Not the entire top 3.5 million that it would take to fill every truck driver job in the US, and of course some strong people will choose to do other things, and some less-physically-gifted individuals of both sexes will choose to do it despite not being compensated as well as others with the same job.

So. If 94/6 doesn't seem reasonable to you, what does?