> I doubt UA would follow through considering it is illegal to submit known false debts.
I wonder if they've snuck in a mandatory binding arbitration clause into their contract, and if that would cover disputes about false debts. Even if the false debts were totally illegal, arbitration could make it impractical to challenge them.
> This is insane on a whole other level, because United profits when you don't get on that 2nd leg.
Not necessarily. If you use use hidden-city ticketing, they lost out on extracting the extra money they wanted to charge you for going to your intended destination AND the extra money they may have been able to charge someone else for the leg you didn't take.
That said, I think it's the airline's fault for using an over-complicated pricing model with odd behaviors that customers can take advantage of like this. There'd be no issue if they just charged the same per leg regardless of your final destination. That'd make everything transparent and totally remove the need for hidden-city ticketing.
It depends how you look at it. Once you've booked your ticket, United is better off if you don't take the last leg of the flight than if you do. Prior to booking, they would of course prefer you book the more expensive ticket. Forcing you to take the last leg is about encouraging you to book that more expensive ticket; it's not because they actually lost something when you chose to skip the final leg of the journey rather than take it.
> they lost out on the extra money they may have been able to charge someone else
Not necessarily. Airlines have sophisticated yield management programs that should give them a good estimate on how many passengers are likely to skip the final leg of any particular route -- the airline can oversell the final leg by exactly the number of passengers who aren't likely to show up.
Misrepresentation is commonplace, even outright fraud is commonplace. Serious fraud is a multi-billion dollar industry. "Light fraud" and gray area misrepresentation is at least hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
The "free market" doesn't make fraud or misrepresentation illegal, the laws and regulations of the dreaded government do.
The worst the free market can do to a fraudster is to stop dealing with her as knowledge of her frauds becomes widely known. That, of course, doesn't work very well to limit fraud.
Well... we're generally used to "adulterants" referring to inactive or even potentially (purely) harmful ingredients being added to things to make them cheaper. However, note that "adulterating" your sexual potency supplement with Viagra means that it will, you know... work. Same with putting steroids in your workout supplement... it makes it work, better than the competition that doesn't do it.
There are all kinds of other problems with that, of course. I'm not saying it's a good idea. But in terms of "why would people buy these?", well, I'd suggest part of the reason is that people want to lose weight, be sexually potent, or get swole, and these "adulterated" supplements actually work. Just at a cost you may not have realized you were paying, or intended to pay.
> 1) This data privacy glitch is just like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, except it isn’t.
> well, if its not, then why even bring it up? that part smells like sensationalism to me..
It's the same type of glitch, except there's no evidence that it was exploited (which is a different statement than it wasn't exploited; it may very well have been).
Unless I'm horribly misinformed, the Google breach is absolutely nothing like the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica deal. CA got huge amounts of information about users. The G+ breach just gave out contact information.
It's similar only in that it unintentionally gave out more information than it was supposed to. Beyond that, they're not similar at all.
I get that we shouldn't give Google a slap on the wrist because it's "not as bad", but we absolutely should not conflate the massive breach that was CA with this.
I think the comparison is a coherent one on the security side - these were both attacks enabled by allowing apps to piggyback on the visibility settings of the app user. Further, both represent threats which can't be entirely controlled (picture a user infected with a worm that simply opened Facebook and clicked through profiles), but can be constrained by auditing API data request options. If I had a social media site with an API for user-installed apps, I'd be thinking about these attacks in the same category.
But I do think the coverage here, equating the attacks on a user-impact level, is substantially unfair. The Facebook attack in some cases compromised Timeline posts and private messages from friends. What's more, Facebook initially claimed only profile data had been access, and took very little further flak when it was eventually revealed that private messages had been compromised.[1] Portraying the contents of the breach as comparable feels like it not only overstates the current exposure, but gives Facebook a pass on the broader reach of its exposure.
> Can we really continue to claim that we're unaware Google, Facebook, and other web companies are monitoring everything they can and sharing the information they collect, sometimes for profit, sometimes accidentally, and sometimes compelled by legal orders?
Yes, we can.
1. Some people (mostly technologists) are aware, but many people aren't.
2. Much of the awareness that does exist was not the result of those companies being transparent about their practices. It's the result of inferences based on scraps of information and speculation.
> Surely the author, editor, and publisher of this article, and anyone likely to read it, are aware. We are aware.
That's a really weird statement. Articles are published so that readers can be informed of things that the author and editors have become aware of. Often many articles are published on the same subject because 1) many people missed previous articles, 2) there a new update that people aren't aware of, 3) people forgot and it's a good time to remind them, 4) it's not news-facts article but a persuasive piece, 5) etc.
>> 2. Much of the awareness that does exist was not the result of those companies being transparent about their practices. It's the result of inferences based on scraps of information and speculation.
This means that "we" aren't as aware as you make us out to be.
> An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it happens at 3 AM.
Maybe the the trigger for the automatic reboot could be more complicated than just a time-based trigger. Something like
Reboot when
localtime > 2AM &
localtime < 5AM &
traffic averaged over the last 5 min < 5kbs
Basically reboot unless the router detects the network is being used actively.
Of course, if you're on vacation and relying on that router to be available for security cameras, an automatic firmware update that results in a bricked router can be more than a little disruptive.
Automatic security updates should be the default, all other updates should absolutely not. In case of patching routers there isn't much crapware to be upsold, but in general, if we're ever going to develop some code of ethics in this industry, I wish a part of it would be a rule of hard separation between security patches and feature updates, and another rule that the latter should never be done automatically without explicit opt-in.
Yes, it's extra work for developers, but the result of not doing that is the present situation - a lot of users, including a surprisingly large population of non-tech-savvy people, will go out of their way to shut down automatic updates, to avoid having to deal with broken workflows, upselling, ads sneaking in, and forced reboots in the middle of a business presentation or a game (or a surgery).
Automatic updates has some of the same issues as telemetry. Windows Update for example has to send information on things like drivers to scan for updates.
What about links that need to be available for failover or during emergencies? What about organizations that operate at those hours? I used to work at a 24 hour retail chain, and some stores in mining towns had their busiest hours around 4AM as busloads of miners came in to shop before the day started. We could _never_ upgrade those stores in the early morning hours.
So you're saying the defaults should be setup for the unusual use cases like you describe, even if that means we get botnets of millions of routers?
You're not going to define one set of secure-by-default rules that's going to work for everyone. Rather, you want to try to define a set of secure-by-default rules that work for most people. Then but the burden of reconfiguration and maintenance on those with unusual needs, rather than the majority.
Mikrotik's aren't really consumer-grade hardware (most Mikrotik's that is). Some operators deliberately stay a version or so back off the latest due to features breaking or instability, or requiring configuration changes, etc.
Automatic updating could be crippling to ISP operators (Mikrotik's are very popular with WISP's, and other smaller ISP operators).
> Basically reboot unless the router detects the network is being used actively.
For the average Mikrotik router, deployed at some WISP or small ISP, that's unlikely to happen.
> Socrates Scholasticus presents Hypatia's murder as entirely politically motivated[95] and makes no mention of any role that Hypatia's paganism might have played in her death.[95] Instead, he reasons that "she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed.
This is also interesting:
> ...Hypatia['s] sudden death not only left her legacy unprotected, but also triggered a backlash against her entire ideology.[146] Hypatia, with her tolerance towards Christian students and her willingness to cooperate with Christian leaders, had hoped to establish a precedent that Neoplatonism and Christianity could coexist peacefully and cooperatively.[147] Instead, her death and the subsequent failure by the Christian government to impose justice on her killers destroyed that notion entirely[147] and led future Neoplatonists such as Damascius to consider Christian bishops as "dangerous, jealous figures who were also utterly unphilosophical."[147] Hypatia became seen as a "martyr for philosophy"[147] and her murder led philosophers to adopt attitudes that increasingly emphasized the pagan aspects of their belief systems[148] and helped create a sense of identity for philosophers as pagan traditionalists set apart from the Christian masses.[149] Thus, while Hypatia's death did not bring an end to Neoplatonist philosophy as a whole, Watts argues that it did bring an end to her particular variety of it.[150]
> Shortly after Hypatia's murder, a forged anti-Christian letter appeared under her name.[151] Damascius was "anxious to exploit the scandal of Hypatia's death", and attributed responsibility for her murder to Bishop Cyril and his Christian followers.[152][153] A passage from Damascius's Life of Isidore, preserved in the Suda, concludes that Hypatia's murder was due to Cyril's envy over "her wisdom exceeding all bounds and especially in the things concerning astronomy".[98][154] Damascius's account of the Christian murder of Hypatia is the sole historical source attributing direct responsibility to Bishop Cyril.[154]
And the ideologically-motivated myths seem build from there.
Agreed. Emotive contemporary documentaries and cinema paint Hypatia as an early feminist martyr for science but actual records of the political/social dynamics surrounding her death are sketchy.
I wonder if you could test this theory using helium gas from one of those cylinders they use to inflate balloons. Put an iPhone in a bag, inflate it with helium, and see if it malfunctions.
> On the Leadership Team of the Bro Project, we heard clear concerns from the Bro community that the name "Bro" has taken on strongly negative connotations, such as "Bro culture".
My understanding is that the negative connotations of the word "bro" come wholly from outsiders who co-opted it to use as a pejorative to attack a community. It originated and remains an in-group term of endearment and familiarity in that community.
It's interesting to note that seems like an inversion of what I understand happened to certain forms of the n-word. It started out as a pejorative slur used by outsiders to attack a community, but then forms of it were "reclaimed" by that community to be used as an in-group term of endearment and familiarity.
> How about actually leaking documents on day, I dunno, how the Chinese government is trying to brainwash Uighurs and erase their culture and religion?
Wikileaks legitimately may not be in a position to acquire such documents to leak. My understanding is that they mainly distribute documents provided to them by others, and has never exercised much editorial discretion. If Wikileaks is best known in the US/Western Europe, it'll likely only acquire documents related to those regions.
For a Chinese person to leak documents about Xinjiang to Wikileaks, that person must first know about them, then be able to contact them, then be able to send the documents to them. I wouldn't be surprised if Wikileaks itself is blocked by the Great Firewall, and that its typical communication channels for leakers are blocked and/or difficult to use from the PRC, which makes the whole process doubtful.
We'll never know how much "editorial discretion" they exercise by just not releasing things that don't suit the narrative they're building. And I'm guessing it's actually a whole lot. During the 2016 US election, they implied often on twitter that they were sitting on more information about all parties, constantly hyping up more bombshells and then only releasing some one-sided nothingness. It was such an obvious attempt to destabilize the discourse, it's hard to imagine their motives were driven by anything other than the interests of a certain foreign government.
I wonder if they've snuck in a mandatory binding arbitration clause into their contract, and if that would cover disputes about false debts. Even if the false debts were totally illegal, arbitration could make it impractical to challenge them.