Re: Something in the water?
To my left-coast USian ears, Bill Clinton has a very noticeable accent. Same with Obama, although it's a different one. I don't think I've heard them speaking on the BBC, though, so I can't compare that...
5648 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2015
"how deeply should the company investigate in order to decide whether the report is true or just someone being malicious or trying to eliminate the competition?"
It depends on the severity of the complaint. Accusations of, say, AirBnB hosts installing spy cameras are extremely serious. AirBnB should at least send someone posing as a customer to stay in the place and check it out.
"A night vision camera and an IR light."
Suitable cameras and IR flashlights are available very inexpensively from all the usual suspects (Amazon, eBay, etc.).
But I think that if you're so concerned that buying such gear for routine use is appealing to you, it would be better to stop using the likes AirBnB entirely.
Fines are appropriate when a company unintentionally violates the law (through being incompetent or whatever). When a company knowingly and intentionally violates the law, prosecution of the individuals who decided to do that, combined with a revocation of the company's article of incorporation and/or business licenses seems appropriate.
"they have those 'like' button trackers but if you never login to them they can't link that activity back to you"
This is not exactly true.
Also, aside from the Like buttons, Facebook also has web beacons and all the other sorts of trackers. Just not using Facebook (or even not having an account) does not protect you from Facebook's tracking.
"Monopolies are especially dangerous because [...]"
This is all true, but we're talking about the adtech/martech industry specifically here. As I said, I think that those industries as a whole are bad actors. I don't see how it affects me one way or another if it devolves into a monopoly. It doesn't change a thing for me if the industry consists of one company or a thousand -- the industry is still a malicious attacker and the defenses that I have to engage in aren't affected.
"How will you prevent Google from spying on you [...]"
The same way I do now. Right now, Google+Facebook pretty much control all advertising anyway, and have an undue influence over browser standards (both official and de facto). In my view, the situation you're describing in your comment has already been reality for a while.
"Since Google is the biggest and most dangerous player in the ad tech industry, killing the competition is bad for everyone especially those who hate advertising"
How so?
In a sense, it's better for me if that does happen -- then I only have to worry about a single large attacker instead of the large number of attackers that I have to worry about now. (That's just for the sake of argument, I don't actually think it matters much either way).
Also, I don't hate advertising. I hate the ad tech industry because they are so insistent about spying on me. There's a significant difference there.
"while Google's cookie changes will benefit consumer privacy, they'll be devastating for the rest of the ad tech business."
Boo hoo.
Anything that is devastating for the ad tech industry is a good thing in my view. My only problem with Google's move here is that it won't hurt Google as well.
Calls from abusing offshore outfits can be blocked entirely. Or, their ability to spoof CID can be blocked.
Even if international calls are difficult-to-impossible to deal with (which I don't think is true), that in no way means it's not worth tackling domestic ones. Just because you can't solve all aspects of a problem doesn't mean you shouldn't solve the parts that you can.
"people stop answering ANY calls"
A lot of people, and particularly young people, are there already.
I'm an old fogey, so I do answer phone calls if the calling number is one of someone in my address book. Fortunately, pretty much everybody I know understands that if you're calling someone without prearranging it, that means you're having an emergency -- so I rarely get actual phone calls.
They can leave a message for that as well.
I have a very strict policy of not answering the phone if the calling number is not in my address book. So strict that my phone won't even ring -- it just gets shunted directly to voice mail.
This policy has never caused any trouble, and I can't imagine a circumstance where it would cause more than an inconvenience.
"I think that was BEFORE outside-the-box technologies like VoIP came along which allowed the spoofing of everything"
There is nothing inherent in VoIP that leads to this. That this situation exists is a side-effect of how VoIP is integrated with the phone system. That is something that can be changed.
The phone system has an unspoofable Id mechanism in place, and has had so for almost as long as it has existed. It's what phone companies use to work out billing.
The reason that it's not used for Caller ID is that there situations where spoofing the CID is genuinely in everybody's best interest. For instance, when making a call from a phone bank, the phone # of the line that happened to be used to place the call is worthless -- you can't call it and expect the call to go through. Spoofing the CID to provide the correct number for people to call is a good thing.
What needs to be done is not to remove the ability to spoof, it's to take the power to do it out of the hands of phone customers, so companies would have to arrange to have the phone company itself set what the spoofed number is. Then the phone company could ensure the spoofed number isn't deceptive, and would have legal liability for any abuse of the capability.
I think it depends on the relationship between the employer and the recruiter. Many companies regularly work with certain recruiters and have an ongoing business relationship with them. In those cases, the companies usually do offer feedback to the recruiter about why applicants were rejected, because it lets the recruiter refine which applicants they bring to the table.
Recruiters that are cold-calling employers, however, are different. They almost never get any feedback, because it's not worth the employer's time to give it.
Indeed. A friend of mine once had his car break down in the middle of nowhere (this was before cell phones). He had the presence of mind to go to a farmhouse he could see and offer to pay the farmer to do a little emergency repair of his car.
The farmer did the repair without a problem, and didn't even accept money for it.
"Framing this as "It's mine so I have a right to repair it" is not helpful"
But it is true.
"It's not desirable for farmers to fix their own tractors"
I think that farmers would strongly disagree with this. Why do you think it's not desirable?
"This should not be strange, this was the situation with cars, TVs, white goods etc for decades."
During those same decades, it has also been very common for people to fix their own cars, TVs, etc. That should also not be considered strange
You're right.
This is one of the main reasons why companies shouldn't use Google Drive or the like for this sort of thing at all.
But it could be done in a more secure way. Instead of sending the link provided by the cloud service, set up a redirect so that the link that is actually sent is to the company's domain name. So the link may read "https://my.company.files/file1", but it will get redirected to the cloudy link.