"the data will be kept" isn't an explanation of WHY. Why will it be kept? Was it capable of sending it but did they do this on purpose to create a treasure trove for later?

Why can't it just send it back to the base station there and have it forwarded back to earth? Isn't that how it's been working all along? (or is it too far away from the base station?)

I'd venture a guess that it started out with someone offering the service of providing 911 access, and it worked fine at small scale. Then they found more customers to connect, because traffic was very low for the infrastructure they already had. Then more and more jumped on the bandwagon, to offload their "911 responsibility" to this one popular provider. Adding more users was practically "plug-and-play", they just had to adjust some routing tables and bam, their 911 responsibility had been outsourced and now they can forget about that annoying and expensive thing the government mandates them to do "because we have this other outfit taking care of all that for us".

Then over time this one scrappy little outfit found itself the sole 911 service provider in three states. But instead of using all that new capital from all their new customers to upgrade their now over-extended systems and add redundancy, they just pocketed most of it. Their customers were happy, their shareholders were happy, life was good. Nobody thought there was anything wrong because there hadn't been any problems, and the 911 calls were getting through. There were no reliability or single-point-of-failure audits because there had never been any problems with it in the past.

Then a wild posthole digger appears, and suddenly everyone is vividly aware of just how fragile of a system everyone in the area is relying on. And the finger-pointing begins. "We never could have imagined something like this could possibly happen!" Oh yeah, ignorance is bliss.

I wonder if circuits like this are being overused due to low prices? Like if you have a "weak link" circuit that is one of the few that connects popular points X and Y together, and "in theory" there's a lot of users for that circuit, but the smart ones realize they can't put all their eggs in one basket through there (like their primary AND their backup system, you can't run BOTH through the same node, for fault-tolerance reasons) and so the owners of that circuit find they're having trouble selling capacity through it, so they lower prices. This attracts outsourcers and resellers to reroute through there for the low prices. Then some groups, looking to cut costs, find this new outfit offering bandwidth from X to Y and switch to it, without realizing that now their backup service is running through a node that their primary service does. I'm sure there's processes in place to catch when this might happen, but I wonder if the lower prices (due to those 'aware of the danger' avoiding the node) is what's leading to unexpected loss of redundancy for the less diligent groups?

Most phones lock up the biometric keys when they're rebooted, and require something like a pin code to unlock after reboot. (at which time the biometrics get unlocked)

So if you're in a situation where you're worried about someone forcefully unlocking your phone, shut it off.

Although this frustratingly means you can't record the interaction with your phone...

webp has been a headache for me and a lot of other people. While I can agree that it tends to be about half the file size, these are already usually small-ish files, and I don't really need the savings. All it does for me is cause my older apps to go "what is this?" and refuse to display them as inline images or have other compatibility problems. There was a big push for webp but it seems to have gotten enough pushback to have caused a lot of places to back off and return to the old reining king JPEG.

I don't see anything different happening with JPEGLI. A momentary annoyance for a lot of people with very little functional benefit.

if you want ME to "take care of your kids", then yes, you ought to pay me to do it.

Otherwise, step up and be a responsible parent. It's not the world's job to raise your child and instill the values you want them to have. I believe legisnation like this is mostly the result of lazy parents that expect (and want to FORCE) the world to do the parenting they can't be bothered to do themselves.

They typically will make a temporary connection with a nearby device (usually Apple or Android) and let them know they are nearby. Their identification is anonymous though. The device they connected to can then connect to Apple's servers and provide the identification along with the geo location of the device performing the upload. If the device has a GPS with a position, that's what will be sent.

But if the device was just turned on or is in a location with poor GPS signal, the accuracy of the location can be poor. Due to the nature of GPS, the precision can be much higher in one direction and lower in another, so it may be +/- 20 feet north/south, and +/- 100 feet east/west. If GPS is unavailable but the device has a cellular signal, it may instead try to estimate the location using nearby tower strength. (the phone knows the GPS coordinates of the towers) This can also be low precision if cellular reception is poor or there are few towers nearby with a decent signal. The same +/- variations that happen with poor GPS can happen with poor cellular.

GPS DOP (degree of precision) is available to your GPS and some will display the uncertainty, but most cell phones don't display their DOP, for their GPS or for their cellular. Unfortunately, they're happy to provide an exact GPS coordinate and say "this is where I am", without any warning of just how good or bad the precision actually is. (my GPS will give me a rough indication of its current precision, sometimes while showing me driving down the road that's one block to my left or right...) DOP can be included with the report, but again whatever is interpreting it needs to inform the user of the uncertainty. I don't think "find my device" displays the DOP of the last position.

If it puts a thumbtack on a house, but tells you the average DOP is 300 feet, you can't just go busting down that door. It sounds like that's what happened though, and for that they ought to get held accountable.

And making matters worse, this is all reporting the position of the device, not the AirPod, so you have to figure in how far away the AirPod is from the device, and further ADD to the DOP, which is just going to make the reading even less accurate. Even if the phone had excellent DOP of say +/- 3 feet, if they're driving down the street and pass by the house, there's NO way to tell even which side of the street it's on, since the DOP from the AirPod to the phone is going to be something like +/- 40 feet to reach to the AirPod in the house. (so the final DOP is +/- 43 feet) And so realistically, that position is going to cover at least half a dozen houses.

But from what I recall of Find My Device, I think a lot of the blame here is on Apple, for not being clear about the accuracy of the indicator. The last time I used it, it pulled up a map and put a red pin where it thought my laptop was, and gave NO indication of the blob-shaped area my phone was LIKELY to be in. It just put a pin on the map and said "here it is!" But it was in my house, I had a good signal on my phone, and the computer was in the same room, so both the phone and the computer had good DOP. And this is probably the same scenario that people were in when they turned it on and played with it for the first time. "The pin is on my house and that's where my computer is, this seems to work really well!" This leads to an unreasonably high confidence in the precision of the report.

It's also important to remember that this is the LAST REPORTED position. If that AirPod was in a car that was following another car, whose driver's phone reported it, and it hasn't checked in with any other device since then, it could easily be MILES away from that reported position now. You've got to pay attention to the exact timestamp of the report, and again that may be something the swat team didn't do.

"If you're playing games in the same room with someone, it's a different experience than doing it online. You can only be so much of a jackass to somebody who was sitting three feet away from you..."

Oh but it was SO much better. Taunts are so much more effective when they're live and in person. And we used to trash talk the piss out of each other as we played - this house was fully networked and we had a good ten machines running at a time. And you had the added bonus of being able to hear other people's computers, which could give you an edge from time to time. "OK I just heard a redeemer launch from the living room, time to find somewhere to hide!"

Also, everyone has sub-10ms pings, which is nice.

UT2004 with the bots set to Godlike. Us vs them. (and those bots would cheat like you would not believe - think playing against an entire team of wall hack, radar, headshot hacks) We had single CTF matches that lasted nearly an hour. Coordinating over voice chat just doesn't work the same as yelling down the hallway. (also, several people can be screaming at once without someone getting muted)

I DO miss that.

and "noted" that stakeholders needed to be consulted,

Remember, the WEALTHY must give their approval before a rule is changed!!

Pray I don't alter it further!

Arkansas has removed algebra from their graduation requirements.

I find it odd that the flight computer will reject commands that will do things like over-stress the airframe, while at the same time allowing a maneuver that's this dangerous for the crew and passengers?

I suppose it's allowed due to the pilot maybe having the need to do something like that in an emergency, but they should have to manually disengage the autopilot or something for that. I assume the autopilot was on at this stage, and that the sudden stick movement automatically disengaged the autopilot and kicked them into the nose-dive.

It also wouldn't surprise me if that server standing in the cockpit didn't get flung into the chair and possibly pilot, just making the problem worse.

United said the missing panel did not affect the flying characteristics of the airplane...

Using non-flush rivets affects flight characteristics significantly. (top speed, fuel economy, well known since ww2) Saying an entire panel missing "doesn't affect flying characteristics" is just a bald-faced lie.

If they simply said "the change in flight characterists caused by the loss of the panel is still well within safe flying parameters" I might be more convinced they weren't justt trying to hand-waive all of my concerns away.

I don't see a single post here talking about how their good driving habits are saving them money on lower insurance rates... If one group is being charged more, there MUST be another group getting charged less. This discussion is definitely not unbiased.

That being said, I still don't like the idea of a product that I (or my bank I suppose) 100% own collecting data on me and selling it, regardless of whether that works for or against me in the end. Now when I'm using Google to search for something, I'm fully aware that they're providing me with a service at no cost, in exchange for collecting and selling statiscis about my activities. But this is different - I doubt it's in the fine print on the purchasing agreement and I'd wager most owners would say they're not expecting this to be happening. It really feels illegal to me, violating my privacy without notice or compensation.

But I'm sure they just look at this as another source of revenue, and will continue to do it for as long as they can, as any big business will do.

Automakers Are Sharing Consumers' Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies
Posted by msmash on Monday March 11, 2024 @03:40PM from the no-mercy dept.

If you've got more information on an article that's already been posted, you really ought to put it in a reply to that article, rather than posting another article....