Assuming this statement is demonstrably accurate, the most likely scenario is that there was some 'trusted partner' to whom AT&T sold a bunch of data, and it was that 'trusted partner' who then got hacked and had the data dump exfil'd.

I thought I linked my source...Citation for the Snapshot study: https://canada.jdpower.com/sys...

Insurance rates have increased across the board by 25-40% since 2020, depending on who's numbers you believe. *NOBODY* is getting *lower* insurance rates, which is why nobody is talking about that.

But let's go your way for a second and assume that insurance companies *did* lower rates based on good driving habits. Such a program would be more of an opt-in thing, like Progressive's Snapshot. Now, what's interesting about this case study is how the article seems to be optimistic, but it's easy to pivot them differently. 57% of shoppers (i.e. non-Progressive customers) knew about Snapshot, but 89% of *customers* (i.e. people who signed up to be insured by the carrier) 'nope' out of it...so when telemetry is explicitly opt-in, most people don't.

Of those who *did* sign up, they only listed their overall satisfaction at 7.1/10, meaning that there were *very* few people who rated at 9 or 10 ('7' tends to be the default in such surveys). The two most common complaints were that the savings received from having all their driving monitored didn't meet expectations, and that the snapshot system gave demerits for 'hard braking' at levels that weren't contextually relevant. A distracted driver hard-braking to avoid a rear-end collision that would have been a direct consequence of their distraction is vastly different than a driver avoiding a side swipe from another driver merging carelessly. While any onlooker would see a chasm of difference between the two, telemetry doesn't differentiate, and the alert, defensive driver would get penalized as much as the distracted driver. Worse yet, the careless merger wouldn't get a demerit at all despite nearly causing an accident. All this for a best-case-scenario of $231 in savings per year, i.e. less than how much my insurance went up last year anyway, and I didn't have an accident or a ticket.

So, in practice, people don't opt in when it's made abundantly clear that they're being tracked. Florida Man's case revolves around the fact that the telemetry being used against him was not collected with his truly-informed-consent. I do sincerely hope that he wins, because the problem here isn't that telemetry is possible (to your point, I'm perfectly fine with people opting into Snapshot or something like it if they so choose), it's that it's basically impossible to know who's collecting what, and how it's being interpreted. I'd love nothing more than for the case to go to SCOTUS and determine that auto makers *must* provide a way to expressly disable all telemetry from vehicles *and* that insurance companies cannot use the absence of telemetry as an actuarial metric...but it'll take a Florida Man to make the case get that far.

Hock Tan must be surrounding himself with nothing but yes-men who are either unable or unwilling to tell him 'no' once in a while.

The problem with Broadcom acquisitions are 1.) that there have been a lot of them, and 2.) that there aren't *any* examples of a company acquired by Broadcom where the actual-customers (not the shareholders, the people who pay invoices) have been *happier* as a result of the acquisition. Brocade products aren't better, Symantec software isn't better, LSI products aren't better...they're all just more expensive.

So, when Broadcom bought VMWare, Tan's immediate reaction was, effectively, Let's Go Whaling!". The problem is that VMWare has a longer long-tail of customers, and those top-10% customers VMWare planned to extort would have the resources to make Nutanix or Xen or Proxmox work in their environments, at least partially.

Meanwhile, a nontrivial number of VMWare customers likely either preferred Capex licensing, or expressly didn't want the monthly fees associated with The Cloud(tm). To not only require subscriptions, but to require subscriptions that were likely higher than cloud services was to cause chaos in both the IT department *and* the accounting department.

Of course, it's all summed up by the plan to "provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities". Broadcom doesn't have a track record of improving products, and Tan's statements on the matter make it clear that his goals for the foreseeable future are solely based on revenue, rather than product improvement or service enhancements.

Put it all together, and the unfortunate reality is that the damage is done. Even if Tan reinstates perpetual licenses, Essentials packs, and the free hypervisor, AND restructures the pricing to be merely "5% more than you paid last year", the reputation has been irreparably damaged.

Tan may have gotten away with it with Brocade and Symantec, but it's entirely possible that shareholders will be out for blood if Q2 revenue reflects the fact that even the whales are seeking alternatives.

Agreed...however, it seems that nobody wants to actually compile such a list. The one that *supposedly* does so is Mozilla, but their list is so comprehensive that it's basically impossible to make a distinction. The 1999 Toyota Camry I formerly had an ODB2 port that allowed that collected data to be downloaded by an ODB2 scanner, and Toyota's privacy policy at the time, apparently, technically allowed them to collect that data if you brought it in for service.

That's not *remotely* the same as the amount of pervasive data collection that a 2023 Tesla Model X collects, and sends back to the Tesla mothership in real time via a cellular modem...but the Mozilla list gave the Camry and the Tesla the same rating. Thus, the list is basically useless.

Again, if you've got a car manufacturer that's making 2024 model cars without a cell modem, or with an easily-removed modem, I'd love to hear about it...but they all seem to just treat these modems as standard equipment, hence the need for a list that nobody seems to want to make...

Anyone at the EFF want to compromise just a hair and make a "Bronze Certified" list of cars that don't run Free Software, but at least allow for total opt-out of connectivity functions?

Step 1: have receipts for all Funimation purchases indicating proof of purchase.
Step 2: receive 'appropriate value' from Sony. Get receipts.
Step 3: go to TPB or some other public tracker and download *exactly* the same files which were purchased from step 1.
Step 4: Send Sony a file list in a screenshot from a torrent client, along with contact information.
Step 5: Get served with lawsuit papers from Sony for some unfathomable amount of money.
Step 6: Go to court, provide judge with paperwork from Step 1 and Step 2, and offer to write Sony a check for the amount shown in step 2 to settle the lawsuit.
Step 7a: If the judge upholds the payment equal to the 'appropriate value', watch Sony's lawyers squirm.
Step 7b: If the judge upholds the suit for some extremely high sum, have everyone else sue Sony for failing to provide an 'appropriate amount'.

Acme Backup - So good, even the bad guys got their data back.

This is an interesting framing; I enjoyed reading it. I would submit the following....

I think the huge difference here is that the BBS was *only* censored by you, and it was less-public than Facebook or Twitter.

The difference between your BBS and what Twitter and Facebook do is that they implement an algorithm to determine what users see. It's not simply an uncurated list of all of the content creators a user subscribes to, it's 'tweaked' and 'optimized' behind the scenes, with no clear ability for users to tweak it manually or pick a different algorithm, and whose parameters are treated with all the transparency of the Coca Cola formula...and like Coca Cola, lots of users do ultimately like the taste, but it's ultimately detrimental to one's long term health.

I've said for years that the solution for Facebook and Twitter is to allow third party algorithms. We've had this for years. I can spin up my own e-mail server and I can either 'raw dog it' and read all of my mail in its spam-laden glory, or I can spin up my own ScrolloutF1 or Xeams server and tweak exactly how I want my mail filtered, or I can use Miracast or Postini or Barracuda or Cisco Ironport and let those companies 'curate' what e-mails I actually see.

If social media companies allowed for third party API access that, in turn, allowed users to pick which algorithm they see. Or, allow users to have a 'raw dog' mode that shows everything with no algorithmic prioritization at all. Yes, Facebook has this, but it needs to be enabled each time...switching this around so that algorithmic curation was the one that needed to be enabled would help the need for neutrality.

None of this was the case in the BBS days, because user lists were small (tens to hundreds, not billions), and there wasn't really a way to curate content other than human readers. With Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Tiktok having subsumed nearly all of the smaller vBulletin communities that preceded it (and the IRC / BBS / USENET forums that preceded those), the need for a "skip to the good stuff" button is understandable, but to your point regarding social networks not being liable while also being publishers, there's equally a needed middle ground where end users have better leverage over 'the algorithm', so that it balances the need for the website to make a buck (yes, advertisers are going to want some assurance that their ads are going to see more eyeballs) with users' ability to better avoid some of the more problematic implications of a singular, black-box algorithm.

If it works, you weren't getting any bed action that week anyway.

You don't have to wait a decade for this. It's an even simpler test: Will there be a single player game released for the Xbox++, on optical media, such that I can purchase an Xbox++ and that game, and play that game without ever connecting to the internet?

Now, yes, the majority of games released today require internet connectivity so that they can enable that sweet, sweet "recurrent user spending". I get it. However, the disc drive is basically irrelevant if there won't be any offline-playable content.

We don't have to wait to test that theory, we can just have Phil Spencer say how many games are being developed by his studios, which will be offline-playable and disc-purchasable. Since he didn't say that, we can safely assume that the discs are essentially 'purchase receipts' and the games will still be 'digital downloads' for all practical purchases.

Publisher actually isn't a terrible page layout program. Sure, the earlier editions were pretty janky, but it really shaped up after 2007...and while the QuarkXpress and InDesign die hards still scoff at it, they're not the target demographic. The target demographic were office folks who needed something more than MS Word for flyers and other simple page layout tasks, but weren't going to learn the nuts and bolts of Quark or InDesign to make those things.

Infuriatingly, Publisher was only available as a standalone product, or as part of the Professional versions of Office; it wasn't included in the 'home' or 'standard' versions...and the folks who had the budget for Office Professional tended to have the budget for InDesign, too. Sure, MS bundled it with the subscription versions of Office, but that's after a decade of playing games with the availability. By then, there were alternatives.

Ultimately though, I think the reason Publisher is being retired isn't because of the application, it's the templates. To avoid everyone having same-y layouts, the design templates need to be rotated in, and doing so takes artistic development time. Meanwhile, Canva is the new darling product for the niche Publisher had, and Affinity Publisher is both inexpensive and perpetually licensed, making it a viable option, too. With there being less of a need for paper flyers by virtue of e-mail and social media, even Constant Contact ate into the Publisher install base.

Like most things, I'm sure it's still got its loyalists and its niche users, but I'm reasonably confident that 98% of the use cases for Publisher are adequately covered either by InDesign, Affinity, Canva, or Constant Contact. My only hope is that MS makes some sort of converter for .pub and .pubx files to be open in something else.

*sigh*

Because LEARNING and WORKING are two different tasks.

Learning is when a person does not understand what to do and is tasked with acquiring knowledge. Work is when a person does understand what to do and is tasked with implementing that knowledge. The latter is far easier to do remotely than the former, because the outcome of work is self-evident, but the outcome of learning is not.

Assuming that the curriculum is already set up for a primarily-Google-Classroom paradigm, on a subject that lends itself to self-pacing, with lessons already integrated into the online environment, where the intent for the current topic required neither group participation (beyond what IRC-with-attachments could provide) nor tangible objects...then yes, Google Classroom is great for remote learning.

For anything that requires an actual-teacher to actually-teach, it sucks. "Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I'll remember, involve me and I'll understand" doesn't stop being true because it's possible to conjure up test grades from the "show me and I'll remember" part. Then again, one might reasonably argue that the "involve me and I'll understand" part has been relegated to 'aspirational' status within modern education, rather than being treated as an expectation.

Well, I've been generally-satisfied with a tool called iMazing, which has way more functionality than iTunes did for shuffling data from iPhones and iPads.

iTunes definitely had its sore spots; it still shocks me that in all the years it did full device backups, that it never let users pick a custom folder or separate drive...the ONLY way to put backups on another drive was to create a symlink.

It sounds like they're still going to have some variant of the iTunes Media Store, but there are a number of movies and TV shows that are only purchasable through iTunes and don't have other one-time purchase options (Yes, a handful of us prefer that method, though the iTunes DRM for video content remains problematic).

iTunes also had a third party ecosystem around it; DJ software like Serato Scratch Live (and its sequel Serato DJ, as well as its offshoots 'Lite' and 'Itch') read the iTunes library file, which enabled playlists to be created in iTunes and turned into set lists seamlessly. Industry competitors Traktor, VirtualDJ, and Rekordbox also read iTunes playlists. Ironically enough, other media playback software also tried to ride the coattails - I had to laugh a bit when later versions of PowerDVD would import iTunes playlists; a part of me felt a little bit bad for Cyberlink as they had to attempt to 'innovate' on a media player that was the epitome of bloat.

Finally, not every use case involves an iPhone 15. I still have an ancient iPod Touch that has a 30-pin dock connector...whose job is to play songs on my alarm clock that also has a 30-pin dock connector. Props to Apple that, although they kept a lot of the bad legacy code in there (the aforementioned Symlink thing), iTunes still rips CDs and still syncs with old iPods.

As for me, I never really liked iTunes; its insistence on abstracting away the file system, rather than integrating with it, made all of my attempts to use it feel like I needed to trick the software into doing what I wanted, rather than it actually doing what I wanted...but in terms of backing up and migrating data from one iPhone to another, *that* job it still does wonderfully.

And, half of the company will be purchased by Mark Zuckerburg, causing it to enter the Metaphase.