If only there was some way to monitor the traffic flowing in and out of the device over your own, private, internet connection...

This is why I'm generally comfortable with a smart device in most rooms. I know it's not transmitting everything to the cloud because that would be obvious in the data.

What is concerning though is that as the processing power increases, soon these devices will comfortably be able to translate everything to text. At that point all conversations could easily be compressed and uploaded and it wouldn't stand out. Certainly that's not quite as invasive as actually having your speech transmitted, but it would still be a massive erosion of privacy.

Why?

Because it costs me to answer the call. It takes time (usually out of my evening with family or friends). It's more likely than not something I don't want - otherwise every telesales operator would already have a bazillion dollars. You have no idea what time zone I am in (old landline numbers now ported to cell phones). I might be roaming and your call could actually be costing me $1+/min.

Filtering out junk makes actual calls more valuable to the recipient. People will be more likely to answer the phone and to use the phone to call others.

Spoofing is also legitimately needed for office towers -- there might be a pool of 500 lines for 3000 phones

A problem that is trivial to solve. For my UK VOIP provider, I could change my presentation number only after verifying my ownership of it.

Sounds like this leaves the consumer still responsible. We need to whitelist numbers. We can't have a phone line like we experienced decades ago, where real people with a need to contact us could actually do so.

Unsolicited sales and marketing calls should be illegal.

Phone companies should be responsible for verifying that the CLID belongs to an actual individual. I.e. a named person with a credit card and a billing address. If they can't verify it, carry their calls but drop the CLID to "unverified" so we can send those to VM.

Add in a small per-call penalty for marketers who break the rules that attaches to the phone company if it turns out the CLID presented doesn't map back to a real person. Class actions will ensure phone companies comply.

Companies will carry each other's CLID if they cross-indemnify and companies that refuse to cross-indemnify will lose customers because they won't be able to call anyone without having their CLID listed as "Unverified". Customers would only ever have to sue either the identified marketer or their own telephone provider.

Regardless, have you read your agreements with any software where you purchased a perpetual license? What are the manufacturer's obligations to you in the event their product is found to be infringing on someone else's IP?

Maybe you have no rights, in which case you are left with potentially infringing software. If there are obligations on the vendor, I'll guess they don't include redeveloping your existing version to be non-infringing, rather they probably have the right to license the rights or to redevelop (i.e. issue an update) the software so that it's non-infringing.

This issue doesn't seem tied to the subscription model.

I suppose the real question is, how easy is it to create an Apple Pay vendor account that could use these, and how quickly can you get money out?

If you could create a vendor account as Sc00ters and get the money out the same day, then exposure is significant. If, on the other hand, creating an account requires background verification and your money is held by Apple for a couple of weeks, fraud would be a lot harder to pull off.

So, there;s absolutely a risk, but one that could be managed at the cost of making the service a bit less desirable to merchants.

The article has nothing to do with online voting. It is talking about more secure and verifiable systems than are currently used at polling stations.

Which is a fair point, but raises others.

1) What is the problem we're trying to solve here? In most functional democracies, votes are easily verifiable through chain of custody either of paper votes themselves or paper audit trails.

2) Many of the same concerns still exist. If these devices record votes or verify voters, they need to be secured. That's something we've proved time and time again to be phenomenally difficult.

In general, we assume if a malicious actor had access to the physical device, security is by definition compromised. In other words, securely computerizing the polling booth is, to an extent, even more challenging than where you try to implement networked voting.

I've posted this before, but it's worth saying again.

In the early 2000s, there was a GNU project to build a secure online voting system. They ceased work in 2002, citing the project as being at best difficult and at worst, impossible. They quoted Bruce Schneier, one of the foremost experts in computer security as saying "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers... [B]uilding a secure Internet-based voting system is a very hard problem, harder than all the other computer security problems we've attempted and failed at. I believe that the risks to democacy are too great to attempt it."

I see no evidence that Schneier has changed his mind or that any other comparably qualified expert has suggested he's wrong.

So you expect a company maintain a storefront, hire employees, comply with medical regulations and keeps lights on for a product you buy every couple years for $60. Spiffy.

That would be somewhere in the region of what typical glasses in the UK would cost from a store like Specsavers. Mind you, you could pick up a pair of single vision glasses there for 25GBP or about $33. Pretty sure there
s VAT (sales tax) of 20% on eyeglasses, so those prices already incorporate that additional cost.

Specsavers aren't owned by Luxotica. Neither is Vision Express or Boots Opticians or Optical Express.

I wonder, could the lower prices in the UK be somehow related to the existence of competition?

Never heard of it, and the short description here doesn't inspire me to look into it.

/. - news for nerds.

Seriously, this was all over the technical and traditional news a year ago. AI reservations at places like restaurants made by a scarily realistic human-sounding voice.

I'm not sure it's unreasonable for a tech news site to expect a little familiarity from their audience.

Fortune.com reported over 700 million iPhones in use in 2017 with an expected billion within a few years.

If only a tenth of one percent of those iPhones were owned by someone who uses Linux on their desktop. you have a million folk impacted.

Sure, Linux is a niche, but when you're the size of Apple, even small percentages quickly become big numbers. Let's be conservative ans say just 20% of Linux users buy their iPhone new - that still points to 140 million in revenue, not including any app store sales.

I'm guessing you've never actually used PACER. Nothing is self-explanatory. The interface is tiresome and unfriendly - mostly because of the need to hide results until the user agrees to pay (unless you're making a search in which case you're paying for the number of pages needed to display your results).

Remember, the electronic docket is needed by the parties to the case. They already paid filing fees for everything they submitted. If those fees don't cover the cost of an electronic docket, maybe they need to be increased. Most filings are electronic, so there's little need for human intervention like scanning and uploading.

I'm not going to dispute that there's a need to maintain servers and run a helpdesk. However, I'm not convinced that the $60 million/year revenue from PACER on top of the court filing fees is necessary to build a simple document search and retrieval site.

You are a special kind of stupid, aren't you?

I'm not stupid enough to believe that companies the size of Google and Facebook don't have lawyers.

Nor am I stupid enough to think that companies that size would necessarily have agreed to the same terms as others.

And I'm not stupid enough to believe that a contract, even when drafted by expensive lawyers, can't have ambiguity.

So, perhaps, it's not me who's a special kind of stupid.

I think for both Facebook and Google, enterprise certs will be restored at some point - maybe Apple is going to do a review of all the apps signed with them and devices they are installed on before restoring.

Isn't it a message to every enterprise everywhere that Apple are in total control of your platform and can disable your work without notice or warning, rendering any investment you made worthless?

If I were a corporation looking to deploy an internal app, I'd be looking at non-apple options. Having your internal platform disabled could cripple smaller business to the point of threatening their viability.

And if I were Google, I'd be relaxed to see Apple making that point so effectively.

The receipt needs to come in human readable and a structured machine readable format.

If we had apps that could analyze everything we buy - especially if we had anonymous price sharing - we could then have apps that tell you where to shop to minimize cost.

Imagine an app that says " here's your typical weekly shop". You should buy it from Acme this week. With the option to add things you buy less regularly and then get updated advice on which nearby shop is best value.