Just the opposite. Since all the hardware comes installed, this looks like an opportunity to for a deal.

If you are one of the makers out there, develop and sell a replacement computer system that allows access to everything. It's probably easier than one would think. Either hack the existing box to remove the limitations, or start with a Spark or Rabbit open source engine computer. Spend a few months setting up the requisite fuel maps. Sell for a thousand bucks each. People in the Subaru and Mitsubishi community do this all the time.

If you aren't a maker, support one of the people doing the above. Buy the base model and save tens of thousands. Spend a thousand bucks for a new computer and a thousand to have someone put it in.

I tested out joining a meeting on my phone so I could be prepared for questions from my older relatives when I sent them invites. Since I had the host device and a participant device in the same room, I could easily hear the latency.

I use at least ten different web conferencing solutions each week. Almost all of them are insanely easy. The easiest actually have the most problems - HTML5 based clients often have trouble allowing me to select my hardware. GoTo Meeting has been simple forever. Blue Jeans is dead simple and always works quickly. Even WebEx has their crap together nowadays.

Zoom was founded by a guy who worked at WebEx, a company who has been doing exactly what Zoom started doing in 2013, but back in the 1990s. You do need an account (albeit free) to start a meeting and their business model is a standard "free-tier with paid upgrade" model that the entire industry uses. Exactly what credit does Zoom deserve (other than being very successful at running the company) for changing how people use video? This sounds like the rantings of a guy that just discovered web-based video conferencing. The only thing that's really changed is that now everyone is walking around with the requisite hardware in their pocket, and we have cheap-enough data plans so that people aren't afraid to use it.

Much of what you mentioned are red herrings. For example, the secret key generated at the server is simply a poorly chosen name. It's an HMAC validation key that has to be shared between the client and server.

The real problem is that this app, if working perfectly, causes more harm than good. See here.

This seems like another "enabling" argument. Napster said they didn't put the music on the Internet, so a law was passed holding the enabler accountable. This would do the same for kiddie porn - if you are an app publisher and someone is caught using your app to encrypt kiddie porn - then you are accountable.

As mentioned above, this has nothing to do with stopping kiddie porn. It has three purposes: 1. Win votes by pretending to do something about kiddie porn. 2. Force big tech companies to make an effort to stop kiddie porn. 3. Allow government agencies to see what non-criminals are doing. I'm sure #3 is going to be used only for our own good.

Also, #2 is likely to do for kiddie porn what copyright laws have done to YouTube - YouTube is still a haven for copied intellectual property, but the systems put in place are being used by members to abuse each other.

It's probably someone doing exactly what Microsoft Office 365 and Gmail are doing. Only those people are clowns that don't know what you want and these people are going to get it right by sheer force of will.

No one's brainwashed me into anything, I save $1000 a year doing this. I know there are externalities and societal costs, but they won't go away if I leave the money on the table. The day there's a better way for me use my money, I'll start doing it. I'm still looking for a way to use a card to get 3% back on my mortgage payment.

Meanwhile, I'm just as displeased as you are about how merchants are being treated.

Not only normal - a good money making strategy. Get a zero-fee cash back credit card and run every penny you spend through it. It's like a 3% raise at your job.

Did you close the paid-off accounts? You should have paid the car and house way ahead, and paid the credit cards down to zero, but not closed any of the accounts. You may have destroyed the "used credit/available credit" component of your credit rating by turning it into a 0/0 instead of 0/20k. Closing the accounts gives the bureaus a signal that you don't trust yourself with credit cards and the only way you'll stay out of debt is to close them. Obviously, a person with this type of personality isn't the type of person anyone wants to extend credit to.

Did they? The sleazy banks picked the score necessary to qualify for the good terms themselves, so if Fair Isaac didn't change their scale, the bank could simply change their loan conditions. All this FICO change does is give them more fine-grained increments in the middle. It's essentially equivalent to reporting in half-point increments instead of whole points for those on the bubble.

I do the nearly same thing you do, except I pay it off a day before the end of the billing period. They always report $0 to the credit bureaus. Since my monthly expenses are more than 20% of the limit on that card, it actually makes a difference.

or had their POS system compromised.

This is pretty much the poster child for "abnormal usage pattern".

Same here. In the card implementations I did, I told my company to assume all fraud was our risk and to put appropriate measures in place. That's why address verification comes back with a code, but doesn't stop the transaction - it's the merchant's job to make the risk determination.

I was lucky enough to work at places where the shipping address was controlled by the sales department, so random strangers couldn't buy from us with stolen cards. However, the scheme mentioned in the article would have worked against us if the scammers got a login to our system. Of course, we wouldn't be the financial victim, but it's certainly not good from a reputation standpoint.