This AC speaks the truth.

I saw this happen in the US with the skateboard deck industry. In the eighties and nineties, all legitimate wooden skateboard decks were manufactured in woodshops located in North America. Sure, Chinese-made skateboards would show up in big-box retail stores, but they weren't taken seriously by serious skateboarders. They were junk for kids.

In the early 2000's, certain California-based vendors contracted their entire production of these boards to Chinese factories. Within just a couple of years, the margins forced the all the other mainstream deck vendors to follow suit. As it ended up, the companies in California now just design the pictures on the boards, purchase advertising, and promote the decks made by Chinese companies. Whereas previously, Chinese-made skateboards weren't accepted by the skateboard industry, the Chinese factories have co-opted the California industry members to promote and market their products.

If you're referring to the documentation being in digital form, the referenced article does not explain where 'online' the kids found the operator's manual. It could very well, and probably was, a scanned document on a hackerz website or torrent.

One thing that Lyft does and Uber does not do is Lyft requires both drivers and passengers to log in with their facebook account.

Required Facebook membership? No thanks.

Lyft could do some interesting analysis to match people up based on shared characteristics.

These people need to get out of their comfort zone. Expose them to different cultures and ideas. Using FacEbook to ghetto-ize drivers is xenophobic. No sympathy for the OP complaining about immigrant drivers, either.

Uber explicitly states that it is up to the driver to remain compliant. Drivers aren't Uber employees, they're independent contractors.

If the drivers get money from Uber as independent contractors, then Uber's workers' compenation and liability insurance policies cover the independent contractor unless the contractor provides proof of their own coverage. Without proof in Uber's hands, the liability falls on the general contractor, not the subcontractor.

Any city that wants to expel Uber should simply have the state insurance board examine Uber's insurance coverage. Once their insurer has been identified, a quick call to that company is all it would take to convey the real shenanigans being played by the policy holder.

I love this rationalization---

"If you pay for premium service, you can expect a higher degree of safety. If you purchase standard service, it's a roll of the dice."

If Uber isn't requiring proper licensing and insurance from these service providers, but is referring people to use them, Uber will be held liable for insurance claims.

The lawsuit won't come from the guy's family who got paralyzed after an Uber driver ran over him on his bike. The paralyzed guy's health insurance company will sue Uber because they don't want to pay for quadraplegic care for the rest of his life.

Guess who has the tougher set of lawyers...

Limited range and repetitive concerns.

Oh, I dunno. How long has Mark Rothko's influence / popularity lasted?

I'm with everyone else pooh-pooing this misguided disservice. It's not for us.

But, GM is not floating this concept out of sheer ignorance. They already have hooks into a certain collection of consumers who don't know crap and subscribe to OnStar because operating a GPS themselves is too complicated. GM marketing executives are sitting in board rooms laughing at how much money they are still getting out of these subscriptions while cellphones would seem to have made OnStar obsolete. This internet package is just an added service fee they're trying to pile on top of these clueless subscribers.

A closer look would likely reveal that many of them are still subscribing to AOL at home.

Give out an annual award to someone on the IT staff who jumped on more Severity 1 tickets than anyone else. When everyone else wanted to be in bed asleep, this person was the one who tirelessly answered the pager and ran into the burning buildings to rescue the crashed servers. The holder of the award is your best first-responder. Having this plaque on the wall reminds management of the crises that were resolved in heroic fashion.

Sure, there's no award for the person who prevented drama from happening in the first place. But that's kind of the way it goes with heroes.

Modify your outbound proxy rules to redirect every outbound http request that has a useragent string belonging to the affected browser. Send them to an internal HTML page that explains the security threat and provides a link to download and install the browser preferred by the organization.

This will:

1. Selectively communicate the issue to only the affected users.
2. Prevent anyone on the internal network from being compromised due to this vulnerability.
3. Prevent anyone from ignoring the 'advisory.'

If you're not using an outbound proxy, god help you.

The optimist in me hopes HornWumpus accomplishes his goal atop the Oyabashi space elevator.

Two years ago, Obayashi corp announced its intention to have a space elevator up by 2050. Part of that design involves solar panels transmitting energy back down to terra firma.

Apple doesn't care about the 'bug reports'... They're looking at kernel dumps and other crash reports automatically submitted by the users' computers. From there, they can reach out to third-party developers with suggestions on how they can update their software to work on the next OS release.

This is more to help third-party developers than to help Apple developers. In the closed beta, it's common for many third-party apps to fall through the cracks if they don't have a large enough user-base to have some participants in the closed beta.

I'm not convinced this wasn't an intentional effort to backdoor OpenSSL.

Code was submitted on new year's eve. A moment when the fewest people would be available to review it. Many people are on vacation and likely to gloss over the pile of code submitted while they were gone.

Just because he's a professor doesn't mean he wasn't compromised. A common page out of spycraft textbook would be to get an agent to seduce the professor and then document his infidelity. With this hanging over his head, he'll plant the requested vulnerability and even after it's discovered, he'll stick to the cover story to prevent those photos from being sent to his wife. For further reading on this topic, see the wikipedia page on Julian Assange.

I've spouted it a hundred times, here's #101:

Intuit's QuickBooks package is in desperate need of competition. It's thoroughly entrenched in the accounting industry such that the interface is nonsensically-antiquated. Yet, it's become one of those industry standards that Intuit refuses to modernize it or introduce any kind of improvements for fear it will alienate the armies of accountants that have been compelled to learn it.

If google were to launch a cloud-based bookkeeping app, this would be a tremendous benefit to small business owners worldwide.

How would you tell someone to prepare for their first year at Burning Man?

It's absolutely identical to the Gathering of the Juggalos, but hugely more pretentious.