"Absolve Verizon of customer service responsibilities"?

Why would Verizon take that deal? As far as they're concerned, they already aren't particularly responsible for customer service. But they can rake in the fees from their captive customer base.

What NY seems to be asking Verizon is "Pretty please, lay in the last mile of fiber and then step away."

You'll have to seriously sweeten the pot (such as extortionate wholesale service fees) to make it more profitable for Verizon to do this, vice continuing to squeeze its current copper-service victims for sunk-cost mostly-profit revenues. And for companies like Verizon, "less profit" is a non-starter.

"Jet" means any stream of high-velocity low-pressure fluid... like rocket exhaust, or water, or air, accelerated in a ducted fan.

It's a jet device.

He can't sell that exploit. He's already given it away. Here.

Please tell me about the other amazing business strategies you're contemplating. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Brute forcing your own account isn't banned. But it's not rewarded, either. That's what the "If you believe you have found a method to conduct a brute-force or code injection attack, please report it to us without testing it." bit of the rules means.

In other words, no, Bennett, you did not outsmart those meanies in charge of making the rules of this bug bounty system. Your hack wasn't particularly clever, so doesn't get rewarded as if it were. However, the bug report itself is probably valid, and United obviously has some fixing to do. (No failed-PIN limiter? The 1970s called; they'd like their input validation methodology back.)

for support reasons

You're not asking the correct question.

"To support whom?"

I'm going to go one step beyond.

I'm going to market a homeopathic router. Radiated power measured in femtowatts, properly diluted with open air and succussed* correctly, will have an effective wifi range measured in light-years. I figure a good 30C dilution will work fine.

(BTW, if the user doesn't get the proper range from the device in use, it'll be because they didn't hit the router correctly.)

Problem, wifi router market?

In Windows, use the Java Control Panel and select the "Advanced" tab.

At the very bottom of the list, completely out-of-sight unless you scroll aaaaaaal the way down, in a category called "Beware of the Leopard"... no, sorry, I meant "Miscellaneous"... there's a checkbox labeled "Suppress sponsor offers when installing or updating Java".

Of course, by default it's not checked. Because money.

But check it and apply or "OK" the settings change. In the current implementation, this prevents bundling the Ask.com malware with Java upgrades -- it's a pre-opt-out, and you never have to think of it again. (At least, until Oracle decides the option should auto-magically unset itself when the user's not looking. Because money.)

Assuming this option continues to exist in future Oracle Java versions and is honored for the Yahoo tie-in, this would alleviate the pre-opt-in crapware issue. Big assumptions, of course, because Oracle.

(Or alternately, don't install Java if you don't actually need it. Or install OpenJava rather than Oracle's.)

This is not malicious. It is stupid and ignorant, but not malicious.

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

--Clark's corollary to Hanlon's Razor after Clarke's 3rd Law

What Voltaire taught long ago:

Il est dangereux d'avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort.

("It is dangerous to be right when established men are wrong.")

I think Putin is capable of being photographed climbing onto a T-72 flying the Russian flag, surrounded by Russian soldiers while standing in front of the sign that says "Welcome to Donetsk, Ukraine! Population 944,000" while explaining to a NY Times correspondent that no Russian troops are in Ukraine.

And do it all with a straight face.

You ever noticed you never see Vladimir Putin and the Iraqi Minister of Information together at the same time? Hmmm....

You don't happen to work for the Public Affairs office at Patrick AFB, do you?

It'll take "canaries" inside of the system though to draw attention to it.

Next up: NDAs integrated into contracts that prevent disclosure of this kind of termination/outsourcing, on penalty of immediate termination for cause and no severance.

The next time Disney does this, it'll take more than a canary: it'll take a whistle-blower willing to eat the personal consequences. Because in Disney management's mind, they "would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!"*

*yeah, I know, that's Hanna-Barbera, not Disney.

I'm a veteran too. I'm coming to the conclusion that OPSEC is dead, because social media guarantees the loosest lips in history.

The only way to "fix" this is either submitting social media participation of military personnel to military censorship, or a strongly enforced ban on military member participation in social media.

Which, I suspect, wouldn't work.

ObPedant: those aren't regexes, they're globs. Otherwise (for instance), the Samsung entry would match

Samsung SSD<space>
Samsung SSD<space>8
Samsung SSD<space>88
Samsung SSD<space>888
.
.
.

ad nauseam: the "*" regex operator means "zero or more occurrences of the previous pattern", which in this case is the character "8".

At least, I hope they're not supposed to be regexes. Otherwise, the kernel blacklist itself will have some serious issues known-bad SSDs because someone never learned how to create a regular expression.