Better, yes. A lot better? No. The US homicide rate is 2 to 5 times higher than European OECD countries.

Some 20 years ago, my employer had an employment/salary income verification service. There is a similar service running today by my current employer.

I would have to request and employment verification code. Then the landlord, bank, etc. uses this code to request employment information about me. I control the code (I can disable it) and it only provides the minimum information necessary.

One description suggests that the user isn't handing over login and password isn't necessary. How would this work with 2FA?

Instead, the user somehow runs an agent that hijack's the user's logged-in session to download the files.

What do you think Real-ID cards are?

People carrying ID cars in the UK is quite a recent change Driver licenses issued before 1998 did not have photos on them and were issued with validity until the holder reached 70 years old. These are still valid today as long as the holder has the same name and address.

There are probably many people who still have such licenses.

Furthermore, it's not required to carry your driver license with you in the UK, even while driving.

In fact, with the printer cartridge I mentioned above, I paid a lot more than a refilled cartridge would have cost, so I believed that I was getting a genuine product.

I recently bought a supposedly "genuine" and "new" cartridge for an HP Inkjet printer. When I installed it, the printer showed the cartridge at 1/4 full and now my printer doesn't work at all (although that could be coincidence).

Did you read the article?

As well as buying from Temu, it talks about buying batteries from Amazon.

Have you looked lately? I got my laptop last year and put Pop on it. Uses the 4070 out of the box and I was playing the second Horizon game on Steam on release day. The huge tons of effort put into getting AAA games running on the Steam Deck has really paid off. I'm currently playing Uncharted 4 on it.

I do still have two desktops running Windows, but finally migrated my daily driver laptop last Black Friday.

Trump, his enablers, lackeys, funders and the 2025 authors are all betting on there NEVER being another D president.

That article is chock full of bullshit promulgated by right-wing organizations. But I'll quote one thing from it (note the lack of connection to H1B visas):

I believe that there is some fraud in the H1B system, but a lot less than other people would have you believe.

There is nothing stopping a second employer sponsoring a new H1B for someone who just entered the country on an H1B. No penalty today.

What does tend to stop H1B visa holders from transferring to a new employer are contracts that require the employee to repay moving and other costs: sometimes, somewhat inflated costs.

" (c) The restriction imposed pursuant to subsections (a) and (b) of this section shall not apply to any individual alien, all aliens working for a company, or all aliens working in an industry, if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines, in the Secretaryâ(TM)s discretion, that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H-1B specialty occupation workers is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States."

Contribute to Trump or promote Trump and your company gets a waiver. "national interest" means "Trump's interest".

This is just more corruption, using a clear 1st amendment violation to enforce it.

My company uses Microsoft for email. Managing users is a mess with two systems ("Admin" and "Entra"). We don't use Microsoft for any Windows logins or anything resembling the cloud AD.

Earlier this year, one of my users lost access to his authenticator app. I followed instructions I found on the web, which went through the "Admin" web pages. Didn't work. I got on a support call with Microsoft, in which they could see my screen. They talked me through the same steps as I had performed earlier. Didn't work, even though it should. Eventually, with lots of searching, I happened on the "Entra" web pages and was able to actually fix the user's log in issue.

It's a mess.