1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.

Yeah, this. If I have to sign up to some site that I don't care at all if it gets hacked, I use a throwaway password. Oh noez, someone might compromise my WidgetGenerator.foo.bar account and generate some widgets in my name, heavens to betsy!

In this case centralization isn't a bad idea. Okay, occasionally there is a problem, but when there is a massive amount of resources are thrown at it, and it gets fixed quickly. Meanwhile their software is updated and constantly tested, so it's more secure and stable than most in-house efforts. It's their full time job, where as it's usually just the IT guy's background task when the company manages it themselves.

What matters is that there is still competition, to keep the market working properly, and that such services are properly regulated.

The only laptops I'd consider to have even half decent security are Lenovo ones, and of course Lenovo is a Chinese company.

Siri has been one of the weakest assistants for many years now, and given that they usually just ship half finished software (Apple Maps comes to mind), I'm surprised they were able to resist. Maybe there is another reason, like it kills the battery.

It's interesting that there seems to be more paranoia over fears that the Chinese government may possibly have backdoors in network gear, than there is over US companies that we know for a fact have NSA backdoors in their network gear.

Your job probably has a lot of weak passwords. Humans can remember a small handful of semi-decent ones. Password managers are the way to go.

It's a grift, taking advantage of a grieving person's desire for it not to be so final, for there to be hope of seeing their loved one again.

They all have cloud sync too, and in a pinch you can look up the password on your phone and type it in.

I get not bothering when it's a throwaway account, using the built in password manager is usually the path of least resistance.

I don't think it's just that people are bad at passwords, it's that they don't care. If their account gets compromised, it will probably hurt the service provider more than it will hurt them.

Gen Z are particularly sensitive to this, because they have noticed that most of the advice they get is bunk. If they are told to protect something like a password, they are more likely to evaluate if it actually matters to them to protect it, rather than just blindly following the advice.

That said it's a little surprising that password managers aren't having a bigger effect. All the major browsers offer to create and remember strong passwords for you.

Our government seems to mostly react to Facebook posts these days. I'm sure China, Russia, and others are all busy spamming Facebook in order to destabilize us.

The plant is over half a century old, and it was originally shut down supposedly because the state cut off the subsidies. It seems very marginal to restart it now, especially if they are relying on a single customer.

That's not actually a meaningful difference as far as antitrust law is concerned. With the possible exception of the monopoly being created by doing something illegal (which then becomes a separate violation on its own), it does not matter *how* a monopoly came to be, only that it is, and whether it causes harm to society, to customers, to other companies in the market, etc.

It's actually not. Any jacka** can buy a block of phone numbers and set up a trunk line. That's exactly why we have so much Caller ID fraud these days. I mean yes, ostensibly, but in practice, no.

Ah, but most phone companies these days don't even have a physical presence anywhere.

Entertainment monopolies have *lots* of government restraints. It really doesn't matter whether the company is an entertainment company or a toilet paper manufacturer. A monopoly is a monopoly, and subject to antitrust laws.

Except that email is surprisingly bad as a sharing medium, and 1000x as bad if you want to share large content like photos. But regardless, that's kind of moot.

Sure. None of that changes whether having basically one giant platform that almost everyone is on makes it difficult to impossible for any other company to meaningfully compete, though. And when your own platform buys another platform, that's where governments *do* start to have the right to deny a company from doing as it pleases.

There's something called a natural monopoly. Social media is likely to be a natural monopoly, in much the same way that the phone company was a natural monopoly before it was forcibly broken up and forced to provide interconnections to other phone companies using shared standards, etc. There's not a whole lot of difference other than the phone company having a higher physical infrastructure barrier to entry.

Regardless, Facebook is not blameless. They bought Instagram, effectively consolidating the potential players in that space from two down to one. And antitrust law does sometimes break up natural monopolies. It isn't about fault or blame. It is about actions taken while in that state that harm competition, harm users, etc.

Doesn't matter. Antitrust law isn't just about the users being victims. It is also about other companies being the victims by being unable to compete because of unfair competition, collusion, excessive mergers, etc. User/purchaser harm is only one narrow aspect of a much larger body of law.