Here's why the SEC would be interested in this, and it has to do with the financial equivalent of parallel construction.

There's an HFT firm called Citadel that has a very cozy partnership with Robinhood, which is where a lot of these retail investor accounts are coming from.

As part of that partnership, Robinhood routes trades through Citadel, who does the actual buying and selling (what's called "execution") of user stock orders. Citadel makes money by buying the stock themselves and then selling to the user for a slightly higher price. Robinhood gets a kickback from this, it's a practice called PFOF and a lot of discount brokers do it.

The problem is that like all brokerages, Robinhood has something called Duty of Best Execution to its users. This means that they'll route stock trades through whoever will give users the best price. However, Robinhood doesn't do that - they route through whoever pays them the best kickback via PFOF.

As part of that relationship, Citadel also knows every trade made by a Robinhood user.

Now, Citadel knows that hedge funds like Melvin and Citron have massive short interest in Gamestop. They also know that if Gamestop's stock was to pop right around the time those hedge funds have to cover their short sales, they'd potentially become insolvent and could be snatched up for cheap.

However, price manipulating like that is illegal. So what do they do? They use the trade data from Robinhood to justify a massive buy of Gamestop stock. This is perfectly legal. And naturally, as soon as Melvin and Citron are in trouble, Citadel swoops in and buys a stake in them.

This also means that Citadel is making money off every angle: they make money front-running the retail trades, make money buying the smaller hedge funds, and make money off Gamestop's stock.

This is the kind of thing the SEC cares about, not retail investors.

They're also naturally concerned about the pyramid scheme-like nature of Gamestop stock, where a lot of average people are going to get burned, particularly if they got in late.

Oh yeah, it definitely is. Volume on TWTR is already something like 2x or 3x their normal daily average and it's not even 11 AM. It's a panic sale.

That's all fine and good, until Google tells Mozilla to implement it in Firefox or lose funding, since they're still Mozilla's primary funding source.

Most likely, you'll need to go to a Firefox fork maintained by a non-Mozilla entity.

It's pretty clear why the pope is doing this, and that's to protect the church from being sued. The church's lawyers probably pointed out that even with the SCOTUS decision barring governments from putting restrictions on church attendance, they could still be sued if someone catches COVID and dies as a result of going to church.

This way, the church can say "We directed all of our priests to obey the law, and if any of them were opening their churches it was specifically against our orders."

This is probably being done entirely because Sony is buying up Crunchyroll, the largest (legal) streaming anime site. Crunchy's subs are known for being crap, but a large amount of the content on Nyaa is ripped from them - funny enough, the main scene group for that is called Horriblesubs.

They've been pirating Netflix's "original" anime for years and no one has seemingly cared, and this whole thing reeks of Sony trying to force people to sub to Crunchyroll, which I won't do unless their sub quality improves dramatically.

Realistically, if they kill Nyaa, a new site will spring up because plenty of other people hate Crunchyroll as much as I do.

Let's say the Five Eyes countries get their wish. The problem is that there would obviously need to be exceptions.

The financial system is one. Health care providers are another (at least in the US under HIPAA). In addition, you'd probably want e-commerce covered. The legal system as well, due to attorney-client privelige.

The problem is, how do you differentiate that traffic from Signal or Telegram? Moreover, how do companies who have both priveliged and un-priveliged communications interpret which communications they can encrypt and which ones they can't?

The whole thing is a nightmare.

Where I went to school, I had a professor who did work on this kind of thing, and I think his theory makes more sense.

In his theory, you can't travel back in time. You could send information back in time (so in this example you could send a cure for Covid or a warning about it) but this wouldn't do anything to your timeline - the second you do that, you create a new and entirely separate timeline. So while it would be possible to create a timeline where Covid never happens, it wouldn't do anything to this one.

The problem here is that there's no option anymore to just buy a non-smart TV. Most TV manufacturers refuse to make them because there's way more profit to be had with a smart TV: not only do they get the full retail price of the TV, but they also get money from all of the companies whose apps are loaded by default and from advertisers who can pay to have their ads injected into the TV's firmware (things like banner ads that come up when you change channels). They want it to be as hard as possible to block the stuff as well, so that they can guarantee the advertisers that people are seeing the ads.

Short of the government stepping in and putting heavy fines into place for security breaches, there's not much you can do to stop it.

The real reason the ISPs don't want this is because of revenue. Most ISPs in the US have "enhanced DNS pages" that serve you ads instead of a 404 if you search for a nonexistent URL. At the same time, they double-dip by selling your information. Sure, people can go to Cloudflare or Google but most won't.

Oh yeah, I realized that a long time ago. What happens is that when you sign up on OKC, it'll give you two to four fake "likes". I'm 90% sure that these are "deleted" profiles as opposed to AI generated images. They'll even try to purposely match you with these fake accounts and encourage you to message them knowing full well you won't get anything back.

The only "legit" match I ever got there was a person who wanted $500 for compensated dating. Dating sites don't work.

There's about a hundred reasons I can think of why whitelisting wouldn't work for the average person.

Take my bank as an example. I have a debit card through them and have, on occasion, gotten calls regarding suspicious use of my card. The bank's card security department has multiple phone numbers and I have no idea what all of them are - there'd be no way for me to whitelist them unless the bank were to provide me with a list of all of the numbers they use.. which would then open the door for scammers to come in with spoofed caller ID.

Robots have a pretty clearly defined role in today's stock market, and that is managing funds that already have a clear-cut investment strategy (ie; index funds that own equal amounts of everything in whatever index they track).

This is something robots can do very well - when the fund's only job is to divide all of its money equally between stocks, a robot can cut an ETF's expense ratio dramatically. Most ETFs have an expense ratio around 0.20-0.30.. but I've seen robot-managed funds with expense ratios as low as 0.05.

This investor sounds like an idiot for thinking a robot can manage what is basically highly random gambling.

I own an HTC Vive, and while I really like the VR experience I don't exactly have space to dedicate a room to VR. I can still do standing/sitting games but I can't do roomscale at all. The Rift S actually was an exciting prospect to me because it purportedly had no need for external sensors.. but my IPD is definitely not in that golden "average" spectrum, so I guess I'll be sitting the Rift S out and hoping HTC comes out with something.

The only people who have been using Hangouts are spam bots who use it as a way of getting into people's gmail inboxes without actually sending an email. There's no easy opt-out either.

I don't have exact case names, but I specifically remember that the Obama-era FCC went to court because the telcos sued them claiming the FCC did not have the authority to regulate net neutrality under Title 1 (information services). The telcos won, and the courts told the FCC that if they wanted to mandate net neutrality, they'd have to do it under Title 2 (by regulating ISPs the same as telephone companies).

That was EXACTLY what Tom Wheeler did - he moved ISPs under title 2 and began regulating them as Title 2 Common Carriers, which DID give the FCC the authority to mandate net neutrality because that's what the courts told him he had to do.

I would hope the court would respect stare decisis and tell Ajit Pai that he cannot have it both ways, preferably forcing him to restore the regulation of ISPs under Title 2.