If an activity affects interstate commerce, then that activity is potentially subject to regulation by congress.

Unfair Business Competition, Antitrust, etc, are federal issues. It doesn't matter if the company does not engage in any interstate commerce directly - it would still be subject to these laws.

This effectively makes it impossible to sue an employer for misconduct. Binding arbitration needs to go.

Erm.. This arbitration crap is not some long-standing standard. It's a new exploitive trend that is currently affecting about half of US employees.

They can require arbitration of contractual issues, but in case the employer breaks the law -- having a binding arbitration clause puts them in the DOL crosshairs.. Or so they say

We vigorously prosecute violations at workplaces where workers are bound by mandatory arbitration.

I can see barring someone who is in a sales position from going to a direct competitor in a small market where they would be able to take their clients with them

They don't exactly need a no-compete for that; they really need a broad no-solicit listing everyone who would be in the sales' peoples contact list.

As for future business prospects in the area; the company has not yet paid the Sales person to sell to them, especially not in companies where the Sales folk are paid on mostly commission, eg 25% per account in good standing -- in this case the company might have let go the Sales person solely to terminate Sales commissions from a number of recurring accounts. If the Sales rep had accumulated hundreds of $K per year in commissions but weren't making new sales often, then the rep can get to be seen by management as a liability.

So maybe you could say this is manipulative as well, and simply Ban no-solicits that don't preserve and include fair commission for the term on that person's active Sales and business referred to the company past the end of employment.

Intercepting letters is also done in the distribution centers based on the metadata.

That only works for letters delivered with the Postal service. I can have a private courier personally carry a lockbox containing a letter to you at point B from point A, and it will never hit the distribution center.

Furthermore, in case the person mailing the letter encrypts it before sending it in the mail; you won't be able to tell what the letter you intercepted contains. I mean: I can AES encrypt some text and print it out as a QR Code. Only my recipient will be able to read that, so long as only that recipient was given the key.

You can do that with electronic E2E messages just the same; it's just a digital payload you won't be able to decrypt without seizing the keys from the end users.

Likewise, I can use a voice encryption technology that encodes the call over the POTS line I am sending you to E2E; even if the link is "Listened in on" from a central dispatch point - it is only garbled noise.

No logging software is able to record the authentications to AAD, Exchange Online, or other cloud services run by Microsoft, Because they're
  Microsoft's servers; Microsoft doesn't provide you the ability to run programs on their servers - you literally Don't have access to the sets of logs, Tools, or APIs necessary to get the log of authentications without Paying extra for security licenses.

Oh look, it's the "it's to hard qq" crew. Go back home nobody needs your doomer shit

The other thing that's weird about this bill is it Purports to Restrict how the law could be challenged in court By stating that there is a Very short time limit to file any kind of challenge against the law, and the DC Court of Appeals has exclusive jurisdiction.

why is it that companies are so reluctant to invade customers' privacy at the request of the government?

It costs them money and creates risks. The companies Cannot exactly share with the public the nature Of the orders they have to follow -- but you can bet it's gone way beyond the Phone Company having to Provide a secret room at every central office to house the government agents who get to push a button and snoop on All the fiber connections or any Phone lines they want.

We're at the point now where they can say "Hey Google; We need to see everything everybody in the US searched for yesterday"

There's significant costs involved with capturing any significant amount of surveillance.

That takes infrastructure, compute, bandwidth, and employee time.

There are also risks involved. Including Public relations risks, and security-related risks. Any surveillance backdoor they have that employees can use Can also potentially be abused by other hostile nation states to spy on Americans; having A procedure that exist that easily authorizes a person at your company to tap into customers' private conversations, and having a large team who can do that on request, is an existential risk within their company's security posture. The companies also face risks of being sued if the power is used improperly.

Yeah.. You need a legal basis to force companies to violate their customers' privacy.

Their basis for attempting to extend this further is shady as fuck.

The Law provides that existing orders will continue to be in effect, so they convinced the Special court that administers this law to hand them a blanket order that allows the intelligence gathering to continue past the end date of the law.

These transition procedures provide that any
order, authorization, or directive issued pursuant to Title VII shall remain in effect until its stated
expiration date. Consequently, if Title VII sunsets, the government can continue acquiring foreign
intelligence under Section 702 until any existing FISC authorization expires, and the FISC can continue
administering previously authorized acquisition procedures under Section 702.

Recent FISC Authorization
News outlets have reported that, on April 5, 2024, the FISC authorized government foreign intelligence
acquisitions under Section 702 for one year. If reports are accurate, the effect of this authorization is that
the government can continue foreign intelligence acquisitions under Section 702 until the authorization
expires one year from when it was issued, regardless of whether Title VII sunsets on April 19, 2024. In
addition, the FISC can continue administering authorized acquisition procedures under Section 702 until
the authorization expires.

That's for the entire bay, though? San Francisco the city only needs about 14 miles of seawall. Then it's another 50+ miles to San Jose, and 65+ miles up to Richmond point. I would imagine each city will tackle the problem different as they're in different counties, different soil types and most importantly different elevations

Yeah I've played that game. It breaks every week or two, when Autodesk releases a new update, and then you're stuck without a solution while you wait for an unpaid developer to fix it sometime in the next month

People arguing about grades of steel on "one weird trick to make the PERFECT knife out of a cast iron skilet, EDC" video 7,363,983

The Netherlands have proven without question that you can build and maintain sea walls for centuries at marginal cost to the economy. Building a seawall is very straightforward and a seawall of any length can be built in under a decade.

The only reason I still have a windows machine is for the exceedingly rare game that doesn't work on proton/steam, and more importantly, Fusion 360, although browser-based OnShape apparently is pretty good if you have a computer/GPU that can make it run smoothly (they both use the same licensed "kernel" that almost all CAD software uses)

Outside of the /. crowd

Sometimes I wonder why this particular website bothers to cover issues related to that particular crowd. They're such an insignificant minority!