Fishing for Funny in the dark. Pretty sure I didn't get there, but also expressing my disappointment than no one else got there first.

Getting away from funny, but 'modern capitalism' is supposed to be based on a kind of adversarial model. The companies want to sell us as much stuff as possible with the highest profits, while we are supposed to be trying to find the best values to force the companies to offer better products at lower prices. But the powers are not balanced in this 'game'. Individuals are acting alone and mostly in ignorance, while the companies continue to become larger and increasingly powerful. From this perspective, collecting customer information is like ammunition for tomorrow's attacks on the customers' credit cards.

Some stories are worth more discussion than the standard scrolling time allows... I think Slashdot should allow for some stories to move down the front page more slowly than others.

Quoted against the censor trolls. My degree of concurrence is complex. Goes back to Fermi...

Seems obvious enough that the phishing website will ask for the google login information if that is the target of the phishing scam. Possibly disguised as one of those authorization requests to link and login from the google account?

Pretty sure I've seen a bunch of these, but not a significant fraction of the phishing spam I receive each day. I'd estimate that about three to five false negatives slip through on a daily basis, though the false positives have been mostly eliminated. I'm "tracking" about five email systems and it is interesting to see the differences in the volumes and kinds of spam targeted at each email system, but mostly I only use one of them. Microsoft's Outlook had a major spam storm a few days ago...

I still think the best way to address the spam scam problem is to go after the money, but that would call for working with the potential victims and no one (running a major email system) cares that much about the peasants (like you and me). I can't yet decide if the "countermeasure" described in this story is more or less laughable than average. But I'm predicting the spam will continue apace.

Quoted to deal with the censor trolls, and in this case I do agree with your sentiments even though I think the comment is kind of orthogonal to the main topic. But your Subject is still relevant if "this" is taken as referring to the money part of it. Education as a for-profit business is mostly a problem and rarely part of any solution. My mind is boggled by the "valuation" of $2.5 billion.

Some years ago I did spend quite a bit of time taking online classes, mostly on EdX and Coursera. However, they were not worrying about the money at that time and I think that is a large part of why some of the courses were pretty good. They were teaching for love of the game and exploring the new tools, though not too adventurously. I remember a pretty good philosophy course run by Michael Sandel and an excellent Python course from some Rice people. The Rice course was especially innovative in the evaluation system, which leveraged students to test each other's games. I know that course was still running some years later, though they had switched from Asteroids to Pong as the main game.

On the negative side, I felt that most of the courses were too dependent on long video lectures. I thought the solution approach was obvious. but I never saw such a course among the various ones I took from various universities. What I am looking for would involve testing up front to find out what I don't know and then the course would guide me to relatively short videos where the points of my ignorance were addressed. Perhaps in the form of a video of a teacher explaining each teaching point to a student whose ignorance matched mine? The tricky part would actually be in figuring out the depths of my ignorance, so I imagined the distractors would be designed to find out where to "place me" within a network of knowledge at each stage of the course. My goal would obviously be to learn as quickly as possible with minimum time. Anyone seen such a beast? (Been some years since I went back to the books...)

On the financial side, my fantasy was that they would charge for strictly proctored exams. If you can pass the tests, then you deserve appropriate certificates and stuff. However I actually doubt that approach would be financially viable. The prices for the exams would have to find a tricky sweet spot. High enough to pay for the course material but also low enough to get people to pay for them. Even worse, I don't see myself as a paying customer for such a system. Much as I enjoy learning new stuff, I'm too old to get much benefit from any more certificates or diplomas...

'Nuff said, but now I feel like I need to clarify that I'm not an expert on garbage. Probably not an expert on anything. Purely a dabbler?

Perhaps a substantive comment to follow, but not here.

s/regard Musk/regarding Musk/

Okay FP, but I think that's a weak approach. They would simply play the same game and try to devise new ways to cheat under the modified rules.

I think the fundamental problem is the lack of friction. There is no cost to trades, so more trades are always better. On that basis I think a transaction tax, even a tiny one, would be the best fundamental solution. Without friction the engine will accelerate without limit until it explodes. But I also think it's too late and the next market implosion will be much worse than anything we've seen yet.

And so far no one has cited Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. You know it's old news when someone has already written the book...

Needs funny, but the best I can do is that every company includes some part or person who is least profitable and it seems easy and a "sure fire" path to higher profitability to cut off that part or person.

What could possibly go wrong? Until you get down to the last person?

Is that 60-days notice or just 60-days pay?

There are too many ways known to attack SHA-1. Why can't they at the least use SHA-2? Even better, go straight to SHA-3.

Disappointed there is no funny here. At least someone could have posted a link to their favorite video of a cat riding a Roomba. Or some story about the funniest thing their Roomba has eaten? Or maybe an AI joke about Grok hacking into and taking over all of the Internet-connected robot vacuum cleaners?

Basically expressing my concurrence, though I think the full story is more complicated than that. Not just the house brands, but the manipulation of the secret ranking algorithms to put the most profitable (for Amazon) products at the top.

For example, why would Amazon care if some company sells you (via Amazon) a huge piece of shite as long as it produces the highest payback for Amazon? In the case of house brands there is actually some reputational risk if they cut the corners on quality too deeply, whereas they can let some other company do the same thing, temporarily boost Amazon's profits, and then Amazon just drops that company after Amazon has taken the profits...

Even better (or worse), Amazon will always claim to offer the best value. You were just too lazy to scroll down far enough to find it and too stupid to recognize it when you finally got to it.

But my bile against Amazon goes way back. My second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. I didn't yet have the idea of "corporate cancer", but I could see what Amazon was doing with my personal data and it was clearly wrong. Nothing I've learned since then has improved my opinion of the company.

Story deserved more funny, but I've got nothing. However you reminded me of my latest encounter with the Gemini of the google. I drove it into an apparently infinite apology loop and it refused to return to the original question of my research. (Took the same topic to DeepSeek and got a pretty good answer that might even turn out to be correct. I'm still studying the question.)

Strong concurrence and largely describes my thoughts regard Musk. Should be modded up, but apparently I'm never going to receive another mod point to bestow.

But I think humanity is in a death spiral now, thus resolving the Fermi Paradox. Too many crucial decisions made by greedy people for stupid and shortsighted reasons.

Insofar as America has influence on the flushing of humanity, the current interesting book is Turning Back the Clock by the late, great Umberto Eco. Written before the YOB turned to politics, but eerie and I didn't realize the degree to which the YOB's playbook replicates Berlusconi's style from not so long ago. To be more precise, I think the YOB deserves no credit, but the puppeteer's pulling the YOB's strings studied Berlusconi's methods. Remember how they used to call the American states the laboratories of democracy? Now I think Italy might be the leading laboratory for the destruction of democracy... If you count the Roman Empire before Mussolini, then maybe we can even say "Third time's the charm!"