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Comment It's not regulations (Score 2) 30

They're getting ready for mass firings. California and New Jersey both have rules about how you do that. You can still do it, but it's gonna show up in the press and you can't cheat people out of unemployment insurance or agreed upon severance.

Also you have to report the mass firings. Texas lets you sweep them under the rug.

I'm saying don't move. You'll be fired in a year.

You can't race to the bottom

Comment Re:You are protected (Score 1) 54

it's just so much easier to centralize it

Fully-decentralized trust systems just don't work. PGP failed primarily for this reason, while SSL Certificate Authority system succeeded -- which shows that you don't need perfect centralization, a federation can do it, but the federation has to contain a sufficiently small set of authorities that it's practical for those who need to trust them to do so. The SSL analogy is useful in another way, too. Note that end-users don't know or care about CAs, they only have to trust their browser; the browser authors package the list of trusted root CAs, and they're moderately well-positioned to make those trust decisions on their users' behalf (the certificate transparency log is another layer, a global, fully-decentralized oversight mechanism -- but I don't see an obvious analogue for caller ID).

Applying this structure to caller ID trust, the most obvious points of control are the network operators first and phone makers second. Clearly the MNOs should be taking responsibility. They each know the accuracy of the IDs originating in their networks, and they are in a good position to validate the trustworthiness of IDs from outside their networks. Ideally, they should probably just refuse to forward an ID from a network that doesn't commit to anti-spoofing.

However, they're not doing that, and they're not going to do that, and we all know why: It's more profitable for them to permit spoofing.

One possible market-driven solution to this would be if some sufficiently-large networks decided that consumers cared enough about caller ID accuracy to make it a selling point for their services, committing to send only trustworthy IDs, either because they know the origin within their own network, or because the ID came from another operator who made the same pledge. My guess is that this would require renegotiation of interconnection agreements, but it could be done. More importantly, it would require users to care enough about caller ID spoofing to be willing to switch networks to get away from it. I don't know if that's in the cards.

So, what about the phone makers? They're in the next-best position... and Google by itself can put a big dent in caller ID spoofing globally. If Apple does the same thing between their devices, and then if they collaborate with Google (not an outlandish idea; Google and Apple often collaborate on technical standards), they could ensure that any call originating from a mobile phone provides accurate caller ID, and block the rest. And then they could also collaborate with the dumbphone makers and any new entrants to the smartphone market.

I think this is actually not a bad solution, and the market-driven motivations are clear. Phonemakers benefit from happy phone users and don't profit from phone spam.

Comment Re:Tech sovereignty is a survival need. Good on 'e (Score 1) 155

In China nothing is brutal since over 30 years.

Unlike USA it is a fine working striving democracy -

LOL...PLEASE tell me you weren't able to actually type that without at least a smile on your face....

If you were actually serious...I have to tell you you're a bit too late for 1984, doublespeak and rewriting history daily

Comment Re:How Do They Make Money? (Score 1) 163

Can we get a car like this? Can we get congress to pass a law that says we can have a car like this?

I'd written something similar earlier....make some cars and jeeps this simple, go back to 60's - 70's tech maybe....where you can work on your vehicles on your own on the weekend.

No need for uber tech, no telemetry and over the air updates....

I for one would kill for a modern day CJ7....simple gas engine that is bulletproof....and well, not that much else.....

Hell, give me a '76 TransAm....big engine, no computer needed...maybe just modernize the suspension....

Comment Re:Capitalism wins again. (Score 3, Informative) 163

Ahem....back to tractors one can own and self repair made simply and just works...

If they would only do this with CARS and JEEPS again.....simple, mechanical...without all the fucking tech, something in 60-70's area of tech....I'd be one of the first in line.

It was nice to be a shade tree mechanic and work on your own vehicles on the weekends....

I guess maybe having just Bluetooth in the radio to hook my phone to to stream music..but shy of that I don't need cars that phone home, nor have internet, or require software updates...fuck all that.

Hell I don't even need a backup camera....I never use them on cars that have them anyway....so far, mine don't.

Comment It'll depend on how the midterms go I think (Score 1) 155

If Trump backed candidates win then Europe is going to have to do something but if they lose even if it's Republicans winning Europe will see that as a signal that they can back down.

The basic question is will America return to some semblance of sanity with the economy crashing and gas prices skyrocketing or will they just keep doubling down on more Trump. There have been several primary elections where Trump backed candidates won though. So it's not looking good. The basic problem is American voters either are obsessed with voting Republican even when it hurts them economically and a lot of Americans aren't allowed to vote because we do heavy duty voters suppression.

So the country is really going off the deep end here.

The thing is Europe can't really ignore a mentally unstable United States because we still have this massive military. I know it looks like we got our asses kicked in Iran but the only reason Trump had the back down even a little is that a draft and boots on the ground is still a bridge just a little bit too far.

All it takes to change that is one middle-sized terrorist attack and the American public will freak the fuck out and send their kids off to die in the desert again. Hell the last time when 9/11 hit we didn't even have to do a draft because so many people signed up. Now mind you Iran is a much bigger country and taking Greenland is a bigger deal so yeah we would need a draft, but you can get away with pretty much anything when people think that they are under attack

Comment Dude deregulation isn't a panacea (Score 2, Informative) 155

You need to look up what a mother fucking chesterton's fences.

Deregulating isn't going to create some magical world of competition and wonder and beauty. All it's going to do is what a handful of psychopaths abuse people's privacy and civil rights. Basically the exact same problem the United States has right now where finance Bros have used technology to do all sorts of fucked up shit and get us to where we are right now.

All Europe has to do if it wants to compete with Microsoft is take government money and dump it into software. That's it. Most of the software they need is already 60 to 80% of the way there. After that all you have to do is mandate the use of that software to interoperate with the government and with government contracts and everyone has to follow along because government contracts are worth way too much money to blow them off. It really is that simple and it's only corruption that prevents it from happening.

Every few years Europe threatens to dump Microsoft and Microsoft comes in and gives them tens of millions of dollars worth of free software and free support. This is been going on for at least as long as I've been paying attention and that's going on 30 years.

The reason we are here talking about this shit is because this doesn't look like another cycle of Europe pressuring Microsoft for free support, free software and discounts but instead they are legitimately trying to decouple themselves from America because America has gone bad shit crazy with right-wing extremism and the kind of laissez-faire bullshit that you're talking about when it comes to quote unquote deregulation.

What you're suggesting is basically Europe traveling the exact same road that the United States did which is the exact reason Europe doesn't want to buy software from the United States anymore. Counterproductive doesn't even begin to cover it. That would be batshit insanity.

Comment Re:Tech sovereignty is a survival need. Good on 'e (Score 0, Flamebait) 155

Did you seriously write that comment or are you just a AI chatbot? Honestly can't tell the difference anymore.

You might want to look up where most telecommunications hardware comes from regardless of what the rules and regs say. Or fuck where do you think phones are made? Yeah some of them are made in India not anywhere close to all of them.

People will buy from dictators all day long as long as those dictators are predictable.

Comment Re:Tech sovereignty is a survival need. Good on 'e (Score 5, Interesting) 155

So this isn't about tech sovereignty per se this is because America has gone so far off the rails that we can no longer be trusted.

You will note that Europe isn't busy doing the same thing with Chinese electronics and software. That's because as brutal a regime as China is they are at least predictable. As long as the money flows they're not going to do anything too crazy.

In the era of a second term of trump that is no longer true for america. All bets are off and God only knows what's going to happen.

I don't think people really can process just how crazy it is that the president of the United States threatened to seize Greenland by force and that the only reason he stopped is that Congress told him no. And to be clear not all of Congress just enough of it that he had to listen on that one issue...

At a certain point crazy is so fucking crazy that while intellectually you know it's there emotionally you can't really process it. It's what I call the Dick Cheney effect.

Comment Re:They can opt out for longer than that (Score 1) 65

So anyone Facebook really wants and needs will get an exemption and anyone else gets tossed into the grinder. That's how these sort of exemptions work. Same thing they do with remote work.

Every company is going to have a handful of genuinely irreplaceable workers and those are the ones that this policy will be available to and everyone else can go fuck themselves.

And if the other workers refused to work for Facebook they couldn't be more happy about that because the administration will just let them bring in cheap H-1B labor after they claim they can't find Americans willing to work. Because America first and all that.

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