"But Clorox says that the "debilitating" breach was not its fault. It had outsourced the "service desk" part of its IT security operations to the massive services company Cognizant".
So yeah. Fire all of your experienced staff, and outsource it to some sweaty lowest-bid schlubs. That'll improve security!
Really. Wow. "Guarantee" that they will comply with 23-and-me's policies. Sure, yup. Will do that, I promise. Pinky promise.
Who's going to enforce the promise once I've completed the purchase?
Yes. Yes, he is.
> This was a reasonable fix. It's not "forever" it's EACH violation per person. If they get caught doing it AGAIN with the same data and person then it's easily intentional and 5x as much of a fine!
Yeah, but, as we've seen with other PII, it's not that the same company itself leaks out your info again and again; the damage is done by the very first leak. Now you have a phalanx of nameless, faceless entities that appear and disappear in and out of the thin corporate air, trading your biometric data to each other. Worse, this is data you can't even change, unless you figure out a way to replace your fingerprint or iris print.
That doesn't address anything. Sure, you could move to upstate Idaho and do what you want - killbots or whatever. But if such a product is illegal for sale in California, no distributor will touch it (if it's a consumer play), and no major corporation will buy it (if it's a B-to-B play).
Consider how California passes stringent (even extreme) environmental bills (e.g. auto emissions), and every manufacturer worldwide will (reluctantly) adopt it once it's a fait accompli.
I would say less than a quarter of Google's employees will fall into that category. You may not have an idea just how many support staff are needed in a company that large.
Are you kidding? The amount of data that Google farms from the Email is tremendous, and tremendously valuable to them. Don't overestimate their generosity.
The real danger here is not of "AI getting too smart for humans". It's "humans getting too dumb, and starting to accept it as 'intelligence', and then blindly abdicating control and responsibility to what is basically a dumb pattern matcher".
Of course, we are already at the point where we blindly trust google searches as "the truth", so maybe we should dump all search engines and make people go to the library and read books and understand the subject matter first.
It's not just that "doctors prescribe antibiotics".
The concept of controlled drugs that can be dispensed only with a prescription is a joke in India. People just stroll up to the nearest neighborhood pharmacy and demand antibiotics for just about anything, and the pharmacist usually has a "doctor" in the back room who'll sign anything.
The good, or bad, thing is that most of these antibiotics are so cheap in India, that even slum-dwellers can afford them. Unlike the US, where they charge you an arm and a leg, especially if you don't have insurance.
They even turned it off and on again. Or tried to.
Sure, when they've worked out the kinks of productizing this. (Sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, storage, harsh weather conditions, etc.)
This is pretty much like the annual "amazing battery breakthroughs" we read about. Not that they are bogus, but that it's just a first step, and there are many more required before it comes into common use. And the product can die along any of those steps.
All that said, though, the problem of route density is a real one here in the US.
Europe is much more densely populated, and very few cities are more than, say, half an hour or an hour away from a high-speed rail line. It makes it easier to run efficient feeders to the backbone networks.
And even in Egypt (the original subject here), I think this can be made to work, because the population is concentrated in a "T"-shaped region (Alexandria down to Luxor, and the Mediterranean coast, and it will be much easier to set up a few lines that can serve well over 50% of the population with very little feeder support needed.
On the other hand, in the US, for example, you'd need to set up an extensive network of feeder lines just to get to the main routes (even if you laid down high-speed routes along the same pattern as interstates). If it takes you 2 hours to drive to the nearest high-speed station, a 5-hour journey on the train itself, and then have to find yourself a one-hour ride to your destination, that puts a damper on its utility, especially if you can get a couple of flights that will do the same distance in 3 or 4 hours, even including the security theater involved.
Also very close to the theme of "Upload"..
"I have more information in one place than anybody in the world." -- Jerry Pournelle, an absurd notion, apparently about the BIX BBS
