77 karma · joined October 12, 2019
Who Owns Your Wireless Service? Crooks Do.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/08/who-owns-your-wireless-s...
Is that Professor Sonja Starr?
https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_g...
> There are other studies that have shown gender disparity in criminal cases, but not as pronounced as Prof. Starr's findings. This is because she is looking at "a larger swath of the criminal justice process" in her analysis, she said. The paper states, "Existing studies have typically focused on single stages of the criminal process in isolation"—in particular, the judge's final sentencing decision. These studies compare actual sentencing outcomes after controlling for the recommended sentence associated with the defendant's ultimate conviction. The problem with this, Starr explains, is that "the key control variable is itself the result of a host of discretionary decisions made earlier in the justice process"—including prosecutors' charging and plea-bargaining decisions. Starr's research incorporates disparities found at those earlier stages, and finds that "more disparity is introduced at each phase of the justice process."
> After estimating the amount of disparity left unexplained by the arrest offense and other control variables, the paper explores "why these gaps exist—and, in particular, whether unobserved differences between men and women might justify them." Prof. Starr explores several potential mitigating factors, such as the "girlfriend theory" (that "[w]omen might be viewed as…mere accessories of their male romantic partners"), the role of women as primary caregivers to their children, and the "theory that female defendants receive leniency because they are more cooperative with the government." Although each of these theories found some support in the data, they did not appear capable of explaining anything close to the total disparity that Prof. Starr found.
I wish more people were open to hearing this sort of information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_wate...
1. Government-mandated monopoly provider
2. Government provider
A small business I worked at in a town with a population of 40,000 was approached by the local cable provider. We had 4x T1 lines at $1000 per month. They offered to run fiber to our building for only $1000 per month plus $4000 per year for three years installation fee. Given how many other places we could spend $4000 per year for three years, we opted to keep the existing T1 stupidness as the slow bandwidth was not a serious problem for a small manufacturer.
I found it interesting that during the sales pitch of their salespeople (new rep + her manager), they mentioned that they were "in good with the town council" and were proud of this fact.
Our building was approximately 150 feet from a cable box in a residential neighborhood that was immediately on the other side of a tall fence along one side of the parking lot.
I asked why they couldn't just run a cable from that cable box, and they told me that the city had a law that forbid them from running a single line across public property to private property that wasn't receiving service and then to another private property that would receive the service. The private property they were referring to was a 10' strip of unused property with bark ground cover.
I asked why they hadn't run cable throughout the industrial zone that we were located in. They said that they had plans approved by the city, but those plans required they use a PG&E substation on the opposite side of the industrial zone that was already at 100% capacity. They had requested, years ago, for PG&E to upgrade the substation, but this request didn't even have and ETA from PG&E, itself yet another government-mandated monopoly provider.
Now, why they could run a fiber optic cable anywhere they pleased, is beyond me. They certainly were excited at the prospect of offering us this service.
The problem here that I have personally witnessed has nothing to do with the evil cable provider and everything to do with a corrupted local government.
Because they can.
Might this be consistent with their statement:
> We have been advised that any download, including one without charge, constitutes a sale. Serving GeoLite2 database downloads on a public page simply does not allow us to communicate and honor valid “Do Not Sell” requests we receive from individuals.
> 2. There was supposedly a confusion around whether they were allowed to block anything. That's gone now.
Under the current system, it seems 100% of spam gets through that could so easily be filtered. At an old small business I worked at, we received ~10 calls per day from an identical caller ID number robocaller and ~20 calls per day from a robocaller always using a slightly different very long string of characters. Due to the nature of the company, the main line had to be manned by a human being, so even just the time to look at the caller ID, ignore the caller, and then re-focus back on task was at least 15 minutes of lost productivity every day, yet this is about the easiest type of spammy activity to filter. No need to cooperate with anyone but your customers.
The second could be interpreted as: regulations caused the proliferation of robocalling, as we can see in the unregulated email space that far more spam is sent yet far less ever makes it through the filters. What problems will the new regulations cause?
I don't think this is possible in the telecom space without some sort of complete rethinking of spectrum licensing.
Why didn't they do that already?
To be fully cynical would be to predict that in five years Congress will be calling the wireless providers to testify as to why prices are increasing at such a high rate.
Okay, so that's a kind of a long bill, so I can't verify but you make it sound a bit like the carriers will be fined. They historically directly pass-through all compliance costs to customers, so ultimately customers pay to receive the robocalls?
Facebook is free to do with their servers as they please. Don't like it? Don't use it. I don't.
To my knowledge, facebook isn't breaking into anything. This is a terrible analogy.
> For example, even Facebook says (and the comment you replied to noted) it uses photo tagging and what wifi network you're connected to in order to determine location.
By photo tagging, do you mean GPS coordinates? Isn't that done by the app that takes the picture?
Can't I disable Wi-Fi?
If my wireless ISP is giving everyone free access to my location through some sort of IP address or rDNS scheme, isn't this an ISP issue? I mean, can't you make this exact complaint about every single thing you use that connects through an IP address?
Isn't this more of an OS level issue?
I feel like Gary Larson is still new to the Internet. I mean, the prevalence of Twitter screenshots alone should demonstrate the futility of such efforts. Though it may be that he just doesn't want to tell with supporting the image link traffic.
However, given that uMatrix reports blocking >5K, my suspicion is that he or whoever he has doing his site may not be all that clever. (I haven't any plans to dig into why uMatrix is reporting so much.)
It is not so straightforward as always being an improvement. For example, a user can be uniquely identified through session resumption session ID whereas with plaintext UDP behind a firewall with many others doing lookups unique identification of a user can be close to impossible.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-appli...
Ctrl+Alt+R> Seems to me that zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers of the opposite sex would be an example of "winning", not an example of "men have it bad, too."
You may be struggling to make sense of this by inserting some sort of "who is winning and who is losing" query. I'm not positing winning, losing, better, or worse for anyone. I'm stating that men and women have different online experiences and most are not aware that the other has a different experience.
> As a guy who wishes he'd had zero unwanted online sexual advances from creepers, what am I missing here?
Okay, so non-zero over what time-frame?
Without meeting IRL, is there any way for you to determine if these "creepers" are scammers? You may find they are nearly all scammers if probe even just a little.
You may have something in your profile most men do not have, making you a more attractive target, because, really, HN is full of men and although this is a really poor survey, you are so far the only person stating you experience elsewise.
I would be curious to hear if you receive initial contact from non-"creeper" women. Women also receive non-harassing contact from men, whereas men generally don't receive any.