1,613 karma · joined October 4, 2020
Google gets this much better - with a ton of SAAS / biz focused apps. So I imagine google is tracking me somehow (I use google search / chrome etc) and apple does not seem to be doing that good a job.
Every other company would have been falling over themselves to unlock a terrorists iPhone.
Apple said no, hired Ted Olsen, and litigated (along with lots of other less well known cases).
This may have even hurt them in some consumers eyes (hard to understand them protecting someone who killed a bunch of people). So the PR risk was very significant.
So they do seem to have a pretty committed consumer focus (and now make money because of that).
It is virtually inevitable though that someone will go after them (anti-trust etc) because this is a game of billions and folks who for example do in-game loot boxes (fortnite) and marketing (facebook) etc are going to be in regulators ears and in ny times ads and op-eds calling for this horrible situation to be broken up.
1) Many unions are govt unions - think police, prison guard, teachers.
2) For closed shop states, if a union wins election, EVERYONE has to join the union.
3) A history of corruption in unions in some cases.
4) There is a perception in the US that unions and lazy workers overlap.
Teachers unions, prison guard unions, police unions - they need to have some real good examples of the successes unions can bring. Internationally (at least in EU in my experience) there really are those. In the US it's a bit muddied.
The latest example I saw, a parent wanted to try and get schools to reopen. Union called them racist -
"she was being racist and not considering “the needs of brown/black families who 'predominantly want to stay home' as evidenced by the several months old OUSD survey that was sent out to all district parents."
Stuff like this is kind of eye rolling. The union starts calling folks racist for wanting their kids in school? Do the black/brown folks they are speaking for even agree with these claims?
Security:
One issue early on for Linode was just abysmal security despite claims. Lots of denial and lack of transparency too which was even worse. For a biz focused offering that was just a no go.
Even 8 year ago there was stuff with the bitcoin hacks? Do folks remember any of this?
They might have been using cold fusion or something because they got hacked again I think just like a year later?
These weren't just little corner case hacks / issues - but major with plenty of denial and obfuscation from linode.
There was this hack here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170
I'm sure I'm missing others (unsecured mysql databases etc?).
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Anyways, at least in my world linode was actually seen as the cheap/crappy offering even though they actually cost more which was weird. But I def told folks to stay away just because of the repeated lack of care around security.
I had no idea DO was at 350M+ ARR - nice job by them - wow!
The other poster indicated it is possible for stuff like this that you get bumped, even on the el cheapo plan, to someone actually on product team. While I'd hate to be on the product team having to answer these, it perhaps keeps folks aware of customer issues so they can at least improve docs for corner cases?
Developer support $29/month, and business support is $100 (both go up if you spend more).
I paid for business support. You get
24x7 phone, email, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers
Unlimited cases / unlimited contacts (IAM supported)
This is for $100/MONTH!! That is the deal of the century.
And they are ridiculously helpful.
I don't understand this - AWS must be losing money at least on support side, though they obviously get happy customers (myself included).
And even at $150 this would be great.
I had a client on gsuite with google 8 years ago - we COULD NOT get anyone to help with some weird admin state flow issue - it just was not possible to talk to a human being for ANY amount of money.
Scanning looks for spam and phishing- attachments may be scanned for malware - you can enable enhanced pre delivery scanning. They don’t scan suite emails for ads.
If you want to let stuff through you can setup an mx proxy and then whitelist the ip in admin settings. Just be ready for the metric ton of spam and scam emails you’ll get
Good news though. Losses saves you from conversion artifacts. Compression that's not further mangled sounds fine, but what's weird is if you run something with one crompression model through other compressors (ie, to get it onto a network then airplay then etc. )
The bitrates relative to the endless youtube / netflix / twitch streaming are still very small - 4K video streaming just crushed bandwidth, I'd love to know the youtube / netflix / prime video / twitch bandwidth loads, they have to be insane.
The platforms don't have a lot of confidence in the timeliness of claim resolution through the court process, they have 10's to 100's of thousands of issues to address weekly. Trademark ripoff apps, apps ripping off copyright, content issues (child abuse / apps that promote violence). Waiting for legal orders on any of this would be time consuming and costly. So we are clear, courts take YEARS to resolve these things. They also operate globally. Developers in Israel and Egypt and the EU and the US. Cross border legal enforcement through the courts is very hard at scale currently and there are political differences as well.
My own sense, if govt provided more timely, effective and accurate relief and determinations, folks would be more comfortable with court involvement. But at least on commercial side, given both the politization of courts (which makes rulings both unpredictable and highly variable based on judges involved) and the delays in the process there is just an understanding that to maintain functional ecosystems the platform owners need to take a more hands on approach.
I'm in another field where basically everything has gone to arbitration agreements without exception because the court process is just broken for resolutions on larger scales.
Companies are getting very careful on this.
"If a subscriber/enrollee doesn't agree to arbitration, will Kaiser Permanente decline enrollment? A: Yes. If a subscriber/enrollee does not agree to arbitration, they (and their dependents) will NOT be able to enroll in a Kaiser Permanente plan."
So this is extending to nonprofits as well. What's really interesting is business to business (ie, both parties roughly similar negotiating authority) also going to arbitration. The big issue on the business side though is arbs tend to split awards (it's a safe call) rather than just destroying one person even if the case calls for that, and there is no appeal (which business doesn't like, they want at least one other crack at the apple).
I'm reminded of Nikola's director of hydrogen tech - guy had no degree in anything close to hydrogen and had worked doing driveways. I am skeptical in those cases, as I am here!
So I'd seriously looking at something like journalistic or academic fraud or plagiarism with this guys background.
This looks like a pretty clear trademark violation!
Rideshare Cheat Monitor for Uber would be MUCH safer than resuing an extremely similar sounding name. Or just RiderCheat Monitor.
Given they don't think their name is similar to UberEats / Uber, it makes me wonder whether they are scam of some sort as well.
Municipal owned fiber is great -> you permit and add it on EVERY dig. Putting a new sewer line in? Run fiber. Someone wants to replace their sewer lateral? Run fiber. Repaving? Run fiber. Someone doing a new development. Run fiber.
You can actually wholesale it out as well if you want and let folks compete on top of it with backhaul etc (at whatever level you want, from customer service / billing handoff only to some backhaul network comp). That said, fiber to the home is pretty close to a natural monopoly. Everyone should have a fiber to their house, but it makes NO sense for competing providers to string up fibers in most cases and so they do not.
I'm on fiber now with a hardwired set of connections to pretty much everything. It is AMAZING! I do remote work, video conference, large files. Even my 300Mbps cable service only had 10Mbps upload (or less), so wife and kids doing whatever on things (dropbox file sync maybe for large vidoes) meant my zoom calls were dropping. Gigabit is 4-6ms (!) ping to major services. And symmetric.
There had to have been some deals on backend to keep things the way they were - insane shortages of vehicles on weekends and no service to minority areas - with Uber you can get dropped and picked up most places I've found even dicey ones.
Right now I'm PRETTY sure I can't get screwed by a random subscription. Having played with some of the others, definitely not true elsewhere.
And I don't normally support some of the more political cases against Uber et al
What's interesting is the Chinese companies are actually getting better at this. It's usually multi-part.
* Post a meaningful deposit / security to list, more if you list more.
* Pretty involved complaint resolution process and tracking inventory by actual seller (no comingled inventory).
* Product spot checks by platform itself for stuff that sells a better
* Product spot checks let you also pick up the free product offers for good reviews game players this way.
* Real human support for review bombing situations and de-listings. If you can start untangling the knots a lot of the scam folks are all cross linked.
I've got plenty more, and no one is paying me $100K. So these platforms are mostly just lazy.
Eventually someone will build a knock-off amazon with more trust, and we'll all move there and just use amazon for AWS compute.
Anyways - in developing countries models along these lines are already being used - there are no or limited credit scores and identity issues can be big. So people are already getting financing as a result of this evil - usually microfinance
For transitional job programs - you don't get kicked out w out a reason - they work with lots of people. They agree not usually as ocial workers though - program is about jobs and employers usually.
Ok to use them for mail like onboarding paperwork from employers. Because of liability and other risks (folks can be hustling etc still) usually not ok too use mail service for other reasons.
AWS has enough scale to have its own gravity and will likely run development forward regardless of .org, it would be GREAT if .org could actively work to integrate where possible the open source options here.
I remember some early efforts of google to contribute wakelocks and other features to the linux kernel - so annoying when that was shot down and created a pretty significant split, and the commercial entity wasn't going to hold off on wakelocks because a subsystem maintainer didn't like it - so android starting going off into its own land.
Wakelocks also ended up proving a reasonable power management approach (despite complaints they didn't use existing linux mechanisms etc).
There was a big push ultimately to get wakelocks into mainline and drive some convergence.
Apple and the EU's approaches to privacy and security are diametrically opposed. Apple has reasonable technical defaults, and is not to intrusive. EU is massive annoyance and intrustion, and limited technical competence.
My guess - if you let users flip a bit in their browser to never have to see a cookie popup again with an auto agree to all forms of tracking, a huge number would do it.
The EU has done more to damage the attention people pay to privacy and security than almost anyone out there.
They seem to not realize that:
1) Users have control over cookies, persistence etc via their browser directly, which would be a great place to start making changes.
2) Popping up a notice for every damn innocuous and obvious use of a cookie is totally annoying to just about everyone.
3) THe amount of time wasted on cookie policies alone is just nuts. The mismash is ridiculous. ICO, CNIL, German and Spanish DPA, UK and EU laws on cookies.
You used to own your music. The next generation largely DOES NOT. Does HN not understand this?
You used to own your movies etc. The current netflix generation DOES NOT.
You used to buy equipment (like tractors). Now a surprising range of stuff is going to pay for power / hour etc. This includes firmware for tractors which enforces whatever emissions control regime, speed control, overload control, annoying safety things (lane departure warnings on commercial vehicles are so maddening commercial drivers have the silence button built into their muscle memory and almost all would turn them off if they could).
John Deere and EVERY other company is going this direction as fast as they can. This is not a question of PR, it is a question of current fact. This is to make money, build big tech platforms, allow for snitching on all sorts of things (elogs now let fleet operators know about tailgating by drivers in commercial trucking) etc.
One factor for me - things were opened up in the automotive world, and emissions controls on diesel trucks are a MAJOR source of the "hacking" people came up with.
Some estimates are 50%+ of trucks in places like texas are running delete's. So that is an incredible pollution impact.
It would be helpful to have some more specific examples (other than emissions bypasses / feature lockout bypasses - yes very annoying on a 800K vehicle!, etc) where farmers can't do a repair. What repair, in particular, do farmers want to do in the field, that they can't? That might help ground the convo.