@LRRRonEarth Not so, John McClane crawling shoeless through the air ducts is a well known metaphor for the birth of Christ, and the famous 'NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN HO HO HO' line, the gifts of the three wise men.
Prime Minister, Minister,
I would like to draw your attention to section 15.A. of the National-Act and National-NZ First agreements as published last Friday, 24th November 2023. It reads:
A. Principled – making decisions based on sound public policy principles, including problem
definition, rigorous cost benefit analysis and economic efficiency.
(Emphasis added).
Your plan to repeal the Smokefree legislation will inevitably lead to more New Zealanders
Apple's support of universal messaging is, just as you might expect, deliberately less secure than it could have been. https://www.macrumors.com/guide/rcs/
It's still good that they're supporting RCS at all...
(Edited to reflect that this is all a work in progress and should get better over time.)
@whitehurst@dangillmor Which is ‘as secure as governments will let it be’ because carriers have clear text interception obligations. It’s only a matter of time till one of them decides to drop the nuclear bomb and ban iMessage or Signal if they refuse to implement breakable encryption. It’s a miracle Apple have been able to hold the line this long.
Gerry, if you need to consult a bunch of people in order to decide whether or not we should ask someone to please stop killing children then you're not who I want making that kind of decision in my name.
This week, the FCC said it was finally going to put a stop to SIM swapping and port-out fraud. The new rules, the commission said, “require wireless providers to adopt secure methods of authenticating a customer before redirecting a customer’s phone number to a new device or provider. The new rules require wireless providers to immediately notify customers whenever a SIM change or port-out request is made on customers’ accounts and take additional steps to protect customers from SIM swap and port-out fraud.”
But there’s no real guidance on what these secure authentication methods should be or what constitutes immediate notification. The FCC rules have instead been written to explicitly give “wireless providers the flexibility to deliver the most advanced and appropriate fraud protection measures available.” Adding to the challenge is a gaggle of carriers with low-paid and poorly trained employees and cultures steeped in apathy and carelessness.
None of this is to say that the FCC won’t ultimately create rules that will provide a meaningful check on a scam that’s reached epidemic proportions. It does mean that the problem will be extremely hard to solve.
For the time being, SIM swaps and port-out scams are a fact of life, and there’s little reason for optimism that a handful of vaguely worded requirements will make a difference. For now, the best you can do is—when possible—to ensure that accounts are protected by a PIN or verbal password and follow additional precautions provided by the Federal Trade Commission.
@dangoodin The biggest challenge carriers face is time pressure. Subscribers who genuinely require a SIM swap because their phone was lost/stolen will chafe at the kinds of security measures required to get arbitrarily close to zero fraud. Fraudsters have passable fake ID; fraudsters often gain control of secondary channels eg email so you can't trust those to provide instant verification. But you can't have a 3-day cooldown to leave time for better checks either if the subscriber has no phone.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell Oh yes, and those people who are afraid of brown people in boats have approximately 100% overlap with those who don't believe in climate change. They're going to LOVE what's coming.
It was Ardern’s emotional intelligence and knowledge of politics IMO that played a huge role in forming and maintaining the coalition Gvt of 2017-20.
Luxon (and Seymour to an even greater degree) lack these utterly essential characteristics in dealing with Peters.
Peters is playing Luxon like the total political amateur he is; this will be a fractious and very leaky arrangement. If it lasts 3 years it will be a miracle.
Goggle's "Web Integrity" project has been widely condemned as a trojan horse for bringing DRM crippleware to the web. The battle against it has been won. But the war against Goggle's attempt to iThing-ize Android continues;
Nope, my very first reply was that Android is a whole operating system written by an ad company. Google controls it from top to bottom, and its only purpose is to collect your private data so they can push ads to you. Well done on your effort to never see a single ad on your Android device; that's a lot of work, and far from the typical experience.
Google's dropped the "don't be evil" motto years ago.
"Returning for my second visit. Haven't been here since the early 80s. Not in the least bit harmless anymore, thanks a bloody lot Thatcher." -- Ford Prefect
Non-writers looking at the output of ChatGPT and worrying that a MOLE (1) will replace human writers are like non-musicians looking at The Trons and worrying that robots will replace human musicians;
What Greg Locke did with The Trons was really clever, and I'd definitely queue up to see a live show. But I don't know a single musician who saw this and worried for their future.
just checked a major review site and not a single smart TV was released in the past two years without integrated ads that you can't opt out from or disable. that's depressing.
Finished chapter 1 of the new novel and it's rough (because first draft) but certainly crams in the WTF?!?-ery, as required.
Also, prior to November 2022 it was literally not possible to pitch a book in the British market with a plot geared around the assassination of Queen Elizabeth II ... let alone a comedy take on it!
(Pinky chirps up: "if someone would assassinate the Queen it would put us out of Bob's sartorial misery!" See, I knew someone would see my side of things.)
I am begging Apple PR to understand that absolutely nobody is insane enough to put a fucking iMac on a kitchen island while you are cooking. end the madness
@HeavenlyPossum The force behind Edward Norton's nameless narrator having a mental break and becoming Tyler Durden in Fight Club is that his job is to decide whether it's cheaper to pay out on lawsuits for fatal defects, or recall all the cars to fix the problem.
