Posts by JohnFen

"her spoken voice is somewhat like fingernails on a blackboard."

Interesting! I really enjoy listening to Lisa Stansfield sing, but I've never heard her speak. I think I'll have to seek out a clip of her speech.

Re: popular belief

"I thought the popular belief was that Britons sounded like Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins". "

In the US, it's very well known that Dick Van Dyke's accent is bonkers.

Re: No accent?

To be fair, a number of English accents do strongly resemble a number of American accents, and not by coincidence.

Re: No accent?

I've always found it amusing when people assert that they don't have an accent.

Of course, a half-second of thought will reveal that literally everyone has an accent, and each one of us considers our own accent to be the normal way of speaking.

Re: Consider this ...

"Would you hold Friday Ad responsible? How about if it was on eBay?"

If I reported it to them and they continued to allow that seller to do business on their platform, I would certainly hold them responsible for failing to exercise their basic duty.

Re: What’s with the hate?

"Not everyone is a crook."

True, but AirBnB is notoriously bad at dealing with the ones who are, so the only safe thing to do is to assume that anybody listed in AirBnB is shady.

Re: Detecting hidden cameras?

"A night vision camera and an IR light."

Suitable cameras and IR flashlights are available very inexpensively from all the usual suspects (Amazon, eBay, etc.).

But I think that if you're so concerned that buying such gear for routine use is appealing to you, it would be better to stop using the likes AirBnB entirely.

Re: No shit!

AirBnB has said explicitly that surveillance cameras are perfectly acceptable as long as their existence is disclosed.

Re: Some people would argue....

Fines are appropriate when a company unintentionally violates the law (through being incompetent or whatever). When a company knowingly and intentionally violates the law, prosecution of the individuals who decided to do that, combined with a revocation of the company's article of incorporation and/or business licenses seems appropriate.

Re: To be fair to AirBnB I don't think they can be held responsible for people doing this

You can see the dirty dishes in the sink and react accordingly. Finding a spy camera might not be so easy.

Re: Crocodile tears

"Out of a list of scummy companies, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google,. I trust Google the most"

Not me. Of that list, I trust Apple the most, but I don't really trust any of them. I put Facebook and Google at about the same trust level.

Re: doubleclick lives in my

Although you can run your own DoH server and configure Firefox to use that.

Or, if you're more technically capable, you can do what I do: run a man-in-the-middle proxy to inspect the HTTPS traffic and drop DoH exchanges entirely.

Re: Crocodile tears

"they have those 'like' button trackers but if you never login to them they can't link that activity back to you"

This is not exactly true.

Also, aside from the Like buttons, Facebook also has web beacons and all the other sorts of trackers. Just not using Facebook (or even not having an account) does not protect you from Facebook's tracking.

Re: Crocodile tears

"I know what Facebook can do when you upset them and call them out."

What can they do? I talk about how terrible Facebook is all the time, but they've never sent any goon squad to my door or anything.

Re: Crocodile tears

"Monopolies are especially dangerous because [...]"

This is all true, but we're talking about the adtech/martech industry specifically here. As I said, I think that those industries as a whole are bad actors. I don't see how it affects me one way or another if it devolves into a monopoly. It doesn't change a thing for me if the industry consists of one company or a thousand -- the industry is still a malicious attacker and the defenses that I have to engage in aren't affected.

Re: Crocodile tears

"How will you prevent Google from spying on you [...]"

The same way I do now. Right now, Google+Facebook pretty much control all advertising anyway, and have an undue influence over browser standards (both official and de facto). In my view, the situation you're describing in your comment has already been reality for a while.

Re: Crocodile tears

"Since Google is the biggest and most dangerous player in the ad tech industry, killing the competition is bad for everyone especially those who hate advertising"

How so?

In a sense, it's better for me if that does happen -- then I only have to worry about a single large attacker instead of the large number of attackers that I have to worry about now. (That's just for the sake of argument, I don't actually think it matters much either way).

Also, I don't hate advertising. I hate the ad tech industry because they are so insistent about spying on me. There's a significant difference there.

Re: No change

My friends and family do that by sending me a text.

Recently, a food delivery driver was having problems finding my place and called me to get directions. I didn't answer it, of course, so he sent me a text as well. This is pretty much the new norm.

Re: Of course the FCC is doing nothing

Behold the power of money in a society that values money above all else.

Re: My 3 steps to avoiding robocalls.

Yes, I think that is a far superior idea.

Re: AT&T

That would be great, but I think it's fair to expect that any such program would be as effective in the US as the Do Not Call list -- which means almost completely ineffective.

Re: My 3 steps to avoiding robocalls.

Calls from abusing offshore outfits can be blocked entirely. Or, their ability to spoof CID can be blocked.

Even if international calls are difficult-to-impossible to deal with (which I don't think is true), that in no way means it's not worth tackling domestic ones. Just because you can't solve all aspects of a problem doesn't mean you shouldn't solve the parts that you can.

Re: No change

I assumed he meant really fined, rather than doing what the FCC is currently doing: announcing fines but never worrying about actually collecting them.

A fine that is announced but not enforced is not a fine at all.

Re: No change

"people stop answering ANY calls"

A lot of people, and particularly young people, are there already.

I'm an old fogey, so I do answer phone calls if the calling number is one of someone in my address book. Fortunately, pretty much everybody I know understands that if you're calling someone without prearranging it, that means you're having an emergency -- so I rarely get actual phone calls.

Re: Feral Pay Masters

They can leave a message for that as well.

I have a very strict policy of not answering the phone if the calling number is not in my address book. So strict that my phone won't even ring -- it just gets shunted directly to voice mail.

This policy has never caused any trouble, and I can't imagine a circumstance where it would cause more than an inconvenience.

Re: My 3 steps to avoiding robocalls.

"I think that was BEFORE outside-the-box technologies like VoIP came along which allowed the spoofing of everything"

There is nothing inherent in VoIP that leads to this. That this situation exists is a side-effect of how VoIP is integrated with the phone system. That is something that can be changed.

Re: My 3 steps to avoiding robocalls.

The phone system has an unspoofable Id mechanism in place, and has had so for almost as long as it has existed. It's what phone companies use to work out billing.

The reason that it's not used for Caller ID is that there situations where spoofing the CID is genuinely in everybody's best interest. For instance, when making a call from a phone bank, the phone # of the line that happened to be used to place the call is worthless -- you can't call it and expect the call to go through. Spoofing the CID to provide the correct number for people to call is a good thing.

What needs to be done is not to remove the ability to spoof, it's to take the power to do it out of the hands of phone customers, so companies would have to arrange to have the phone company itself set what the spoofed number is. Then the phone company could ensure the spoofed number isn't deceptive, and would have legal liability for any abuse of the capability.

Re: Of course the FCC is doing nothing

"Pai isn't like the "other party" of corruption, deep state, swamp, and deceit."

Pai is corrupt to the bone.

Indeed. A friend of mine once had his car break down in the middle of nowhere (this was before cell phones). He had the presence of mind to go to a farmhouse he could see and offer to pay the farmer to do a little emergency repair of his car.

The farmer did the repair without a problem, and didn't even accept money for it.

It makes more sense if you remember that we're a nation "of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation".

Re: Clarity needed here

"Instead of thinking this is a money grab by dealers, it keeps cars from being stolen and parted out"

Of all of the lame excuses trotted out to support the notion that we shouldn't be allowed to fix our own stuff, I think this must be the lamest.

"what I meant is that a farmer's area of expertise is farming"

Yes, and a big part of what you need to do to engage in farming is to be able to fix your own equipment when it breaks. Repairing farm equipment of all sorts has always been a core competency needed to be a farmer.

"Framing this as "It's mine so I have a right to repair it" is not helpful"

But it is true.

"It's not desirable for farmers to fix their own tractors"

I think that farmers would strongly disagree with this. Why do you think it's not desirable?

"This should not be strange, this was the situation with cars, TVs, white goods etc for decades."

During those same decades, it has also been very common for people to fix their own cars, TVs, etc. That should also not be considered strange

Re: Standard practice

You're right.

This is one of the main reasons why companies shouldn't use Google Drive or the like for this sort of thing at all.

But it could be done in a more secure way. Instead of sending the link provided by the cloud service, set up a redirect so that the link that is actually sent is to the company's domain name. So the link may read "https://my.company.files/file1", but it will get redirected to the cloudy link.