Nope seems like you understand it perfectly. It’s completely detached from reality. It’s like saying “we know of no rigorous study showing that accurate weather forecasts produced a tangible increase in the number of people who like bagels.” Like, okay, sure, but no one thought there was.
That article really rubbed me the wrong way. It was a bunch of marketing people basically saying “privacy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be because it doesn’t make poor people rich” and “you’ll ruin the ability of small businesses to thrive if you don’t allow them to base their businesses on intrusive mass surveillance.”
The arrogance is astounding. If you can’t start a business without invading my privacy, you should rethink your business model. Just because surveillance marketing makes finding customers easier, doesn’t make it right. This part in particular is absurd:
Privacy can be, in some sense, a problem of the privileged. We know of no rigorous study showing that toughened digital marketing privacy policies produced tangible economic benefits for anyone, let alone lower-income consumers.
No, privacy is a problem for all of us, not just the privileged. To suggest otherwise is a deflection. It’s not always just about economics, even the working class have other things we value.
Wow, props to Castellucci for being a stand up person and not using their discovery to control or mess with tens of thousands of people’s power supply. And props to GivEnergy for not turning around and suing them after they reported finding the issue.
This could have gone badly in either direction, but we lucked out that this Castellucci seems to be an excellent and conscientious citizen.
Haven’t we always known this? It’s the same concept as a Stingray device, which is used to spy on people because their devices connect to it automatically, assuming it’s a normal cell tower. People don’t know what tower they’re connected to, so if you connect to a “fake” or exploited tower, you’ve basically handed over the keys. This is essentially the same thing, but on a 5g network, which is presumably made up of even more nodes/towers.
The justice system doesn’t apply to corporations, even though they’re people. And since the corporations are run by billionaires, the most peopliest people there are, the justice system definitely doesn’t apply to them. Money = speech, and these corporations have the most money, therefore they get the most speech, meaning they have more rights than us normal people, and can get away with breaking the same laws that would get any of us thrown in jail.
/s but not really…
I was in second grade when the school district started thinking about providing internet access for a few computers. You could just add a period at the end of a URL to get around the filters. No idea how or why it worked, but I told everyone. Those were the days.
You’re totally right about the SEO industry. My comment wasn’t meant as an endorsement of SEO, I agree it’s one of the internet’s most fundamental problems. I’m just so frustrated by how consistently google lies about these things. Their first impulse, in so many different situations, is to immediately tell a bald-faced lie, then double down on the lie, and then when the truth comes out, they somehow always seem to get a pass. That’s what’s despicable to me.
But it did expose all the lies google has been telling about SEO and how it works with their algorithm. Basically all the times google was asked “so are you sure you don’t do x, y, or z to prioritize certain sites?” They said no, emphatically, despite some very clever folks who had a pretty good idea of how things were working based on independent tests and experiments on SEO. So google was lying all along, while trying to convince the experts that what they were seeing wasn’t real. Pretty despicable if you ask me.
Pretty sure the answer will be a knock on your door, with the strong possibility that you’ll never be seen again.
They say it works without an internet connection, and if that’s true this could be pretty awesome. I’m always skeptical about interacting with chatbots that run in the cloud, but if I can put this behind a firewall so I know there’s no telemetry, I’m on board.
Bummer. That’s some weak and feckless megacorp bullshit. Just like something Stewart would cover, which is why this show was such a great power move. And yet? Infinite profit over all else, so never mind.
Look at John Oliver, he talks shit about HBO constantly. Do they care? Nope, because he has more Emmys than anyone could know what to do with. Respect your talent and reap the rewards. Pretty basic stuff, Apple.
I thought it was just me and my old iPhone, but I’ve also been having a lot of trouble connecting for the last few months. Since May, really.