General News Discussion Thread

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GatoDelFuego

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It seems there’s one thing washington is bipartisan on at least. Both sides agree that something needs to be done about big tech’s business practices. Even the EU are setting up tech taxes. What are peoples thoughts about this?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vo...ogle-facebook-house-hearing-congress-break-up

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vo...st-investigation-amazon-apple-google-facebook

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ws...al-against-eu-antitrust-decisions-11581516872

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cn...st-probe-expands-as-states-beef-up-staff.html
Tech taxes are profiteering from the data war, we need to mandate user data encryption, salting, etc, and impose massive fines on anybody who breaks the rules. Big tech isn't even the worst offender of "tech" business practices in this regard. Then we can break up the tech companies
 
Big tech isn't even the worst offender of "tech" business practices in this regard.
I agree with you fundamentally, but yes they absolutely are the worst offenders in this regard. Several large tech companies (Google and Facebook being the most notorious in this regard) have had massive data breaches in the past and gone unpunished for it. Smaller tech companies likely aren't much better but at the very least the amount of data they need to secure and the number of people impacted if they do experience a breach is far lower.
 

Surgo

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Several large tech companies (Google and Facebook being the most notorious in this regard) have had massive data breaches in the past and gone unpunished for it.
What the fuck are you talking about? What breach has Google had that even begins to approach the scale of Equifax or Anthem? For that matter, what severe and notorious breach has Google had at all?
 
What the fuck are you talking about? What breach has Google had that even begins to approach the scale of Equifax or Anthem? For that matter, what severe and notorious breach has Google had at all?
Lmao, bit hostile there my dude. You feeling alright, or are you just always a bit of a cunt?

Anyways you got me on Google, I was thinking of the 2018 breach that there was a huge circus in the media about but it turns out it was a relatively small-scale breach so I suppose that one simply got blown out of proportion. I apologize for slandering your precious Google. Google notwithstanding, the fact remains that large tech companies are still pretty abysmal when it comes to securing their consumer's data (I have doubts Google is much better honestly lol). Yahoo, Facebook, and Adobe among others are all responsible for multiple huge data breaches, some of which dwarf the Equifax and Anthem cases you mentioned.
 

Surgo

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Lmao, bit hostile there my dude. You feeling alright, or are you just always a bit of a cunt?
I'm always a "bit of a cunt".

Yahoo, Facebook, and Adobe among others are all responsible for multiple huge data breaches, some of which dwarf the Equifax and Anthem cases you mentioned.
None of those approach Equifax or Anthem in terms of bad stuff (Facebook is a special case though, see the bottom of this post).

Equifax breach: 147 million people impacted.
Anthem breach: 37.5 million people impacted.

Both involved full SSN leaks, which by itself (not to mention the rest of the data) is all that's necessary for identity theft. Not to mention medical IDs, etc.

Yahoo breach: all of its user accounts ever should be considered compromised. That's admittedly really bad (there were billions of accounts). But all the data they got were... names, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers, dates of birth, and passwords. This is nothing at all like the Equifax and Anthem breach. The only thing that really matters here is DOB.

The breach happened after Yahoo stopped being a notable tech company. Never would have happened when Yahoo was still in the hands of engineers.

Adobe breach: 150 million, but it's just credit card numbers and login credentials. Their security obviously sucks (anyone in the industry could have told you that before the breach) but the data they lost is just not that important in the grand scheme of things. Nothing personal or that you could run some damaging identity theft on.

In terms of sheer numbers, Yahoo and Adobe look bad. But in terms of what's actually been leaked, Equifax and Anthem aren't just bad. They're scary bad.

Now let's talk about Facebook. Facebook data breach: 50 million, but honestly that's not the worst part of this. Facebook has its own level of bad that's independent of its data breaches and is a lot worse. And that's its historic willingness to share everything with Cambridge Analytica and other firms. Facebook should be considered entirely compromised 100% of the time with zero trust whatsoever.
 

Surgo

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Also sorry if I came off as hostile. Like I said, I'm always a "bit of a cunt". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 

GatoDelFuego

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Facebook is not so much a data breaching machine, the only thing that hackers have usually gotten is passwords. Facebook's problem is that it just gives away your data anyway.

Even target's 150 mil credit card number breach was crazier, and credit cards are easily replaced. The worst offenders are the healthcare industry, they give away SS numbers like candy
 

Acklow

I am always tired. Don't bother me.
So apparently an elderly woman here in Daegu, S.Korea went to her weekly cult meeting despite showing symptoms of Corona Virus and got the congregation sick and now the govt is scrambling to make sure that people reduce their mobility between affected cities. Fun fun fun when idiots don’t do as they’re told.
 

UncleSam

Leading this village
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Buttigieg dropping out.

Odds he made a deal with Biden to drop out, endorse him at a less opportunistic moment, and be his VP pick down the line if Biden wins?

This probably helps Biden not because Buttigieg’s voters will go to him overwhelmingly (he will probably win marginally more of them than Bernie), but because it’ll help ensure that Biden and others meet the 15% viability threshold in a bunch of states on Tuesday, including and especially California. Splitting the delegates and making sure Biden gets over the threshold everywhere seem to be the main goals for the moderate wing right now on Tuesday.

Bernie may need a strong performance in California on Tuesday or else the establishment is going to line up behind Biden. Odds are Amy is only still in the race to try to steal Minnesota from Bernie. Bloomberg will be left for dead and will hilariously drop out after blowing hundreds of millions of dollars to get his name in the race for one day. Warren probably isn’t dropping out because the powers that be want her to siphon progressive votes from Bernie (and, again, possibly siphon delegates or steal Massachusetts from him).

Basically the establishment is fighting back HARD against Bernie. We will see on Tuesday if it pays off.
 

Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
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https://communemag.com/become-unrea...xhuFWcTivnevZfwFJdyKxbn_u4EMhQko_QfzK5aRuCASc

"If the UC had been smarter, they would have settled with us already. But now there’s a COLA campaign on almost every UC campus. UC Davis is striking with us. UC Santa Barbara is striking with us. UC Berkeley is striking with us. And it won’t stop there: Movements are growing at UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, UC Merced, UC Riverside, and UC Irvine. This is just the beginning."

the uc admins are incompetent military industrial complex cronies. i feel like half way thru my time at ucsc they got rid of the incompetent tech bro admins and imported big gun mic generals like janet neopolitano to run the uc, but theyre so dumb like how hard is it to give out a raise? and now u have strikes on all 9 campuses. genius, honestly ppl the current crop of capitalists are completely incompetent. it's funny cause capitalism enriched just enough randos that you now get nouveau rich types power tripping like '5,000 students paying 20m total over 4 years in tuition wont graduate cause i wont shell out 1mill a year so tas can pay their rent' but you know it cant last cause students are gonna bail if they cant get classes so then how will ur nice colonial university continue to exist?
 

Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
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http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-...RJG5xHxoCSKtszln-1YGoY2gWQjjFrDVaxt5rRU7XRtMM

"This spread is, of course, driven by global commodity circuits and the regular labor migrations that define capitalist economic geography. The result is “a type of escalating demic selection” via which the virus is posed with a greater number of evolutionary pathways in a shorter time, enabling the most fit variants to outcompete the others.

But this is an easy point to make, and one already common in the mainstream press: the fact that “globalization” enables the spread of such diseases more quickly—albeit here with an important addition, noting how this very process of circulation also stimulates the virus to mutate more rapidly. The real question, though, comes earlier: prior to circulation enhancing the resilience of such diseases, the basic logic of capital helps to take previously isolated or harmless viral strains and place them in hyper-competitive environments that favor the specific traits which cause epidemics, such as rapid viral lifecycles, the capacity for zoonotic jumping between carrier species, and the capacity to quickly evolve new transmission vectors. These strains tend to stand out precisely because of their virulence. In absolute terms, it seems like developing more virulent strains would have the opposite effect, since killing the host sooner provides less time for the virus to spread. The common cold is a good example of this principle, generally maintaining low levels of intensity that facilitate its widespread distribution through the population. But in certain environments, the opposite logic makes much more sense: when a virus has numerous hosts of the same species in close proximity, and especially when these hosts may already have shortened lifecycles, increased virulence becomes an evolutionary advantage.

Again, the avian flu example is a salient one. Wallace points out that studies have shown “no endemic highly pathogenic strains [of influenza] in wild bird populations, the ultimate source reservoir of nearly all influenza subtypes.”[iii] Instead, domesticated populations packed together on industrial farms seems to display a clear relationship with such outbreaks, for obvious reasons..."

a long read on how industrial agribusiness contributes to the outbreak of viruses
 

GatoDelFuego

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Trigger warning: nyt paywall article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/magazine/wall-street-landlords.html

I am fortunate enough to own a home in a growing community. 80% of my subdivision is rented out by foreign nationals at the "market rate"--about 50% larger than my mortgage. The profits on this are about $10,000 a year per property--and you STILL own the actual house, which increases in value year after year because of the demand to rent it out!

I know this because I check the titles and they do not match the last names of the tenants. I know the rental rate because one of my young coworkers actually toured the house next to mine. Wasnt even cleaned out from the previous tenant, just paid them to leave to minimize time on the market.

Housing prices are now rising to support the rental market, rather than the other way around. Homes have been turned into a business. There are thousands of articles out there by rich investors on why you shouldn't own a home...just let them buy it instead. Land ownership has become the single greatest method to extract value from a property. You wonder why the homeless rate is going up in {coastal city }? There is plenty of housing out there, being used to generate free income.

My proposal for this is to heavily tax any home not lived in for a majority of the year. Of course this will be framed as punishing the """middle class""" but the fact is if you are renting your second home you are indirectly putting people on the street, right now.
 

BP

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My proposal for this is to heavily tax any home not lived in for a majority of the year. Of course this will be framed as punishing the """middle class""" but the fact is if you are renting your second home you are indirectly putting people on the street, right now.
How would this effect college students who need to rent houses during the school year?
 

Stratos

Banned deucer.
If you rent out single-family homes, you are absolutely going to hell. This is wildly inefficient land use and one of the most devious things the rich have come up with in recent years to reduce upward mobility. Triple the price of owning property and force middle incomes to live on rent for a lifetime! Fuck it makes me sick.
 

GatoDelFuego

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How would this effect college students who need to rent houses during the school year?
Rent a basement room while the owner is still there, or just...rent an apartment. Obv rental property is in short supply but this needs to be tackled by building more high density housing not by inflating the "traditional" housing market to turn it into a second apartment industry
 

Myzozoa

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the thing you need to understand is that conservatives are happy to let anyone die of the coronavirus. after the epidemic is over they'll claim that the powers they seized in the emergency (banning the movement of ppl, getting rid of the asylum process, etc) all made America safer regardless of how willfully the conservatives mismanage the crisis. Ppl think this is gonna tank trump have got it dead wrong, it's in crises like this that conservatives can grab power. Coronavirus could end up being trump's 9-11 moment where whats left of the country slides full tilt to the right.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/20...LIPiGYA9ExwgDdhNM1aMHXq8fJpb0bsxE12k6UdvJ7QV0
 

termi

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-to...nt-unusual-disruptions-in-markets-11584033537

funny how the american govt just has 1.5 trillion dollar lying around when the stock market bubble bursts but still insists that they couldn't possibly give people decent health care. it's almost like big business and the finance sector are de facto in government and the whole "representing the people" bit is just a formality. dont make the mistake that this is a republican problem btw the democratic establishment is not much better
 

Pyritie

TAMAGO
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-to...nt-unusual-disruptions-in-markets-11584033537

funny how the american govt just has 1.5 trillion dollar lying around when the stock market bubble bursts but still insists that they couldn't possibly give people decent health care. it's almost like big business and the finance sector are de facto in government and the whole "representing the people" bit is just a formality. dont make the mistake that this is a republican problem btw the democratic establishment is not much better
is there a version of this article that doesn't require me to give them my data?
 

GatoDelFuego

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Technically it's just a loan tho, isn't it? It's not free money....until a year from now when we pass a law to ignore the loan
 
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