> offer them two free years of credit monitoring. Victims aren't going to really use that because it's essentially useless
It's generally actively harmful, and the CRAs fight for this business from breaches because universally, to accept the free credit monitoring you have to sign up for their highest tier credit monitoring package (which can be up to $50/month), supply a credit card, and then hope to remember, a year later, to cancel at the end of the free period, because at that point they'll convert you to a paying customer.
> Republicans win elections by blocking anything that's good for ordinary Americans
This. Mitch McConnell literally was on camera, and said, quote, that Republicans would block any bill Obama or the Democrats tried to pass, even if it was good for America and Americans, because the Republican's priority was to make Obama's term ineffectual.
Not to govern the country. But to actively prevent governance of the country. Even at a cost to its people. They didn't care. And they were open enough about it to say it on the record.
> But about 1.5 million private entities can legally access your data
Somewhat. They are allowed to access it "for treatment purposes", not just to nose around out of curiosity.
I found myself explaining this to a number of my patients (I used to be a paramedic) who were irate about disclosures they'd made to their therapist, doctor, etc., that they had said they didn't want revealed to other providers (but were actually germane to their care).
"Does the HIPAA Privacy Rule permit doctors, nurses, and other health care providers to share patient health information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization? Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows those doctors, nurses, hospitals, laboratory technicians, and other health care providers that are covered entities to use or disclose protected health information, such as X-rays, laboratory and pathology reports, diagnoses, and other medical information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization."
One problem is all the data breaches it encourages. Data breaches are already bad enough with the providers I actually use without 1000s of random companies having access.
Very much so. Also ironically, as a healthcare provider (paramedic), HIPAA expressly allows me to get your healthcare information without your consent (as needed for your care). A lot of facilities have you sign paperwork to explicitly authorize sharing, but that's really just a CYA.
"Does the HIPAA Privacy Rule permit doctors, nurses, and other health care providers to share patient health information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization? Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows those doctors, nurses, hospitals, laboratory technicians, and other health care providers that are covered entities to use or disclose protected health information, such as X-rays, laboratory and pathology reports, diagnoses, and other medical information for treatment purposes without the patient’s authorization."
100% reasonable (and often necessary - pill shopping, psychiatric concerns, etc. And not irony in the Act itself, more people's perception of its intent.
> Thalidomide never even made it to use in the USA.
What? It was initially blocked by the FDA, but was later approved for use in cancer, where it is in fact a front line drug for some myelomas, albeit with significant usage warnings.
It was never approved in the US for the on-label use for which it gained its reputation (it's a potent teratogen and was prescribed --- never officially in the US --- for morning sickness).
Fair, I was talking more the initial pregnancy use, but even still that further pushes my point that those examples have either never been considered perfectly safe, or have been in active normal usage for so many years that you really have to squint to say it's unsafe.
I never found it to be overly reliable. It was reliable... for a while. Then would silently fail/stop working, or just tell you that it had stopped working and that whatever you had in it was no longer accessible.
And then I went to Acronis True Image backing up to my Synology NAS, but that became unreliable too - oftentimes when I'd go to do a restore, the client would crash trying to read the catalog.
So, like you... CCC nightly to my Synology, with a Snapshot rotation on it - snapshot the previous night's backup at 8pm, and then kick off that night's backup at 11pm.
It was unreliable over SMB. Not surprising when you look at what it was doing. It would create a virtual drive on the share, map that and backup to it. There was too much going on for that to be reliable.
I've loopback mounted disk images over network filesystems for many years without any recurring issues outside of macOS. It's not rocket science, particularly if you have a reliable network connection.
I'm aware there's a long tail of possible issues that can come up, but most of the complaints I've seen amount to "I have a reliable connection and Time Machine is still a tire fire", which suggests that the problem exists outside of that particular set of edge cases.
(It seems to genuinely be that nobody at Apple really cares about network filesystems at this point - people in this thread talking up AFP makes me want to look at migrating _to_ using it for my mac's backups, because SMB on macOS randomly drops or hangs for no reason and Time Machine at least twice has just started stating the backup was completely unreadable, leading to me having to restore the backup filesystem from backups.
And attempting to use NFS on macOS somehow makes everything three times as buggy, like they special cased SMB shares to not be touched in some random "touch everything synchronously" calls throughout the OS but didn't do it with NFS shares, so Finder will now take seconds or minutes to do things that shouldn't involve that share, but as soon as you remove it, it stops doing so.)
Yeah, you may be right. I have fond memories of it from around 2008, but those might be from the initial experience and not all the "you need to recreate your back from scratch" errors that would crop up after a while.
> Everything is increasingly integrated for dust/water proofing, components are integrated to reduce the power envelope and push performance. Repairability is the tradeoff.
This is a fair point. But when I hear "you can't repair your device" I also think "you can't take it to someone of your choice to repair", which is often true, too, even though that limitation is artificial - witness the Rossmans and others of the world who can absolutely repair these devices. There's a whole YouTube channel of a guy who makes ASMR videos of him doing things like removing iPhone/iPad/MBP storage and replacing it with large capacity chips.
> I also think "you can't take it to someone of your choice to repair", which is often true, too, even though that limitation is artificial
This I think is a fair enough criticism. Screen and battery replacement by 3rd party professionals should be easier. Both of these things would tackle the biggest reasons that iPhones become useless before Apple drops OS support which is quite long compared to Android OEMs.
Take a photo on your iPhone and wait for it to sync on your Mac. You might get lucky and it syncs nearly immediately (which is still typically a minute or so, even if your phone and Mac are on the same network and have gigabit internet). But you won't know when. And it might not be immediate.
Both sides will tell you they're up to date. You can't force a sync. They'll be synced when Photos is ready, not you. And if that's ten minutes or more later? So be it. You'll just deal with it.
This is a very good example of a disruptive bug that destroys the ability to work. I’m making a document on my laptop and using the phone as a camera to take pictures, I am working on, now. Same WiFi, same person, same cloud, inches apart. No work.
In a very different direction. Photos are almost a second class citizen on IG now. Stories. Reels. Shit, a quarter of my feed is (very repetitive) ads.
It's absolutely grown, but the concept of IG was definitely "de-prioritized".
It's generally actively harmful, and the CRAs fight for this business from breaches because universally, to accept the free credit monitoring you have to sign up for their highest tier credit monitoring package (which can be up to $50/month), supply a credit card, and then hope to remember, a year later, to cancel at the end of the free period, because at that point they'll convert you to a paying customer.
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