Monday Morning Links
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 | | Lone Grad student... ...they are tenacious. Until they need money. Then, they will bend. They all bend for money.
Google is evil. As is the FTC. As well as Apple, M$, Facebook, ATT, Verizon... because you let them.
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Splat | |
|  |  Noah VailSon made my AvatarPremium
join:2004-12-10
Lorton, VA
kudos:2
 ·Bright House
| This story has problems. Don't get me wrong, I like Propublica - a lot.
But this article keeps lamenting that the FTC isn't out there, actively discovering wrong-doing.
... But the FTC didn't discover the violation.
... If it seems odd that a federal regulator was scooped by a sleep-deprived student, get used to it
... the federal government is often the last to know about digital invasions of your privacy.
... The largest privacy scandal ...wasn't discovered by federal regulators, either.
... in the United States, but the FTC, as well as the FCC had no idea until the Germans figured it out.
... the agency's (FTC) ambitions are clipped by a lack of both funding and legal authority
Government agencies proactively find bad behavior by scrutinizing everyone.
And investigators who really want to discover other people's poor choices, often find find them - whether they are there or not.
A longer term issue is when a gov enforcement agency can't locate enough law-breakers to justify it's size.
Cooperation with lawmakers can result in new criminals being legislated into existence.
Propublica should already know that the best possible role for a gov watchdog
is to effectively act when credible information is brought to it's attention;
especially from individual citizens.
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The Dark Tower's Skynet evolves from 4chan. | |
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Noah VailSon made my AvatarPremium
join:2004-12-10
Lorton, VA
kudos:2 Reviews:
·Bright House
| Linksys updates routers into cloud-based administration Cisco pushes a radical firmware update without notifying the user first.
quote:
The new firmware presented a login screen for the Cisco Connect Cloud instead of the LAN-based router management interface that had come up previously.
Some voiced concerns about the security of cloud-based LAN administration and didn't want to set up accounts on Cisco Connect Cloud.
They were able to bring up a local, non-cloud management interface after disconnecting the router from the Internet, but that interface lacked most of the features they had been used to with the previous firmware.
On Friday, an administrator in the Cisco forum posted a link to official instructions for downgrading the routers' firmware.
It's notable that Cisco chose the EA3500/EA4500 models to test this unwanted upgrade strategy.
They're two of the few Cisco/Linksys models that can't be upgraded to non-Cisco firmware (dd-wrt, tomato). | |
| | rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO | Re: Linksys updates routers into cloud-based administration Where are the scruples by which these companies operate? What happened to making money by offering better and better products that encouraged folks to upgrade. Why is everyone trying to sell products as a "services". I'll bet a paycheck that if they continue with this strategy, new routers will be managed in the cloud and once most customers are in the cloud, then they'll start charging a monthly fee. That's right -- a monthly fee to change your router's password! | |
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