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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

> (if the ISP blocks the account) “Those customers are likely going to get super pissed off and call up the ISP mad as hell,” Bill said. “And that customer service person is then going to have to spend a bunch of time explaining how to use the webmail service. As a result, very few ISPs are going to do anything about this.”

If someone had copied your door key, and was breaking into your house each week to look for food, then you probably would want the police to change the lock. Or at least let you know you need to.

This just strikes me as a regulatory issue - we have to be able to trust our online services. As such, the level of security needs to be upped by fiat. Its not a popular idea but a FIDO key for everyone in US / Europe would be within the bounds of feasible in next 10 years. Hell just SMS 2FA would massively cut back on this.

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I don't believe it's the norm anywhere in the US for the police to change your locks by fiat, or to go lock your unlocked car doors. That's not something I think a lot of people want.

OK OK everyone - not a perfect analogy ... but I feel it's worth defending.

No I don't want the cops to change my locks either - but imagine you lived in an apartment building whose rules that prevented say, adding a second lock. Even if you changed your lock, you could not give yourself the comfort of two-factor doors.

If there were tens of thousands of such apartments being burgled each day I would be surprised if the answer was not requiring landlords to raise their security standards.

Ultimately it frustrates me to find (yet another) area that criminal activity trivially siphons off cash to the extent we may as well call it a subsidy.

Back when cops used to walk a beat, it was usual for them to check the doors of the closed businesses as they passed to make sure they were still locked.

Whether they locked one if they found it unlocked, I do not know.

Are there really people that want the police to manage their locks? I've genuinely never heard of this idea before but I absolutely don't want the police touching my locks and if my house was broken into I'd want to change the locks myself, immediately.

In England, if the police cannot contact the owner of a burgled property in a "reasonable time" they will call a company to board it up. The property owner (or their insurance) is charged by the security company.

I also want the police to do the dishes and take out the trash...

There are things people are personally responsible for.

A story in the UK (attributed to any number of well known bank robbers) was after they were caught and doing a long stretch, their wife arrives and says the allotment is over-grown and needs digging up. So they ask to see the arresting detective, say "if I tell you were I hit the loot, can I get a reduced sentence", and then announce its buried under the allotment.

Twenty police dig up and de-weed the allotment the next day, and everyone laughs.

Dishes not done of course :-)

Change the analogy from house to hotel room and management, it'd be more fitting.

Yes. I tried a reply above - I think the episode of CSI:Locksmiths has got a few strong replies :-)

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