FireBeyond

You say in practice, NDAs. What we've seen so far: classified military ops, people with access to Presidential speeches...

The other issue is that for Flock's marketing purpose, if a Flock query was made in relation to a crime, and that crime was later resolved, Flock considers themselves to have "helped solve the crime", regardless of the relevance or lack thereof of the query itself.

That's the best you got.

"Just lie on your visa applications, no countries on earth share data with each other and no-one cares except the US and who cares about them, nothing will ever happen to you."

Cool.

Actually, the idiocy of this response is even more notable when you learn that many countries will notate it IN YOUR PASSPORT that you were refused entry.

"Lie on your visa application and hope no immigration officer thumbs through your passport." Stunning advice.

Airlines do care. They get assessed a fee for every passenger that is turned around.

Oh look, Australia cares: https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/form-listing/forms/1563.pdf

> Have you, or any other person included in your visa application, ever been removed, deported or excluded from any country (including Australia)?

Oh look, Germany cares: https://preview.auswaertiges-amt.de/blueprint/servlet/resour...

> Have you ever been expelled or deported from the Federal Republic of Germany, had an application for a residence permit rejected, or been refused entry into the Federal Republic of Germany?

Almost like you're just making shit up based on some anti-US sentiment.

LOL at your hypocrisy. I am a UK citizen, and I am an Australian citizen, and I am -not- a US citizen, lived and worked in both and in Europe though I am, currently, in the US. But sure, make the same assumptions that you want to think I'm guilty of making.

You make it sound so "meh, whatever", but there's a few realities attached to this:

The airline in question will likely not serve you again, but probably more importantly, when you apply for a tourist visa to just about any country on earth, you'll now have to answer that question "Have you ever been denied or refused a visa or entry into a country?" and while some might take sympathy on "Oh, yeah, we get it", you can be sure you'll be getting extra attention and some countries will threaten to deny entry too.

But what they can do is confiscate your phone, _image_ it, without the access attempt, and keep the phone as evidence until or unless they feel the need to apply for a warrant for the access.

Amazon and PayPal are horrible for this. Clicking out of the dialogs and modals to actually get logged in? (Shout out to PayPal for a dark pattern that implies "continue to login" but is actually "continue to set up PassKeys", and you actually need to "cancel" to actually login).

I also despise that in between OSes, browsers and certain sites I am having to close/cancel/skip sometimes three or even four dialogs to say "No, I'm not interested in changing my login method to passkey" (PayPal is one example).

A nominal fee convinces people they're getting a bargain. "Free" feels like you're driving to someone's house to pick up their trash.

> “At a minimum, relocating Paramount’s headquarters and other operations out of California would result in losses of 2,750 and 5,550 job-years in California across all industries and losses of between $1.01 billion and $2.03 billion in economic output between October 1, 2026, and September 30, 2031,” the county’s Economic Development Corporation wrote in a September 10 document.

Except it's NOT the County's Economic Development Corporation at all. It's an affiliated non profit.

And you know who funded the study that led to the document? I'll give you one guess: starts with a P.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-16/leaked-stu...

> This is really clever from Apple. The journalist use case is just the PR story. This will be really useful for identity verification and insurance apps

This is definitely not an Apple thing, though the use profile is more ubiquitous. Canon had, more than twenty years ago, when they first started making DSLRs, the question of "If we want law enforcement to use these, how do we handle the inevitable questions?" and as a result built out the option to digitally sign the raw sensor data in-camera so the raw file could be pointed to in court with an attestation of image integrity.

> Do you have an example in mind for this?

Liver lesions, often benign cysts. Other cysts too (kidney, ovarian). Will often require targeted contrast MRI, and needle biopsy - which has notable risks for bleeding, often minor, but 3-4% can require surgery or even transfusion.

Bile leakage or infection can also result, or injuries to the gallbladder, bowel, bile ducts.

> This suggests a very fundamental misunderstanding of healthcare, treatments, and what insurance companies exist for. They are not about health policy or well being. They are about derisking profit loss. Their recommendations are to reduce cost, and nothing more. Doctors understand this, and will tell you this very plainly, as you fight to get required treatments covered.

I am someone who has worked for providers, worked as a paramedic, and worked for a company whose customers were health insurers, as we built claim benefits management systems for them, so literally the logic to calculate deductibles, handle accumulators, provider negotiated rates.

The issue is not my misunderstanding, it is that "health insurance" in the US is the worst of all worlds - health insurance when convenient (to the insurer), amortized healthcare when convenient. It used to be that about the biggest offering that health insurers could give you was better provider-negotiated rates, but that era is largely behind us with the vertical integration of supply chains, and a health insurance industry that can only make more money when prices go up (if your profits for premium administration are capped at 15%, the only way that number goes up is if premiums go up, because healthcare costs more - this is compounded by the fact that it's in everyone in the system's interests for it to cost more except the actual consumer).

Everything has had to be fought for - otherwise, to your point, why are actual clinical "annual exams"/"wellness" visits covered at zero cost, but incentives for weight loss (as in obesity reduction, even pre GLP-1s) or cardiac health are near zero while a gastric bypass is covered in toto.

My thoughts there are that there are a couple of factors at play - false positives, which might lead to interventions, even exploratory, that are not zero-risk. Even without risk, not zero-cost. And as such you end up with "you had no symptoms or concerns about condition X until you had this not-recommended MRI, and then treatment was ordered about condition X that was actually a false positive". Insurance doesn't view full body MRIs as medically necessary preventative screenings and this is generally accurate (though I'm also not naive enough to believe that a non-insignificant part of their objection might be cost).

The first part of this one is more hilarious when you ask "Find me the nearest Starbucks" while CarPlay is actively providing you navigation: "I'm sorry, I don't know your location".

I feel like imaging and physicians really amped up on pushing this over the last decade or two. Most of the big DI companies (GE, Philips, Siemens) had very friendly financing targeted heavily at physicians. They had "matching" services ("Find other providers in your area who'd also like to own a DI facility"). They'd help with consultants to facilitate getting your Certificate of Need (i.e. how not to piss off the other facilities in your area who get to say whether or not they'd reduce their investment in serving the area if you open up).

And the not unsurprising conclusion of all this? Physicians who own a DI facility or stake in one (and realize this doesn't have to be just radiologists, but any physician) refer their patients to imaging at rates far above expectations.

But now, line must go up, so we're doing this "scan your whole body and let's see what we can do to give you a touch-up", and ever-so-helpfully we have a whole network of providers lined up for referrals (that's if we don't just handle things in-house). I will be similarly unsurprised if many of the outcomes from this raft of scanning are procedures that are medically unnecessary.

The CRAs compete for breach business, because it's absolutely a profitable enterprise for them:

How many people actually sign up for your "free credit monitoring for a year" following a breach?

When you do, you typically do so by signing up for the highest tier (sometimes $30 or even $50 a month) product with a redemption code for one year free. You have to enter a credit card to do so, and to no-one's surprise, if you don't cancel in time, it automatically converts to a paid subscription "for your convenience".

There are many consumer protection farces in the US, but right up there has to be the notion that "identity theft" is the consumer's responsibility/obligation to prevent or resolve, not the entity that actually had the data stolen. You're considered liable until you prove innocence, even though you did nothing wrong.

This very nearly burned me when buying my home - having been an AT&T customer in the PNW for nearly two decades, "I" apparently decided to hit up a Walmart on the outskirts of El Paso, sign up for a Verizon service, run up two months of international calls and bail out.

Despite a police report, my utility statements, AT&T bills, etc. (all of which were, to be blunt, none of VZWs business), VZW stood by it initially, "On review of your documentation, we remain satisfied that this debt belongs to you based on the documents used to open your account".

I asked to see them, since they were, in VZW's own words, "mine". "We can't, for customer privacy reasons." Oh, so "mine when the bill needs paid, may not be mine for privacy purposes".

It's definitely not 10%, more like 3%. His net worth is currently listed as $248B. If he has to pay out the penalty on both acquisitions, his net worth will still be about $240B. There's nothing articulable about the difference in his life as a result.

I will give you the time though, or the motivations (however appalling they are) for his exertion of energy on these.

And will be still worth a quarter trillion dollars.

Years of his life, perhaps, though a large part of that will be banks and lawyers, not him grinding it out.

He won't even notice the money being gone, not even close.

> There should be a national registry of officers fired for misconduct that makes them ineligible for rehire in all jurisdictions

There is/was (though Trump has largely de-fanged it) - tracks officers fired or who resigned in lieu of termination.

> but police unions and the politicians they back would never let it happen.

Correct again. The Unions that represent ~70% of police across the country have managed to get into their CBAs that the database is not to be used for hiring or promotion decisions (i.e. not to be used).

The problem is that when such things happens, insurers have said - and won - in Court with:

"We are not denying or delaying care for our customer. We are, instead, only noting that we are not going to be the Responsible Party for paying for it. They are, as they have been all along, free to get the care they believe they need and pay for it themselves."

> so people who don't have the time or energy to

For example, people who are sick, ill, or injured...

The difference here is that oftentimes your situation can markedly deteriorate, sometimes irreversibly, as a result of that denial. And the "make a stink" can come at a time you're least equipped to deal with it.

> It's all negotiation. They put forth an initial low-ball offer because most people accept it.

And that's the problem. People having to make a stink because insurers are doing things that are in contradiction to the policy they wrote, if not the law, because private enterprise wants more money.

Private enterprise that has simultaneously almost singlehandedly caused the skyrocketing of medical costs, because the only way to make more money when your profits are regulated is to increase costs, and nobody except the consumer/patient is incentivized to do anything about it, quite the opposite - they're entirely happy to go along with it. And then insurers will stand up in Court and say "Oh, we're not denying care to our customer, we're just saying we won't pay for it. They're free to pay for it out of pocket." My old boss would have received a $1.8M bill for his daughter's care, born at 33 weeks. A coworker of mine had to raise a substantial portion of an expected $1.25M bill for a lung transplant for her son. My kidney stone would have cost $70,000 to have not been resolved (they went in, found infection, retreated and gave me IV antibiotics instead, and revisited the issue two weeks later, which had its own separate bill). My ENT had to put me on two expensive and useless nasal sprays for months so that when he recommended deviated septum surgery for an effectively blocked nostril (90%+ deviation) that insurance wouldn't deny it because (gasp, shock, horror) nasal sprays don't realign or open up cartilage.

That's not how it works, and I have firsthand experience, and hasn't been for at least three decades. The very first thing that happens when you show up in Fontenay-sous-bois is that they run Interpol checks and other checks in your country of residence or anything notable in your passport.

Gone are the days of accepting any criminal openly.

They do however, if you either complete your contract, or are injured, deem you eligible for French citizenship "by spilled blood".

That's the association's problem, not the referees. When I refereed basketball in Australia, referee grading was done according to FIBA standards and you had to be evaluated before any promotion in your referee grade and that could be (at the lowest levels) 3 games on 3 occasions through to 10 games or more. And when we got to a certain (albeit relatively high) level, we'd have every game recorded and reviewed.

Absolutely - I used to referee basketball in Australia, including at a high level.

Extremely high level junior, was generally not an issue. As was true local league.

It was the intermediates, the travel leagues. Where "your kid is good but is still not going to be a pro" (the NBA sends a letter to all new D1 college players congratulating them on the effort they've put in to get this far - and to focus on their education, as the NBA drafts <1% of D1 college players, let alone anybody else). Those were the ones where the parents were convinced that their kid was going to be a pro and the only thing holding him back was "that fucking referee".

We had the power to eject those parents from the venue. Which was usually a conversation that went something like this:

Ref: You need to leave the venue until the end of the game.

Parent: It's my fucking kid's game and I'm not leaving and you can't fucking make me.

Ref: You're right, I can't remove you from the venue. I can however forfeit the game on your child's behalf.

Kid: Daaaad. [usually weary as this tends not to happen just the once]. Go and wait in the car. Pleaseeeee.

Parent: I will go and wait in the car, and we're going to wait and when you come out, you and I are going to fucking get into it, ref.

Cue security, if not police, walking refs to their cars.

that is served by Google to users using oftentimes Google platforms.

Matt made a big deal of transferring rights.

When the rights were transferred to the WPF, Matt didn't disclose that the Foundation was essentially just him, and the two other nominal members were effectively absent.

When the rights were transferred, and a big deal was made of this, "It now belongs to the WPF, which ensures that no commercial entity or interest can affect what should be a community project", there was no mention of how, on that same day the WPF silently granted a "irrevocable, non-expiring, exclusive universal commercial licence" to Automattic.

Throughout all of this Matt has conflated Automattic, himself, WP.com, WP.org, the WPF to whatever is most convenient to himself.

Matt says himself "I am WordPress.org. It's not a part of the Foundation", but you'd be forgiven for thinking so, given that the website resides on the Foundations AS network...

Matt doesn't want WPE's "revenue-sharing" license agreement to go to the community, the project, or the Foundation, though, he wants it to go to himself, via his private, for profit competitor.

Matt's claim, "My mom is confused and thinks that WPEngine is part of the open source project", is a deflection, and laughable coming from the man who runs wordpress.org as a "independent website" (that just happens to be running on the Foundation's IP addresses) and wordpress.com as a for-profit business. That seems just a little more confusing.

No, they have their own number and basically it's a little PBX, simultaneous ring, and outbound CID rewriting.

This is about letting the same number exist twice in the network.

WP Engine were not 'crooks' stealing from him.

WP was the community's, apparently, not Matt's. Unless it suited him, in which case it was his.

WP was open source, and WP Engine followed the license. What crookery?

Oh, they misrepresented themselves as being WP affiliated, like the claimed "independence" of WP.com (Matt's for profit entity, not the open source app)? Why was one okay not the other?

Let's not discuss that Matt, and Automattic, while pushing press releases saying that WP was forever an unencumbered open source app for the community, that very same day issued WP.com an exclusive, free, unlimited, irrevocable commercial license... didn't tell anyone about that, it came out in the lawsuit.

Or that the WP community board was effectively Matt and a friend, and a largely absent third friend.

Crooks, stealing? WP Engine contributed to the OSS app with thousands of developer hours a year - not as many as Matt "felt" they should. And only them, not other WP hosters.

Crooks, stealing? WP Engine donated six digits a year to sponsor and support WP community events, including the one where Matt went on stage and spent 45 minutes slandering them - after disinviting them, and refusing to return their sponsorship or donation. He made WP Engine effectively pay to give him a stage to talk shit about them.

Crooks, stealing? Like Matt taking software packages that WP Engine wrote, doing a search/replace on Copyright, license, authorship, and replacing their entries (with all their accumulated community reviews, ratings, followership and traction) with his wholesale-copied variants?

Matt was unhinged. I think "right to be" is "debatable, at best".