I think one interesting thing that the article does mention is that Walmart does accept Apple Pay and contactless payments in Canada. I suspect this is because Canadians pretty much expect contactless to be accepted anywhere they shop, compared to in America where there are still many places (restaurants mostly) that have limited support for it.
I don’t see many places without contactless support anymore. Most times I get told they don’t support contactless, they actually do but are simply unaware of it. PCI requires businesses to use modern card readers, and most new card readers take contactless payments.
Modern solar panels last around 30 years, so I wouldn't exactly call it "short-lived".
Economically, I'm sure the locations chosen were optimal. You'd imagine that actual mountainous wilderness would be a much more expensive terrain to blanket with solar panels, compared to flat areas. If there were other choices, economically they'd better options.
Given the vast amount of flat, well-lit terrain within the borders of China, it should be clear that the pictured projects (and the other "blanket a mountain in solar panels" projects that are easily discoverable) are not about the economics of power generation.
At least it's better than sending peasants into the mountains and building solar panels on the flat field that has been growing crops for thousands of years.
Much of the internet is copyright violations. If copyright were enforced as written the internet as you know it would stop existing. Our draconian copyright laws are designed to protect the power and profits of a small number of industries and unless they see profit in going after the countless violations that go on every single day they just look the other way while extorting easy targets with fat wallets. The last thing they want is to piss off enough powerful people that laws get changed and their racket gets disrupted.
But look, they occupied his time for 7 weeks full-time. He could have taken another project (opportunity cost) if not for this project. I mean, the inefficiencies of their business processes are not his point of concern - they occupied his time and they should pay for it.
OP didn’t put this in the title but the article is from 2016. Turns out a lot has changed in the last decade and I think it’s likely that the article should be updated on what it’s like right now.
Oh this is still very true!
I am from Banglaore, India. There are sites that outright block me. And in a day, I at least encounter 20-25 times where I need to click on "human checkbox" due to my region or IP.
In mobile it's worse. All sites that have "strict" mode on, will either block or show the "human checkbox".
Even sites that I manage with Cloudflare, I see the same. Even if I use relaxed mode on, If I visit the site via mobile, it can trigger the Cloudflare human validation.
> Turns out a lot has changed in the last decade and I think it’s likely that the article should be updated on what it’s like right now.
Yes, every one-pager running on Vercel/Netlify sits behind Cloudflare now because no one wants to risk an insane cloud bill in case of an attack. People have become hopelessly dependent on managed cloud services.
However, to be fair, there's less captcha solving nowadays, since they introduced their one-click challenge (but that's not always the case).
But no they literally aren’t. If the Chinese government takes data from a Chinese company in China, there is no legal process available to anyone affected because it is outside of US jurisdiction. What is America going to sue China the country in American court? That’s <mentally deficient>.
I don’t mean US law is perfectly enforced on US drone companies, that’s <mentally deficient>. I mean that there exists a legal system that harmed people can use, as opposed to the case of Chinese companies where there does not exist etc.
I’m leaving my employer soon, and one of the things I wanted to do was to keep some of my old correspondence from Slack that was more personal in nature. I wrote a script (well, I prompted AI to write a script) that exported all my DMs to a JSON file. I then built a quick local RAG, ran through them all, and had a local model categorize what was “personal”. From there I had it spit out a list of conversation topics and people that I went through by hand. The ones I wanted to keep got exported into a clean JSON file that I then copied over to a personal device.
Honestly, I think even that is at least very close to the line of what’s acceptable. I did everything I could to protect the company’s interests, and am confident that even if they were fully aware they wouldn’t have an issue with it, but I’m not at all confident it would be defensible in court if it came to that. If I thought it would, I wouldn’t have done it.
I would never even consider uploading the output to a third party, much less everything.
Interesting that it seems that you're using proton mail. I confess that I wasn't aware about that platform till few days ago.. that's what I'm also willing to achieve.
I'm not sure I understand - what are you willing to achieve exactly?
I switched to Protonmail years ago after learning that the US courts had ruled that third-party email hosts like Gmail do not receive Fourth Amendment protections. I had originally intended to fully self-host, but between the effort required to maintain my own email server and keep it off blacklists, I was looking specifically for something hosted outside direct US jurisdiction and that wasn't "responsive" to informal requests from the US.
Protonmail isn't exactly that, as I expect they would answer a subpeona, but that's OK. I'm not doing anything that I need to truly hide from the state; I only wanted my normal correspondence to not be vacuumed up with everyone else's by the NSA. At least the information that they have access to (and is therefore discoverable) is limited by design.
Their security posture also means that some of their other products - calendar, in particular - are virtually useless to me. Email not being available via IMAP is a bummer, but manageable since they have decent native apps for the platforms I care about. The only exception to that is visionOS; their iOS and iPadOS apps aren't installable on the Vision Pro, so I'm left using the web client there.
Trevally has the data encrypted and, in order to get authorized by Gmail or even Microsoft, we need to face a hard process to show them that we're following the requirements to keep the user data safe... apart from the data being stored in the cloud and other elements around it.
So, the idea behind this platform is a way to keep you email and other elements related to that (contacts, for example), synced and backed up.. and not only that, but also share informations about your data that most of these solutions doesn't offer.
Maybe, moving the servers to outside the US would avoid this 4th Amendment situation in respect to the user data.
But, I'm not sure how people are so scared about security but they're everywhere, in social platforms, using smartphones, etc. I really don't believe that there's a safety place in this WWW, but, we're trying to do that, at least, for contacts and emails, attachments.
Yup. I don't know of any U.S. state where this wouldn't be considered a proprietary and confidential information violation given the usual slate of NDA clauses.
Unless the individual is already actively seeking whistle-blower protections (and they better be extremely highly financially incriminating) there's no legal support here.
I'm willing to get behind many "wild" start-up ideas, but this business model is dead-on-delivery in the U.S.
Not that I doubt examples exist (I've yet to be at a large place with 0 failures on responding to such issues over the years), but it'd be nice if you'd share the specific examples you have in mind if you're going to bother commenting about it. It helps people understand how much is a systemic problem to be interested in vs having a comment which more easily falls into many other buckets instead. I'd try to build trust off the user profile as well, but it proclaims you're shadowbanned for two different reasons - despite me seeing your comment.
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