"Well I can't see this ending well. It's either more invasive KYC ..."
I think there is an opportunity here for an elegant solution.
Banks, by definition, know quite a bit about you and aspects of your identity and this is not necessarily problematic nor dangerous.
Further, banks enjoy exorbitant privileges above all other business firms and organizations - privileges that the public rarely receives any upside in exchange.
For these reasons, I think we should consider concentrating KYC responsibilities with the banks such that they do the heavy lifting and the rest of the economy reaps the benefits.
Here is one small example:
A credit or debit card which, by virtue of the card number itself, identifies the user as being over 18 years of age. The bank already knows this information with very high confidence and now smaller, less resourced firms could make use of this to effectively age-gate with almost no investment and no fragmented intrusion into the private lives of their customers.
I don't see any world in which the banks don't have all of this information anyway - why not get some value out of it ?
I’ve said this for as long as I’ve been here on hacker news…
I want the terminal to be as dumb as possible.
I don’t want it to have any understanding of what it is displaying or anscribe any meaning or significance to the character characters it is outputting.
The first time apples terminal.app displayed that little lock icon at the ssh password prompt?
The hairs on the back of your neck should have stood up.
What you’re describing would be a completely unusable terminal. You’d lose things as basic as the backspace key. And what’s wrong with Terminal.app indicating when it’s suppressing output?
Terminal.app does not suppress output in my example.
The ssh command switches the terminal into no-echo mode with termios flags.
Terminal.app, being clever, watches for disabled echo (among other things) and assumes a password is being entered and displays the key icon and enables Secure Event Input.
"I guess the problem with Backblaze's business model with respect to Backblaze Personal is that it is "unlimited"."
The new and very interesting problem with their business model is that drive prices have doubled - and in some cases, more than doubled - in the last 12 months.
Backblaze has a lot of debt and at some point the numbers don't make sense anymore.
Yeah, I found that out recently when I had to purchase a new 16TB drive because of them in my RAID died recently. I bought the hard drive used about three years ago for about $130. To replace it I had to shop around and I ended up paying about $270 and I think that was considered a decent deal right now.
Oh well, I guess this is why we're given two kidneys.
Is it that bad? When I look at the prices of new drives on amazon I mostly see increases just under 50%. I think used went up more but that's not affecting backblaze as much.
Depending on the usecase, rclone can expose an S3 endpoint via `rclone serve s3` to route to another protocol, eg sftp.
I mention it not to shill rsync.net, but to shill rclone, because when I discovered it I was even more impressed with it.
Obviously having to run a command and apply some amount of plumbing is different to a service just providing that API at the outset so the applicability for users will differ but still, rclone is very cool!
Happy to email you, if that's better, but is this because of unsustainable competition in the space or the tremendous volatility in consumption that object storage customers bring to the table?
I ask because in this current market, I would imagine investing in storage infrastructure is painful, but then I wonder, you are still in the storage infrastructure space anyways, so it likely has to do with the user behavior or user expectations or both.
“Only a small minority of users know about settings and how to change them. The vast majority of users do not change default settings.”
Even worse, whatever critical settings you may set as a sophisticated user will frequently be reset, or changed, or re-organized under different settings… And of course, set back to insecure defaults… With subsequent software updates.
This is a regular occurrence with Firefox and privacy settings.
Whatever the actual impetus is, we should act as if this is intentional.
Most don't spam texts, but those that do I've switched out. And yeah, I should probably use a fake number so whoever has Jenny's number in my area code doesn't get messages about how a toilet tank gasket is being delivered from Home Depot to my house...
"Currently undergoing some sort of 60 days appeals process, but who knows."
.. and the op said:
"I have tried to contact Microsoft through various channels but I have only received automated replies and bots. I was unable to reach a human."
... which is a roundabout way of saying you did not spend lawyer hours and you did not contact them through channels that they cannot ignore: registered, physical mail, from a lawyer.
I'm sorry for these difficulties, truly, but don't tell me you can't reach a human when you most definitely can reach a human. From my own experience with an organization at least as calloused and indifferent as MS[1], as soon as I sent a real, legal communication I had real live humans lining up to talk to me.
Microsoft hasn't managed to burn down entire towns (But Copilot is probably working on it), so I suppose we do have at least some kind of gauge of callousness to work off of thanks to PG&E. Which was also the company behind that whole slightly famous Erin Brockovich thing, amongst so very many others.
"If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch."
This is not a given.
Many people have many different kinds of investments inside a 401k. Your 401k can own a rental property. Or gold. Or, in a more mundane scenario, the Russell 2000.
If it weren't for the glacial pace of plan administrators and plan holding companies there would be an opportunity for a fund provider to offer "S&P500exSpaceX". It's just another index, after all ...
I think there is an opportunity here for an elegant solution.
Banks, by definition, know quite a bit about you and aspects of your identity and this is not necessarily problematic nor dangerous.
Further, banks enjoy exorbitant privileges above all other business firms and organizations - privileges that the public rarely receives any upside in exchange.
For these reasons, I think we should consider concentrating KYC responsibilities with the banks such that they do the heavy lifting and the rest of the economy reaps the benefits.
Here is one small example:
A credit or debit card which, by virtue of the card number itself, identifies the user as being over 18 years of age. The bank already knows this information with very high confidence and now smaller, less resourced firms could make use of this to effectively age-gate with almost no investment and no fragmented intrusion into the private lives of their customers.
I don't see any world in which the banks don't have all of this information anyway - why not get some value out of it ?
reply