tangeli

Most software companies I dealt with didn’t provide enough support for the helpfulness of customers/users to make a significant difference to the support they provided, and that includes Microsoft in the context of an ‘enterprise’ support agreement. The few companies that did provide significant support never once, across decades of experience, identified that they had used or were helped by telemetry collection.

The telemetry collection may help them with product development, impact assessment and license enforcement. I never worked at one of those large vendors that does significant telemetry collection. Only the impact assessment might be considered relevant to support, though typically on a time frame irrelevant to any single support call.

The biggest threats I am concerned with are:

• my liability and harm to my reputation resulting from unauthorized abuse of my systems
• consumption of my limited Internet access bandwidth and capacity
• corruption or loss of my systems and data
• theft and sale or other abuse of my private data

The first results mostly from the risk of my systems being incorporated into bot nets.

The second from bot nets and abusive crawlers.

The latter results mostly from ransom ware or open ended theft and exploitation of my data.

The threats are not all from the Internet. I saw an article recently about ‘smart’ TVs that are configured to be part of a web scraping infrastructure that the vendors sell as a service, in some cases configured to use up to 200GB per month of bandwidth.

I don’t know if there is more than one ultimate source, but here are some other proximate sources:

• The Times of Israel: US indirectly warned Iran during talks that Israel might try to kill its top negotiators — NYT, with a note that Israel dismisses the report as fake news
• The New York Times: U.S. Officials Believed Israel Was Plotting to Kill Iranian Negotiators
• The Washington Post: U.S. warned Iran about Israel’s aims to assassinate leaders

These are just the first three results when I searched for other reports of this. There are many more.

Of course, telling a lie and having it reported by many media outlets doesn’t make something true. Trump has proven this many times. But when a story is reported by multiple credible outlets, there is something deserving attention and investigation to determine the truth, at the very least.

Conspiracy to Murder and Attempted Murder are crimes in many jurisdictions and I see reports that suggest that even in Israel, at least some people are sometimes charged with at least the latter crime.

In this case, I think it is unlikely the alleged crime will be investigated in any meaningful way, let alone anyone being charged or convicted.

keep making the same fundamental error: treating his employees as if they’re not human beings deserving of respect and care.

It’s not just Meta. It’s capitalism driven by financialization with sociopaths at the helm. It’s not an error. It is essential. Whatever changes they might make to increase their profits, they will not include actually caring about employees as human beings. AI might produce memos that better conceal the callous exploitation and fraudulently proclaim caring, but it doesn’t care either.