Message-ID: <B30E6086-63FA-4545-AD04-107B68D70D12@roscom.com>
Date: 13 May 2022 09:17:35 -0400
From: "Monty Solomon" <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: AT&T is about to get away with its bogus $1.99
'administrative fee'
Both sides are asking the judge to approve a wrist-slap settlement
By Sean Hollister
Since 2013, AT&T has quietly bilked customers out of hundreds of
millions of dollars with a bogus "administrative fee," a fee it more
than doubled to $1.99 a month in 2018. For a few years there, a
California class-action lawsuit made it seem like AT&T might finally
get taken to task. But this week, both sides told a judge they'd
settle for just $14 million -- meaning customers may get less than 10
percent of what they paid AT&T, while AT&T gets to keep on charging
them.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/12/23069156/att-vianu-lawsuit-class-action-administrative-fee
Message-ID: <6D12383D-32D3-495F-8FC4-32142D526546@roscom.com>
Date: 13 May 2022 09:06:40 -0400
From: "Monty Solomon" <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: Meet the parents who refuse to give their kids smartphones
Meet the parents who refuse to give their kids smartphones
The vast majority of teens and tweens today have smartphones. These
parents said no.
For Adriana Stacey, it's very simple.
"I'll never buy a smartphone for any of my children," she says.
It's a personal stance born of professional experiences. Stacey is a
psychiatrist who works primarily with high school and college students
in Fayetteville, Ark., and in her practice she routinely asks new
patients to swipe open their phones and show her how much screen time
they're clocking per day.
"I rarely find one that's under nine hours," she says. "So, these
teenagers are spending more time on their phone than they are
sleeping."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/09/parents-kids-smartphones/
***** Moderator's Note *****
I knew an Amateur Radio Operator who had a teenage daughter, back
around 1995, and he figured out a novel way to obviate the problem.
When his daughter demanded that she get a cellphone, because "All the
cool kids have them," he told her that she could have a special radio
instrument which would top whatever the "cool" kids had, and made her
obtain a Ham Radio license to get one.
My buddy then went and bought her a small 220 MHz Ham transceiver
which had been set up to use a local Amateur Radio repeater, and
whenever his daughter wanted to get a ride or ask permission to visit
a friend's home after school, she would call home on her "special"
phone, using the "autopatch" which connected the repeater to a phone
line, and make a request without needing to pay for a cell phone or
airtime. He told me that when other kids asked where to get one, he
had told her to say that her dad worked at the phone company (which
was true) and had speacial permission to use channels that the
ordinary cellphone users couldn't get, and none of them, according to
him, ever persued their questions any further.
Admitedly, he had advantages others did not: they lived in a rural
community far from the major cities, and he owned the repeater
equipment himself, and 220 MHz has always been a rarely used band, but
it shows what you can do to fight back against megabuck peer pressure,
"influencers," and the other tricks of the marketing juggernauts that
infested the early years of the cellular revolution.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Message-ID: <6FEE099C-972B-4ADB-94B1-0C572D002E22@roscom.com>
Date: 12 May 2022 00:38:01 -0400
From: "Monty Solomon" <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: "War upon end-to-end encryption:" EU want Big Tech to scan
private messages
A European Commission proposal could force tech companies to scan
private messages for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and evidence
of grooming, even when those messages are supposed to be protected by
end-to-end encryption.
Online services that receive "detection orders" under the pending
European Union legislation would have "obligations concerning the
detection, reporting, removal and blocking of known and new child
sexual abuse material, as well as solicitation of children, regardless
of the technology used in the online exchanges," the proposal
says. The plan calls end-to-end encryption an important security tool
but essentially orders companies to break that end-to-end encryption
by whatever technological means necessary.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/war-upon-end-to-end-encryption-eu-wants-big-tech-to-scan-private-messages/
***** Moderator's Note *****
This kind of fluff pops up whenever some EU country is having an
election: it's free ink for the incumbents, and free ad revenue for
the "news" outlets that push it upon an untrained and ignorant public.
Whatever technical means the EU might
think are necessary, they
would be, even if implemented, bypassed by the porn freaks with little
trouble. I know this because I had a job doing remote-access virus
removal back in the early 2000's, and I found out that most of my
customers were trying to recover porm that had been deleted or
encrypted by others whom were taking advantage of the porn freaks'
passion (pun intended) for anonymity.
I was astonished at the number and variety of tips, techniques, and
software packages available to those whom chose to trade questionable
images or text: not as astonished as I was at some of the images, but
I solved that problem by finding another job.
Long story short, neither the EU nor any ISP can block traffic in
pornography, no matter how hard they pretend to try.
Bill Horne
Moderator
