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[TheBiggerFish]

Was casually reading the privacy policy of my cable provider (Mediacom Cable) and noticed this clause:

In some cases, it is possible that a third party to whom we make available anonymous data will be able to independently accumulate sufficient additional information to enable your identification from the totality of that data (so-called contextual identification). However, where we have a direct contractual relationship with recipients of anonymous data we provide, we generally seek a commitment that the recipient will not attempt to re-identify our customers. Such a commitment, if obtained, does not guarantee that contextual identification will not occur or that the third party will comply with its commitment.

Can one legally argue that being aware of contextual identification as a problem that is not enforced via contract is grounds for lawsuit over violation of the Cable Privacy Law and the Telecommunications Law?

One can, though I have no idea if it'd work.

[wierd]

Wont somebody think of the share holders!?  How will they have their fiduciary obligations be met, if their investment managers aren't able to wring every last red cent out of that deliciously lucrative advertising data!?  /s


Better solution:  Say it is illegal to profit financially from the purposeful violation of another individual's privacy, if obvious efforts to assure that privacy have been enacted.

[Flying Dice]

... voted down? It passed the senate a few days ago, hit the desk in the house on the 23rd, iirc. Least the bit of bullshittery FD linked to mention of upthread a bit.

"Congressional disapproval [...] of the rule submitted by the [FCC] relating to [Protection of Privacy]" seems to mean they were voting against the FCC proposal for privacy protections.

Those protections have been in place for months. They passed a bill designed to strip them away.

[Reelya]

It is hard because Electricity measurements are evil.

Approximately 25 acres of land is required for every 5 megawatts (MW) of installation

So... megawatt of what?

This reminds me of Square Kilometers all over again...

HUH? How can you claim to be talking about the issue if you can't even decipher the simplest statements. 5 MW of generation capacity. Equivalent to a 5 MW coal or nuclear plant. Each hour a 5 megawatt  plant makes 5 megawatt-hours of electricity. That's why it's called "5 megawatt hours". A megawatt is the rate of production, and that rate for 1 hour = the amount made. You've been confused about the difference between rate and amount more than once. Think of the watts as equivalent to speed of a car and the watt-hours as how far you went. If you have a car that goes 60 miles / hour, you multiply that by 1 hour, then you went 60 miles / hour * 1 hour. The hour/hour cancels out and the units left is just 60 miles.

In the case of "watts", "watts" is a rate, so you multiply the number of watts by the time and you get the total amount of electricity made. 5 megawatts times 1 hour = 5 megawatts * hours = 5 megawatt-hours. Basic physics units calculations: the units multiply and cancel out like algebra. e.g. if you want to make 5 MWh of power, and you only have a 1 MW plant, you divide the total amount needed by the rate at which it's produced, to get the time needed. 5 MWh / 1 MW = 5 * h = five hours. This is the same as saying if you want to go 60 miles but you travel at 20 miles per hour, you divide "60 miles" by "20 miles/hour" the miles cancel out, and the hours goes to the top and you're left with "three hours" as the mathematical statement.

[wierd]

5MW/H is different than 5MW. 

One is a rate, the other is a charge. 
To help understand the difference-- A bucket holds 5 gallons. A firehose delivers 5 gallons per second.

Concerning the resale of personally identifiable information to "interested 3rd parties", they get around it by "anonymizing" and "obfuscating" the information, so that it is not "personally identifiable" anymore. Except of course, that the interested 3rd party is hoovering in that data like a ravenous black hole, and doing everything possible to undo that obfuscation and anonymization. This makes it a "*nod, wink* yes, totally not personally identifiable! totally!" practice to sell that information. 

Really, the actual solution is to make the practice of de-anonymizing information illegal, except for law enforcement, with more than just token wrist-slap punishments.

As is, trying to use the VPN route to further obscure your identity so your ISP cannot sell anything useful is only going to pressure the industry toward deep packet inspection and aggressive decryption of user data, so they can circumvent your clearly intentional efforts to avoid being identified. That is what will happen as computational capacity becomes more and more available/cheap. It is the WRONG direction.

To solve the problem, you have to solve the problem: It is highly profitable to personally identify individual people for targeted advertisements. 

We have to make it NOT profitable. ONLY THEN will it stop being a highly aggressively sought "holy grail" of marketing with strong industry pressure to make a reality.  You do that with astoundinly heavy fines. The kind that make the moon landing look like a thrifty discount operation.

[Reelya]

There's no "5 MW/hour." 5 MW is the rate at which power is generated. It's the reason power plants are rated in KW or MW: it's how much power they can produce at peak. A 10 MW plant produces energy twice as fast as a 5 MW plant. You multiply that rate by time elapsed to get KWh or MWh. Since KW and MW don't have a division by time in the symbol like rates normally do, then you end up with KWh or MWh. In this case it's not divided by hours, it's times hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt_hour

Your equivalent to a gallon of water on your bill is KWh. That is why water charges by the gallon and electricity by KWh. Both are amounts of stuff you used. gallons/hour is equivalent to KW in electricity terms. If you're using 1 KW of power, you're consuming 24 KWh in a day, in the same sense that if you use 10 gallons/hour you used 240 gallons in a day.

[PTTG??]

This is all complicated by the fact that, without storage, only the base wattage capacity matters.

The explosion in storage capacity has changed the game, of course.

[Max™]

^Storage is why I'm all about those tanks of molten salt, yo.

... voted down? It passed the senate a few days ago, hit the desk in the house on the 23rd, iirc. Least the bit of bullshittery FD linked to mention of upthread a bit.

"Congressional disapproval [...] of the rule submitted by the [FCC] relating to [Protection of Privacy]" seems to mean they were voting against the FCC proposal for privacy protections.

Those protections have been in place for months. They passed a bill designed to strip them away.

They were passed in the FCC, were initially put in place in Oct 2016, due to be in force by last month, large (over 100k users) providers were expected to comply by Dec 2017, and small ones were given until Dec 2018?

The initial bit: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/isps-will-soon-have-to-ask-you-before-sharing-private-data-with-advertisers/

The start of what they're doing today: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/isps-wont-have-to-follow-privacy-rules-if-gop-lawmakers-get-their-way/

A stay on the rule while the vote was set up: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/isps-cheer-pause-of-rule-that-guards-private-data-from-security-breaches/

The actual vote being presented: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/ad-industry-lobbyists-celebrate-impending-death-of-online-privacy-rules/

The current situation: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-isps-can-sell-your-web-history-and-how-to-stop-them/

[wierd]

Watt is defined as 1 Joule per second, or 1J*1S.

Joule is defined as "the energy transferred to (or work done on) an object when a force of one newton acts on that object in the direction of its motion through a distance of one metre (1 newton metre or N·m)."

And Newton is defined as "One newton is the force needed to accelerate one kilogram of mass at the rate of one metre per second squared in direction of the applied force."

Watt already thus contains a time term, in seconds. Fully expanded, the definition would look like this:

W = ((1kg*1m^2/1s^2)*1s)

[wierd]

A VPN is the wrong direction to actually solve the problem! (RAWR!!)  It is just a temporary stopgap, relying on the fact that it is expensive to break the encryption of the channel!

A decade ago, it was computationally expensive to do mass data analytics too. And now where are we?


No, this needs to be solved, and solved right. 

[Reelya]

Watt is defined as 1 Joule per second, or 1J*1S.

Joule is defined as "the energy transferred to (or work done on) an object when a force of one newton acts on that object in the direction of its motion through a distance of one metre (1 newton metre or N·m)."

And Newton is defined as "One newton is the force needed to accelerate one kilogram of mass at the rate of one metre per second squared in direction of the applied force."

Watt already thus contains a time term, in seconds. Fully expanded, the definition would look like this:

W = ((1kg*1m^2/1s^2)*1s)

A watt is joule divided by seconds, not times seconds. you can't go very far with physics if you can't sort out division from multiplication.

Whereas a KWh is the rate of 1000 J / S but kept up for 3600 S. You multiply the rate by the time to get the amount used, and the units cancel out like in algebra. So 1000 J / S * 3600 S = 3,600,000 J. Which means a KWh is 3.6 megajoules of energy.

Since Watts doesn't have time expressed in the unit itself, then the time unit used in the equation doesn't cancel out and your left with watt*hours as the units.

[wierd]

Good catch. that is correct.

[palsch]

So yesterday Trump tweeted to watch a show that immediately called for Paul Ryan to resign.

"Paul Ryan needs to step down as speaker of the House," said Pirro, beginning her show. "The reason? He failed to deliver the votes on his health care bill, the one trumpeted to repeal and replace Obamacare. The one that he had seven years to work on. The one he hid under lock and key in the basement of Congress. The one that had to be pulled to prevent the embarrassment of not having enough votes to pass."

"But this bill didn't just fail," she continued. "It failed when Republicans had the House, the Senate, the White House."

The network host assured viewers that she hasn't spoken with Trump on the subject, but it seemed as though the president knew she would cover the issue on her show when Trump tweeted earlier in the day to "watch @JudgeJeanine on @FoxNews tonight at 9:00 P.M."

"Americans elected the one man they believed could do it: a complete outsider beholden to no one but them," said Pirro on her show. "And Speaker Ryan, you come in with all your swagger and experience, and you sell them a bill of goods, which ends up a complete and total failure, and you allow our president, in his first 100 days, to come out of the box like that?"

[martinuzz]

This really is the best possible way the whole repeal Obamacare could go wrong.

The need for popcorn intensifies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvDvTnTGjgQ

[Iceblaster]

@Internet thing

Has it already passed? Tbh, I'm still waiting for it to pass before I go 'DOOOOOOOOOM' about it.

@The Clusterfuck that is the repeal of the ACA going wrong.

WE DON'T NEED ANY DAMN EXPERTS

NO DR I DON'T WANT YOU OPERATING ON MY BRAIN! GO GET AN INTERN FROM MEDICAL SCHOOL TO DO IT! ALL YOU DAMN EXPERTS WITH YOUR SWAGGER COMING IN AND STEPPING ALL OVER THOSE INTERNS :V