That simply isn't an easy job with the current interpretation of the 2nd Ammendment and somewhere around 3 to 4 million AR15s alone, well more than 300M firearms total[1]
It's a matter of 0.00013% of the population (1 in 750,000)[2] picking one of them up one day and deciding to use it for a killing spree.
Mass shootings are tragic, but it's not as if there's a good solution to them on the table waiting to be taken.
Why doesn't Congress pass a law limiting how school shootings can be covered by news media? It might save student lives.
There is an amendment that prevents that you say? Well the first amendment talks about freedom of the press. The founders could not have imagined online news, tv and cable news or social media. Maybe we only allow stories published on actual printing presses, and ban coverage on online, tv, and social media of school shootings.
Also, even with presses, the printing presses of the 18th century were not like our automated presses of today that can print hundreds or thousands of pages per minute, no those presses were single shot presses where you had to reload after each page. Maybe they were only talking about those kind of presses when they named freedom of the press.
The feeding frenzy the corporate media indulges itself in, whenever an event like this occurs is regrettable.
It's a prisoners dilemma, since any corporate media outlet that does not ramp up to "National Enquirer" level hysteria, will be overshadowed by those who do. To solve such a prisoners dilemma would seem to require regulation, so that those who want to be good actors are not punished by losing viewership to bad actors.
Japan's (lack of) coverage of suicides to prevent copycat behavior can serve as a model.
The first amendment wasn't written with social media in mind, just like the second amendment wasn't written with semi-automatic rifles in mind. The US needs to enact common sense speech control to stop these tragedies from propagating.
Secondary thought: maybe if we restrict online speech to those over 21, we could stop a lot of bullying that leads to these problems in the first place, and as an extra benefit this kind of ban could stop children from posting things online that will negatively impact them later in life.
> maybe if we restrict online speech to those over 21
Even as an old guy, I hate that solution. Something about "Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither", except it's not the kids giving up their liberty, it's you taking it from them.
I also can't imagine how you could stop it. There's lots of people under 21 that can code.
Perhaps if you had to pass a background check, then you could be allowed to engage in approved speech? In 2018, speech can cause just as much damage as a car, and we all agree you need a license to operate a car. A license could probably help with the "fake news" epidemic too.
Sure, it's hard to totally stop people from using speech irresponsibly and hurting others, but if we aggressively prosecute unlawful speech, we could probably reduce the amount of harm done by people speaking their minds.
What country are you from? I hope you are not from USA. No matter where you are from, I have to tell you that you are on a path that will lead to the slaughter of millions, if you achieve your goals. I am sorry your history teachers hid from you, the examples of when and how this occurred in the recent past. I can only tell you that you and your age cohort have been ill served by the school system and I hope to protect my family from the consequences of that failure, somehow.
Yes, I'm from USA. And to be honest, I'm just trying out some new ideas here. I half-expected to be skewered here for proposing speech controls similar to gun controls, but it's actually becoming a mainstream view. The recent gun control marches have really opened up my eyes to this.
I used to be a proponent of free speech, gun rights, drug legalization, and all the other internet libertarian ideas about freedom. I realize now that the culture is changing rapidly around me and that those old ideas about freedom put you on a path toward isolation, public scorn, and possibly criminality.
You may need to reconsider your ideas about freedom before you get shunned in a way that hurts your family.
Watch the gun control movement, the people trying to solve "fake news" with regulation, and other social movements. They're having great success at trading in freedom for security, and it seems inevitable that the same types of controls will be applied to speech.
It's probably better to adapt early to the new normal and be on the "progressive" side than it is to side with hate mongers, gun activists, and drug addicts to promote freedom. You might think you can protect your family from societal change with critical thinking and appeals to classical liberal ideas, but I believe those ideas are the most likely to get you ostracized in our current environment.
I think your best bet for protecting your family now is to conform early and often. We're going to sacrifice freedom for perceived security anyway, so you might as well get on the correct side of it before you become an outcast. Your comment about what "history teachers hid" from a generation and your need to "protect my family" place you somewhere near "alt-right" in the current landscape. You have to ask yourself if that's really where you want to be.
Whenever the locals rub blue mud in their navels, I rub
blue mud in mine just as solemnly. --Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love
I have begun to teach my children this, which conforms slightly to what you are advocating. However, my children will know they are blending into a dangerous mob, while you seem to advocate joining and promoting that mob as "a good progressive".
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot
stamping on a human face — forever.
While you and I may both agree that this is likely our future, you seem to be cheerleading it, or at least, trying to get in good with those in power (a good communist), while I am still struggling against it. Again, if you look at history, it's not only those who fight the evil who end up marched into the fields one last time. It's often also those who tried as you, to "not be ostracized", but still ended up suffering the same fate as those who resisted.
That you almost threaten my safety if I am perceived as being on the "alt-right" end of the spectrum, should fill you with terror. You should remember that many of the people who started the French Revolution ended up being marched up to "the national razor" themselves when their faction split into sub-factions and they found themselves on the outside. Also, FYI, alt-right is composed of many Ron Paul type people, who HN used to like. That such people should fear from the mob is not a sign of a healthy society.
I'm not saying it's healthy, I'm just saying it's how it is. I also didn't mean to threaten your safety, but I think it's reasonable to caution anyone against being associated with "alt-right" stuff, because it is a safety concern.
For example, if you're teaching your kids that sitting in class instead of walking out over gun control is the right thing to do, you might think that makes sense. Why protest for something that you don't believe in? But you're probably hurting their chances at being socially accepted, and there's a good chance the other kids will think your kid is likely to be the next school shooter simply by their lack of protesting. Sitting out is now more dramatic than joining the protesting already in progress.
If you teach them that questioning the sentiment of the day is healthy, they're going to end up being identified as sexist, or racist, or a likely shooter, or whatever acceptable slur would describe the most perverse interpretation of their belief. I'm pretty sure Damore's intentions were good, but do you think his questioning of diversity initiatives was helpful to his career or his social life?
The way these movements are shaping up, you can't be neutral. If you're not part of the perceived solution, you're part of the perceived problem, and you're going to be treated as a problem. But if you fall in line with the mob, you'll have more opportunities for advancement, networking, and community support.
edit: Btw, I upvoted all of your comments. But you'll notice my suggestions for censorship are being upvoted while your cautionary tale about freedom is not... HN is illustrating my point for me.
Understood that you were not personally threatening my family's safety, but were cautioning against the mob.
Here's hoping that the pendulum swings towards sanity soon. Despite the walkouts in the news recently, there seems to be evidence that the youngest of us are beginning to reject the scary SJW mob mentality.
Happily, the filter bubbles on the internet, or in silicon valley, are not representative of the entire country, so there are areas the mob does not yet rule.
http://brilliantmaps.com/2016-county-election-map/
> The first amendment wasn't written with social media in mind, just like the second amendment wasn't written with semi-automatic rifles in mind.
This doesn't seem terribly likely. In the case of the second amendment in 1791, things like swivel guns were available, and at the time the second amendment was written, swivel guns were permissible. Now even an old swivel gun from those days would do measurably far more damage than the kind of semi-automatic rifles used in today's shootings. Such weaponry would only be banned far later in 1934, and probably the original authors of the 2nd amendment would not have banned it. So there is no reason to believe that the 2nd amendment was not written with semi-automatic rifles in mind. It almost definitely was: it was written so that the common man could band together into a militia and be able to take on the full might of the army and government.
Now certainly such an idea may be flawed and you are free to disagree with it. But the authors of the 2nd amendment were certainly aware of the existence as such things as guns that could kill a lot of people very quickly, and they very much covered them with the 2nd amendment.
I know this is a parody, but my belief is that speech is actually more relevant than guns per se; after all, as people repeatedly point out, the US is not the only country with guns. Most of the mass shooters are "self-radicalised".
> Also, even with presses, the printing presses of the 18th century were not like our automated presses of today that can print hundreds or thousands of pages per minute
This is essentially what the "fake news" argument is about: if you publish enough hate speech, you can cause a massacre even without guns. A Rwandan radio station was a major contributor to the massacre of around a million people, and the genocide was largely carried out by hand with machetes and arson.
I know you're trying to prove a point but news outlets have actually changed their reporting and stopped publishing details of suicides because of the copycat effect.
But they don't do that for school shootings. Media companies are selling student lives in exchange for advertising money. Think of the innocent children that have been killed by copycat killers, just so media companies could make a few more dollars in advertising!
You'd think that after 28 years[0] they'd finally do something. Looking at the data[1] and honestly, just common sense. There doesn't need to be more bloodshed.
They don't enforce things to stop kids from being killed in classrooms in mass numbers. There were a number of things that should have stopped the kid.
I agree. The people who pound the table about guns, but refuse to pound the table about the countless failures of the system to protect these kids, are cynically using this event for political gain.
The FBI not picking up the kid after being tipped off, the sheriff's department not picking up the kid after 39 visits, or the Sheriff Deputy that did not engage the shooter, but waited for backup, all point to already existing policy that failed to be followed properly.
Even the principal himself, who evacuated a school based on an unsubstantiated fire alarm (every fire control panel tells you what switch was pulled, so he could easily have called a teacher near that station for confirmation) shares some of the blame here. Also, the fact that he evacuated multiple buildings, rather than only the building where the alarm was pulled, was a confusing mistake.
There are people who are actually trying to fix a very broken system, and they are not the ones using this to advance a political agenda.
The people who pound the table about guns, but refuse to pound the table about the countless failures of the system to protect these kids
Who is doing this? Not very many, I estimate.
Even allowing your premise, they're separate issues. Gun control is about more than school shootings, and one could turn your ire back onto you for focusing only on school shootings when there are many more kinds of mass shootings out there, not to mention interpersonal fights escalating to firepower.
The number of posters who harp on gun control, without even mentioning the failings that allowed this kid to carry out his attack approaches 100% on certain sites. I would say it's 80% even on this site.
As somebody who personally had (and witnessed others) fights in high school parking lots with rifles in the pickup windows of the combatants (yep, I'm over 40), and never heard of anybody ever considering escalating to firepower, I have to call BS on that. I expect to be down voted, but unless you feel that people have become more evil since your father was a kid, I don't know what to tell you.
As for gang violence and other crime, I invite you to look at Mexico (or Chicago), which have strict gun control.
Serious question, what does "FBI not picking up the kid" mean? Were they supposed to arrest him? Confiscate his guns? My understanding is they were tipped off that he introducing himself as a school shooter and acting suspiciously. If they had followed up on that tip, is that grounds for arrest? If it is, would they be able to either keep him in jail until trial or confiscate his guns until trial? Same question for the sheriff's department.
I agree that it was not a slam dunk (you post crap on the internet, we take your guns). However, as this Miami Herald article [1] points out, there were just so many scary events that the authorities (Sheriff and FBI) were aware of in this kids history, that starting the process of mental health evaluation most certainly should have occurred.
I don't think it is likely that a mental health evaluation would have demonstrated much. The law only bars those who have been involuntarily committed from getting firearms, a diagnosis of mental illness is not sufficient. And an involuntary commitment is a pretty high bar. My Dad is a clinical psychologist who evaluates people for the courts, and he can go on and on about how the severely mentally ill often do not qualify for involuntary commitment. Unless you are actively trying to hurt yourself or others you will not be committed, which basically limits it to people who are either attempting suicide, or assaulting people.
I'd also like to point out that there are a number of issues with the current system besides what you've mentioned that could improve things. For starters, even if this person was involuntarily committed, he would fail a background check, but would still be able to purchase guns online or at a gun show without a background check. There are red flag laws, which allow people to petition the court to temporarily seize guns from someone acting in a disturbing way, which would have been ideal for this case, but these are only in some states.
You can not purchase a gun without a background check online, at least not legally.
Online or by-mail purchases can only be shipped to an in-state dealer, where you must complete a background check.
This has been the case for twenty years.
Neither can you do so at a gun show. The same laws apply.
You can not legally obtain a weapon from a licensed dealer without a background check. Period.
If you derive any notable income from selling weapons, then you are legally required to register as a dealer. Failure to do so is a federal felony.
This is why weapons used in crimes do not generally come from legal sources. The vast majority are either stolen, or illegally purchased by a friend of family member.
The point I'm trying to make is that blaming all of these shootings on mental illness is completely baseless. All it does is further stigmatize mental illness, and it does so by conflating people that, in all honesty, are just terrible, terrible people, with people who have mental illness. Combining that scapegoat with the fact that we, as a country, do absolutely nothing to treat mental illness, just makes life worse for those who actually do have mental illness.
Given post-9/11 history, they could have enticed him into overt preparation for the crime they were tipped off that he might be prone to commit, arrested him for it, and claimed it as a foiled terrorist plot. But regardless of whether it would have actually been a something-like-accurate claim in this case, he wasn't Muslim, so the resulting headline wouldn't fit with the acceptable narrative, so there was no motivation to expend the required resources.
I'm downvoting this not because I disagree with the sentiment (I'm in favor of gun control) but because there is zero chance this doesn't descend into a hellscape flamewar, when there's plenty of very valid on-topic discussion to be had here.
There is still the isssue of the Photos permission granting access to all photos on the device.
But I believe location metadata is stripped for apps without location permissions, and the Photos permission is largely unnecessary thanks to the near ubiquitous Share button support.
>Congress REALY needs to pass strong privacy regulations.
They could do that. The first thing I'll expect them to do is exempt themselves, so that the government(s) can continue to work with these same companies to violate your privacy as they have been doing.
So the main purpose of new technology is to help corporations spy on people. Google Maps wants to know where you go, Facebook wants to know whom do you call, chinese SDKs want their share of data.
Some time ago I looked into Uber app and saw inside a Baidu SDK if I remember correctly. It had the class that was collecting WiFi network ids and sending them to some server. Of course, I cannot say that this code was really invoked by the app, but anyway this was very suspicious.
Some regulation is definitely necessary. The market cannot do anything with it and it needs help.
Imagine if you invited an electrician to your house to fix something, but he would secretly search for your documents and copied them. That is what many apps do today. They advertise themselves as a game or as a map app but secretly they spy on you or use your phone for their purposes.
That's not a fair comparison. Imagine if you hired an electrician for no money, and you kept using them over and over again. I expect if I were to pay for an alternative to not have my privacy violated.
Where do they come out and say that? Where do they put a message, in readable english, and not buried under a thousand other things, that says they'll do that?
Allowing the app to access the contact list doesn't mean that the user allows to upload call history to the server. Maybe they only want to add one of the people from their contact list.
I agree privacy policy details are opaque, but it takes the bare minimum of skimming to know if the policy is not giving up your data.
It should be clear as day what’s being collected and it’s a failing that it’s not, but there’s also the old adage of “if it’s too good to be true...” doing some due diligence when you’re promised the services of a billion dollar company that’s not charging you is prudent.
If you search for Facebook on Google Play then you'll see the word "free" under Facebook icon [1]. It is interesting ,that the app page [2] doesn't have this word, but it doesn't say that Facebook is going to upload your call list to the server either. So they advertise the app as "free".
Google asks devs how much an app costs to install not to use.
Even if the app has IAP the value gets rendered as “Free” with an additional notice.
On that note Google will also take down your app if it doesn’t have a comprehensive privacy policy. And it also requires that policy to be accessible without installing.
They’ve been cracking down on things as detailed as “leaking” clicked URL in troubleshooting logs.
I’m not here to astroturf for companies abusing jargon filled pages of legalese to get you to sign over rights to your data, but you don’t even need to read those to know: “If you’re not paying, you’re the product”. Doubly so if you’re using a service valued at billions of dollars.
I expect if I were to pay for an alternative to not have my privacy violated.
The whole free versus pay argument is sophistry. Many pay products usurp your privacy. Your television is selling your viewing habits. Your car telematics solution is selling your movements. That operating system is mining your activity to sell you things.
And many free products defend your privacy. Linux, VLC, Firefox, IPF, and on and on. More concerned for your privacy than any other product.
So can we please stop this binary differentiation. It isn't useful.
As much as I'd like to believe this anecdote, more proof to back you up would be nice.
It's becoming super easy to post weightless stories here similar to this one, and I'd like to see the (rough?) integrity of HN somewhat preserved a little longer.
Ok, I looked through old files and found the details. First, you need to get the file Uber_v3.86.5_apkpure.com.apk (Uber app) and decompile it. You can decompile a later version but I cannot guarantee that all the files are still there. In case you don't have decompiling tools around, I found that someone has uploaded files from the directory 'classes/com/baidu/' here: http://rgho.st/8WlHPJC8g
To find the code that scans WiFi networks, grep the files for getScanResults which is the method name from Android API. You will find a file classes/com/baidu/android/pushservice/util/l.java (and several other files). Someone posted this file here: https://pastebin.com/6cXv2itK
If you look at the method
public static String a(Context paramContext, String paramString)
If you search Uber sources for "pst", you'll find a file classes/com/baidu/frontia/a/d/b$b.java (here: https://pastebin.com/4zDp8dSz ) that also uses this property:
71 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadIt's a matter of 0.00013% of the population (1 in 750,000)[2] picking one of them up one day and deciding to use it for a killing spree.
Mass shootings are tragic, but it's not as if there's a good solution to them on the table waiting to be taken.
[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2012/12/20/assault_rifle_st... edit: [2] I previously used ~0.00002%, or 50 mass shootings per year, but there were 427 in 2017 including shootings with just injuries https://massshootingtracker.org/data/2017
There have been studies that news coverage of these school shootings leads to copycat attacks. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-bi...
Why doesn't Congress pass a law limiting how school shootings can be covered by news media? It might save student lives.
There is an amendment that prevents that you say? Well the first amendment talks about freedom of the press. The founders could not have imagined online news, tv and cable news or social media. Maybe we only allow stories published on actual printing presses, and ban coverage on online, tv, and social media of school shootings.
Also, even with presses, the printing presses of the 18th century were not like our automated presses of today that can print hundreds or thousands of pages per minute, no those presses were single shot presses where you had to reload after each page. Maybe they were only talking about those kind of presses when they named freedom of the press.
It's a prisoners dilemma, since any corporate media outlet that does not ramp up to "National Enquirer" level hysteria, will be overshadowed by those who do. To solve such a prisoners dilemma would seem to require regulation, so that those who want to be good actors are not punished by losing viewership to bad actors.
Japan's (lack of) coverage of suicides to prevent copycat behavior can serve as a model.
Secondary thought: maybe if we restrict online speech to those over 21, we could stop a lot of bullying that leads to these problems in the first place, and as an extra benefit this kind of ban could stop children from posting things online that will negatively impact them later in life.
I also can't imagine how you could stop it. There's lots of people under 21 that can code.
Sure, it's hard to totally stop people from using speech irresponsibly and hurting others, but if we aggressively prosecute unlawful speech, we could probably reduce the amount of harm done by people speaking their minds.
I used to be a proponent of free speech, gun rights, drug legalization, and all the other internet libertarian ideas about freedom. I realize now that the culture is changing rapidly around me and that those old ideas about freedom put you on a path toward isolation, public scorn, and possibly criminality.
You may need to reconsider your ideas about freedom before you get shunned in a way that hurts your family.
Watch the gun control movement, the people trying to solve "fake news" with regulation, and other social movements. They're having great success at trading in freedom for security, and it seems inevitable that the same types of controls will be applied to speech.
It's probably better to adapt early to the new normal and be on the "progressive" side than it is to side with hate mongers, gun activists, and drug addicts to promote freedom. You might think you can protect your family from societal change with critical thinking and appeals to classical liberal ideas, but I believe those ideas are the most likely to get you ostracized in our current environment.
I think your best bet for protecting your family now is to conform early and often. We're going to sacrifice freedom for perceived security anyway, so you might as well get on the correct side of it before you become an outcast. Your comment about what "history teachers hid" from a generation and your need to "protect my family" place you somewhere near "alt-right" in the current landscape. You have to ask yourself if that's really where you want to be.
That you almost threaten my safety if I am perceived as being on the "alt-right" end of the spectrum, should fill you with terror. You should remember that many of the people who started the French Revolution ended up being marched up to "the national razor" themselves when their faction split into sub-factions and they found themselves on the outside. Also, FYI, alt-right is composed of many Ron Paul type people, who HN used to like. That such people should fear from the mob is not a sign of a healthy society.
For example, if you're teaching your kids that sitting in class instead of walking out over gun control is the right thing to do, you might think that makes sense. Why protest for something that you don't believe in? But you're probably hurting their chances at being socially accepted, and there's a good chance the other kids will think your kid is likely to be the next school shooter simply by their lack of protesting. Sitting out is now more dramatic than joining the protesting already in progress.
If you teach them that questioning the sentiment of the day is healthy, they're going to end up being identified as sexist, or racist, or a likely shooter, or whatever acceptable slur would describe the most perverse interpretation of their belief. I'm pretty sure Damore's intentions were good, but do you think his questioning of diversity initiatives was helpful to his career or his social life?
The way these movements are shaping up, you can't be neutral. If you're not part of the perceived solution, you're part of the perceived problem, and you're going to be treated as a problem. But if you fall in line with the mob, you'll have more opportunities for advancement, networking, and community support.
edit: Btw, I upvoted all of your comments. But you'll notice my suggestions for censorship are being upvoted while your cautionary tale about freedom is not... HN is illustrating my point for me.
Here's hoping that the pendulum swings towards sanity soon. Despite the walkouts in the news recently, there seems to be evidence that the youngest of us are beginning to reject the scary SJW mob mentality.
Happily, the filter bubbles on the internet, or in silicon valley, are not representative of the entire country, so there are areas the mob does not yet rule. http://brilliantmaps.com/2016-county-election-map/
This doesn't seem terribly likely. In the case of the second amendment in 1791, things like swivel guns were available, and at the time the second amendment was written, swivel guns were permissible. Now even an old swivel gun from those days would do measurably far more damage than the kind of semi-automatic rifles used in today's shootings. Such weaponry would only be banned far later in 1934, and probably the original authors of the 2nd amendment would not have banned it. So there is no reason to believe that the 2nd amendment was not written with semi-automatic rifles in mind. It almost definitely was: it was written so that the common man could band together into a militia and be able to take on the full might of the army and government.
Now certainly such an idea may be flawed and you are free to disagree with it. But the authors of the 2nd amendment were certainly aware of the existence as such things as guns that could kill a lot of people very quickly, and they very much covered them with the 2nd amendment.
Though it appears the first "consumer" versions of semi-automatic rifles are from the early 1900s with the M1 Garand being the point of mass adoption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-automatic_rifle#Notable_e...
> Also, even with presses, the printing presses of the 18th century were not like our automated presses of today that can print hundreds or thousands of pages per minute
This is essentially what the "fake news" argument is about: if you publish enough hate speech, you can cause a massacre even without guns. A Rwandan radio station was a major contributor to the massacre of around a million people, and the genocide was largely carried out by hand with machetes and arson.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-Free_School_Zones_Act_of_1... 1: http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2017/feb/21/ric...
The FBI not picking up the kid after being tipped off, the sheriff's department not picking up the kid after 39 visits, or the Sheriff Deputy that did not engage the shooter, but waited for backup, all point to already existing policy that failed to be followed properly.
Even the principal himself, who evacuated a school based on an unsubstantiated fire alarm (every fire control panel tells you what switch was pulled, so he could easily have called a teacher near that station for confirmation) shares some of the blame here. Also, the fact that he evacuated multiple buildings, rather than only the building where the alarm was pulled, was a confusing mistake.
There are people who are actually trying to fix a very broken system, and they are not the ones using this to advance a political agenda.
Who is doing this? Not very many, I estimate.
Even allowing your premise, they're separate issues. Gun control is about more than school shootings, and one could turn your ire back onto you for focusing only on school shootings when there are many more kinds of mass shootings out there, not to mention interpersonal fights escalating to firepower.
As somebody who personally had (and witnessed others) fights in high school parking lots with rifles in the pickup windows of the combatants (yep, I'm over 40), and never heard of anybody ever considering escalating to firepower, I have to call BS on that. I expect to be down voted, but unless you feel that people have become more evil since your father was a kid, I don't know what to tell you.
As for gang violence and other crime, I invite you to look at Mexico (or Chicago), which have strict gun control.
I'm referring to domestic violence and partner homicide.
[1] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/arti...
I'd also like to point out that there are a number of issues with the current system besides what you've mentioned that could improve things. For starters, even if this person was involuntarily committed, he would fail a background check, but would still be able to purchase guns online or at a gun show without a background check. There are red flag laws, which allow people to petition the court to temporarily seize guns from someone acting in a disturbing way, which would have been ideal for this case, but these are only in some states.
Online or by-mail purchases can only be shipped to an in-state dealer, where you must complete a background check.
This has been the case for twenty years.
Neither can you do so at a gun show. The same laws apply.
You can not legally obtain a weapon from a licensed dealer without a background check. Period.
If you derive any notable income from selling weapons, then you are legally required to register as a dealer. Failure to do so is a federal felony.
This is why weapons used in crimes do not generally come from legal sources. The vast majority are either stolen, or illegally purchased by a friend of family member.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I believe location metadata is stripped for apps without location permissions, and the Photos permission is largely unnecessary thanks to the near ubiquitous Share button support.
The reality is they have no idea what this is all about.
If we want something done __and done right__ we're gonna have to figure it out on our own.
They could do that. The first thing I'll expect them to do is exempt themselves, so that the government(s) can continue to work with these same companies to violate your privacy as they have been doing.
Some time ago I looked into Uber app and saw inside a Baidu SDK if I remember correctly. It had the class that was collecting WiFi network ids and sending them to some server. Of course, I cannot say that this code was really invoked by the app, but anyway this was very suspicious.
Some regulation is definitely necessary. The market cannot do anything with it and it needs help.
You're assuming you know better than millions who believe cheaper IS in their long term benefit. Quite a sweeping statement!
It is sad that some people in Silicon Valley find it acceptable and ethical.
It should be clear as day what’s being collected and it’s a failing that it’s not, but there’s also the old adage of “if it’s too good to be true...” doing some due diligence when you’re promised the services of a billion dollar company that’s not charging you is prudent.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/search?q=facebook&c=apps&hl=en
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.k...
Google asks devs how much an app costs to install not to use.
Even if the app has IAP the value gets rendered as “Free” with an additional notice.
On that note Google will also take down your app if it doesn’t have a comprehensive privacy policy. And it also requires that policy to be accessible without installing.
They’ve been cracking down on things as detailed as “leaking” clicked URL in troubleshooting logs.
I’m not here to astroturf for companies abusing jargon filled pages of legalese to get you to sign over rights to your data, but you don’t even need to read those to know: “If you’re not paying, you’re the product”. Doubly so if you’re using a service valued at billions of dollars.
The whole free versus pay argument is sophistry. Many pay products usurp your privacy. Your television is selling your viewing habits. Your car telematics solution is selling your movements. That operating system is mining your activity to sell you things.
And many free products defend your privacy. Linux, VLC, Firefox, IPF, and on and on. More concerned for your privacy than any other product.
So can we please stop this binary differentiation. It isn't useful.
As much as I'd like to believe this anecdote, more proof to back you up would be nice.
It's becoming super easy to post weightless stories here similar to this one, and I'd like to see the (rough?) integrity of HN somewhat preserved a little longer.
To find the code that scans WiFi networks, grep the files for getScanResults which is the method name from Android API. You will find a file classes/com/baidu/android/pushservice/util/l.java (and several other files). Someone posted this file here: https://pastebin.com/6cXv2itK
If you look at the method
at line 114 you'll see that it gets WiFi scan results and then does something that looks like composing a POST request to https://cp01-rdqa-dev404.cp01.baidu.com:8443/rest/2.0/zwifi/... (which doesn't resolve currently).I didn't have time to examine the code thoroughly.
By the way, the code in a paper [1] mentions a shared property named "pst":
If you search Uber sources for "pst", you'll find a file classes/com/baidu/frontia/a/d/b$b.java (here: https://pastebin.com/4zDp8dSz ) that also uses this property: You can also search for "push_sync", which was mentioned in the paper, and you'll find that several files contain this string:classes/com/baidu/android/pushservice/c/b.java
classes/com/baidu/android/pushservice/PushLightapp.java
classes/com/baidu/android/pushservice/PushManager.java
classes/com/baidu/android/pushservice/util/i.java
You can also search for other keywords, for example 'http' and you'll find interesting URLs like 'http://127.0.0.1:7777/native'.
Finally, you can search for getSubscriberId which is an Android API method that returns an IMSI and you'll also find several matches:
classes/com/baidu/location/h/b.java
classes/com/baidu/platform/comapi/util/f.java
classes/com/baidu/vi/VDeviceAPI.java
classes/com/baidu/android/pushservice/message/f.java
[1] https://www.virusbulletin.com/virusbulletin/2018/03/vb2016-p...