I had a similar story. I set up a home pc for recording tv and hooked it up to the main entertainment system. I built it on a budget so it did it’s job but later on as we switched to more HD content it struggled occasionally.
I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the noise. When I came home the thing was in danger of burning down the house and the video card had failed.
I am not sure if the following is true or one of those stories that gets recycled.
While I was working at Best Buy - the Geek squad told us a story of an older Lady who brought in a computer wrapped entirety in plastic saran wrap, to prevent the virus from escaping the computer and infecting people. She thought it was okay as she containing the virus and continued to use the computer before it turned off and didn't turn on again, which is whys she brought it in.
On the Pentium Overdrive! days, a guy came to my father's shop complaining that the computer wouldn't turn on. Turns out that he had installed the process in a different orientation "to see if it would go faster". Spoiler alert: it didn't.
Neither the CPU nor the motherboard failed (nor did the fancy overdrive socket). Once the CPU was installed correctly, it worked again.
My 'best' related Best Buy story (well, Future Shop a decade ago, but it is/was the same company) while working in the ConnectPro department (name for Geek Squad at Future Shop, all the same tools and procedures):
A person who had purchased a laptop a few hours prior came back into the store furious because the device shut off and wouldn't turn back on. I pressed the power button and it flashed indicating the battery was dead. I connected the laptop to power and told her it needed to be charged. She then threw a retail tantrum because the salesman had apparently told her it was wireless.
I think this really says more about a lack of basic science education in high school. People plug 1800W space heaters into $4 power strips and cause fires. I think by the time you graduate you should at least be able to understand that watts of electricity are the same thing as heat.
Yes, and Facebook already has agreements in place with CC companies to get that data. They’ve had access to that data for a while. This isn’t a new data source, this is horizontal integration.
I highly recommend David Simon’s talks on policing (he is the creator of The Wire).
He talks at length about how the skill sets necessary to investigative work and community policing have largely been lost as a result of the focus on meeting drug war quotas.
> So while they might make a show of being upset, after the way they snubbed Iran they have nowhere to go if they want to pivot from the Saudis to a different potential regional ally
The answer to that is Turkey; it's the last remaining regional power that has a chance of being seen as the de facto leader of the muslim middle east. For anyone who has been watching closely, the hidden story here is the way Erdogan has masterfully handled both the press in order to drive public opinion. A couple weeks ago every major Turkish and U.S. newspaper ran almost the exact same story (as far as the facts) and it was straight off of Erdogan's desk. Turkey has been very effective at driving the news cycle and painting the Kingdom of S.A. into a corner.
The Turks have also been trying very hard to create a close relationship with the Trump White House - the very first scandal of the administration was when it was revealed that Michael Flynn had taken >$500K from a Dutch company run by a prominent Turkish businessman with close ties to Erdogan.
> There are supposed to be all sorts of other GDPR protections, about rights to be forgotten, about being able to access and selectively remove personal data from an online profile, that I have no idea how to activate.
You don’t have to do anything to “activate” these rights under GDPR. You can just email the website in question and ask them to send an accessible copy of your data, or remove some or all of it from their servers. GDPR simply requires companies to adhere to certain consumer demands about my own data and respond within reasonable time frames.
Also I disagree with your analogy. Companies are allowed to track users for internal purposes Uber GDPR. But they are not allowed to sell your data to third parties without consent. The reason all these pop ups and consent forms are so complicated have nothing to do with GDPR, and everything to do with the fact that companies are trying to nudge you into making a choice against your own best interests.
> You don't have to do anything .... just email the website ...
Okay ... let me try this.
> TO: cnn.com
> SUBJECT: Remove my data
Okay, let's send it!
> gmail: The address "cnn.com" in the "To" field was not recognized. Please make sure that all addresses are properly formed.
Oh. I've been around the block; maybe I can try admin@ or support@ or look at whois data, or browse around their website for a "Contact us" link, and maybe I can figure out how to properly assert that I do in fact own the account in question whose data I wish to remove, assuming I even have an explicit account rather than just a tracking cookie and a "shadow" profile. But isn't the GDPR supposed to be consumer-focused? What earthly consumer is going to go through these steps?
What earthly consumer is going to go through these steps?
I have requested the removal of my personal data from multiple business, and I can assure you I'm quite earth-bound. Copy-pasting a template and filling in my name and account ID is not that hard.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you are a fairly technical user. My snarkiness in the previous reply was excessive, but reflected my frustration with being told that something is simple that is actually a multi-step process with questions that are not easy to find the answer to.
I guess the problem with email for this process is that you have a number of questions, all of which may not have an easy answer.
1. Identify an email address -- is this standardized? Searching "GDPR address for cnn" gives nothing, and similar more general queries yield little information.
2. Identify a template -- is there a standard one? I see a bunch of websites that claim to have them, looks like 'datarequests.org' is a good(?) one? It seems to have only a small set of sites that can be submitted. The template is incredibly verbose and it isn't clear how to request specific information; would that typically happen as part of a dialog?
3. Identify an account number/user name/verification of identity -- is there a standardized process for this? Could someone else send a request to remove my data? What is the process for this and how can I activate it?
4. Email is not a structured medium. I don't want to get into a whole conversation about this; I want to see the data about me and be able to remove bits of it.
Note that as a software developer #4 sounds kind of ridiculous to me, since user data can be represented in a variety of site-specific manners, and the existing pre-GDPR protections put in place for PII make this almost impossible. But to an end user it feels like it should be a natural thing and having to deal with a number of complex bespoke systems sounds like a pretty heavy load.
I can see the GDPR in this sense being useful for celebrities and the wealthy, who can afford managers or consultants to take this action on their behalf, but not for people like my parents, for whom even step 1 is daunting.
I'm going to guess you're a technical user :) my parents would never think to search for standardized or GDPR-specific email addresses. What they did was find some generic way to contact the company (phone number, possibly Facebook or email) and ask them "where should I send a request for you to delete my data?"
Regarding the content, they would find some template they can mostly understand, then change/add a paragraph to include whatever specifics they need.
As for verification of identify, they would not even think much about it. They would sign with their name, and of course send from their email. The company would have to reply back to ask for whatever they need to verify it properly.
> 1. Identify an email address -- is this standardized?
Interesting, wasn't that addressed by GDPR? For that reason does german law requires information like this to be easily accessible, aka "Impressumspflicht". Lets compare for example amazon footers links.
https://opt-out.eu/ is a service run by AFAIR someone on HN (spotted it today, can't find the source comment). Select a company, fill out a form, and you're done[0].
[0] - Maybe. I'm not endorsing it, I just found it today. I wish someone (maybe the author) could say something more about the validity of such process, and whether this kind of e-mail is enough in practice.
One of the authors here. Thanks for mentioning us! I personally use the service and can testify it works. Just used it last week following the Apollo breach to have them remove me from their database. The service is free and open source. Happy to answer any questions!
I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the noise. When I came home the thing was in danger of burning down the house and the video card had failed.