For those replying, I believe the parent was saying that EU phones are stuck with a physical SIM slot because of regulations. In the US, iPhones no longer have a SIM tray.
Yes, people misread this to read “only physical sims”. The sim tray is useless in 2023 imo, but their phones are stuck w/ them because of laws that aren’t keeping up. We’ll see how well the regulators keep up w/ the next generations of tech.
I understood it but I would definitely want at least one physical SIM on my phone. It has served me well many times (and not limited to remote areas) when my phone is unusable and I can use my SIM on another phone with the lock PIN.
I've had to contact the carrier to get a new phone approved for a SIM here in the states, so in my mind it is a bit of a wash there.
On the flip-side, T-Mobile has an app to add an eSIM to "test drive" their service on your phone for free, and I look forward to the day I can buy travel SIMs in advance on my couch at home.
I've travelled across Europe with eSims bought from Mobimatter, and I've also bought local Vodaphone eSim in Italy and some other operator Montenegro. In fact, I'm writing this from a eSim in my iphone while I wait for Airbnb to resolve issues with check-in on Cyprus. What are you talking about?
Yeah, we have two esims as well. More or less feature parity. No clue why anyone would want a sim card/tray in 2023. I’ve been working remote on 3 continents in the last year across the economic power spectrum and have never thought of using one.
We have both esim and physical. Not only this, for people that want more privacy, some can buy physical sims without any documents at simple shops so that there is no risk for govt to track you
I think you are projecting your beliefs onto them. Mixers, privacy chains, and ZK privacy schemes have all been implemented because everyone in crypto acknowledges the lack of privacy.
You are confusing the enthusiasts with the people who understand crypto. Both groups existed, but the enthusiasts group made many claims that anyone who had even minimal understanding didn't believe.
> So enlighten me, what is the actual $$$ threshold where "terrorist financing" can be deemed a legitimate complaint?
It seems reasonable to at least set the lower bound above Deutsche Bank who are frequently in the spotlight for AML and terrorist financing for amounts far greater than $600 and operating today.
> I suppose you could argue about whether the CFTC's relevant regulations protect anyone, but they certainly think they do, and if so it's easy to argue that Binance was skirting those protections.
There are two weird things here. The first is that the CFTC does have purvue to protect the American people. However, if Binance were to simply say “we now accept US citizens” — the trading cited here would be allowed. Market makers are accredited investors.
It’s rather because they offer services to investors who are not US based which, if they were offered to US investors, would only be allowed to be offered to Accredited Investors — Binance has chosen to not offer services in the US, and allowed Accredited Investors (the same group who would be permitted if they did operate in the US).
The case is interesting. Even though these traders were operating significant portions of their business from the US, the claim will be made that they were acting as their international subsidiary.
> if Binance were to simply say “we now accept US citizens” — the trading cited here would be allowed
No, it wouldn't. Derivatives exchanges and swaps settlement requires licenses, e.g. from the CFTC. Also, the swaps analog for accredited investor is eligible contract participant (ECP) [1].
> the allegedly “protected” parties in this case would still be able to trade with Binance if Binance were licensed
Correct. Except those parties would have their own risk disclosure obligations which the CFTC could check.
It’s easy to hide leverage in swaps. They also uniquely accumulate counterparty risk, since the standard way to close out a swap isn’t to cancel the original swap, but to enter into a new, counter-balancing one. This means even a minor party failing can lead to systemic risk as positions their counterparties assumed were hedged are now levered and open. Add in opaqueness, and any swap participant going under leads to legitimate concerns about everyone else. This happened in 2008. The rules Binance helped institutions evade are the ones that were written to prevent that form of crisis re-emerging.
This is a nice story but it's just not true. The amount of leverage built up in the derivatives market on Binance is completely transparent. The trading shops named in the CFTC suit are very unlikely to blow themselves up in anything remotely resembling the way 2008 unfolded, and the CFTC regulations are not designed to catch anything important that might realistically be going on under the surface here.
The point of this CFTC lawsuit is to attack crypto, no more, no less. If you don't like crypto, you may think that's a good thing, but I'd argue that it's always a bad thing when regulators leverage technicalities to achieve political ends. And make no mistake, that is exactly what is happening here.
Yes, I mean it would be absurd to argue that there isn’t more systemic risk in crypto markets.
The question I keep pointing at though is, why does it matter? These are not retail traders. They’re institutions that are considered experts in their field and hold no customer deposits (aside from accredited investors, who are again considered knowledgeable enough to not need government oversight to invest).
Everyone here ostensibly knows the risks and their crash won’t tank i.e. the housing market or pension funds.
Not a lawyer, but my impression is that a lot of time such cases are decided on what a reasonable person might take away from the text rather than what the text literally says.
No, the grandparent poster was right. That’s other agencies, not the intelligence community. He’s right that the cloud I was thinking of is on prem but with Amazon personal (that are cleared).
So not the greatest analogy. But still I think most doctors, lawyers etc should be okay with their own cluster running in the cloud.
Not lawyers in the US at least, that would typically be a violation of confidentiality. Even with a client's permission, it would work a waiver of attorney-client privilege. (I don't use GPT but I'm assuming the ToS is clear that someone there can examine the input material? Can it even be used to build their model, i.e., submitted information could potentially work it's way back to the eyes of the public and not just OpenAI engineers?) I imagine HIPAA issues would stop doctors. Can HIPAA data be stored on the cloud? Every instance I've seen they store it locally.
I agree with you on the SaaS version but the scenario I was thinking of was where there is a licensable model that can be run on a cluster in law firm’s AWS account. I think that should be okay.
HIPAA data can definitely be stored in the cloud given the right setup. I’ve worked for companies that have done so (the audit is a bit of a pain.)
I work in legaltech, and we use cloud services like aws for lawsuit data, and lawyers trust it. Any 3rd party must of course be vetted and go through NDA, and follow regional laws and guidelines ect, but using the cloud is definitely used for legaltech documents including sensitive data.
It should be added that legaltech vendors are often employed as go-betweens for quite adversarial interactions, such as e-discovery, that require them to be trusted (to a degree) by both sides of a case, even if they are being paid by one side.
Seems like there are lots of confidentiality and reliability issues in how tech is being used in law right now, but there aren't that many attorneys who understand the issues, and those that do find it more advantageous to overlook them unless forced to do otherwise.
HIPAA regulated organizations routinely store protected health information on the cloud. This has been common practice for many years. The physical location is legally irrelevant as long as security and privacy requirements are met. AWS and other large cloud vendors specifically target this market and make it easy to achieve legal compliance.
Are they even aware of where their data is? Opening a web browser might be a big hint for them, but how about editing something in Microsoft Office? Does the data there ever touch the cloud? Do Chromebooks make it clear enough where the data is?
I imagine lawyers knowing about where document data is stored as a bit like software developers being sufficiently aware of licensing. There's plenty who are paying attention, but there's also plenty who are simply unaware.
You’re aware that ~$150B of $200B SVB deposits are not covered by FDIC insurance, correct? I don’t think SVB is going to end up 0, but pointing at 25% of investments being safe and saying “look regulation works so well” seems absurd.
All the people involved are institutional investors. 0% of people who have USD savings under $250k are affected by this. On the other hand, anybody who has a significant portion of their net worth tied up in cryptocurrency is affected by this.
Indeed, if your company is in the banking business without understanding the banking business, you might have a surprise coming up. As in most other industries.
Interestingly, the host was also violating AirBNBs terms of service and the author could have gotten a full refund if they realized. It’s against AirBNB’s ToS to charge a security deposit outside of the fees already charged by AirBNB. I’ve had AirBNB offer to kick a host off of the platform if they didn’t back down on this. You could probably get them to cancel a reservation because of it.
Right, Android trades ads for system wide tracking and that's rotten for the user. Moreover, Android's tacking mechanism is brilliantly effective—one has to admire Google's ingenuity for its receiver/signalling system. It's so integral to Android that one can view the O/S as built around it rather than it as an addition/add-on to the O/S. Essentially, Android is an O/S built around an ingenious spying system.
It's just not possible to use
an Android phone as Google intended (and as the vast majority of users actually do) without that tracking mechanism taking center stage.
My solution is to disable or uninstall Google Play Services/apps and I never create a Google account. Also, wherever possible, I use a rooted phone.
The penalty for such action is that many of the attractive so-called free services are unavailable to me. However, the benefits of closing down or uninstalling all unnecessary services and apps and disabling JavaScript are that my battery now lasts for days, ads are a thing of the past and the phone and internet access are much faster.
I accept however the vast majority of users either aren't capable of making such a tradeoff or aren't prepared to do so and Google knows that—that's why it's a winner. For Google, users like me are just insignificant noise.
> It's just not possible to use an Android phone as Google intended (and as the vast majority of users actually do) without that tracking mechanism taking center stage
These things are not as tightly woven into the OS as you make it seem.
It is very much possible. GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, roll your own AOSP-based image.
A completely degoogled Pixel series is even practical and realistic for casuals. As you say you miss out or have to fiddle a big for many apps which break without SafetyNet and other malware.
"These things are not as tightly woven into the OS as you make it seem."
I know that but try and tell it to the average user. Even many of my techie colleagues aren't game to make changes to their phones for fear of losing some beloved feature. Frankly, I'm amazed at how tolerant people are to this level of surveillance.
That said, much can and does go wrong, resurrecting bricked phones seems to be a pastime of mine. As you know, whether one can decouple Google's spyware subsystem easily or not depends on the phone. If you can't gain access to the OS then it's not possible to roll one's own ASOP-based image or use some other one.
These days, many manufacturers are making it harder and harder to bypass security features, unlock the boot loader and install custom ROMs. Nevertheless I won't buy a phone without first checking whether I can install a custom ROM and it's definitely harder now than it was say five years ago.
Man, some people are just crazy. You’re so hell bent on using android you limit the functionality of your phone to it essentially just being a brick.
Buy an iPhone, install an ad blocker, disable all the tracking, and be done with it while still being able to use the features of the phone you bought.
Imagine not being able to have root, uBlock origin, or third party Youtube clients. Oh, and now also, sending every one of your pictures to Apple so they can call the cops on you to cover their asses[1].
1. I've owned iPhones and Apple is hell bent in locking me out of its tech. If you want to live in a straightjacketed tech world then that's fine. In my world that's a truely bricked environment.
2. When I make phone calls I use a feature phone, it's incapable of doing anything else. That is, it has no Internet access—not even Bluetooth.
3. I wouldn't be seen dead on social media or using a Gmail account, and I've no need of Apple's store or Netflix, etc. so the functionality you refer to isn't an issue.
4. My Android phones are for limited internet use only and or portable computer use. Similarly, the functionality you speak of just doesn't apply. They are hacked and tailored specifically for my requirement and they do exactly what I want. Right, I'm in control (unlike iPhone users).
5. Even then, as a rule, my Android phones don't use SIM cards, they connect to the internet wirelessly via separate pocket routers which further isolates them from internet gumpf and garbage.
Maybe I'm reading this response wrong, but your comment doesn't seem to make much sense to me. The amount of freedom from surveillance the GP seeks is not something Apple hardware will offer to you at any price. Google makes it painful and onerous, but Apple makes it impossible.
I think this was meant to point out that trading ads for system wide tracking isn’t necessarily a deal you are forced to make if you are a person who is motivated not to make that deal. For most people avoiding tracking isn’t even a thought. Their first order of business is inviting Facebook, Twitter, and Tik Tok to the party.
AFAIU it's all F-Droid apps that are GPS-free. I rely on a small handful of others installed from the Aurora, Google Play is a requirement for some of those.
I may be hallucinating that shim, though I'm pretty sure it actually exists...
"...I rely on a small handful of others installed from the Aurora, Google Play is a requirement for some of those."
Later thought. I also occasionally install Play Store apps via Aurora Store and it's worth noting that some state that they require Google Play Services but in fact they do work without it (I normally have GPS/Google Play disabled or uninstalled).
I've not bothered to research why but I presume it's the reporting mechanism that's not working, the core operation of these programs being independent of GPS (presumably this would simplify programming if the programmer is also coding the program for iPhone).
I'd be most interested if you or anyone else has more info about this.
I have been running Graphene for years and find that few proprietary apps really need GAPS. I get a warning that it is required when they try to serve an ad, but I just dismiss it and enjoy the ad free experience. Graphene has great shims and even a sandboxed Google Play Services for those who want a lot of notifications. I don't use it myself, but my partner does.
