The device is paid through a loan. That makes radio locks more preposterous, not less.
Breaking a contract is far less serious than defaulting on a loan. And if the cell providers' argument is "we need radio locks because fraud," remember they're full of crap.
It's not every consumer's fault that Verizon made hundreds of thousands of bad decisions about to whom they decided to extend credit last year. It's theirs.
This change in policy came less than a week after Verizon suffered a high-visibility outage[1] that left scores of people unable to use their phones. Before this policy change, customers could at least pick up an eSIM on another network for emergencies. Not anymore. Thanks, FCC.
The GP's concern isn't a practical one, it's ultimately about net neutrality. It's not the ISP's job to discriminate against traffic—it's their job to deliver it.
This may seem like a good idea, and frankly is likely a net-positive thing, but it is literally the definition of "ISP decides what apps its customers can and cannot use."
I share the concern and don't really like it either.
It's not a net-neutrality issue because they're not banking on any alternative.
Net-neutrality law doesn't work like that. Service providers still get to filter stuff.
What's illegal for an ISP is e.g. to give VoIP services other than their own a lower priority. That would tie in customers to use their own service and they could even charge more for it. Net neutrality means a level playing field for services on the Internet.
If you ask your ISP to do filtering, that's perfectly legal. If they filter specific traffic for the purpose of maintaining service, that's okay too.
Now if there was no alternative and they'd try to sell their product by blocking telnet, they could be sued.
There is some merit to the end user ISPs doing that - for example one I used before filtered SMTP traffic (and iirc some other) to the client unless you opted out from it.
Which was mildly annoying workaround for the power users (disabling it was just changing the ppp login), but stopped a lot of accidentally open open relays and a lot of other cruft
>I only really cared about ... the HD screen-sharing
I bought and canceled nitro in a single day because it's a bad product.
They promise HD screen-sharing, but it's only for _my_ screen. When I hopped into a call, the other user's screen share is illegible. Higher quality is still locked behind a "Buy Nitro" message.
If I'm paying for an improved experience, I should be able to get it.
> Oh right, companies change ToS and EULA and "agreements" without notice, without due process, and without recourse.
Companies change their terms of service all the time. They usually send emails about it.
I've responded to decline them a handful of times and asked for my account to be deleted. I chuckle slightly at the work it creates, but sometimes it has been easier to close an account that way.
There was a magical period. I suspect it ended with the introduction of the Secure Enclave. But maybe it was a little later.
An encrypted iTunes backup of a device was a perfect image. Take the backup, pull the SIM card, restore the backup to a new phone with the sim card installed, and it was like nothing had happened.
No reauthentication. No missing notifications. No lost data. Ever.
Because I’m saying the threat vector you used to justify it is not an issue for me at all, so it’s a baseless justification for “security”, ergo, theatre.
That's still not theater though. Annoying? Yes, quite! But according to the definition:
> Security theater is the practice of implementing security measures that are considered to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to achieve it.[1][2]
Adding additional security to something that doesn’t need security is basically doing this by definition. It’s adding nothing because nothing was needed. So yes, theatre.
> my impression of most of that documentation from that time is that it was incorrectly using .local as a fake TLD
When setting up Active Directory on Windows Server 2003, there was a note in the wizard that explicitly called out .local as a domain suffix that would prevent DNS lookups from hitting the public internet, which many people (myself included) took as an endorsement.
I generally dislike anime and tend to reflexively roll my eyes when someone suggests I watch it, but I've been complaining about VLC for at least 15 years.
Its main claim to fame is that it "plays everything," and it rose to prominence in the P2P file sharing era. During this time, Windows users often installed so many "codec packs" that DirectShow would eventually just have an aneurysm any time you tried to play something. VLC's media stack ignored DirectShow, and would still play media on systems where it was broken.
We're past that problem, but the solution has stuck around because "installing codecs will break my computer, but installing VLC won't" is the zombie that just won't die.
Breaking a contract is far less serious than defaulting on a loan. And if the cell providers' argument is "we need radio locks because fraud," remember they're full of crap.
It's not every consumer's fault that Verizon made hundreds of thousands of bad decisions about to whom they decided to extend credit last year. It's theirs.
This change in policy came less than a week after Verizon suffered a high-visibility outage[1] that left scores of people unable to use their phones. Before this policy change, customers could at least pick up an eSIM on another network for emergencies. Not anymore. Thanks, FCC.
[1]: https://www.the-sun.com/tech/15782764/verizon-down-sos-mode-...
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