If it’s baked into the firmware of major cell phone manufacturers components how many people would it take?
A team of CS engineers at NSA.
1-2 people in privileged positions either at the point of assembly/programming deployment to ensure the code is delivered.
- for each company which is basically just alphabet, Samsung, and Apple or their chip providers which is about five companies.
This does not seem all that impractical - how many people are dumping firmware from in the wild consumer cellular devices and reverse engineering enough of the code to see if this functionality exists or not? Anyone with that skill is likely making a killing doing other work.
You want a good one? Silent password truncation on account creation without a required relogin so on return my saved password doesn’t work and I need to reset it.
Deploy the army Corp of engineers, tie to a massive jobs program with expedited eminent domain. Fund it by closing loopholes on wealthy tax cheats, tax unrealized gains for billionaires, tax loans against stocks, tax private jet travel 100%. And on and on.
These are all solvable problems but no one has the will because the people empowered are too fucking comfortable watching the planet get destroyed while people die deaths of exposure and despair by the millions.
Build rail and deploy bussing like you fucking want it. Make it so good Japanese and European civil engineers ask you for help.
Noise?
That’s an engineering problem.
Teacher ratios?
Your property taxes too low for the services your community needs. Notice how I said need - it’s necessary. 20-1 is high, 30+ plus and your local governance is criminally incompetent.
You’re distracted by change and upset that you need to adapt to a world that’s moved past you. Tale older than the dirt we walk on.
The housing and finance markets seem like a fitting example. Under and over investment respectively fueled bubbles that fed each other until their inevitable pop took the entire economy down and required a decade of artificially suppressed rates backed by trillions in debt setting us for bigger problems when an actual economic crisis occurs (Covid). We’re still weathering this storm of financial mismanagement on a national scale. Narrowing in, housing is now being over invested in fueling a bubble while the communities houses exist in are victims of underinvestment.
Zooming back out, whatever pain comes from breaking Google up today will be less than the pain of doing so in a decade. Even more broadly, the pain of breaking up any monopoly (a matter how small) today will be less than when their breakup is as or more pressing than any of the historical antitrust cases.
As Senator John Sherman put it, "If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life."
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, ATT/Verizon/Tmobile, and hoards of smaller but similarly situated companies behave as kings shaping markets, acting without accountability or culpability, and shaking down the public at their whims. The gospel of the stock market has paralyzed our legislators from taking action to put these corrupt, wasteful, polluting and abusive businesses in their place or out of operation.
Gelsinger would be shooting blind and in order to cut enough to force compliance he would ultimately be sabotaged as the entire workforce unites against him unless he had the ability to bring in a few thousand loyal soldiers to manage every unit. He’s got the much harder job of ferreting out deep corruption and incompetence that perniciously hides in corners protected by knowing whose buried what bodies. Rough job that he cannot possibly accomplish. Instead he’s probably trying to root out these toxic messes and quarantine them in safe environments where they can be productive enough to realize ROI but disempowered and segregated while he works on fixing the broken systems and teams that got Intel to this point. Maybe this layoff was in his back pocket waiting for the right time to cut the shit loose with cover or maybe he failed to realize that should have been his first order of business and this was a desperate move to stop the hemorrhaging and Intels books are going to be even worse two years out when the consequences of firing qualified staff begins to manifest.
Paying more for worse staff is stupid. In some cases the employee is good at their job but has languished for so long they’ve burnt too many bridges to be promoted. The only response for these people is work to retirement or job hop.
> The way I usually describe this is a lot of the younger people I talk to weren't punched in the face enough by their peers growing up because that's the other social risk side of this equation.
If it’s so critical that nurses are left standing around clueless then if it goes down entire teams of people should be going to prison for manslaughter.
Or, we could build robust systems that can tolerate indefinite down time. Might cost more, might need more staff.
Pick one. I’ll always pick the one that saves human lives when systems go down.
Opting out via ssid is pull the table cloth off at a wedding level absurd. Effectively this design is we saying we respect you so little that you might be able deactivate this feature if tattoo your choice on your face but we might might ignore that too because fuck you for disagreeing.
Iirc the same optout method is used opting out of WiFi scanning.
Blanket behavior like this should always be opt in with explicit informed and uncoerced consent. A laughable proposition in this corporate world but a worthy aim nonetheless.