Buying Positive or Negative Reviews: The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative. It clarifies that the conditional nature of the offer of compensation or incentive may be expressly or implicitly conveyed.
I hope this is actively enforced with real teeth very soon. I 1-star fake products and call them out in reviews resulting in the devious vendor somehow being able to send me a postcard to my real physical address offering money for 5 stars. The sham vendor also spam my email weekly. Amazon appears to actively support this process. It needed to be curtailed decades ago.
>> The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives.
Amazon has had this rule in place for a long time and I still get cards in the boxes of the stuff I buy, "Give us a 5 star review and get 30% off your next purchase!"
Clearly Amazon doesn't know about this or isn't generally enforcing it. I'm wondering how the FTC is going to patrol this since Amazon has already had this rule in place for a while and it hasn't dissuaded sellers from changing their habits.
Given that hundreds of people reading this thread have experienced exactly what you’re talking about, I think it’s impossible that Amazon doesn’t know anything about it.
Amazon is currently providing a LLM-generated summary of these faked customer reviews. To abide by the FTC ruling, Amazon would now have to prove that all of their training data is legitimate customer reviews. Do you think they will actually do that?
It seems the gift of free AWS cloud services reconciles all harm Amazon continues to do against customers and employees alike. The government will need to locate its backbone.
The government is not a single entity. those investigating this type of thing are rewarded for success, and are not in any way related to those who would use services.
(as pointed out, it is also illegal for AWS to do that)
That conspiracy theory needs work. The federal government pays billions annually for cloud services and it’s “people go to jail” illegal for the government to accept free services which would otherwise cost money (i.e. the government can use the AWS free tier like everyone else but above that they’re paying like everyone else).
It's not a conspiracy theory. It's business as usual for AWS. I'm all for righteousness but that's not applicable to the US Government and DOJ. People are bought and sold all the time.
The people I've met that leave reviews for free product aren't required to leave any "particular sentiment". They just rely on tacit laws of reciprocity.
private equity does seem to be kinda crap at running stuff, even screwing up with successful brands. It's not a surprise that hospitals and smaller businesses also get screwed up.
Like Toys'R'Us, Sears, Gymboree, Payless, Claire's, Radioshack, Sports Authority, Brookstone, all of them filed for bankruptcy, some closed for good. Now maybe they would have anyway, but it's hard to say.
But I guess they get money out of them. If you pile on debt and pay yourself, and then the company goes bankrupt, well you got paid, that's what matters to PE investors, right?
They aren't trying to run the businesses. They're trying to extract the value from the businesses. What happens to the business afterwards and what happens to the businesses customers in the process is not important because they've structured their ownership in such a way that they profit regardless.
PE acts as vultures (not in a negative way) who come in and clean up dead carcasses. They are typically not the cause but a symptom of a failing company.
We all have nostalgia for small chains or companies at the mall in our youth. Almost all of those are terrible and failing businesses now. It's a bit like the movie Up In the Air where Clooney goes around firing people. He's the face of the bad news, but he's not the cause.
For the article at hand, hospitals really should be non-profit. Providing great care at low costs means the goal is a terrible business.
>They are typically not the cause but a symptom of a failing company.
This isn't true in most cases. PE has killed many profitable companies by taking deliberate steps which resulted in the companies directing their incomes to servicing unsustainable debts rather than running or improving the businesses.
For example the eldercare company ManorCare was profitable and successful prior to being bought and destroyed by a PE group. The PE firm loaded ManorCare with the debt that the PE firm used to buy it in the first place and then sold ManorCare's real estate and forced ManorCare to rent it back, causing ManorCare to spend $500 million/year on rent[0]
Forcing companies to take on debt and sell their assets is a standard part of the PE playbook and inevitably ends in the death of the company regardless of how it was performing prior to being taken over.
I put a company like ManorCare under healthcare. In fact after bankruptcy it was taken over by a non-profit group.
Also, profitable is not the measure. Blame capitalism or investors or ourselves. I know I'd rather put my money earning 5% rather than 1%. Both are profitable, but the 1% is not the best use of my capital.
As I said above and again here, healthcare related services should not be under the profit pressures of regular businesses (though then you have to deal with other issues of inefficiencies and waste).
Hey, just going to say what I've been telling folks IRL, if you are reading this, and your parents and family members aren't tech savvy, you need to set them up with two factor authentication now.
Because you know how to do that, and it's so much easier than helping them when they get hacked.
Friend receives an email from ISP, asking her to contact them.
She searches, comes across a "customer service number" on a legit looking page, calls them up.
(Whoever she called) plays out a 30 minute charade about how she's been flagged by IRS for illegal activity and is about to have her business accounts frozen, including multiple phone transfers to "another party" (played by different people) to boost authenticity.
And during this whole time, they not once asked her for any "red flag" information (e.g. account #, SSN).
Instead, it seemed to be a shell game of extracting limited information (last 3 of your account #?), then having "unrelated" parties parrot that back as proof of their "working for the government."
I expect it would have eventually escalated into an actionable ask, but they were definitely playing the intermediate-term game.
If not for the utter moral black hole of the endeavor, I'd be kind of impressed.
I shouldn't, but sometimes I play along just to see what the scam looks like.
Last time I did this, it took three days of texting my new friend before it was finally clear that what she really wanted more than anything was to teach me to trade cryptocurrency.
Once, I thought I had her, because she spelled D&D like: D&D, but she played it off real cool and just explained that her English isn't that great so she used translation software.
In retrospect I think that all of her probing questions about my Svirfneblin cleric were because she later intended call him up and teach him to trade cryptocurrency. I like to think he's in some scammer's database now, causing confusion. He'd like that too.
Once I understood what she was after, I explained that my problem with cryptocurrency was that it resembled money too closely and really what I'd like to do with blockchains is to do away with money in favor of something entirely different.
Her training dataset had not prepared her for this conversation, so it was quite clear when her human handler took over. They were very rude, unlike their AI pet, and tried to bully me into sharing other people's contact info, which is when I lost interest.
I noticed the same pattern. The rude humans afterwards answered with expressions sounding like translated Chinese (like, I wouldn't think mentioning the ancestors' graves)
MFA doesn't stop this kind of phishing. If you're tricked to put in your password, you'll likely put in your 2FA code right after. A yubi key or device passkey that uses webauthn can stop these methods, since the domain seeking authentication is checked and won't authenticate unless it's the original domain.
Even then, that won't help scams and fraud that just trick you into sending money, or direct you to install malware.
surely it won't hurt. at minimum, it makes the attacker's job much harder -- their window to exploit becomes max 30 seconds instead of however long you don't change your password.
Tools like evilnginx proxy the traffic, then grab the auth token / cookie after a successful login. From there you can send the session tokens to something like necrobrowser to automatically do whatever you want with the account. The whole hack can happen in seconds.
I set up 2fa codes through Google Authenticator with my family, and employees. That is to say I generate a QR code, we all scan it while we are in the room together and can use it at any time to check who we are really speaking to. This is in addition to a question/answer pair that we have had with my immediate family for years (duress question, duress answer, standard question, standard answer).
Interesting. So it's a bit like providing a public key, if they need to make sure they are talking with you they ask you to provide the TOTP and they control they have the same number on their side?
Yeah that's right. So me, my 2 kids and my wife all have the same code, I have one with my brother and my dad (my mum is a bit too past it ... ) and one with my employees (I only have 2 ... ). It's like a way to prove you were all the same people in the room at the same time! I have a little script that produces a QR code, then I delete it and it will never exist again :) EDIT: my youngest daughter in particular really loves it. When I go on a run and get home without my key, and I knock on the door she grabs her iPad and opens the door a little crack and says "what's the code?"
If you are your family’s de facto IT support, it is worth considering Seraph Secure, which can detect when someone might be falling prey to an online scam and can notify you (among other things).
Rather than sending an article that they'll ignore, I recommend helping them do it when you visit. Note: you're guarding against phishing and also locking themselves out of their accounts. Both are important.
I bought Mom a Yubikey and helped her set it up on her Google account. She has it on her keychain. She doesn't need to remember how to use it, though, since it's only needed when she buys a new computer.
For good measure, I also helped her print out backup codes (and I know where they are) and I registered my Yubikey, just in case.
Nowadays, an old backup phone might also work, but I think paper backups are better because an old, unused phone might not start.
GitHub uses Slack, and has done since long before the Microsoft acquisition. GitHub also does a ton of chat-ops, or at least used to, so their migration from Campfire to Slack was a big move for the company, I doubt they want to move again.
Probably because of the high number of civilian deaths in a much shorter period.
Adults are harder to split out into civilians vs combatants, so sticking with just kids, by the beginning of March, four months into the Israel Hamas conflict, there were about 12.5k children dead in Gaza and Israel (a few dozen Israeli children on October 7th, the rest are Palestinian casualties of war).
In Ukraine 15 months into the war only 1.5k children had been killed, (all Ukrainian).
Add to that that the US government is continuing to directly arm and support the Israeli government, whose attacks are killing those Palestinian kids.
I think I can make it simple. Would love to hear of any cases refuting this.
If the country is on the US State Department's 'Sponsored' program list (currently DPRK, Iran, Sudan, and Cuba) it doesn't count. Florida terrorism ok, you get a pass and called a hero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles
Comparing to other more recent Florida originated attack on against a poor country, the assassination of Haiti's president. Haiti is not on that country approval list, go directly to jail: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-florida-men-arrested-plo...
So basically the elites are using the internet to control (feeding) the starving folk.
No internet means less control. Brings them closer to the starving folks level, more chance of actually being a "people's republic" then.
There's not much government worth salvaging in that country, basically an army.
The only loss would be them improving their security now. Other world governments may have left that vulnerability untouched purely in case they need to use it at a later stage.
Avoid highly processed foods, chicken nuggets are worse than chicken breasts
Try to use glass containers over plastic ones.
Heat from dishwashers and microwaves can cause plastic containers to break down and release particles.
Use paper tea bags over plastic ones
Tap water has less microplastic particles than bottled water, and you can use a filter to remove additional microplastics
synthetic fabrics when worn down from friction, lighting, or heat like sunlight/dryers can shed particles you can inhale that can get into your blood stream.
Vacuuming with a hepa filter can make a difference.
These days there is no "paper tea bag". Even the paper ones have a nontrivial amount of PLA plastic embedded in them, enough to cause acid reflux and allergic reactions. It is added to diminish the risk of tearing. Just do yourself a favor, throw them away, and use loose leaf.
I feel like the US government has a legitimate interest in making sure US corporations don't pay paramilitary death squads for drug traffickers, especially ones that the US had designated as terrorist organizations at the time.
I don't think it's really that controversial to prevent US companies from doing this.
But to be clear they had already pled guilty to doing that crime in 2007 (and they also prosecuted the AUC, many AUC leaders were extradited to the US in 2008).
This isn't about enforcement at all, this is them being found liable in a civil class action lawsuit, one brought by families of folks the AUC murdered.
> But to be clear they had already pled guilty to doing that crime in 2007 (and they also prosecuted the AUC, many AUC leaders were extradited to the US in 2008).
That's exactly what I mean for extremely selective enforcement
Say some hypothetically medium/small US business with some operations in Mexico has their employees stalked/intimidated and their equipment gets burned down and people with guns hang out in the office, usual cartel stuff that happens daily there
Then they go to the Mexican gov for help and find out they don't give a shit because they are paid off or worse directly working for the cartel (as this particular Colombian paramilitary group was notorious for being protected by the gov).
So they pay money to some local cartel to make them go away
This is bad yes and should be punished.
But I don't see how that behaviour at all should allow civil action by random families from Mexico who were harmed (indirectly) by the same Cartel to make a case in the US
That's the most disconnected and roundabout form of justice imagineable.
Their crime should have rightfully been procescuted by Colombia at the time or the US sanctioning them. That is the real deterence. Civil courts in the US have no business playing judge in that context IMO. Unless your goal is feel good emotions by giving victims of crime money by takkng money from another party coerced by the same criminals.
>So they pay money to some local cartel to make them go away
Traditionally it's more like "they pay money to some local armed group to get rid of union activists and unruly workers asking for more rights and better conditions and salaries".
Yes, because real workers are never exploited and never have legitimate concerns and demands, especially in developing world countries /s
It's not like such companies like Chiquita even support dictators or topple goverments (or lobby to get it done on their behalf) to protect their margins and cheap labour...
"Among the Honduran people, the United Fruit Company was known as El Pulpo ("The Octopus" in English), because its influence pervaded Honduran society, controlled their country's transport infrastructure, and manipulated Honduran national politics with anti-labour violence."
Well, feel good justice isnt even just one part here because justice isnt the primary goal of a legal system. Your premise is wrong.
Its about punishment to enforce the civil contract and once you exclude bodies, eg drug trafficing CIA officials or sociopathical CEOs, you start to loose credibility.
> But I don't see how that behaviour at all should allow civil action by random families from Mexico who were harmed (indirectly) by the same Cartel to make a case in the US
So then only attorneys are left to lead the charge, right? How can you still trust a system that prosecutes journalists that uncover war crimes that get covered up by the same cartel?
Buying Positive or Negative Reviews: The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative. It clarifies that the conditional nature of the offer of compensation or incentive may be expressly or implicitly conveyed.
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