Jane came to my high school and I forged a pass to sneak in to her talk. I am not sure why every class didn't get the opportunity to see her, but I am glad I did. RIP
Lifetime fixed rate is more common especially after 2008 when floating rates contributed to crushing the US housing market. Even before 2008 fixed was more common. The fixed rate is why those in the US who have a ~3% rate from a few years ago are “stuck” as it is difficult to justify giving it up.
Unfair thing to measure him by in my opinion. Steve Ballmer inherited Microsoft when the stock traded at a P/E of 60. When he left it was 14, in line with many other tech stocks during that time. (Even Apple was lower)
He took earnings per share from $0.70 to $2.63 during his tenure. A CAGR of 10.5% across 13 years in one of the world's biggest companies. He couldn't control multiple compression following the dotcom bust.
Serious question. Does this open up EU iPhone customers to CrowdStrike-like security issues related to their phones if they use these new App Stores? Or at least reduce security and privacy of their devices by downloading less vetted apps? I am not pro either way yet I am just curious what the community thinks.
Apps still don't have system level access to anything, so no. iPhone apps can't automatically run in the background, run on boot or just access random data from random apps. If they can it'd be an exploit, and while the App Store gives you some extra safety in that they can scan for it / pull the app without updating iOS, now you actually need an up-to-date OS.
It's a small additional risk but really not that big at all compared to what you can do with Android sideloading or app installing on macOS/Windows, and not comparable at all to macOS kernel extensions or Windows drivers.
No, not at all. Security is an ongoing process of system design, nothing that the App Store can offer. iOS is designed with an aggressive sandboxing model with very strict permissions for accessing privacy-impacting APIs. The App Store, additionally, does include all sorts of scamware that was let through the screening process.
Apps on iOS are strictly user space. They cannot run at a kernel level, which was the issue with CloudStrike. An oversight in CloudStrike's software, which assumed a downloaded file would never be in a broken state, prevented the system from booting.
Technically, Microsoft requires approval for software that runs at the level of CloudStrike. So, clearly, a review process is not sufficient to prevent that issue either.
First part: Not at all. Apps can‘t deeply integrate into the system and it’s always through very tightly defined APIs.
Second part: Technically yes, practically no. Apps are still tightly bound by the system.
Theoretically there can be exploits out of the app sandbox that could be caught before an app is released on the app store. But once the vulnerability it will quickly be closed - and while it‘s not known it also won’t be caught by the app store‘s automatic checks anyway, so it could also be inside of app store released apps.
Yes, absolutely. Part of the reason I’m very happy that people around me tend to use iPhones is that I have some base level confidence in what they’re installing. I don’t trust nearly anyone to make good decisions about what applications they are installing, given how much information cellphones have it’s untenable to have them installing random garbage because some website said so.
Vegas local here, after Oct 2017 no Vegas hotel room on the strip is going 24 hours without hotel staff seeing the inside of a room - every hotel has this policy. I don’t know why people expect privacy in Vegas, there are more cameras and technology watching you here than anywhere else in the US.
The obvious question is "would these inspections have stopped Route 91?" I strongly suspect that would have had NO impact. The guest was known to them, was a high roller, known to get comps, and used the service elevator over several days to load the room with weapons hidden in cases. All for the purpose of attacking a large outdoor festival next to the hotel.
The other obvious question is, did the people who "cyberattack" them do so from _inside_ their own hotel? Is there some reason to think simple visual room inspections are going to help prevent their networks from being attacked?
None of these are logical responses to the stated problems. They're just ways to reduce privacy with a very thin corporate liability excuse tacked onto the end of it. I don't trust that they can people safe, and I don't trust their motivations in deploying these "techniques."
I'd rather sleep in the tunnels with the homeless at this point.
Likely, if there were another terrorist (which is not very likely, they usually don't repeat the same thing over and over) the housekeeping would report something weird, and then somebody would file it somewhere, and would sit on it for hours if not days, and then when the shit hits the fan, everybody would trade the blame and claim it wasn't their job to do something about it. I mean, the US Secret Service works this way, do you expect hotel security to be better?
I agree with you that it probably would not have stopped it, but Steve Wynn at the time was convinced his staff would have discovered him.
He claims they implemented policies in 2015 to enter and inspect all rooms after more than 12 hours of DnD. In other interviews he admits they "profile" everyone that enters their hotel.
If they really have "more cameras than anywhere else" and if that even mattered, then its already covered.
It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to put cameras in every single room, with a big sign saying this camera turns on every 4 hours with a big red light, and then if you cover it up a physical presence will occur.
Instead they go with: SHOW ME ALL YOUR USB DRIVES. Same shit as covid, if you make it normal for "officials" to touch and make copies of everything all the time everywhere, then there is no such thing as crime anymore yay
If the objective is to check whether anyone's hiding an AR-15 in their hotel room, presumably you have to check under the bed and in the closet and in the bathroom, which a fixed camera couldn't do.
Also I think the average hotel guest is completely fine with maids entering during the day when the room's unoccupied, but would not appreciate a camera in the bedroom, with or without a big sign and a big red light.
A rifle can be disassembled in relatively small components, and re-assembled in minutes. You'd have to do a pretty invasive and thorough search to detect it - and still, the criminal could just keep it in their car, which is not checked, and bring it in 10 minutes before the time, assemble it and do the deed.
You don't need anything special - most of them can be easily disassembled, with most components fitting a purse, not even suitcase. The barrel probably would be the biggest one - it has to be 16 inches long AFAIK or the law is going to have questions (of course if you're about to commit a crime anyway, it may be not that big of a deal, but most places won't sell you an illegal firearm). Still will fit a standard carryon suitcase, or most common backpacks.
“Why single out a rifle”? C’mon, man. The shooting being discussed in this thread would have been orders of magnitude less devastating with just a handgun, and you know it. Don’t make it a weird 2A thing.
The objective is not “make sure nobody in Vegas has a gun” the objective is “prevent a mass casualty event like the previous one”
Obviously the “tool” makes a difference, otherwise the tool wouldn’t have been used.
> He claims they implemented policies in 2015 to enter and inspect all rooms after more than 12 hours of DnD.
Eh, I guess I'd trip flags there. I typically put up the DnD on checking in at a hotel and leave it up until I check out. It's not a principled stance or anything, I'm just never staying for an amount of time (i.e. more than a week) where I'd need housekeeping services so figure I can save the housekeeping staff some effort and save some water.
Yeah, same here. I'm happy to save the housekeeping staff some time and effort for something I don't really need, and I just don't like people coming into the room while I'm gone. Including security-theater room inspectors.
So, potential future shooters will be limited to the number of guns that they can bring in to the hotel in 24 hours (or however many hours they have between the last inspection and their "event".) I'm sure that will help a lot.
Video is from 2016, so tough to say how much of that is or ever was implemented. The NYC subway is just now piloting metal detector type devices which are poles which detect "signatures" of common items and weapons. I have no idea how often these detect weapons or false positive on a laptop or lacrosse stick, and the press has not been interested in the science of it so far.
He had 10 guns and thousands of rounds of ammo. Killed 60+ and wounded 400+. Yes this would be a fraction but still possible to cause a lot of harm in 24hr.
“ Authorities have said he brought 23 weapons in 10 suitcases into the room and set up cameras inside and out to watch for police closing in on him.”
If they are looking through everyone’s rooms I would hope they find this now as he took days to get all of the guns and ammo up to his suite. I am not law enforcement and can’t say for sure though. The US has done a lot worse in the name of terrorism (I believe this was a terrorist act).
He did this in broad daylight. The guns were disguised in cases. He used the service elevator with staff help. In one case the staff helped move his guns on a rack.
If he leaves the guns in the cases it just looks like he has a lot of luggage. He had a huge suite. If it didn't look odd to them in the first place I can't imagine how it would in retrospect:
Why did he need 23 weapons? Seems like someone could have done just as much damage with one weapon and a bunch of ammo. I feel like it would be pretty trivial to bring a couple luggage cases in with that, plus some cameras, without hotel staff being suspicious, especially if you didn't bring any "normal" luggage with clothes or toiletries or the usual stuff people bring, to keep the total number of luggage pieces down.
Hotel staff certainly wouldn't find that with room inspections; they'd just see three or four pieces of luggage, which shouldn't raise any eyebrows. Then when the shooter decides to get started, they take everything out of the cases and set things up.
Like... this isn't rocket science. The only kind of room inspection that would actually stop these kinds of attacks would be if they do room searches, including opening and going through people's luggage. But I hope we can all agree that would be a huge invasion of privacy that no one should accept.
Of, course the actual way to stop -- or at least drastically reduce -- these sorts of attacks would be much stronger gun, ammo, and accessory controls. But of course the mouth-breathing 2A crowd (including most of SCOTUS) think guns are more important than people's lives.
This policy by itself: perhaps not. He did skip a room cleaning one day before the shooting, but he quite probably could have worked around one if he knew it was coming as a matter of policy. It is, however, just one of many changes made, all of which in concert (no pun intended) would make something like that at least significantly harder to do.
For instance, he had bell desk bring 22 large suitcases to his room over a few days. That's a huge red flag that would not go unnoticed now (and there's likely some procedure about logging/reporting since then). Prior to that event, nobody logged or even paid attention to such things. When you work with whales in Vegas, you just get used to eccentric rich people being eccentric rich people. Now you're at least aware of threats from people posing as them.
of course they wouldn't have, but if they don't change their policies at all, they have 2 new problems: some patrons will perceive your property as not taking security seriously if other hotels have "beefed up security" while yours doesn't. Secondly, if there were another shooting, even if it wasn't nearly as big as the Route 91 massacre, in court they could point to your lack of doing anything whatsoever "in the face of the nations worst shooting".
not really, no. I'm sure they considered everything, like having airport-style security to go up to the rooms, which is even more invasive. This way if there is another incident they can point to their policy and say "see? we inspect every room every 24 hours. We can't have a security guard in every room, but we at least tried"
I feel I have privacy in my home here in the Las Vegas suburbs. Surveillance stops at the strip for the most part. But the strip is not “home” for anyone I know and I would never call a hotel * stay at anywhere home. Strangers have access to your room at all times, that is why they provide safes.
Strangers have access to hotel rooms at all times, but the expectation is that they'll only enter for agreed-upon reasons (like daily housekeeping, if you don't put up the do-not-disturb sign), and emergencies.
The safe is there because they acknowledge that quite a few people have access to the room and they can't be 100% sure that all their employees are good people who wouldn't steal, even if they expect them not to. Not because they intend to send randos into your room at all hours of the day.
(And it's not clear how many employees have access to override the locks on the in-room safes... I've always thought of those safes as borderline security theater.)
I wouldn't call a hotel stay "home" either, but I expect the privacy situation to be only slightly weaker than an apartment rental.
Hell, I own a unit in a condo building, and our building insurance requires annual inspections of the sprinklers and fire alarm horns. I know someone who owns a condo in another city, and the building does (required) quarterly spraying for cockroaches, and replacements of the air conditioning filters. None of us feel like we don't own these spaces.
Then you must not rent your home. I've lived in rented apartments my entire adult life and while not daily inspections, everywhere I've lived the management has mandatory inspections every few months to check on fire alarms and other maintenance issues as well as making sure residents aren't violating policy by having more than two pets, trashing the apartment, allowing roaches and other pests to fester, etc. It can be annoying, but if I don't own it, it's not really "my" home.
Same here. Landlords do inspections when moving out. Maybe they come, with notice, once or twice a year to repair something or show the place to potential buyers.
That's not even remotely the same thing at all. In the US, a landlord (or their agent) cannot legally enter a tenant's unit without 24 hours notice (or more, depending on local laws), unless there is an emergency. And for the non-emergency visits, the tenant has the option to be present for the visit. That is completely unlike a hotel doing random daily room inspections without your knowledge or presence.
Yes, a property you rent is your home. It's not your property, though.
Because it's part of the United States, where personal freedoms are supposedly respected. Reading so many comments describing daily room searches at hotels as just the new normal state of affairs makes me sick. I hadn't been aware that the terrorizing mass media had ruined hotels even harder than they ruined air travel.
The Las Vegas Strip and its hotel casinos are famously one of the most surveillance-heavy areas in the world due to the casinos ostensibly looking for casino cheaters but it goes way beyond that now in the name of "safety"
Way too much American individual freedom has been destroyed by the regressive embrace of corporate freedom, but there are still some strong distinctions between being passively surveilled in a public venue and being actively searched in a private room.
Sure, they have cameras up in public spaces, on the casino floors, etc. No one is going to argue with their right to place cameras on their private property like that.
Hotel rooms are a different matter, though. People should and do expect levels of privacy similar to that of a rented apartment. (Lower levels, but similar.)
* If housekeeping was unable to service the room, security will come take a look.
The protocol for DefCon rooms:
* Security comes and takes a look no matter what, and is, from reports, particularly invasive. E.g. asked to look for USB sticks as evidence of "hacking tools": https://x.com/d0rkph0enix/status/1822879409126162779
For those who don't want to follow a X link: Soldering irons, breadboards, USB sticks, and WiFi access points are called out as "hacking tools." What clowns!
As I understand, housekeeping is instructed to look around the room to see if a bunch of guns are lying around. This is a result of the incident that happened there in 2017, where there were two dozen guns in a hotel room, unnoticed, because housekeeping respected the do not disturb sign indefinitely.
Housekeeping is neither trained nor spending time to performing a deep search of anyone’s room. But they do know what a pile of guns look like, and they’re instructed to escalate the situation to their superiors if they discover it.
And yet, housekeeping is directed to look for soldering irons and USB sticks, among other things. God forbid some maniac brings a loaded thumb drive into the premises - some of those high-capacity rounds can hold 1TB or more!
* Housekeeping is optional, and not preferred. Housekeeping never shows up.
* Security is never seen once on any floor above the ground level.
This has been my experience in Las Vegas in 5 different hotel rooms in the same hotel this year. These were 3 to 4 day stays. If the stay is longer than that then maybe a visit from security is more likely, but I didn't see them at all in the afternoons, evenings, mornings, any time. There was a security guard at the elevators on 1 day out of all the days I stayed.
The "protocol" probably depends on the hotel, where it's located, the events going on around Las Vegas at the time, and probably what the budget for security is.
The reports of mandatory security coming from "locals" and others in the comments here seem pretty wild to me, and far outside of what I've experienced in Las Vegas in the last year.
For clarity, these are the two protocols listed in the documents shared, purportedly from Resorts World, for stays during Def Con, stating how security would act in block vs. not-obviously-convention-attendee rooms.
Are they invisible people? If Security had to check 4,000+ rooms in each hotel building every day, they would be busy from sunup to sundown, throughout the hallways. The chance of seeing them would be very high, but they were nowhere to be found and we didn't even leave the hotel for a whole day, visiting people on multiple floors. Some hotels have over 5,000 rooms in one building. There are 154,000 hotel rooms in Vegas. You can do more research on the matter if you wish, but from my experience, and from the numbers I've found, I seriously doubt anyone claiming every hotel room in Vegas is checked once a day.
I expect privacy in any hotel room, regardless of where I am. Certainly not the same level of privacy I'd expect in my own home, whether purchased or rented. But daily security checks? No way, that's unreasonable. If I've put up the "do not disturb" sign, I expect no one to enter my room, at all, except in an emergency, or in a non-emergency where I'm present and have agreed to let someone in. That seems to me... entirely normal and reasonable to expect.
> there are more cameras and technology watching you here than anywhere else in the US
What does that have to do with it? Just because casinos want to watch what's going on to prevent cheating (or just too-good play), that doesn't mean the hotel-room privacy situation should go to shit.
My last few trips to Vegas I stayed in Airbnbs; I guess I will continue doing that for the foreseeable future when I visit.
This comes as news to me! I’ve stayed in Vegas numerous times since then, and I almost always decline housekeeping. I’ve never had anyone come into the room (to my knowledge, anyway). I wonder how selectively this is enforced.
I'm not sure. I didn't even open the door all the way for the guy, he seemed to just be checking a box that whoever was in the room was alive. If they can't get in because the door is jammed and there's no answer, I'd guess they assume there's an emergency and call whoever at the hotel has the tools to get in.
There's no way someone is "barging in" with a door chained (with normal-style chain or a bar-style chain) in under 30 seconds, probably a minute or more of finagling the long tool into place to get it undone.
While this is happening, the person on the inside can totally thwart the attack by just blocking the tool physically - it's hard enough to do this while you're not being interfered with.
The idea behind forcibly stopping someone from barging into your room is to slow down the interaction and gain control.
The goal is then to establish identity, purpose, and ultimately deescalate. And then if need-be call the police and/or chargeback your credit card later.
Until otherwise verified, this intruder is no different than a random burglar breaking-and-entering in the middle of the night.
> I don’t know why people expect privacy in Vegas, there are more cameras and technology watching you here than anywhere else in the US.
Yeah I can't imagine ever willingly going there (eg unless my work forces me to). It's a very curious choice for a community with so many privacy activists. The shooting excuse for the inspections is stupid. Anyone could walk in and set up in 10 minutes.
> what motive would they have that is so important that they insist on spending money on low skill headcount to enter thousands of rooms per day?
The motivation could merely be a desire to capriciously wield power over others. You see this in physical security careers from mall security up to actual law enforcement. Plenty of people get into these security-related roles simply for the ability to unaccountably bully and intimidate others, and will eagerly do so if given the chance, regardless of monetary cost or reward. I wouldn't be surprised if a hotel security apparatus were in favor of being allowed to enter rooms at will just because they want to.
> what motive would they have that is so important that they insist on spending money on low skill headcount to enter thousands of rooms per day?
95% of these rooms are being cleaned anyway by low-wage staff. The added 5% is such a small percentage.
But the shooting excuse is an excuse because they're not even liable for this. Any idiot can do the same from their private apartment. A mass shooter has no survival expectancy anyway. They can just rent a private flat and do it. Or they can just rent a room, bring their guns in and start shooting during the first day. It doesn't actually solve the problem at all. Only 24/7 video surveillance would do that which is obviously untenable in a hotel. Or strict gun controls which is why this isn't a problem in Europe but the US just can't get that into their heads.
The other reason I consider it an excuse is that in this case they are not causing hassle about firearms but about technical devices. Nothing to do with shootings at all. If the motive was purely looking for guns they wouldn't be harrassing unarmed defcon visitors.
I don't think they actually care about shootings but that it's dumb security theater to make customers feel safer which they probably see as a monetary benefit.
Knowing this now I definitely will refuse to visit Vegas even if my company tries to send me there on a business trip. Although to be fair I kinda have this policy already for the entire US because I'm not willing to give up my devices or my social media accounts to border patrol either.
> A court on Wednesday approved a settlement totaling $800 million from casino company MGM Resorts International and its insurers to more than 4,400 relatives and victims of the Las Vegas Strip shooting that was the deadliest in recent U.S. history.
A settlement is not admission of liability. It's done to avoid a determination on this. But I think it's ridiculous that they even tried to sue the venue.
Some knowledgeable lawyers must have concluded that there is a likelihood of some liability (whether rightly or wrongly) to result in willingly parting with $800M. So in practice, there is liability.
Or that the court case would end up costing that much, or that staying in the news because of the court case would end up costing that much. There's plenty of costs besides just what the actual judgement might end up being.
In the context of this discussion, there is no reason to distinguish liability from the judgment itself, or liability from legal costs of preventing the judgement.
The liability in this context is money leaving the business’s pocket due to performing or not performing X action, regardless of who the money goes to.
I'm fascinated by the juxtaposition of the idea that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" and the assumption that your bedroom should be searched every 24 hours because of a policy.
I had never in my life heard of this before now and I am no stranger to hotels.
I would go straight to the front desk, demand my money back for that day and then never stay with hotel again along with making sure the corporate office got a nice email about their bullshit policy.
Maybe over priced Vegas hotels can do this but any hotel I have ever stayed at needs to make the customer happy because the competition is so fierce. Most hotels will go out of their way to make sure you are happy. Not randomly inspect your room like you are a child.
Maids have access to your room if you stay at a hotel, along with most staff members. Many brands you are familiar with follow the Vegas model of 24 hours no access, someone is gonna see the room.
It is absolutely astonishing to me that Americans call their country "the land of freedom" while at the same time their society keeps on producing more and more bizarre ways to control the citizens, paralleled only by communist regimes. Usually when I try pointing this out they act confused and explain to me that I'm misunderstanding their idea of freedom. "You know what, no adult can be trusted to be left alone in their own room for 24 hours, the official policy is to make regular inspections" turns into "the hotel has freedom to check on their guests, if you don't like it you're free to go to a different hotel (closest one is 10h drive away)"
Some pretty bizzare things happen at UK airport security.
Our government is currently trying to use the recent riots as an excuse for even more surveillance and censorship.
The arguments include "the rioters used social media". That is one reason its going to be easy to catch them. They themselves were posting photos and videos - self-surveillance.
Unfortunately for the recipient of the violence, we can't bring people back from the dead, or unslash their faces with machetes, so not everyone's gonna be on board with your alternative.
You are framing it to sound very scary when its a short lived breakdown in law and order. A lot of people involved were not motivated by any particular ideology, but were just taking the opportunity to do things like looting. There is nothing that I can see in fascist ideology that motivates people to loot a Greggs.
It is very much what the media are doing: one local news website compared what happened in their town to Kristalnacht when what happened was 12 houses had windows broken and some cars were vandalised. Nasty, but hardly a fascist takeover.
On the other hand, the media do not balance it with equally wide reporting of things such as local builders doing free repairs on mosque in Southport, or the far larger crowds that turned out for counter protests.
Crime IS a normal occurrence. Riots will happen. You should not compromise human rights to deal with it.
There are blatantly racist social media posts - FB is infested, and I agree showing such posts so widely (no doubt because they get high engagement because people feel impelled to disagree with them) shows FB in a bad light.
One alternative is using the huge footprint people have left on social media (to say nothing of phone location data) to catch the people involved.
As a brown British person the riots have not caused me any great concern (contrary to what some posturing politicians may claim). Yes, it might be different if I lived in an area very close to where a riot occurred, but most people do not. I still think the UK is a lot less racist than the other countries I have lived or worked in, or no anything about, and a lot less racist than if was when I was young.
Check into a hotel room in Idaho and this won't happen. Check in to one of the hotels in the city who makes its money on tourism where the worst shooting in the US occurred and here we are. We are talking about 5 Miles of Las Vegas Blvd.
The fact that it can happen at all, anywhere, even on just 5 miles of Las Vegas Blvd, is a stark reminder that the US has very little in the way of legally-mandated privacy protections.
Mass shootings happen because the US has one of the most-armed citizenry in the developed world, and because we have ridiculously backward views about how easy it should be to put deadly weapons in the hands of anyone who wants one.
Daily room inspections are not going to stop any mass shooting where the shooter is aware of the inspections. The 2017 case was egregiously bad, certainly, with the shooter able to bring an insane amount of weaponry up to his room. But he could have been just as deadly with the contents of two or three regular-looking suitcases, something that wouldn't have raised any red flags during daily room inspections.
There hasn’t been another mass shooting on the strip in the following 7 years and this policy makes the scale much harder to replicate. I don’t know if this policy is responsible or what else is being done but to dismiss it as security theater seems too easy. If it is a deterrent, it is working and if it limits the scale of a future attack as mentioned I understand the policy.
You sure you're allowed to post this? You better double-check with your department of censorship.
Remember that you're also free to open a hotel that doesn't have this policy and there's plenty of cheap land to be had very near Vegas. If you're right that this is something people want then it should be quite successful, maybe it can host the next DefCon. That's the American way to solve the problem.
Additional regulation generally yields less overall freedom.
reply