281–290 of 457 posts
Is this the first case of a company's data being sold at bankruptcy for a significant sum? I'm genuinely unsure. Where there such value in this type of data before? Is every bankruptcy manager looking at this and seeing how every bankruptcy can now raise a few million more dollars?
No. I seem to remember that when pets.com failed, in 2000, their customer data was to be sold.
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Just a reminder that about 40% of the email conversations in the last 20 years are already in Google’s possession with the identifying data. (About another 40% are in Microsoft’s.) If they want to do that they already can, thanks to the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE” overriding every single other possible concern. Which is funny to point out on a post about Spirit, since that was an airline built to serve…
> the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE” In the early pioneering days of the commercialized Internet, email addresses were inextricably linked to your ISP. You paid for an ISP connection and you got an email box, with MTA and MUA service to match. You were reluctant to switch or leave your ISP, because that also meant leaving behind your email address. Of course, a minority of nerds got around this with their…
Interesting proposition. It seems to me like the first round of this (Hotmail, Yahoo, the free types of accounts AOL offered, Juno, etc) was not about monetizing the data, but about acquiring sticky loyal traffic for their overall portals, to monetize with ads. Remember in the early days you'd log into Yahoo or whatever and the first thing you'd see was your inbox, then later on all these services added a welcome page that would have a bunch of "news/sports/entertainment" type stories, ads, and links to more Yahoo! services. Email was being used then as a loss leader to guarantee you'll be returning several times a week minimum.
I believe it was Google who broke the seal on reading our email to show us targeted ads.
I hear what you're saying that especially for those who go through exceptional circumstances, a free email untethered to any billing account is useful.[1] But it's still sad to me that that concept - admittedly very compelling to Gen-X and millennials who were going through the chaos of college in the 90s and 2000s when email was becoming popular - ended up cementing this idea forever. Both by establishing these identities on a few popular commercial domains like gmail.com, hotmail.com, and yahoo.com, and by setting the expectation that "email shouldn't cost even $1 a year." Most of us pay $60-100 a month for an ISP and another $60-100 a month for a cell phone plan, and $0 of that money pays for email.
[1] I'd argue that for everyone fortunate enough to have more stability of accounts, homes and such, the "moving" problems could have been easily solved by a regulation kind of like cell phone number portability, which shockingly worked out quite well.
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Your comment reminded me of a funny interaction I had a week or so ago. I got a call that started with the usual automated message, "This call is being recorded." After the person joined, I pushed the record button on my iPhone, "This call is being recorded." They were surprised and asked why I'm recording. I said, "You're recording, so I'm recording too." The rep insisted that the company doesn't like this but that…
"I have nothing to hide" -> "Ok take off your cloth". Privacy is a useful social construct not some abstract mathematical concept. Everyone has stuff to hide and that's ok.
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I suppose consider yourself lucky that you haven't yet been inconvenienced by an issue completely within the airline's control and been offered $50 in funny money even though you had to pay out of pocket for your dingy hotel and transport in/out of the airport at 11pm/6am the next morning. And no, they won't reimburse that, because you could have slept on the terminal floor for free I on the other hand will never und…
Because airlines don't -and can't- promise incident free travel. They promise to get you to your destination. They don't like engine problems and the domino effect that has on their routing any more than you do. Saying this as someone with over a million miles flown, I've seen the worst sides of airlines. But let's be real, their slim margins cannot support bonusing out every passenger with a sob story about getting…
Critically they promise "by a certain time" as well. Surely with so many miles you are aware of the "significant disruption to my travel plans" aspect to getting compensated for a service that they failed to deliver.
Plane crews timing out on the tarmac at midnight forcing everyone aboard to lose a day of travel is not a "sob story" it is a systemic and purposeful optimization on the airline's part, a gamble that they can put up enough customer service phone menus and hoops that they only have to comp a small portion of customers whose time and money they've misappropriated.
ETA: my example above is to point out that even in the common failure cases airlines are awful, and as OP shares, even worse in the rare engine failure case. Yeah, they don't directly control that the engine failed (unless we start talking about how lack of maintenance and overworked mechanics contribute to that, which we should, and is under their control btw) but a hundred bucks for being stranded in the jungle is an insult no matter how you slice it
About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…
I'll never understand this attitude toward airlines. What did you want them to do in this situation? Keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings? It sounds like the airline did the right thing here but you were still mad?
I think that in the EU, compensation for such an event is at least 600€, plus all expenses paid (including meals, hotel, etc...). The airline most likely offered $100 as an attempt to settle for way less than what they legally owe.
Without further information, we can't really blame the company for the incident itself, and they may have had no other option regarding what happened in Manaus, but they definitely had the option of offering proper compensation instead of threats.
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I suppose consider yourself lucky that you haven't yet been inconvenienced by an issue completely within the airline's control and been offered $50 in funny money even though you had to pay out of pocket for your dingy hotel and transport in/out of the airport at 11pm/6am the next morning. And no, they won't reimburse that, because you could have slept on the terminal floor for free I on the other hand will never und…
These situations are regulated in Europe. But then corporates go brainwashing on tv that too much regulations are killing business. You can have rights or ease of business, nailing both, sounds difficult.
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There's something about circles of control in this, that makes the difference. If I publish information about myself, that's about me, and it's in my control. If someone else shares information about me, without my consent, and someone uses that to nose in on me, that feels creepy and problematic.
If you find that concerning, I recommend asking Claude or Codex to analyze all your HN comments and build a profile of you (I recommend that to everyone, not trying to single you out btw.) It takes about 20 minutes. It was eye opening and somewhat unsettling how accurate it was when I ran it on my own data. Even worse, there’s NO way to delete your old HN comments.
About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…
I'll never understand this attitude toward airlines. What did you want them to do in this situation? Keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings? It sounds like the airline did the right thing here but you were still mad?
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They failed to uphold their end of the contract and caused OP to experience damages.
Poor op. /s This is the kind of attitude that puts pressure on airlines and thus pilots to fly even when situation is dubious.
They can carry insurance or spend the correct amount on maintenance so this doesn't happen.
About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…