Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I like big fines and I cannot lie”.
Should we talk about the big Seagate van yeah, rather the fine for violating an export ban? I feel like I’ve done all the topics. Up till now, Seagate technology Holdings has admitted to wrongdoing and agreed to pay 300 to agreed to pay a 300 million dollar fine to settle allegations that it sold 7.4 million hard disks to Huawei violating a 2020 export ban. This is the largest single administrative penalty ever levied by the U.S Commerce Department’s Bureau of industry and security, and it is meant to represent double the estimated profit Seagate accrued from the illicit sales seagate’s annual net income for 2022 was 1.6 billion and their estimated profit from Sales was a period because we don’t have that note. I’M not I’m not sure what happened there.
Yeah uh, but you know probably 150 million, based on that the settlement was meant to be double the expected profits. That makes sense we can. We can solve for x.
Here, let’s go yeah yeah, very good uh, some background information in August of 2020 uh, the U.S Commerce Department, expanded export restrictions against Huawei after they allegedly tried to allegedly try to obtain Advanced Technologies to undermine U.S national security, while huawei’s two other primary suppliers stopped shipments. Seagate continued sales for 11 months as huawei’s sole supplier, Seagate, even extended multiple lines of credit worth one billion dollars to Huawei to help them purchase more hard drives and, to be clear, everyone knew that this export ban was going on. Oh yeah, it was like the biggest news, yeah yeah we talked about it on land show, that’s even like the probably one of the smaller ones.
Talking about like every news agency. They 100 knew what they were doing. So here’s what I want to know. On the one hand, I think you – and I probably both agree – that if a corporation breaks the law, the fines should be such that it really isn’t worth it to break that law again yeah, and I think we would probably agree that this is positive. In that sense, but here’s my problem with it is that it’s it sort of comes across, maybe not hypocritical, but um. I guess the cynic in me looks at this and goes huh, so it turns out that you do know how to properly punish this sort of behavior when you actually care, but when the transgression is against the individual user.
It’S like today. I don’t know four dollars per user. You know class action whatever. Actually most of it just goes to the lawyers. This seems like a good system.
Where is this Justice for individual users, particularly when it comes to data privacy or when it comes to other rights violations? You know how is it that you know someone like a TransUnion man, I remember being so mad transunions own website back when I had to sign up for it for credit monitoring, because something something my insurance wouldn’t cover me unless I had credit monitoring something something it Doesn’T matter the point is I had to have this stupid service that I signed up for for credit monitoring because of some identity? Something incident that took place and transunions own website had a like a a help, article talking about the importance of two factor and at the time transunion’s own accounts didn’t support two-factor. I pointed this out to the rep and they’re just like and how many, how many breaches have they suffered, and so I’m still at least one yeah and and we’re not talking breaches of trivial things right, like you know, oh man, I mean nothing’s trivial, nothing’s trivial. When it comes to to personal data, but we’re talking, you know, sin numbers which are our equivalent of an SSN right, a social security number. These are things that, while technically can be changed, are a royal pain in the butt to change and can be extremely beneficial to narrative Wells right like there’s, there’s databases out there that are going to have basically every piece of information that you could ever want to Keep out of people’s hands pretty much across the board at this point, because nobody is actually punishing this stuff in a way that is Meaningful and forces them to take data security seriously. I mean we went through. This was an interesting conversation. I was complaining to Luke about how our new password manager takes a long time to open and he was like. Well, let me tell you about that: that’s because they are actually decrypting it. The reason our old password manager was so fast. Yeah was because it wasn’t being stored at all times in an encrypted Manner, and I’m like oh security, is better freaking.
Amazing, then yeah. The usability of the the stuff we’re using now is is genuinely worse in like a lot of ways, in my opinion, but theoretically it’s more secure. So, on the one hand yeah I’m happy, but on the other hand no I’m actually like pretty pissed off right, because this is just yet another double standard and I’m I’m just kind of tired of it. So yeah show us: you actually mean business there, uh Dan.
That just still says the thing we’re doing. We did too way to go dance, keeping us in line it’s supposed to be additional topics, additional ones yeah. You can do as many as you want. Until I tell you to do something else, oh, oh all, right, .