David Rice heading to Apple as global security lead

I wonder if some hack his Facebook, email, etc would he lose his job with apple?

Private industry, unfortunately, usually has to be dragged kicking and screaming to do things that protect consumers eg auto safety, increased gas mileage, emission standards, food safety, clean air and water to name a few.

The only effective way it can be done is with some national standards which can only be enacted by the federal government.

Computer system security or rather insecurity is a major problem. Throughout the year their are reports of huge breaches at large corporations and institutions resulting in the release of person and financial for millions of people who expected their information to be secure. Only the federal government can effectively force these institutions to have better security.

Without regulation many corporations treat the costs that arise when a consumer is damaged by their action or inaction as a cost of doing business, not as a reason to change their practices. That makes the process of change too slow. Only regulation can speed the required changes in those cases.

Now that apple's the second largest US company, I suppose it only makes sense they'd start with the rent seeking. Push your costs onto the taxpayer and pass heavy regulation to keep out small competitors. Happens with every large industry from rail roads to meat packing to airlines to the auto industry.

Wrong to want to add a tax. Only a government can tax therefore you'd be giving even more control to a slothful, inefficient government that will exploit the opportunity to generate revenue while simultaneously crippling any efforts by private sector leaders like Apple to implement real changes and forcing companies at all levels to implement even more 'backdoors' for them to get into our systems. I'm sorry, but our government drags down almost anything it touches to a crawl. We need less government, less regulation and more proactive leadership like Apple has done to stay well ahead of the game and not allow a 'problem' to sit long enough for the feds to feel they need to get involved.