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Larry Page: I'd Give Money to Elon Musk Before Charity

Elon Musk in talks with Google to bring driverless tech to Tesla cars

Elon Musk: I’ve known Larry (Page) since before he got venture funding for Google.

Elon Musk: With Jobs Gone, Google Will Win Mobile

They really are buddies. This story is as much about SpaceX as Google.

Who knows, it was Leahy's call.

Interesting, thanks for the link. According to the article at least, it sounds like the bill has been just delayed a bit longer rather than stalling outright. Also, the writer of that article appears optimistic that it could actually pass, which makes sense, given that it's apparently a bi-partisan bill.

Republicans want the law to require the losing party in a patent-infringement suit to pay the other’s legal fees. A reasonable idea, certainly. Democrats appear worried that some suits that do have merit may not be undertaken, provided the possibility of larger legal fees if an even reasonable suit fails.

Hopefully they'll hammer out a reasonable compromise. I can see the merits of both arguments here. The big issue is whether there have been any significant number of legitimate patent suits which would otherwise have been discouraged. Call me cynical, but I'd sort of be surprised if there actually were that many, given how badly the system is being abused right now. At this point, I'm probably willing to swing the pendulum a bit to the other side and go with "loser pays" penalties, since for so long there's been a massive financial incentive for actually abusing the system. I think it would help to balance the equation a bit. The law can always be amended in the future if the "loser pays" option turns out to be too harsh.

Should be interesting to see what happens with this.

Who knows, it was Leahy's call.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/...

"Images are truly ephemeral: They disappear after being viewed, from a user’s inbox as well as the Glimpse servers. Photos are shown for eight seconds, while video is just four seconds or shorter..."

The TSA's already gotten started on this one: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/...

Indeed, so it seems. Media says so, but i did not see this news outed officially by Google yet.

I read this at http://tweakers.net/nieuws/957...
which cited http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/...
but that lacks source, i for one did not find the original Google statement regarding business anywhere.

If true, i guess the gmail PGP they considered made it impossible to scan the emails anyway, so they might as well make a big deal out of it. First education ofcourse, it'll simplify that lawsuit and all. http://www.edweek.org/ew/artic...

Google will also soon stop scanning the accounts of Google Apps customers with Business, Government and legacy accounts for the free version.

- http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/...

yawn http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/...

Older article, but talks about how ISPs are making huge margins while actually reducing their capital investments:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Two more recent articles looking at the margins ISPs make:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/...
http://gigaom.com/2011/05/12/n...

True revenue and profit reports aren't easy to get ahold of for the big ISPs. Yes, I'm sure the profits are higher in higher density areas. No, I never made any comparisons to prices paid in North America vs. Europe and Asia. The fact remains that the big ISPs took huge amounts of money SPECIFICALLY to provide broadband to rural areas. They can't then turn around and say they couldn't do it because the cost was prohibitive due to population density. They knew the populations when they took the money. You make a statement like the big providers are going bankrupt and tell me I have no idea what I'm talking about, without providing any sources?

"Such launches are done with a Russian rocket right now"

more correctly, the launches are done with an American rocket, using a Russian engine (RD-180).

see: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lo...
http://www.parabolicarc.com/20...

(the article has it right; the summary is inaccurate).

Any chance this means Google is going to back-pedal on Google+ ?

Yes: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/...

Probably the same as now, like the lovechild of a weird European city car and a Soviet attack helicopter.

I think a batter question is, how will the Nissan Leaf compete with the Tesla E?

I'm assuming that there will be no active investigation of GitHub unless Horvath files a lawsuit. To me, I'm curious about the liability of the company because of TPW's wife's actions (IF TRUE). From :

"She says that the wife of the founder continued to show up at the office, sit next to her and “glare” at her for extended periods of time “as if trying to provoke a reaction.”

and...

"HR eventually asked the wife to not be on the same floor as Horvath. But according to Horvath’s recount, “she continued to find her way in and plant herself right next to wherever I was working.” This continued until her exit from the firm this past Thursday."

Private conversations are going to come down to she-said-she-said, but what about this psycho behavior? GitHub has to be at fault for SOMETHING here...

Building Blocks simply means any number of a variety of blocks, most notably wooden building blocks.
LEGOs are a trademarked branded construction toy that goes together in a very specific way.

The point of this is that it's about physical dexterity.

This article does not reference Lego.

You are absolutely correct. When I saw the edited headline of the article I submitted, I had a WTF! moment. But now, I'm somewhat ambivalent about the edit that trades "lego" for "toy blocks". I can see several reasons why the edited headline might be better for the discussion.

If I'd complain to the editors (who do pretty well for a thankless job) about anything, it's that they failed to post the related news link that I submitted.

Most artists don't expect anyone to actually pay money for their portfolio.

I was under the impression that established video game studios would consider a portfolio "better" if it contains contributions to a finished commercial game. This shows HR that a candidate not only can produce but has produced well enough to sell something. As Jon Evans of TechCrunch put in "Why The New Guy Can’t Code": "So what should a real interview consist of? Let me offer a humble proposal: don’t interview anyone who hasn’t accomplished anything. Ever." If anything, I guess a credit in a commercial game might help elevate a candidate's standing with HR from "we'll hire you if you already live here" to "we'll help pay for your relocation". But then what do I know? I've never been hired in the mainstream video game industry.

The notion that step #1 is, "asking people to pay, no strings attached for what you haven't made" when you haven't made anything yet is relatively recent.

An indie studio needs money to make the first thing. And when there isn't such money, a studio has to fall back to what its artists can put together alongside a day job in another industry, and that often means 2D pixel art.

So, is this just another update to shuffle a couple of buttons and checkboxes around or is there something else in this update?

Good luck finding the change log from Microsoft.

I'm assuming they've updated all the "SkyDrive" stuff to "OneDrive", since they lost the trademark lawsuit on that one.

That happened in some previous update I think. When I go to my user folder there's a folder named "OneDrive". Open it up and the breadcrumb navication calls it OneDrive. Yet when I check the actual path it's still actually "c:\users\Linuxisgarbage\SkyDrive" folder.

Nope. If you're seeing anything on the Windows GUI called "OneDrive", then you must have the update released today. I'm still waiting for the update to finish installing, but it definitely has always been called "SkyDrive" except on the web site.

Nope. I had noted the OneDrive / Skydrive thing two weeks ago, and I have Updates currently disabled (and am months behind). I also note that on my Windows 7 PC Skydrive changed to Onedrive. Looks like it was pushed out in February:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/...

On the Win 8.1 it can be as easy as changing the desktop.ini to include:

[.ShellClassInfo]
IconResource=C:\Users\LinuxisGarbage\AppData\Local\Microsoft\SkyDrive\SkyDrive.exe,1
LocalizedResourceName=OneDrive

Not that hard to push that out.

Intel Releases $99 "Minnowboard Max," An Open-Source Single-Board Computer

http://slashdot.org/submission...

##

"Not to be outflanked by rivals, Intel has released the $99 Minnowboard Max, a tiny single-board computer that runs Linux and Android. It is completely open source - you can check out the firmware and software here(1) - and runs a 1.91GHz Atom E3845 processor."

http://www.minnowboard.org/mee...

http://newsroom.intel.com/comm...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/...

(1) http://www.minnowboard.org/

Intel Releases $99 "Minnowboard Max," An Open-Source Single-Board Computer

http://slashdot.org/submission...

"Not to be outflanked by rivals, Intel has released the $99 Minnowboard Max, a tiny single-board computer that runs Linux and Android. It is completely open source - you can check out the firmware and software here(1) - and runs a 1.91GHz Atom E3845 processor."

http://www.minnowboard.org/mee...

http://newsroom.intel.com/comm...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/...

(1) http://www.minnowboard.org/

Yes as US gov protections in place for just such legal events eg safe from US gov surveillance without a warrant.

Snowden's published revelations cover much more than (admittedly reprehensible) warrantless spying on US citizens. For example, he revealed NSA's capability to record all telephone traffic of a foreign country.

Anyone alerting the Germans in 1943, that Enigma is compromised, would've been (justly) denounced as a traitor... What changed?

Not so fast, Ras. I said that transaction malleability was exploited by hackers; it was. My only error was confusing the Mt.Gox incident with the Silk Road 2 incident. Here, from the very first paragraph of this Tech Crunch article ( http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/... )

Silk Road 2 moderator Defcon reported in a forum post that hackers have used a transaction malleability exploit to hack the marketplace. The hackers stole over 88,000 4474.26 bitcoins worth $2,747,000, emptying the site’s escrow account.

The site used a central escrow service to send bitcoins from buyers to sellers. The hackers exploited the transaction malleability bug – essentially a way users can mask transfers and ask for the same amount of BTC multiple times – to clean out this wallet. This is the same bug that forced Mt. Gox to halt all withdrawals and recent updates have made average bitcoin wallets secure against this sort of attack. According to the site, hackers used the Silk Road’s automatic transaction verification system to order from each other and then request refunds for unshipped goods. Hackers were able to use the transaction malleability bug because the Silk Road used only transaction ID to confirm the transfer of bitcoins. You can read more about the problem here.

The fact that the Bitcoin software no longer has this bug does not change the fact that it once did have this bug, and that this bug has been exploited. I think I can be forgiven for having confused one multimillion dollar Bitcoin loss with another caused by the same underlying problem. :-)

But Mt.Gox and Silk Road 2 and every other incident is immaterial when taken individually. As I said in my post, let's leave that aside for a minute and focus on the real issue. I have seen people tying themselves in knots to defend Bitcoin exactly-as-is when that energy would be far better spent acknowledging the weakness in the ecosystem and laying out clear plans to eradicate them. Your own reply speaks about the Mt.Gox fiasco as if losing 350M to incompetence is somehow better than losing it to a targeted attack. The longer people deny the existence of these problems with the existing ecosystem, the longer it will take for cryptocurrencies to find a firm footing in the world. Which I think is a shame.

Finally, as for your "tinfoil hat" comment.... save the name-calling for the conspiracy theorists, of which I am not one. I have only said what many have said already, that Bitcoin is not yet ready for adoption by the masses. It currently, currently, lacks the necessary economic infrastructure to be used safely and effectively by the public. I don't know why that easily-supported statement bruises so many feelings.

Not so fast, Ras. I said that transaction malleability was exploited by hackers; it was. My only error was confusing the Mt.Gox incident with the Silk Road 2 incident. Here, from the very first paragraph of this Tech Crunch article ( http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/... )

Silk Road 2 moderator Defcon reported in a forum post that hackers have used a transaction malleability exploit to hack the marketplace. The hackers stole over 88,000 4474.26 bitcoins worth $2,747,000, emptying the site’s escrow account.

The site used a central escrow service to send bitcoins from buyers to sellers. The hackers exploited the transaction malleability bug – essentially a way users can mask transfers and ask for the same amount of BTC multiple times – to clean out this wallet. This is the same bug that forced Mt. Gox to halt all withdrawals and recent updates have made average bitcoin wallets secure against this sort of attack. According to the site, hackers used the Silk Road’s automatic transaction verification system to order from each other and then request refunds for unshipped goods. Hackers were able to use the transaction malleability bug because the Silk Road used only transaction ID to confirm the transfer of bitcoins. You can read more about the problem here.

The fact that the Bitcoin software no longer has this bug does not change the fact that it once did have this bug, and that this bug has been exploited. I think I can be forgiven for having confused one multimillion dollar Bitcoin loss with another caused by the same underlying problem. :-)

But Mt.Gox and Silk Road 2 and every other incident is immaterial when taken individually. As I said in my post, let's leave that aside for a minute and focus on the real issue. I have seen people tying themselves in knots to defend Bitcoin exactly-as-is when that energy would be far better spent acknowledging the weakness in the ecosystem and laying out clear plans to eradicate them. Your own reply speaks about the Mt.Gox fiasco as if losing 350M to incompetence is somehow better than losing it to a targeted attack. The longer people deny the existence of these problems with the existing ecosystem, the longer it will take for cryptocurrencies to find a firm footing in the world. Which I think is a shame.

Finally, as for your "tinfoil hat" comment.... save the name-calling for the conspiracy theorists, of which I am not one. I have only said what many have said already, that Bitcoin is not yet ready for adoption by the masses. It currently, currently, lacks the necessary economic infrastructure to be used safely and effectively by the public. I don't know why that easily-supported statement bruises so many feelings.

There's no indication that it was anyone's decision but the hula-hoopers' to gyrate their own bodies - and, given the context, if there had been any pressure to make them do so, it almost certainly would have been mentioned in the article.

To be honest, as a man, I found that paragraph of the article a bit offensive, when she said that "it felt unsafe". Did it feel like the men sitting on a bench and gawking at the hoopers were going to attack them, just because they saw a couple of hula-hooping women? Does she believe men to be that violent? Imagine if she'd made the same sort implication for some black people - that would be as racist as all get out.

That said, I read the rest of the article, and that's the only paragraph I feel that way about. The rest of it (another link for the lazy) sounds like a serious case of a founder and his wife bullying an employee.

This was set in motion 2011. Searching for H2-11 (to see what it was) I came across how the jets were in the position to get the fuel, that "Google has no official relation with H211", and heck of a lot of information on this -in one link (dated Dec 11, 2011).

"The Google leaders and their friends are not the only ones using the jets. NASA conducts flights on the planes with its own researchers and equipment to gain scientific data. That deal was part of the unusual agreement with NASA allowing the Google team the use of Moffett Field, an airport closed to private aircraft."

Below is from the same link and explains NASA and Google's ties at least at Moffit field, I added the links for hanger one.

"The Mercury News reported the three top executives at Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, are offering to pay $33 million to finish the restoration of the historic airship hangar at Moffett Field. The giant structure, built in the 1930s and called Hangar One, "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... (1930s as a naval airship hangar for the USS Macon)

Save Hanger one
http://www.savehangarone.org/

"The jets are not owned or operated by Google. Instead, the 3 Google leaders operate the fleet through an LLC called H211. Google has no official relation with H211. Ken Ambrose, the Director of Operations for H211, announced the funding offer at a public meeting this week. He also complained that NASA, which owns Hangar One, has taken too long to respond to the offer.

On first glance, it sounds like a purely noble gesture by the Google trio. The building is in the middle of a project to strip toxic materials in its siding. Lack of taxpayer funding to complete the project has raised fears that could lead to the demolition of one of the world’s largest freestanding structures.

But, as the Mercury News reported, “There’s a catch: They want to use up to two-thirds of the floor space of the hangar to house their fleet of eight private jets.” Most of the members on the Hangar One committee, along with the local congresswoman, support the idea, although there is some concern about the public-private partnership."

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/...

You don't seem able to follow simple facts. The fact of the matter is that these are private jets bought by executives, who happen to work for Google, with their own private money and for their own private needs. That makes it have nothing to do with the Google corporation. Not a single penny from Google Inc. went to this company. You're clearly the mook on this one.

From TechCrunch:

CarPlay only grants access to select applications installed on the connected phone. At launch, CarPlay only works with Spotify, Beats Radio, iHeartRadio, and Stitcher. Sorry, Rdio fans.

Tell me again how this is somehow better than the Bluetooth connection everybody is using now?

The other 3 billion is for retention bonuses http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/...

Why does /. have so many problems with links these past few days? can anyone explain what happened? Never noticed this problem before.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/...

I have a feeling most of the upset people are renters. The property owners are all too glad for the influx of rich tenants. It sucks for the renters of course because rent goes up, but their income doesn't. They're being pushed out of their home while they see a private bus full of yuppies drive by. It's an easy target.

Quite obviously, an influx of wealth to a particular area can be a good thing, but city planners have to make the most of it. This seems to be a case of stagnant development at a time when they need it most.

This is the same with Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, BBM, and all the rest. At least I can copy my iPhone's messages to a PC and archive them.

Apple's security documents show just how secure it actually is, with iMessage using public key cryptography. Are we going to also complain that PGP locks you in too now?

You are correct about the behavior, but I think I can explain why Apple made the choices at work here.

It turns out iMessages are cryptographically secured with public key cryptography using a per device key. There is a recent Techcrunch Article that details what they have released, but it appears to be a highly secure implementation. Each device has a private key that never leaves the device. An iMessage is actually encrypted to multiple public keys so each device can read it. No one outside the device holder, not even Apple, has the ability to decrypt messages.

I think the argument Apple would make, and I would agree with is to fall back to SMS would be insecure. It's possible to conceive of ways an attacker could prevent an iMessage from being delivered (a Denial of Service attack, for instance). That could force a fallback to SMS, which is often not well secured and/or permanently archived by the carrier or governments. Worse, with your algorithm simply sending someone a text message from a spoofed source would clear the bit, and might result in an insecure communication.

As a result, I would argue if you value strong encryption and privacy, Apple's choices make perfect sense. Turn on strong crypto when you can, and don't automatically fall back to something without strong crypto.

I'm still okay with recommending Android to non-technical users, given that most of them manage just fine on Macs and PCs that face the same primary vector for attack (i.e. the user downloading and installing a trojan).

That said, yeah, Android is really getting a disproportionate share of the malware. More recent reports peg it at 99% of all mobile malware, and Pichai is trying to brush that away as a simple factor of market share, which is rather short-sighted. iOS currently sits around a 16% market share (and falling, due to Android outpacing iOS' rate of growth), which should be more than enough to attract malware. Especially so when you consider that iOS still attracts a comparable (some would argue better) amount of third-party support from developers making apps, as well as the fact that we still get reports like these (tl;dr: this last Christmas season, iOS users accounted for 5x more online purchases than Android users and spent roughly 2x as much on each purcase), making them potentially much more lucrative targets to developers of adware and malware.

Yet, despite all of that, iOS malware rates aren't even being registered on any of the mobile malware reports I can find from the last quarter. I recall them being at something like 0.07% the quarter before that, with Blackberry even registering more malware than them.

Definatly not true.

Really? The trend has been downward for a number of years for everyone below the age of 55, a much as 59% for teens. For those older than 55 there is an upward trend, but overall the trend is down. http://www.bostonglobe.com/bus... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12... http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/...

That is a well known fact, such a poll is rather useless.
I don't know how accurate graphs like this are: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/...
However WhatsApp has a hughe user base in Europe and Asia.

VP9 is going to be supported for both encode and decode on the next generation of chipsets and devices from ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba. That's a long list of heavy hitters. Maybe they know something you don't.

All major ARM chipset manufacturers have committed to including the VP9 hardware codec. My Nexus 5 already has the VP8. Soon even the $40 tablet will have it. The license is free, the hardware design is free, so there should be no problem including this high-value IP.

These new hardware partners include ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba.

The legal blogs are a bit different, but they're not without their own unique hazards...

I mean, PJ's little blog (I'm sure the readers have heard of it ) got a metric ton of attention, and likely boosted Pamela's career nicely, but she had to put up with some rather vicious human beings trying to root her out (and force her to testify) during SCO v. IBM, and eventually shut down thanks to the NSA, and continued harassment from various corners.

Agreed on Feynman, though... Me, I think that Albert Einstein would have made a truly badassed blogger, if his surviving witticisms are any measure. :)

...and yet, it could have been a nerd story, if only they'd have given up a bit of bias. I don't eat from the super bowl, but I'm lead to believe that Goldieblox advertised on it: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/...

The amusing thing is that I found the ad, and the product, to be a bit sexist itself, even while it aims for more gender equality. Part of a big problem is the notion that many boys and girls toys need to be different in the first place, and that you have to color a "boy's toy" pink before it becomes a "girl's toy." It didn't used to be that way, it's only in the last few decades that toy stores have been segregating the genders. I heartily recommonend this article, and while I don't agree with everything, it makes some good points.

...and yet, it could have been a nerd story, if only they'd have given up a bit of bias. I don't eat from the super bowl, but I'm lead to believe that Goldieblox advertised on it: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/...

Surely engineering/tech toys for girls *is* news for nerds? Why on earth would you run a story about advertising on the super bowl without mentioning it, not least because it didn't cost them millions to put on.

#slashdotsucks

It is good to shine the light on stuff like that, but let's be sure we keep the scale of the problem in context, since referring to it as a "massive problem" is quite a bit of an overstatement. Moreover, the connotation involved in the comparison with Google and Amazon suggests a false equivalency, when the fact is that one of them is suffering a malware incidence rate that is over two orders of magnitude greater than the one with the lowest rate (which, when you look at the raw numbers, isn't actually that bad, but they're still not in the same vicinity as each other by any stretch of the imagination).

A single proof of concept that's already been addressed (according to your source) and has yet to be seen in the wild beyond that initial research experiment is a negligible concern, not a massive one. It's worth sharing and worth calling Apple to task on, but let's not overstate the issue.

Link

and avoid a war with their customers.

Exactly. Nail hit squarely on the head.

Samsung leaked a Tizen phone just to get Google's attention.
Google extracted a patent deal in exchange for getting out of the hardware deal, and now they complete their end of the bargain.

+1

Google scares me. It's getting more and more pervasive - and invasive.

A while ago, I installed Waze on my Android device as an alternative navigation app to avoid using Google Maps, because I don't want Google to know where I'm going (or where I am, or how fast I drive, or anything at all about me.)

Guess what? Waze has been purchased by Google. It's sickening. Google is silently cornering us.

I'm at a point where, whenever I install a new app or use a new PC application, I check whether Google owns the company that makes it, or whether it made it, or whether for one reason or another, Google has a vested interest in it. I used to do that with Microsoft, now Google has joined them in my list of evil-companies-to-avoid-at-all-cost. Only with Google, it's getting really, really tough because they're f*ing everywhere...

A World in which the Deepmind AI tied with Google Glass reduces humans to the "hands and feet" of the AI.
Google has agreed to establish an ethics board to ensure DeepMind’s artificial intelligence technology isn’t abused.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/...
Which is more likely?

Oh well at least Facebook's offer to Deepmind was declined =)

Dell also made the news by buying out the whole capacity of some polish startup: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/...

Well, then, if it's not a sufficient reason to say H264 is unsafe and troublesome, then it's not sufficient reason to say WebM is unsafe or troublesome.

Except that Google ended up licensing the MPEG LA patents whilst AVC has been in use for ages and no one who has paid the license fee for the MPEG LA patents has successfully been sued by a third party.

If you look here

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/google-and-mpeg-la-sign-licensing-agreement-covering-googles-vp8-video-codec-clearing-the-way-for-wider-adoption/

It looks like Google ended up paying the MPEG LA for the patents that WebM infringed. Google then licenses those patents out for free to anyone who wants to use WebM.

Fallacy: Appeal to emotions. h.264 has hardware support because the few that seek rents from it (the eight MPEG-2 patent owners -- Fujitsu, Panasonic, Sony, Mitsubishi, Scientific Atlanta, Columbia University, Philips and General Instrument, CableLabs and certain individuals) have organized hardware support, as a good investment. When open codecs are dominant, they too will supported more widely by hardware and these eight companies will have to follow. References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/02/googles-vp9-video-codec-gets-backing-from-arm-nvidia-sony-and-others-gives-4k-video-streaming-a-fighting-chance/

faggots suck open source dicks

Come on Slashfags, tell us all about how OUYA is better than everything else.
 
Massive fail... RIGHT UP THE ASS!!!!

I believe the article is accurate. Back in 2010, a senior staff engineer received a pre-IPO offer from Facebook, but Google gave him $3.5M to keep him. I strongly suspect that person from 2010 and this person from this current article are the same, and it's probably Jeff Dean, one of the engineers who created Map-Reduce (which led to Hadoop and all that jazz) and other engineering feats.

Chances are, Jeff Dean makes several grades above that.