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Schmidt: G+ 'Identity Service,' Not Social Network
David Gerard writes "Eric Schmidt has revealed that Google+ is an identity service, and the 'social network' bit is just bait. Schmidt says 'G+ is completely optional,' not mentioning that Google has admitted that deleting a G+ account will seriously downgrade your other Google services. As others have noted, Somewhere, there are two kids in a garage building a company whose motto will be 'Don't be Google.'"
Yet another useless marketing buzzword upon the massive pile of existing, meaningless Web 2.0 buzzwords.
will be sued the second they stick their heads out cause someone holds a patent of a fucking text entry box
On one hand, I cannot believe Google is doing this.
On the other hand, I cannot believe I fell for Google's "Don't Be Evil". While I used to wish for Google Wallet to come out and take over from Evil Paypal, at least, with Paypal, you know what they are doing. Always doing everything they can screw you over.
Google promises you with sweetness and honey... and then betrays you, which is even worse.
And for everyone who says you don't have to use G+ - it is *NOT* G+, it is Google Profile that is the problem, G+ is a component of Google Profile. If your Google Profile is disabled, a shit load of other services are impacted. Yeah, don't use Google. Sure.
Looking for alternatives now.
bing is not THAT bad.
Looks like some random forum post to me...no recording or exact transcript...the guy even admits he's paraphrasing (albeit he's doing his best).
An optional service that is tied to other optional services.
You mad about your free optional services bro?
I use google for email, maps, and homepage for RSS feeds.
Any of those are taken away, I can find alternatives very easily.
[Google CEO Eric Schmidt] replied by saying that G+ was build primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they're going to build future products that leverage that information.
Straight from the horse's mouth:
You are the product, not the consumer.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Pretty slanted summary. By "identity service", I interpret Schmidt as meaning that they prefer people use their own real identity because that makes it a better service for users. As we see on Slashdot, comments posted by anonymous cowards are only occasionally worth much. And the "bait" comment is completely fabricated.
What do all companies with power want? ...
More power!
Would it be too much to ask for people, when submitting a story, to keep their bias out of it and let us form our own opinion. If you want to voice your _opinion_, save it for the comments section. Let's leave story summaries to, you know, summaries.
This summary couldn't have been more obviously anti-Google biased if it tried. It's utterly tedious trying to stay informed about geek news while being bombarded with such overwhelming biases. Its annoying in the comments section, but that's where I expect to see it.
I know, I know. I must be new here...
What alternatives do you use?
For Searching i mean.
It's not that there are no alternatives. It's that I have become used to Google, and their interfaces are clean. Remember search before Google? Page full of crap.
Same kind of thing with all the other things.
It's kind of sad, but the evidence is getting stronger and stronger that capitalism is worse for the average person than communism, in spite of the failure of the USSR (which likely would not have occurred if not for the arms race pressure with the USA).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
From the summary:
From the article
So the article is at complete opposites with the posted summary. Did the OP just link to the article because they thought more links would increase the chance of story acceptance, or were they deliberately trying to mislead?
Not for "Google Apps For Your Domain", though, since we still can't have Google Profiles on that service. (Feature?)
If you used Gmail as your primary mailbox/frontend then it's quite painful. Yeah, it was free, but it's self defeating to punish people for trying out G+. I didn't for exactly this reason: I don't want to play with fire.
Been using alternatives a while ago. That includes Chrome and a zillion other services Google provides.
Google does evil, well duh, like everyone elses before when they become too big. And after that, they usually fall.
So far the only sensitive thing I have seen to counter that is to force the company into separate entities. It's what Samsung does, actually. It's not perfect - at all - but it's an attempt I suppose.
To undermine Google.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and our "citation" is to a Google+ status update. Not an article. Not even a blog post. A status update. The conclusions from this summary don't even follow the post that was linked. This is just... bad.
I keep saying it The cost of free has to high a price in this age. Oh and does Google offer all the services for a price without tracking? i dont use anything google so i really dont know.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Every time a post about G+ or Facebook pops up I am reminded of the good old days of IRC when you could socialize with your friends without going through an evil multinational corporation.
I can't even count the number of friends that I don't talk to anymore only because they abandoned IRC, or even real life get-togethers, for Facebook (and G+).
They killed my entire account, including my email account without warning because of something they didn't like on Yahoo Answers.
I don't mind Google wanting people to use real names so much. Unless you're a celebrity using a stage name, it's really not a problem.
Just use a fake name. Google has no way of knowing.
None of my dozens of gmail accounts are under my real name. My facebook profile and twitter account are also under fake names. I've never had any problems.
The USSR collappsed after years of spending all their mone fighting the talibans in Afghanistan, then armed by the US. Now its the US fighting the talibans year after year...
In capitalism and fascism, the powerful betrays the consumers/subjects. And exploits them.
They only bullshitted you, when they, between the lines, said something like: you have a choice.
It reminds me of a George Carlin bit called, you have no rights, you have owners.
For the american audience:
No, I'm not a commie.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/229401282
Do you think they meant the Google+ identity service?
Yes, it is horrible google is sending all those people to Siberia to work in the gulags. You are an idiot. It would be nice if your real name was attached to your post so everyone in the world knew what an idiot you were,
How many times does someone parrot the "oh, they're evil now"?
because they call it an identity service? really?
Troll less, please.
If you want to worry about a company, worry about facebook + microsoft working together.
While it is factual that those things occurred in that order, that was a minor economic cost for the USSR, the implication that it was causal is quite the stretch. The arms race was a massive cost.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Run your own crawler, web/mail server on a plug computer
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
It's the expectation.
With Microsoft and Facebook, you *KNOW* they are out to get you.
With Google, you don't expect it. My G+ profile was in limbo for over a month and I couldn't even get them to take a look at it - the damned "click this and we will review your name" link even disappeared!
It's like this - when your girlfriend or family spurns you and locks you out - you totally did not expect it, and the impact is far worse.
First then they came for sluts with a bunch of emo myspace pictures, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a slut with a bunch of emo myspace pictures.
Then then they came for slashdot posters who didn't like sluts with a bunch of emo myspace pictures, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a slashdot poster who didn't like sluts with a bunch of emo myspace pictures.
Then then they came for slashdot posters who comment on comments posted by other slashdot posters who didn't like sluts with a bunch of emo myspace pictures, and there was no one left to speak out for me.
The USA has more prisoners and more forced labor. Granted, most of that is not happening in Alaska, but our prisoner fatality rates are still pretty competitive.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Gosh, Communism sure has worked out well everywhere else. You're obviously right. Communist policies such as taking land from farmers and parceling it out to the Common People who didn't know how or have any desire to farm were absolutely sound ideas, that only failed because of EVIL MEAN CAPITALISM!
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
The way to think about this is that G+ is part of a very long list of things that people can do together using Google tools and services. It's the part of the system that identifies a person as a person ('identity service'), really the linchpin of the whole system of person-to-person networking. The "social" uses of this are but one application of the identity service.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Why are there reports that people lost Gmail access from earlier G+ account suspensions? Did Google actually do that, or were people confused somehow?
Google: Gmail suspensions are unrelated to Google+ suspensions. It's possible, and an unfortunate coincidence, for users to have both products suspended at the same time, for separate reasons. Earlier in the summer there was some confusion around SMS verification, which we addressed here.
I am considering "downgrading" my G+ account after reading this but let's not spread any fud here.
Having said that, I'm not quite sure why Google is being such a dick about this real name policy. It's really quite possible that they already know exactly who you are so they have all the info they need, so why give yourself such a bad buzz (pun intended) about this anal-retentive real names policy.
People get so upset when a free online service wants to make money off of freely submitted data. Gee. Who woulda thunk it? Maybe the question is really: Are there ANY on line services that are required for Life, Liberty, and the pursuit or happiness? As for "social network" anonymity: There was a time people social networked by going to churches, clubs, and various events IN PERSON. Security? There was once a group of individuals who dedicated their fortunes, life, liberty and sacred honor to found a new nation. You can read their signatures on the Declaration of Independence.
... a social networking requirement? It never has been before.
When the heck did this expectation creep into peoples brains that any new social network must be the ultimate vehicle for social justice for all the oppressed people of the world, or be the or the ultimate tool for self-important, angsty, psuedonyming blowhards who want to spout off their crazy philosophies and conspiracy theories without having to use their real names to do it (because obviously the powers that be want to shut them up!)? Really?
I like to use social networks to communicate and socialize with people. I'm sorry for all the oppression in the world, but hey - G+, Facebook, et al. maybe arent your best tools to fight it, though I'm sure they will, in some instances, be helpful.
This is all just... a little silly.
Tell me about it.
Signed,
Google Apps user.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Yes, capitalism has had no obvious failures of policy to compete.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Obviously there needs to be real people tied to these accounts, they're not worth anything if they're fake people or pets. Facebook regularly deletes profiles it deems are not "real", too.
At the end of the day, share what you are comfortable with. It's not like this is Google Mortgage we're talking about, or Google Driver's License. There is no one standing over anyone's shoulder screaming "YOU WILL USE GOOGLE AND YOU WILL LIKE IT!" Google sells information about you...everybody sells information about you...but they can only sell the information you give them. Buy a car, your info is sold. Go to college, your info is sold. Buy a house, your info is sold. Apply for a credit card, your info is sold. Look at your junk mail after any of these activities if you need verification of that. Hell, I started receiving a bunch of new junk mail for third party car warranties and auto repair coupons after I registered my car last time with the DMV, so even government agencies are monetizing your personal info now. That is far more troubling to me because it's not like I can opt out of the DMV if I want to legally drive in this state.
You want an anonymous social network? Go ahead and start one up...good luck paying for it. Everyone has a choice here....we need to remember that.
Firstly, is the first source reputable? I never heard of Andy Carvin. Why is he the only one reporting it?
Secondly, the reasons which are given are silly:
"so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they're going to build future products that leverage that information. "
Google has my Gmail. So it already knows my name. When people who know me send me emails, they generally use my name. If you use it as a primary email and send your CV to companies - then they potentially have a crapton more of info. They can easily harvest my name from there. Identity service? With all the stuff Google already knows about me? Not really needed.
Also what does my name have to do with anything? User #39430432 likes linux, /. and images of llamas. If my name is Joe Smith or John Smith it makes no difference.
> a shit load of other services are impacted
The linked article quotes a Google spokesperson that the services impacted are, all told:
Am I the only one around here who wouldn't be impacted by that? I did play around with Buzz but frankly, I didn't use it much and wouldn't miss it.
"""Eric Schmidt has revealed that Google+ is an identity service, and the 'social network' bit is just bait."""
Looked for "bait" in the "news' source" and couldn't find any.... what's wrong with me? Or is it Slashdot accepting fabricated stories?
none
<devil's advocate>
Ah yes, cos China's doing such a terrible job economically. I mean they're only the second largest economy in the world
</devil's advocate>
It is not free. It is costing you your privacy. Apparently that is not worth anything to many people.
Privacy is the last freedom we have and we are handing it over as if it was never ours to have.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Exactly right.
Google may have started as a couple of college students creating a search engine and Facebook may have started as a couple of college students creating a social networking web site. But those days a long gone. Google and Facebook are not in the search or social networking business, they are in the ADVERTISING business. Their business model is now one thing and one thing only: collecting as much personal information about you as they can so they can sell it to advertisers.
If you really seriously have a problem with this, then DON'T FUCKING USE THEM. Seriously, how hard is that to figure out.
Then they would already have known that Violet Blue was really Violet Blue. This and other cases indicate that they (and Facebook) haven't the foggiest idea exactly (or even approximately) who you are. And don't care.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
wha?
you can pretty much make your entire profile invisible on g+. change the profile photo to something random, use a fake name, make sure every post is only seen by certain people.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Yes, people have gotten locked out but it's rare and fake names *don't* get locked.
The USA has more prisoners and more forced labor.
Forced labor...................... what?
I used the same email address, an @gmail.com addy, to sign up for YouTube, that I registered as my G+ account. I have had the YouTube account for years, so it wasn't something new I did.
Last time I tried to log onto YouTube I got a dialogue saying I would from now on have to log onto YouTube using my Google+ credentials. It would no longer be possible to log on using my old YouTube account's password, which only incidentally is connected to Google through my using a gmail account to sign up. I think I even got the YouTube account before Google bought them.
If you have an emotional attachment to a free online service offered by an advertising agency you have some real problems.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Therefore, I'm looking for a) a browser with a good cookiemanager or b) a "view 10-50 different browser processes as a tabbed browser".
b) Here I can start several different instances with their own profile, fully sandboxed by the OS (I hope)
a) Something that provides the same, but without me needing a new beefy computer.
The US needs an online identity service provider. Way too much authentication ultimately depends on email access--not designed for authentication, i assure you.
You want your WoW account back after hacking? A strong identity service provider will ultimately save online economies billions of dollars. It is a really hard problem, though.
http://adwords.google.com/
<devil's advocate> Ah yes, cos China's doing such a terrible job economically. I mean they're only the second largest economy in the world </devil's advocate>
All of China's actual money comes directly from us and our evil capitalist society. The rest of their GDP is artificially inflated by meaningless public works projects such as building gigantic malls or housing complexes that today sit there unoccupied because nobody can afford to use them... but the mere construction of them inflates their GDP so their currency and government will look stronger than it is.
Yes, China is doing a terrible job economically because the government controls everything and nobody has a chance at an independent means of success. Everybody who is successful has the government's hand firmly up their ass... except those who are the most successful, and they have their hand up the government's. You might say that corruption is also quite prevalent in OUR society, and you might be right, but at least it's only the government in the pocket of the large corporations and NOT large and small corporations alike in the pocket of the government.
Ok, so for you, GMail wasn't suspended. But someone might desperately need Picasa for work, or access to Google Docs.
Point is, maybe they didn't suspend GMail this time, but this is a pretty big issue.
If your account goes into violation, you should have 96 hours to PREVENT things from being shut down. To shut it down immediately, and without warning, is just plain wrong/evil.
And your argument is that they didn't suspend GMail this time. But this is a very bad precedent. Blocking Gmail would probably hurt the majority of people the most. So it's only a matter of time until it's on the chopping block for whatever they consider a 'serious' violation.
Don't! Be evil.
Any of those are taken away, I can find alternatives very easily.
What alternative do you use to communicate with people on Google+?
Unlike email where you have an open standard and plenty of provider to chose from, you don't get that choice on Facebook or Google+, either you are with them or you are locked out of that piece of communication infrastructure.
It pissed me off when Google mandated the "upgrade" on my YouTube account to a Google ID.
There is absolutely no reason to tie these together for the user's purposes - only for Google's. Now, if you want to participate on YouTube you have to put up with Google tracking you. No more anonymous searches.
Of course, you can log out of YouTube, search, and log in again, but they are expecting that you won't bother.
You think those guys on the side of the road with the orange jumpsuits have a choice about what they're doing? Or the ones making license plates, etc?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
So becoming used to Google and then Google providing an optional service you don't like the terms of makes them evil?
when your girlfriend
I couldn't imagine. Can you please give something that all of us slashdotters can relate to?
or family
Oh, okay.
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
Statements from Google which are on record and verifiable, versus anecdotal evidence of what happened to some undefined person. I somehow think I'm going to choose to believe Google on this one.
The current side effects of a Google Profile suspension, with confirmations by Google staff in various G+ posts, are:
Any other side effects reported until now have been labeled bugs and were not experienced by everyone consistently. Of particular note, a Profile suspension currently does NOT (modulo reappearing bugs?):
So that's the state of the world today. Whether it stays that way is up to debate, and I posited that question in my post that clarified the name policies as being an artifact of Profiles (including a reference proving that users can be banned without even having access to Google+ to begin with).
It's funny seeing people arguing for either Capitalism or Communism without mentioning democracy.
Emphasizing democracy would mean neither capital (wealth) or a state bureaucracy would be as likely to control the state. The principle would be the well being of the people. Ignoring democracy makes the argument over Capitalism and Communism fairly meaningless.They are both just ways of gaining power over the people.
Perhaps you think the U.S. is a democracy? My subjective answer would be not as much as you might think, and not as much as it once was.
Citizen's Political Power in the U.S. http://i-voter.tripod.com/
Jobs was 100% right when he said about "Google's bullshit mantra" - and then EVERYBODY jumped at his throat. Google is still too cool to disassemble but it won't last long till people see the truth behind.
One of my friends was attacked on Google+ , because she initially used her real name, and her online and offline identities could then be traced through use of google circles. She almost immediately realized her mistake and started using a false (but real looking) name, but that was too late, of course.
My own solution has been to just delete my google profile. The only issue I've had so far is getting my android phone to work. I needed to reset it and create a stub google profile for it. After that I've had no problems.
I don't want to switch from one evil social network (Facebook) to another (G+).
What's going on with all the attempts to make an open/decentralized service?
Google betraying users isn't anything new.
Did you nuke any posts with DejaNews? Use Google's original terms of a sworn statement and personal information to remove posts through Google Groups?
Now, check the newest terms of use. Guaranteed at least some of those nuked/removed posts have been restored. Still waiting for the class action lawsuit for that stunt by Google.
So even then it was proven that Google is all about owning users' information. Hard to believe anyone is a fan of Google these days except for the obvious stockholders posting on the tech boards and tech blogs.
You think those guys on the side of the road with the orange jumpsuits have a choice about what they're doing? Or the ones making license plates, etc?
Yes. They do. All of them volunteered for that work because it gives them something to do. In fact, they are on waiting lists for MONTHS trying to score those gigs. It gives them a little money (usually a couple dollars an hour I think), some jobs even teach valuable skills for use when they get out, and most of all it gives them something to do.
Actually, there is a lot more that goes on with these privately operated prisons... the more you dig into the subject, the uglier it gets.
This is an idea I came up with back in the way past the first time I found out a company sold my phone number. I was outraged. What right did these people have to sell my phone number.
So I came up with the idea that all information about me, whether public or not, should be considered my private property. My email address, phone number, address, what I search for, what I shop for, should all be considered my personal intellectual property. If you wanna make money off it you have to come negotiate a contract with me.
Now I have removed myself from facebook because as I've said for years, facebook is evil. Now I am considering how to decouple myself from google because I gotta admit google is evil.
What we ultimately need is to take this stuff out of the hands of the corporations. Our online identity, search, and extremely important communication systems such as twitter and facebook should not be controlled by corporation with ulterior motives. It's frightening to realize how important this stuff was to the situations in Egypt or Tunisia and you realize a corp could just shut that stuff off.
I have a daydream every once in awhile wherein the UN comes along to google, facebook, twitter, etc and says "Sorry boys this stuff is WAY to important for the future of society. It's not yours anymore it's everybody's.
FYI, irony and hypocrisy are two completely different things.
Irony: actual result is exact opposite as intended.
Hypocrisy: I do the exact opposite of what I say you should do.
Requiring everyone to use their real names, except celebrities, is neither. That is simply an exception to a rule, and it makes perfect sense: if the fake name is more widely-used to identify someone, then it is actually more useful to G+.
If Vic Gundrota signed himself up on G+ as "MonkeyDude42", THAT would be hypocrisy.
If Vic Gundrota signed himself up on G+, using his real name, in order to avoid having his personal information leveraged for advertisers, THAT would be irony.
The fact that he uses a nickname as part of his professional discourse is neither hypocrisy nor irony. Its just something famous people do, and he isn't saying it is wrong or that it does things which it doesn't do.
You are making a very simple mistake of correlating privacy and freedom. Freedom has little to do with privacy. Anonymity(also confused with privacy quite often) is something very recent and does not relate to freedom*.
* During Stalin's purges most information of "enemies of the state" was received anonymously and privately.
No. http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2011/08/cnn-interview-reveals-more-from-eric.html has the perfect first comment.
Google is building Microsoft Passport (equivalent) and then forcing you to use it. *THAT* is evil.
I actually believe google considers what it does as "not evil" I believe Facebook and google are seeing themselves as pioneers of new social structures and values. Us still sticking to the idea of privacy maybe seems strange to them. Could be that from their strategic point of view we are already Living in the World of yesterday.
If you have an emotional attachment to a free online service offered by an advertising agency you have some real problems.
If you're on a social network and have zero emotional attachment to the people you're networking with, you got some even bigger issues. By your logic I should also not get upset if I get locked out of my email account, since that too is a freebie offered by a company making money on advertising.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If a simple example makes you think that I have an emotional attachment to a free service, you might want to consult a nearby mental health medical professional.
OK - how about this as an example then. Google is building the equivalent to Microsoft Passport and slowly, forcing everyone to use it. Better?
Fuck anyone who forces use of a real name on the internet. If they want G+ to really take off and be useful, they need to do away with this.
What the hell are you talking? What evidence is getting stronger that proves that? Hell, you wrote your post on a computer that was the product of capitalism.
There just needs to be a stable pseudonym service run in parallel to this if that's all the damned issue is.
Verify identities and rank them higher. If they can't be verified, leave them neutral. Bury identities that are gratuitously fake, troll/spam. It's important to note that the reason that eBay, Facebook and even Google's +1 system works properly by only having a positive feedback loop, that way it prevents the abuse of the service via voting down people you hate. Negative feedback loops should only be peer-rated, eg (vote down this person because I never want to see them) by proxy of clicking an "X" or so beside their comment to make their comment disappear completely (from your "wall") or hide that users comment chain from that point forward, thereby leaving threads intact. The lower they get ranked, and the system starts first by truncating their comments, to hiding their comment, to hiding their existence.
This allows for keeping pseudonyms over a very long period of time, and only being penalized for trying to abuse the system. I'm sure many of you use twitter, and lots of random friend'ers and @ spammers. This problem wouldn't exist at twitter at all if they required peer friending before being able to do @'s, and only sending "A new friend has appeared on Twitter!" notifications if that friend was already peer friended by someone you follow.
There are ways of solving things without requiring real names, and with all the identity theft, job issues that go with it, you'd think that everyone would be required NOT to use their real name instead.
Prison labor is not comparable to the gulags, and you cite absolutely no evidence that prisoner fatality rates are "pretty competitive."
Being fuckheads over real names and account deletions are Google's way of rapping on your door and saying, 'Those services of ours you've been using for so long? Yeah. We just need a tiny favor from youse in order to keep this business relationship running smoothly. Capisce?
"Remember search before Google? Page full of crap."
Which shit search were you using? I never had that issue with Webcrawler back in the day.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They made the choice when they committed the crime that put them in prison. As for the labor itself, prisoners wait in volunteer lists for a chance to perform those jobs. You have a really screwed up political worldview.
Yeah, it was free, but it's self defeating to punish people for trying out G+. I didn't for exactly this reason: I don't want to play with fire.
But there is no fire. You just create a free email account (with any service, but gmail is the obvious one) and then sign up for G+ telling it your name is Stevie Sourceror or whatever. I can understand if you're just not interested but if you want to try it out then doing so is painless. They can't stop you using a pseudonym because they have no way of knowing whether anything you tell them is true or not (David Sorrow, George Johnson, Harry Cliff, Thomas Doter... whatever you like) and the most they can do is cancel a throw-away account. Who cares? Try it out if you want or not if you don't.
G+ is beta remember? so i think its quite obious that there are problems with it the whole point in making a beta is so you can find solutions to these problems before the launch.
Here are a couple names at the latest who's who meeting.. (Bilderberg 2011)
It was a few months later that G+ was released.
Alexander, Keith B., Commander, USCYBERCOM; Director, National Security Agency
Bezos, Jeff, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Hoffman, Reid, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, LinkedIn
Hughes, Chris R., Co-founder, Facebook
Mundie, Craig J., Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation
Schmidt, Eric, Executive Chairman, Google Inc.
Steinberg, James B., Deputy Secretary of State
You can punish capitalists; the U.S. does it all the time. Hell, Google just paid the feds $500 million. Communism creates a gigantic, centralized government that's above the law, has no incentive to improve because it doesn't have to compete for money (its income is taken at gunpoint--just try not paying your taxes or showing up to court and see what happens), and is extremely difficult to overthrow if needed.
What? They aren't forcing you to do anything. If they were, yeah, it would be evil.
And when you create a Google profile, they ask for your first and last name, not for your pseudonym.
How long before this optional service starts to affect your normal browsing? Want Youtube? Gotta tie it to your Google account. Fine, have a fake one. But all of a sudden, you're required to use your real info. So now you can't access significant portions of the web without being under their umbrella.
If google gets big enough, once it pushes all the alternatives out of the market, or once the alternatives become somewhat irrelevant as to force you into google to be part of the internet "life", then it might become a case for the FTC, or equivalent government entity.
You sound like every stereotypical dorm room, anti-corporate socialist I've ever seen. You don't even see the irony of the fact that you're using capitalist technology like a networked computer to bash capitalism. Capitalism is the least bad, and there is a reason it has risen to dominate the modern era. You just think you're being an enlightened, contrarian intellectual because you're bashing the system used by the country you're in.
Democracy is a political system.
Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism are economic systems.
I can't believe anyone fell for "Don't Be Evil" either, but because Google was always public about the fact that they use Linux and open source, they got a pass from tech communities like Slashdot.
Google's search monopoly is the gatekeeper of the web. Worse yet, it's not even an open source engine, so web traffic is regulated by a closed source product from an advertising megacorp. It's taken years, but people finally seem to be waking up to this realization.
Google's core business is in selling context-sensitive advertising space, so they have to guarantee that their indexed information is legitimate in order to justify their advertising rates to clients.
You are wrong. Privacy gives you freedom. It allows you a greater presence online without fear of retaliation, embarrassment, fraud, and more. Anonymity is the absolute version of privacy, where even your superficial identity is private.
I agree. So warn about it, fight against the trend, and try to keep it from happening. But calling them evil like the_B0fh does seems a bit premature, if your worries are all about the future.
Mr. Schmidt gets to explain that to the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 21st. That's on top of Google's other legal problems.
Google has to be very careful for the next two years, because of the terms of their non-prosecution deal with the Justice Department over the drug ads issue. This is the one where Google management had to admit criminal guilt and pay $500 million dollars. For the next two years, if Google does anything out of line in the drug-ad area, DOJ can, at their sole discretion, bring felony criminal charges for Google's past actions. Read that agreement between Google and DOJ. Nobody signs something like that unless going to trial would be much worse.
Peter Neronha, the U. S. attorney who headed the prosecution, issued a statement yesterday. He says that "Larry Page knew what was going on. We know it from the investigation. We simply know it from the documents we reviewed, witnesses that we interviewed, that Larry Page knew what was going on". He went on to say that "this is not two or three rogue employees at the customer service level doing this on their own. This was a corporate decision to engage in this conduct.", and called Google's attempts to control the problem "window dressing".
Google now has to clean up their act. It's not voluntary any more.
Do you even know what fascism is? Google isn't a government. "Fascism" is a loaded term thrown around so much that it's becoming meaningless, along with "Nazi" and other cliches.
As opposed to communism and socialism, where the powerful government betrays the citizens and exploits them--expect that unlike capitalism, citizens don't have a choice in putting them out of business by not using them anymore?
George Carlin liked to use a lot of populist, fist-raising monologues later in his career. He was asked once who exactly were the "owners" he was referring to, and he never replied.
Read what I actually wrote.
Correct. If your email was important you would not make it reliant on a promotional giveaway.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Wow, we really are jumping to the worst today. Deleting your G+ account does not downgrade anything else. If your account is suspended it will, at least until the suspension is resolved. That's why I deleted my G+ account, I wasn't prepared to put my real name on it, and I didn't want my other services (Blogger, Picasa, Calendar etc) to be affected. Deletion != suspension. I wish at least the submitter would RTFA.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Yeah, it's not due to their history of privacy violations, antitrust investigations around the world, and cynical exploitation of tech-friendly phrases like "openness" to get activist techies onto their data-indexing platform even as they ship closed technology like Flash and withhold Android source.
Why not? I still don't understand why anyone always trusted an advertising megacorp whose business depends on grabbing your personal data. With that in mind, why wouldn't you expect that Google was "out to get you?"
In fact, Microsoft's core business is in operating systems and business software, not context-sensitive advertising, so they are less likely to care about your personal data to the degree that Google would.
That's not true. The first times I went to a search engine they were pretty clear of crap on the first page too. The first one I remember being full of crap on that home page was Yahoo.
Email isn't private nor has it ever been private. It's sent unencrypted over the net through any number of intermediary servers which may or may not be located in countries with privacy laws. Anybody that's sending emails who honestly believes that they're private is just fooling themselves.
Consequently, the computer program that Google has reading the email and selecting the ads is not really that big of a deal compared with all the other privacy issues inherent in email.
Perhaps, but an email account can store years worth of personal correspondences to which one has an attachment. Which is why I always back up my emails. But, even without that, it's still a PITA to change addresses when you've had an address for any length of time. And you're risking the possibility of somebody from years back not being able to get in touch with you. Which is probably not a big deal, but it is one factor to consider.
The US was never a democracy.
The US is a democratically elected republic.
Quite different.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
They made the choice when they committed the crime that put them in prison.
So did the prisoners in the gulags.
Of course their crime was probably saying 'You know, some days I wonder whether Comrade Stalin is really quite as nice as everyone says he is'.
and we are handing it over as if it was never ours to have.
you hit on a VERY key issue; and by that, I mean age.
many people who are online have grown up with there 'always being a high speed internet' that they have easy access to.
many have grown up not knowing what it was like to have privacy due to it being too much physical effort to surveil or too costly. now, with many of the g services its all too easy to have people spy on each other and of course have companies spy on you.
but a long time ago (20 yrs, lol) the barrier was much higher to pierce your veil of privacy. us grey hairs fully remember the assumption that your mail was not opened, your phone was not tapped, your car was not bugged. those were things 'commies did', not the US!
but ask a kid in his 20's today and they have not been around long enough to remember personal freedoms. they'll sign up for ANY stupid advertising based program if they get some free widget from it or discount on some product.
I am afraid that by the next generation, there will be zero notion of privacy or expectation of it. the 20's gen, right now, is pretty far along in their 'programming' (or conditioning). the next will be fully willing to be tracked if they get some perceived benefit from it.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Webcrawler sucked. Dogpile sucked. Yahoo sucked.
It all sucked.
Google is huge because they got search right first.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
No, they don't. When Google "paid the feds $500 million", where did that money come from?
Anyone who's been to Germany or Israel or Japan or any of the Northern European countries knows how well Socialism works.
When you find a country whose population is healthier, wealthier and happier than the United States, you have found a socialist country.
Enough of the bullshit. The endgame of capitalism is very very ugly and we're just beginning the endgame. The cow has been milked dry and most of us are going to experience a collapsing standard of living as will our children.
The only way for America to regain prosperity is something that the rest of the world just isn't going to allow much longer: pure military conquest and exploitation.
My family and I have been very fortunate, but I'm finding that being well-off in a country where most people are in a steep decline just isn't that much fun.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Privacy is the last freedom we have
That's an absurd statement, as free speech has never been more prevalent for the common person because of the Internet. Privacy isn't strictly a freedom, as freedom of speech dictates that people are allowed to talk about other people. You may want to put limits on information collecting, but that's not freedom.
That differs from the communist situation how?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You think those guys on the side of the road with the orange jumpsuits have a choice about what they're doing? Or the ones making license plates, etc?
Where in the world do you get this stuff from? The Internet??? I worked in the prison systems and very few states have mandatory prisoner work rules. I would say 98% of the inmates work only because they like money and privileges that come with working. I know where I worked kitchen inmates ate better than non kitchen workers. I know that the industry workers made twice what any others made. I know that a ton of inmates refuse to work and sit and watch TV all day too. Most work because they want to.
"Remember, politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reason."
I'm seeing a lot of comments that if people don't like Google's policies, they shouldn't use Google. However, with Google's domination over Internet searching and over public email, it takes a fair amount of work to avoid using Google. And given the degree of social influence Google has attained, it really seems that the proper thing to do about a problem with Google's policies is to confront Google about it, not just run away and hide.
There was an email bulletin from the Free Software Foundation, complaining that 50% of their subscribers used Gmail. Outside work, almost all the personal email addresses I see in use are @gmail.com. On Slashdot, I'm used to frequent criticisms of Google, lauding of do-it-yourself system configuration, and lots of nerd rage whenever "cloud computing" comes up, so I found the reaction to Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives? astonishing, in that most of the responses were that the poster should stick with Google Apps for mail hosting, because self-hosting was too difficult. (I had been suggesting to my partner that I thought we should consider running our own mail server on our own Linux box, so I was reading that thread closely. I wouldn't have expected the Slashdot crowd to talk me out of it, but they did.)
At first, I liked the looks of Google+, because it seemed to show more planning to meet privacy concerns; however, the "real names" policy is a serious problem. If anybody's in a position to effectively challenge Facebook, a service I loathe, it's Google.
Some people throw around the claim that social networking services are not a necessity. The problem is, the definition of "necessity" is a social construction, human existence is social existence, and with social networking services, you're talking about the deliberate construction of a forum for constructing society. Opting out means a significant withdrawal from contemporary social life, especially for youth -- and this is a global pattern. It's more important when one looks at political developments around the world, of which Google is distinctly aware.
Opting out of Google services and ignoring the problem is not an effective response.
Even if their "actual money" comes from us (which is pure bullshit), their "actual wealth" comes from their labor. China still understands something that the US has forgotten: that labor always precedes capital, not the other way around. A stick lying on the ground isn't worth nearly as much as that stick carved into a beautiful cane.
The world doesn't need all that many software engineers or investment bankers. By blindly and foolishly destroying our labor-based economy, crushing unions, putting supply over demand, we've given away our seed corn and have thrown our national wealth away. Almost every one of you who are pre-retirement are losing ground, but you're too proud and too scared to admit it.
And the one hope that the US has of trying to turn it around is going to be discarded thanks to the sudden concern about deficits. Government austerity here in the US is going to work about as well here in the US as it has in Europe. It is impossible to turn around a downward trend by "shrinking government".
You have obviously not been to China in the past decade, nor have you ever spoken to a Chinese businessman.
Do you know that the same thing was said about the public works projects of the New Deal? They turned out to herald the greatest period of widespread growth and prosperity in US history. Here in the US, we're destroying our own prosperity and economic well-being for the benefit of a few powerful corporate groups. China is not only going to pass the US by economically, but in 25 years it will be superior socially and culturally too. But only if they can resist the pressure from the same corporate oligarchs that have just about finished destroying America.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ah yes, cos China's doing such a terrible job economically.
China grew economically by abandoning communism and bringing in capitalism. They're still a one-party government that does as it pleases, but communism it ain't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
Slashdot really is going down the drain. Shill accounts like bonch and the rest of his alternate accounts used to be dealt with swiftly by the community.
RE: Democracy is a political system. Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism are economic systems.
Whats your point?
Basics first. Are you trying to pretend that you can define Capitalism,or Socialism, or Communism, or whatever "ism" you choose and declare a winner? Words are subjective and ism's are very subjective. I have read so many different definitions that I can't count them. Those with the power make the rules. They tend to create, or modify, an economic system so that it benefits themselves.
I am so fucking tired of these "it costs you your fucking privacy" comments! Do you think that for one second some goddamned advertising company is thinking "oh, yessssss!!!!! now we've got some fucking private info on this rat-shit asshole in east mother-fucking jabib ohio! We've got him now! I can sell his fucking info to the gubments and they can spy on him while he whacks off!!! we can fucking sell his private info to our advertisers and they can advertise whack-off cream to him. YES!!!!!!!!!! we can fucking sell his info to the insurance companies and they can cancel the fucking bastard due to their "no fucking whack jobs" policy!!! YESS!!!! FUCKING YESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!"
Seriously, it's fucking ridiculous. They just don't fucking care! They're doing what every fucking marketing company has ALWAYS DONE AND STILL DOES! They're trying to target people for their fucking ads! So the fuck what?!?!?!
"But if they have private info on me then they'll do xxx!" What the fuck do you think they're going to do?!?!?! Advertise to you?!?!?!? You think maybe they'll start advertising porno to you because of all your fucking "selena gomez nude" searches?!?!?! (She's pretty hot in those fake naked pics, by the way)! Then your mom will see the ads and know that you've been whacking off again! God fucking forbid!!!!!
I would write /rant, but after I submit this I'm still going to be running around my house naked screaming at the top of my fucking lungs about how fucking ridiculous these privacy fucking comments are. fucking morons.
My mail is on one of my hosting accounts, filtered by SpamAssassin. My videos are on blip.tv, although there's some legacy stuff on YouTube from before Google acquired it. Open source code is on SourceForge. Still pictures go on my web sites. I have a Facebook account, with platform applications turned off and all Zynga content blocked, which makes that tolerable. I usually search with Google, but I'm never logged into Google. Anything medical-related or in a heavily spammed area, I search on Blekko.
What Google services?
No, Google gets a pass because it is not Microsoft and not a Microsoft-wannabee (the object of your undying support, Apple).
Imprisonment is failure of the system by definition. It says we couldn't find any way to engage these people productively. That's our failure, not theirs, particularly since we also supply the education.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Let me suggest that you look up SMTP-TLS. A lot (not all, but a lot) of email is encrypted between email servers.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
there is more than 1 type of democracy, unless you want to tard out and argue semantics. in any current discussion, i'd wager that 9/10 referring to a democracy simply means that voting by the populace is involved. does america have a direct democracy? no. is a constitutional republic a form of a democracy? yes.
Or their crime was complaining about the long lines in the grocery store. Or having a "nice" apartment that their neighbor wanted. Or just happening to be at a wrong place when a KGB official needed to have his quota fulfilled. Or having the wrong nationality or speaking the wrong language. Or fighting against nazism on the wrong front. Or having a distant relative who escaped to the west. And comparing the conditions in US prison system (arguably rather horrible, I agree with that) with concentration camps like those in the GULAG system is just offensive to all the victims of GULAG. You sound just like a some sort of holocaust denier.
I am not saying that there are no miscarriages of justice in the US, or that everything is all rosy here. Lot of crap does happen in here, but just the fact that we can talk about it here, complain about it, and fight it, shows the difference between a democratic or semi-democratic country like the US and a totalitarian regime like the communist countries of eastern Europe.
AccountKiller
I "deleted" my FB account months ago, and have no intentions of using G+.
Are there email services out there folks would recommend?
Are there any email services that use encrypted email on both ends?
Are they free?
Looking for recommendations.
Thanks.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Well, freedom went out the door a long time ago, and the defense of freedom is frequently and openly mocked in the name of practicality. Why shouldn't privacy follow? After all, with no freedom, what difference does privacy really make?
That's the opposite of volunteering. Like if I hold a gun to your head, and say 'work or I'll kill you' ... if you volunteer that's not a choice. Neither is it a choice if I offer to torture you or let you 'volunteer' to work. Neither is it a choice if I offer to put you in a box for the day, or work.
No, a choice would be: come out to the open road. There you can work, or not.
What the hell? Nobody's holding guns to anybody's head. Nobody's forcing the prisoners to work. They committed crimes and now they're in prison. They can either sit around in prison and do nothing or they can get a prison job and get a break from the ordinary. They do it entirely by choice. They're not in prison by choice, but they have the choice of making their stay more enjoyable.
FYI: Prison is a correctional system. It's a punishment for wrongdoing. It's also a rehabilitation for wrongdoers. Giving them choices about how they want to spend their time is a part of rehabilitation and assessment of whether or not they're fit to re-enter society. Nobody is forcing them to work, and they are free to hang out in the yard and lift weights for the next 10 years if they want, or they can do something different.
Good call. That's because it's a fib.
See in the summary where it says "Google has admitted that deleting a G+ account will seriously downgrade your other Google services."?
Here's what the quoted link actually says:
Quite different, aren't they?
As for the "identity service" thing, I rather suspect that the writer of the blog (who spelled "billed" as "build", which should give you some idea of his level of care) has mistaken "identity service" for "identified service", as described here
RE: Democracy is a political system. Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism are economic systems.
Whats your point?
I think his point is that you can have both communism and capitalism with a democracy or a dictatorship. I know in the US many confuse capitalism and democracy and think it is somehow the same.
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
So that's why Google keeps nagging me to add my phone number to my account. As if!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
I like that thought. I'll have to dwell on that for a few weeks. Thanks!
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
"And for everyone who says you don't have to use G+ - it is *NOT* G+, it is Google Profile that is the problem, G+ is a component of Google Profile. If your Google Profile is disabled, a shit load of other services are impacted. Yeah, don't use Google. Sure."
So you say: If you dont have Google Profile (you deleted it or never taken it) -> you can not use Google services == Google is BAD
You whine about: Google Services should be available without Google Profile.
Next you will say that Facebook should be available without account and Microsoft Live should be available without a account and so on....
I believe my US postal mail is private, and it's handled by intermediaries and in clear text. Just because something could be intercepted does not mean you have no expectations of privacy.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The cake is a lie.
.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
An optional service that is tied to other optional services. You mad about your free optional services bro?
Just because being your friend is optional doesn't mean you're not acting like an asshole.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Altavista didn't suck, newfag.
That's the opposite of volunteering. Like if I hold a gun to your head, and say 'work or I'll kill you' ... if you volunteer that's not a choice. Neither is it a choice if I offer to torture you or let you 'volunteer' to work. Neither is it a choice if I offer to put you in a box for the day, or work.
That's not what's happening. You're not getting tortured if you don't choose to work, you simply remain in prison. Yes, you may argue that being imprisoned is torture, but the people working are still imprisoned.
No, a choice would be: come out to the open road. There you can work, or not.
C'mon...I'm the first to admit that we imprison far too many people for victimless crimes, especially with all the drug laws. That said, by your definition it's impossible to not be a slave. I can work or not, but if I choose not to work I won't have money to pay for shelter and food. In a sense, I'm being forced to work, but is that really the same as a gun to my head?
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I am afraid that by the next generation, there will be zero notion of privacy or expectation of it.
Did you really think the singularity would come about with any vestige of privacy intact? If one is to have hyper-rationality brought about by increase of machine intelligence, certainly one must have omniscience to base it on. Stop whining - embrace the future. No one actually cares what you're doing in your pathetic, puny life anyway, other than to try to sell you something more efficiently. And soon, that will be gone as well, as our hyper-evolved, singularity-based intelligence moves beyond primitive concepts like trade and moves to purely rational machine models of what is best for all. You will be assimilated. Bwa-ha-ha!!!
Love and kisses...
Eric
That is all.
Or LinkedIn, Twitter, or Meetup. Or credit cards. Or supermarkets. Or ISPs. Or cell phones. Or...
So you're suggesting creeping corporate evil, in increasingly non-competitive markets, isn't a problem which needs to be addressed, because ... you can be a cash-only off-grid recluse? Gee, thanks.
Alternately, there's European-style privacy law.
The sad thing is, if Google had just been honest, most people would have been ok with it. Better Google than Facebook. But as its PR dissembling keeps growing, that becomes less clear.
That goes for end of sentence punctuation as well.
HATE IT.
It's like this - when your girlfriend or family spurns you and locks you out - you totally did not expect it, and the impact is far worse.
If you have an emotional attachment to a free online service offered by an advertising agency you have some real problems.
Which part of "Google is his family and girlfriend" did you NOT understand?
You can't handle the truth.
Leftists with power are always evil. This was expected.
Why are we glossing over companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Lodsys.... who do actual evil, anti-competitive shit and troll Google not because of what they've done, but because of what they might hypothetically do according to someone's blog post?
Not saying they're saints, but compared to the alternatives they pretty much are.
Our society will actually provide food stamps, and shelter for the desperate, so it's not quite the same situation. Also, force vs lack of access to necessities is somewhat different as well.
But yes, most people are slaves of some kind in our society.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Any of those are taken away, I can find alternatives very easily.
What alternative do you use to communicate with people on Google+?
Unlike email where you have an open standard and plenty of provider to chose from, you don't get that choice on Facebook or Google+, either you are with them or you are locked out of that piece of communication infrastructure.
What are you talking about? People on G+ still have facebook and email access, don't they? You could phone them or write a letter. Hell you could even talk to your friends face to face. There are plenty of options! Being pseudonymous and all, I haven't signed up for G+, so I'll go out on a limb without having read the end user agreement(s). Even though Google locks out non-G+ users from THEIR network, they do not preclude G+ users from using other technologies.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
No. http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2011/08/cnn-interview-reveals-more-from-eric.html has the perfect first comment.
Google is building Microsoft Passport (equivalent) and then forcing you to use it. *THAT* is evil.
I'm curious how the fuck that perfect first comment guy reached the conclusion you're being forced to use a product you can't even sign up for yet. I'm sure Google would like people to use G+, there's no way in hell they would ever force anyone to use it. Google don't follow Microsoft, it's always been the other way around.
You fucking piece of garbage shill bonch. We know your other accounts...
You sound like a politician: all broad platitudes, no concrete examples. You throw around flowery terms like "sweetness and honey", "expectation", and rhetoric about your girlfriend throwing you out, but I have yet to see a single example of how what Google is doing is evil.
Just about every commenter here who thinks Google is being evil is playing the Slippery Slope Fallacy card for absolutely everything it's worth. Yeah, I don't understand why Google is being so hard on the real names policy either, and yeah there's potential for abuse by tying your real name to all your Google accounts (though you're telling you didn't put your real name on your email? seriously?), but they've been King of Search and Advertising for quite some time now and, to my knowledge, haven't used their data for nefarious purposes just yet.
And given your lack of empirical evidence for why Google is being evil, I have to pose the same question regarding your take on Microsoft, Paypal, and Facebook: do you have data for why they're "out to get you", or just more anecdotal BS?
I'm really not trolling you; I just want to see if you have legitimate reasons for your very, very strong feelings or if it's all one big kneejerk, since the data, as it were, would tend to imply the latter.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
I hear you all crying, and i'm laughing at you.
You have to be popular, have to do the latest stuff. and now your crying because your stupid.
Guess what? I didn't join Google+ and it doesn't affect me!!!!
I can use fake names in my google crap, and not worried that i'm going to get my shit shut off.
See, I don't have to be the first person on crap, and I don't have to use social networks to validate my self worth.
And I'm not crying because Google did a bait & switch, or some weird crap with this google+
Do I think google is bad, or evil because of the stuff they are pulling with Google+? no, not at all. They are trying to make something that will be used more then facebook or something, and hell, all power to them. And maybe i'll join a year or so down the road when all the kinks and crap and figured out. maybe i won't. But I sure as hell won't join it now when they don't even seem to know exactly what they are doing with it. But then, I don't care if you know exactly what song i'm listening to (Blancmange, Game Above My Head), or what my current favorite series is on TV (Switched at Birth, Vanessa Marano is hot). Or what sort of porn my utorrent client is downloading (Gay Rhino Porn). See, somethings don't matter, but damn, people want everyone to know what they are doing.
Anyways, thanks for the rant, time to smoke weed, and read more posts bitching about google+ (which seems to be taking the place of posts bitching about facebook these days).
Be seeing you...
I don't believe Google is doing this. You have to concentrate on the (hard) facts:
1. Google search is free and efficient. If MS and (in fact most of America) drives Google out of business, forget search engines for free. And forget good results; MS has already shown that it gives you the results which MS wants to give.
2. Google maps. The same.
3. Google earth. The money that you need to get satellite photos is insane. Yet Google gives it for free. It has helped me and my colleagues enormously.
4. Google translate. A very essential tool for me and almost everyone I know. For free.
5. Google mail.
6. Google Lunar prize. If this does not convince you, then nothing can.
7. VP8 codec, which Google bought and set it free.
And if they make a buck with advertisements, then good.
Right from the start I didn't want on G+ because then G will have all my mail history + personal chats, search history, browser tracking history, mobile/cell phone data (Android) PLUS social data. What other personal current data of mine is there?
Glad I have a G Apps account and can't even enable G Profiles nor G+... I won't be joining anytime soon.
awesome post :)
People get very upset when online services want their real names. The thing is there are literally hundreds of other firms you frequently hand over your personal information to. Banks, insurance companies, utility companies, etc... The only difference is that you assume that because they make money elsewhere, your data is safe. Actually, I trust Google with my information much more than any credit card company with all my shopping habits (I have not surrendered my full name to Google directly but they could probably infer it from my emails or just my email address). Because it's comparatively easy to switch search engines as opposed to a bank or government, Google knows that one false step with user data could land them in a lot of hot water. Google's not perfect, but I'd like to see some concrete evidence of malice before I start accusing them of evil.
It's easy to have a Workers Paradise when you spend money you don't have. Just like maxxing out your credit cards, everything can be great fun for a number of years as you live well beyond your means. But when you reach the point that interest payments and bare necessites exceed your income, you're completely screwed.
Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain are all showing the endgame of Socialism. All of those governments will likely collapse, and surely be unable to meet the promises they've made to their people, because Socialism requires spending beyind what you make. Frane and Germany would collapse too, if they tried to keep the Euro going for too long (which seems unlikely, self-preservation will kick in). There's nothing special about Socialism making people's lives better - vast overspending can manage that with almost any system.
Here in the US we face the same problem - we simply can't meet the promises of our social programs. Money transfers to the old and poor (e.g., Social Security, Medi*) now exceed 100% of federal revenue, yet many people still see them as untouchable. Hello, math!
If we're not willing to limit spending this year to what we earn this year, we're just as doomed as the PIIGS. You can imagine all sorts of ways to increase federal revenue, and some of them might actually work, but that's no excuse to overspend now - if some new plan actually happens, and actually increases revenue, we can spend more then. If we won't prioritize economic growth over a naive sense of social justice (many people would hurt "the rich" even if it meant hurting themselves), we'll never pay down the current debt even if we did start a 12-step program on spending.
But, hey, continue to advocate failed approaches in the faith of all actual evidence , that's what faith is all about!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If Google wants a scan of an identity card to prove your identity, I guess there will be a nice business for someone to Photoshop ID cards.
If your Google Profile is disabled, a shit load of other services are impacted.
Cite?
Yeah, I know the summary says that, but the article says the opposite.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
People on G+ still have facebook and email access, don't they?
They might today, in the not so distant future I wouldn't be so sure. People are moving more and more of their communication essentially from open protocols (email, IRC) or well regulated infrastructure (phone, mail) into closed cooperation controlled environments (G+, Facebook) and the only way to communicate with them is by using said services. What is even worse, even if you can find a side channel to communicate with them, it quickly becomes impractical, as the side channel simply doesn't provide the features people expectp Yhoto sharing by mass email ain't such a good idea, services like Facebook and G+ handles that a hell of a lot better and there simply isn't a proper usable alternative (no, running your own server ain't one).
Even though Google locks out non-G+ users from THEIR network, they do not preclude G+ users from using other technologies.
They preclude communication with people on G+, the existence of side channels doesn't make that problem go away. We are essentially moving into a world where our communication infrastructure is fully cooperation controlled with so far no government oversight. Never underestimate the amount of freedom people are willing to give up for a little bit of convenience.
Jews don't like communism, they like fascism or state capitalism. The powerful Jews at least. I'm sure that every rank and file Jew has their own opinion.
You are not seriously trying to argue with a guy that just blamed privacy for Soviet atrocities, are you?
heya,
Ok, this is just getting silly and pointless.
Other posters have already pointed out the factual inaccuracies in the summary (e.g. Leaving Google+ affects your other Google services - no it doesn't, etc.).
However, all these whiney privacy screaming privacy advocates are ignoring one very important fact of life - nobody cares.
In your pathetic, mundane, meaningless life, who (God aside) actually cares? I myself will readily admit I'm a boring person. I mean, sure, I care about my hobbies, my friends, my faith, my likes/dislikes. But seriously, you thing some mindless drone in Mountain View cares? Or somebody halfway around the world?
Unless your name happens to be Barack Obama, or heaven forbid, Lady Gaga (or whatever her real name is, frankly I can't even be bothered to Google it), I doubt anybody outside your circle of friends or families would actually take five minutes out of their day to read up about it.
Nobody is going to stalk you buddy, sorry. Please. Don't be so conceited. There's no global conspiracy with people shadowing your every move. Worst case, some guy is going to try and sell you a breakfast cereal cause the algorithm tells him you like breakfast cereal. Big frigging whoop.
I mean, jeez, do you have a Wikipedia page? Are you of note? Pftt. I'm certainly not.
Heck, if they can make ads more targetted, so I don't have to sit through ads selling me useless c*ap I wouldn't need (e.g. swimming lesson, or hair dye, or woman's products), I'm all for it.
And for a tech-oriented site, people here are surprisingly un-tech savvy.
Do you really think some intern is sitting there look at the sites you visited? There are probably 3.1 billion people out there more interesting than you. It's an *algorithm*, alright. They put in a couple petabytes of data, and it spits out gross aggregated trends. I doubt they even have the capability of picking out a single person, let alone any reason to pick you. Heck, if they picked somebody at random every day of the year, it'll be the heat death of the universe before they pick you.
Look, the only people that care to stalk me, or pillage my personal data are probably friends, family or somebody I have some kind of relationship with. If I had a friend at Google with access to that data, sure, I might be worried. Lol. But I suspect very few people have access to that data. It's not exactly like they'll publish it on the company intranet.
One of my parents works for a financial institution. They told me that one of their colleague was dismissed for opening up a friend's file at the bank, just for curiosity. Companies aren't idiot. They do understand things like need-to-know-basis, and audit trail.
Cheers,
Victor
I did it just to show how annoying similar stuff is.
It's been said before, but it should be repeated again and again: marketing. Not to you, the end user, but to Google's real clients who will fork out good money for fine-grain demographic information. This is Google's means of guaranteeing that the data they're selling is good.
But that's the thing, what kind of demographic information are they going to get from a NAME. That's really the only requirement I see from Google's Profiles.
And if you're going to say that they can probably gather it from all the other information on you based on your Gmail email and searching habits, then don't you think they'll already have a pretty good idea what your name is?
Also, their support pages:
Google does not and will never rent, sell or share information that personally identifies you for marketing purposes without your express permission. No email content or other personally identifiable information will be provided to advertisers. We provide advertisers only aggregated non-personal information such as the number of times one of their ads was clicked.
So I don't see what the angle is with their real names push. And if they do start selling my "real name" to advertisers, they can kiss my patronage goodbye
Thing is Gmail's spam filter is amazing. It seems unlikely that Google would with one hand be helping disreputable companies spam you and with the other doing everything possible to filter those messages out of your inbox. Google is all about advertising, just not the shitty kind. They try to make ads relevant and non-annoying because the click to sale ratio is better.
My guess is that the real name thing is an attempt to keep their social network "clean" and free from scams, paedophiles, celebrity impersonators and other miscellaneous badness that afflicts Facebook. Twitter is also a constant source of defamation and the platform of choice for LulzSec and Anonymous. Just like with email spam and search engine spam Google is looking to clean up and thus provide a better service to its users, which is historically how it has always succeeded.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
they'll sign up for ANY stupid advertising based program if they get some free widget from it or discount on some product.
I'm in my early thirties and I sometimes sign up to those things. I just don't use my name. I have free stuff that arrived in a padded envelope addressed to Mr. R. Sole.
ID is a commodity to be bargained with. Fortunately most companies will value a fake one the same as a real one. Age has nothing to do with how readily people will hand it over, only the knowledge of its value.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm not willing to take a chance that they'll decide that "DigitalSorceress" isn't a real name and suspend me. Yeah, I have a real name, and no, I'm not ~afraid~ to use it as such - it's just that I've been using it as a Nom de Net since the late 1990's, and it's as much me as the legal name.
If I could sign up with my "real name" behind the scenes (so they knew it was me) but get to choose to not tie my name directly to my public profile, I wouldn't be ~as~ bothered.. though I still think they should just not be such a bunch of EVIL bastards about it.
That's right Google - "Don't Be Evil" is pretty much not on the list anymore is it? Well, I already heard others say it, "Right now, there's some college students in a garage whose company's motto will be ~don't be Google~" I am inclined to agree.
The Digital Sorceress
Facebook is an identity service too. Everything that claims to be "social media" is really just a way for companies to get your data. I don't see how this is news.
Facebook also has a "real names" policy.
Don't forget that a lot of the Chinese economy's growth is born on the backs of a virtual slave class, and that it was only possible because of a combination of their grossly undervalued workers (undervalued if you're a Westerner who, you know, actually thinks that the lives of people have innate value beyond an expendable and utterly replaceable cog to be used as hard and fast as possible until it shatters) and their utter disregard for any sort of environmental protection.
China's factories are so awful that even a 19th century Englishman gleefully sending children under machinery for a pittance a day with no regard for their safety would blush and consider it barbaric. It's pretty damn bad.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Betrays you how? Seriously talk about hyperbole. Google offers a free service in which they believe real identities will make the service more useful and generally better. What's more they are being completely upfront and honest that they want people to use real names and why. The service is completely optional you don't have to use it. So geez don't use their free service. Seriously you sound like a PR astroturfer that works for Facebook or Microsoft. Betrayal oh noez111!!!!
Messrs Schmidt and Page are now on record with their commentary.
Their commentary leaves many to wonder .. gasping at the shear lunacy of what their thoughts presage.
No wonder. Google is Evil and as Evil as Messrs Schmidt and Page to their wildest ID dreams and nigthtmares
which they will gladly invisange upon us all for money sake.
By your words Messrs Schmidt and Page, by your words ... not mine.
--//++
\
I remember back in the 90s as some friday afternoon fun someone would suggest a stupid concept, and the rest of the office would have to find on the internet the image that best matched the concept. I generally won more often than anyone else, and my search engine of choice was HotBot. Not because HotBot was particularly brilliant, merely that it responded well to precisely-crafted queries. I think altiavista was trying to be a bit too clever, as if you changed your query slightly, you'd get the same results, because it thought it knew best and wuold try to reinterpret what you'd typed. The other guys who occasionally won were all AltaVista users, however, so it clearly was capable of doing the job.
Google, being more "intelligent" than altavista, seems to have stripped me of all my search-engine fu now. In fact it often returns things I've explicitly said I'm not interested in, but it knows best.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
It's true the lack of worker protections, environmental regulations, and glut of labor supply makes everything cheaper in China. However, all that was true under communism. It wasn't until they enacted free-market reforms that their economy exploded.
As for cogs, well come on, most corporations feel the same way about their employees. They pay them as little as what the market, laws, or unions allow. Just look at how the games industry chews through employees.
As for your 19th century Englishman example, I tend to think that the early industrial abuses of the West were probably comparable, if not worse. My impression is that China is slowly moving away from the worst abuses and starting to take the environment seriously.
Most mail sent through USPS (or any other snailmail intermediary) is most certainly NOT in clear text. There's that little thing called an "envelope".
Now the clear text is certainly pretty easy to retrieve (open the envelope) but envelopes are usually manufactured to at least make such tampering obvious.
I'm sure someone, somewhere, can open almost any envelope and reseal it with minimal obvious damage, but its not exactly a common thing (the penalties are pretty large for those caught tampering with mail inappropriately).
Email is more like a postcard -- its just out in the open for anyone who gets their hands on it to read.
The more fundamental issue with email though that regular mail doesn't have an analog to is copying. An email intermediary could potentially copy every single email and analyze them, store them, sell them to third parties, etc. All without any trace of this actually happening (at least to the end point parties. Some clever researcher may be able to figure it out by looking at aggregate traffic patterns or something, but for us lay people there'd be no indication).
I don't believe that shit for a second. People are getting suspended from G+ and then they look at their gmail and TRY to find a reason to suspend it. And if you don't believe that then I have all kinds of crap^Wwonderful stuff to sell you.
I'm done sharing stuff or making comments on G+. Back to failbook until the next thing comes along.
It's really rather retarded that we're doing all this when we could get ALL the same functionality with Drupal or Wordpress, syndication, and trackbacks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have never met anyone here in the USA who confused capitalism and democracy! I might personally draw an analogy between an unregulated market economy and democracy, but that is as far as I would go. The US economy is highly regulated by law. All modern economies are legally defined by the laws. Other than that I completely agree with you. It was just the arguments about the evils of both systems without any reflection of the nature of the political system that defines and modifies the economic system whatever it is called that I was mocking - and one individual who claimed I couldn't bring that up because they are different subjects.
Is China a Capitalist nation? They call themselves Socialists. Is Sweden capitalist? It is often described as a Social Market Economy. Is the USA Capitalist? The USA is usually described as a free-market economy although the economy is highly regulated.
Can we really explain these economies without mentioning the political system? I don't think so. The economic system is subservient to the political system.
But yes, most people are slaves of some kind in our society.
So I guess in your world "slave" is defined as anybody who doesn't live a privileged life of near-infinite wealth and no need to work for a living. I have to work for a living... if I didn't I wouldn't be able to do the things I enjoy. That doesn't make me a slave, that makes me a productive member of society.
Except we did/do all of those things. The idea of "those were things 'commies did', not the US!" is just propaganda
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
Everything is fun and laughter until:
http://igadgetlife.com/internet/press/googles-wi-spying-and-intelligence-ties-prompt-call-for-congressional-hearing/
What backdoor attacks?! Eric Schmidt is the one saying G+ is an identity service. The negative news about Google lately has been about things they've really done, like settling with the government for $500 million over illegal drug ads or forbidding pseudonyms on G+. The Street View scandal was a scandal because Google was "accidentally" collecting the data for four years and only revealed it under pressure from German investigators.
Where's the paranoid conspiracy here? You're just seeing things through fan blinders.
Infoseek was pretty good, actually. The big thing about Google was more about its minimalist, ad-free search results.
Altavasta, Infoseek, and a few others were pretty good, actually.
Signed,
Anonymous Coward
Can you explain why everyone should worry about Facebook and Microsoft yet not worry about Google? Why shouldn't they worry about Google? Why are you defending a multi-billion dollar global megacorp and telling people to only be concerned about its competitors?
Yeah, that sucks.
Google promises with sweetness and honey...
So I made my profile a honeypot.
There is a major problem with having a real identity online, which is a disconnect from how we live in the real world. In the real world, if you do something stupid, you get another chance. You can move house, whatever, and nobody knows you. You can start again. Make new friends.
If everyone has a universal online identity, you can never put your stupid remarks and old opinions behind you. Even you remember to set privacy settings on *every service* that uses your identity, assuming their privacy statements don't change every other week, Big Brother will be able to connect it all, and I'm not really sure that's going to lead anywhere good.
After all, it's corporations and governments that should be more transparent, not us. It's not the average citizen who starts wars, damages the environment, mismanages the economy and entrenches poverty.
If you are not familiar with the concept of boiling a frog...
After reading this load of schmidt from Eric, I reacted this way: https://noctslackv1.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/google-wont-pwn-me/ I'm done. :)
Nocturnal Slacker
Paypal is actually good for the enduser. But if you are a seller, paypal is the shits. Paypalsucks.com and so on for more info if you like.
Microsoft has always been evil. Licensed "Microsoft Disk Operating System" to IBM when it did not have a product, but thank god, Bill Gates saw what'shisname demo QDOS a week ago, and paid $50k for it. Then did the reverse when they went to kill Netscape - offered Spyglass/spycat/whatever the name was such a great deal - give us your code, and we will pay you a percentage of every copy of IE sold. But... wait... IE is *GIVEN* away for free, so, sucks to be you. And pushing out shit like ActiveX and other insecure shit on purpose (read Mark Minasi's The Software Conspiracy where he had Microsoft VP of Software Engineering admitting they ship shitty insecure code because the customers don't care for better code - quotes on the record, by the way). By the way, does lying in court count?
FB started out crooked and as time went out they would change and remove privacy settings all to get more things shared publicly. Every now and then, privacy settings would reset to whatever they wanted the default to be. Beyond that though, it's mostly OK.
People are moving more and more of their communication essentially from open protocols (email, IRC) or well regulated infrastructure (phone, mail) into closed cooperation controlled environments (G+, Facebook) and the only way to communicate with them is by using said services.
I can't say that I have noticed people abandoning email or even telephone services in favour of Facebook or G+. I still get quite a lot of material by regular post as well, so that's not dead either. I have noticed people adopting things like FB and G+ in addition to more traditional communication channels, but not instead of them.
They preclude communication with people on G+, the existence of side channels doesn't make that problem go away.
No, they do not - that problem never existed! Google+ users are not prevented from all communications with non G+ users, nor vice versa. If there are alternative communications channels still in use, it does not matter if they are side channels or not. Google is not cutting anyone off, or locking anyone in - there are real alternatives available.
I have this awful feeling I just fed a Troll.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Has nobody yet figured out it's the old 'con men' trick.. they don't get you by being nasty.. they pretend they're 'the other (nice) guys' and they're in *your* corner.. But they say one thing, and do another.. or put a different way ...they say 'don't be evil' but they *do* evil.
If you wanted more proof.. take note of Google DNS.. a purportedly 'unfiltered' dns service that has been blocking *tons* of music sharing sites, that *are* accessible via, say OPEN DNS...
So there...
I have two google accounts, one for important stuff(communicating with potential employers when I decide to switch jobs, communicating with my bank etc.) and a second one for /., forums, facebook etc. On the first one I use my real name and I haven't joined G+, I have not noticed any degradation of any service because of that, can someone explain what am I losing except integration with G+? On the second one I use a nickname but it seems like a real name so I haven't had my account deleted etc. Can someone please tell me what the fuss is about? If you want to be anonymous just create a new online identity and for stuff that directly links to you don't use stuff like G+. Geeks worried about privacy? I wouldn't care until my browser started sending out headers with the info I registered with my ISP. As for Joe Average, I couldn't care less.
I'm familiar with FUD spread by interested parties in the hopes of taking customers away from competitors.
All the pots around Google are already boiling, which one will you jump into?
I have noticed people adopting things like FB and G+ in addition to more traditional communication channels, but not instead of them.
That might be true for your peer group, that doesn't make it true for a hell of a lot of other people.
If there are alternative communications channels still in use, it does not matter if they are side channels or not.
Yeah, "still in use". G+ is just a few month old. Give it a few years and then see how much open communication protocols are left that are actually in use. It doesn't help to have email when the person who wants to communicate with doesn't.
Google is not cutting anyone off, or locking anyone in - there are real alternatives available.
The only reason why social networks services are such a success in the first place is because they work by locking people in. If people would have free choice what to use, Facebook would have never been as success as it is, but because you need Facebook to communicate with people on Facebook, everybody is either forced to use it or quit communicating with those people.
I have this awful feeling I just fed a Troll.
It's not a troll, it's a simple observation of how a lot of the glorious freedom the Internet should have provided is currently going down the toilet, getting replaced by cooperate controlled and censored networks. And yeah, users cheering with but "it's THEIR network" and ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away.
Infoseek was pretty good, actually. The big thing about Google was more about its minimalist, ad-free search results.
And the "cached page" thing where they highlight the search terms. That's a time saver, and I think Google were the first to do that.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
The UI was why I switched to Google, and why I switched form Google. The last straw was when they broke the text entry field. On every other text field in the system, up arrow jumps to the start, down arrow jumps to the end. With the Google search field, up arrow does nothing, down arrow invokes some autocompletion crap.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Newfag? Seriously? This is not 4chan...
And if you don't think that Altavista sucked, then you obviously weren't on dialup. I switched to Google from Altavista because the Altavista page took about 30 seconds to load on my modem, while the Google one loaded almost instantly. Important when you're paying by the minute, and irritating even when you aren't.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But that's the thing, what kind of demographic information are they going to get from a NAME
My tango group uses Facebook for communication (fortunately, they have a mailing list too). If you're a member of that group, that gives a good indication of which city you're in - especially if it's combined with comments about attending events. If they have your real name as well, then they can cross-reference this with the electoral roll (public domain information) and get your address. Replace Facebook group with G+ Circle and the same applies.
Even without the group membership, they know your IP address, and geolocation can easily get you within a couple of miles if you're using cable. Connect from the same residential IP for a few months, and they can then do the same cross-referencing with the electoral roll to narrow it down to a real address.
They don't have to sell this address to advertisers, they can send junk mail on their behalf. They might not even do that. If they've got your location and name, then you may see billboards appearing near you that are specifically targeted at you and a few other people nearby.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I got the choice a few weeks ago, between tying my Youtube account to a Google account, or having my Youtube account deleted.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
In 1985 a more than one year chain of online harassment and death threats began for me. At the time I had posted my name and address on the "resume" page for the service, BIX. I quickly started feeling quite naked for doing so and removed the address. I still do not give it out lightly. Nor do I lightly give out my full name. I certainly don't do that very often. It does not take very long for being told you were about to be raped with a knife and then chopped up and fed to his dog to get very very old. I managed to stick it out until he was captured, tried, punished, and self-exported back to Germany his nation of origin. The only "good" thing is he won't do it again. A couple years later word filtered back saying he'd suicided.
Hell will freeze over before I lay myself out THAT naked online. .38 revolvers make poor bedfellows. Smuggling it into work in a defense contractor's company in California was "interesting." But, I was determined I'd rather live and deal with the consequences of doing what was needed to live than suffer what he promised me. Google has not thought through what they are doing to women. This is potentially monstrously evil.
{^_^}
I can't say that I have noticed people abandoning email or even telephone services in favour of Facebook or G+.
You'd be surprised. I'm on my second career, and the folks I work with just a few years out of college practically live on Facebook. I just went to a birthday party where the hostess was taking photos with her cellphone and immediately posting them to FB. When I used to be on FB, I could send her a message through the service and get a response within minutes. On email, it may take two business days; on telephone, SMS might come back in an hour, but voice calls are rarely picked up at all; and of course she has no landline at all.
On a related tangent, I myself am clearing out most of my home videos in favor of Netflix streaming, because why should I use up storage space for a couple hundred movies when Netflix streams them at better resolution anyway? Someone just now putting together their adult life who uses their smartphone effectively doesn't even need a general-purpose PC at home.
Times they are changing, and fast.
1) Eric, it can be both, an advertising system AND a social network
2) So what? i'm not a paranoid nutjob. i can handle my shit.
If the service is free you are the product. Just like TV and Radio. i'm the product, i know this and i'm fine with it. It beats paying for Classmates.com.
Slashdotters,
Unbunch your panties about G+. Stop insulting everyone who isn't as paranoid as you. Some of us have friends and LIKE being in contact with other real human beings. Pseudonymous sites like /. and fark have their place. Social networks have theirs. Get over it. Get over yourselves.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
This is Google's means of giving the illusion that the data they're selling is good.
FTFY
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
My problem is that I wanted my online friends to be able to find me. My G+ with thas been successful at that since the name for the account is my handle. Nobody fucking knows my real name since I never use it. I intend to keep it that way. I guess I'll go back to IRC, DA, tumblr, et al to do my social interactions. Tis a shame, G+ was semi-useful.
I shoulda seen it coming when they started adding games.
We hear report after report of the difficulties of managing user passwords. Balancing the need to know who you're talking to against the need for privacy is difficult. Facebook has become the federated identity server of choice, in that they provide a single place where you can accept login and user information for about half the world. But, like so many of their services, they kind of fell into the position without any forethought. Google is trying to bring some sense and some engineering to the problem.
If Google doesn't do it, it will continue to be done, poorly, by Facebook.
Yeah, "still in use". G+ is just a few month old. Give it a few years and then see how much open communication protocols are left that are actually in use. It doesn't help to have email when the person who wants to communicate with doesn't.
Well, then that other person can just sign up for email (or whatever preferred open source/regulated channel)
Why should I be the one to join G+/FB/etc? To quote the Captain:
"When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world - 'No, you move.'"
The only reason why social networks services are such a success in the first place is because they work by locking people in.
If these social networks are such an oppressive evil thing, locking people in will also bring about their (eventual) downfall. That's how oppressive systems go throughout history: initially you draw in people thinking it's a good idea, then you lock them in and exploit them, but eventually people will realize they're being screwed and it was a bad idea, then the people will fight to break free of the locks you've placed upon them.
Which goes back to standing your ground and refuse to join G+ and the like if you think it presents a problem to our freedoms: that is how you can fight back. You can't force people to not join G+, but you can choose, out of your own free will, to not do the same.
Will it be inconvenient to not use those services? Oh yea, but hey - freedom is valuable, that's why it comes with a price.
Why should I be the one to join G+/FB/etc?
Because that is the only way to stay in contact with the people you might care about. If a class reunion or just a random meet up is organized on a social network you essentially only have the choice of joining the network or not participating in the event. Good luck trying to convince your class mates to all give up on Facebook and join an old school mailing list.
The thing that makes the last step extra problematic is not only that you will have a hard time convincing people to switch, but they will also have very good reasons not to. Email is slow, inflexible and just a complete mess when you try to communicate with a larger group. There simply isn't an open protocol that has the features and ease of use of a social network. Google Wave could have maybe become that, but Google axed before it could become popular or even feature complete.
If these social networks are such an oppressive evil thing, locking people in will also bring about their (eventual) downfall.
I wouldn't count on it, at least not anytime soon. Once such a social communication infrastructure is in place, it becomes really hard to switch, essentially the only time people switch is when vastly superior tech comes around and that is more a matter of decades then just years. It's also far from sure that this would actually fix anything, right now the biggest danger for Facebook is G+ and that is essentially the same kind of evil with a different brand on it.
You can't force people to not join G+, but you can choose, out of your own free will, to not do the same.
That just makes you an outcast in your social circle, it helps nothing to fix G+ or Facebook. As nice as boycotts sound in theory, unless you actually have a huge number of people behind them, they are absolutely worthless.
Diaspora. https://joindiaspora.com/
It's in Alpha. I can email people an invite if they ask for one. email me at jack454 on my hotmail account.
They actually said "Don't be facebook." But it's close enough.
That's what makes both slave and productive member of society useless labels. It's obviously actually a range, with some people closer to true freedom, and some closer to abject bondage. Even among people who are actually owned by other people, the level of freedom varies. For most people in our society, while they technically have the freedom to walk away from their job at any time, they can't exercise that freedom without significant sacrifices (like decent food, shelter) for their families. The closer you are to being unable to make ends meet, the less leverage you have to get a fair wage for your work, the closer that work comes to being enslavement.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
named bill & dave?
So you seem to be set on the idea that the necessity to work in order to support yourself is no different than slavery, and I don't think anybody could convince you otherwise. So I will ask you this: What is your point? Are you trying to push the idea of some kind of communist utopian society in which nobody has to do anything to contribute? If so, then you are fucking delusional.
This is my company's new motto ;)
Oh, Altavista sucked, just not as bad as the rest. I switched lickety-split.
Looking for other services? Oh grow up people. So far as corporate responsibility go I trust Google the most. I know if I was a Chinese dissident Google will do their best to protect my information just like I know I can expect Microsoft to sell it to the Chinese government. Out of all the other service providers out there Google without a doubt has the better (not perfect) reputation.
True, but they don't enforce it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
FYI: Prison is a correctional system. It's a punishment for wrongdoing. It's also a rehabilitation for wrongdoers.
This depends on the jurisdiction. In NH, the only legitimate purpose of prison is reform.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just answering to GP on his own language.
Also, I was on dialup. USR Sportster 33.6. I didn't have broadband until mid-2001.
My point is that our current society is structured to almost minimize the number of people who are truly free, and could be structured to maximize that number instead.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Ahem, I beg to differ: http://wp.me/pJ8Wt-1z6
Not really. Google was better. It was also CLEANER.
The less the better and in the beginning Google was fast, clean and accurate.
I really want to think you're trolling, but your low uid and comment history is trying to prove me otherwise, so I shall continue this conversation.
So based on your extremely loose definitions of slavery, how exactly do you propose to save people from lives of bondage? How could society POSSIBLY work without people being, according to you, "slaves" to the system?
How about this then?
http://www.rainydaysuperstar.com/?p=265
Is that evil enough for you?
Forcing?
What imagination do you come up with?
The difference between google+ and facebook is google+ doesn't track you across every single website on the internet. Facebooks' like button does track you, whether you are logged in or not, and whether or not you have or have ever created a facebook profile in the first place.
Again, the focus on google is not only inaccurate, but misleading.
You could maximize the number who were free by massive taxation of the wealthy. Our current system favors the elite, heavily. Skewing it to favor the ordinary would make most people more free, and need not make anyone less free (once you have enough to be free as we've defined it, you can tax at 100% without making them less free).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Maybe they did that because of those darn HOME and END keys.
I come here for the love
Those exist, but on OS X they control movement on the page (jump to start / end of scroll view) not the line. On a laptop, they're also typically accessed via a modifier or in an inconvenient place to reach on the keyboard. That's not the point though. A good UI is consistent. If you have a text field, and it doesn't behave in the same way as every other text field in the system then you'd better have a damn good reason for this. It's like having a button that you have to hover over with the mouse and press space. It may work, but it destroys motor memory, because rather than just thinking 'I want to go to the start of this text field' and your spine controlling your hands to hit the button that always does that, you have to think 'I want to go to the start of the text field, now what kind of text field is this? Ah, it's the Google one, so I have to press this combination of buttons.'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Did I? Really? But feel free to extrapolate and skip my first statement...
You are wrong. Privacy gives you freedom.
Does it really give you freedom? Or does privacy give you control over you social image?