Yes, this is the end of an era. It is worth noting, and we should have serious discussions about the future and direction of American space travel. But this is the last space shuttle spacewalk, not the last NASA spacewalk. Who approves these headlines, anyway?
(NB: the headline comes from TFA, so don't blame/. completely.)
No, that's the name of the malware, not the apps. FTFA:
"The malware is embedded in a seemingly legitimate application in the market, and once users download and install that app, the fun begins."
It goes on to talk about "the host app" which the malware "piggybacks". Which app? They don't tell you. They'd rather tell you that "The Apple iPhone may still be the gold standard when it comes to smartphones".
Why don't these articles ever tell you WHICH markets and apps are affected? Oh, that's right, they're too busy trying to generate page hits through scare-mongering to care about information.
(I'm not trying to say these aren't legitimate threats: quite the opposite. But, good reporting would help mitigate these threats by publicly shaming and informing.)
Look, nobody's saying this was a good idea on Google's part. It's dumb, and it's worth noting and fixing. But, there was nothing stopping your friends from copying your pictures and sending them to your boss/mother/ex-wife before, and that hasn't changed. If you're willing to chance that and use a social network, Google+ has better control and protection than Facebook, so give that a go. If you aren't, that's fine. But no privacy setting is going to save you from your friends or yourself.
Option 1: You want nobody to see your pictures. So, you make them private.
Option 2: You want anyone to be able to see your pictures who would want to. So, you make them public. If you're on Google+, maybe they get re-shared.
Option 3: You want your friends to be able to see your pictures, but no one else. Even if you use Google+, you use the Picassa "only those with the URL" privacy setting, and don't post the link to Google+.
Option 4: You want to share your photos with only your friends, but no one else, via Google+, but the privacy settings don't allow for that. You post to Slashdot about how horrifying this discovery was, and declare that you have decided not to join the service for this reason alone.
G+ will automatically link your Picassa account to your G+ account, yes. But it WON'T go and change the settings on all your albums to automatically share them. Those that are currently private will remain so; those that are currently public will remain so, but also be visible via G+.
Now go take off that tin-foil hat before pictures of you wearing it appear all over Google+.
There was also a Canadian federal election yesterday, with many surprising results which were all reported in this exact time slot. I know that's not as exciting as a bunch of commandos shooting a guy, but if we're going to talk facts, let's get them straight.
Availability is only half the problem in Canada. I'm paying extra for an Internet plan that only gets me 60 GB/month. That maxes out pretty quickly with anything HD!
Speed is all well and good, but it's not my main bottleneck anymore. You could make my connection 100x faster tomorrow, and it would only be frustrating because of my bandwidth cap. With that faster connection, I could hit my monthly cap within 5 minutes instead of 8 hours!
You both have a point, but sharing and using knowledge takes energy. Without the cheap energy of oil (or an alternative which has yet to take over) all that knowledge won't go very far or even last very long.
You sound unimpressed with "stuff", so don't buy "stuff". Buy experiences. Take them to the zoo, or a children's show, or a good hands-on science museum. It'll cost the same, they'll get more out of it, and there'll be that much less plastic sitting around your sibling's house.
Maybe because they can be the geekier type that have less social lives, maybe feel alienated from those around them, and thus easier to isolate and brainwash.
In other words, engineers don't get laid enough. Promise them an afterlife full of virgins, and the next thing you know....
That's only true for monoculture fed by petroleum-based fertilizers. As soon as you talk in terms of sustainable farming, with crop rotations and even mixed fields, traditional farming has productivity levels that monoculture can't touch.
It's a moot point, though. Petroleum-based monoculture cannot be sustained indefinitely. Traditional agriculture has been and--unless we continue to destroy our soils--will be.
The only spanner in the works here is that the PS3 owners don't need to upgrade their PS3s. All their games that they've bought so far currently work, so long as they don't "upgrade" to the latest firmware, plus they keep their other OS functionality.
Alas, Sony has no out there either. Users can no longer play their current games online, which is definitely an advertised feature. The user loses functionality no matter what they do.
We need to make manufacturers calculate mileage averages from the total vehicles they sell, not the total vehicles in their lineup. This is just going to result in more abominations like the PT Cruiser, which was designed to lower the average mileage of Dodge's truck line rather than to be a useful (or even safe) passenger vehicle.
1. Cost of living varies regionally. Of course, as soon as you inject money the cost of living changes, so you have to do it gradually.
2. Economics is not a zero-sum game.
To some extent, we do need to grow our way out of poverty... but that only works if we commit ourselves to sharing the wealth to a reasonable degree. I'm not advocating Communism. I just don't think the highest incomes should be thousands of times the size of the lowest.
And the real trick is that the next terrorist attack won't be on a plane. It will probably be a real nuke stashed in a port somewhere, since we don't even bother to check the trillions of pounds of cargo we import each year.
Could we, even? At what point would it be cheaper to just relieve the world of poverty than establishing an impassible fence three miles from every American border?
The system is broken: even the experts realize that. Should we be playing with the algorithm, or throwing the whole system out?
If racial profiling doesn't work, what do we do next? Do we keep going with the security theatre, building a divide between "us" and "them", or do we start attacking the causes of terrorism rather than pretending we can do anything about the effects?
Let's not jump to conclusions. They may have come up with a technology for palpating people's nodes over the internet. I'd be surprised, though: I always figured that if any industry developed a device for feeling up my gnads online, it would be the porn industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is the end of an era. It is worth noting, and we should have serious discussions about the future and direction of American space travel. But this is the last space shuttle spacewalk, not the last NASA spacewalk. Who approves these headlines, anyway?
(NB: the headline comes from TFA, so don't blame /. completely.)
That would be a good feature! The "Sparks" idea has merit, but it doesn't do what you're suggesting, and it probably should.
No, that's the name of the malware, not the apps. FTFA:
"The malware is embedded in a seemingly legitimate application in the market, and once users download and install that app, the fun begins."
It goes on to talk about "the host app" which the malware "piggybacks". Which app? They don't tell you. They'd rather tell you that "The Apple iPhone may still be the gold standard when it comes to smartphones".
Why don't these articles ever tell you WHICH markets and apps are affected? Oh, that's right, they're too busy trying to generate page hits through scare-mongering to care about information.
(I'm not trying to say these aren't legitimate threats: quite the opposite. But, good reporting would help mitigate these threats by publicly shaming and informing.)
Look, nobody's saying this was a good idea on Google's part. It's dumb, and it's worth noting and fixing. But, there was nothing stopping your friends from copying your pictures and sending them to your boss/mother/ex-wife before, and that hasn't changed. If you're willing to chance that and use a social network, Google+ has better control and protection than Facebook, so give that a go. If you aren't, that's fine. But no privacy setting is going to save you from your friends or yourself.
OK, let's break it down.
Option 1: You want nobody to see your pictures. So, you make them private.
Option 2: You want anyone to be able to see your pictures who would want to. So, you make them public. If you're on Google+, maybe they get re-shared.
Option 3: You want your friends to be able to see your pictures, but no one else. Even if you use Google+, you use the Picassa "only those with the URL" privacy setting, and don't post the link to Google+.
Option 4: You want to share your photos with only your friends, but no one else, via Google+, but the privacy settings don't allow for that. You post to Slashdot about how horrifying this discovery was, and declare that you have decided not to join the service for this reason alone.
G+ will automatically link your Picassa account to your G+ account, yes. But it WON'T go and change the settings on all your albums to automatically share them. Those that are currently private will remain so; those that are currently public will remain so, but also be visible via G+.
Now go take off that tin-foil hat before pictures of you wearing it appear all over Google+.
There was also a Canadian federal election yesterday, with many surprising results which were all reported in this exact time slot. I know that's not as exciting as a bunch of commandos shooting a guy, but if we're going to talk facts, let's get them straight.
Availability is only half the problem in Canada. I'm paying extra for an Internet plan that only gets me 60 GB/month. That maxes out pretty quickly with anything HD!
Speed is all well and good, but it's not my main bottleneck anymore. You could make my connection 100x faster tomorrow, and it would only be frustrating because of my bandwidth cap. With that faster connection, I could hit my monthly cap within 5 minutes instead of 8 hours!
You both have a point, but sharing and using knowledge takes energy. Without the cheap energy of oil (or an alternative which has yet to take over) all that knowledge won't go very far or even last very long.
You sound unimpressed with "stuff", so don't buy "stuff". Buy experiences. Take them to the zoo, or a children's show, or a good hands-on science museum. It'll cost the same, they'll get more out of it, and there'll be that much less plastic sitting around your sibling's house.
Maybe because they can be the geekier type that have less social lives, maybe feel alienated from those around them, and thus easier to isolate and brainwash.
In other words, engineers don't get laid enough. Promise them an afterlife full of virgins, and the next thing you know....
That's only true for monoculture fed by petroleum-based fertilizers. As soon as you talk in terms of sustainable farming, with crop rotations and even mixed fields, traditional farming has productivity levels that monoculture can't touch.
It's a moot point, though. Petroleum-based monoculture cannot be sustained indefinitely. Traditional agriculture has been and--unless we continue to destroy our soils--will be.
Wait, they want to turn the International Space Station into a national lab? What about all the other countries with a stake in this real estate?
The only spanner in the works here is that the PS3 owners don't need to upgrade their PS3s. All their games that they've bought so far currently work, so long as they don't "upgrade" to the latest firmware, plus they keep their other OS functionality.
Alas, Sony has no out there either. Users can no longer play their current games online, which is definitely an advertised feature. The user loses functionality no matter what they do.
We need to make manufacturers calculate mileage averages from the total vehicles they sell, not the total vehicles in their lineup. This is just going to result in more abominations like the PT Cruiser, which was designed to lower the average mileage of Dodge's truck line rather than to be a useful (or even safe) passenger vehicle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pt_cruiser#Overview
I see two ways out of that:
1. Cost of living varies regionally. Of course, as soon as you inject money the cost of living changes, so you have to do it gradually.
2. Economics is not a zero-sum game.
To some extent, we do need to grow our way out of poverty... but that only works if we commit ourselves to sharing the wealth to a reasonable degree. I'm not advocating Communism. I just don't think the highest incomes should be thousands of times the size of the lowest.
And the real trick is that the next terrorist attack won't be on a plane. It will probably be a real nuke stashed in a port somewhere, since we don't even bother to check the trillions of pounds of cargo we import each year.
Could we, even? At what point would it be cheaper to just relieve the world of poverty than establishing an impassible fence three miles from every American border?
The system is broken: even the experts realize that. Should we be playing with the algorithm, or throwing the whole system out?
If racial profiling doesn't work, what do we do next? Do we keep going with the security theatre, building a divide between "us" and "them", or do we start attacking the causes of terrorism rather than pretending we can do anything about the effects?
I have two concerns with that, without getting into legitimate questions of the pros and cons of running your government by utilitarian principles.
1. Who's compiling the statistics? And have we seen them, or are we just fearing the people Fox News tells us to fear?
2. If the statistics show us that 9/11 was an anomaly, we have a real problem with your system.
Guess who belongs to terrorist organizations? Young middle eastern men with travel records back and forth from Pakistan.
Tell that to Christian militia groups in Michigan.
people who don't understand the difference between binary and decimal have no place in IT
And they shouldn't be allowed to buy hard drives, either?
At the risk of being moderated "Troll"...
What a jerk.
Let's not jump to conclusions. They may have come up with a technology for palpating people's nodes over the internet. I'd be surprised, though: I always figured that if any industry developed a device for feeling up my gnads online, it would be the porn industry.