I for one am sad about this. I'm one of those holdouts who still doesn't have a (i|g|smart)phone, so it was nice to be able to call Google up to contact the restaurant I want to get reservations at, or anything like that. I can understand why they canceled it (they get way more voice data from Google Voice, I'm sure), but still, I'm a bit sad.
Maybe I'll finally get a more intelligent phone now...
Same here! I've long said that when I'm old and feeble, I plan to have a powered exoskeleton that will keep me active and let me do whatever I damn well please. With luck, I've got at least 40-50 years before I need to worry about it, but I love seeing developments like this today. It makes me excited to see what will be available when I'm actually in the market...
I've heard good things about this small, obscure start-up that's done a lot of work on machine translation and has a pretty good site available. Maybe you should give them a shot;)
Yeah, this is not really anything new/innovative, though it certainly could be a better implementation of an existing idea.
I read the summary as "While that might sound a bit been there, done that, here's a feature that's already been done by many of our competitors." Awesome!
I always taken "up to" X Mbps to mean you might get bursts up to X, but would hopefully average X/2 or so, and I'm a bit of an optimist. They've always been very careful to specify that you'll definitely get less than X, why is it surprising that you do?
Nobody's suggesting that pacemaker code should be written and maintained by random volunteers, but that it should be *available* for anyone to review. I'd certainly feel more comfortable if I knew that the software keeping me alive was written and tested by a faceless corporation, reviewed and approved by a faceless government agency, and skimmed over by at least a few J. Random Hackers, as opposed to just written and tested in private by the faceless corporation without any external verification.
I've never understood why "Preferences" would be in the Edit menu. I think the thought process is "You edit your preferences!", but that just makes no sense at all, given the rest of the entries in the Edit menu. This seems to be a common theme among most Linux (at least) applications, so I have to assume (quite optimistically, I admit) that there's some sort of explanation... Does anyone know?
> I don't actually have anything against coffee
As far as I'm concerned, coffee falls under the same rule as beer and buttermilk: anything that smells that foul is NOT going in my mouth. I also don't chew on old sweaty gym socks.
You're clearly not smelling the right beers, then:)
I won't evangelize, but there are some truly delicious beers out there, even for someone who "doesn't like beer". The vast majority of Americans don't even know such a thing exists, sadly.
In my opinion, buttermilk is an ingredient. I wouldn't drink it just like I wouldn't eat flour, but it can have a very nice effect on pancakes and bread.
What do you get when you just order a beer in a bar where you live? Here in Germany that tends to mean what the closest brewery produces, unfortunately my town's brewery isn't terribly good. The neighboring city got some better breweries but unfortunately the bars in this town don't stock their products.
Most US bars that don't care about serving "better beer" have about the same selection: a variety of Budweiser, Miller, Coors, or similar, including a few that count as imports, like Heineken and Corona, and then one or two obligatory beers for the snobs like me who want something that actually tastes good. That's often a Samuel Adams Boston Lager, which is decent, and/or something made locally. In those places I usually go for the local whatever or the Sam Adams. I can also drink the cheap shitty beer, since the reason it's normally shitty is that it's not entirely unlike drinking water, but I rarely have reason to. I have the fortune of living in an area that has a lot of very good breweries relatively close by, so there's usually at least one beer that I'll like.
Note that, in the US, a "local" brewery could be a few hundred miles away, but is usually in the same state, unlike Germany where a local brewery has the same PLZ.
Generally, I try to go to bars/pubs that have far better selections of beer. The majority of beers in places like that are American craft brews, plus a decent amount of imported craft beer, mostly from England, Germany, and Belgium. For example, this place has 70 beers on tap, almost as many in bottles, and is just a few blocks from where I lived the past two years:)
I don't actually have anything against coffee, but I don't drink it because I can wake up on my own, and I don't find its taste compelling enough to drink all the time. I think the comparison between alcohol and caffeine probably has more to do with the reasons people have for drinking it.
Drinking coffee to wake up every morning will probably lead to dependence. Drinking coffee because it tastes good, at somewhat irregular times, probably won't. Similarly, drinking beer just because it's delicious(*) and the light buzz is pleasant probably won't lead to dependence, but drinking to make yourself happier or to "escape" in any way probably will. It's much easier to become dependent on something that you, you know, depend on.
(*) I'm wholly on board with you that most super pale, weak, flavorless "beer" is vile; that's why I drink better beer.
Too bad the current US President seems to be channeling Woodrow Wilson. The demonization of middle-age & senior citizens, often with children & grandchildren with them, that have protested this governments' irresponsibility (Tea Party), and the characterization of them as violent & dangerous, is the first step towards repeating, or even exceeding, Wilson-esque suppression of dissent. Particularly when coupled with the government wishing to be able to detain citizens indefinitely without a trial or due process on their whim.
Wait wait wait, who is characterizing the Tea Party as violent and dangerous? They've been doing a really good job of characterizing themselves as clueless and uninformed, but I haven't seen anyone imply that they're dangerous (except maybe politically, but that's a different thing).
Its shocking though, nobody would trust someone in the real world telling you that you need something they are providing without some kind of double check.
If someone showed up at your house and told you that your water could kill because of some microbe you have never heard of that they claim is getting into your pipes and the only way to make yourself safe is to install this helpful filter that they are selling would you believe them?
A big difference is that the fake antivirus pop-ups aren't usually trying to sell you anything, they just want you to click OK! It's easy to click OK, and, for the average [clueless] user, just clicking OK doesn't feel nearly as risky as letting a stranger into your home, or buying a mysterious product.
I think most people just do a naive, clueless sort of risk assessment. If the pop-up is telling the truth, they really need the software. If the pop-up is lying... well, they're not directly paying anything and have no idea what could go wrong, so they assume it's not a problem. Therefore, they decide to click OK to install the software. To them, it's more like some random person standing on the sidewalk telling them, "You should walk on the other side of the street; there's a dead skunk halfway up the block and you really don't want to get near it." Eventually people will learn... but it may take a few generations.
Even auditing the code doesn't help. The only thing crazier than running a browser and OS whose code you've not audited is auditing the browser's and OS's code but then compiling them! The only way out is to write the compiler in pure machine code yourself.
...and then you just have to run it in your head -- you can't trust hardware!
More seriously, proprietary software requires you place all your trust in one entity. With open-source software, that trust is more distributed, and it's less likely that someone was able to bury something malicious, especially if there's an active and large developer community. This isn't at all to say there can't be anything malicious (or flawed) in OSS, but it's easier to trust a large group of people that have nothing to gain from duping you and who know they would probably get caught than it is to trust a single company that might have something to gain and can probably get away with it.
With proprietary software, you're betting that a specific company won't fuck you over.
With OSS, you're betting that at least one person out of a community of developers (and users who actually do audit code) won't fuck you over.
I don't know about you, but I'm quite shocked at how an innocuous thing like this can lead to the theft of "one of Google's crown jewels".
I sincerely doubt this is anything near a "crown jewel" for Google. From TFA:
The program, code named Gaia for the Greek goddess of the earth, was attacked in a lightning raid taking less than two days last December, the person said. Described publicly only once at a technical conference four years ago, the software is intended to enable users and employees to sign in with their password just once to operate a range of services.
Yes, a useful piece of software, and it probably works better than most every other site's login system. An important trade secret of Google's worth freaking out about? No. It also doesn't really seem like Google is freaking out. If they're making changes to the program, it's probably primarily to placate the panicky masses/press (or maybe panicky managers who don't really understand what's going on).
Honestly, this whole story seems like a non-issue. Google is pretty damn good with security (this attack was the exception that proves the rule), and I'd be very surprised if their login system couldn't stand on its own without the veil of obscurity. Their real crown jewels (some of the algorithms in the backend and, more importantly, their massive stores of user data and history) are safe and well behind the front lines. What's making them "paranoid about security" is that they were hacked and it's public knowledge. That shit is embarrassing.
That is a very good point. In all honesty, if I had a phone that had Opera Mini and a normal, non-proxied browser, I would probably use the normal browser for things like online banking, and Opera for everything else, for exactly the reason you said. In a bind, though, I generally trust Opera, both as a business and as software developers, and they have a very good track record for doing security well; if I really needed to I wouldn't hesitate to use Opera Mini for my banking.
And how do you know that? On what grounds you're putting this trust in most of the closed software you use? (heck, also open one...did you make sure all your binaries are fine? Do you trust all eyes looking at the code? The compiler?)
Exactly. I considered linking to this in my post above, but it seemed a little too philosophical for the topic. Still a great read, and excellent point.
Since Opera's proxy servers do the actual rendering of the page, anything that's accessed via https has to be decrypted by Opera's servers, then re-encrypted and sent back to the user (ala man-in-the-middle).
If you don't trust Opera not to spy on your data, why in the hell would you trust them not to spy when you use https in their normal browser? You're always forced to place trust in your browser to keep things encrypted and secure; using their proxies is approximately the same amount of trust. If you're worried about them caching sensitive pages on their servers, that's somewhat more valid (even if you trust them, they could be hacked, say), but still not a very strong argument.
." I have to agree: from where I sit, IBM likes Open Source only as long as they don't have to compete with it."
Not like you'd have any bias here or anything...
Who claimed not to be biased? That is clearly a statement of opinion, and they even acknowledged their bias earlier in the summary.
Something worth keeping in mind: Everything anyone ever says is at least a little biased. Unless someone is claiming not to be biased, there's no point calling them out on it.
It doesn't help "move standards forward" or anything - it means that people will be asked to design for a specific resolution. We're going backwards - remember all those "Best viewed with Internet Explorer at 800x600"?
There are still too many sites out there that use a fixed-width table layout - on todays wide-screen monitors, all the content is in the left third of the browser.
Morons. (But what do you expect for people who "want their site to look good on a device that hasn't sold a single unit" - they've bought into the hype.
No, this is a good thing. No one is changing their site to look good exclusively on the iPad; they're changing their site to look good on a wider range of devices, including those without flash. That is good, and exactly the opposite of the "Best viewed with..." crap. The web moving in this direction urges developers (both of websites and of browsers) to adopt cross-platform open standards and reasonable industry best practices (which will hopefully finally kill many abhorrent things, like the fixed-width table layout you mentioned and sites written entirely in flash).
The editors didn't make this up (nor the YouTube text mode thing). This is an actual prank by Google. If you're arguing that it's not funny and shouldn't be reported, sure, that's a fine complaint to make, but this isn't the Slashdot editors thinking, "You know, it'd be funny if Google changed its name to Topeka..."
On a different note:
If something is untrue it is not funny, it is called a lie.
Wow. If it's not true it's not funny? I think you should read this, it may help clear some things up for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one am sad about this. I'm one of those holdouts who still doesn't have a (i|g|smart)phone, so it was nice to be able to call Google up to contact the restaurant I want to get reservations at, or anything like that. I can understand why they canceled it (they get way more voice data from Google Voice, I'm sure), but still, I'm a bit sad.
Maybe I'll finally get a more intelligent phone now...
Same here! I've long said that when I'm old and feeble, I plan to have a powered exoskeleton that will keep me active and let me do whatever I damn well please. With luck, I've got at least 40-50 years before I need to worry about it, but I love seeing developments like this today. It makes me excited to see what will be available when I'm actually in the market...
I've heard good things about this small, obscure start-up that's done a lot of work on machine translation and has a pretty good site available. Maybe you should give them a shot ;)
Yeah, this is not really anything new/innovative, though it certainly could be a better implementation of an existing idea.
I read the summary as "While that might sound a bit been there, done that, here's a feature that's already been done by many of our competitors." Awesome!
I always taken "up to" X Mbps to mean you might get bursts up to X, but would hopefully average X/2 or so, and I'm a bit of an optimist. They've always been very careful to specify that you'll definitely get less than X, why is it surprising that you do?
Nobody's suggesting that pacemaker code should be written and maintained by random volunteers, but that it should be *available* for anyone to review. I'd certainly feel more comfortable if I knew that the software keeping me alive was written and tested by a faceless corporation, reviewed and approved by a faceless government agency, and skimmed over by at least a few J. Random Hackers, as opposed to just written and tested in private by the faceless corporation without any external verification.
Ah, true, I've been using almost exclusively GNOME for a while and forgot how KDE's menus work.
I've never understood why "Preferences" would be in the Edit menu. I think the thought process is "You edit your preferences!", but that just makes no sense at all, given the rest of the entries in the Edit menu. This seems to be a common theme among most Linux (at least) applications, so I have to assume (quite optimistically, I admit) that there's some sort of explanation... Does anyone know?
Sporkhack has tinfoil hats. They block telepathy and protect you from psi bolts. That should keep you safe.
I read it as you progressively getting more agitated and increasing the volume of your voice. It really made your post more dramatic :)
> I don't actually have anything against coffee As far as I'm concerned, coffee falls under the same rule as beer and buttermilk: anything that smells that foul is NOT going in my mouth. I also don't chew on old sweaty gym socks.
You're clearly not smelling the right beers, then :)
I won't evangelize, but there are some truly delicious beers out there, even for someone who "doesn't like beer". The vast majority of Americans don't even know such a thing exists, sadly.
In my opinion, buttermilk is an ingredient. I wouldn't drink it just like I wouldn't eat flour, but it can have a very nice effect on pancakes and bread.
What do you get when you just order a beer in a bar where you live? Here in Germany that tends to mean what the closest brewery produces, unfortunately my town's brewery isn't terribly good. The neighboring city got some better breweries but unfortunately the bars in this town don't stock their products.
Most US bars that don't care about serving "better beer" have about the same selection: a variety of Budweiser, Miller, Coors, or similar, including a few that count as imports, like Heineken and Corona, and then one or two obligatory beers for the snobs like me who want something that actually tastes good. That's often a Samuel Adams Boston Lager, which is decent, and/or something made locally. In those places I usually go for the local whatever or the Sam Adams. I can also drink the cheap shitty beer, since the reason it's normally shitty is that it's not entirely unlike drinking water, but I rarely have reason to. I have the fortune of living in an area that has a lot of very good breweries relatively close by, so there's usually at least one beer that I'll like.
:)
Note that, in the US, a "local" brewery could be a few hundred miles away, but is usually in the same state, unlike Germany where a local brewery has the same PLZ.
Generally, I try to go to bars/pubs that have far better selections of beer. The majority of beers in places like that are American craft brews, plus a decent amount of imported craft beer, mostly from England, Germany, and Belgium. For example, this place has 70 beers on tap, almost as many in bottles, and is just a few blocks from where I lived the past two years
I don't actually have anything against coffee, but I don't drink it because I can wake up on my own, and I don't find its taste compelling enough to drink all the time. I think the comparison between alcohol and caffeine probably has more to do with the reasons people have for drinking it.
Drinking coffee to wake up every morning will probably lead to dependence. Drinking coffee because it tastes good, at somewhat irregular times, probably won't. Similarly, drinking beer just because it's delicious(*) and the light buzz is pleasant probably won't lead to dependence, but drinking to make yourself happier or to "escape" in any way probably will. It's much easier to become dependent on something that you, you know, depend on.
(*) I'm wholly on board with you that most super pale, weak, flavorless "beer" is vile; that's why I drink better beer.
Coffee is far more vile than beer! Beer has no withdrawal symptoms, other than wishing you were drinking beer.
Too bad the current US President seems to be channeling Woodrow Wilson. The demonization of middle-age & senior citizens, often with children & grandchildren with them, that have protested this governments' irresponsibility (Tea Party), and the characterization of them as violent & dangerous, is the first step towards repeating, or even exceeding, Wilson-esque suppression of dissent. Particularly when coupled with the government wishing to be able to detain citizens indefinitely without a trial or due process on their whim.
Wait wait wait, who is characterizing the Tea Party as violent and dangerous? They've been doing a really good job of characterizing themselves as clueless and uninformed, but I haven't seen anyone imply that they're dangerous (except maybe politically, but that's a different thing).
Its shocking though, nobody would trust someone in the real world telling you that you need something they are providing without some kind of double check.
If someone showed up at your house and told you that your water could kill because of some microbe you have never heard of that they claim is getting into your pipes and the only way to make yourself safe is to install this helpful filter that they are selling would you believe them?
A big difference is that the fake antivirus pop-ups aren't usually trying to sell you anything, they just want you to click OK! It's easy to click OK, and, for the average [clueless] user, just clicking OK doesn't feel nearly as risky as letting a stranger into your home, or buying a mysterious product.
I think most people just do a naive, clueless sort of risk assessment. If the pop-up is telling the truth, they really need the software. If the pop-up is lying... well, they're not directly paying anything and have no idea what could go wrong, so they assume it's not a problem. Therefore, they decide to click OK to install the software. To them, it's more like some random person standing on the sidewalk telling them, "You should walk on the other side of the street; there's a dead skunk halfway up the block and you really don't want to get near it." Eventually people will learn... but it may take a few generations.
That was an excellent post.
...that's pretty much all I have to say. Pity I don't have mod points.
Even auditing the code doesn't help. The only thing crazier than running a browser and OS whose code you've not audited is auditing the browser's and OS's code but then compiling them! The only way out is to write the compiler in pure machine code yourself.
...and then you just have to run it in your head -- you can't trust hardware!
More seriously, proprietary software requires you place all your trust in one entity. With open-source software, that trust is more distributed, and it's less likely that someone was able to bury something malicious, especially if there's an active and large developer community. This isn't at all to say there can't be anything malicious (or flawed) in OSS, but it's easier to trust a large group of people that have nothing to gain from duping you and who know they would probably get caught than it is to trust a single company that might have something to gain and can probably get away with it.
With proprietary software, you're betting that a specific company won't fuck you over.
With OSS, you're betting that at least one person out of a community of developers (and users who actually do audit code) won't fuck you over.
I don't know about you, but I'm quite shocked at how an innocuous thing like this can lead to the theft of "one of Google's crown jewels".
I sincerely doubt this is anything near a "crown jewel" for Google. From TFA:
The program, code named Gaia for the Greek goddess of the earth, was attacked in a lightning raid taking less than two days last December, the person said. Described publicly only once at a technical conference four years ago, the software is intended to enable users and employees to sign in with their password just once to operate a range of services.
Yes, a useful piece of software, and it probably works better than most every other site's login system. An important trade secret of Google's worth freaking out about? No. It also doesn't really seem like Google is freaking out. If they're making changes to the program, it's probably primarily to placate the panicky masses/press (or maybe panicky managers who don't really understand what's going on).
Honestly, this whole story seems like a non-issue. Google is pretty damn good with security (this attack was the exception that proves the rule), and I'd be very surprised if their login system couldn't stand on its own without the veil of obscurity. Their real crown jewels (some of the algorithms in the backend and, more importantly, their massive stores of user data and history) are safe and well behind the front lines. What's making them "paranoid about security" is that they were hacked and it's public knowledge. That shit is embarrassing.
That is a very good point. In all honesty, if I had a phone that had Opera Mini and a normal, non-proxied browser, I would probably use the normal browser for things like online banking, and Opera for everything else, for exactly the reason you said. In a bind, though, I generally trust Opera, both as a business and as software developers, and they have a very good track record for doing security well; if I really needed to I wouldn't hesitate to use Opera Mini for my banking.
And how do you know that? On what grounds you're putting this trust in most of the closed software you use? (heck, also open one...did you make sure all your binaries are fine? Do you trust all eyes looking at the code? The compiler?)
Exactly. I considered linking to this in my post above, but it seemed a little too philosophical for the topic. Still a great read, and excellent point.
Since Opera's proxy servers do the actual rendering of the page, anything that's accessed via https has to be decrypted by Opera's servers, then re-encrypted and sent back to the user (ala man-in-the-middle).
If you don't trust Opera not to spy on your data, why in the hell would you trust them not to spy when you use https in their normal browser? You're always forced to place trust in your browser to keep things encrypted and secure; using their proxies is approximately the same amount of trust. If you're worried about them caching sensitive pages on their servers, that's somewhat more valid (even if you trust them, they could be hacked, say), but still not a very strong argument.
Not like you'd have any bias here or anything...
Who claimed not to be biased? That is clearly a statement of opinion, and they even acknowledged their bias earlier in the summary.
Something worth keeping in mind: Everything anyone ever says is at least a little biased. Unless someone is claiming not to be biased, there's no point calling them out on it.
It doesn't help "move standards forward" or anything - it means that people will be asked to design for a specific resolution. We're going backwards - remember all those "Best viewed with Internet Explorer at 800x600"?
There are still too many sites out there that use a fixed-width table layout - on todays wide-screen monitors, all the content is in the left third of the browser.
Morons. (But what do you expect for people who "want their site to look good on a device that hasn't sold a single unit" - they've bought into the hype.
No, this is a good thing. No one is changing their site to look good exclusively on the iPad; they're changing their site to look good on a wider range of devices, including those without flash. That is good, and exactly the opposite of the "Best viewed with..." crap. The web moving in this direction urges developers (both of websites and of browsers) to adopt cross-platform open standards and reasonable industry best practices (which will hopefully finally kill many abhorrent things, like the fixed-width table layout you mentioned and sites written entirely in flash).
On a different note:
If something is untrue it is not funny, it is called a lie.
Wow. If it's not true it's not funny? I think you should read this, it may help clear some things up for you.