Imagine every woman to have on average five sex partners over her life. Imagine they are 100% heterosexual, only doing it with men. And only one at a time, no orgies. As long as there is an equal number of men as there are women, men should also have on average five sex partners over their lives.
From various statistics it seems that some 95% of men is pure heterosexual, and a slightly lower number for women. The number of men and women in this world is also almost equal. So there is very little room for difference between numbers of sex partners for men and women.
I was thinking in the same line... someone who is married has probably more sex in a year than someone who manages to have five one-night-stands in that same year. So less partners == more sex. So I would conclude from these statistics that iPhone users have less sex than other handset users. After all they obviously have to spend more time finding a new partner.
Interesting. So men had more sex partners than women. And you don't give the number for women, but for men less than 6% had same sex contact, so 94% exclusively opposite sex contact. I assume similar for women. Indeed the good question is: who did those men have sex with? Are there a few women with thousands of partners or so?
It's the same as the typical feminist notion of "many men are cheating on their spouses" as if women don't... without partners no cheating. And those partners again tend to be of the opposite sex.
But I don't know whether it's something to be really proud of, as it also means that there were at least 16,000 bugs in KDE 4.4. And no matter how you look at it that's no small number!
I always had the idea that politicians do not read the mails that are sent to them - the higher up the chain the less likely. I would expect them to have a bunch of aides who actually go through those mails, categorise them, and regularly hand summaries to the politician, or forward really important ones directly to his actual private e-mail.
A national politician reading all mails sent by constituents by himself is doing something wrong imho. He has better things to do than spending all day reading mails, as I expect that he will get lots of mails.
We all know how well that went... this doesn't sound too different. Basically same purpose, client-side, government initiated. Just the exact focus is different. What a waste of money and effort.
Depending on the exact letter of the law, it is not always possible to fully forego your copyright and/or authorship. Have a look at the Creative Commons CC0 license. That is the closest you can get to putting it in the public domain outright. After all in most jurisdictions (and certainly under the Berne Convention) copyright is automatic. You create it, you own the copyright. Getting rid of that copyright may actually be a problem.
Again they are comparing ALL Android phones, a lot of different models, and comparing it to a single model, confirming my original comments. Of course it sells more; if it doesn't then there's really a problem. And I'm not exactly an Apple fanboi like you try to make me; I'm also getting fed up with iPhone all the time being compared to everything else (it says something though if your phone is the de-facto reference).
Much more valid is comparing Apple's iPhone sales to the latest Motorola Droid model for example - why don't we see those statistics? Why only comparing to the complete Android line of phones which spans various makers and maybe dozens of different models?
Two stories with an iPhone image attached to it, specifically talking about the iPhone.
Two more stories about cellphones in general, one of them is this story.
90 stories about iPhone in the past 120 days.
Does any other mobile phone model or even brand have their own logo? How about Nokia? Used to be #1 hands down, don't know the current stats but they're still at least in the top. I don't recall much about it. A quick search gives me a whole two stories only.
Not talking about just/. Also the newspapers and TV news. Queues overnight in front ofg Apple stores. Problems with the antenna. Oh no it's a little software bug. Oh no it's how we hold it. All those little things make the front page of/. It's totally over the top. RIM is also regularly in the news, but not for their smartphones themselves but for their tech (being blocked in UAE most recently).
A count of stories for various smartphones could be interesting though. Even counting "iPhone vs the other smartphones" it seems iPhone has more stories.
If that Droid phone is selling so much better than iPhone - why are we not talking more about that one then?
And from the name I assume it's Android OS based - how come Android as a whole still has so much problems outselling iPhone if a single model sells more already as claimed? Android being installed in dozens of devices should have no problems outselling an OS that comes with only one device in the whole market. We never hear stories about how Windows is outselling OS-X, for example. Of course it does: OS-X is only sold by Apple, Windows is sold by Dell, HP, Lenovo, you name it.
I also love how a single model mobile phone (well maybe four versions or so by now) is compared to a complete ecosystem of maybe dozens of models, and then decried that this single phone can not keep its total sales larger than a pool of a few dozen models. It's apples and oranges. The iPhone versus "all phones running the Android OS" - many with so different functionality and user interface that if you know one runs Android you wouldn't recognise the other as running it as well.
Is there any single phone model that is selling as well as the iPhone these days? Or even nearly as well? It is almost like Microsoft's marketing statistics putting the Zune as market leader in "brown portable music players with a 80GB hard disk".
At the moment when looking at smartphones, the iPhone is still simply #1, no contest. Pretty impressive for what is basically a newcomer in the market. And as long as that phone is selling so much better than whoever is #2 there will be people that try to find ways of making the iPhone look like they're not #1 any more. Sorry for the rest but as long as they do not thoroughly improve their offerings it's going to be "iPhone and the rest". Apple's offering is on the market long enough for the novelty to wear off, and that it is selling this well indicates to me that for many people it's simply a great device, and that the rest of the competition still has to catch up.
History and saved credentials should not be a problem privacy-wise. That are exactly the details a browser should never give to the web site you are browsing. This info is kept on your own computer, and save browser bugs stay there.
Cookies are another matter: they are designed to do just that, give info to the web site you visit. Third-party cookies are a problem imho, cookies from the web site you are visiting not so much. Actually I like it when a web site that I visit often keeps track of my preferences.
Users simply visit the URL to begin the process, which modifies the iOS mobile operating system found on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
This sounds like a huge security hole. If simply visiting a web page can modify the OS of the phone, then this can surely be used for more malicious purposes. Maybe the user has to make some more clicks but then how hard is it to social engineer a user into doing that, and the attacker can do anything they like. Such as installing back doors, keyloggers, whatever. This I think is more than just a jailbreak: this is a root exploit in the browser. Scary, to say the least.
The jailbreak itself may not work on other versions of iOS, but as it involves Safari I wouldn't be surprised if the root exploit itself works there as well. Binary patching of the running O/S (which is what I guess they are doing) of course works only against a specific version, minor revisions may break it, so no surprise it doesn't work for the iPad.
This is one I have to say I hope Apple plugs quickly. It just sounds too scary to me.
For example, I could set my browser to tell a server that I am running Opera version 16 on Windows 7, and the only font I have installed is Comic Sans. And it doesn't get much more fake than that.
Then you're using that plugin the totally wrong way, as with such a string you would create a unique signature for your browser, which in turn would make you even more trackable. Bad example. Best is to give no information at all, or maybe just actual browser name.
And as we all know of course unicode and Slashdot comments don't go well together. Which is why I couldn't use such a character even though I am aware it exists.
I just re-read the summary, and it is at best ambiguous about where to block, what to block, and how to block. It is talking about a browser-based tool, while of course the actual tracking is done on the other end of the connection.
Having something browser-side to thoroughly block tracking would be much more useful as it is very easy to move servers into another jurisdiction. Or to use a third-party tracking service that is located in another country. Having a browser ask politely to not track that user may work somewhat within the US where said law is valid, it doesn't do anything outside of it.
And I'm wondering how long before FF is going to really increase their privacy options. They only have to look at the current options provided by extensions for good ideas.
There must be a FF extension that can do just that by now. I can't imagine that there are no paranoid nerds that haven't thought of this.
And if there is no FF extension then the required functionality is probably impossible to do browser-side.
Actually I am wondering how they track behaviour, and what a browser can do to prevent it. I can think of a few bits:
- Cookies. The obvious one. Third-party cookies especially. Can be blocked in FF and other browsers for more than a decade already.
- Referrer tags in URLs. Sometimes useful - especially for sites to see where visitors originate - but also for the end user. E.g. after a Google search you go to some web page that then highlights your search terms. Seems trivial to block in your browser as your browser puts the referrer tag in the http request.
- IP address. Naturally public information. Can not be blocked, ever. Merely obfuscated by using tor or so.
- Browser ID. Can easily be faked. But is usually constant for a user, allowing them to be traced anyway using this and the IP address. Also between cooperating web sites. And of course third-party ad providers who in turn can follow IP addresses over their customer's web sites. Those third parties can be (partly) blocked by e.g. AdBlock Plus, only partly as the visited web site can still give your info (IP address, page visited) to the ad company, even when the actual ads are blocked.
That's all that I can think of at the moment, there may be more ways to follow a user. But I don't see much that can be done on the browser-side to stop more tracking.
There will be incalculable economic losses and numerous people losing their jobs over that of course. After all the whole advertising business will go totally down the drain if you build in such functionality. I mean think of the children and so. This is is also totally anti-capitalist. You really should listen to your local politicians and advertising lobbyists better for failing to see the obvious.
And would even like to add: how many TECHNICAL people would even know that it's not doing anything? It's low-level stuff after all. To see what it's really doing almost requires comparing disk images. Maybe the software says it has removed some malware, but has it really? How can you check? Windows is also not known for being very forthcoming with low-level system information. To really know it works or not you will have to install specialised tools.
The main reason for me to distrust is on a different level. For example being advertised in spam e-mail (especially if that does not appear to come from the actual vendor). Not knowing it. Not being able to find references about said software through a Google search.
Trusting software (or a vendor in general) I do for very different reasons: seeing it advertised in traditional media, hearing friends talk about it, seeing talk about it on various other web sites and forums, seeing it for sale in computer shops.
Remarkable that only at the end of the comments (as now, reading +3) I see a comment like this.
Personally I don't see too much problem with the ISP keeping these logs - your traffic passes through them after all, and there may be reasons (legal, technical, whatever) for them to keep such logs.
That a third party, a foreign third party in a jurisdiction not known for its great human rights record nonetheless, has access to this databases is far more worrying. If it is as anonymous as the ISP says it is no idea what Huawei can actually do with it - still it's not something that would make me happy if my ISP were to do something like it.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean those scenarios are mutually exclusive?
They do it with girls most of the time or so?
Imagine every woman to have on average five sex partners over her life. Imagine they are 100% heterosexual, only doing it with men. And only one at a time, no orgies. As long as there is an equal number of men as there are women, men should also have on average five sex partners over their lives.
From various statistics it seems that some 95% of men is pure heterosexual, and a slightly lower number for women. The number of men and women in this world is also almost equal. So there is very little room for difference between numbers of sex partners for men and women.
I was thinking in the same line... someone who is married has probably more sex in a year than someone who manages to have five one-night-stands in that same year. So less partners == more sex. So I would conclude from these statistics that iPhone users have less sex than other handset users. After all they obviously have to spend more time finding a new partner.
Interesting. So men had more sex partners than women. And you don't give the number for women, but for men less than 6% had same sex contact, so 94% exclusively opposite sex contact. I assume similar for women. Indeed the good question is: who did those men have sex with? Are there a few women with thousands of partners or so?
It's the same as the typical feminist notion of "many men are cheating on their spouses" as if women don't... without partners no cheating. And those partners again tend to be of the opposite sex.
16,000 bug fixes committed.
That's a lot of work, really.
But I don't know whether it's something to be really proud of, as it also means that there were at least 16,000 bugs in KDE 4.4. And no matter how you look at it that's no small number!
I always had the idea that politicians do not read the mails that are sent to them - the higher up the chain the less likely. I would expect them to have a bunch of aides who actually go through those mails, categorise them, and regularly hand summaries to the politician, or forward really important ones directly to his actual private e-mail.
A national politician reading all mails sent by constituents by himself is doing something wrong imho. He has better things to do than spending all day reading mails, as I expect that he will get lots of mails.
We all know how well that went... this doesn't sound too different. Basically same purpose, client-side, government initiated. Just the exact focus is different. What a waste of money and effort.
Depending on the exact letter of the law, it is not always possible to fully forego your copyright and/or authorship. Have a look at the Creative Commons CC0 license. That is the closest you can get to putting it in the public domain outright. After all in most jurisdictions (and certainly under the Berne Convention) copyright is automatic. You create it, you own the copyright. Getting rid of that copyright may actually be a problem.
In your other post you mention why does Android have a problem outsell iPhone? The reality is, it doesn't.
If so then why is it news? It's not the first time that /. posts a story of "iPhone vs Android" but never "iPhone vs ".
It took 1 year for Android to ship 5 million unit, it took Apple a year and a half (with the help of the 3G) to do that. Sorry, but you really should try to look up the facts before you start shooting your mouth off.
Again they are comparing ALL Android phones, a lot of different models, and comparing it to a single model, confirming my original comments. Of course it sells more; if it doesn't then there's really a problem. And I'm not exactly an Apple fanboi like you try to make me; I'm also getting fed up with iPhone all the time being compared to everything else (it says something though if your phone is the de-facto reference).
Much more valid is comparing Apple's iPhone sales to the latest Motorola Droid model for example - why don't we see those statistics? Why only comparing to the complete Android line of phones which spans various makers and maybe dozens of different models?
Just checked the frontpage of /.
Two stories with an iPhone image attached to it, specifically talking about the iPhone.
Two more stories about cellphones in general, one of them is this story.
90 stories about iPhone in the past 120 days.
Does any other mobile phone model or even brand have their own logo? How about Nokia? Used to be #1 hands down, don't know the current stats but they're still at least in the top. I don't recall much about it. A quick search gives me a whole two stories only.
Not talking about just /. Also the newspapers and TV news. Queues overnight in front ofg Apple stores. Problems with the antenna. Oh no it's a little software bug. Oh no it's how we hold it. All those little things make the front page of /. It's totally over the top. RIM is also regularly in the news, but not for their smartphones themselves but for their tech (being blocked in UAE most recently).
A count of stories for various smartphones could be interesting though. Even counting "iPhone vs the other smartphones" it seems iPhone has more stories.
If that Droid phone is selling so much better than iPhone - why are we not talking more about that one then?
And from the name I assume it's Android OS based - how come Android as a whole still has so much problems outselling iPhone if a single model sells more already as claimed? Android being installed in dozens of devices should have no problems outselling an OS that comes with only one device in the whole market. We never hear stories about how Windows is outselling OS-X, for example. Of course it does: OS-X is only sold by Apple, Windows is sold by Dell, HP, Lenovo, you name it.
Interesting. I had never heard of that phone. Not sure what it is but the iPhone is the only smartphone which is talked about in the media.
I also love how a single model mobile phone (well maybe four versions or so by now) is compared to a complete ecosystem of maybe dozens of models, and then decried that this single phone can not keep its total sales larger than a pool of a few dozen models. It's apples and oranges. The iPhone versus "all phones running the Android OS" - many with so different functionality and user interface that if you know one runs Android you wouldn't recognise the other as running it as well.
Is there any single phone model that is selling as well as the iPhone these days? Or even nearly as well? It is almost like Microsoft's marketing statistics putting the Zune as market leader in "brown portable music players with a 80GB hard disk".
At the moment when looking at smartphones, the iPhone is still simply #1, no contest. Pretty impressive for what is basically a newcomer in the market. And as long as that phone is selling so much better than whoever is #2 there will be people that try to find ways of making the iPhone look like they're not #1 any more. Sorry for the rest but as long as they do not thoroughly improve their offerings it's going to be "iPhone and the rest". Apple's offering is on the market long enough for the novelty to wear off, and that it is selling this well indicates to me that for many people it's simply a great device, and that the rest of the competition still has to catch up.
Now to come back to the actual question:
Does it REQUIRE any action by the user? Or is this just a technicality, and can the actual exploit be run without any further user intervention?
History and saved credentials should not be a problem privacy-wise. That are exactly the details a browser should never give to the web site you are browsing. This info is kept on your own computer, and save browser bugs stay there.
Cookies are another matter: they are designed to do just that, give info to the web site you visit. Third-party cookies are a problem imho, cookies from the web site you are visiting not so much. Actually I like it when a web site that I visit often keeps track of my preferences.
Users simply visit the URL to begin the process, which modifies the iOS mobile operating system found on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
This sounds like a huge security hole. If simply visiting a web page can modify the OS of the phone, then this can surely be used for more malicious purposes. Maybe the user has to make some more clicks but then how hard is it to social engineer a user into doing that, and the attacker can do anything they like. Such as installing back doors, keyloggers, whatever. This I think is more than just a jailbreak: this is a root exploit in the browser. Scary, to say the least.
The jailbreak itself may not work on other versions of iOS, but as it involves Safari I wouldn't be surprised if the root exploit itself works there as well. Binary patching of the running O/S (which is what I guess they are doing) of course works only against a specific version, minor revisions may break it, so no surprise it doesn't work for the iPad.
This is one I have to say I hope Apple plugs quickly. It just sounds too scary to me.
For example, I could set my browser to tell a server that I am running Opera version 16 on Windows 7, and the only font I have installed is Comic Sans. And it doesn't get much more fake than that.
Then you're using that plugin the totally wrong way, as with such a string you would create a unique signature for your browser, which in turn would make you even more trackable. Bad example. Best is to give no information at all, or maybe just actual browser name.
And as we all know of course unicode and Slashdot comments don't go well together. Which is why I couldn't use such a character even though I am aware it exists.
I just re-read the summary, and it is at best ambiguous about where to block, what to block, and how to block. It is talking about a browser-based tool, while of course the actual tracking is done on the other end of the connection.
Having something browser-side to thoroughly block tracking would be much more useful as it is very easy to move servers into another jurisdiction. Or to use a third-party tracking service that is located in another country. Having a browser ask politely to not track that user may work somewhat within the US where said law is valid, it doesn't do anything outside of it.
And I'm wondering how long before FF is going to really increase their privacy options. They only have to look at the current options provided by extensions for good ideas.
To the other repliers: please don't take me too seriously.
There must be a FF extension that can do just that by now. I can't imagine that there are no paranoid nerds that haven't thought of this.
And if there is no FF extension then the required functionality is probably impossible to do browser-side.
Actually I am wondering how they track behaviour, and what a browser can do to prevent it. I can think of a few bits:
- Cookies. The obvious one. Third-party cookies especially. Can be blocked in FF and other browsers for more than a decade already.
- Referrer tags in URLs. Sometimes useful - especially for sites to see where visitors originate - but also for the end user. E.g. after a Google search you go to some web page that then highlights your search terms. Seems trivial to block in your browser as your browser puts the referrer tag in the http request.
- IP address. Naturally public information. Can not be blocked, ever. Merely obfuscated by using tor or so.
- Browser ID. Can easily be faked. But is usually constant for a user, allowing them to be traced anyway using this and the IP address. Also between cooperating web sites. And of course third-party ad providers who in turn can follow IP addresses over their customer's web sites. Those third parties can be (partly) blocked by e.g. AdBlock Plus, only partly as the visited web site can still give your info (IP address, page visited) to the ad company, even when the actual ads are blocked.
That's all that I can think of at the moment, there may be more ways to follow a user. But I don't see much that can be done on the browser-side to stop more tracking.
There will be incalculable economic losses and numerous people losing their jobs over that of course. After all the whole advertising business will go totally down the drain if you build in such functionality. I mean think of the children and so. This is is also totally anti-capitalist. You really should listen to your local politicians and advertising lobbyists better for failing to see the obvious.
I totally agree.
And would even like to add: how many TECHNICAL people would even know that it's not doing anything? It's low-level stuff after all. To see what it's really doing almost requires comparing disk images. Maybe the software says it has removed some malware, but has it really? How can you check? Windows is also not known for being very forthcoming with low-level system information. To really know it works or not you will have to install specialised tools.
The main reason for me to distrust is on a different level. For example being advertised in spam e-mail (especially if that does not appear to come from the actual vendor). Not knowing it. Not being able to find references about said software through a Google search.
Trusting software (or a vendor in general) I do for very different reasons: seeing it advertised in traditional media, hearing friends talk about it, seeing talk about it on various other web sites and forums, seeing it for sale in computer shops.
It is psychological. It adds another digit to the size of the number.
For the rest it is as much of a barrier as "the stock market has broken through the 20,000 point barrier", that idea.
Breaking the light speed barrier now that would be an achievement.
Remarkable that only at the end of the comments (as now, reading +3) I see a comment like this.
Personally I don't see too much problem with the ISP keeping these logs - your traffic passes through them after all, and there may be reasons (legal, technical, whatever) for them to keep such logs.
That a third party, a foreign third party in a jurisdiction not known for its great human rights record nonetheless, has access to this databases is far more worrying. If it is as anonymous as the ISP says it is no idea what Huawei can actually do with it - still it's not something that would make me happy if my ISP were to do something like it.