Most likely this is about Android versus "Android by Google" being labeled on the phone. One is pretty much free to do anything with, the other is if you agree to conform to some additional requirements, you can put the Google label on your phone. If Motorola decides that they want the Google label, then yes they have some restrictions,. If they opt out of the Google label, then they can do whatever they want. Part of this is an attempt to force the carriers to not cripple the phones too much if they decide to leverage the Google brand, though obviously there are other benefits to Google.
Yes, in this specific case of 9 lines of code that aren't doing anything with many outside libraries, etc., it may be possible to read the documentation, and assuming the documentation is correct, rely on the default behavior. That is very rarely the case however.
However when I have come across a particular problem that is resolved by being thorough, and ensuring things are initialized, my tendency is to remember that and keep doing it in the future, which is the case for srand/rand.
I thought the same thing, until I ran across a situation in ruby's Passenger, where they were initializing the srand with time or something similar, but of course all the servers were restarted at the same time. This then caused my UUID's to collide in another library because we had removed a 'superflous' srand in our code that was masking the problem.
Just saying you don't always know what the code that isn't yours is doing, so it is probably a good idea to assume it isn't done and do it explicitly.
Hide empty drives can be pretty annoying when you are ripping a few discs in a row (pretty much the only time I use my DVD drive) as it keeps moving the selected folders each time you pop the drive. Obviously your suggestion is valid, just that as with many things in windows, it is a double edged sword, lol. Kind of like auto-hide taskbar...works great *most* of the time, but not all of the time. Gets stuck open often enough that I have a shortcut that kills and restarts explorer.
There is a price threshold, at least for me. Right now HDD's cost say 5-6 cents per GB. Once Flash starts to hit the 3-4 cents per GB level (assuming HDD have gone below 1 cent/GB), it starts to make up for itself for many applications because of the performance/reliability factor. Right now I have say 200 'videos' per drive on a single 1.5TB drive (2TB just recently became more cost effective if you wait for the $99.99 sales at newegg). However, if that drive goes, it will tend to go in a catastrophic way, and I would lose all or a large portion of that drive. The hope/expectation is that a Flash drive sitting around without moving parts, would be much less likely to have a catastrophic failure like that. More likely for Flash is you would lose a single file or two. When you realize it might take two to three months to recover a completely lost HDD (redownload the 'videos'), at a reasonable download rate, it makes a lot more sense to make that switch as soon as you can.
A naive analysis of my Comcast Business Class service: $59.99 per month, bandwidth usage 1 TB, but lets say 1TB. A naive analysis already values a GB at 5-6 cents per GB just on ISP costs alone. You could say knock this down to 2-3 cents if you assume that even if you stopped downloading, you would need to spend $30 a month for decent internet if you didn't want good bandwidth.
Plus the labor involved in organizing your 'video' downloads, etc. might run into 4-10 hours per drive.
Once that threshold is met, and the perceived reliability of SSD versus extra cost becomes negligible in the overall cost, a lot of people will be jumping on SSDs, which should ultimately drive the costs even lower.
It isn't a requirement that they provide the HD versions, just *a* version. In many cases they will encrypt the HD version of the channel but leave the SD version clear.
You seem to be missing the point that people don't want it to be trivial to save the h264 file to disk and then redistribute it. If someone in the right zone can just download the link to the file, those that feel they need DRM/content control won't be using it. Heck, even Youtube makes it non-trivial(to most users) to download the actual FLV to preserve it, even without Youtube using DRM on that particular file.
Not saying that is good or bad, just pointing out why your argument about IP doesn't address the desire for a 'secure' client.
A lot of it comes down to resources. In general, it is just quicker to develop using the Adobe stuff and get a product out the door. Most people forget that Actionscript 3 is javascript essentially. If you ignore typing (disable the warnings), you can pretty much copy pure js code directly over.
MXML is obviously somewhat different than HTML, but in my mind at least, it is more rational, since it wasn't designed by committee. Like you set something hidden, you just do 'visible="false"'. You don't have to mess with the style in the same way. And I LOVE bind variables in a scripting language. Having the runtime handle all of the updating for you automatically is such a time saver. Using visible="{xmlUser.lastResult.user}" to show hide UI elements if the user is logged in, etc.
When HTML5 has some cool unified dev tools (man, debugging in Flex Builder is so much nicer than say Firebug to me), 95% market penetration, and the 3rd party libraries have shaken out (like jQuery has to some extent), and you don't have to test your shit on every single browser just to make sure it didn't break, and the performance starts nearing Flash some more...and all of that can happen while Flash/Actionscript stands still and doesn't add any new features...then I will be on board with HTML5 as the Flash killer:P
* There are the occasional browser incompatibilities in Flash that drive me batshit: Having a problem where some, not all, Firefox installs only on OSX have mouse coordinate issues when dragging. And overall if Macromedia (and now Adobe) has done a better job on OSX/Linux support there would be a lot less bitching.
Yea thats why I always use IE or Safari for debugging, depending on my OS. I hate having my browser hung when I need to look up a bug online, etc.
IE has its own problems though with Flash debugging. You have to remember to always close the pp from the browser window and not terminate it with Flex Builder, or it orphans the process because of the whole ieuser.exe sandboxing thing.
It is 'spooky' correlation at a distance, not action. An analogy: Say you have two balls, red and blue. You have someone put them into black boxes (hidden from you) and give one to you and one to someone else. That other person takes theirs home. When you open your box, and 'take the measurement' and observe you have the blue ball, you 'instantaneously' know that the other person has the red one.
The quantum complication is that while the red and blue balls are in a definite state the entire time due to the infeasibility of isolating a macro-sized object like a ball from all other atoms and photons, the entangled particles are not in a definite state, depending on your interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
There are 3 major interpretations of quantum mechanics, and this has different implications for each. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the measurement causes the quantum wave function to 'collapse' into a particular state. This is generally where the term spooky comes from, since that came out of the Bohr/Einstein discussions. In the non-local hidden variables interpretation, then some hidden variable that acts non-locally causes actual definite particles to travel through the quantum wave probabilities (ie. the particles where never in an indeterminant state). In the Many Worlds interpretation, the universe enters into a superposition of both basis states (|you observing red, ball is red> and |you observing blue, ball is blue>, you are simply part of the quantum interactions), 'branching' so to speak, but that doesn't affect the fact that in each branch observing red means you know the other is blue and vice versa.
Someone else mentioned Bell's Theorem. Bell's theorem only rules out local hidden variables, not non-local hidden variables. since it is one of the major interpretations in quantum mechanics that is still viable, though those non-local effects can be considered spooky.
Just finished The Teaching Company's QM video series, so blame them:P
I think the point Loconut was making is that ReCaptcha does not 'further' machine OCR (ie. it doesn't improve the recognition algorithms used by the OCR software), instead using humans used to 'OCR' words that otherwise aren't legible.
No, not really. An app that makes sounds is by definition an audio player. The question isn't or shouldn't be 'if Apple wanted', but what the user wants.
I think the whole attitude that somehow the desire for volume control in a particular application is somehow wrong or inelegant is the real problem. I got the same attitude when I asked for uTorrent to make the font it uses for the grid configurable (to make it larger). 'Just use the OS font setting.' Except that doesn't work. I am using RDP to see my machine that runs uTorrent, and adjusting DPI is not one of the options when you are RDPing. Perhaps RDP should allow for the DPI setting (maybe it does in some non-obvious place), but my point is there may be very valid reasons why you would want to adjust something without having to use some global setting. They got all pissy when I listed the 15 apps I was running on my machine at the time and all but one of them allowed separate configuration of the font.
I would bet though, that in this case what the user really wants is the ability to control Flash volume from within Safari, primarily, since this is presumably where most of the audio comes from (or QuickTime possibly). It may not technically be possible because of that, but it probably is.
I also think that holding up 'Windows' (not Shoe Puppet, but other posters in this thread) as that model is a real problem, since they actively defeat their own technology when it comes to HDCP and Windows Media Center. Specifically, you can't do things like adjust the volume using the system volume in Windows Media Center if you are using SPDIF outputs. You are required to use you amp's volume control, because adjusting the volume in the OS would require decrypting the audio stream or some horseshit. You also aren't allowed to do things like have volume come out of SPDIF and analog jacks at the same time. All of which was previously possible in XP before HDCP.
Yea I saw that this morning and had already replied on that post.
More bad PR, fine. I think it is a lack of imagination to think that it took some exceptional set of circumstances for this to happen inadvertently or without malice/nefarious intent, or that any promise not to do it again will be non-absolute.
It is also possible they intended to do this all along and record all of our unencrypted data for marketing purposes. I am the optimist.
You're content to argue semantics to convince yourself that you have a point?
Yes I am content to argue that 'is' means 'is', to rebut your failed attempts to show that my analogies are wrong. That's apparently what this conversation has devolved to.
You admit what they did was wrong then?
I have already indicated that it was bad karma and probably not good for business and PR. I think it would have been wrong for them to use the data for anything intentionally. We could of course argue the definition of wrong...
So it's an accident, but it's not incompetence? How does that work?
Correct. Asked and answered, but I will try again. It is plausible 'standard best practices' development techniques were applied in the development of the original code, which had the purpose or, as a developmental aid, effect of logging the packet data present on the network adapter when scanning for Wifi Access Points. (It is likely these were not Google developers at all at this stage, as they were likely using OSS tools like airodump-ng.) It is plausible that subsequent developer, either did not realize that the 3rd party code had this logging effect, or as a developer did not realize that logging the data in this particular scenario would be a privacy issue, since they were probably NAL, and developers as a rule try and avoid involving lawyers in their day to day work.
By your definition, any bug or inadvertent behavior in any application ever is due to incompetence. Then fine, I will admit that Google is 'incompetent' by that definition, since it would encompass 'the entire human race'. It would be interesting to see how that logic would apply to something like neural network/chaotic systems programming...wait, no it wouldn't.
When you abuse people's goodwill, you lose goodwill.
Your words -- not mine. My world isn't that black and white.
Yes, my words, my opinion based on the apparent contrarian nature of this discourse.
Not logging -- dumping the contents of memory. And did you not read the part where I said, if there's a problem there, then go after them as well?
That's how analogies work. You take some specific scenario, make some generalization and apply it to another scenario with similar features. The semantic equality between logging and 'dumping memory' is pretty straightforward IN MY OPINION. You will probably disagree.
From you they have. You are contesting the fact that they did anything wrong at all.
No I am contesting whether they did anything ILLEGAL and actionable, and I am contesting your analysis that only intentional 'malice' or incompetence (in the sense of gross negligence, as opposed to) leads to an accidental capture of the data, as opposed to just standard programming practice of logging all inputs, in particular when 3rd party/team code is reused for a particular subset of its features and you don't realize the logging is taking place.
Therefore, by your logic, they should not have apologized (they did), had no reason to stop (they did), and do not even deserve the bad PR!
You have a strange sense of logic to be able to extrapolate to that. Businesses do plenty of things intentionally and inadvertently that do not rise to the level of illegality that are then apologized for. Examples of things companies do that are not popular (OUTRAGEOUS!) that might lead to some sort of apology/acknowledgment/promise to avoid doing in the future: Comcast throttling services selectively, Apple banning 3rd party toolkit based apps, spilling oil into a body of water by accident when drilling, recording everything employees do on their computers and phone conversations, listening to or viewing communications when employees use employer supplied phones,.... etc etc etc.
And bad PR isn't just a hot air with no financial impact, it affects the company financially by lowering their 'Goodwill' the accounting term used to describe their perception in the marketing place, which has actual value. Goodwill is more elastic though, and ongoing/continued good behavior and honesty tend to make it rebound over time.
And I think you thinking the crash dump analogy is dumb, just means you are a little close minded about this. You've made up your mind that Google is evil and needs to be punished.
The crash dump example is exactly analogous. The were LOGGING the data. A highly plausible reason they were logging the data is because if the program crashed (or a subsequent program in the data processing chain that processed the output of the app that logged the data) they would want to have the logged data to replay or recover their efforts. If the dataset got corrupted, the cost of reproducing the dataset (having the special vehicles re-drive the route) is so high that, as a matter of Cover Your Ass, any decent programmer would have logged that data in a way that allowed the dataset to be regenerated.
Over-competence, as opposed to incompetence at least from a programmers perspective, is a more likely rational in my opinion. I think it is also possible that they data collection methods were developed in the US (where everything they did is probably legal, we shall see) and then deployed internationally and this might have been missed (review: creates debug log, move on...) without realizing that it was potentially more of an issue there.
Again, given the amount of PR, there is no way that Google has 'gotten a pass'. They have already been punished in the 'court of opinion'. The question becomes, what else.
If my rational makes no sense whatsoever to you, in answer to '3) people...have no case' then I certainly hope you are never on a jury with serious consequences.
No - I'm merely saying they did snoop people's data (which they did), and that they should not be doing that.
I was just quoting you: 'you're saying it's "understandable" that Google should want to violate people's privacy?'
No - you said "show me what harm befell them", and I'm telling you that harm isn't necessary to condemn this action.
So my question is: What do you think should happen to Google? What is the outcome that you think is just? Are you tilting at windmills or do you actually have something in mind besides outrage?
Should executives go to jail? Should an independent commission be established by the UN to investigate? Should Google pay every man woman and child in 28 countries that might have been 'violated', some amount of money? Does Google need to cease to exist because of this? Is bad PR enough? Be broken up into separate companies? How about a donation/creation to/of a Wifi Education charity?
Your.Net crash dump example
1) Data in a crash dump isn't a feature.
2) It's orthogonal to the current case -- the users has to take an action to submit a crash dump
3) If there's something wrong there, condemn that too. Don't use it to let other offenders off the hook.
1) It is to a developer, since the data may be what caused the crash.
2) The user had to set up an open wifi in this case. Open wifi is used for many things that are legal and don't 'take advantage of the ignorant'. Logging the packets was bad karma, sure, and certainly in retrospect bad for business.
3) Fine condemn it. Condemning doesn't mean 'file a frivolous or gold-digging lawsuit because my privacies were bruised'.
I'm not saying it is a perfect analogy, I am just trying to understand why it is so important to you that Google should suffer any more than they have (PR wise) for this particular instance, or what you think a remedy would look like.
Why do you keep needing to refer back to the 'money grab lawsuit'?
Because that is what the OP is about: "Google's Streetview Privacy Snafu Prompts Lawsuit"
It is illegal in Germany and UK - and potentially in the US (people are still analysing that).
We will know if Google's actions were illegal when they are convicted of something.
And again -- you're saying it's "understandable" that Google should want to violate people's privacy?
You are the one claiming they 'wanted' to 'violate' people's 'privacy' in this case. I am not saying that is 'understandable', you are just taking everything as a paranoid attack. I said that making the kind of mistake that Google did, by reusing code that had unintended (by their statements) consequences is understandable and plausible, and that a good faith effort to remedy the problem should be taken as such.
Why, do you give them so much slack, and no slack for the tech-phobic users?
Again, you can try and twist things all you want, but I don't give frivolous lawsuit happy people slack, not 'tech-phobic' users.
Show me the part of the wiretapping act that says that harm has to befall a person for wiretapping to be illegal.
You must be trying to intentionally misread what I am saying I guess. I said that there is a difference between wired and wireless communications in the law.
The analogy will only hold when you demonstrate that a novice user with open wifi does not expect privacy.
I would expect that the first police that realized that their communications could be overheard would be considered 'novices', and they probably 'expected' privacy. I don't need to demonstrate that a novice user with open wifi expects privacy, I just have to prove that there are reasonable expectation of the lack of privacy by the 'violator', such as the availability of Open commercial Wifi access points and the inability to distinguish between them.
It is unreasonable to not err on the side of caution.
Just as long as they are allowed to 'err' at all, by accidentally including code that has unintended consequences, and then be allowed to fix it.
Same case with Ethernet in the same collision domain. Is it okay for you to snoop someone else's data in that scenario? Talk sense man!
'Okay' and 'legal' are two separate discussions.
Every time I mention tech-challenged users, your response starts with "if they are too stupid..."
Yes, and you haven't used hyperbole AT ALL either in this discussion, lol. Goose, meet gander.
They first claimed they weren't gathering the data at all. Their claims are not worth much.
Fine, they were wrong before. I happen to have a little optimism left that they are being as truthful as they can be in this scenario, and that their inaccurate statement before was an honest mistake. You can choose not to.
Really? First they denied it. Then they backtracked and offered a lame excuse.
It may be lame, but most excuses are. "Why didn't you take out the trash?" "I was watching TV."
What? So you're saying Google is to be conferred some status as benevolent do-gooder who we can blindly trust?
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Google was sent here by God to do His work and you shall bow down before them, heathen.
I read TFA. It didn't seem to be about MS. Classic strawman.
Haha, you are hilarious. Kettle, pot, meet black. Anyway, your blanket statements about how Google's development practices are incompetent, etc., and how code reviews and code coverage would have somehow caught every possible issue with the code, is precisely what I was saying were unreasonable, and provid
If a lame money-grab class action lawsuit and a bunch of bad PR isn't 'screwing over' I don't know what is.
We're at the point where I'm saying "they did a bad thing" and you're saying "no, what they did was acceptable"
I'm not saying it is acceptable. I am saying that it is understandable, and that it probably wasn't illegal. When they discovered the error they told us and indicated they would stop. Can't it just end there? Is this really a 'make an example of them' scenario?
The same harm that befalls anyone that's had their phone tapped w/o a warrant. You're clutching at straws if you have to fall back on "what harm befell them"
I am in fact 'clutching at' the law. Wire transmissions have a higher degree of protection than wireless transmissions. What you are suggesting is akin to saying 'People shouldn't be allowed to listen to the police band just because we say so'.
You also seem to forget that plenty of commercial wifi services use open authentication to allow you to sign up for the service. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to not know the difference between two open wifi systems and actually check? The very nature of wifi means you are receiving other people's transmissions.
My guess is you have some other set of axes to grind with Google, which I don't have a problem with...grind away. But this one? Just not that big a deal in the grand scheme.
Why narrow it down only to the lead plaintiffs? Why omit thousands of tech-challenged users? And why treat tech-challenged users with so much scorn?
I am not treating tech challenged people with scorn...I am treating frivolous lawsuit filing asshats with scorn. Maybe if the lawyers were doing it pro-bono 'because of the injustice' and the lead plaintiffs were donating their portion to charity for educating people on how to secure their wifi...Lead plaintiffs usually end up getting treated better than the rest of the class, is why I make the distinction.
Again, Google has claimed they have not used the stored data, and have been pretty open about the collection, so we have reason to believe they are being truthful. If these people are so outraged about Google doing it, then the scary part is the people who really mean them harm.
Ever so ready to excuse Goog's incompetance. Not ready to give an inch to tech-phobic users. Extremely unreasonable.
I am just saying that in the real world, development has deadlines and challenges. Why aren't you saying 'Microsoft allows users data to be stolen with malware..THE HORROR THE HORROR.' Apparently it is so easy to test and debug every line of code and code review things...
They cannot examine everyone who gets their hands on their private data and decide who is good and who is bad.
Wanting your data to be private and it actually being private are two different things. You actually have to make an effort to have privacy in communications. I.e. You can't discuss something in a bar, and then later claim it was private. And their claims about using their credit cards is ludicrous since all sites accepting credit cards are required to use https as part of the merchant agreement. In those cases they should try suing the right person (the website that wasn't encrypting the transaction).
Your attitude towards end-users is extremely distasteful, and your attitude to privacy and compliance is extremely cavalier
I haven't worked at DCLK in 6 years. I am every bit as outraged at the Google Buzz privacy breach as you seem to be about this. I just can't seem to find a real reason to focus on this one which I have said over and over. Google wasn't parked outside their house for days recording every single conversation they had, then putting it some easily searchable format. They 'walked by an open window' and hea
Err.. what? So it is okay to screw over people who *are* ignorant?
No, I didn't say that. I was just reusing your words to point out that anyone 'screwing over' anyone other than themselves isn't good. (I reserve judgment on people screwing themselves over...) Trying to 'screw over' google for this particular issue is dumb. There are plenty of other real issues to screw them over for that are legitimate, like the Buzz privacy breach.
These people didn't screw themselves over with their ignorance. They were screwed, by Google, because of their ignorance.
In what way were they 'screwed'? What harm befell them due to Google's reckless hatred for their wlans...The only harm the lead plaintiffs mentioned in the article are facing is the ridicule of them admitting now how stupid they are not to secure their wireless transmissions.
Oh well, I guess it's okay then.
Yes, as a matter of law, it is ok.
Let's ignore that their story doesn't add up (how the hell do hundreds of lines of code get into your product without you knowing about it. Who did the code-review? Who wrote the test cases?
You must work in some very rarified coding bubble, to have to ask these questions. Is today opposite day?
If nobody tested it, why didn't anyone get suspicious when the code-coverage numbers didn't add up?
Haha. Code coverage. Priceless. Yes, I am sure all internal tools not meant for public consumption always get code coverage testing...
When the German govt. asked them the first time, why did they supply the wrong answer
Because the right person wasn't found, or the wrong person thought they knew the answer. I actually worked at DoubleClick for 7 years (which was bought by Google a few years back after I left), on their backend reporting system. As many times as they (DCLK) were under fire for privacy things, I can tell you it was all a bunch of BS. I never had to change a single line of code to 'comply' with anything that was said to smooth the feathers of the powers that be.
Bottom line: either there was malicious intent, or there was staggering incompetance. Either way, the investigation/criticism/public outcry are warranted.
Again, lady doth protest too much. This was an internal tool. If you want to froth at the mouth about, I can't stop you, but I think there is a disconnect in the quality level of code you seem to expect. More power to you, but that doesn't mean Google did anything wrong here. Again, Buzz, etc. are other real examples that people should be focused on instead of this piddling crap.
It may or may not be illegal in all locales, but it is in many.
What is it you think is illegal? Receiving the transmission? Storing the transmission? Most of those laws are there to prevent theft of service (ie protect the ISPs not the consumers). Ie. deliberately connecting to someone's network, transmitting to it, not just passively listening to it.
How on god's green earth do you hold those companies culpable but not Google? I'm not saying I agree with this point -- but let's say I do. Then by your argument they are selling a product with a gaping security flaw, and Google is exploiting that gaping security flaw. But you'll take the router dudes to task, and give the attacker a free pass, as opposed to going after all of them??
Listen, if these two people filing the class action suit are anything but money grubbing because they think they will get a quick settlement and don't give a rats ass about their actual harm, I will eat my hat.
Do I think that they(router mftrs) should be sued in class action? No. Do I think they should do a better job of teaching the consumer how to correctly use their products? Absolutely. My point was, if you were going to file some lame money grubbing lawsuit, I think you would have a better chance with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Most likely this is about Android versus "Android by Google" being labeled on the phone. One is pretty much free to do anything with, the other is if you agree to conform to some additional requirements, you can put the Google label on your phone. If Motorola decides that they want the Google label, then yes they have some restrictions,. If they opt out of the Google label, then they can do whatever they want. Part of this is an attempt to force the carriers to not cripple the phones too much if they decide to leverage the Google brand, though obviously there are other benefits to Google.
Yes, in this specific case of 9 lines of code that aren't doing anything with many outside libraries, etc., it may be possible to read the documentation, and assuming the documentation is correct, rely on the default behavior. That is very rarely the case however.
However when I have come across a particular problem that is resolved by being thorough, and ensuring things are initialized, my tendency is to remember that and keep doing it in the future, which is the case for srand/rand.
Just sharing my story.
I thought the same thing, until I ran across a situation in ruby's Passenger, where they were initializing the srand with time or something similar, but of course all the servers were restarted at the same time. This then caused my UUID's to collide in another library because we had removed a 'superflous' srand in our code that was masking the problem.
Just saying you don't always know what the code that isn't yours is doing, so it is probably a good idea to assume it isn't done and do it explicitly.
You obviously haven't seen the RedLetterMedia reviews then, which explain in excruciatingly funny detail why the prequels are so awful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfBhi6qqFLA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI
Hide empty drives can be pretty annoying when you are ripping a few discs in a row (pretty much the only time I use my DVD drive) as it keeps moving the selected folders each time you pop the drive. Obviously your suggestion is valid, just that as with many things in windows, it is a double edged sword, lol. Kind of like auto-hide taskbar...works great *most* of the time, but not all of the time. Gets stuck open often enough that I have a shortcut that kills and restarts explorer.
There is a price threshold, at least for me. Right now HDD's cost say 5-6 cents per GB. Once Flash starts to hit the 3-4 cents per GB level (assuming HDD have gone below 1 cent/GB), it starts to make up for itself for many applications because of the performance/reliability factor. Right now I have say 200 'videos' per drive on a single 1.5TB drive (2TB just recently became more cost effective if you wait for the $99.99 sales at newegg). However, if that drive goes, it will tend to go in a catastrophic way, and I would lose all or a large portion of that drive. The hope/expectation is that a Flash drive sitting around without moving parts, would be much less likely to have a catastrophic failure like that. More likely for Flash is you would lose a single file or two. When you realize it might take two to three months to recover a completely lost HDD (redownload the 'videos'), at a reasonable download rate, it makes a lot more sense to make that switch as soon as you can.
A naive analysis of my Comcast Business Class service: $59.99 per month, bandwidth usage 1 TB, but lets say 1TB. A naive analysis already values a GB at 5-6 cents per GB just on ISP costs alone. You could say knock this down to 2-3 cents if you assume that even if you stopped downloading, you would need to spend $30 a month for decent internet if you didn't want good bandwidth.
Plus the labor involved in organizing your 'video' downloads, etc. might run into 4-10 hours per drive.
Once that threshold is met, and the perceived reliability of SSD versus extra cost becomes negligible in the overall cost, a lot of people will be jumping on SSDs, which should ultimately drive the costs even lower.
Unfortunately the name is "Tree Style Tab" not "Tabs" which is probably a BIG reason why more people don't use it.
When you do a search on addons.mozilla.org for "tabs" it isn't anywhere near the top.
And this is why you still can't find a decent trackball controller ala the Reflex:
http://gizmodo.com/175126/bodielobus-ps2-controller-with-trackball
Sony/MS won't release one because they know it would destroy joystick users, and no one else can make one because of patents (is my guess).
For those of us with RSS, etc., we would pay pretty much anything to get one of these. My 'one of these days' projects is to build one.
I think the 21st point was say at waist level :P
It isn't a requirement that they provide the HD versions, just *a* version. In many cases they will encrypt the HD version of the channel but leave the SD version clear.
You seem to be missing the point that people don't want it to be trivial to save the h264 file to disk and then redistribute it. If someone in the right zone can just download the link to the file, those that feel they need DRM/content control won't be using it. Heck, even Youtube makes it non-trivial(to most users) to download the actual FLV to preserve it, even without Youtube using DRM on that particular file.
Not saying that is good or bad, just pointing out why your argument about IP doesn't address the desire for a 'secure' client.
A lot of it comes down to resources. In general, it is just quicker to develop using the Adobe stuff and get a product out the door. Most people forget that Actionscript 3 is javascript essentially. If you ignore typing (disable the warnings), you can pretty much copy pure js code directly over.
MXML is obviously somewhat different than HTML, but in my mind at least, it is more rational, since it wasn't designed by committee. Like you set something hidden, you just do 'visible="false"'. You don't have to mess with the style in the same way. And I LOVE bind variables in a scripting language. Having the runtime handle all of the updating for you automatically is such a time saver. Using visible="{xmlUser.lastResult.user}" to show hide UI elements if the user is logged in, etc.
When HTML5 has some cool unified dev tools (man, debugging in Flex Builder is so much nicer than say Firebug to me), 95% market penetration, and the 3rd party libraries have shaken out (like jQuery has to some extent), :P
and you don't have to test your shit on every single browser just to make sure it didn't break, and the performance starts nearing Flash some more...and all of that can happen while Flash/Actionscript stands still and doesn't add any new features...then I will be on board with HTML5 as the Flash killer
* There are the occasional browser incompatibilities in Flash that drive me batshit: Having a problem where some, not all, Firefox installs only on OSX have mouse coordinate issues when dragging. And overall if Macromedia (and now Adobe) has done a better job on OSX/Linux support there would be a lot less bitching.
Yea thats why I always use IE or Safari for debugging, depending on my OS. I hate having my browser hung when I need to look up a bug online, etc.
IE has its own problems though with Flash debugging. You have to remember to always close the pp from the browser window and not terminate it with Flex Builder, or it orphans the process because of the whole ieuser.exe sandboxing thing.
It is 'spooky' correlation at a distance, not action. An analogy: Say you have two balls, red and blue. You have someone put them into black boxes (hidden from you) and give one to you and one to someone else. That other person takes theirs home. When you open your box, and 'take the measurement' and observe you have the blue ball, you 'instantaneously' know that the other person has the red one.
The quantum complication is that while the red and blue balls are in a definite state the entire time due to the infeasibility of isolating a macro-sized object like a ball from all other atoms and photons, the entangled particles are not in a definite state, depending on your interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
There are 3 major interpretations of quantum mechanics, and this has different implications for each. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the measurement causes the quantum wave function to 'collapse' into a particular state. This is generally where the term spooky comes from, since that came out of the Bohr/Einstein discussions. In the non-local hidden variables interpretation, then some hidden variable that acts non-locally causes actual definite particles to travel through the quantum wave probabilities (ie. the particles where never in an indeterminant state). In the Many Worlds interpretation, the universe enters into a superposition of both basis states (|you observing red, ball is red> and |you observing blue, ball is blue>, you are simply part of the quantum interactions), 'branching' so to speak, but that doesn't affect the fact that in each branch observing red means you know the other is blue and vice versa.
Someone else mentioned Bell's Theorem. Bell's theorem only rules out local hidden variables, not non-local hidden variables. since it is one of the major interpretations in quantum mechanics that is still viable, though those non-local effects can be considered spooky.
Just finished The Teaching Company's QM video series, so blame them :P
I think the point Loconut was making is that ReCaptcha does not 'further' machine OCR (ie. it doesn't improve the recognition algorithms used by the OCR software), instead using humans used to 'OCR' words that otherwise aren't legible.
Sorry to double post just remembered the other reason why Windows Media Center volume issues are such a pain:
When you have WMC in the foreground playing audio, no other audio on the system works...You can't hear email dings, IM's or Skype ringing.
(I assume you are trolling, but I will play).
No, not really. An app that makes sounds is by definition an audio player. The question isn't or shouldn't be 'if Apple wanted', but what the user wants.
I think the whole attitude that somehow the desire for volume control in a particular application is somehow wrong or inelegant is the real problem. I got the same attitude when I asked for uTorrent to make the font it uses for the grid configurable (to make it larger). 'Just use the OS font setting.' Except that doesn't work. I am using RDP to see my machine that runs uTorrent, and adjusting DPI is not one of the options when you are RDPing. Perhaps RDP should allow for the DPI setting (maybe it does in some non-obvious place), but my point is there may be very valid reasons why you would want to adjust something without having to use some global setting. They got all pissy when I listed the 15 apps I was running on my machine at the time and all but one of them allowed separate configuration of the font.
I would bet though, that in this case what the user really wants is the ability to control Flash volume from within Safari, primarily, since this is presumably where most of the audio comes from (or QuickTime possibly). It may not technically be possible because of that, but it probably is.
I also think that holding up 'Windows' (not Shoe Puppet, but other posters in this thread) as that model is a real problem, since they actively defeat their own technology when it comes to HDCP and Windows Media Center. Specifically, you can't do things like adjust the volume using the system volume in Windows Media Center if you are using SPDIF outputs. You are required to use you amp's volume control, because adjusting the volume in the OS would require decrypting the audio stream or some horseshit. You also aren't allowed to do things like have volume come out of SPDIF and analog jacks at the same time. All of which was previously possible in XP before HDCP.
Yea I saw that this morning and had already replied on that post.
More bad PR, fine. I think it is a lack of imagination to think that it took some exceptional set of circumstances for this to happen inadvertently or without malice/nefarious intent, or that any promise not to do it again will be non-absolute.
It is also possible they intended to do this all along and record all of our unencrypted data for marketing purposes. I am the optimist.
Which is?
Exactly.
You're content to argue semantics to convince yourself that you have a point?
Yes I am content to argue that 'is' means 'is', to rebut your failed attempts to show that my analogies are wrong. That's apparently what this conversation has devolved to.
You admit what they did was wrong then?
I have already indicated that it was bad karma and probably not good for business and PR. I think it would have been wrong for them to use the data for anything intentionally. We could of course argue the definition of wrong...
So it's an accident, but it's not incompetence? How does that work?
Correct. Asked and answered, but I will try again. It is plausible 'standard best practices' development techniques were applied in the development of the original code, which had the purpose or, as a developmental aid, effect of logging the packet data present on the network adapter when scanning for Wifi Access Points. (It is likely these were not Google developers at all at this stage, as they were likely using OSS tools like airodump-ng.) It is plausible that subsequent developer, either did not realize that the 3rd party code had this logging effect, or as a developer did not realize that logging the data in this particular scenario would be a privacy issue, since they were probably NAL, and developers as a rule try and avoid involving lawyers in their day to day work.
By your definition, any bug or inadvertent behavior in any application ever is due to incompetence. Then fine, I will admit that Google is 'incompetent' by that definition, since it would encompass 'the entire human race'. It would be interesting to see how that logic would apply to something like neural network/chaotic systems programming...wait, no it wouldn't.
When you abuse people's goodwill, you lose goodwill.
So you agree then...
Your words -- not mine. My world isn't that black and white.
Yes, my words, my opinion based on the apparent contrarian nature of this discourse.
Not logging -- dumping the contents of memory. And did you not read the part where I said, if there's a problem there, then go after them as well?
That's how analogies work. You take some specific scenario, make some generalization and apply it to another scenario with similar features. The semantic equality between logging and 'dumping memory' is pretty straightforward IN MY OPINION. You will probably disagree.
From you they have. You are contesting the fact that they did anything wrong at all.
No I am contesting whether they did anything ILLEGAL and actionable, and I am contesting your analysis that only intentional 'malice' or incompetence (in the sense of gross negligence, as opposed to) leads to an accidental capture of the data, as opposed to just standard programming practice of logging all inputs, in particular when 3rd party/team code is reused for a particular subset of its features and you don't realize the logging is taking place.
Therefore, by your logic, they should not have apologized (they did), had no reason to stop (they did), and do not even deserve the bad PR!
You have a strange sense of logic to be able to extrapolate to that. Businesses do plenty of things intentionally and inadvertently that do not rise to the level of illegality that are then apologized for. Examples of things companies do that are not popular (OUTRAGEOUS!) that might lead to some sort of apology/acknowledgment/promise to avoid doing in the future: Comcast throttling services selectively, Apple banning 3rd party toolkit based apps, spilling oil into a body of water by accident when drilling, recording everything employees do on their computers and phone conversations, listening to or viewing communications when employees use employer supplied phones,.... etc etc etc.
And bad PR isn't just a hot air with no financial impact, it affects the company financially by lowering their 'Goodwill' the accounting term used to describe their perception in the marketing place, which has actual value. Goodwill is more elastic though, and ongoing/continued good behavior and honesty tend to make it rebound over time.
And I think you thinking the crash dump analogy is dumb, just means you are a little close minded about this. You've made up your mind that Google is evil and needs to be punished.
The crash dump example is exactly analogous. The were LOGGING the data. A highly plausible reason they were logging the data is because if the program crashed (or a subsequent program in the data processing chain that processed the output of the app that logged the data) they would want to have the logged data to replay or recover their efforts. If the dataset got corrupted, the cost of reproducing the dataset (having the special vehicles re-drive the route) is so high that, as a matter of Cover Your Ass, any decent programmer would have logged that data in a way that allowed the dataset to be regenerated.
Over-competence, as opposed to incompetence at least from a programmers perspective, is a more likely rational in my opinion. I think it is also possible that they data collection methods were developed in the US (where everything they did is probably legal, we shall see) and then deployed internationally and this might have been missed (review: creates debug log, move on...) without realizing that it was potentially more of an issue there.
Again, given the amount of PR, there is no way that Google has 'gotten a pass'. They have already been punished in the 'court of opinion'. The question becomes, what else.
If my rational makes no sense whatsoever to you, in answer to '3) people...have no case' then I certainly hope you are never on a jury with serious consequences.
No - I'm merely saying they did snoop people's data (which they did), and that they should not be doing that.
I was just quoting you: 'you're saying it's "understandable" that Google should want to violate people's privacy?'
No - you said "show me what harm befell them", and I'm telling you that harm isn't necessary to condemn this action.
So my question is: What do you think should happen to Google? What is the outcome that you think is just? Are you tilting at windmills or do you actually have something in mind besides outrage?
Should executives go to jail? Should an independent commission be established by the UN to investigate? Should Google pay every man woman and child in 28 countries that might have been 'violated', some amount of money? Does Google need to cease to exist because of this? Is bad PR enough? Be broken up into separate companies? How about a donation/creation to/of a Wifi Education charity?
Your .Net crash dump example
1) Data in a crash dump isn't a feature.
2) It's orthogonal to the current case -- the users has to take an action to submit a crash dump
3) If there's something wrong there, condemn that too. Don't use it to let other offenders off the hook.
1) It is to a developer, since the data may be what caused the crash.
2) The user had to set up an open wifi in this case. Open wifi is used for many things that are legal and don't 'take advantage of the ignorant'. Logging the packets was bad karma, sure, and certainly in retrospect bad for business.
3) Fine condemn it. Condemning doesn't mean 'file a frivolous or gold-digging lawsuit because my privacies were bruised'.
I'm not saying it is a perfect analogy, I am just trying to understand why it is so important to you that Google should suffer any more than they have (PR wise) for this particular instance, or what you think a remedy would look like.
Why do you keep needing to refer back to the 'money grab lawsuit'?
Because that is what the OP is about: "Google's Streetview Privacy Snafu Prompts Lawsuit"
It is illegal in Germany and UK - and potentially in the US (people are still analysing that).
We will know if Google's actions were illegal when they are convicted of something.
And again -- you're saying it's "understandable" that Google should want to violate people's privacy?
You are the one claiming they 'wanted' to 'violate' people's 'privacy' in this case. I am not saying that is 'understandable', you are just taking everything as a paranoid attack. I said that making the kind of mistake that Google did, by reusing code that had unintended (by their statements) consequences is understandable and plausible, and that a good faith effort to remedy the problem should be taken as such.
Why, do you give them so much slack, and no slack for the tech-phobic users?
Again, you can try and twist things all you want, but I don't give frivolous lawsuit happy people slack, not 'tech-phobic' users.
Show me the part of the wiretapping act that says that harm has to befall a person for wiretapping to be illegal.
You must be trying to intentionally misread what I am saying I guess. I said that there is a difference between wired and wireless communications in the law.
The analogy will only hold when you demonstrate that a novice user with open wifi does not expect privacy.
I would expect that the first police that realized that their communications could be overheard would be considered 'novices', and they probably 'expected' privacy. I don't need to demonstrate that a novice user with open wifi expects privacy, I just have to prove that there are reasonable expectation of the lack of privacy by the 'violator', such as the availability of Open commercial Wifi access points and the inability to distinguish between them.
It is unreasonable to not err on the side of caution.
Just as long as they are allowed to 'err' at all, by accidentally including code that has unintended consequences, and then be allowed to fix it.
Same case with Ethernet in the same collision domain. Is it okay for you to snoop someone else's data in that scenario? Talk sense man!
'Okay' and 'legal' are two separate discussions.
Every time I mention tech-challenged users, your response starts with "if they are too stupid..."
Yes, and you haven't used hyperbole AT ALL either in this discussion, lol. Goose, meet gander.
They first claimed they weren't gathering the data at all. Their claims are not worth much.
Fine, they were wrong before. I happen to have a little optimism left that they are being as truthful as they can be in this scenario, and that their inaccurate statement before was an honest mistake. You can choose not to.
Really? First they denied it. Then they backtracked and offered a lame excuse.
It may be lame, but most excuses are. "Why didn't you take out the trash?" "I was watching TV."
What? So you're saying Google is to be conferred some status as benevolent do-gooder who we can blindly trust?
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Google was sent here by God to do His work and you shall bow down before them, heathen.
I read TFA. It didn't seem to be about MS. Classic strawman.
Haha, you are hilarious. Kettle, pot, meet black. Anyway, your blanket statements about how Google's development practices are incompetent, etc., and how code reviews and code coverage would have somehow caught every possible issue with the code, is precisely what I was saying were unreasonable, and provid
Screwing over google is a stretch.
If a lame money-grab class action lawsuit and a bunch of bad PR isn't 'screwing over' I don't know what is.
We're at the point where I'm saying "they did a bad thing" and you're saying "no, what they did was acceptable"
I'm not saying it is acceptable. I am saying that it is understandable, and that it probably wasn't illegal. When they discovered the error they told us and indicated they would stop. Can't it just end there? Is this really a 'make an example of them' scenario?
The same harm that befalls anyone that's had their phone tapped w/o a warrant. You're clutching at straws if you have to fall back on "what harm befell them"
I am in fact 'clutching at' the law. Wire transmissions have a higher degree of protection than wireless transmissions. What you are suggesting is akin to saying 'People shouldn't be allowed to listen to the police band just because we say so'.
You also seem to forget that plenty of commercial wifi services use open authentication to allow you to sign up for the service. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to not know the difference between two open wifi systems and actually check? The very nature of wifi means you are receiving other people's transmissions.
My guess is you have some other set of axes to grind with Google, which I don't have a problem with...grind away. But this one? Just not that big a deal in the grand scheme.
Why narrow it down only to the lead plaintiffs? Why omit thousands of tech-challenged users? And why treat tech-challenged users with so much scorn?
I am not treating tech challenged people with scorn...I am treating frivolous lawsuit filing asshats with scorn. Maybe if the lawyers were doing it pro-bono 'because of the injustice' and the lead plaintiffs were donating their portion to charity for educating people on how to secure their wifi...Lead plaintiffs usually end up getting treated better than the rest of the class, is why I make the distinction.
Again, Google has claimed they have not used the stored data, and have been pretty open about the collection, so we have reason to believe they are being truthful. If these people are so outraged about Google doing it, then the scary part is the people who really mean them harm.
Ever so ready to excuse Goog's incompetance. Not ready to give an inch to tech-phobic users. Extremely unreasonable.
I am just saying that in the real world, development has deadlines and challenges. Why aren't you saying 'Microsoft allows users data to be stolen with malware..THE HORROR THE HORROR.' Apparently it is so easy to test and debug every line of code and code review things...
They cannot examine everyone who gets their hands on their private data and decide who is good and who is bad.
Wanting your data to be private and it actually being private are two different things. You actually have to make an effort to have privacy in communications. I.e. You can't discuss something in a bar, and then later claim it was private. And their claims about using their credit cards is ludicrous since all sites accepting credit cards are required to use https as part of the merchant agreement. In those cases they should try suing the right person (the website that wasn't encrypting the transaction).
Your attitude towards end-users is extremely distasteful, and your attitude to privacy and compliance is extremely cavalier
I haven't worked at DCLK in 6 years. I am every bit as outraged at the Google Buzz privacy breach as you seem to be about this. I just can't seem to find a real reason to focus on this one which I have said over and over. Google wasn't parked outside their house for days recording every single conversation they had, then putting it some easily searchable format. They 'walked by an open window' and hea
Err.. what? So it is okay to screw over people who *are* ignorant?
No, I didn't say that. I was just reusing your words to point out that anyone 'screwing over' anyone other than themselves isn't good. (I reserve judgment on people screwing themselves over...) Trying to 'screw over' google for this particular issue is dumb. There are plenty of other real issues to screw them over for that are legitimate, like the Buzz privacy breach.
These people didn't screw themselves over with their ignorance. They were screwed, by Google, because of their ignorance.
In what way were they 'screwed'? What harm befell them due to Google's reckless hatred for their wlans...The only harm the lead plaintiffs mentioned in the article are facing is the ridicule of them admitting now how stupid they are not to secure their wireless transmissions.
Oh well, I guess it's okay then.
Yes, as a matter of law, it is ok.
Let's ignore that their story doesn't add up (how the hell do hundreds of lines of code get into your product without you knowing about it. Who did the code-review? Who wrote the test cases?
You must work in some very rarified coding bubble, to have to ask these questions. Is today opposite day?
If nobody tested it, why didn't anyone get suspicious when the code-coverage numbers didn't add up?
Haha. Code coverage. Priceless. Yes, I am sure all internal tools not meant for public consumption always get code coverage testing...
When the German govt. asked them the first time, why did they supply the wrong answer
Because the right person wasn't found, or the wrong person thought they knew the answer. I actually worked at DoubleClick for 7 years (which was bought by Google a few years back after I left), on their backend reporting system. As many times as they (DCLK) were under fire for privacy things, I can tell you it was all a bunch of BS. I never had to change a single line of code to 'comply' with anything that was said to smooth the feathers of the powers that be.
Bottom line: either there was malicious intent, or there was staggering incompetance. Either way, the investigation/criticism/public outcry are warranted.
Again, lady doth protest too much. This was an internal tool. If you want to froth at the mouth about, I can't stop you, but I think there is a disconnect in the quality level of code you seem to expect. More power to you, but that doesn't mean Google did anything wrong here. Again, Buzz, etc. are other real examples that people should be focused on instead of this piddling crap.
It may or may not be illegal in all locales, but it is in many.
What is it you think is illegal? Receiving the transmission? Storing the transmission? Most of those laws are there to prevent theft of service (ie protect the ISPs not the consumers). Ie. deliberately connecting to someone's network, transmitting to it, not just passively listening to it.
How on god's green earth do you hold those companies culpable but not Google? I'm not saying I agree with this point -- but let's say I do. Then by your argument they are selling a product with a gaping security flaw, and Google is exploiting that gaping security flaw. But you'll take the router dudes to task, and give the attacker a free pass, as opposed to going after all of them??
Listen, if these two people filing the class action suit are anything but money grubbing because they think they will get a quick settlement and don't give a rats ass about their actual harm, I will eat my hat.
Do I think that they(router mftrs) should be sued in class action? No. Do I think they should do a better job of teaching the consumer how to correctly use their products? Absolutely. My point was, if you were going to file some lame money grubbing lawsuit, I think you would have a better chance with them.