"Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed"... by attacking Google systems directly. Using other methods, the attackers were highly successful.
Google disclosed that upon investigating users suspected of being attacked, they found "dozens" of Chinese human rights activists who had been compromised through phishing, malware or other systems that allowed security forces (presumably) to read their mail via a valid authentication. So, while Google itself may be mostly reliable on the backend, the security ecosystem as a whole is deeply flawed.
Google: "as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html
"Hey COO, we need to locate a remote technology office. This will support the economy of Brazil, China, India, Poland." "Let's choose... ANYWHERE BUT CHINA, because they will steal our stuff."
Public perceptions matter. And statements like this drive headlines, which drive perceptions. There's some line-in-the-sand drawing happening: we'll put up a lot of shit, but not so much with the stealing our data. So knock it off, or things will get unpleasant.
We've tried the no-talk, all-action approach: Iraq reconstruction. How well did that work?
Google had 20-30% of search market in China. They have been losing market share to Baidu, which has pretty much all of the rest.
One theory is that the Chinese censorship rules were being jockeyed so as to make google.cn a miserable search engine, thus training the Chinese market to prefer local brands over Google. Rather than play a loser's game in the world's biggest market (defined, as Google surely does, by the number of people staring at screens), Google is out on their own terms now, with the possibility of reentry, brand intact, should the politics change.
It's also entirely possible that the idea of Chinese security services (the obvious but unproven culprit) hacking Gmail so they can arrest and torture human rights activists is so repellent to Google execs that strategy has gone out the window. "They're messing with our guys? F those guys, let's do some damage." So far, they have sought maximum publicity (delaying decisions, etc), which suggest some scorched earth is the goal.
If we accept for a moment that cellphone radiation (very low-dose but longterm exposure microwaves) is zapping proteins related to Alzheimers, I'm not going to jump up and down and get happy. Rather the opposite: we've confirmed that, in this case, supposedly benign EM radiation (non-ionizing, etc) can have important, medically significant effects on how our brains function. And we're currently zapping a hell of lot of people with this stuff. And we have really no idea what those effects are.
Unless my math is wrong, plugging in a headset on a 1m cord reduces your exposure by a whole lot compared to keeping the antenna shoved up against your head. Seems like a good idea until we get this sorted out.
The difference is that with online document editing you increase your risks and likely your costs as well, while failing to gain anything.
Unless I am missing something? What exactly is there to gain from online document editing? From google docs or ms office 2010?
If it's a single user, probably little more than offsite backup. But for organizations... whoo! It's a whole new process. Multi-site collaboration. Baked in version control. Realtime updates. no more attachments bloating up email servers. This is a big deal.
"Yeah, you need $10 million to cover that" - Tell me then, how do you punish a company except by a fiscal penalty?
Yes. I love how libertatians have perfect faith in torts as the only mechanism required to regulate corporate behavior, but when someone tries to do exactly that, it's all whiners and losers trying to make a buck.
On the other hand, cases like this are a pretty good way to sort Slashdot commenters into either actual libertarians (people with a thing for individual liberty, including freedom from fear) or corporatists (peasants who believe that corporate rule is infallible).
It's worst than 35 people. They had 35 violent criminals multipled by (.65 -.42 extra candy eaters) = eight people. This finding is based on EIGHT FRICKIN PEOPLE reporting they ate candy as a child.
Presumably the option to 'leave' implies the option to periodically back up your data as well. Compare that to 37 Signals's online collaboration product Basecamp, which has a uploaded file backup policy of "go screw yourself". They have argued that since you put all the files in, you already have a copy. But if this were an accurate picture of how business works, then no one would need their product.
It is intuitive, just at the expense of accuracy. MPG is miles per unit of energy, and in this case the EPA converting the real world energy units (a mix of gas and coal/other stuff sourced electricity) into the ones consumers are most familiar with. You can snipe at the model used to estimate what people will see on the street, but it's perfectly understandable. This car has lower fuel costs than a 40MPG Prius, if your use is roughly like the EPA model. So it's intuitive.
Accurate? No, but it doesn't need to be to inform economic decisions, so long as the standard is consistent across vehicles. Maybe you drive fast, maybe not. Get a spreadsheet and geek out if you like, but the simple MPG rating is actually pretty well designed for public consumption.
Right. The EPA numbers don't have to be "realistic" to be useful. People make sound economic decisions all the time on completely fictional numbers (think about a price/earnings ratio, among many others). The key is that they need to be consistent, and related to real performance in predictable ways. As long as a 200MPG car is about as good as a 230MPG car and vastly different from a 40MPG car, the fact that your mileage may vary doesn't change the economic value of the rating.
Investing (and trading) benefits everyone by shifting capitol to companies that produce goods and services. Microsecond trading is different: it takes advantage of economically meaningless quirks of valuation to siphon money out of the markets. This benefits the traders (mynocks, if you will) doing the siphoning, but does not allocate any capitol to companies that are creating good and services. It is simply a transaction cost passed on to the people who are actually investing, reducing the available capitol for people with goods and services to sell. It's a lot like a tax. So, F those guys.
1) There are media outlets that cover pretty much exactly this list. Good for them. I don't read those and never will. I question their contribution to democracy.
2) I get news from a variety of social media filters, and almost none of the information I get from these very useful selection processes are from this list (the flu outbreak is the exception). That's not to say that my information is better than yours - just that it's what I happen to want.
3) Therefore: A more useful "democracy" strategy might be to help readers select from the vast array of information coming out of organizations like the Tribune and put that on the "front page" akin to Amazon's personalized homepage metrics.
As a journalist, I will say that allowing anyone outside the organization to spike a story pre-publication opens to the door wide open to self-censorship. Critical journalism requires independence, or it becomes PR. Critical journalism is rare enough as it is without this.
Started by Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity after the Center spent over a million dollars fighting libel cases. They have never lost a libel case, but pretty soon their libel insurance company dropped them. Their opposition spent 3 million litigating a single case. Scary.
The reason HuffPo isn't a replacement for newspapers is that (according to their numbers) they have 3000 opinion/analysis writers (aka unpaid bloggers), and 7 reporters.
That's, umm, 0.2% news, 99.8% analysis. This is at the 15th most popular news site in the world. Yikes.
So, yeah, throw some coin at a stable of investigative reporters. Talking Points Memo, ProPublica and The Center for Public Integrity have proven that small teams of diggers (database people, mostly) and writers (old school newspaper journalists, mostly) works pretty well. Good luck to them.
I still think HuffPo is a joke of a news site, for reasons above. 0.02%!
Silkworks are a snack in Southeast Asia. I really enjoyed them. They fry them till they're a little crunchy and cover them with a dry chili powder. It's a party food, socially similar to how we'd use nachos.
The experience is a little like Cheetos with meat in the middle.
The reason spin dominates the media, is not because publishers give a damn. They just want a paycheck. But spin is cheaper than facts. Hard hitting journalism continues to be popular, but in light of crashing budgets, very few outlets are putting resources into it. And investigative journalism is the most expensive kind. If databases make that job cheaper, the quality of information will improve.
Yeah, when I was at the Center for Public Integrity, we very much started with the database and trolled for leads. There are MANY public datasets put out by the government that no one has ever even looked at. One story I worked on crawled legal docs for keywords indicating an appeals court judge rebuked a prosecutor for cheating. Then, we verified the docs (thousands) and had a nice list of the worst prosecutors in America. And guess what: they clustered. Nice little dens of abuse of power, based not on our opinion, but on judges rulings. Think that can get a readers attention? That's good journalism to me.
One more example: the FDA has a database that sources all the bad meat in America, going back who knows how long. You think you could find a story in that? Probably.
Slashdot Mirror
"Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed"... by attacking Google systems directly. Using other methods, the attackers were highly successful.
Google disclosed that upon investigating users suspected of being attacked, they found "dozens" of Chinese human rights activists who had been compromised through phishing, malware or other systems that allowed security forces (presumably) to read their mail via a valid authentication. So, while Google itself may be mostly reliable on the backend, the security ecosystem as a whole is deeply flawed.
Google: "as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers."
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html
So go change your passwords.
"Hey COO, we need to locate a remote technology office. This will support the economy of Brazil, China, India, Poland." "Let's choose... ANYWHERE BUT CHINA, because they will steal our stuff."
Public perceptions matter. And statements like this drive headlines, which drive perceptions. There's some line-in-the-sand drawing happening: we'll put up a lot of shit, but not so much with the stealing our data. So knock it off, or things will get unpleasant.
We've tried the no-talk, all-action approach: Iraq reconstruction. How well did that work?
^ Score: 6 Insightful
SSL : I like this idea a lot.
Google had 20-30% of search market in China. They have been losing market share to Baidu, which has pretty much all of the rest.
One theory is that the Chinese censorship rules were being jockeyed so as to make google.cn a miserable search engine, thus training the Chinese market to prefer local brands over Google. Rather than play a loser's game in the world's biggest market (defined, as Google surely does, by the number of people staring at screens), Google is out on their own terms now, with the possibility of reentry, brand intact, should the politics change.
It's also entirely possible that the idea of Chinese security services (the obvious but unproven culprit) hacking Gmail so they can arrest and torture human rights activists is so repellent to Google execs that strategy has gone out the window. "They're messing with our guys? F those guys, let's do some damage." So far, they have sought maximum publicity (delaying decisions, etc), which suggest some scorched earth is the goal.
If we accept for a moment that cellphone radiation (very low-dose but longterm exposure microwaves) is zapping proteins related to Alzheimers, I'm not going to jump up and down and get happy. Rather the opposite: we've confirmed that, in this case, supposedly benign EM radiation (non-ionizing, etc) can have important, medically significant effects on how our brains function. And we're currently zapping a hell of lot of people with this stuff. And we have really no idea what those effects are.
Unless my math is wrong, plugging in a headset on a 1m cord reduces your exposure by a whole lot compared to keeping the antenna shoved up against your head. Seems like a good idea until we get this sorted out.
The difference is that with online document editing you increase your risks and likely your costs as well, while failing to gain anything.
Unless I am missing something? What exactly is there to gain from online document editing? From google docs or ms office 2010?
If it's a single user, probably little more than offsite backup. But for organizations... whoo! It's a whole new process. Multi-site collaboration. Baked in version control. Realtime updates. no more attachments bloating up email servers. This is a big deal.
If the Nook ebook does become synonymohappens, I look forward to a generation calling all portable book readers "nookiebooks".
"Yeah, you need $10 million to cover that" - Tell me then, how do you punish a company except by a fiscal penalty?
Yes. I love how libertatians have perfect faith in torts as the only mechanism required to regulate corporate behavior, but when someone tries to do exactly that, it's all whiners and losers trying to make a buck.
On the other hand, cases like this are a pretty good way to sort Slashdot commenters into either actual libertarians (people with a thing for individual liberty, including freedom from fear) or corporatists (peasants who believe that corporate rule is infallible).
Yes, thank you. Sample is WAY too small.
It's worst than 35 people. They had 35 violent criminals multipled by (.65 - .42 extra candy eaters) = eight people. This finding is based on EIGHT FRICKIN PEOPLE reporting they ate candy as a child.
No -- commercial speech is regulated in ways that political speech is not. Here's an example from this week of a company getting dinged for posting crazy nonsense on their website:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/10/montana_ag_probing_american_police_force_deal.php?ref=fpb
The question is whether this is deceptive, within the bounds of the law, which may be at the state level.
Presumably the option to 'leave' implies the option to periodically back up your data as well. Compare that to 37 Signals's online collaboration product Basecamp, which has a uploaded file backup policy of "go screw yourself". They have argued that since you put all the files in, you already have a copy. But if this were an accurate picture of how business works, then no one would need their product.
It is intuitive, just at the expense of accuracy. MPG is miles per unit of energy, and in this case the EPA converting the real world energy units (a mix of gas and coal/other stuff sourced electricity) into the ones consumers are most familiar with. You can snipe at the model used to estimate what people will see on the street, but it's perfectly understandable. This car has lower fuel costs than a 40MPG Prius, if your use is roughly like the EPA model. So it's intuitive.
Accurate? No, but it doesn't need to be to inform economic decisions, so long as the standard is consistent across vehicles. Maybe you drive fast, maybe not. Get a spreadsheet and geek out if you like, but the simple MPG rating is actually pretty well designed for public consumption.
Right. The EPA numbers don't have to be "realistic" to be useful. People make sound economic decisions all the time on completely fictional numbers (think about a price/earnings ratio, among many others). The key is that they need to be consistent, and related to real performance in predictable ways. As long as a 200MPG car is about as good as a 230MPG car and vastly different from a 40MPG car, the fact that your mileage may vary doesn't change the economic value of the rating.
Investing (and trading) benefits everyone by shifting capitol to companies that produce goods and services. Microsecond trading is different: it takes advantage of economically meaningless quirks of valuation to siphon money out of the markets. This benefits the traders (mynocks, if you will) doing the siphoning, but does not allocate any capitol to companies that are creating good and services. It is simply a transaction cost passed on to the people who are actually investing, reducing the available capitol for people with goods and services to sell. It's a lot like a tax. So, F those guys.
How can you not mention Salesforce in this context? Free up to 10 users, powerful, and all-cloud, which fits nicely with most NPOs.
Very true about the vultures though.
What a democratically decided newspaper would put on the front page today (via Yahoo search traffic):
Swine Flu
Christina Applegate
American Idol
Kristie Alley
Jon and Kate Plus Eight
Sarah Jessica Parker
Twitter
Hi-5
Lady Gaga
NBA
Source: http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/overall/
Three observations:
1) There are media outlets that cover pretty much exactly this list. Good for them. I don't read those and never will. I question their contribution to democracy.
2) I get news from a variety of social media filters, and almost none of the information I get from these very useful selection processes are from this list (the flu outbreak is the exception). That's not to say that my information is better than yours - just that it's what I happen to want.
3) Therefore: A more useful "democracy" strategy might be to help readers select from the vast array of information coming out of organizations like the Tribune and put that on the "front page" akin to Amazon's personalized homepage metrics.
As a journalist, I will say that allowing anyone outside the organization to spike a story pre-publication opens to the door wide open to self-censorship. Critical journalism requires independence, or it becomes PR. Critical journalism is rare enough as it is without this.
maybe I'm looking in the wrong places :)
Try these:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/
http://www.propublica.org/
how would they propose to protect the whistleblowers?
I refer you to the Fund for Independence in Journalism. A legal defense fund for small, aggressive media outlets. They take donations.
http://www.tfij.org/
Started by Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity after the Center spent over a million dollars fighting libel cases. They have never lost a libel case, but pretty soon their libel insurance company dropped them. Their opposition spent 3 million litigating a single case. Scary.
The reason HuffPo isn't a replacement for newspapers is that (according to their numbers) they have 3000 opinion/analysis writers (aka unpaid bloggers), and 7 reporters.
That's, umm, 0.2% news, 99.8% analysis. This is at the 15th most popular news site in the world. Yikes.
So, yeah, throw some coin at a stable of investigative reporters. Talking Points Memo, ProPublica and The Center for Public Integrity have proven that small teams of diggers (database people, mostly) and writers (old school newspaper journalists, mostly) works pretty well. Good luck to them.
I still think HuffPo is a joke of a news site, for reasons above. 0.02%!
Form the USA Today story on this:
Space station crew has close call with space junk
Whoa! Dude, WTF?! Put that away or I'm telling Mission Control.
Silkworks are a snack in Southeast Asia. I really enjoyed them. They fry them till they're a little crunchy and cover them with a dry chili powder. It's a party food, socially similar to how we'd use nachos.
The experience is a little like Cheetos with meat in the middle.
Yes, totally. Although the 10-incher on my 1000H isn't all that bad. The trackpad, on the other hand...
The reason spin dominates the media, is not because publishers give a damn. They just want a paycheck. But spin is cheaper than facts. Hard hitting journalism continues to be popular, but in light of crashing budgets, very few outlets are putting resources into it. And investigative journalism is the most expensive kind. If databases make that job cheaper, the quality of information will improve.
Yeah, when I was at the Center for Public Integrity, we very much started with the database and trolled for leads. There are MANY public datasets put out by the government that no one has ever even looked at. One story I worked on crawled legal docs for keywords indicating an appeals court judge rebuked a prosecutor for cheating. Then, we verified the docs (thousands) and had a nice list of the worst prosecutors in America. And guess what: they clustered. Nice little dens of abuse of power, based not on our opinion, but on judges rulings. Think that can get a readers attention? That's good journalism to me.
One more example: the FDA has a database that sources all the bad meat in America, going back who knows how long. You think you could find a story in that? Probably.