No, because its on their machine and you would be "searching through what isnt clearly visible on someone elses property.
Let's make the test case even simpler then. He has his GMail in the browser, in full-screen mode. He walks away without locking the PC (trusting his fellow man.) Will you LOOK at his screen while he is away? The screen "broadcasts" photons for anyone to receive...
I could be mistaken, but it is legal to walk into unlocked homes so long as you have no intention of stealing or vandalizing the place.
I wouldn't recommend you to test this legal theory of yours. If you are lucky you will be arrested for trespassing. If you are not very lucky, your body will be collected by the coroner. Note that you, a 30 y/o man (for example) don't need to wield a weapon to constitute a clear threat to a 90 y/o woman who just happens to have a.357 in the drawer. Remember, if an old man is not strong enough to fight you he will just kill you.
I wonder how this would go over in states with wire taping laws that require consent from both parties?
The process would be the same as for one-party consent because neither party here was aware of the wiretapping. Google is not a party to the conversation.
As a previous poster mentioned what is different between this and shouting your banking info in a public area and having Google record it?
You can shout your banking information in the middle of a desert and expect to be safe. However Google broke your expectation, however incorrect it was in the first place. Unbeknownst to you, Google buried microphones in the sand, for no reason other than to intercept whatever visitors to the desert might be saying.
We are supposed to be secure in our communication. Written laws don't cover all the ways of communication, and they don't cover all the ways of being secure. It's for a qualified human (known as judge) to decide. The judge have decided based on common sense, not on technicalities. But geeks like to ride on technicalities; if something was technically possible for an attacker to do, then it's OK. Obviously that's not so; almost every door lock can be picked, but it doesn't make it legal to go around and pick locks - even if you only look inside. House windows are transparent, but it doesn't make it legal or moral to go around and peek into windows.
Just because the judge doesn't know how to do it, does not mean that it is not trivial
IMO, it is nontrivial if the laptop doesn't come with that software.
But even setting technicalities aside, isn't it obvious that reading someone else's emails just might be wrong? If your coworker walks away from his desk, will you jump on the opportunity to go through his GMail account? It's not encrypted, and the access software is trivial (your eyes.)
If the people were outside screaming their online banking credentials out loud and Google happened to be driving a car with microphones recording ambient noise at the time, would that be illegal?
IMO, it would be illegal if you use a high gain microphone and uncommon, expensive equipment. A packet sniffer, for most people, comes straight from spy stories, and it's not much different to placing alligator clips on phone wires. After all, we "broadcast" our phone conversations on public wires that aren't much protected.
The reason is that we deal in perception of privacy. There are no absolutes. However when two persons talk in the street, they believe to have privacy if there is nobody around close enough to overhear their conversation. It's common sense.
There is yet another note. "Broadcasting" means transmission that is intended for everyone to receive. Radio and TV stations broadcast. However cell phones don't broadcast - we say that they establish communication channels, point to point (from the handset to the base station.) Clearly intercepting that communication (however difficult today) would be wiretapping. But what's the difference between the cell phone that carries your protected oral speech and the email that carries your protected written speech? The encryption can't define that, otherwise it would be legal to break into unlocked homes.
It beats SATA because it is not locked into ATA command set. Thunderbolt routes PCIe I/O, which means you can build any PCI peripheral and it will work as if you plugged it into the main board. You can have access to the RAM, use interrupts, DMA and whatever. There are many I/O devices out there that generate lots of data, and they are not disks. Medical sensors, scientific equipment, software-defined radios, high resolution / high frame rate cameras (for security and for machine vision,) external video cards and GPU... I can think of many examples.
Another item of interest is the DisplayPort channel. SATA doesn't support it, Thunderbolt does. Sure, you can always have a second cable... but why to use two when one works fine? The need for remote display devices is quite obvious, and one Thunderbolt jack can replace DP and SATA ports - something that a small device will appreciate.
The cable's $50 price may be justified, but it's also a further reminder of why Thunderbolt may follow FireWire's path into obsolescence.
Firewire went to silicon heaven because USB was cheaper, smaller (connector-wise and cable-diameter-wise) and fully embraced by Intel. Will you make a FireWire mouse? Probably not; you can hoist a cow on a standard FireWire cable. But once you have a USB mouse, why to get Firewire? Note that speedy peripherals were uncommon back then, except video cameras. And USB 3.x attacked that market; I have one USB 3.0 device here, an HDD, and it is backward compatible to USB 2.x.
However 2 x 10 Gbps is some good increase in speed. You don't need it for 99% of peripherals on the market; but when you need it you need it - like that RAID thingy which can generate and consume that much data. Your choices there are simple - either this Thunderbolt, which is more or less fixed, or a variety of 10 Gbps connections, copper or fiber, SFP+ or XFP or whatever. They all are very much different, locking you into some specific hardware, and they all run hot - bad news in a notebook.
10GBASE-T is one of competitors; it runs on slower clock and requires more pairs. But as long as it works, who cares? The twisted pair cable, even category 6A, is cheap, and the distance up to 100m is what you want in any reasonable setup that includes more than two boxes on top of each other. 10G Ethernet is also switchable and routable. Considering that Thunderbolt is a point to point transport for DisplayPort and PciE, it's use is probably limited to expansion ports; but it's probably pretty good in that role - even if majority of computers can't even handle the bandwidth, let alone have a need for such a thing.
I flipped around the site for 5 minutes and came up with no clear idea what Open-Xchange is for.
I'm not responsible for the choice of that name, fortunately. Also, if you use open source software you should be already conditioned to expect no sensible description of what the software does:-)
However the software itself is exactly what you need if you require a Web interface to your mail. It's written in Java, works very well and looks good. If you run Ubuntu LTS, for example, the installation is trivial and well described. Lots of plugins are available for those who want them.
You can of course run lighter products, like SquirrelMail. They work too, and I used them. But Open-Xchange is far more polished, and it offers a few additional features, like InfoItems - it's your personal notepad for quick storage of files, text, bookmarks, etc. Calendar is also available, but I'm not using it.
This software has nothing to do with Outlook or Exchange, which should be obvious since both are in its name:-) The only tie to Exchange is in the function - Open-Xchange can be used as a complete replacement for MS Exchange on the Web, if you are a small business. The IMAP side works on its own (it's not even a part of Open-Xchange; postfix + cyrus is your friend, probably.)
I love the idea of rolling releases. There isn't even a "but" involved here.
How you can then assure your boss that Firefox will always be able to correctly operate your company's Intranet-based ordering system?
The problem is that in the enterprise world upgrades are not done willy-nilly. Upgrades are done when they are necessary; and before upgrading 10,000 clients the change is tested.
But rolling, automatic, background releases take that control out of your hands. Do you want to wake up every morning and wonder, on your way to work, if your company's ordering system crashed again today? With a known release this won't happen that easily. But when some other guys, somewhere, who never even heard about your system, decide to "fix a bug" - even if that is a right thing to do - they can cost your enterprise big bucks.
So as an engineer, you develop what I call the "Dr. No" persona
It is natural for an engineer to reflexively reject all complaints and bug reports about "his" product. Steve Jobs famously said "you are holding it wrong."
And that is exactly why engineers shouldn't be even allowed to decide the fate of entered bugs. This should be done by a person who sees the problem from the customer's point of view and has not too much personal attachment to the current implementation.
For example, you design an IMAP client and it takes only ports 143 and 993, hardcoded. The customer logs a bug saying he wants to enter his own port numbers. You reject by saying "we conform to RFC, case closed." This answer is wrong - the product simply can't be used with millions of private IMAP servers that are configured to obscure their existence. This is a showstopper bug, not a mere suggestion. A manager should understand the implications and then talk to the programmer. Most likely the programmer just doesn't want to change the layout of the GUI because otherwise the change is trivial.
GMail is also famous for such stupid things. It still has, I believe, the "Consider including..." and they started as "Also include" - this was a fricking disaster when they added that misfeature - and they still insist on having it there. But I don't know for sure because that was the day when I said "enough is enough" and enabled IMAP. Now I'm back to the sane interface where nobody "suggests" that I include strangers into destination fields of my emails. Google lost me as a profit center (however small) - and what was the price they haggled about? Just two comments, <!-- --> or/* */. The coders at Google simply refused to accept that someone doesn't like their idea.
How about describing how "thinking like an engineer" specifically doomed Google Health and Power Meter?
As I recall, the Power Meter was marketed only to power companies, not to individuals. Google's Web page said "Talk to your power company about this product" - a stupid advice that could be made only by someone who never had an experience of calling a utility company.
Some software, like Brultech's mess, have interfaces to Google Power Meter, but you need to dig deep to figure it out, and the configuration there is horrible to begin with. But GPM did *nothing* for a common man. If you go out and buy ECM-1240 on your own you probably don't need GPM anyway.
When the power failed and they used the battery backup they all kept crap time, often being out by a minute per hour.
The error then would be about 1.5%. My guess is that your clock switches to an RC oscillator, and the frequency is then determined by tolerances of components. No crystal could be that bad.
Also another poster above mentioned that some clocks have an internal switch for 50 or 60 Hz.
One such switch costs more than a few crystals. Besides, it's another "maintenance" item that could be incorrectly set by the customer. I guess some clocks were made this way, after all, but I'm not guilty of that:-)
A simple crystal is cheap. A good calibrated crystal with temperature correction and such is not so cheap.
You most certainly don't need a TCXO. If you get one, like DS32KHZS#T&R, it gives you ±7.5ppm. This translates into 4 minutes of error per year if the frequency error is never adjusted or otherwise compensated for. There are temperature compensated crystals with better stability. However a common crystal comes with tolerance ±20ppm and hopefully has stability that is not worse. This figure translates into about 10 minutes per year, and that is perfectly fine for most people.
If, however, you can't accept the fact that you need to touch your clock at all, you have an option of using WWVB broadcasts at 60 kHz, or WWV that is broadcast on HF. Or you can get some Rubidium or Cesium standard.
Most lime-powered digital clocks use the line for the frequency reference and run from the quartz crystal reference only when there's a power outage.
I'm not aware of even ONE such design. There are many reasons to not design a clock this way. For example:
You need two frequency inputs (60 Hz and 32768 Hz) and two dividers down to 1 Hz. Isn't it easier to have only one?
You are confusing the frequency error (% or ppm of the harmonic) and the phase error. The phase error is accumulating over the year, and as you state it can be (n*60*1*2*PI) where 'n' is the error in minutes. In other words, it's n*60 extra turns of the 'seconds' hand. The phase error has little to do with the frequency error, other that it is an integral of it. You can have an awful clock which goes 10 minutes faster on even days and 10 minutes slower on odd days, and it will have zero error at the end of the year.
The crystal is already there, and if you aren't using it you are wasting money.
Most line-powered clocks don't maintain time if the power is lost; some have a small capacitor that holds time for about a minute.
Such clocks won't work in countries with 50 Hz grid - and most of the world runs on 50 Hz, as I understand. China will not be making clocks that it can't sell in Europe.
The device has to tolerate grid frequency being off by a few percent. This is not likely to happen in any one country, but grids of different countries may run on slightly different frequencies even if they all run near 60 Hz.
Clock manufacturer can't guarantee the accuracy of their product.
ghettos dont have the chance of educating themselves
They have enough chances to do that. See "Affirmative action." See "Barack Obama" (whoever he is.)
social classes are set in stone unless ur lucky, hard working, AND smart.
Luck is something we all need. However "hard-working" and "smart" are qualities that a ghetto dweller can learn. Especially the "hard-working" part of it. The "smart" part is not even required to hold a good job and have a peaceful life.
But of course realities of the modern USA tell us that even a white, male graduate can't easily get a job outside of McD. A black ex-con has nearly zero chances of getting a job anywhere.
Regardless, hard work is the only salvation those people in ghettos have - because the gravy train is nearing the cliff, and if the welfare is not canceled by the government it will be canceled by devaluation of the dollar when it crashes. Working people, however, will be always selling their labor for the going rate, and that rate is not measured in dollars - it is measured in other goods that you need to live. It may be that you will be paid $100K per day, and you will be paid daily, and that will feed you. But welfare recipients will be left at their $300/head or whatever they are getting, and that won't even buy a newspaper. Then they will get really mad at "the man" for "keeping them down." As I believe, "the man" is indeed doing them a huge disservice by paying them welfare.
If you were a quality employer, you wouldn't be pissing off your employees. If you are, you deserve whatever comes back to you for abuse of power.
There are many problems with this position.
Who determines who is and who isn't a quality employer? What if the worker's expectations are unreasonable? ($500K/yr salary and free hookers, for example.)
Even if the manager is not a quality person, it is wrong to threaten the company.
It is usually wrong to go vigilante - the response is often out of proportion and illegal. See "going postal."
In other words, there should be no situation when a worker is justified in doing something to hurt his boss or the company (except in very narrowly defined cases of self-defense or defense of others against an imminent, deadly threat when you can't retreat.) Pulling a stunt like that only proves that the decision to fire this "loose cannon" was correct.
You personally (or me, sometimes) may have different logic, and occasionally out of pure philanthropy we may do something that is counter to our own interests. In statistics, however, such behavior is insignificant. The economy is driven by players who act in their own interests. Therefore bitcoins will be hoarded. We can already see that - the market of bitcoin goods and services is miniscule compared to the market of speculation.
I will pay slightly more for things if I pay with bitcoin, but that's because the total value of the transaction is higher for me if it's carried out in bitcoin.
The political ears are exposed again. This is something *you* do, and that's fine. Only don't expect any statistically significant number of players to do that too. Some people contribute to charities, but that doesn't turn "charities service" into a significant portion of the GDP.
Also, I have been approached for work in bitcoin by companies that are in random parts of the world. This simply would not have been possible in a more traditional currency.
But why is that? Any country that is not of likes of Sudan or Afghanistan can pay you in USD. Those companies act in their interest; most likely they came across some number of bitcoins, and now you will be working for something they got for free. From your point of view you shouldn't care if the customer pays you with money from a wallet he found in the street... but since you are so much interested in the advancement of the humanity, this transaction is unfair (people paid you with wealth that they haven't created.)
Another, more sinister, explanation is that those companies want to pay you under the table, skipping the books. How will you report this income? There is no way to establish the value of goods that you received. Or perhaps this income will be conveniently forgotten?
I'm shocked by the number of people who take pleasure in Bitcoiners' recent misfortune. A lot of people are putting effort into something they care about, and snide little shits on the internet lol it up.
Founders and early adopters control 60% of all possible bitcoins, as reported. People who are not early adopters (just about 6 billion) don't want this currency to succeed because that would give those early adopters 2/3 of the planet's wealth for... literally nothing, besides a few CPU cycles and some math ideas.
It's entirely possible that the spread of Bitcoin will make a few millionaires or billionaires (in USD), but that doesn't seem especially important.
I guess the concept of fairness is obsolete. Bill Gates at least was working hard and taking risks; his money was earned. We can debate whether he deserves his billions or not, but his contribution to the human civilization is obvious.
However Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem that is worth solving. It doesn't cure cancer. It doesn't teach children. It doesn't even make your smartphone any smarter. It's just another currency. Its inventors took no risks, they invested nothing except little time. Any money that they get will be taken from someone else's pockets. I don't want them to take money from me.
I had the opportunity to mine Bitcoins from the beginning, to buy and hold when they were extremely cheap, but I was too stupid to do so.
Don't torture yourself - most of bitcoins have been mined by founders before the rest of the world knew about it. You had no chance to become a billionaire. You probably could make a few hundred $K on it, but that would be not any different from playing the stock market right now. You can do it at any time, but you will lose.
And I still own a bunch of bitcoins. I will be using them to buy actual physical goods and not USD as much as possible.
This is pretty contradictory. If you are bullish on Bitcoin then spending them as currency is the worst decision you can make. You need to hoard them.
But if you do spend them it means you are willing to take financial loss for the benefit of the currency. This moves Bitcoin from the category of currency (which is a fair trade in either direction) into the category of political agendas and personal sacrifices. Not many people will follow you there.
But if you are bearish on the Bitcoin (and that's why you are spending it) then it contradicts your hope that the Bitcoin succeeds.
In either case, if you are willing to spend Bitcoins then you shouldn't focus on conversion to USD - you should do what makes sense. If the company A offers the product Y for 1 bitcoin, the company B offers the product Y for $10, and the exchange rate is 1 bitcoin to $20, you will do well if you sell 0.5 bitcoins and use USD to buy the product from company B. Paying more to the company A is a political action, not a financial one.
you can read post after post by grumpy Americans who angrily swear the Dollar is going to collapse and be trampled upon by China... then read even MORE replies by people FROM China who tell them they're completely insane, and that Chinese investors view US Dollars as the safest stores of value you can buy.
Of course Chinese investors would be saying this, as long as they hold USD.
But those Americans know the truth - the country is going bankrupt in several directions at once. It loses the industry; it loses specialists; its infrastructure decays; its society is deeply polarized and ready to explode; its job market is sick and the numbers of unemployed rise, and the government spends trillions on pointless wars... This is not the happy, happy country anymore (if it ever was such.) It is not going to be even a viable country soon - see Mexico.
If the USD falls then indeed, as you say, the fallout will be global. But who will swim to the surface? Will it be China, with resources and factories? Will it be Russia, with resources and huge land? Will it be Europe, with [not much at all]? Will it be the USA, with angry mobs rioting in all major cities, and with armed ranchers shooting their 30-06 at anyone who shows up uninvited?
(money laundering and dope dealing going on with it)
You mean exactly like with the real, traditional, cold hard cash?
There are laws and procedures to prevent using traditional cash for such things. Go to your bank and deposit $50,000 in small bills. If you are not a retailer, expect trouble. That's exactly why Bitcoin is taking off like a rocket among criminals - payments are anonymous.
Yet another example is taxation. Imagine that I designed a gizmo for you, and you paid me 100 bitcoins for that. As a contractor, I should include this revenue into my estimated taxes. But what is the value of those bitcoins, and at what time do we calculate them? That would be similar to getting paid in Canadian dollars, Yens, etc.
Alternatively, we can treat them as a security transaction, as if you paid me for my work with 100 shares of a certain company. Perhaps that's how it should be treated. But the catch is that this security is not registered! Even then you have to pay the tax on it, at its current value - which can't be determined because there is no established market for it. Your own pet exchange in the basement, where you dial whatever prices you want, doesn't count - that's why securities laws exist.
But on top of that, why would I want to pay taxes if I can get away with it? The bitcoins are tied to a number of my "account" that nobody can associate with me.
Government-issued currency has fewer problems of this sort. In essence, by using it you submit to a certain level of monitoring, but in return you are given certainty. For most people it's a trade they don't even think twice about. I'm not concerned that the government knows that my paycheck cleared. I will report it in my tax papers anyway. But the guy who sells drugs to homicidal maniacs ought to be concerned. An ideal libertarian currency - like Bitcoin - produces the same effects that humans discovered over the course of thousands of years that we know currencies. Bitcoin will also repeat all the mistakes of earlier currencies that it can technically do, just because there are always people who benefit from doing so and people who are just sheep ready for fleecing.
bitcoin is insanely attractive to people who sit at computers all day.
On the other hand, geeks have no weight in finances. People printing USD and other currencies have no interest in an ever-deflating currency that they don't control, and 60% of which is already in pockets of founders and early adopters. Soros and Buffett and Bernanke would have to be insane to play on someone else's terms.
With regard to your theory of geeks setting up farms at work, it is probably quite far from reality. The reason is that Bitcoin had no value until very recently, so there wasn't a good reason to bother. Now that it has (or had) some value it becomes more interesting, but very few bitcoins remain, and a herd of low end business PCs will not be of much use - you need quite specific GPUs.
Another problem is that the Bitcoin client (at least the official one) is an application; it can't be ran as a service, it can't be remotely controlled, etc. etc. In other words, it is not suitable for a massive deployment (nor it was meant to be.) So an admin can't easily hide the application on a business PC. If he is discovered, he won't just get a verbal reprimand (as for SETI @home) - he will get fired; there is no scientific or otherwise benign purpose here.
When robots start taking menial service jobs, what do you think will happen?
The society will die. What do you think will happen when young people (between 5 and 30) realize that they can do whatever they want? They will do whatever they want, and you will not like a single bit of it.
It will take a great amount of [very unusual among humans] devotion to work. Such people exist even today, but what is the percentage of workaholics - 1% at best? The rest will be going crazy from having nothing to do and from knowing that whatever they do is pointless.
They used to say that labor made man out of ape. We can reverse this wisdom and say that lack of labor will make man back into ape.
You can preview this in ghettos. People there don't have to work to stay alive; but instead of educating themselves, learning crafts, creating art they tend to revert to basest instincts that we inherited from our animal predecessors. Welfare is a cancer of societies, and it doesn't matter who pays for it - some faraway countries or some robots.
I take this as a strong sign that this kind of technology, including near field communications, are hindered by some other factor, such as disinterest from banks.
Banks would have to provide phones to their account holders - and that's quite expensive!
Alternatively, they can provide software for existing phones. But then they have to support thousands of models! It's a nightmare.
Such a system is not under bank's control. There will be various people who want their cut. The bank is not in business of giving money out.
Such a system has to be sufficiently secure, so that the customers don't sue the bank and that the bank doesn't lose too much money on fraudulent transactions.
Customers don't feel any urgency in parting with their money. I can certainly wait a few seconds while the transaction clears, and I do want my receipt.
Vendors are in no hurry to pay for another gizmo that won't increase their revenue. There would be no customers who come, want to buy stuff, note that the phone pay is not available, and leave.
This leaves only peddlers of those new technologies, who are doing their best to sell the idea to phone companies. And phone companies want to insert themselves into the payment chain - for a fee, of course. Everyone else is indifferent. The gas station that I usually use has some sort of wireless pay thingie, I guess, but I gain nothing from using it (even if I had it) as opposed to using a c/c. The thingie would be just one more item to carry and lose, and one more bill to pay.
If you could make a cradle where you slide the phone into it, the purchaser's phone would send it's public_key to the purchasing system, which would then send it's public_key back to the purchaser's phone -- encrypted with the purchaser's public_key.
There is no reason to encrypt public keys - they are public, after all.
Then the purchaser's phone would send the payment information encrypted with the public_key of the purchasing system -- and the acknowledgement of successful transaction would be sent back encrypted with the purchaser's public_key
How do you know who you are paying to? You need to have those public keys signed, so that:
The buyer knows that he pays to Albertsons Groceries and Stuff, and not to MS-13 Cyber Crime Gang. It could be a good racket to reconnect a couple of wires under the desk during the night. Even if the setup lasts one day, it's a good take.
The store knows that the customer uses his legitimate account, and not a fake one that won't survive validation by the bank.
All these issues are well known from HTTPS. If your phone needs to validate signatures of store keys it has to have keys of CAs on it, and those need to be managed in some way. Don't forget revocation, keys will be inevitably lost.
But if you consider, swiping the credit card, waiting for the authentication, then waiting for the signature, then waiting for the printing out of the receipt, etc. That whole thing can take a minute or so depending.
This is not the bottleneck, and there is no reason to optimize that phase. It rarely takes more than 15-20 seconds to confirm the transaction and to print the receipt. You know what takes forever? Checks, if someone in front of you is antisocial enough to use them.
no requiring another signature to use the device, and all you have to do is slide your phone in a slot for 30 seconds to a minute to complete the transaction
As other posters already mentioned, phones get lost quite often. With this system in place muggers will be hunting for phones. Do you want the thief to empty your bank account while you are laying in a ditch? Your {G,B}F will also be able to pay with your phone when you least expect it - and there is no way to prove that it wasn't you.
To really make this "safe" as well, you could have the software on the phone require a password to be entered on the device to "unlock" the encrypted "credit card information" within the phone for 2 minutes or whatever.
How is it different from using a debit card? Besides, the same attack applies to the phone: the mugger beats you until you reveal the password. Even worse - with the debit card the mugger can't verify it instantly; but with the phone he can enter it right in the dark alley, where you are laying on the ground, and check if you lied. [There is a possibility of duress codes, though, but they aren't implemented by US banks, AFAIK.]
it nulls out the time and makes for effective use of technology.
Paying for stuff is never a problem. Getting money to be able to pay is what you need to focus on:-) This and other phone-based "technologies" are just contrived ways to use the phone where it shouldn't be used. Might as well connect a toothbrush to it, set to "vibrate" and enjoy your new Sonicare:-)
Payment systems are supposed to be simple and cheap. Many people don't know how to use technology. Other people don't have money to buy phones. Other people don't want phones. A phone is not a requirement to live in the country. Even a card is not required, cash is still accepted. If you can't drop cards then you have to have yet another payment system connected to your cash register. What for? What is gained? A phone is MUCH HEAVIER than a plastic card, and it costs more, and it has to be charged, and it can run malware, and it's always connected to who knows what. You don't want to forget your phone in that cradle ei
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No, because its on their machine and you would be "searching through what isnt clearly visible on someone elses property.
Let's make the test case even simpler then. He has his GMail in the browser, in full-screen mode. He walks away without locking the PC (trusting his fellow man.) Will you LOOK at his screen while he is away? The screen "broadcasts" photons for anyone to receive...
I could be mistaken, but it is legal to walk into unlocked homes so long as you have no intention of stealing or vandalizing the place.
I wouldn't recommend you to test this legal theory of yours. If you are lucky you will be arrested for trespassing. If you are not very lucky, your body will be collected by the coroner. Note that you, a 30 y/o man (for example) don't need to wield a weapon to constitute a clear threat to a 90 y/o woman who just happens to have a .357 in the drawer. Remember, if an old man is not strong enough to fight you he will just kill you.
I wonder how this would go over in states with wire taping laws that require consent from both parties?
The process would be the same as for one-party consent because neither party here was aware of the wiretapping. Google is not a party to the conversation.
As a previous poster mentioned what is different between this and shouting your banking info in a public area and having Google record it?
You can shout your banking information in the middle of a desert and expect to be safe. However Google broke your expectation, however incorrect it was in the first place. Unbeknownst to you, Google buried microphones in the sand, for no reason other than to intercept whatever visitors to the desert might be saying.
We are supposed to be secure in our communication. Written laws don't cover all the ways of communication, and they don't cover all the ways of being secure. It's for a qualified human (known as judge) to decide. The judge have decided based on common sense, not on technicalities. But geeks like to ride on technicalities; if something was technically possible for an attacker to do, then it's OK. Obviously that's not so; almost every door lock can be picked, but it doesn't make it legal to go around and pick locks - even if you only look inside. House windows are transparent, but it doesn't make it legal or moral to go around and peek into windows.
Just because the judge doesn't know how to do it, does not mean that it is not trivial
IMO, it is nontrivial if the laptop doesn't come with that software.
But even setting technicalities aside, isn't it obvious that reading someone else's emails just might be wrong? If your coworker walks away from his desk, will you jump on the opportunity to go through his GMail account? It's not encrypted, and the access software is trivial (your eyes.)
If the people were outside screaming their online banking credentials out loud and Google happened to be driving a car with microphones recording ambient noise at the time, would that be illegal?
IMO, it would be illegal if you use a high gain microphone and uncommon, expensive equipment. A packet sniffer, for most people, comes straight from spy stories, and it's not much different to placing alligator clips on phone wires. After all, we "broadcast" our phone conversations on public wires that aren't much protected.
The reason is that we deal in perception of privacy. There are no absolutes. However when two persons talk in the street, they believe to have privacy if there is nobody around close enough to overhear their conversation. It's common sense.
There is yet another note. "Broadcasting" means transmission that is intended for everyone to receive. Radio and TV stations broadcast. However cell phones don't broadcast - we say that they establish communication channels, point to point (from the handset to the base station.) Clearly intercepting that communication (however difficult today) would be wiretapping. But what's the difference between the cell phone that carries your protected oral speech and the email that carries your protected written speech? The encryption can't define that, otherwise it would be legal to break into unlocked homes.
But do you really need it?
It beats SATA because it is not locked into ATA command set. Thunderbolt routes PCIe I/O, which means you can build any PCI peripheral and it will work as if you plugged it into the main board. You can have access to the RAM, use interrupts, DMA and whatever. There are many I/O devices out there that generate lots of data, and they are not disks. Medical sensors, scientific equipment, software-defined radios, high resolution / high frame rate cameras (for security and for machine vision,) external video cards and GPU... I can think of many examples.
Another item of interest is the DisplayPort channel. SATA doesn't support it, Thunderbolt does. Sure, you can always have a second cable... but why to use two when one works fine? The need for remote display devices is quite obvious, and one Thunderbolt jack can replace DP and SATA ports - something that a small device will appreciate.
The cable's $50 price may be justified, but it's also a further reminder of why Thunderbolt may follow FireWire's path into obsolescence.
Firewire went to silicon heaven because USB was cheaper, smaller (connector-wise and cable-diameter-wise) and fully embraced by Intel. Will you make a FireWire mouse? Probably not; you can hoist a cow on a standard FireWire cable. But once you have a USB mouse, why to get Firewire? Note that speedy peripherals were uncommon back then, except video cameras. And USB 3.x attacked that market; I have one USB 3.0 device here, an HDD, and it is backward compatible to USB 2.x.
However 2 x 10 Gbps is some good increase in speed. You don't need it for 99% of peripherals on the market; but when you need it you need it - like that RAID thingy which can generate and consume that much data. Your choices there are simple - either this Thunderbolt, which is more or less fixed, or a variety of 10 Gbps connections, copper or fiber, SFP+ or XFP or whatever. They all are very much different, locking you into some specific hardware, and they all run hot - bad news in a notebook.
10GBASE-T is one of competitors; it runs on slower clock and requires more pairs. But as long as it works, who cares? The twisted pair cable, even category 6A, is cheap, and the distance up to 100m is what you want in any reasonable setup that includes more than two boxes on top of each other. 10G Ethernet is also switchable and routable. Considering that Thunderbolt is a point to point transport for DisplayPort and PciE, it's use is probably limited to expansion ports; but it's probably pretty good in that role - even if majority of computers can't even handle the bandwidth, let alone have a need for such a thing.
I flipped around the site for 5 minutes and came up with no clear idea what Open-Xchange is for.
I'm not responsible for the choice of that name, fortunately. Also, if you use open source software you should be already conditioned to expect no sensible description of what the software does :-)
However the software itself is exactly what you need if you require a Web interface to your mail. It's written in Java, works very well and looks good. If you run Ubuntu LTS, for example, the installation is trivial and well described. Lots of plugins are available for those who want them.
You can of course run lighter products, like SquirrelMail. They work too, and I used them. But Open-Xchange is far more polished, and it offers a few additional features, like InfoItems - it's your personal notepad for quick storage of files, text, bookmarks, etc. Calendar is also available, but I'm not using it.
This software has nothing to do with Outlook or Exchange, which should be obvious since both are in its name :-) The only tie to Exchange is in the function - Open-Xchange can be used as a complete replacement for MS Exchange on the Web, if you are a small business. The IMAP side works on its own (it's not even a part of Open-Xchange; postfix + cyrus is your friend, probably.)
Since I host my own mail accounts, and don't want to have to maintain my own web interface to them, having a mail client comes in rather handy.
It takes maybe 15 minutes to install Open-Xchange and it works just fine.
I love the idea of rolling releases. There isn't even a "but" involved here.
How you can then assure your boss that Firefox will always be able to correctly operate your company's Intranet-based ordering system?
The problem is that in the enterprise world upgrades are not done willy-nilly. Upgrades are done when they are necessary; and before upgrading 10,000 clients the change is tested.
But rolling, automatic, background releases take that control out of your hands. Do you want to wake up every morning and wonder, on your way to work, if your company's ordering system crashed again today? With a known release this won't happen that easily. But when some other guys, somewhere, who never even heard about your system, decide to "fix a bug" - even if that is a right thing to do - they can cost your enterprise big bucks.
So as an engineer, you develop what I call the "Dr. No" persona
It is natural for an engineer to reflexively reject all complaints and bug reports about "his" product. Steve Jobs famously said "you are holding it wrong."
And that is exactly why engineers shouldn't be even allowed to decide the fate of entered bugs. This should be done by a person who sees the problem from the customer's point of view and has not too much personal attachment to the current implementation.
For example, you design an IMAP client and it takes only ports 143 and 993, hardcoded. The customer logs a bug saying he wants to enter his own port numbers. You reject by saying "we conform to RFC, case closed." This answer is wrong - the product simply can't be used with millions of private IMAP servers that are configured to obscure their existence. This is a showstopper bug, not a mere suggestion. A manager should understand the implications and then talk to the programmer. Most likely the programmer just doesn't want to change the layout of the GUI because otherwise the change is trivial.
GMail is also famous for such stupid things. It still has, I believe, the "Consider including..." and they started as "Also include" - this was a fricking disaster when they added that misfeature - and they still insist on having it there. But I don't know for sure because that was the day when I said "enough is enough" and enabled IMAP. Now I'm back to the sane interface where nobody "suggests" that I include strangers into destination fields of my emails. Google lost me as a profit center (however small) - and what was the price they haggled about? Just two comments, <!-- --> or /* */. The coders at Google simply refused to accept that someone doesn't like their idea.
How about describing how "thinking like an engineer" specifically doomed Google Health and Power Meter?
As I recall, the Power Meter was marketed only to power companies, not to individuals. Google's Web page said "Talk to your power company about this product" - a stupid advice that could be made only by someone who never had an experience of calling a utility company.
Some software, like Brultech's mess, have interfaces to Google Power Meter, but you need to dig deep to figure it out, and the configuration there is horrible to begin with. But GPM did *nothing* for a common man. If you go out and buy ECM-1240 on your own you probably don't need GPM anyway.
When the power failed and they used the battery backup they all kept crap time, often being out by a minute per hour.
The error then would be about 1.5%. My guess is that your clock switches to an RC oscillator, and the frequency is then determined by tolerances of components. No crystal could be that bad.
Also another poster above mentioned that some clocks have an internal switch for 50 or 60 Hz.
One such switch costs more than a few crystals. Besides, it's another "maintenance" item that could be incorrectly set by the customer. I guess some clocks were made this way, after all, but I'm not guilty of that :-)
A simple crystal is cheap. A good calibrated crystal with temperature correction and such is not so cheap.
You most certainly don't need a TCXO. If you get one, like DS32KHZS#T&R, it gives you ±7.5ppm. This translates into 4 minutes of error per year if the frequency error is never adjusted or otherwise compensated for. There are temperature compensated crystals with better stability. However a common crystal comes with tolerance ±20ppm and hopefully has stability that is not worse. This figure translates into about 10 minutes per year, and that is perfectly fine for most people.
If, however, you can't accept the fact that you need to touch your clock at all, you have an option of using WWVB broadcasts at 60 kHz, or WWV that is broadcast on HF. Or you can get some Rubidium or Cesium standard.
Most lime-powered digital clocks use the line for the frequency reference and run from the quartz crystal reference only when there's a power outage.
I'm not aware of even ONE such design. There are many reasons to not design a clock this way. For example:
ghettos dont have the chance of educating themselves
They have enough chances to do that. See "Affirmative action." See "Barack Obama" (whoever he is.)
social classes are set in stone unless ur lucky, hard working, AND smart.
Luck is something we all need. However "hard-working" and "smart" are qualities that a ghetto dweller can learn. Especially the "hard-working" part of it. The "smart" part is not even required to hold a good job and have a peaceful life.
But of course realities of the modern USA tell us that even a white, male graduate can't easily get a job outside of McD. A black ex-con has nearly zero chances of getting a job anywhere.
Regardless, hard work is the only salvation those people in ghettos have - because the gravy train is nearing the cliff, and if the welfare is not canceled by the government it will be canceled by devaluation of the dollar when it crashes. Working people, however, will be always selling their labor for the going rate, and that rate is not measured in dollars - it is measured in other goods that you need to live. It may be that you will be paid $100K per day, and you will be paid daily, and that will feed you. But welfare recipients will be left at their $300/head or whatever they are getting, and that won't even buy a newspaper. Then they will get really mad at "the man" for "keeping them down." As I believe, "the man" is indeed doing them a huge disservice by paying them welfare.
If you were a quality employer, you wouldn't be pissing off your employees. If you are, you deserve whatever comes back to you for abuse of power.
There are many problems with this position.
In other words, there should be no situation when a worker is justified in doing something to hurt his boss or the company (except in very narrowly defined cases of self-defense or defense of others against an imminent, deadly threat when you can't retreat.) Pulling a stunt like that only proves that the decision to fire this "loose cannon" was correct.
Your logic is very short-term gain focused.
In the long term we are all dead.
You personally (or me, sometimes) may have different logic, and occasionally out of pure philanthropy we may do something that is counter to our own interests. In statistics, however, such behavior is insignificant. The economy is driven by players who act in their own interests. Therefore bitcoins will be hoarded. We can already see that - the market of bitcoin goods and services is miniscule compared to the market of speculation.
I will pay slightly more for things if I pay with bitcoin, but that's because the total value of the transaction is higher for me if it's carried out in bitcoin.
The political ears are exposed again. This is something *you* do, and that's fine. Only don't expect any statistically significant number of players to do that too. Some people contribute to charities, but that doesn't turn "charities service" into a significant portion of the GDP.
Also, I have been approached for work in bitcoin by companies that are in random parts of the world. This simply would not have been possible in a more traditional currency.
But why is that? Any country that is not of likes of Sudan or Afghanistan can pay you in USD. Those companies act in their interest; most likely they came across some number of bitcoins, and now you will be working for something they got for free. From your point of view you shouldn't care if the customer pays you with money from a wallet he found in the street ... but since you are so much interested in the advancement of the humanity, this transaction is unfair (people paid you with wealth that they haven't created.)
Another, more sinister, explanation is that those companies want to pay you under the table, skipping the books. How will you report this income? There is no way to establish the value of goods that you received. Or perhaps this income will be conveniently forgotten?
I'm shocked by the number of people who take pleasure in Bitcoiners' recent misfortune. A lot of people are putting effort into something they care about, and snide little shits on the internet lol it up.
Founders and early adopters control 60% of all possible bitcoins, as reported. People who are not early adopters (just about 6 billion) don't want this currency to succeed because that would give those early adopters 2/3 of the planet's wealth for ... literally nothing, besides a few CPU cycles and some math ideas.
It's entirely possible that the spread of Bitcoin will make a few millionaires or billionaires (in USD), but that doesn't seem especially important.
I guess the concept of fairness is obsolete. Bill Gates at least was working hard and taking risks; his money was earned. We can debate whether he deserves his billions or not, but his contribution to the human civilization is obvious.
However Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem that is worth solving. It doesn't cure cancer. It doesn't teach children. It doesn't even make your smartphone any smarter. It's just another currency. Its inventors took no risks, they invested nothing except little time. Any money that they get will be taken from someone else's pockets. I don't want them to take money from me.
I had the opportunity to mine Bitcoins from the beginning, to buy and hold when they were extremely cheap, but I was too stupid to do so.
Don't torture yourself - most of bitcoins have been mined by founders before the rest of the world knew about it. You had no chance to become a billionaire. You probably could make a few hundred $K on it, but that would be not any different from playing the stock market right now. You can do it at any time, but you will lose.
And I still own a bunch of bitcoins. I will be using them to buy actual physical goods and not USD as much as possible.
This is pretty contradictory. If you are bullish on Bitcoin then spending them as currency is the worst decision you can make. You need to hoard them.
But if you do spend them it means you are willing to take financial loss for the benefit of the currency. This moves Bitcoin from the category of currency (which is a fair trade in either direction) into the category of political agendas and personal sacrifices. Not many people will follow you there.
But if you are bearish on the Bitcoin (and that's why you are spending it) then it contradicts your hope that the Bitcoin succeeds.
In either case, if you are willing to spend Bitcoins then you shouldn't focus on conversion to USD - you should do what makes sense. If the company A offers the product Y for 1 bitcoin, the company B offers the product Y for $10, and the exchange rate is 1 bitcoin to $20, you will do well if you sell 0.5 bitcoins and use USD to buy the product from company B. Paying more to the company A is a political action, not a financial one.
you can read post after post by grumpy Americans who angrily swear the Dollar is going to collapse and be trampled upon by China... then read even MORE replies by people FROM China who tell them they're completely insane, and that Chinese investors view US Dollars as the safest stores of value you can buy.
Of course Chinese investors would be saying this, as long as they hold USD.
But those Americans know the truth - the country is going bankrupt in several directions at once. It loses the industry; it loses specialists; its infrastructure decays; its society is deeply polarized and ready to explode; its job market is sick and the numbers of unemployed rise, and the government spends trillions on pointless wars... This is not the happy, happy country anymore (if it ever was such.) It is not going to be even a viable country soon - see Mexico.
If the USD falls then indeed, as you say, the fallout will be global. But who will swim to the surface? Will it be China, with resources and factories? Will it be Russia, with resources and huge land? Will it be Europe, with [not much at all]? Will it be the USA, with angry mobs rioting in all major cities, and with armed ranchers shooting their 30-06 at anyone who shows up uninvited?
(money laundering and dope dealing going on with it)
You mean exactly like with the real, traditional, cold hard cash?
There are laws and procedures to prevent using traditional cash for such things. Go to your bank and deposit $50,000 in small bills. If you are not a retailer, expect trouble. That's exactly why Bitcoin is taking off like a rocket among criminals - payments are anonymous.
Yet another example is taxation. Imagine that I designed a gizmo for you, and you paid me 100 bitcoins for that. As a contractor, I should include this revenue into my estimated taxes. But what is the value of those bitcoins, and at what time do we calculate them? That would be similar to getting paid in Canadian dollars, Yens, etc.
Alternatively, we can treat them as a security transaction, as if you paid me for my work with 100 shares of a certain company. Perhaps that's how it should be treated. But the catch is that this security is not registered! Even then you have to pay the tax on it, at its current value - which can't be determined because there is no established market for it. Your own pet exchange in the basement, where you dial whatever prices you want, doesn't count - that's why securities laws exist.
But on top of that, why would I want to pay taxes if I can get away with it? The bitcoins are tied to a number of my "account" that nobody can associate with me.
Government-issued currency has fewer problems of this sort. In essence, by using it you submit to a certain level of monitoring, but in return you are given certainty. For most people it's a trade they don't even think twice about. I'm not concerned that the government knows that my paycheck cleared. I will report it in my tax papers anyway. But the guy who sells drugs to homicidal maniacs ought to be concerned. An ideal libertarian currency - like Bitcoin - produces the same effects that humans discovered over the course of thousands of years that we know currencies. Bitcoin will also repeat all the mistakes of earlier currencies that it can technically do, just because there are always people who benefit from doing so and people who are just sheep ready for fleecing.
bitcoin is insanely attractive to people who sit at computers all day.
On the other hand, geeks have no weight in finances. People printing USD and other currencies have no interest in an ever-deflating currency that they don't control, and 60% of which is already in pockets of founders and early adopters. Soros and Buffett and Bernanke would have to be insane to play on someone else's terms.
With regard to your theory of geeks setting up farms at work, it is probably quite far from reality. The reason is that Bitcoin had no value until very recently, so there wasn't a good reason to bother. Now that it has (or had) some value it becomes more interesting, but very few bitcoins remain, and a herd of low end business PCs will not be of much use - you need quite specific GPUs.
Another problem is that the Bitcoin client (at least the official one) is an application; it can't be ran as a service, it can't be remotely controlled, etc. etc. In other words, it is not suitable for a massive deployment (nor it was meant to be.) So an admin can't easily hide the application on a business PC. If he is discovered, he won't just get a verbal reprimand (as for SETI @home) - he will get fired; there is no scientific or otherwise benign purpose here.
When robots start taking menial service jobs, what do you think will happen?
The society will die. What do you think will happen when young people (between 5 and 30) realize that they can do whatever they want? They will do whatever they want, and you will not like a single bit of it.
It will take a great amount of [very unusual among humans] devotion to work. Such people exist even today, but what is the percentage of workaholics - 1% at best? The rest will be going crazy from having nothing to do and from knowing that whatever they do is pointless.
They used to say that labor made man out of ape. We can reverse this wisdom and say that lack of labor will make man back into ape.
You can preview this in ghettos. People there don't have to work to stay alive; but instead of educating themselves, learning crafts, creating art they tend to revert to basest instincts that we inherited from our animal predecessors. Welfare is a cancer of societies, and it doesn't matter who pays for it - some faraway countries or some robots.
I take this as a strong sign that this kind of technology, including near field communications, are hindered by some other factor, such as disinterest from banks.
This leaves only peddlers of those new technologies, who are doing their best to sell the idea to phone companies. And phone companies want to insert themselves into the payment chain - for a fee, of course. Everyone else is indifferent. The gas station that I usually use has some sort of wireless pay thingie, I guess, but I gain nothing from using it (even if I had it) as opposed to using a c/c. The thingie would be just one more item to carry and lose, and one more bill to pay.
If you could make a cradle where you slide the phone into it, the purchaser's phone would send it's public_key to the purchasing system, which would then send it's public_key back to the purchaser's phone -- encrypted with the purchaser's public_key.
There is no reason to encrypt public keys - they are public, after all.
Then the purchaser's phone would send the payment information encrypted with the public_key of the purchasing system -- and the acknowledgement of successful transaction would be sent back encrypted with the purchaser's public_key
How do you know who you are paying to? You need to have those public keys signed, so that:
All these issues are well known from HTTPS. If your phone needs to validate signatures of store keys it has to have keys of CAs on it, and those need to be managed in some way. Don't forget revocation, keys will be inevitably lost.
But if you consider, swiping the credit card, waiting for the authentication, then waiting for the signature, then waiting for the printing out of the receipt, etc. That whole thing can take a minute or so depending.
This is not the bottleneck, and there is no reason to optimize that phase. It rarely takes more than 15-20 seconds to confirm the transaction and to print the receipt. You know what takes forever? Checks, if someone in front of you is antisocial enough to use them.
no requiring another signature to use the device, and all you have to do is slide your phone in a slot for 30 seconds to a minute to complete the transaction
As other posters already mentioned, phones get lost quite often. With this system in place muggers will be hunting for phones. Do you want the thief to empty your bank account while you are laying in a ditch? Your {G,B}F will also be able to pay with your phone when you least expect it - and there is no way to prove that it wasn't you.
To really make this "safe" as well, you could have the software on the phone require a password to be entered on the device to "unlock" the encrypted "credit card information" within the phone for 2 minutes or whatever.
How is it different from using a debit card? Besides, the same attack applies to the phone: the mugger beats you until you reveal the password. Even worse - with the debit card the mugger can't verify it instantly; but with the phone he can enter it right in the dark alley, where you are laying on the ground, and check if you lied. [There is a possibility of duress codes, though, but they aren't implemented by US banks, AFAIK.]
it nulls out the time and makes for effective use of technology.
Paying for stuff is never a problem. Getting money to be able to pay is what you need to focus on :-) This and other phone-based "technologies" are just contrived ways to use the phone where it shouldn't be used. Might as well connect a toothbrush to it, set to "vibrate" and enjoy your new Sonicare :-)
Payment systems are supposed to be simple and cheap. Many people don't know how to use technology. Other people don't have money to buy phones. Other people don't want phones. A phone is not a requirement to live in the country. Even a card is not required, cash is still accepted. If you can't drop cards then you have to have yet another payment system connected to your cash register. What for? What is gained? A phone is MUCH HEAVIER than a plastic card, and it costs more, and it has to be charged, and it can run malware, and it's always connected to who knows what. You don't want to forget your phone in that cradle ei