You made a valid point, but we do not make points which might, through any stretch of the imagination, be considered criticism of an Apple product or users of Apple products on Slashdot. It simply is not done. The mods were correct to mod you down.
No sir, we do not need your reasonable opinion here. We don't need you to suggest that the iPad may possibly be a "good or bad" product. Come back when you have some irrationally glowing praise without consideration for potential pitfalls.
Your post has an infammatory headline, but then your post's body says nothing to justify it. Why does this the "survey stink"? I feel like you probably didn't read it, as the majority of the users in it were as glowing in their praise of the iPad as you were.
Either you read it and then screamed out loud: "DAMN THIS SURVEY WHICH CONFIRMS MY BELIEFS. I CANNOT ACCEPT ITS VALIDITY."
Or you simply didn't read it at all. Still, you typed an amazingly long response to something you didn't bother reading. That's unusual.
The article in question is extremely positive of Apple, but you hear one word that there might have a been a tiny issue for a percentage of buyers on which they were less than satisfied and immediately conclude this must be some sort of "anti-apple article" (cause there's so many of those, right -- journalists and bloggers just hate Apple) with the caveat that "Oh, I didn't actaully read it, I just lept to a wild conclusion with no supporting evidence."
You might want to re-evaluate your methods for ferreting out anti-apple bias (if such a twisted Unicorn can even be found) in the news.
If it where easy we would see sites like this listing many many active Mac virus like threats. The count now is 0, just lots of user installed malware and a few per OS X efforts.
Again, this is where you go wrong.
There was a time when Malware was written by people just for fun. There were premade software kits from which you could very easily and with little technical skill build your own. All you had to do was name it "Cute Kittens.exe" and email it to 50 random people and you all set.
Those days are gone -- now it's a business. If you're in the business, you do it for money. Maybe you're stealing WoW accounts and selling the gold, maybe you're creating a botnet and sending out spam, maybe you're just making it and selling it to someone else and letting them decide what to do it with it. Either way, its about money.
To make this money you have to spend a lot of time and effort honing a very particular set of skills -- possessing vast quantities of otherwise highly esoteric knowledge. Low level system calls, APIs, assembly, whatever. To get that acquainted with MacOS, spend the time necessary to find exploits and write the malware, only to see 1/10th of the return on your investment? That would be madness. There's 0 reason to waste time finding MacOs exploits except when there's prize money involved -- but when there is, people find them every year. That should tell you all you need to know.
The economics of malware gives MacOS absolute protection -- it's never been about how the operating system is built or the coders who wrote it. It's economics and nothing more.
Somethin Else welcomes new business opportunities throughout the world and would be interested in discussing applications and uses of our content with genuine business partners
The use of the word genuine in this context probably means "Not you, you don't have enough money to pay us". The hidden subtext is most assuredly "Pay us" and as a small site I"m sure you can't afford to do that, which is why you were given the blow off when you tried to contact them. It was clear you were not going to be a "genuine" business partner.
It's not that MacOS has better built-in security, it's simply that you cut your profits by a factor of 10 if you target MacOS than if you target PC. Your "security" is "obscurity". Simple as that. Malware is a profit-driven industry, and there's never been any reason to target anything but windows. If I develop a mac exploit and/or malware, I'm only targeting 10% at the most -- that's going to pay far worse, so why do it? A good windows exploit only goes for 10k on the black market these days (or so we're told). What do you think a MacOS exploit is worth? If you have the skills to find exploits, which OS are you going to spend your time on? It's not hard to see why MacOS gets a free pass.
If anything, Microsoft has put far more into securing it's OS simply because they've had to. Apple has not because they have not had to. Weekly updates, a malware removal tool that's updated weekly automatically (as opposed to "monthly"), anti-virus and firewall built in. Hell, Microsoft even turned all their systems into a botnet so they could use idle cycles to "fuzz" Office and find new exploits/bugs before anyone else found them. Fuzzing is how the guy who beat all the Mac systems at the last pwn2own found all his exploits -- it was apparently quite easy for him to find exploits for Safari/MacOS, he just needed the financial motivation that doesn't exist without pwn2own.
The day MacOS gets 50% marketshare is the day they suddenly have a *huge* security problem. They will be Microsoft 10 years ago -- caught completely unaware and unprepared.
The odds of grabbing passwords in this way (changing channels 5 times per second and only being in range of a network for a few seconds at a time) is pretty slim, in general, but given that Google was apparently running this software for years it's not surprising that it happened occasionally. Still, the total packets collected only amount to like 660 gigabytes -- that's not very much, and I'm willing to bet that only a tiny, tiny, percentage of that data is this sort of data. Most of your traffic is not plaintext (even if its unencrypted). Heck, even if someone was browsing the web, you're far more likely to see a snippet of a jpeg or embedded Youtube video than HTML. With just a few packets, that's likely to be gibberish.
So Theodp continues his one-man crusade against Google, and Slashdot inexplicably continues to aid him by posting his troll article summaries. This is at least his 3rd one on this particular Google issue alone and there haven't even new developments.
Ok, man, we get it. You think Google is evil and you wear a tinfoil hat to keep them from packet sniffing your brain because they can *totally* do that. Whatever. The rest of us are sick of hearing about it. Most of us here understand the issue better than you apparently do and we aren't nearly as concerned.
It's clear you have a bone to pick, especially with the whole wifi thing which I'm not sure you really understand -- but FFS, why is Slashdot still posting these things? I swear this is the 4th time you've rehashed the whole wifi thing with a slightly different spin and managed to get it posted yet again. Each time you avoid facts in favor of frantic hand-waving and put words in Google's mouth like "how-many-times-do-we-have-to-tell-you" and "After mistakenly saying that it did not collect Wi-Fi payload data". Please, for the love of god. Just stop.
What was parsed and stored was the Mac Address and SSIDs of the network. When you turn on your Laptop or iPhone and see a list of networks that are available for you to join, that list is their SSIDs and though you cannot see them, includes their MAC addresses.
See, without you doing anything, your laptop/iphone just PARSED AND STORED a list of Mac addresses and SSID's.
I'm sorry man. You're going to jail. I mean, you broke the law. You parsed and stored publicly broadcast announcement packets. Nevermind that they are "announced" for the public's consumption and that you are a member of the public.
The process also captures wireless data packets, which can include personal information like e-mails and browser history
This by itself was hysterical silliness. Browser history? Why would you transmit your browser history across the internet? You might as well have said it could include nuclear launch codes. It's theoretically possible, but just as unlikely. At least the article then goes on to indicate that while that sort of data *could* have been in the packets, Google wasn't parsing them.
The Slashdot summary on the other hand is written in a way that makes it sound like Google was absolutely collecting exactly that data:
The technology used, known as gslite, then parses and stores certain identifying information about these wireless networks to a hard drive. That information includes the MAC address and the SSID amongst other things like e-mails addresses and browser history.
They mislead on various items in the keynote. The comparison shots they used for "non-retina display vs Retina display" are way off accurate. There was a good blog post about it here:
Moreover, they say that the aluminosilicate glass-ceramic on the front and back is "comparable to sapphire" in hardness -- but by all indications, even the toughest Aluminosilicate glass ceramics (Gorilla Glass) rate at a 7 on the Mohs Scale. Sapphire is a 9 and is *4x* harder than a 7. This makes a big difference becuase at a 7, it's comparable to quartz and therefore most types of sand in hardness. This means a few loose grains of sand in your pocket can result in a scratched up device. If it were truely comparable to sapphire in hardness, this would not be the case. These sort of distinctions matter. I don't see how being 1/4th as hard as sapphire is "comparable to sapphire" in hardness. I wonder if Apple would accept a "comparable" payment to the iPhone's retail price . . .
It's one thing when Apple just loosely throws around superlatives like "revolutionary" and "magical" to try to generate a Reality Distortion Field, but it's another thing entirely when they exaggerate and mislead in their claims about their device.
Nobody is arguing that a crime wasn't committed. To the contrary: everybody keeps harping on that particular strawman as if establishing that he committed a crime is the end of the story.
The truth is that the harm done is an important thing to consider; in fact, it's the most important thing. It dictates whether or not the crime rises to a level worthy of extradition. Since this is a discussion about whether or not he should be extradited, this discussion is transitively a discussion on how much harm was done by his crime.
Yes, he committed a crime. That's not not really in dispute.
Yes, he has Asperger's. That's not really relevant.
The only thing that matters is the severity of his crime and the extent of damages caused. I personally think that the 800k number is total bullshit. It's a number invented by adding up the costs of securing a network that should have been secured in the first place. It's "damages" caused by spending money that should have been spent years ago. I mean, ffs, he guessed that your fucking password was "password".
There's no reason why this warrants extradition or the ridiculously trumped up charges against him. He should be tried in the UK, get the appropriate slap on the wrist, and move on with his life. Graffiti artists do more property damage than this guy -- he just happened to embarrass the wrong people.
It is being offered as a kind of defense and it should not be. It is not relevant or appropriate. What is relevant and appropriate is the fact that he charges against him far, far exceed the magnitude of the crime and do not rise to the level of extradition. There's no reason why he could not or should not be tried in a UK court for a crime committed on UK soil.
The costs of 800k is the trumped up part. Suggesting that he caused 800k worth of damage is silly. The 800k is what it cost them to secure their network. They realized their network wasn't secure as a result of his breach but he did not MAKE their network insecure. They *should* have had to pay that 800k all along, but blame him for ruining their happy ignorance of needed security measures.
It's silly.
Aspergers, Depression and everything else are note excuses for illegal behavior. These things did not prevent him from knowing better. That said, the punishment should fit the crime. The crime was mostly harmless. His "real" crime is simply embarrassing the government and for that they want to make an example out of him.
So while I can see the side that says "he's guilty he should pay" and agree, I'm also keenly aware that the price that the US government wants him to pay will almost certainly far exceed the magnitude of his crime. With that in mind, it's far better that a disinterested 3rd party (like the UK) try the case and punish him. After all, if the US government is both victim and prosecutor, isn't that sort of a conflict of interests?
I really wanted to respond to this, but it was only semi-coherent. Each sentence makes sense, but not in any connection to reality or to the sentence that preceded it. I really don't want to make fun of you, but I'm kind of sad to see that Google is the new CIA to people wearing tinfoil hats. I guess it was inevitable.
It's not a gold mine to anyone. We're talking about 600 gigabytes of packets over 6 years. Not nearly as much as they could have collected had this been done intentionally. This is a trivial amount of data that could easily go unnoticed by Google. This would fit entirely on one hard drive with plenty of room to spare.
Now ask yourself, if the Street View car drives by your house and at that exact moment you're using the internet, how likely is it to be something unencrypted and sensitive? Emails take a split second to download, and the street view car is only listening for a split second. The timing would have to be a 1 in a million shot.
If I download, on a given day, 3 megabytes worth of webpages, 100 kilobytes worth of Email, and 50 megabytes worth of gaming, 300 megabytes worth of netflix streaming, 1 gigabyte worth of bittorrent -- ask yourself what are the odds that the street view car gets a slice of that 100 kb instead of something else completely useless to anyone?
So yeah, we have like 600 gigabytes, of which maybe a few hundred megabytes might actually be sensitive plain text information at best -- and even then you're not getting all of it, just fractional bits. Spread out over 6 years, you think this tiny trickle of single tiny pieces of peoples emails, half of which probably went through gmail anyways, is something Google is willing to break the law to get?
Seriously. What the hell do you think Google wants with this? Take the tinfoil hat off and THINK.
Not to mention that the reason iPhone users don't use more than 2 gigabytes is because we're not allowed. AT&T's agreements with Apple has strictly limited the amount of bandwidth Appstore approved apps can use. Even the phone's basic apps like Youtube are significantly throttled while under 3g. So we've basically been told to "drive as fast as you like" while AT&T keeps its foot on the break. Now AT&T wants a speed limit and they say "Don't worry, you never drove that fast anyways", hoping we won't have noticed who's fault that was in the first place.
In other words, the lack of disincentive should not necessarily be construed as an incentive. More importantly, if I waste electricity, more has to be generated at an environmental and monetary cost. If I use more bandwidth, not necessarily so. If enough people need more bandwidth, then more will have to be created by upgrading infrastructure. Unlike generating extra electricity, however, monetary costs are not simply "wasted" -- but rather remain as infrastructure upgrades. You pay once, and reap the benefit indefinitely.
These two commodities are fundamentally different beasts. Moreover, it's not as if we sell electricity in a tiered pricing structure. It's not "Use up to 2 gigawatts and pay 25 dollars a month", so the analogy is simply isn't apt on any level.
This is not useful information even for Google. Their software was constantly switching frequencies so we're talking about less than a seconds worth of packets for any given network.
What are they gonna do with that?
"Well, Ted, based off this TCP_ACK I'm seeing here, I think we can safely conclude that this Fred Morgan of 123 Anystreet is gay. Wouldn't you agree?"
"Sure is Bob, that's the queerest TCP_ACK I've ever seen."
They don't want this crap. They can't monetize that. They *want* to delete it. They want to have never captured it in the first place, but sadly that ship has sailed. If they delete it, they'll be charged with destroying evidence or whatever the equivalent crime is in the various European jurisdictions in question. One dumb careless mistake has grown a life of it's own.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it uses MAC addresses. After all, they are unique and do not change, unlike SSID's. It's the same system Skyhook uses, if you want to Google them I'm sure they have a FAQ explaining it.
Ireland was smart and simply asked Google to delete the data that was collected from Ireland. This was done. This was done after they made the announcement that they had accidentally collected the data. The only reason they ONLY deleted Ireland's data and not all the other data at the same time was because other governments had indicated they would view such actions as destroying evidence.
Now the German government puts Google in an impossible position by asking them to turn the data over to them. Not only would this be illegal under German law, according to Google's lawyers, it would also obviously further exacerbate the original privacy breach. That is, currently nobody has looked at this data. It was accidentally collected and has been and Google would love to just delete it and forget about it. Currently, the privacy breach is basically theoretical. Turning it over the government, however, puts the data in a sphere where they cannot guarantee nobody's privacy will be violated. It makes the situation worse (not to mention, again, that it is probably against the law to do so).
When you look at all the facts, its a pretty obvious innocent mistake on their part. Why? Because they have a really good explanation, from a technical standpoint, and the data in question is *worthless* to anyone. It has no value whatsoever. Why would Google break the law on purpose for something that benefits them in no way and then freely admit it, not try to hide it, and then lie and say it was a mistake? If you believe that, you'd have to believe that Google is a schizophrenic off their meds. It makes no sense. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this case it's also the only one that makes any damn sense at all. It was a simple, unfortunate mistake.
I don't use Linux. I'm just pointing out that allowing only Linux would be logically consistent with the stated goal, while allowing MacOS but not Windows is not. Frankly, I don't see any reason for Google to limit peoples selection of operating systems at all. I mean, Google has learned the lesson that having a Windows XP box with IE 6 as the browser is not smart -- but they've learned it in entirely the wrong way, imo.
Slashdot Mirror
You made a valid point, but we do not make points which might, through any stretch of the imagination, be considered criticism of an Apple product or users of Apple products on Slashdot. It simply is not done. The mods were correct to mod you down.
No sir, we do not need your reasonable opinion here. We don't need you to suggest that the iPad may possibly be a "good or bad" product. Come back when you have some irrationally glowing praise without consideration for potential pitfalls.
Your post has an infammatory headline, but then your post's body says nothing to justify it. Why does this the "survey stink"? I feel like you probably didn't read it, as the majority of the users in it were as glowing in their praise of the iPad as you were.
Either you read it and then screamed out loud: "DAMN THIS SURVEY WHICH CONFIRMS MY BELIEFS. I CANNOT ACCEPT ITS VALIDITY."
Or you simply didn't read it at all. Still, you typed an amazingly long response to something you didn't bother reading. That's unusual.
The article in question is extremely positive of Apple, but you hear one word that there might have a been a tiny issue for a percentage of buyers on which they were less than satisfied and immediately conclude this must be some sort of "anti-apple article" (cause there's so many of those, right -- journalists and bloggers just hate Apple) with the caveat that "Oh, I didn't actaully read it, I just lept to a wild conclusion with no supporting evidence."
You might want to re-evaluate your methods for ferreting out anti-apple bias (if such a twisted Unicorn can even be found) in the news.
If it where easy we would see sites like this listing many many active Mac virus like threats. The count now is 0, just lots of user installed malware and a few per OS X efforts.
Again, this is where you go wrong.
There was a time when Malware was written by people just for fun. There were premade software kits from which you could very easily and with little technical skill build your own. All you had to do was name it "Cute Kittens.exe" and email it to 50 random people and you all set.
Those days are gone -- now it's a business. If you're in the business, you do it for money. Maybe you're stealing WoW accounts and selling the gold, maybe you're creating a botnet and sending out spam, maybe you're just making it and selling it to someone else and letting them decide what to do it with it. Either way, its about money.
To make this money you have to spend a lot of time and effort honing a very particular set of skills -- possessing vast quantities of otherwise highly esoteric knowledge. Low level system calls, APIs, assembly, whatever. To get that acquainted with MacOS, spend the time necessary to find exploits and write the malware, only to see 1/10th of the return on your investment? That would be madness. There's 0 reason to waste time finding MacOs exploits except when there's prize money involved -- but when there is, people find them every year. That should tell you all you need to know.
The economics of malware gives MacOS absolute protection -- it's never been about how the operating system is built or the coders who wrote it. It's economics and nothing more.
Somethin Else welcomes new business opportunities throughout the world and would be interested in discussing applications and uses of our content with genuine business partners
The use of the word genuine in this context probably means "Not you, you don't have enough money to pay us". The hidden subtext is most assuredly "Pay us" and as a small site I"m sure you can't afford to do that, which is why you were given the blow off when you tried to contact them. It was clear you were not going to be a "genuine" business partner.
It's not that MacOS has better built-in security, it's simply that you cut your profits by a factor of 10 if you target MacOS than if you target PC. Your "security" is "obscurity". Simple as that. Malware is a profit-driven industry, and there's never been any reason to target anything but windows. If I develop a mac exploit and/or malware, I'm only targeting 10% at the most -- that's going to pay far worse, so why do it? A good windows exploit only goes for 10k on the black market these days (or so we're told). What do you think a MacOS exploit is worth? If you have the skills to find exploits, which OS are you going to spend your time on? It's not hard to see why MacOS gets a free pass.
If anything, Microsoft has put far more into securing it's OS simply because they've had to. Apple has not because they have not had to. Weekly updates, a malware removal tool that's updated weekly automatically (as opposed to "monthly"), anti-virus and firewall built in. Hell, Microsoft even turned all their systems into a botnet so they could use idle cycles to "fuzz" Office and find new exploits/bugs before anyone else found them. Fuzzing is how the guy who beat all the Mac systems at the last pwn2own found all his exploits -- it was apparently quite easy for him to find exploits for Safari/MacOS, he just needed the financial motivation that doesn't exist without pwn2own.
The day MacOS gets 50% marketshare is the day they suddenly have a *huge* security problem. They will be Microsoft 10 years ago -- caught completely unaware and unprepared.
The odds of grabbing passwords in this way (changing channels 5 times per second and only being in range of a network for a few seconds at a time) is pretty slim, in general, but given that Google was apparently running this software for years it's not surprising that it happened occasionally. Still, the total packets collected only amount to like 660 gigabytes -- that's not very much, and I'm willing to bet that only a tiny, tiny, percentage of that data is this sort of data. Most of your traffic is not plaintext (even if its unencrypted). Heck, even if someone was browsing the web, you're far more likely to see a snippet of a jpeg or embedded Youtube video than HTML. With just a few packets, that's likely to be gibberish.
Show Tits or I vote you down.
It shoots *lego* bricks. That makes more sense then.
So Theodp continues his one-man crusade against Google, and Slashdot inexplicably continues to aid him by posting his troll article summaries. This is at least his 3rd one on this particular Google issue alone and there haven't even new developments.
Let's review:
WHEN YOU USE GOOGLE LOCATION SERVICES, THEY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. Shocking!:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/06/01/1217220
This one's summary is so ridiculously inaccurate and biased I can't do it justice by summarizing it myself:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/29/0818219
The germans wanted to do something, but failed. Lets argue about Google some more:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/06/04/1839230
Here's some other Google posts he's made that are only slightly less ridiculous:
Google is hacking your box:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/06/11/0143255
Google Lied about Apps being a successful product:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/09/07/1218227/Google-Apps-Not-the-DC-Success-Many-Believe?from=rss
Google is racist:
http://search.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/11/26/0311249
Ok, man, we get it. You think Google is evil and you wear a tinfoil hat to keep them from packet sniffing your brain because they can *totally* do that. Whatever. The rest of us are sick of hearing about it. Most of us here understand the issue better than you apparently do and we aren't nearly as concerned.
It's clear you have a bone to pick, especially with the whole wifi thing which I'm not sure you really understand -- but FFS, why is Slashdot still posting these things? I swear this is the 4th time you've rehashed the whole wifi thing with a slightly different spin and managed to get it posted yet again. Each time you avoid facts in favor of frantic hand-waving and put words in Google's mouth like "how-many-times-do-we-have-to-tell-you" and "After mistakenly saying that it did not collect Wi-Fi payload data". Please, for the love of god. Just stop.
What was parsed and stored was the Mac Address and SSIDs of the network. When you turn on your Laptop or iPhone and see a list of networks that are available for you to join, that list is their SSIDs and though you cannot see them, includes their MAC addresses.
See, without you doing anything, your laptop/iphone just PARSED AND STORED a list of Mac addresses and SSID's.
I'm sorry man. You're going to jail. I mean, you broke the law. You parsed and stored publicly broadcast announcement packets. Nevermind that they are "announced" for the public's consumption and that you are a member of the public.
What a terrible summary.
Here's what the article said:
The process also captures wireless data packets, which can include personal information like e-mails and browser history
This by itself was hysterical silliness. Browser history? Why would you transmit your browser history across the internet? You might as well have said it could include nuclear launch codes. It's theoretically possible, but just as unlikely. At least the article then goes on to indicate that while that sort of data *could* have been in the packets, Google wasn't parsing them.
The Slashdot summary on the other hand is written in a way that makes it sound like Google was absolutely collecting exactly that data:
The technology used, known as gslite, then parses and stores certain identifying information about these wireless networks to a hard drive. That information includes the MAC address and the SSID amongst other things like e-mails addresses and browser history.
I mean, WTF?
They mislead on various items in the keynote. The comparison shots they used for "non-retina display vs Retina display" are way off accurate. There was a good blog post about it here:
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/06/apple-using-fake-489-to-815-ppi-on-iphone-4-ads/
Moreover, they say that the aluminosilicate glass-ceramic on the front and back is "comparable to sapphire" in hardness -- but by all indications, even the toughest Aluminosilicate glass ceramics (Gorilla Glass) rate at a 7 on the Mohs Scale. Sapphire is a 9 and is *4x* harder than a 7. This makes a big difference becuase at a 7, it's comparable to quartz and therefore most types of sand in hardness. This means a few loose grains of sand in your pocket can result in a scratched up device. If it were truely comparable to sapphire in hardness, this would not be the case. These sort of distinctions matter. I don't see how being 1/4th as hard as sapphire is "comparable to sapphire" in hardness. I wonder if Apple would accept a "comparable" payment to the iPhone's retail price . . .
It's one thing when Apple just loosely throws around superlatives like "revolutionary" and "magical" to try to generate a Reality Distortion Field, but it's another thing entirely when they exaggerate and mislead in their claims about their device.
Nobody is arguing that a crime wasn't committed. To the contrary: everybody keeps harping on that particular strawman as if establishing that he committed a crime is the end of the story.
The truth is that the harm done is an important thing to consider; in fact, it's the most important thing. It dictates whether or not the crime rises to a level worthy of extradition. Since this is a discussion about whether or not he should be extradited, this discussion is transitively a discussion on how much harm was done by his crime.
Yes, he committed a crime. That's not not really in dispute.
Yes, he has Asperger's. That's not really relevant.
The only thing that matters is the severity of his crime and the extent of damages caused. I personally think that the 800k number is total bullshit. It's a number invented by adding up the costs of securing a network that should have been secured in the first place. It's "damages" caused by spending money that should have been spent years ago. I mean, ffs, he guessed that your fucking password was "password".
There's no reason why this warrants extradition or the ridiculously trumped up charges against him. He should be tried in the UK, get the appropriate slap on the wrist, and move on with his life. Graffiti artists do more property damage than this guy -- he just happened to embarrass the wrong people.
It is being offered as a kind of defense and it should not be. It is not relevant or appropriate. What is relevant and appropriate is the fact that he charges against him far, far exceed the magnitude of the crime and do not rise to the level of extradition. There's no reason why he could not or should not be tried in a UK court for a crime committed on UK soil.
The costs of 800k is the trumped up part. Suggesting that he caused 800k worth of damage is silly. The 800k is what it cost them to secure their network. They realized their network wasn't secure as a result of his breach but he did not MAKE their network insecure. They *should* have had to pay that 800k all along, but blame him for ruining their happy ignorance of needed security measures.
It's silly.
Aspergers, Depression and everything else are note excuses for illegal behavior. These things did not prevent him from knowing better. That said, the punishment should fit the crime. The crime was mostly harmless. His "real" crime is simply embarrassing the government and for that they want to make an example out of him.
So while I can see the side that says "he's guilty he should pay" and agree, I'm also keenly aware that the price that the US government wants him to pay will almost certainly far exceed the magnitude of his crime. With that in mind, it's far better that a disinterested 3rd party (like the UK) try the case and punish him. After all, if the US government is both victim and prosecutor, isn't that sort of a conflict of interests?
I really wanted to respond to this, but it was only semi-coherent. Each sentence makes sense, but not in any connection to reality or to the sentence that preceded it. I really don't want to make fun of you, but I'm kind of sad to see that Google is the new CIA to people wearing tinfoil hats. I guess it was inevitable.
It's not a gold mine to anyone. We're talking about 600 gigabytes of packets over 6 years. Not nearly as much as they could have collected had this been done intentionally. This is a trivial amount of data that could easily go unnoticed by Google. This would fit entirely on one hard drive with plenty of room to spare.
Now ask yourself, if the Street View car drives by your house and at that exact moment you're using the internet, how likely is it to be something unencrypted and sensitive? Emails take a split second to download, and the street view car is only listening for a split second. The timing would have to be a 1 in a million shot.
If I download, on a given day, 3 megabytes worth of webpages, 100 kilobytes worth of Email, and 50 megabytes worth of gaming, 300 megabytes worth of netflix streaming, 1 gigabyte worth of bittorrent -- ask yourself what are the odds that the street view car gets a slice of that 100 kb instead of something else completely useless to anyone?
So yeah, we have like 600 gigabytes, of which maybe a few hundred megabytes might actually be sensitive plain text information at best -- and even then you're not getting all of it, just fractional bits. Spread out over 6 years, you think this tiny trickle of single tiny pieces of peoples emails, half of which probably went through gmail anyways, is something Google is willing to break the law to get?
Seriously. What the hell do you think Google wants with this? Take the tinfoil hat off and THINK.
Not to mention that the reason iPhone users don't use more than 2 gigabytes is because we're not allowed. AT&T's agreements with Apple has strictly limited the amount of bandwidth Appstore approved apps can use. Even the phone's basic apps like Youtube are significantly throttled while under 3g. So we've basically been told to "drive as fast as you like" while AT&T keeps its foot on the break. Now AT&T wants a speed limit and they say "Don't worry, you never drove that fast anyways", hoping we won't have noticed who's fault that was in the first place.
In other words, the lack of disincentive should not necessarily be construed as an incentive. More importantly, if I waste electricity, more has to be generated at an environmental and monetary cost. If I use more bandwidth, not necessarily so. If enough people need more bandwidth, then more will have to be created by upgrading infrastructure. Unlike generating extra electricity, however, monetary costs are not simply "wasted" -- but rather remain as infrastructure upgrades. You pay once, and reap the benefit indefinitely.
These two commodities are fundamentally different beasts. Moreover, it's not as if we sell electricity in a tiered pricing structure. It's not "Use up to 2 gigawatts and pay 25 dollars a month", so the analogy is simply isn't apt on any level.
This is not useful information even for Google. Their software was constantly switching frequencies so we're talking about less than a seconds worth of packets for any given network.
What are they gonna do with that?
"Well, Ted, based off this TCP_ACK I'm seeing here, I think we can safely conclude that this Fred Morgan of 123 Anystreet is gay. Wouldn't you agree?"
"Sure is Bob, that's the queerest TCP_ACK I've ever seen."
They don't want this crap. They can't monetize that. They *want* to delete it. They want to have never captured it in the first place, but sadly that ship has sailed. If they delete it, they'll be charged with destroying evidence or whatever the equivalent crime is in the various European jurisdictions in question. One dumb careless mistake has grown a life of it's own.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it uses MAC addresses. After all, they are unique and do not change, unlike SSID's. It's the same system Skyhook uses, if you want to Google them I'm sure they have a FAQ explaining it.
I believe you're mistaken on the time-line.
Ireland was smart and simply asked Google to delete the data that was collected from Ireland. This was done. This was done after they made the announcement that they had accidentally collected the data. The only reason they ONLY deleted Ireland's data and not all the other data at the same time was because other governments had indicated they would view such actions as destroying evidence.
Now the German government puts Google in an impossible position by asking them to turn the data over to them. Not only would this be illegal under German law, according to Google's lawyers, it would also obviously further exacerbate the original privacy breach. That is, currently nobody has looked at this data. It was accidentally collected and has been and Google would love to just delete it and forget about it. Currently, the privacy breach is basically theoretical. Turning it over the government, however, puts the data in a sphere where they cannot guarantee nobody's privacy will be violated. It makes the situation worse (not to mention, again, that it is probably against the law to do so).
When you look at all the facts, its a pretty obvious innocent mistake on their part. Why? Because they have a really good explanation, from a technical standpoint, and the data in question is *worthless* to anyone. It has no value whatsoever. Why would Google break the law on purpose for something that benefits them in no way and then freely admit it, not try to hide it, and then lie and say it was a mistake? If you believe that, you'd have to believe that Google is a schizophrenic off their meds. It makes no sense. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this case it's also the only one that makes any damn sense at all. It was a simple, unfortunate mistake.
I don't use Linux. I'm just pointing out that allowing only Linux would be logically consistent with the stated goal, while allowing MacOS but not Windows is not. Frankly, I don't see any reason for Google to limit peoples selection of operating systems at all. I mean, Google has learned the lesson that having a Windows XP box with IE 6 as the browser is not smart -- but they've learned it in entirely the wrong way, imo.
Woah, dude. I just heard that even if you use Google's encrypted search service, they still know what your searching for!!!!!!
That's like, not encrypted at all then! I want my searches to be secret from Google! This is false advertising.