People understand that if they leave their doors open and have an argument, that people outside the door can hear them having said argument. However, do the people outside the door have the right to record said argument? It's a grey area, it isn't clear cut at all in my opinion.
I think it's clear: from a privacy point of view you have the right to record anything that happens on your property. You have not widened it's availability by doing that - nobody knows it who didn't hear it from the original source anyway. Rebroadcasting it would be debatable (eg: take the recording and play it on the radio) because you are widening the audience. Now more people have heard it than before. Google did not rebroadcast or use this information in any way. *They did not even know they possessed it*.
That's the thing here...there is absolutely no reason AT ALL in my opinion why google, or the company(ies) they used to do the street view should have done ANYTHING AT ALL with wifi networks, macs and data. What the hell does that have to do with mapping streets?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
You need to educate yourself a little bit about why Google is doing this, and why other companies are too. Your base assumption that they are just collecting for the sake of violating people's privacy is totally wrong. Wifi data is tremendously useful and you will appreciate enormously it at some point when you own a device and discover it can do geo-location and get GPS-like functionality for a tiny fraction of the cost, power and speed with which GPS does it.
brb. Reading the letters in your mailbox. It wasn't locked or anything, and it's right out there for the public to access, so it's cool.
Was the letter box right in the public street and not on their property? Were the letters all opened and visible without even opening any envelopes? Did you not actually read them but just accidentally saw them as you went past because you were trying to read the number on the letter box and as soon as you realized your mistake you tried your best to forget and notified the recipients that you accidentally saw some of their letters?
Then I would say you are a morally upstanding citizen and have gone beyond any normal reasonable expectation about privacy.
I think it's a problem but it's not the problem of the people who innocently leave a Wifi recorder on as they drive down the street.
If anyone gets blamed it should be the wireless access point vendors that ship devices that automatically broadcast people's internet traffic unsecured into the whole surrounding neighborhood without sufficiently educating them about the dangers of it. Why don't we have class actions about that?
As for it being a moral issue: Google did not even realize they were collecting this data. How can they be morally responsible for a decision they did not make? Their crime is, if anything, lack of oversight - but that's a very different thing with a totally different moral context.
Change "Facebook" to "Google", drop "that awful Beacon feature", and the above is still true
OK -
Google went from being a closed network to an open one with several changes to the privacy controls, etc. They never back down until there's immense pressure. Usually even then they don't back down entirely. And it's all so they can monetize their site.
This is not even remotely true. In what way has Google has gone from closed to open by relaxing privacy? They revealed the Wifi data problem *themselves* - that's about as far from only backing down under immense pressure as you can get.
How much more privacy-violating information did they abuse via Chrome? Via AdSense? Via browser cookies?
Umm, how about none? Do you have any evidence of this "abuse" or are you just making FUD here?
I think there are plenty of reasons to be wary of Google, but as far as I can tell they have acted so far as a force for good and have genuinely and swiftly apologized and corrected their mistakes. For a company that depends on people using their services they have about the least amount of lockin of any company on the planet. The day they start actually being evil then certainly let's condemn them, but what lesson are we as consumers teaching them by condemning them while they are being good?
> When they make an Android device with non-crap hardware
I guess you are trolling? Or living in some country with only the G1?
Android hardware far outclasses the iPhone right now. I can barely use my iPod Touch any more because the screen looks so faded and fuzzy compared to the crisp screen on the Nexus One. This isn't really a criticism of the iPhone, it's just a fact of Apple's yearly product cycle - a year is a long time in technology and their hardware are nearly a year out of date now. The software is one thing, but saying you can't use Android because of the *hardware* is really weird.
> browsers could be made to download just:visited images
Wouldn't that just alter the attack? In the end they will just make it infer the 'visited' state from other things that are much harder to block. (Eg: change the link to bold if visited - now it's bounding box is slightly larger, which you can detect in javascript and use to report back if the user visited the site). I think the protection has to be positioned further back in the chain: a visited style will only be rendered if the user visited the target page *from* the current page that is trying to render the style or *from* the same domain.
> You're describing one of the more useful features of selective enforcement
No. Of course this varies enormously across different jurisdictions, but most places actually do have Good Samaritan laws that are a defense *against* other laws even when they are selectively enforced.
eg: if I stop at a traffic accident and try to help an injured person and actually accidentally kill them in doing so, when prosecuted for manslaughter I can cite these good samaritan laws in my defense in court.
> but I don't see the problem in general with a consumer electronic device making some "higher-level" choices for the customer
The problem is not "giving up the choice" but giving up the *right* to make that choice. It may seem fine in the short term to give up your power to choose. But some time, perhaps a long time, in the future, the power you have given to the vendor who now controls one of the most important devices in your life will be used against you.
In truth, I don't mind the iPhone, specifically, being tied to a locked down app store. If people want to choose that, and they are fully cognizant that they are throwing away their freedom, then fine.
But I have a huge problem if the whole industry goes this way. And the problem is that it *is* showing worrying signs of that, with Windows Phone now electing also to be a dictator of the user's choices. The only way to fight against this is to fight against the success of the platforms that represent this trend. Otherwise we are looking at a future in 10 years time where all devices are locked down and consumers are back to being passive consumers of content controlled by huge content providers like in the TV era. There won't be small startups like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. that take over the world because they simply won't be allowed in on these platforms. I don't want that, and I think it's a horrible future that we have to resist.
This is what I don't understand about the whole debate. Why can't the browser vendors just build their tags to use the *built in* codecs that are available on the underlying platform? All users of (modern) Windows and Mac systems have these codecs. Built in. They are licensed to use them - full stop. They *paid for it* with their Windows & Mac OS license. Why do we need to even talk about re-licensing them? Just use the damn things, that are *already there*. If they are not there, show the user a nice page about software patents and how evil they are.
We don't argue about the fact that FireFox relies on the user having a graphics card that is probably patented from top to bottom to display the graphics FireFox renders. Or an audio card. Or an OS that can display windows etc. These all exist at the layer below the browser. So should the video codecs.
> So how do I deploy a better environment to all my users?
Tell them to install Java (or bundle it with your application). In fact most of them already probably have it installed. The standard Java runtime ships with Rhino (pure Java Javascript implementation) built in, so you can run pure javascript applications that have access to the full range of libraries that Java has access to, including access to raw audio devices.
> How about procedural audio? Say I want to write a speech synthesizer in JavaScript
That's not a property of the language. It's property of the platform the language has access to (the browser). Javascript is no more constrained than any other language that lives in the browser sandbox in that regard.
In fact, you can synthesise speech in Javascript on some platforms/browsers quite simply because those platforms do provide TTS apis to the browser.
Javascript does have language issues - mainly around namespacing and modularity and a paucity of robust types. But with a good library in hand it's actually much more pleasant than some of the other parts of the web stack.
> Apple / The Steve are advocating HTML5 as an alternative to flash
And yet, there are 200,000 apps in the app store which were written using platform specific native code. This argument that HTML5 should be used to substitute for *applications* written originally in Flash compiled to be native iPhone apps with full access to the iPhone APIs is just silly. HTML5 can't do a fraction of what native apps can do, and Steve Jobs knows it. That is why he advocates for HTML5 - because it is *inferior enough* that his own proprietary ecosystem will not be threatened by it whereas Flash and various other cross-platform tools are not.
> This is exactly like making it illegal to leave your door unlocked
No, because the contents of your house do not (normally) protrude out onto the street and area surrounding your property. It's more like you left your CD burner out on the path outside your house and then someone came by with some CDs and made illegal copies using *your* equipment. I don't know if it mattered in this legal case specifically, but I think it's an important distinction if you are projecting your open access wifi signal *into public space*. If you, on the other hand, confine it within your house and someone has to enter your private property to access it, that would be different.
> Unusable? Really..Compared to what? You have driven off the cliff into fantasy land.
Compared to just about anything. It's a browser designed for a 4 inch mobile screen blown up to desktop size - it's just totally inapproprate. Really, seriously, tell me, if mobile safari was released today for the desktop would you use it? No tabs? Can't download (most) files to save locally? Can't support many common web media formats? Slow as hell to open new windows? Can't open more than 9 new windows, silently replaces old ones when you try?
I guess I shouldn't have said "casual" - "casual" is just about the only thing it IS useful for. Any kind of sophisticated browsing is what it is unsuitable for - but for me that includes things like reading slashdot, newspapers etc. because I want lots of new windows and easy transition between them.
I just got finished tweaking a product which was perceived as slow because the user interface flickered a lot. It was erasing background then repainting when various things updated. The fix just pushes the erase / repaint into an offscreen buffer and then copies the buffer to the screen at the end so there is no flicker. The amazing thing is that everyone now thinks the product is faster - but actually it's doing *more* work and is technically slower.
It is fascinating indeed how the psychology of this stuff plays out.
Apple seems to have proved the opposite. The "write everything as a web app" got anemic support at best, then along comes the App Store and it takes off like wild fire. Seems like while people do want simplicity, they still desire something that only native applications give them.
> Ask a parent if they want their 6 y/o using a controllable "dumb" internet terminal appliance or anything else and they'll tell you "safe and dumb as possible".
Actually, somewhat ironically, when I hand my child either the iPad or the Nexus One, just about the *only* thing I am worried about is that they might open up the browser and end up somewhere horribly inappropriate. The apps on there are all things that I know exactly what they will do and what they will access. The browser is a completely open ended bastion of potential evil that I have to carefully supervise what they might get into on.
I'm glad someone else picked up on this (no mod points today, sorry).
The portrayal of copyright violation as theft is one of the biggest lies of our time. I honestly believe that there should be some kind of legal action at some point (the basis of what I don't know what it could be) to call out these people who consistently, on the record, out right blatantly lie about the nature of what is happening (eg: the stupid "you wouldn't steal a car" statements at the start of DVDs, etc). This is actually impugning millions of people with crime they did not commit. Just because they may commit a lesser (civil) infringement does not make it OK to claim they committed a criminal act (theft).
> Cloud computing is the biggest failure our industry has seen. It's even a bigger failure than Windows.
Ah, for a minute I was confused but now I see you are using a new definition of "failure" that means making hundreds of billions of dollars and becoming the richest man on the planet. This kind of "failure" is something I think I could warm to...
> Fact: despite what MARKETING says, it's a general-purpose computer
Actually, Apple's entire marketing campaign is very focussed on it being a very general purpose device. How else can we interpret the obsession with the tag line, "There's an app for that"?
Slashdot Mirror
People understand that if they leave their doors open and have an argument, that people outside the door can hear them having said argument. However, do the people outside the door have the right to record said argument? It's a grey area, it isn't clear cut at all in my opinion.
I think it's clear: from a privacy point of view you have the right to record anything that happens on your property. You have not widened it's availability by doing that - nobody knows it who didn't hear it from the original source anyway. Rebroadcasting it would be debatable (eg: take the recording and play it on the radio) because you are widening the audience. Now more people have heard it than before. Google did not rebroadcast or use this information in any way. *They did not even know they possessed it*.
That's the thing here...there is absolutely no reason AT ALL in my opinion why google, or the company(ies) they used to do the street view should have done ANYTHING AT ALL with wifi networks, macs and data. What the hell does that have to do with mapping streets?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
You need to educate yourself a little bit about why Google is doing this, and why other companies are too. Your base assumption that they are just collecting for the sake of violating people's privacy is totally wrong. Wifi data is tremendously useful and you will appreciate enormously it at some point when you own a device and discover it can do geo-location and get GPS-like functionality for a tiny fraction of the cost, power and speed with which GPS does it.
brb. Reading the letters in your mailbox. It wasn't locked or anything, and it's right out there for the public to access, so it's cool.
Was the letter box right in the public street and not on their property? Were the letters all opened and visible without even opening any envelopes? Did you not actually read them but just accidentally saw them as you went past because you were trying to read the number on the letter box and as soon as you realized your mistake you tried your best to forget and notified the recipients that you accidentally saw some of their letters?
Then I would say you are a morally upstanding citizen and have gone beyond any normal reasonable expectation about privacy.
I think it's a problem but it's not the problem of the people who innocently leave a Wifi recorder on as they drive down the street.
If anyone gets blamed it should be the wireless access point vendors that ship devices that automatically broadcast people's internet traffic unsecured into the whole surrounding neighborhood without sufficiently educating them about the dangers of it. Why don't we have class actions about that?
As for it being a moral issue: Google did not even realize they were collecting this data. How can they be morally responsible for a decision they did not make? Their crime is, if anything, lack of oversight - but that's a very different thing with a totally different moral context.
Change "Facebook" to "Google", drop "that awful Beacon feature", and the above is still true
OK -
Google went from being a closed network to an open one with several changes to the privacy controls, etc. They never back down until there's immense pressure. Usually even then they don't back down entirely. And it's all so they can monetize their site.
This is not even remotely true. In what way has Google has gone from closed to open by relaxing privacy? They revealed the Wifi data problem *themselves* - that's about as far from only backing down under immense pressure as you can get.
How much more privacy-violating information did they abuse via Chrome? Via AdSense? Via browser cookies?
Umm, how about none? Do you have any evidence of this "abuse" or are you just making FUD here?
I think there are plenty of reasons to be wary of Google, but as far as I can tell they have acted so far as a force for good and have genuinely and swiftly apologized and corrected their mistakes. For a company that depends on people using their services they have about the least amount of lockin of any company on the planet. The day they start actually being evil then certainly let's condemn them, but what lesson are we as consumers teaching them by condemning them while they are being good?
> When they make an Android device with non-crap hardware
I guess you are trolling? Or living in some country with only the G1?
Android hardware far outclasses the iPhone right now. I can barely use my iPod Touch any more because the screen looks so faded and fuzzy compared to the crisp screen on the Nexus One. This isn't really a criticism of the iPhone, it's just a fact of Apple's yearly product cycle - a year is a long time in technology and their hardware are nearly a year out of date now. The software is one thing, but saying you can't use Android because of the *hardware* is really weird.
> browsers could be made to download just :visited images
Wouldn't that just alter the attack? In the end they will just make it infer the 'visited' state from other things that are much harder to block. (Eg: change the link to bold if visited - now it's bounding box is slightly larger, which you can detect in javascript and use to report back if the user visited the site). I think the protection has to be positioned further back in the chain: a visited style will only be rendered if the user visited the target page *from* the current page that is trying to render the style or *from* the same domain.
> now we want to see, what you have collected, as we don't see any more reason to trust you"
So all the government should have to do for people to start handing over their private property is to declare they don't trust them?
Gee, I have bad feeling about you, hand over all your hard drives please.
If this is really the rationalization here then it's a very scary and worrying precedent (and if not a precedent then it's even more scary).
> You're describing one of the more useful features of selective enforcement
No. Of course this varies enormously across different jurisdictions, but most places actually do have Good Samaritan laws that are a defense *against* other laws even when they are selectively enforced.
eg: if I stop at a traffic accident and try to help an injured person and actually accidentally kill them in doing so, when prosecuted for manslaughter I can cite these good samaritan laws in my defense in court.
> but I don't see the problem in general with a consumer electronic device making some "higher-level" choices for the customer
The problem is not "giving up the choice" but giving up the *right* to make that choice. It may seem fine in the short term to give up your power to choose. But some time, perhaps a long time, in the future, the power you have given to the vendor who now controls one of the most important devices in your life will be used against you.
In truth, I don't mind the iPhone, specifically, being tied to a locked down app store. If people want to choose that, and they are fully cognizant that they are throwing away their freedom, then fine.
But I have a huge problem if the whole industry goes this way. And the problem is that it *is* showing worrying signs of that, with Windows Phone now electing also to be a dictator of the user's choices. The only way to fight against this is to fight against the success of the platforms that represent this trend. Otherwise we are looking at a future in 10 years time where all devices are locked down and consumers are back to being passive consumers of content controlled by huge content providers like in the TV era. There won't be small startups like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. that take over the world because they simply won't be allowed in on these platforms. I don't want that, and I think it's a horrible future that we have to resist.
This is what I don't understand about the whole debate. Why can't the browser vendors just build their tags to use the *built in* codecs that are available on the underlying platform? All users of (modern) Windows and Mac systems have these codecs. Built in. They are licensed to use them - full stop. They *paid for it* with their Windows & Mac OS license. Why do we need to even talk about re-licensing them? Just use the damn things, that are *already there*. If they are not there, show the user a nice page about software patents and how evil they are.
We don't argue about the fact that FireFox relies on the user having a graphics card that is probably patented from top to bottom to display the graphics FireFox renders. Or an audio card. Or an OS that can display windows etc. These all exist at the layer below the browser. So should the video codecs.
> So how do I deploy a better environment to all my users?
Tell them to install Java (or bundle it with your application). In fact most of them already probably have it installed. The standard Java runtime ships with Rhino (pure Java Javascript implementation) built in, so you can run pure javascript applications that have access to the full range of libraries that Java has access to, including access to raw audio devices.
> How about procedural audio? Say I want to write a speech synthesizer in JavaScript
That's not a property of the language. It's property of the platform the language has access to (the browser). Javascript is no more constrained than any other language that lives in the browser sandbox in that regard.
In fact, you can synthesise speech in Javascript on some platforms/browsers quite simply because those platforms do provide TTS apis to the browser.
Javascript does have language issues - mainly around namespacing and modularity and a paucity of robust types. But with a good library in hand it's actually much more pleasant than some of the other parts of the web stack.
> Apple / The Steve are advocating HTML5 as an alternative to flash
And yet, there are 200,000 apps in the app store which were written using platform specific native code. This argument that HTML5 should be used to substitute for *applications* written originally in Flash compiled to be native iPhone apps with full access to the iPhone APIs is just silly. HTML5 can't do a fraction of what native apps can do, and Steve Jobs knows it. That is why he advocates for HTML5 - because it is *inferior enough* that his own proprietary ecosystem will not be threatened by it whereas Flash and various other cross-platform tools are not.
> This is exactly like making it illegal to leave your door unlocked
No, because the contents of your house do not (normally) protrude out onto the street and area surrounding your property. It's more like you left your CD burner out on the path outside your house and then someone came by with some CDs and made illegal copies using *your* equipment. I don't know if it mattered in this legal case specifically, but I think it's an important distinction if you are projecting your open access wifi signal *into public space*. If you, on the other hand, confine it within your house and someone has to enter your private property to access it, that would be different.
> Unusable? Really..Compared to what? You have driven off the cliff into fantasy land.
Compared to just about anything. It's a browser designed for a 4 inch mobile screen blown up to desktop size - it's just totally inapproprate. Really, seriously, tell me, if mobile safari was released today for the desktop would you use it? No tabs? Can't download (most) files to save locally? Can't support many common web media formats? Slow as hell to open new windows? Can't open more than 9 new windows, silently replaces old ones when you try?
I guess I shouldn't have said "casual" - "casual" is just about the only thing it IS useful for. Any kind of sophisticated browsing is what it is unsuitable for - but for me that includes things like reading slashdot, newspapers etc. because I want lots of new windows and easy transition between them.
I just got finished tweaking a product which was perceived as slow because the user interface flickered a lot. It was erasing background then repainting when various things updated. The fix just pushes the erase / repaint into an offscreen buffer and then copies the buffer to the screen at the end so there is no flicker. The amazing thing is that everyone now thinks the product is faster - but actually it's doing *more* work and is technically slower.
It is fascinating indeed how the psychology of this stuff plays out.
> I think apple answered that one for you:
Apple seems to have proved the opposite. The "write everything as a web app" got anemic support at best, then along comes the App Store and it takes off like wild fire. Seems like while people do want simplicity, they still desire something that only native applications give them.
> Ask a parent if they want their 6 y/o using a controllable "dumb" internet terminal appliance or anything else and they'll tell you "safe and dumb as possible".
Actually, somewhat ironically, when I hand my child either the iPad or the Nexus One, just about the *only* thing I am worried about is that they might open up the browser and end up somewhere horribly inappropriate. The apps on there are all things that I know exactly what they will do and what they will access. The browser is a completely open ended bastion of potential evil that I have to carefully supervise what they might get into on.
I'm glad someone else picked up on this (no mod points today, sorry).
The portrayal of copyright violation as theft is one of the biggest lies of our time. I honestly believe that there should be some kind of legal action at some point (the basis of what I don't know what it could be) to call out these people who consistently, on the record, out right blatantly lie about the nature of what is happening (eg: the stupid "you wouldn't steal a car" statements at the start of DVDs, etc). This is actually impugning millions of people with crime they did not commit. Just because they may commit a lesser (civil) infringement does not make it OK to claim they committed a criminal act (theft).
> Cloud computing is the biggest failure our industry has seen. It's even a bigger failure than Windows.
Ah, for a minute I was confused but now I see you are using a new definition of "failure" that means making hundreds of billions of dollars and becoming the richest man on the planet. This kind of "failure" is something I think I could warm to ...
> Fact: despite what MARKETING says, it's a general-purpose computer
Actually, Apple's entire marketing campaign is very focussed on it being a very general purpose device. How else can we interpret the obsession with the tag line, "There's an app for that"?
Perhaps the relentless ads from Apple proclaiming that there's an "app" for every possible circumstance. Hmm, what kind of device would that be?
Pre-emptively replying to myself - I misread which post yours was replying to. No FUD in your post, just information - apologies!
> There are VNC and RDP clients for iPhone and iPad. Not sure about android.
FUD much?
Here's my go: Android handles email really well and definitely doesn't corrupt and delete all your files regularly. Not sure about iPhones.
Yes, a leak that happened *after* the first quarter ended is definitely responsible for a drop in first quarter sales. Brilliant logic!