I think it is a better than even bet that censorship will end (at least in its current form) in China. Once the citizens become aware of how much the truth is being obscured from them they will demand it and the government will have no way to justify it. Based on this, I think it may eventually be good business decision for Google to refuse to censor. In 15 years when the information revolution happens in China Baidu may be shunned as a willing arm of government censorship while Google will be seen as the path to liberty and truth.
Ummm... doesn't the same argument also prove then that Apple is a monopoly? They are famous for their high profit margin.
Perhaps Windows is just better than its competitors in the same way Apple fans say that iPhones are better and that is why people are willing to pay for it?
If I was a bank I would just completely avoid recommending any particular browser. Once you do that you are complicit / partially liable when a user is compromised by following your advice. As a case in point, as far as I know, FireFox 2.0 is no longer receiving security updates and there are known vulnerabilities in the last released version. Chase recommending this browser could easily be taken as an argument in a court case if a user is compromised while using their web site.
It would be far more sensible for the bank to impose no limitations and simply recommend that all users acquire a secure and standards compliant browser for using their web site.
Yeah, I must say, the sudden change of heart of Telstra about ADSL2+ occurred suspiciously close to the time when they had their stoush with the government over the NBN. All of a sudden they made all their ADSL1 plans obsolete by making ADSL2+ plans the same price - and this was within weeks of the government cutting them out of the NBN (all ancient history now...).
Given that the internet filter proposal was already on shaky ground (Labor has quietly been putting it on the backburner as being "too toxic a topic" for an election year), this may be the extra push needed to make sure it sinks into oblivion (and good riddance!).
I hope so, but I am afraid Labor still considers the filter a winner with voters and if anything they have held it back so that it can be an election issue / wedge against the coalition. Your "too toxic" quote I think came from the greens and I have never seen anything concrete to back up that statement other than that they did not introduce the legislation yet. So - I share your sentiments but I am not nearly as optimistic.
You seem to have completely the wrong idea about what multitasking is useful for. It is more about context switching and combining separate apps into useful workflows than doing "work" in the background.
Example: I want to take a screen shot. So run the screen shot app (now it is sitting the background, monitoring key presses) and when the next app in in the right state, press the magic key combo - screen shot app (because it is running) can run and grab the screen shot.
Example: I'm editing an email and it has a link. I open the link to check it works. Now I want to copy some text from the browser and go back to my email.
Multitasking is all about building workflows between multiple apps. It is fundamentally a creative process where apps build on each other to create and allow new possible workflows. The problem with Apple's crippling of the iPhone is that it has a huge "chilling effect". Where people can invent new and crazy workflows which go on to live and die in the free marketplace of ideas on other platforms, on the iPhone it basically just won't happen at all. Who is going to go to all the effort of getting Apple's blessing for a crazy experiment? And will Apple even allow such "experiments"? They are basically killing off the primordial sludge that produces life by spraying with pesticide. It might make the place look clean, but don't expect interesting things to evolve that kind of hostile environment.
It is totally insane, but given the expense of having a data plan and the usefulness of even tiny amounts of data it actually makes some amount of sense to contemplate routing data over the SMS channel. It's no use for anything real time, but if you are doing things like constantly reporting data (latitude, etc.), sending or downloading things in the background (eg: email) then it might be possible to have no data connection at all and still get significant use out of certain types of connectivity.
Also, when not on a capped data plan (pay per MB) my carrier has a 100kB minimum for data - so for a 20 byte message I pay for 100kB. When I need to send a tiny amount of data it would make a lot of sense to send it over SMS.
I want as many things together as possible. It dramatically simplifies the setup and reduces the number of issues. I used to have 3 boxes (modem, router, wifi access point) and whenever there was any kind of problem it was a hell to figure out, tracing each connection through to try and find which one was unplugged, off line or whatever.
The all-in-one I have now has never faulted, fires everything up in the right order on startup and has a net power consumption equal to just one of the previous boxes. And there are only 2 cables going into it (power and phone line).
What I really want now is to add print and file sharing because I hate having a separate NAS as well.
I actually think it *is* a testimony to Gates that he turned things around after being so woefully misguided about the internet. After that you saw MS rally and produce dramatically better OSes (95, XP and 2K) and come from behind to make what was, for its time, a far superior browser. They bascially turned a tanker around and steamed in ahead of the competition. There is a fairly close correlation between Gates' loss of influence and the period when MS went into their "dark ages" (2001-200?).
Yeah, I'm mystified that they never built a gateway to email. That might (emphasis on might) have pushed it over the edge into mass adoption.
It's pretty hard to launch a new communication service and a) not open it to everyone while b) having no integration with communication systems everyone else is using. Communication is all about network effect. Heck, even Facebook sends you emails to notify you when when someone messages you in Facebook. It isn't pretty but it is necessary.
However I do think the problems go just a little deeper. Even when I got my whole company onto it, we tried it 4 or 5 times for things and then stopped using it. Mostly we went back to Google Docs - yep, Google Docs is a better collaborative editor than Wave. I think Wave underestimated some very important human factors that make other mediums successful. For example, how we model things in our minds is well matched by email. Each email often contains a whole thread of replies in its body. It is insane from an IT point of view, but from a human point of view it perfectly matches what I want - I can pick out any email and see the entire state of the conversation captured in a single document. Wave has the timeline for that which serves functionally the same purpose but breaks my mental model of wanting an actual document. These subtle psychological issues make Wave less "sticky" - you can't explain why, but you're not particularly keen to go back to it, even when it works for you.
Whats the use of an encrypted connection when you're being mass-MITMed by the very lines you're going through?
Avoiding MITM attacks is one of the primary design features of SSL / TLS. Unless the government has control of a root cert authority in your browser they can't MITM you without you getting at least a warning. Of course, I wouldn't put it past them to legislate that all browsers distributed in Austraila must ship an "Australian Government" root cert and then the game will be up...
Yes because hackers use the data for personal gain, while google...
Let me finish the sentence for you: "while google... did not use the data at all".
That's right. Not for their gain, not for anything. It sat on some hard drives until they did their audit and found it. Oh, and then a bunch of governments made them hand it over and the authorities plundered it looking for email addresses, passwords and even banking details (their words, not mine!).
That argument is bogus. The mobile devices which will later use the mapped SSIDs and BSSIDs to calculate their own position do not see anything but the beacon frames
You are being over-simplistic. Google is trying to estimate the location of the hotspot from only the places their street car can access which some times may be a long way from the hotspot. There may even be hotspots that they cannot see SSIDs for at all but which they can infer exist because they can see other devices communicating with them. That gives them a broad general fix on the location of the hotspot even if they never see it directly. This is undeniably useful for geolocation. You can argue it is wrong for them to intercept the data, but it seems obvious to me it could be useful.
It is important to note that Google didn't distribute the data. Nobody is even suggesting that (I know, not even you). People are behaving as if Google published this data on Street View - "here are the packets you can find 101 Johnson st!". As far as we know (and as Google has stated) they did not ever even look at this data.
If there's a law against only storing such data it almost runs into philosophy - is something stored if it is never accessed? Is just the potential to access it enough, even if they never do? (does a tree falling in a wood make a sound if nobody is there to hear it?). If just the potential to access it is enough then we're all guilty because we all have the "potential" to access the open Wifi networks in the first place.
I don't think it was "forgetful" rather than miscommunication. Think about how this probably works inside Google - you have geeks back at HQ doing deep and advanced research into how to do triangulation of hotspots and geolocation based on that. They, of course, are experimenting so they are making software that captures absolutely freaking everything so that they can do full and complete analysis on the data and use any piece of it that seems to help the algorithm get better. For them, the natural default mode of the software is to capture everything - nothing worse than wasting days collecting experimental data because you forgot to capture some critical component.
Now, much later after most of the research phase is complete, the same software gets deployed out to the field. The guys in the car would naturally assume that the default configuration be what they are supposed to use - they are not experts in Wifi capture, they are driving a car. The last thing they should be doing is reconfiguring the software! So they turn it on and it seems to be capturing the data and the folks back at HQ say it all looks good.
I think this is just a classic case of missing communication and lacking oversight - someone should be in the middle there checking the legals of exactly what is going into the cars, and this is what broke down.
You may find your mistake early, after gigabytes worth of data. Then you fix it before it becomes TB or PB of data. Right?
Umm, this whole controversy is about an entire total of 600GB, so I think it is quite fair to say that Google did find their mistake after "gigabytes" and not TB or PB.
So if you use the right software tool, you get a free pass on data collection on other peoples networking
Of course not. Where am I giving google a "free pass"? I'm simply saying I accept their explanation that it was a mistake. If this was their policy I'd be up there with everyone else complaining about it. I don't expect companies to be perfect, as long as they handle mistakes honestly. This appears to be an honest mistake and one that has had zero actual damage resulting (as in, absolutely none of this data was exploited by Google in any way).
No there isn't. And you are a retard for buying into their horse shit.
Thanks for the personal abuse, but there is an independent report that has tremendous detail, including the lines:
"By default, gslite records all wireless frame data, except for the bodies of Data frames from encrypted wireless networks"
The report exhaustively details how the software mostly inherited from an open source project (kismet) which was incorrectly used in its default mode (capture unencrypted packets). The report found absolutely no evidence of intent to capture the packets, merely that the software was used in its default mode instead of the correct mode which required an extra configuration parameter to be set.
They did it knowingly. They did it on purpose. They did it to get your fucking data.
What data? 0.2 seconds of a drive by? What possible use could that be?
And what evidence do you have about Google's intent here? You have not one speck of evidence. You rant on about me blindly trusting Google when your own mistrust and hatred is just as (or more) blind. Google's explanation makes rational sense and is backed up by every independent assessment. Your assertions of evil intent are based on nothing other than paranoia and hatred.
I'm all for scepticism and critically evaluating companies based on trust. But as far as I can tell Google is about the most open and trustworthy company of any tech company going around. I judge them by their actions and their statements and so far I'm happy with what I see.
(1) Unless a double-dissolution election is called (and I'm not at all sure whether that can happen at this late stage), Sen. Conroy's seat is safe for another term.
Are you sure? there is an entire web site devoted to putting him last at the next election, and they have a picture of a ballot with Stephen Conroy on it from 2004. Doesn't that mean he *has* to be up for reelection this time around?
People using unencrypted wifi today have a reasonable expectation of privacy
That may be the central point on which this pivots. However I disagree with you. Wifi technology is specifically designed to enable connections to other computers. That is its entire purpose. It says it right there on the box. It takes a willful act to go and set one up. When you do set it up, the manufacturer provides ample instruction about making it secure. Recent versions of Windows won't even let you connect to an insecure network without going through a giant UAC style warning that what you are doing is insecure.
The user can certainly have an expectation that their conversations over unencrypted Wifi are private, but it could not possibly be reasonable since they have been made aware at every step of the way that their actions are going to result in public transmissions.
That only works if the ISP was complicit in setting up the Wifi access point. While email might go out unencrypted over the internet, the link from you to your ISP is entirely between you and them so it is not totally unreasonable if the email password is sent unencrypted over that link.
Actually it was 0.2 seconds of data from any given Wifi channel, possibly twice over depending how much range the AP had if they sampled it twice. Yes, people are all freaking out over 0.2 seconds worth of data.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is a better than even bet that censorship will end (at least in its current form) in China. Once the citizens become aware of how much the truth is being obscured from them they will demand it and the government will have no way to justify it. Based on this, I think it may eventually be good business decision for Google to refuse to censor. In 15 years when the information revolution happens in China Baidu may be shunned as a willing arm of government censorship while Google will be seen as the path to liberty and truth.
So then the fact that Apple can charge far more for phones than their competitors must also prove that they are a monopoly too?
Ummm... doesn't the same argument also prove then that Apple is a monopoly? They are famous for their high profit margin.
Perhaps Windows is just better than its competitors in the same way Apple fans say that iPhones are better and that is why people are willing to pay for it?
If I was a bank I would just completely avoid recommending any particular browser. Once you do that you are complicit / partially liable when a user is compromised by following your advice. As a case in point, as far as I know, FireFox 2.0 is no longer receiving security updates and there are known vulnerabilities in the last released version. Chase recommending this browser could easily be taken as an argument in a court case if a user is compromised while using their web site.
It would be far more sensible for the bank to impose no limitations and simply recommend that all users acquire a secure and standards compliant browser for using their web site.
Yeah, I must say, the sudden change of heart of Telstra about ADSL2+ occurred suspiciously close to the time when they had their stoush with the government over the NBN. All of a sudden they made all their ADSL1 plans obsolete by making ADSL2+ plans the same price - and this was within weeks of the government cutting them out of the NBN (all ancient history now ...).
at one stage they used to change 17c per MB once you reached your allowance
Considering that you can get a $1 / month plan from TPG that only charges 2.75 c / MB (over 3G, no less) this is almost criminal.
Given that the internet filter proposal was already on shaky ground (Labor has quietly been putting it on the backburner as being "too toxic a topic" for an election year), this may be the extra push needed to make sure it sinks into oblivion (and good riddance!).
I hope so, but I am afraid Labor still considers the filter a winner with voters and if anything they have held it back so that it can be an election issue / wedge against the coalition. Your "too toxic" quote I think came from the greens and I have never seen anything concrete to back up that statement other than that they did not introduce the legislation yet. So - I share your sentiments but I am not nearly as optimistic.
You seem to have completely the wrong idea about what multitasking is useful for. It is more about context switching and combining separate apps into useful workflows than doing "work" in the background.
Example: I want to take a screen shot. So run the screen shot app (now it is sitting the background, monitoring key presses) and when the next app in in the right state, press the magic key combo - screen shot app (because it is running) can run and grab the screen shot.
Example: I'm editing an email and it has a link. I open the link to check it works. Now I want to copy some text from the browser and go back to my email.
Multitasking is all about building workflows between multiple apps. It is fundamentally a creative process where apps build on each other to create and allow new possible workflows. The problem with Apple's crippling of the iPhone is that it has a huge "chilling effect". Where people can invent new and crazy workflows which go on to live and die in the free marketplace of ideas on other platforms, on the iPhone it basically just won't happen at all. Who is going to go to all the effort of getting Apple's blessing for a crazy experiment? And will Apple even allow such "experiments"? They are basically killing off the primordial sludge that produces life by spraying with pesticide. It might make the place look clean, but don't expect interesting things to evolve that kind of hostile environment.
It is totally insane, but given the expense of having a data plan and the usefulness of even tiny amounts of data it actually makes some amount of sense to contemplate routing data over the SMS channel. It's no use for anything real time, but if you are doing things like constantly reporting data (latitude, etc.), sending or downloading things in the background (eg: email) then it might be possible to have no data connection at all and still get significant use out of certain types of connectivity.
Also, when not on a capped data plan (pay per MB) my carrier has a 100kB minimum for data - so for a 20 byte message I pay for 100kB. When I need to send a tiny amount of data it would make a lot of sense to send it over SMS.
I want as many things together as possible. It dramatically simplifies the setup and reduces the number of issues. I used to have 3 boxes (modem, router, wifi access point) and whenever there was any kind of problem it was a hell to figure out, tracing each connection through to try and find which one was unplugged, off line or whatever.
The all-in-one I have now has never faulted, fires everything up in the right order on startup and has a net power consumption equal to just one of the previous boxes. And there are only 2 cables going into it (power and phone line).
What I really want now is to add print and file sharing because I hate having a separate NAS as well.
I actually think it *is* a testimony to Gates that he turned things around after being so woefully misguided about the internet. After that you saw MS rally and produce dramatically better OSes (95, XP and 2K) and come from behind to make what was, for its time, a far superior browser. They bascially turned a tanker around and steamed in ahead of the competition. There is a fairly close correlation between Gates' loss of influence and the period when MS went into their "dark ages" (2001-200?).
Yeah, I'm mystified that they never built a gateway to email. That might (emphasis on might) have pushed it over the edge into mass adoption.
It's pretty hard to launch a new communication service and a) not open it to everyone while b) having no integration with communication systems everyone else is using. Communication is all about network effect. Heck, even Facebook sends you emails to notify you when when someone messages you in Facebook. It isn't pretty but it is necessary.
However I do think the problems go just a little deeper. Even when I got my whole company onto it, we tried it 4 or 5 times for things and then stopped using it. Mostly we went back to Google Docs - yep, Google Docs is a better collaborative editor than Wave. I think Wave underestimated some very important human factors that make other mediums successful. For example, how we model things in our minds is well matched by email. Each email often contains a whole thread of replies in its body. It is insane from an IT point of view, but from a human point of view it perfectly matches what I want - I can pick out any email and see the entire state of the conversation captured in a single document. Wave has the timeline for that which serves functionally the same purpose but breaks my mental model of wanting an actual document. These subtle psychological issues make Wave less "sticky" - you can't explain why, but you're not particularly keen to go back to it, even when it works for you.
Whats the use of an encrypted connection when you're being mass-MITMed by the very lines you're going through?
Avoiding MITM attacks is one of the primary design features of SSL / TLS. Unless the government has control of a root cert authority in your browser they can't MITM you without you getting at least a warning. Of course, I wouldn't put it past them to legislate that all browsers distributed in Austraila must ship an "Australian Government" root cert and then the game will be up ...
Yes because hackers use the data for personal gain, while google...
Let me finish the sentence for you: "while google ... did not use the data at all".
That's right. Not for their gain, not for anything. It sat on some hard drives until they did their audit and found it. Oh, and then a bunch of governments made them hand it over and the authorities plundered it looking for email addresses, passwords and even banking details (their words, not mine!).
That argument is bogus. The mobile devices which will later use the mapped SSIDs and BSSIDs to calculate their own position do not see anything but the beacon frames
You are being over-simplistic. Google is trying to estimate the location of the hotspot from only the places their street car can access which some times may be a long way from the hotspot. There may even be hotspots that they cannot see SSIDs for at all but which they can infer exist because they can see other devices communicating with them. That gives them a broad general fix on the location of the hotspot even if they never see it directly. This is undeniably useful for geolocation. You can argue it is wrong for them to intercept the data, but it seems obvious to me it could be useful.
distribute personal data
It is important to note that Google didn't distribute the data. Nobody is even suggesting that (I know, not even you). People are behaving as if Google published this data on Street View - "here are the packets you can find 101 Johnson st!". As far as we know (and as Google has stated) they did not ever even look at this data.
If there's a law against only storing such data it almost runs into philosophy - is something stored if it is never accessed? Is just the potential to access it enough, even if they never do? (does a tree falling in a wood make a sound if nobody is there to hear it?). If just the potential to access it is enough then we're all guilty because we all have the "potential" to access the open Wifi networks in the first place.
I don't think it was "forgetful" rather than miscommunication. Think about how this probably works inside Google - you have geeks back at HQ doing deep and advanced research into how to do triangulation of hotspots and geolocation based on that. They, of course, are experimenting so they are making software that captures absolutely freaking everything so that they can do full and complete analysis on the data and use any piece of it that seems to help the algorithm get better. For them, the natural default mode of the software is to capture everything - nothing worse than wasting days collecting experimental data because you forgot to capture some critical component.
Now, much later after most of the research phase is complete, the same software gets deployed out to the field. The guys in the car would naturally assume that the default configuration be what they are supposed to use - they are not experts in Wifi capture, they are driving a car. The last thing they should be doing is reconfiguring the software! So they turn it on and it seems to be capturing the data and the folks back at HQ say it all looks good.
I think this is just a classic case of missing communication and lacking oversight - someone should be in the middle there checking the legals of exactly what is going into the cars, and this is what broke down.
You may find your mistake early, after gigabytes worth of data. Then you fix it before it becomes TB or PB of data. Right?
Umm, this whole controversy is about an entire total of 600GB, so I think it is quite fair to say that Google did find their mistake after "gigabytes" and not TB or PB.
So if you use the right software tool, you get a free pass on data collection on other peoples networking
Of course not. Where am I giving google a "free pass"? I'm simply saying I accept their explanation that it was a mistake. If this was their policy I'd be up there with everyone else complaining about it. I don't expect companies to be perfect, as long as they handle mistakes honestly. This appears to be an honest mistake and one that has had zero actual damage resulting (as in, absolutely none of this data was exploited by Google in any way).
No there isn't. And you are a retard for buying into their horse shit.
Thanks for the personal abuse, but there is an independent report that has tremendous detail, including the lines:
"By default, gslite records all wireless frame data, except for the bodies of Data frames
from encrypted wireless networks"
The report exhaustively details how the software mostly inherited from an open source project (kismet) which was incorrectly used in its default mode (capture unencrypted packets). The report found absolutely no evidence of intent to capture the packets, merely that the software was used in its default mode instead of the correct mode which required an extra configuration parameter to be set.
They did it knowingly.
They did it on purpose.
They did it to get your fucking data.
What data? 0.2 seconds of a drive by? What possible use could that be?
And what evidence do you have about Google's intent here? You have not one speck of evidence. You rant on about me blindly trusting Google when your own mistrust and hatred is just as (or more) blind. Google's explanation makes rational sense and is backed up by every independent assessment. Your assertions of evil intent are based on nothing other than paranoia and hatred.
I'm all for scepticism and critically evaluating companies based on trust. But as far as I can tell Google is about the most open and trustworthy company of any tech company going around. I judge them by their actions and their statements and so far I'm happy with what I see.
(1) Unless a double-dissolution election is called (and I'm not at all sure whether that can happen at this late stage), Sen. Conroy's seat is safe for another term.
Are you sure? there is an entire web site devoted to putting him last at the next election, and they have a picture of a ballot with Stephen Conroy on it from 2004. Doesn't that mean he *has* to be up for reelection this time around?
Google made a premeditated decision to collect Wifi data including passwords,emails, chat conversations, etc for 3 years
There is direct evidence that this is not the case.
People using unencrypted wifi today have a reasonable expectation of privacy
That may be the central point on which this pivots. However I disagree with you. Wifi technology is specifically designed to enable connections to other computers. That is its entire purpose. It says it right there on the box. It takes a willful act to go and set one up. When you do set it up, the manufacturer provides ample instruction about making it secure. Recent versions of Windows won't even let you connect to an insecure network without going through a giant UAC style warning that what you are doing is insecure.
The user can certainly have an expectation that their conversations over unencrypted Wifi are private, but it could not possibly be reasonable since they have been made aware at every step of the way that their actions are going to result in public transmissions.
That only works if the ISP was complicit in setting up the Wifi access point. While email might go out unencrypted over the internet, the link from you to your ISP is entirely between you and them so it is not totally unreasonable if the email password is sent unencrypted over that link.
Maybe they were only recording 5 seconds of data
Actually it was 0.2 seconds of data from any given Wifi channel, possibly twice over depending how much range the AP had if they sampled it twice. Yes, people are all freaking out over 0.2 seconds worth of data.