Google wasn't recording something they didn't want to, they explicitly stored the transmitted data because they wanted to store the transmitted data. If all they wanted were SSIDs I'm fairly positive they could have collected those without recording gigabytes worth of data
You seem to be speaking out of ignorance. It's already been well established by an independent investigator that the software Google was using recorded samples of unencrypted Wifi data by *default*, and Google left it in the default mode. So yes it was possible to only sample SSIDs without sampling Wifi data, and no Google did not do it deliberately, or at least, there is no evidence it was deliberate.
The source said the privacy commissioner had already "given the tick" to the proposal.
and (quote from the actual privacy commissioner):
My office would also expect that any proposed legislation would have the appropriate privacy safeguards built-in.
In other words - the privacy commissioner has already given it the go ahead in advance on the basis that the government are really nice and surely won't do anything mean....
So what you're saying is that whether my privacy is violated depends on who is doing it? Person A knowing my private life is OK but Person B is not - and whether I feel violated should be based on the government's blessing?
This is not compatible with my definition of privacy.
There's a problem: the libs will happily vote for much of the evil stuff that Labor wants. Abbott *loves* the idea of the filter and I'm sure would be all over data retention (of course, he won't say this publicly - but when it comes to a vote they'll back it). So there is no scenario where the greens will be able to protect us completely, even if they hold the balance of power by a significant margin.
Seriously, I really want to know who this privacy commissioner is who is all alarmed about Google accidentally capturing a few packets of data in a one time drive by operation and then deleting them, but who is perfectly ok with logging every single email recipient and every web site accessed. How can this person even functionally operate in the world when they are so schizophrenic?
I'm seriously scared by this upcoming election. There are only two possible outcomes and both of them are nightmares. If the neocons get in then we are up for all kinds of horrendous stuff and if Labor retains power then they will be claiming they have a mandate for turning the country into a police state. The only useful option seems to be to selectively target individual senators but that has only a slim chance of making a substantial difference.
5 days doesn't sound like a long time for a "negotiation". While it's certainly true that Microsoft should jump on any such vulnerability quickly I'm having a little trouble buying that 5 days is enough time to conclude the other party is acting in bad faith. Insisting on a fixed schedule for a bug fix to a brand new problem in any product in just 5 days (or 3 days really - one day for the initial contact, 3 days of waiting and then on day 5 he releases) sounds like a random and unreasonable demand. It probably takes that long just to escalate it to the right group in Microsoft for analaysis.
I think this engineer (or perhaps, even worse, Google) really *wanted* this zero day in the wild and thus deliberately made unreasonable demands and then published before MS had a chance to respond.
Something else to throw in: the ad hoc deployment profiles expire after 90 days. So yes, you can install whatever you want, but 90 days later it will stop working. You can then rebuild and sign the package and install it again. Of course, you will also need to keep in mind that Apple's developer terms apply to you whether you put apps on the app store or not. So you are breaking the agreement if you, for example, code in the wrong language or do any of the other things, even if you just deploy to your own phone.
I really think interpolation is the right way for a programmer to express intent, and the compiler should be smart enough to extract it
There are already languages that do this rather well. It is one of my favorite parts about how Groovy handles SQL. The developer simply writes:
db.execute("select foo from bar where id = $id")
and the language is smart enough to extract that out and bind it correctly to the local "id" variable, with correct escaping, etc. Groovy makes it significantly harder to inject data into a string unsafely than safely.
Every person I see who is promoting hysteria about this seems to read enormous evil intent beyond what we actually have evidence for.
recording that data and taking it away for analysis
Notice the prejudice in your *assumption* that Google took away the data for "analysis" when in fact (as far as actual data goes) they accidentally collected it, didn't know existed, when they discovered it they made full disclosure about it, and deleted / will delete it as soon as they can legally do so (they wanted to straight away, but authorities actually *stopped* them!).
But if a multi-billion-dollar company was recording that information
Notice again the prejudice - "multi-billion" == evil? So it would be OK if a small company did the same thing, but you just don't like big companies?
compiling a huge directory of photos of everybody who lives in every house
And more prejudice - "directory" implies Google is publishing some kind of public index that anybody can search - of course they are not. "who lives in every house" implies they are collecting personally identifiable information (names, photos, etc). Of course they are not.
Every analogy I see is inflated with these wild exaggerations about what has actually happened here. They collected *at most* a few packets of data (0.2 seconds worth) from any given Wifi connection. They publish *none* of this information. They use it to provide a *free public service* that has no strings attached. They do *not* correlate this information used for advertising and in no way ever expose it to their advertising network.
It's really a fascinating indicator of the situation Microsoft is in that they are so scared to include or promote basic photo gallery features in Win7 that people like this are completely unaware it exists.
For my money I like it much better than Picasa for the simple reason that it treats your photos *as files* rather than as a *database*. I got completely fed up with Picasa *pretending* it had modified my files when it had really only made changes in it's own database. Then you give photos to someone else and you find Picasa never really applied any of your changes. Or worse, you ditch Picasa and find out that years of long hard work is gone because Picasa was privately storing all that information (even things like rotations, cropping, etc.). (Yes, I know it has some option somewhere to turn this off. I resent the fact they make it the default).
I doubt they would ban encryption - it would be far more lucrative to insist that all the browsers include a government mandated root cert and then all the ISPs become men-in-the-middle.
It's far better to be the *only* ones who can listen in on conversations than to just be one of many.
I don't think we can even tell if this data collection was malicious or just a stupid mistake, going by the information that is available to us.
It is utterly absurd to think Google intended to collect the data because they collected so little as to be totally useless - they hopped channels every 0.2 seconds. The chance of getting anything useful in that time window is so ridiculously small that it makes a mockery of the idea that there was some malicious intent.
That is different. Competition within a market is perfectly ok and even encouraged (if you show my ads you can't show other ads in the same place - let the best ad provider win). Competition that restrains across markets is a problem (if you show my ads you can't use a Mac).
Can you find a place in the TOS for *any* google services that say you can't deal with or restrain in any way how you deal with a third party in a different market?
Something tells me Twitter isn't about to start censoring sites
What tells you that? In all seriousness, you're basically using the rationalization that every censor has ever used before bringing down an iron fist - "trust us - we'll protect you". You need something a little more than just thinking these are nice guys and won't hurt you to justify putting this kind of control and power into someone's hands.
And it really is a double edged sword. When the links are direct Twitter clearly has nothing to do with the content - it's clear. Once these links go through twitter it is a lot more blurry - they start to bear liability for the content that is linked to. If it's child porn - Twitter is aiding people to access child porn. If it is malicious web sites - Twitter is distributing malware. They might not bear the whole responsibility, but they've inserted themselves into the chain. The minute they dabble in any way with filtering or controlling these links they are basically opening a giant can of worms. The only sensible thing they can do is to be a pure URL shortener and do *nothing* to the links. But it would be even better to not have them go through Twitter in the first place.
Really? You think MS updated FireFox itself and didn't use FireFox's blessed extension mechanism specifically provided so that third parties can *their own* functions to FireFox?
I'm pretty sure that Windows Update gets permission / consent somewhere along the line to umm.... you know... update your computer?
You might dislike any particular update it does, but if you just blindly turned on automatic updates and set them install automatically without review then please don't complain that these things are happening without your consent. It's perfectly possible to configure Windows Update to just download the updates and let you review them before you install.
Re:Back to the original subject...
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
> There's probably a keyboard shortcut to select the address bar like in a web browser, but it's not Ctrl+L it seems.
Indeed there isAlt-D - which also works in all web browsers on Windows as well (sadly, not on Macs though... I can't tell you how many bookmarks I've accidentally created on OSX...).
I agree with some of your points but I find it comical that you go all the way back to 1960 to tell me how better off I am now but manage to entirely overlook Windows Mobile which gave us ten times the supposed freedoms that you are crediting Apple with and did it circa 2003 (or earlier depending how you assess it). I'm sure you will wax eloquently on about how crap Windows Mobile is (and I will probably agree) but please don't tell me that Apple invented freedom here. They were late to the game and used their incredible power with consumers to take us backwards and entrench their own ecosystem, just as locked down but centralized around them instead of the carriers.
Sadly, even those who try to escape Steve's clutches are affected by the iPhone, as evidenced by the fact that nearly every mobile platform is copying the App Store model, some of them with exactly the same kind of draconian lock-in policies. So this is not something we can just sit by and watch, it is an industry wide phenomenon that we must fight on every front that opens up, or one day we will get out of bed and there will be no platforms left where we have the legal right to run our own software any more.
So yes, even those of us who escaped the prison camp (or were never captured in the first place) will be coming back to help more of you get out, because there is more at stake here than just a few apps on a phone.
Ad hoc expires after 90 days, has a limited number of devices it can deploy to. That is hardly "no holds barred".
Further, as far as I have been able to understand it, ad hoc is technically is still bound by Apple's SDK developer agreement, so even developing an application for you own phone may in fact violate the agreement.
> I'm particularly attracted to the new high-resolution screen
Really? You mean the screen that is only about 15% higher dpi than what you get on a stock android device these days? This seems like a very marginal thing to change a buying decision, especially considering you may have a hard time getting all the cool hardware to function on Android (last I heard the GPU was not fully utilized, etc.).
I would bet other devices will be on the market pretty quickly with these screens and wait for a new rev of the Nexus or similar.
If you deliberately decide to buy a phone where the manufacturer has disabled the most useful features - being able to install non-market apps or even access the app store at all - then it's just dumb to complain about that afterwards. The fact is, there *is* choice, so choose! Don't reward old school dinosaur carriers and phone manufacturers with your business. It's a new world now.
Slashdot Mirror
Google wasn't recording something they didn't want to, they explicitly stored the transmitted data because they wanted to store the transmitted data. If all they wanted were SSIDs I'm fairly positive they could have collected those without recording gigabytes worth of data
You seem to be speaking out of ignorance. It's already been well established by an independent investigator that the software Google was using recorded samples of unencrypted Wifi data by *default*, and Google left it in the default mode. So yes it was possible to only sample SSIDs without sampling Wifi data, and no Google did not do it deliberately, or at least, there is no evidence it was deliberate.
The source said the privacy commissioner had already "given the tick" to the proposal.
and (quote from the actual privacy commissioner):
My office would also expect that any proposed legislation would have the appropriate privacy safeguards built-in.
In other words - the privacy commissioner has already given it the go ahead in advance on the basis that the government are really nice and surely won't do anything mean....
So what you're saying is that whether my privacy is violated depends on who is doing it? Person A knowing my private life is OK but Person B is not - and whether I feel violated should be based on the government's blessing?
This is not compatible with my definition of privacy.
There's a problem: the libs will happily vote for much of the evil stuff that Labor wants. Abbott *loves* the idea of the filter and I'm sure would be all over data retention (of course, he won't say this publicly - but when it comes to a vote they'll back it). So there is no scenario where the greens will be able to protect us completely, even if they hold the balance of power by a significant margin.
Seriously, I really want to know who this privacy commissioner is who is all alarmed about Google accidentally capturing a few packets of data in a one time drive by operation and then deleting them, but who is perfectly ok with logging every single email recipient and every web site accessed. How can this person even functionally operate in the world when they are so schizophrenic?
I'm seriously scared by this upcoming election. There are only two possible outcomes and both of them are nightmares. If the neocons get in then we are up for all kinds of horrendous stuff and if Labor retains power then they will be claiming they have a mandate for turning the country into a police state. The only useful option seems to be to selectively target individual senators but that has only a slim chance of making a substantial difference.
5 days doesn't sound like a long time for a "negotiation". While it's certainly true that Microsoft should jump on any such vulnerability quickly I'm having a little trouble buying that 5 days is enough time to conclude the other party is acting in bad faith. Insisting on a fixed schedule for a bug fix to a brand new problem in any product in just 5 days (or 3 days really - one day for the initial contact, 3 days of waiting and then on day 5 he releases) sounds like a random and unreasonable demand. It probably takes that long just to escalate it to the right group in Microsoft for analaysis.
I think this engineer (or perhaps, even worse, Google) really *wanted* this zero day in the wild and thus deliberately made unreasonable demands and then published before MS had a chance to respond.
Something else to throw in: the ad hoc deployment profiles expire after 90 days. So yes, you can install whatever you want, but 90 days later it will stop working. You can then rebuild and sign the package and install it again. Of course, you will also need to keep in mind that Apple's developer terms apply to you whether you put apps on the app store or not. So you are breaking the agreement if you, for example, code in the wrong language or do any of the other things, even if you just deploy to your own phone.
I really think interpolation is the right way for a programmer to express intent, and the compiler should be smart enough to extract it
There are already languages that do this rather well. It is one of my favorite parts about how Groovy handles SQL. The developer simply writes:
db.execute("select foo from bar where id = $id")
and the language is smart enough to extract that out and bind it correctly to the local "id" variable, with correct escaping, etc. Groovy makes it significantly harder to inject data into a string unsafely than safely.
Every person I see who is promoting hysteria about this seems to read enormous evil intent beyond what we actually have evidence for.
recording that data and taking it away for analysis
Notice the prejudice in your *assumption* that Google took away the data for "analysis" when in fact (as far as actual data goes) they accidentally collected it, didn't know existed, when they discovered it they made full disclosure about it, and deleted / will delete it as soon as they can legally do so (they wanted to straight away, but authorities actually *stopped* them!).
But if a multi-billion-dollar company was recording that information
Notice again the prejudice - "multi-billion" == evil? So it would be OK if a small company did the same thing, but you just don't like big companies?
compiling a huge directory of photos of everybody who lives in every house
And more prejudice - "directory" implies Google is publishing some kind of public index that anybody can search - of course they are not. "who lives in every house" implies they are collecting personally identifiable information (names, photos, etc). Of course they are not.
Every analogy I see is inflated with these wild exaggerations about what has actually happened here. They collected *at most* a few packets of data (0.2 seconds worth) from any given Wifi connection. They publish *none* of this information. They use it to provide a *free public service* that has no strings attached. They do *not* correlate this information used for advertising and in no way ever expose it to their advertising network.
Seconded.
It's really a fascinating indicator of the situation Microsoft is in that they are so scared to include or promote basic photo gallery features in Win7 that people like this are completely unaware it exists.
For my money I like it much better than Picasa for the simple reason that it treats your photos *as files* rather than as a *database*. I got completely fed up with Picasa *pretending* it had modified my files when it had really only made changes in it's own database. Then you give photos to someone else and you find Picasa never really applied any of your changes. Or worse, you ditch Picasa and find out that years of long hard work is gone because Picasa was privately storing all that information (even things like rotations, cropping, etc.). (Yes, I know it has some option somewhere to turn this off. I resent the fact they make it the default).
I doubt they would ban encryption - it would be far more lucrative to insist that all the browsers include a government mandated root cert and then all the ISPs become men-in-the-middle.
It's far better to be the *only* ones who can listen in on conversations than to just be one of many.
I don't think we can even tell if this data collection was malicious or just a stupid mistake, going by the information that is available to us.
It is utterly absurd to think Google intended to collect the data because they collected so little as to be totally useless - they hopped channels every 0.2 seconds. The chance of getting anything useful in that time window is so ridiculously small that it makes a mockery of the idea that there was some malicious intent.
That is different. Competition within a market is perfectly ok and even encouraged (if you show my ads you can't show other ads in the same place - let the best ad provider win). Competition that restrains across markets is a problem (if you show my ads you can't use a Mac).
Can you find a place in the TOS for *any* google services that say you can't deal with or restrain in any way how you deal with a third party in a different market?
Something tells me Twitter isn't about to start censoring sites
What tells you that? In all seriousness, you're basically using the rationalization that every censor has ever used before bringing down an iron fist - "trust us - we'll protect you". You need something a little more than just thinking these are nice guys and won't hurt you to justify putting this kind of control and power into someone's hands.
And it really is a double edged sword. When the links are direct Twitter clearly has nothing to do with the content - it's clear. Once these links go through twitter it is a lot more blurry - they start to bear liability for the content that is linked to. If it's child porn - Twitter is aiding people to access child porn. If it is malicious web sites - Twitter is distributing malware. They might not bear the whole responsibility, but they've inserted themselves into the chain. The minute they dabble in any way with filtering or controlling these links they are basically opening a giant can of worms. The only sensible thing they can do is to be a pure URL shortener and do *nothing* to the links. But it would be even better to not have them go through Twitter in the first place.
Really? You think MS updated FireFox itself and didn't use FireFox's blessed extension mechanism specifically provided so that third parties can *their own* functions to FireFox?
Surely you troll ...
I'm pretty sure that Windows Update gets permission / consent somewhere along the line to umm.... you know... update your computer?
You might dislike any particular update it does, but if you just blindly turned on automatic updates and set them install automatically without review then please don't complain that these things are happening without your consent. It's perfectly possible to configure Windows Update to just download the updates and let you review them before you install.
> There's probably a keyboard shortcut to select the address bar like in a web browser, but it's not Ctrl+L it seems.
Indeed there isAlt-D - which also works in all web browsers on Windows as well (sadly, not on Macs though ... I can't tell you how many bookmarks I've accidentally created on OSX ...).
I agree with some of your points but I find it comical that you go all the way back to 1960 to tell me how better off I am now but manage to entirely overlook Windows Mobile which gave us ten times the supposed freedoms that you are crediting Apple with and did it circa 2003 (or earlier depending how you assess it). I'm sure you will wax eloquently on about how crap Windows Mobile is (and I will probably agree) but please don't tell me that Apple invented freedom here. They were late to the game and used their incredible power with consumers to take us backwards and entrench their own ecosystem, just as locked down but centralized around them instead of the carriers.
> My Android Nexus One phone already does mobile video conferencing.
Since the N1 only has a rear camera that must be quite a craptastic experience. You either see them or they see you, but never both at the same time?
> Because you don't have to buy an iPhone
Sadly, even those who try to escape Steve's clutches are affected by the iPhone, as evidenced by the fact that nearly every mobile platform is copying the App Store model, some of them with exactly the same kind of draconian lock-in policies. So this is not something we can just sit by and watch, it is an industry wide phenomenon that we must fight on every front that opens up, or one day we will get out of bed and there will be no platforms left where we have the legal right to run our own software any more.
So yes, even those of us who escaped the prison camp (or were never captured in the first place) will be coming back to help more of you get out, because there is more at stake here than just a few apps on a phone.
> Ad hoc is no holds barred.
Ad hoc expires after 90 days, has a limited number of devices it can deploy to. That is hardly "no holds barred".
Further, as far as I have been able to understand it, ad hoc is technically is still bound by Apple's SDK developer agreement, so even developing an application for you own phone may in fact violate the agreement.
So "no holds barred" is completely untrue.
> I'm particularly attracted to the new high-resolution screen
Really? You mean the screen that is only about 15% higher dpi than what you get on a stock android device these days? This seems like a very marginal thing to change a buying decision, especially considering you may have a hard time getting all the cool hardware to function on Android (last I heard the GPU was not fully utilized, etc.).
I would bet other devices will be on the market pretty quickly with these screens and wait for a new rev of the Nexus or similar.
If you deliberately decide to buy a phone where the manufacturer has disabled the most useful features - being able to install non-market apps or even access the app store at all - then it's just dumb to complain about that afterwards. The fact is, there *is* choice, so choose! Don't reward old school dinosaur carriers and phone manufacturers with your business. It's a new world now.
I find it interesting that you dismiss individual rights and enshrine those of the collective.
Is it ok for me to kill one person but if I kill a lot it's a problem?