This is what amazes me about this whole incident. Not one official person (other than from Google) has even once mentioned that people should protect their privacy by putting passwords on their Wifi access points.
On the radio just today, Stephen Conroy said that Google may have captured people doing "sensitive banking transactions" as they drove past, as if it would be perfectly safe for them if only Google hadn't driven past and captured the data. Overlooking that all banking transactions are done over https, Conroy was effectively advising people that extremely risky behavior is perfectly OK. There is a level of extreme hypocrisy about the whole debate that leads me to believe this is 100% a witch hunt primarily designed to distract from the government's own desire to violate our privacy.
Yes, it is a nice illustration of the double standard that the government is applying. I would like to now see a class action against the government(s) to sue *them* for breach of privacy. Then they would have to either go to court and argue it wasn't a privacy breach (in doing so admitting that what Google did wasn't that bad) or go to court and admit they are even worse privacy breachers than Google (since Google did it accidentally, while they pursued it intentionally).
RTFA. They wanted to find open access points for people to use when walking around with mobile phones
Not quite - you should RTFA too. They want it for geolocation. And they couldn't care less if the AP is open or not - they just record enough info to uniquely identify it and map it's signal strength. They are certainly not planning to advertise the location of these open APs which would be somewhat alarming.
The problem is, permissions are an all or nothing choice and many applications request privileges they don't really need (knowing your location one of the most common ones, often to present targeted advertising), so people are pretty quickly get used to just clicking OK to everything.
What I wish is that each security option was a checkbox so that I could install any app but deny it select privileges. When you deny privileges the app would still "work" but it would actually be talking to a stub for the real function (such as GPS or sending SMS) that fakes the function out. Authors could still code their apps to detect this and deliberately fail but by default their apps would "function" and you could evaluate how much you trust it before you turn on the full permissions.
[A good example: I like "fring" as a Skype substitute but I hate the fact it can send SMSs. I worry that if they turn evil they may start sending spam SMSs using my phone. I would love to be able to tell it to just give fring a fake SMS function but let the rest of the app work.]
> "Signed" in Android terms doesn't actually mean much
Well, it does in a way. Assuming the app came from the market then it means Google has established a real world relationship to a real world person based on that signature (usually, because they have done a credit card transaction, etc). So when you get an app from the market that turns out to be malware you (or Google) actually have a provable link to the person that distributed it to you and also non-repudiatable evidence that they intended to distribute it (because they signed it). Which all means that in theory you could sue the person who gave you the malware.
I think deterrent effect of this is probably the main reason we haven't seen much malware yet.
Yahoo was the one company that I actually perceived as not raping my privacy at every turn. It's very disappointing to see them jump on this bandwagon.
They clearly simply *do not get it*. The number one problem with the changes that google and facebook made was that they opted you in. It wasn't about warnings, information, etc. People who were interested could always find out the information. They didn't actually hide what they were doing. The problem was that they opted you in. Or where they presented a UI for choosing the defaults were opted in. Now Yahoo decides to do exactly the same thing.
If they really do this then I may well delete my Yahoo mail account which I've kept now for 15 years.
They hate anything that has the slightest potential to threaten their vice like control over their platform or their position as a toll gate on any content that gets on the device.
The amazing thing is that half of them are convinced it does everything and is the future of computing and the other half are busy rationalizing Steve's insane obsession with control by saying that it doesn't do anything much - it's not like your computer, it's like your "toaster" and hence it's perfectly reasonable that it comes bundled with strict constraints on what you can do with it. It certainly can't be both of these things.
What a total hypocrite... he was just fine with living in the dictatorship until they came for *him*. Then suddenly he sees a problem.
There's been enough publicity by now that anybody investing in the iPhone ecosystem should know they are doing a deal with the devil. Don't complain, just suck it up and take your investment to a platform that won't screw you over.
His point was that Australians can't sell apps on the marketplace yet
It's hard to compute how that translates to Android being the "Wild West". It seems to me he's just angry and wanted to stick it to Google while he was on his soap box.
At least he can sell his app quite happily outside of the Android Marketplace if he wants. Just that fact alone will ensure that Google works hard to keep the Android store fair.
Jumping to WP7 because you don't like Apple's locked down store would be incredibly foolish. MS has locked down the apps for WP7 just as much as Apple.
If you're just looking for a choice between Disneyland and Disneyworld, then fine, but if you actually want choice and freedom then Android is really the only platform left for you that seems to have a good long term chance of becoming mainstream.
Very few consumers even realise that the iPad doesn't support Flash because they barely comprehend what Flash is and Apple has engaged in a fraudulent advertising campaign stating that the iPad gives you the "Whole" Web when it very clearly lacks a number of fundamental features that are part of the normal consumer's comprehension of what the "web" is.
For most consumers they get the device and are simply surprised and disappointed that so many web sites appear to just "not work". But usually they don't blame it on Apple because the love for Apple is so strong that they just can't comprehend that Apple could be the cause it is not working.
> the purpose of law (and government) is to create a successful society
It may be true at a practical level, but I find this kind of rationalization very scary. You are saying that the needs of the collective universally outweigh those of the individual. Which for example (sorry to Godwin the thread) would mean that if we genuinely come to believe that Jews negatively affect society then it is quite OK to discriminate against them, perhaps even ship them out on trains or enslave them and put them in camps because, hey, making 'society' better is a higher purpose than protecting the rights of individuals.
> From some points of view, pornography is immoral. The real questions that should be asked are whether it is detrimental to society
I have to disagree. We are not here to serve 'society', 'society' is here to serve us. We are individuals who agree to participate in 'society' because it serves our own interests. If we all choose masturbating to porn as a great thing to do then it is not the business of government to make a judgement that 'society' has been negatively affected. If you want to make this argument then you have to drive it down to how it negatively affects individuals, and then address a solution at the most granular level possible to help those individuals. It is only in the most extreme and rare cases that this should rise to the level that all 'society' has to be controlled.
Ad hoc is useless for nearly all kinds of deployment because it expires after 90 days, and the apps stop working. (Actually, it expires after an undefined time which Apple occasionally changes just for the fun of it).
Do you know the main reason I read the local newspaper here? Because everyone else does. It's discussed among friends, on the radio, on television, all over the place.
It is the network effect. And when you cut 90% of the network out, you don't end up with 10%, you end up with zero because people simply all go and congregate somewhere else where, once again, they can all be together.
It is amazing to see the desperate competition of new players trying to get into the social networking space and contrast it with the old time dinosaurs who are working as fast as they can to destroy their own assets in the same space.
Actually I think news is in a criteria that does require not government, but independent funding. If news is controlled by private commercial interests then it is impossible for the citizens to access independent information on which to make their voting decisions, because at one time or another it is absolutely certain that laws will need to be made that will affect the private companies providing news and it is impossible for them to provide unbiased reporting about such things. Having an independently funded organization (removed from government) with a fixed funding source and a fixed charter is about the least worst way I can think of doing this. This organization will be admittedly biased towards its own interests, but because we have reduced its funding to a single, fixed source and removed all other obligations other than to obey their charter of providing independent news it is at least as transparent as it can possibly be as to where the biases are.
Why does it always have to be a "fight"?... (I catch what you're saying; but a society apparently spawning the habit of presenting everything as a fight has another set of problems)
Because our natural instincts as humans when we are afraid are to give in to control by a higher authority for protection. It is built in to us at a deep psychological level. Therefore the conflict as much as anything, is with ourselves to remember how wrong our natural instincts are in the larger picture.
Using the metaphor of a "fight" helps to understand this idea in a simple way.
otherwise you could use them for very anonymous communication, perfect for criminal activity..
Umm, there's this thing called the internet which has about a million different ways that people can manage to communicate and remain anonymous. There are also knives, cars, axes, crow bars, guns and all manner of things that could be used for criminal purposes. If you think eliminating everything from society that could possibly be used for a criminal purpose is a reasonable goal of government then you're basically volunteering to live in a police state.
You have it backwards. YOU want to catch the bad guys. How about you throw US a bone and find some ways that don't infringe on our civil liberties?
In free societies the rights of individuals come *first*, then within those constraints you conduct the activities of law enforcement. And yes, we tolerate a certain level of crime because that is the price of our freedom and in the end, by definition, in a free society people have capability to do things that break the law.
Just stop trying to take what isn't yours and we'll all get along.
It's not stupidity. Somehow every other browser maker manages to get by on XP and do so with good performance, yet it's too much for Microsoft the MAKER of the OS itself to figure it out? Believing that story is "stupidity".
If XP doesn't support the acceleration then you just write an emulation layer for that part and tell people that the XP version of IE9 is slower and they should upgrade windows to get some awesome speed boosts.
Whichever way you spin it Microsoft is doing this by *choice*. They *chose* to use APIs not available to XP in the first place. Then they *chose* not to bother back-porting an emulation layer for the XP version to use. These choices are devastating to we developers who now confront the reality that the so-called "HTML5" revolution is, in reality, going to take 3 - 4 years more to arrive - holding back the entire internet because one single company couldn't bothered to spend a few developer hours.
The way I see it, Apple sends you a binary version of the product and you must have the right to redistribute and use *exactly that* binary version with no additional limitations. Not some other hypothetical binary version that may exist somewhere else - exactly that one that you received from Apple. So it is not "good enough" just to post some binary that you claim is equivalent and free of restriction. If you can't use Apple's one that way then they fail the GPL test.
I think Apple would definitely be on the hook once they are notified by the FSF. It's essentially the same as the DMCA takedown situation in a different context - if they know of the violation, assist in it taking place and fail to act and especially profit (either directly or indirectly) from it then they are "inducing" the copyright infringement.
If Wifi access point owners do not know that they are publicly broadcasting then that is the fault of the access point vendor whose software / setup process should have had sufficient instructions to inform them about it. I do actually think that there should be some thought about a class action against vendors that set you up with a totally insecure configuration by default.
However the whole problem is nothing to do with Google. Perhaps Google should sue the access point vendors for any trouble they are put to over this - that would be fair, in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what amazes me about this whole incident. Not one official person (other than from Google) has even once mentioned that people should protect their privacy by putting passwords on their Wifi access points.
On the radio just today, Stephen Conroy said that Google may have captured people doing "sensitive banking transactions" as they drove past, as if it would be perfectly safe for them if only Google hadn't driven past and captured the data. Overlooking that all banking transactions are done over https, Conroy was effectively advising people that extremely risky behavior is perfectly OK. There is a level of extreme hypocrisy about the whole debate that leads me to believe this is 100% a witch hunt primarily designed to distract from the government's own desire to violate our privacy.
Yes, it is a nice illustration of the double standard that the government is applying. I would like to now see a class action against the government(s) to sue *them* for breach of privacy. Then they would have to either go to court and argue it wasn't a privacy breach (in doing so admitting that what Google did wasn't that bad) or go to court and admit they are even worse privacy breachers than Google (since Google did it accidentally, while they pursued it intentionally).
RTFA. They wanted to find open access points for people to use when walking around with mobile phones
Not quite - you should RTFA too. They want it for geolocation. And they couldn't care less if the AP is open or not - they just record enough info to uniquely identify it and map it's signal strength. They are certainly not planning to advertise the location of these open APs which would be somewhat alarming.
The problem is, permissions are an all or nothing choice and many applications request privileges they don't really need (knowing your location one of the most common ones, often to present targeted advertising), so people are pretty quickly get used to just clicking OK to everything.
What I wish is that each security option was a checkbox so that I could install any app but deny it select privileges. When you deny privileges the app would still "work" but it would actually be talking to a stub for the real function (such as GPS or sending SMS) that fakes the function out. Authors could still code their apps to detect this and deliberately fail but by default their apps would "function" and you could evaluate how much you trust it before you turn on the full permissions.
[A good example: I like "fring" as a Skype substitute but I hate the fact it can send SMSs. I worry that if they turn evil they may start sending spam SMSs using my phone. I would love to be able to tell it to just give fring a fake SMS function but let the rest of the app work.]
> "Signed" in Android terms doesn't actually mean much
Well, it does in a way. Assuming the app came from the market then it means Google has established a real world relationship to a real world person based on that signature (usually, because they have done a credit card transaction, etc). So when you get an app from the market that turns out to be malware you (or Google) actually have a provable link to the person that distributed it to you and also non-repudiatable evidence that they intended to distribute it (because they signed it). Which all means that in theory you could sue the person who gave you the malware.
I think deterrent effect of this is probably the main reason we haven't seen much malware yet.
Yahoo was the one company that I actually perceived as not raping my privacy at every turn. It's very disappointing to see them jump on this bandwagon.
They clearly simply *do not get it*. The number one problem with the changes that google and facebook made was that they opted you in. It wasn't about warnings, information, etc. People who were interested could always find out the information. They didn't actually hide what they were doing. The problem was that they opted you in. Or where they presented a UI for choosing the defaults were opted in. Now Yahoo decides to do exactly the same thing.
If they really do this then I may well delete my Yahoo mail account which I've kept now for 15 years.
You're right that they don't hate Flash per se.
They hate anything that has the slightest potential to threaten their vice like control over their platform or their position as a toll gate on any content that gets on the device.
These people are convinced it does everything
The amazing thing is that half of them are convinced it does everything and is the future of computing and the other half are busy rationalizing Steve's insane obsession with control by saying that it doesn't do anything much - it's not like your computer, it's like your "toaster" and hence it's perfectly reasonable that it comes bundled with strict constraints on what you can do with it. It certainly can't be both of these things.
What a total hypocrite ... he was just fine with living in the dictatorship until they came for *him*. Then suddenly he sees a problem.
There's been enough publicity by now that anybody investing in the iPhone ecosystem should know they are doing a deal with the devil. Don't complain, just suck it up and take your investment to a platform that won't screw you over.
His point was that Australians can't sell apps on the marketplace yet
It's hard to compute how that translates to Android being the "Wild West". It seems to me he's just angry and wanted to stick it to Google while he was on his soap box.
At least he can sell his app quite happily outside of the Android Marketplace if he wants. Just that fact alone will ensure that Google works hard to keep the Android store fair.
Frying pan vs Fire?
Jumping to WP7 because you don't like Apple's locked down store would be incredibly foolish. MS has locked down the apps for WP7 just as much as Apple.
If you're just looking for a choice between Disneyland and Disneyworld, then fine, but if you actually want choice and freedom then Android is really the only platform left for you that seems to have a good long term chance of becoming mainstream.
the Apple store has rules (which are published, you just have to read them)
Yeah, the problem is that one of those rules is "we don't have to play by the rules, but you do".
Very few consumers even realise that the iPad doesn't support Flash because they barely comprehend what Flash is and Apple has engaged in a fraudulent advertising campaign stating that the iPad gives you the "Whole" Web when it very clearly lacks a number of fundamental features that are part of the normal consumer's comprehension of what the "web" is.
For most consumers they get the device and are simply surprised and disappointed that so many web sites appear to just "not work". But usually they don't blame it on Apple because the love for Apple is so strong that they just can't comprehend that Apple could be the cause it is not working.
> the purpose of law (and government) is to create a successful society
It may be true at a practical level, but I find this kind of rationalization very scary. You are saying that the needs of the collective universally outweigh those of the individual. Which for example (sorry to Godwin the thread) would mean that if we genuinely come to believe that Jews negatively affect society then it is quite OK to discriminate against them, perhaps even ship them out on trains or enslave them and put them in camps because, hey, making 'society' better is a higher purpose than protecting the rights of individuals.
> From some points of view, pornography is immoral. The real questions that should be asked are whether it is detrimental to society
I have to disagree. We are not here to serve 'society', 'society' is here to serve us. We are individuals who agree to participate in 'society' because it serves our own interests. If we all choose masturbating to porn as a great thing to do then it is not the business of government to make a judgement that 'society' has been negatively affected. If you want to make this argument then you have to drive it down to how it negatively affects individuals, and then address a solution at the most granular level possible to help those individuals. It is only in the most extreme and rare cases that this should rise to the level that all 'society' has to be controlled.
Ad hoc is useless for nearly all kinds of deployment because it expires after 90 days, and the apps stop working. (Actually, it expires after an undefined time which Apple occasionally changes just for the fun of it).
I think they are incredibly optimistic.
Do you know the main reason I read the local newspaper here? Because everyone else does. It's discussed among friends, on the radio, on television, all over the place.
It is the network effect. And when you cut 90% of the network out, you don't end up with 10%, you end up with zero because people simply all go and congregate somewhere else where, once again, they can all be together.
It is amazing to see the desperate competition of new players trying to get into the social networking space and contrast it with the old time dinosaurs who are working as fast as they can to destroy their own assets in the same space.
Actually I think news is in a criteria that does require not government, but independent funding. If news is controlled by private commercial interests then it is impossible for the citizens to access independent information on which to make their voting decisions, because at one time or another it is absolutely certain that laws will need to be made that will affect the private companies providing news and it is impossible for them to provide unbiased reporting about such things. Having an independently funded organization (removed from government) with a fixed funding source and a fixed charter is about the least worst way I can think of doing this. This organization will be admittedly biased towards its own interests, but because we have reduced its funding to a single, fixed source and removed all other obligations other than to obey their charter of providing independent news it is at least as transparent as it can possibly be as to where the biases are.
Why does it always have to be a "fight"?... (I catch what you're saying; but a society apparently spawning the habit of presenting everything as a fight has another set of problems)
Because our natural instincts as humans when we are afraid are to give in to control by a higher authority for protection. It is built in to us at a deep psychological level. Therefore the conflict as much as anything, is with ourselves to remember how wrong our natural instincts are in the larger picture.
Using the metaphor of a "fight" helps to understand this idea in a simple way.
otherwise you could use them for very anonymous communication, perfect for criminal activity..
Umm, there's this thing called the internet which has about a million different ways that people can manage to communicate and remain anonymous. There are also knives, cars, axes, crow bars, guns and all manner of things that could be used for criminal purposes. If you think eliminating everything from society that could possibly be used for a criminal purpose is a reasonable goal of government then you're basically volunteering to live in a police state.
You have it backwards. YOU want to catch the bad guys. How about you throw US a bone and find some ways that don't infringe on our civil liberties?
In free societies the rights of individuals come *first*, then within those constraints you conduct the activities of law enforcement. And yes, we tolerate a certain level of crime because that is the price of our freedom and in the end, by definition, in a free society people have capability to do things that break the law.
Just stop trying to take what isn't yours and we'll all get along.
And, how many bad password entries does it take for a Blackberry to wipe ALL its data? 10 (or less if you want).
I'll have to try this on my friend's phone one day just for laughs ...
It's not stupidity. Somehow every other browser maker manages to get by on XP and do so with good performance, yet it's too much for Microsoft the MAKER of the OS itself to figure it out? Believing that story is "stupidity".
If XP doesn't support the acceleration then you just write an emulation layer for that part and tell people that the XP version of IE9 is slower and they should upgrade windows to get some awesome speed boosts.
Whichever way you spin it Microsoft is doing this by *choice*. They *chose* to use APIs not available to XP in the first place. Then they *chose* not to bother back-porting an emulation layer for the XP version to use. These choices are devastating to we developers who now confront the reality that the so-called "HTML5" revolution is, in reality, going to take 3 - 4 years more to arrive - holding back the entire internet because one single company couldn't bothered to spend a few developer hours.
> Or am I just not getting something?
The way I see it, Apple sends you a binary version of the product and you must have the right to redistribute and use *exactly that* binary version with no additional limitations. Not some other hypothetical binary version that may exist somewhere else - exactly that one that you received from Apple. So it is not "good enough" just to post some binary that you claim is equivalent and free of restriction. If you can't use Apple's one that way then they fail the GPL test.
I think Apple would definitely be on the hook once they are notified by the FSF. It's essentially the same as the DMCA takedown situation in a different context - if they know of the violation, assist in it taking place and fail to act and especially profit (either directly or indirectly) from it then they are "inducing" the copyright infringement.
If Wifi access point owners do not know that they are publicly broadcasting then that is the fault of the access point vendor whose software / setup process should have had sufficient instructions to inform them about it. I do actually think that there should be some thought about a class action against vendors that set you up with a totally insecure configuration by default.
However the whole problem is nothing to do with Google. Perhaps Google should sue the access point vendors for any trouble they are put to over this - that would be fair, in my opinion.