A visit to their homepage helpfully tells Comodo, Twitter, UserTrust and Google about your visit and drops several cookies, some lasting one or two years. But it's OK - it all goes via SSL so it must be good for privacy.
The very existence of 'privacy professionals' as a thing is largely predicated on a rather...tense...view of privacy: specifically, that we will generate and store a fuckton of data about you; but then we'll hire a guy to make sure that the data are only accessed in compliance with HIPAA and/or after the payment has cleared...
They are really more 'transparency compartmentalization' than 'privacy'.
Aside from the trivial case(systems so undocumented that they are, themselves, all the documentation that exists), has anything ever reached the state of perfection where The Manual is actually authoritative?
It'd be a bit scorched-earth; but I wonder if their input validation is good enough to keep a, er, 'motivated', individual from seeding the database with strings that could be construed to create a hostile work environment for the junk mailer's employees? 'Offensive' can get 'expensive' in certain workplace contexts...
The fibers in paper break down a bit with each recycling cycle(and the color generally drifts a bit, unless you bleach it good and hard, which costs money and isn't great for the fibers or the fishies) since phone books are already printed on total shit-grade paper, and contain a lot of ink, they probably reduce the value of the recycled pulp for any but the most undemanding applications.
If the ink doesn't have any problematic metals(not always a safe assumption historically, probably better now) pallets of dry phone books are probably worth something as fuel; but that's about it.
It's amusing because Google only 'controls the technology roadmap' because the other candidates seem to draw their software and UI dev teams directly from the same talent pool that produces ghastly shovelware to be preloaded on cheap consumer wintels. It's to the point where 'flagship device' means 'not fucked up by OEMs'...
It's honestly pretty pathetic. If anything, some of the anonymous Chinese KiRF vendors are better than the big names, since they don't have the time or money to waste on custom skins or abortive attempts at their own apps stores, or whatnot.
While the overly-aggressive push to IVRs in areas where they are clearly too immature to be viable is a rather annoying penny-pinching move, it hardly seems like most of the situations being described are really the sort of 'human interaction' that we want to hold on to.
Interacting with the poor bastard getting paid not-enough to push whatever paper is connected to my situation isn't all that pleasant. I hate to think how it is for the CSR, whose reward for finishing with me is yet another customer...
It is certainly possible for technology to be isolating(or, perhaps more accurately, quietly ease somebody into isolating themselves); but if your quota of 'human interaction' is currently with people slated for replacement with voice recognition and expert systems, I have some bad news about how isolated you already are.
"Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society."
Advertising -- especially political advertising -- is about controlling the message.
Social media is about allowing the message to be debated.
If you want the market penetration of social media, fine. But unless you can disable commenting, you have to take the bad with the good.
I wouldn't be so optimistic. The Chinese, for instance, have been doing considerable R&D on the problem of 'guiding' the conversation without pissing people off by banning the medium entirely. Here in the Land of the Free, we have fine people like HB Gary Federal working on 'Persona management software' for more efficient sock-puppetry.
I'd assume that, with a little more polish, Facebook will soon offer not only Sponsored posts; but(for a small additional fee) 'curation' of responses to sponsored content. Positive responses will receive greater visibility, negative comments will be made less visible or culled.
Well, the major difference is that, in the cases you mention, the politicians fucked up in the same direction as the electorate, and thus(from a pandering perspective) didn't fuck up at all...
On the minus side, it has become readily apparent that the internet's SNR has some... room for improvement. It's also pretty easy for moderately competent jokers to combine trolling skills with sock-puppetry, poll stuffing, etc, etc.
Even on parts of the internet where controlling the discourse is worth essentially nothing, some nutjob is probably wasting his life winning the edit war or posting about how he earns $68/hour working from home. If there were a location where politicians were actually listening(and, implicitly, money and power were available for allocation), you'd need explosives to cut your way through the astroturf...
You seem to have your stereotypes mixed up: campaign operatives, PR flacks, Ad agencies, and similar(while undoubtedly twisted abhumans who subsist on a diet of hatred and the flesh of innocents) are Not sinecured civil-service jobsworths(neither are a lot of real-world bureaucrats; but many of them at least have that option).
The ones attached directly to a given party or candidate rise and fall with the fortunes of their client, and the freelance ones only get re-hired if they appear to get results.
Some of the actual politicians are a few bulbs short of a christmas tree(though they usually have to have some sort of compensating virtues, like charisma or a smiling family for photo ops); but candidate marketing is a flavor of advertising, which is something that we take very seriously indeed.
Inconveniently, while the new kids have grown up and gotten increasingly mean and creepy, that hasn't really stopped IBM and AT&T(or its larger post-breakup chunks) from still being the big bad boys. Team telco is still rent seeking, and IBM didn't build Watson to win at Jeopardy...
Whether through malice, incompetence, or simple inertia, privacy law tends to exhibit a substantial lack of imagination in how it protects information.
A few professions with very long histories(doctors, lawyers, sometimes priests if your jurisdiction isn't so hot on church/state separation) who necessarily have access to privileged information in order to operate tend to be covered; but historically novel entities, or those who use novel inferential methods, tend not to be.
(In practice, I suspect that advertising sellers would also be happy to weasel-word it: "Goodness no, we don't sell consumers' medical information or records! We don't have those, and that would be wicked and naughty. We merely strive to match contextually relevant advertisements to people who might be interested in them. However, if you are interested in an ad-buy targeting customers who searched for 'how is babby formed', or 'breast cancer doctors boston ma' or 'signs of depression', please call our sales team!" That's where you are pretty doomed. When it comes right down to it, people absolutely bleed data about themselves in the course of their everyday activities, not merely when they explicitly tell their lawyer something or let their doctor conduct a test, and now we have the technology to piece together and draw inferences from all those little bits and pieces that people reveal throughout the day.)
Is Microsoft working under the theory that (since they have other profitable areas of business, and Google basically doesn't) it will be wholly worth it if the can salt the earth under both Google and their own advertising efforts?
Or are they making the best of a bad situation by advertising the inferiority of their analytics capabilities as a privacy feature?
Or are they simply hoping that mutually applicable accusations will stick to whoever they are made against first?
The decision was made by the Library of Congress, removing unlocking from the list of things exempt from the DMCA I believe. If they reverse that decision, and it sounds like they will, then the problem is solved unless Congress drafts specific legislation to make it illegal.
In addition to(as you say) the matter being out of Congress' hands unless they amend the DMCA to change the Librarian of Congress' role, it is in some sense the purpose of these goofy little exemptions to protect the DMCA as a whole.
How better to protect the fundamental overreach of the DMCA(ie. just by combining virtually anything copyrighted with even a totally crap DRM system, anybody can code rules into their product, with those rules being given force of federal law, or at least serving as a presumptively very strong basis for lawsuits) than by having a tame process for throwing the opposition a bone on a few relatively minor; but culturally, educationally, or otherwise symbolically significant issues?
If the intention were to open a real exemption in the DMCA, it'd be legal to break DRM for any purpose that is otherwise legal, and development, use, sale, etc. of circumvention tools and devices would only constitute aggravating factors in copyright infringement cases, rather than crimes in themselves.
Jewelry is a type of fashion accessory; but the design and production of fashion accessories is a much larger, more varied, and in many cases quite a bit of a different matter than the production of jewelry. The two are hardly identical.
Honestly, it seems like the 'analyst' pulled the number straight out of his ass even by financial analyst standards.
Aside from the problem you note(today's watch spending is heavily skewed toward overpriced jewelry and 1$ quartz cheapies by the metric ton, which doesn't tell you how big the market for a 'far more expensive than a cheapie, far more powerful and less purely aesthetic than jewelry' product would be), why the focus on revenue?
Apple doesn't give a damn about revenue, never has, they care about profit(so, theoretically, do all for-profit corporations; but Apple is particularly aggressive about simply ignoring segments whose margins don't excite them).
In terms of Apple's ability to make a profit on watches, today's watch market tells us essentially nothing: the cheap seats tell us nothing because Apple would never hit those price points, the expensive seats tell us nothing because Apple doesn't do jewelry. As it stands, the market for 'smart watches' is vanishingly small, almost wholly irrelevant to the watch market generally.
Areal density improvements really accentuate the characteristics that disks have always had(in addition to being cheap and huge):
As you say, the density increases mean that the speed of the head in bits/second has been growing by leaps and bounds, even as actual platter speeds haven't budged in years. And, if you throw a lovely, contiguous, read or write at an HDD, you'll see results to match. Even a lousy little consumer disk can be pretty damn fast.
Under a random I/O workload, everything collapses into seek hell, and suddenly it mostly comes down to how fast you can get the head into position(which really hasn't improved all that much and has always been a sad story).
I suspect that that's why they are killing the faster ones(which are slightly noisier and run slightly hotter). The market for HDDs isn't so much drying up; but strategies other than 'make the hard drive rotate faster' for making storage perform better have been getting cheaper and better pretty aggressively.
With modern areal densities and codecs, if your bandwidth requirements are routinely saturating a 5400rpm drive, you probably have something a bit more serious than a DVR in mind. If occasional bursts are giving you trouble, you can put in a lot of RAM cache for what it would cost to switch to an SSD of equivalent size, and a mere 7200 probably wouldn't have saved you.
.. does this mean that everybody's caught on to their predatory business model?
It's worse than that: Not only is their business model predatory, it has a low first-mover advantage and minimal barriers to entry(and to the degree that the barriers are there, other people are way beyond them).
There is nothing stopping a bevy of more-or-less-exact imitators ('livesocial' and friends); but there is also nothing stopping the people who already issue the consumer's credit card and the small businesses' hosted-payroll service from spinning something ('Bank Amerideals(tm)').
Groupon was doubly screwed: not only are they vultures who are ultimately bad for the people they depend on to offer further offers, they are less efficient and well placed vultures than those who are already well entrenched. Bank of America, or any other major financial institution/credit card issuer, aren't creative enough to know their asses from a hole in the ground; but they are trivially better placed than groupon to skim a few extra percentage points from the transactions they already skim a few percentage points from.
I'm pretty sure that 'being CEO of a company built on skimming a percentage of the profits from businesses willing to lose money and make it up in volume' is epic trolling on a scale that most trolls will never even be able to dream of...
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A visit to their homepage helpfully tells Comodo, Twitter, UserTrust and Google about your visit and drops several cookies, some lasting one or two years. But it's OK - it all goes via SSL so it must be good for privacy.
The very existence of 'privacy professionals' as a thing is largely predicated on a rather...tense...view of privacy: specifically, that we will generate and store a fuckton of data about you; but then we'll hire a guy to make sure that the data are only accessed in compliance with HIPAA and/or after the payment has cleared...
They are really more 'transparency compartmentalization' than 'privacy'.
Aside from the trivial case(systems so undocumented that they are, themselves, all the documentation that exists), has anything ever reached the state of perfection where The Manual is actually authoritative?
Anything that triggers an official talking-to from the fine people at eeoc.gov
It'd be a bit scorched-earth; but I wonder if their input validation is good enough to keep a, er, 'motivated', individual from seeding the database with strings that could be construed to create a hostile work environment for the junk mailer's employees? 'Offensive' can get 'expensive' in certain workplace contexts...
Members of the boards of directors for the Association of Directory Publishers or the Local Search Association clearly love phone books. It's worth looking to see if any are local to you, so you can help them out...
Just be sure to scrawl offensive messages on your trash before dumping it, to ensure that it is clearly identifiable as political speech.
The fibers in paper break down a bit with each recycling cycle(and the color generally drifts a bit, unless you bleach it good and hard, which costs money and isn't great for the fibers or the fishies) since phone books are already printed on total shit-grade paper, and contain a lot of ink, they probably reduce the value of the recycled pulp for any but the most undemanding applications.
If the ink doesn't have any problematic metals(not always a safe assumption historically, probably better now) pallets of dry phone books are probably worth something as fuel; but that's about it.
Why inconvenience the poor bastards on the cleaning crew for whatever office space they rent?
Surely home delivery of unwanted phone books, being protected speech and all, should be acceptable for the corporate officers responsible?
It's amusing because Google only 'controls the technology roadmap' because the other candidates seem to draw their software and UI dev teams directly from the same talent pool that produces ghastly shovelware to be preloaded on cheap consumer wintels. It's to the point where 'flagship device' means 'not fucked up by OEMs'...
It's honestly pretty pathetic. If anything, some of the anonymous Chinese KiRF vendors are better than the big names, since they don't have the time or money to waste on custom skins or abortive attempts at their own apps stores, or whatnot.
While the overly-aggressive push to IVRs in areas where they are clearly too immature to be viable is a rather annoying penny-pinching move, it hardly seems like most of the situations being described are really the sort of 'human interaction' that we want to hold on to.
Interacting with the poor bastard getting paid not-enough to push whatever paper is connected to my situation isn't all that pleasant. I hate to think how it is for the CSR, whose reward for finishing with me is yet another customer...
It is certainly possible for technology to be isolating(or, perhaps more accurately, quietly ease somebody into isolating themselves); but if your quota of 'human interaction' is currently with people slated for replacement with voice recognition and expert systems, I have some bad news about how isolated you already are.
"Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society."
Advertising -- especially political advertising -- is about controlling the message.
Social media is about allowing the message to be debated.
If you want the market penetration of social media, fine. But unless you can disable commenting, you have to take the bad with the good.
I wouldn't be so optimistic. The Chinese, for instance, have been doing considerable R&D on the problem of 'guiding' the conversation without pissing people off by banning the medium entirely. Here in the Land of the Free, we have fine people like HB Gary Federal working on 'Persona management software' for more efficient sock-puppetry.
I'd assume that, with a little more polish, Facebook will soon offer not only Sponsored posts; but(for a small additional fee) 'curation' of responses to sponsored content. Positive responses will receive greater visibility, negative comments will be made less visible or culled.
Well, the major difference is that, in the cases you mention, the politicians fucked up in the same direction as the electorate, and thus(from a pandering perspective) didn't fuck up at all...
On the minus side, it has become readily apparent that the internet's SNR has some... room for improvement. It's also pretty easy for moderately competent jokers to combine trolling skills with sock-puppetry, poll stuffing, etc, etc.
Even on parts of the internet where controlling the discourse is worth essentially nothing, some nutjob is probably wasting his life winning the edit war or posting about how he earns $68/hour working from home. If there were a location where politicians were actually listening(and, implicitly, money and power were available for allocation), you'd need explosives to cut your way through the astroturf...
You seem to have your stereotypes mixed up: campaign operatives, PR flacks, Ad agencies, and similar(while undoubtedly twisted abhumans who subsist on a diet of hatred and the flesh of innocents) are Not sinecured civil-service jobsworths(neither are a lot of real-world bureaucrats; but many of them at least have that option).
The ones attached directly to a given party or candidate rise and fall with the fortunes of their client, and the freelance ones only get re-hired if they appear to get results.
Some of the actual politicians are a few bulbs short of a christmas tree(though they usually have to have some sort of compensating virtues, like charisma or a smiling family for photo ops); but candidate marketing is a flavor of advertising, which is something that we take very seriously indeed.
Inconveniently, while the new kids have grown up and gotten increasingly mean and creepy, that hasn't really stopped IBM and AT&T(or its larger post-breakup chunks) from still being the big bad boys. Team telco is still rent seeking, and IBM didn't build Watson to win at Jeopardy...
Whether through malice, incompetence, or simple inertia, privacy law tends to exhibit a substantial lack of imagination in how it protects information.
A few professions with very long histories(doctors, lawyers, sometimes priests if your jurisdiction isn't so hot on church/state separation) who necessarily have access to privileged information in order to operate tend to be covered; but historically novel entities, or those who use novel inferential methods, tend not to be.
(In practice, I suspect that advertising sellers would also be happy to weasel-word it: "Goodness no, we don't sell consumers' medical information or records! We don't have those, and that would be wicked and naughty. We merely strive to match contextually relevant advertisements to people who might be interested in them. However, if you are interested in an ad-buy targeting customers who searched for 'how is babby formed', or 'breast cancer doctors boston ma' or 'signs of depression', please call our sales team!" That's where you are pretty doomed. When it comes right down to it, people absolutely bleed data about themselves in the course of their everyday activities, not merely when they explicitly tell their lawyer something or let their doctor conduct a test, and now we have the technology to piece together and draw inferences from all those little bits and pieces that people reveal throughout the day.)
Is Microsoft working under the theory that (since they have other profitable areas of business, and Google basically doesn't) it will be wholly worth it if the can salt the earth under both Google and their own advertising efforts?
Or are they making the best of a bad situation by advertising the inferiority of their analytics capabilities as a privacy feature?
Or are they simply hoping that mutually applicable accusations will stick to whoever they are made against first?
The decision was made by the Library of Congress, removing unlocking from the list of things exempt from the DMCA I believe. If they reverse that decision, and it sounds like they will, then the problem is solved unless Congress drafts specific legislation to make it illegal.
In addition to(as you say) the matter being out of Congress' hands unless they amend the DMCA to change the Librarian of Congress' role, it is in some sense the purpose of these goofy little exemptions to protect the DMCA as a whole.
How better to protect the fundamental overreach of the DMCA(ie. just by combining virtually anything copyrighted with even a totally crap DRM system, anybody can code rules into their product, with those rules being given force of federal law, or at least serving as a presumptively very strong basis for lawsuits) than by having a tame process for throwing the opposition a bone on a few relatively minor; but culturally, educationally, or otherwise symbolically significant issues?
If the intention were to open a real exemption in the DMCA, it'd be legal to break DRM for any purpose that is otherwise legal, and development, use, sale, etc. of circumvention tools and devices would only constitute aggravating factors in copyright infringement cases, rather than crimes in themselves.
Jewelry is a type of fashion accessory; but the design and production of fashion accessories is a much larger, more varied, and in many cases quite a bit of a different matter than the production of jewelry. The two are hardly identical.
Honestly, it seems like the 'analyst' pulled the number straight out of his ass even by financial analyst standards.
Aside from the problem you note(today's watch spending is heavily skewed toward overpriced jewelry and 1$ quartz cheapies by the metric ton, which doesn't tell you how big the market for a 'far more expensive than a cheapie, far more powerful and less purely aesthetic than jewelry' product would be), why the focus on revenue?
Apple doesn't give a damn about revenue, never has, they care about profit(so, theoretically, do all for-profit corporations; but Apple is particularly aggressive about simply ignoring segments whose margins don't excite them).
In terms of Apple's ability to make a profit on watches, today's watch market tells us essentially nothing: the cheap seats tell us nothing because Apple would never hit those price points, the expensive seats tell us nothing because Apple doesn't do jewelry. As it stands, the market for 'smart watches' is vanishingly small, almost wholly irrelevant to the watch market generally.
Areal density improvements really accentuate the characteristics that disks have always had(in addition to being cheap and huge):
As you say, the density increases mean that the speed of the head in bits/second has been growing by leaps and bounds, even as actual platter speeds haven't budged in years. And, if you throw a lovely, contiguous, read or write at an HDD, you'll see results to match. Even a lousy little consumer disk can be pretty damn fast.
Under a random I/O workload, everything collapses into seek hell, and suddenly it mostly comes down to how fast you can get the head into position(which really hasn't improved all that much and has always been a sad story).
I suspect that that's why they are killing the faster ones(which are slightly noisier and run slightly hotter). The market for HDDs isn't so much drying up; but strategies other than 'make the hard drive rotate faster' for making storage perform better have been getting cheaper and better pretty aggressively.
With modern areal densities and codecs, if your bandwidth requirements are routinely saturating a 5400rpm drive, you probably have something a bit more serious than a DVR in mind. If occasional bursts are giving you trouble, you can put in a lot of RAM cache for what it would cost to switch to an SSD of equivalent size, and a mere 7200 probably wouldn't have saved you.
.. does this mean that everybody's caught on to their predatory business model?
It's worse than that: Not only is their business model predatory, it has a low first-mover advantage and minimal barriers to entry(and to the degree that the barriers are there, other people are way beyond them).
There is nothing stopping a bevy of more-or-less-exact imitators ('livesocial' and friends); but there is also nothing stopping the people who already issue the consumer's credit card and the small businesses' hosted-payroll service from spinning something ('Bank Amerideals(tm)').
Groupon was doubly screwed: not only are they vultures who are ultimately bad for the people they depend on to offer further offers, they are less efficient and well placed vultures than those who are already well entrenched. Bank of America, or any other major financial institution/credit card issuer, aren't creative enough to know their asses from a hole in the ground; but they are trivially better placed than groupon to skim a few extra percentage points from the transactions they already skim a few percentage points from.
I'm pretty sure that 'being CEO of a company built on skimming a percentage of the profits from businesses willing to lose money and make it up in volume' is epic trolling on a scale that most trolls will never even be able to dream of...