Your knee-jerk reaction would be "great, another useless feature that lets big brother know where I am".
But there _are_ real-world use cases for this, paranoia aside.
In my country, this type of feature is used for situations where emergency response teams need to be dispatched for cases of terrorism and insurgency. Being able to know the exact location of a place that's under attack can make a difference.
... I for one would like to see whether any of the politicians from my country are implicated. We're going through our 13th General Elections, and it would be nice to see if the person I'm voting for is involved. With scant media coverage on these sort of things - the local media is heavily controlled by the ruling government - we over here tend to have to rely on other alternative sources for exposes.
Lastly, from the MDI website about the Airpod: This latest version of AirPod... [has] a base consisting of a composite sandwich of fiberglass and polyurethane... [and a] a cast aluminium frame. More details from that link.
It's been done before, and will continue to be done. Especially because a General Election is coming up. If you read that link I posted, it was reported that the Malaysian prime minister said "Whatever we do, we must put people first,". If that were truly the case, why wasn't that position taken in the first place before the law was passed?
Basically: 1. Pass draconian law 2. Wait for public outcry 3. Repeal draconian law 4. Look like a hero 5. Profit!
I think a lot of comments here are focused on the wrong thing.
TFA says "the ICO has yet to investigate a single website... because its investigative team isn't ready to start work - more than a year after the new laws came into force". So TFA is more about a culture of "shoot first ask questions later" that is prevalent in government agencies - NOT about the validity/ethics of having the rules in the first place. It's already in place, people - arguments about whether cookies are good or bad should have already taken place ages ago when vetting the rule.
So the real question is, why pass a law when there's no clear indication on the lawmaker's capability to enforce it?
Everything you buy here is cheaper everywhere else
I seriously beg to differ. There are many times when I have to resort to buying stuff online from the US, due to various restrictive taxes and import duties imposed to resellers of those products in my country. Even after the exchange rate, shipping charges etc it is still cheaper. Because the local distributor/reseller has profit margins to keep.
Here is the original article, excerpt: "Recognition of human hand can be performed at 1ms with a high-speed vision, and the position and the shape of the human hand are recognized. The wrist joint angle of the robot hand is controlled based on the position of the human hand."
From TFA: "This isn’t about who rakes in the advertising dollars – there’s precious few of those these days for anyone – it’s about the global conversation, and who gets to frame it."
I think that statement gets it spot on. In those few words, you can read a lot between the lines: elements of capitalism, paranoia and perspective.
It's kind of a wordplay on the oft-cited "history is written by the victor" phrase. Only this time round, TFA makes it like history is written by he who has the most money.
People need to remember that one of the reasons the "loudness wars" started in the first place was producer/label/artist A wanted his song/album to sound "louder" than producer/label/artist B. The question is, why?
A very simple answer: "louder" is almost always perceived as better. It's about standing out above the rest.
Take for example - given a set of 20 songs played in a club, all at roughly the same "loudness". Along comes one track which is "louder" than the rest. Chances are very high that more people in the club will take notice of this track. We're predispositioned to perceiving anomalies in our everyday lives, so something that is out of the ordinary (e.g. the louder track in this example) grabs our attention more than the other tracks. And at that point, the crowd would go "man, that track is really pumping".
The other issue is that the mastering engineer (who makes these kinds of calls about how "loud" or "hot" a track is before getting burnt to the master) is being paid to do something according to his client's needs. So if the producer wants the track louder, and is the one footing the bill, then there's not much the mastering engineer can do. So if the paymaster wants a loud track, that's what he will get. If mastering engineer A sticks to his guns, the producer's just going to go to another mastering house, which will mean revenue lost.
Another way to put it - if the customer wants to buy Windows NT and is dead set on this, no amount of enlightening by the consultant about the benefits of a Unix-based platform is going to change what the customer wants.
So yeah, these two factors combine and the result: the loudness wars.
This image from Google's blog post shows that majority of the phishing sites are hosted in the US. Interestingly, most of Africa is relatively "clean", except for Algeria and South Africa.
"Five years after it was first introduced, Google's Safe Browsing program continues to provide a service to the 600 million Chrome, Firefox, and Safari users"
Is that 600 million users served over the five-year span? Or the total number of users on Chrome, Firefox and Safari that we have now? 600 million is just a little under 9% of the world's population.
The tool just teaches you how to redistrict - but has absolutely no real-life outcome. "It's full of smoke-filled back room dealmaking by political insiders with little public input" - highly doubtful that this will ever change.
"The intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and the company quickly started making significant changes to the security of its networks after the intrusions."
"Does not appear" falls kinda short of a satisfactory statement. Considering the intruders took two days to get the source code, one wonders what else they were up to in that period of time. I'm changing my gmail password now..
From TFA: "By clicking on a link [sent on Microsoft Messenger] and connecting to a 'poisoned' Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team."
I don't know about you, but I'm quite shocked at how an innocuous thing like this can lead to the theft of "one of Google's crown jewels". Are their security practises that lax over there in Google China? And, considering that this happened to Google - a leading Tech-savvy company - how many other corporations and conglomerates have already been hit by a similar attack? Banks? Military? Oil and Gas? Heck, MSFT?? After all, TFA reported that it was a "lightning raid that lasted less than two days".
And yeah, while TFA sounds like Luddite fear-mongering, I think it's a valid concern for everyone.
TFA says "The person was able to play with it and see the iPhone 4.0 features. Then, Apple remotely killed the phone before we got access to it."
It's interesting that Apple has this killswitch -- looks like a good security feature to have. I wonder if regular iPhones have it, and if it's available as a 'value-added-service'. Previously, the killswitch was only there to disable apps on the device.
As a side note, Apple builds in a bunch of other phone-home elements in their prototype/developer devices. They get cellphone operators who offer the iPhone to do a lot of field testing for them. Where I work, one of the dev people said pretty much everything you do on that phone gets reported back to Apple. Maybe that's how it is with other companies' products as well.
In TFA, JWZ said "It was ridiculously difficult, because I refused to fork the MacOS X code base: the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system, so it should be a small matter of ifdefs to have the same app compile as a desktop application and an iPhone application, right?"
FLAMESUIT ON At the risk of being shot down by every MacOS/iPhone hacker here... There are two main points that JWZ makes which are quite interesting:
1) I refused to fork the MacOS X code base 2) the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system
So the beef he has, while totally valid is because of:
a) refusal to fork the codebase b) assumed that both iPhone OS == MacOS X
Hmm. I understand the refusal to fork the codebase, but if that's what's _required_ then that's what needs to be done to have the app on the iPhone. And what's the other bit about "assume" making an ass out of you and me? Ditto for the OpenGL/OpenGLES rant... FLAMESUIT OFF
I used to work as a helpdesk consultant -- this was waay back 13 years ago -- and part of my duties was to lug bigass monitors for the company from one workstation to another (they were a publishing house with a lot of DTP guys). One day I lifted a monitor the wrong way, and long story short -- the back pain stayed with me right up until a couple of months ago.
Used to be I couldn't lie face-down for more than 10 minutes before my back would start hurting. And I couldn't carry my kids much. One day the pain got so bad I went to a chiro, and the guy did manage to straighten out my back. Hurt like heck when he "realigned" my spine, but that 13-year-injury is no longer there.
So yeah, I used to think they're bogus. But now I dont. YMMV.
I don't know about you, but I've become somewhat jaded when it comes to standards like these. Usually, there's one or more parties who stand to gain financially if the standards are implemented (naturally). But when those who benefit are those that impose the standards themselves, doesn't it become somewhat of a slippery slope?
Where I work, there was this company XXX who was touting some kind of solution to protect mobile phone users; if your phone is stolen, and you report it to the operator, there was some mechanism in place that would lock the phone when it was powered up. This could be done because each phone has a unique identifier, kind of like a MAC address. Problem was, the technical platform was supposedly half-baked and too pricey, so many of the operators rejected it. But then, they got the idea to approach the government - and lo and behold, the powers-that-be came up with some regulation and standards that all operators had to comply to. Best of all -- we had to use Company XXX's technology!
So the question is -- do the members (or more likely, ASHRAE's Technical Committee members) stand to gain financially by implementing this? I would think so, since ASHRAE's made up of persons in the HVAC and other related fields. Members will gain access to "many opportunities to participate in the development of that technology"
After skimming that report, and comparing it with what's on the Cryptohippie website - it looks to me that the document is more of a marketing tool to promote their company. Am I the only one who thinks this?
Here's what the group claims to do: "Cryptohippie USA, Inc. exists to protect individuals and organizations against attacks on privacy by agents of industrial and competitive espionage, organized crime, oppressive governments and even hired hackers. We do this with the best of encryption technologies and a closed group of highly protected networks - for your peace of mind and safety."
Here's what the report posits:
* "In an Electronic Police State...[every electronic flotsam you produce is] criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long long time." * "Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad" * The State knows everything you do, a-la Big Brother
They are trying to frame this paranoia into a neat little package, which sets you in the right mood to accept what they have to sell - which is protection against attacks on your privacy.
Classic marketing technique? Sorry, it just looks like another insurance agent to me.
So it's a very vague approximation of people going from one place to another by airplane, am I right?
From TFA: "Now, I realize this is a far stretch from a working model to predict epidemics. But, it sure does look cool. I also I think it will be a good base for some more interesting work."
Yes, you are right. But I don't think we should be dissing the chap for trying something new. Yes, maybe the the author was trying to up his coolness factor, but kudos to the guy for putting the two disparate pieces of technology together to visualize something about H1N1.
Two years of work experience will do more for you in the long run. Plus, you could always take the masters at some later point in time.
Also, if you're up to it, there's plenty of colleges that'd let you do your MBA on a part-time basis, or at least schedule your classes around your work requirements.
Back when I was doing my Bachelor's degree (full-time course), I also had a regular 40-hour-per-week day job, and was also raising a baby daughter at the same time.
Ok, TFA has some valid points on the endless annoyance that we know as voicemail. But for mobile operators, at least, there's really no reason for them to kill this service.
And do you know why? Voicemail is considered, from a telco point of view, as a Call Completion Service. This allows the operator to generate revenue by forwarding a call that was destined for termination (B-party hung up, rejected etc) into a service that answers the call. At which point, they can charge the caller for this "previlege".
Let's say operator X has 100 million calls per month on its network where the called party has rejected the call or is unavailable. Assuming that:
* a chargeable block of 0.10 per minute * everyone leaves a short message that's less than one minute long
The operator stands to make $10,000,000 a month in call completion revenue. By providing a simple voicemail service. Which no-one really cares about anyways. Of course, there'd be interconnect charges from other operators, but the gist is the same.
If voicemail was removed, the operator would lose this significant chunk of revenue, just because there was nothing to complete the calls. Which is why you'll never get existing operators who already provide voicemail removing it.
Voicemail == Call Completion == Cash Cow
Where I'm working, revenue from this call completion bit contributes around 20% of the monthly voice traffic revenue.
Another fun factoid: voicemail retrieval stands at 10% of those deposited.
Slashdot Mirror
Your knee-jerk reaction would be "great, another useless feature that lets big brother know where I am".
But there _are_ real-world use cases for this, paranoia aside.
In my country, this type of feature is used for situations where emergency response teams need to be dispatched for cases of terrorism and insurgency. Being able to know the exact location of a place that's under attack can make a difference.
... I for one would like to see whether any of the politicians from my country are implicated. We're going through our 13th General Elections, and it would be nice to see if the person I'm voting for is involved. With scant media coverage on these sort of things - the local media is heavily controlled by the ruling government - we over here tend to have to rely on other alternative sources for exposes.
Some details on the specifications, range etc of the Airpod can be found here, but some of the stats are in French.
Also, Tata originally signed the agreement in 2007. Five year old news?
Lastly, from the MDI website about the Airpod: This latest version of AirPod... [has] a base consisting of a composite sandwich of fiberglass and polyurethane... [and a] a cast aluminium frame. More details from that link.
This is nothing more than political maneouvering by the ruling government.
It's been done before, and will continue to be done. Especially because a General Election is coming up. If you read that link I posted, it was reported that the Malaysian prime minister said "Whatever we do, we must put people first,". If that were truly the case, why wasn't that position taken in the first place before the law was passed?
Basically:
1. Pass draconian law
2. Wait for public outcry
3. Repeal draconian law
4. Look like a hero
5. Profit!
I think a lot of comments here are focused on the wrong thing.
TFA says "the ICO has yet to investigate a single website... because its investigative team isn't ready to start work - more than a year after the new laws came into force". So TFA is more about a culture of "shoot first ask questions later" that is prevalent in government agencies - NOT about the validity/ethics of having the rules in the first place. It's already in place, people - arguments about whether cookies are good or bad should have already taken place ages ago when vetting the rule.
So the real question is, why pass a law when there's no clear indication on the lawmaker's capability to enforce it?
Everything you buy here is cheaper everywhere else
I seriously beg to differ. There are many times when I have to resort to buying stuff online from the US, due to various restrictive taxes and import duties imposed to resellers of those products in my country. Even after the exchange rate, shipping charges etc it is still cheaper. Because the local distributor/reseller has profit margins to keep.
Here is the original article, excerpt: "Recognition of human hand can be performed at 1ms with a high-speed vision, and the position and the shape of the human hand are recognized. The wrist joint angle of the robot hand is controlled based on the position of the human hand."
Here is a link to a video showing what it can do.
And now, the obligatory comment: I, for one, welcome our robotic rock-paper-scissors-playing overlords.
From TFA: "This isn’t about who rakes in the advertising dollars – there’s precious few of those these days for anyone – it’s about the global conversation, and who gets to frame it."
I think that statement gets it spot on. In those few words, you can read a lot between the lines: elements of capitalism, paranoia and perspective.
It's kind of a wordplay on the oft-cited "history is written by the victor" phrase. Only this time round, TFA makes it like history is written by he who has the most money.
People need to remember that one of the reasons the "loudness wars" started in the first place was producer/label/artist A wanted his song/album to sound "louder" than producer/label/artist B. The question is, why?
A very simple answer: "louder" is almost always perceived as better. It's about standing out above the rest.
Take for example - given a set of 20 songs played in a club, all at roughly the same "loudness". Along comes one track which is "louder" than the rest. Chances are very high that more people in the club will take notice of this track. We're predispositioned to perceiving anomalies in our everyday lives, so something that is out of the ordinary (e.g. the louder track in this example) grabs our attention more than the other tracks. And at that point, the crowd would go "man, that track is really pumping".
The other issue is that the mastering engineer (who makes these kinds of calls about how "loud" or "hot" a track is before getting burnt to the master) is being paid to do something according to his client's needs. So if the producer wants the track louder, and is the one footing the bill, then there's not much the mastering engineer can do. So if the paymaster wants a loud track, that's what he will get. If mastering engineer A sticks to his guns, the producer's just going to go to another mastering house, which will mean revenue lost.
Another way to put it - if the customer wants to buy Windows NT and is dead set on this, no amount of enlightening by the consultant about the benefits of a Unix-based platform is going to change what the customer wants.
So yeah, these two factors combine and the result: the loudness wars.
Hey, I resent that!
This image from Google's blog post shows that majority of the phishing sites are hosted in the US. Interestingly, most of Africa is relatively "clean", except for Algeria and South Africa.
"Five years after it was first introduced, Google's Safe Browsing program continues to provide a service to the 600 million Chrome, Firefox, and Safari users"
Is that 600 million users served over the five-year span? Or the total number of users on Chrome, Firefox and Safari that we have now? 600 million is just a little under 9% of the world's population.
Impressive numbers, in any case.
Erlang Solutions will be providing the support structure for this, you can look at the packages offered here: http://www.erlang-solutions.com/section/84/support-plan-overview.
The tool just teaches you how to redistrict - but has absolutely no real-life outcome. "It's full of smoke-filled back room dealmaking by political insiders with little public input" - highly doubtful that this will ever change.
It's like watching Man vs Wild.
All your base are belong to us.
"The intruders do not appear to have stolen passwords of Gmail users, and the company quickly started making significant changes to the security of its networks after the intrusions."
"Does not appear" falls kinda short of a satisfactory statement. Considering the intruders took two days to get the source code, one wonders what else they were up to in that period of time. I'm changing my gmail password now..
From TFA: "By clicking on a link [sent on Microsoft Messenger] and connecting to a 'poisoned' Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team."
I don't know about you, but I'm quite shocked at how an innocuous thing like this can lead to the theft of "one of Google's crown jewels". Are their security practises that lax over there in Google China? And, considering that this happened to Google - a leading Tech-savvy company - how many other corporations and conglomerates have already been hit by a similar attack? Banks? Military? Oil and Gas? Heck, MSFT?? After all, TFA reported that it was a "lightning raid that lasted less than two days".
And yeah, while TFA sounds like Luddite fear-mongering, I think it's a valid concern for everyone.
TFA says "The person was able to play with it and see the iPhone 4.0 features. Then, Apple remotely killed the phone before we got access to it."
It's interesting that Apple has this killswitch -- looks like a good security feature to have. I wonder if regular iPhones have it, and if it's available as a 'value-added-service'. Previously, the killswitch was only there to disable apps on the device.
As a side note, Apple builds in a bunch of other phone-home elements in their prototype/developer devices. They get cellphone operators who offer the iPhone to do a lot of field testing for them. Where I work, one of the dev people said pretty much everything you do on that phone gets reported back to Apple. Maybe that's how it is with other companies' products as well.
In TFA, JWZ said "It was ridiculously difficult, because I refused to fork the MacOS X code base: the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system, so it should be a small matter of ifdefs to have the same app compile as a desktop application and an iPhone application, right?"
FLAMESUIT ON
At the risk of being shot down by every MacOS/iPhone hacker here... There are two main points that JWZ makes which are quite interesting:
1) I refused to fork the MacOS X code base
2) the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system
So the beef he has, while totally valid is because of:
a) refusal to fork the codebase
b) assumed that both iPhone OS == MacOS X
Hmm. I understand the refusal to fork the codebase, but if that's what's _required_ then that's what needs to be done to have the app on the iPhone. And what's the other bit about "assume" making an ass out of you and me? Ditto for the OpenGL/OpenGLES rant...
FLAMESUIT OFF
I used to work as a helpdesk consultant -- this was waay back 13 years ago -- and part of my duties was to lug bigass monitors for the company from one workstation to another (they were a publishing house with a lot of DTP guys). One day I lifted a monitor the wrong way, and long story short -- the back pain stayed with me right up until a couple of months ago.
Used to be I couldn't lie face-down for more than 10 minutes before my back would start hurting. And I couldn't carry my kids much. One day the pain got so bad I went to a chiro, and the guy did manage to straighten out my back. Hurt like heck when he "realigned" my spine, but that 13-year-injury is no longer there.
So yeah, I used to think they're bogus. But now I dont. YMMV.
I don't know about you, but I've become somewhat jaded when it comes to standards like these. Usually, there's one or more parties who stand to gain financially if the standards are implemented (naturally). But when those who benefit are those that impose the standards themselves, doesn't it become somewhat of a slippery slope?
Where I work, there was this company XXX who was touting some kind of solution to protect mobile phone users; if your phone is stolen, and you report it to the operator, there was some mechanism in place that would lock the phone when it was powered up. This could be done because each phone has a unique identifier, kind of like a MAC address. Problem was, the technical platform was supposedly half-baked and too pricey, so many of the operators rejected it. But then, they got the idea to approach the government - and lo and behold, the powers-that-be came up with some regulation and standards that all operators had to comply to. Best of all -- we had to use Company XXX's technology!
So the question is -- do the members (or more likely, ASHRAE's Technical Committee members) stand to gain financially by implementing this? I would think so, since ASHRAE's made up of persons in the HVAC and other related fields. Members will gain access to "many opportunities to participate in the development of that technology"
After skimming that report, and comparing it with what's on the Cryptohippie website - it looks to me that the document is more of a marketing tool to promote their company. Am I the only one who thinks this?
Here's what the group claims to do: "Cryptohippie USA, Inc. exists to protect individuals and organizations against attacks on privacy by agents of industrial and competitive espionage, organized crime, oppressive governments and even hired hackers. We do this with the best of encryption technologies and a closed group of highly protected networks - for your peace of mind and safety."
Here's what the report posits:
* "In an Electronic Police State...[every electronic flotsam you produce is] criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long long time."
* "Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad"
* The State knows everything you do, a-la Big Brother
They are trying to frame this paranoia into a neat little package, which sets you in the right mood to accept what they have to sell - which is protection against attacks on your privacy.
Classic marketing technique? Sorry, it just looks like another insurance agent to me.
So it's a very vague approximation of people going from one place to another by airplane, am I right?
From TFA: "Now, I realize this is a far stretch from a working model to predict epidemics. But, it sure does look cool. I also I think it will be a good base for some more interesting work."
Yes, you are right. But I don't think we should be dissing the chap for trying something new. Yes, maybe the the author was trying to up his coolness factor, but kudos to the guy for putting the two disparate pieces of technology together to visualize something about H1N1.
Two years of work experience will do more for you in the long run. Plus, you could always take the masters at some later point in time.
Also, if you're up to it, there's plenty of colleges that'd let you do your MBA on a part-time basis, or at least schedule your classes around your work requirements.
Back when I was doing my Bachelor's degree (full-time course), I also had a regular 40-hour-per-week day job, and was also raising a baby daughter at the same time.
Two words: time management.
Disclaimer: I work for a cellphone operator.
Ok, TFA has some valid points on the endless annoyance that we know as voicemail. But for mobile operators, at least, there's really no reason for them to kill this service.
And do you know why? Voicemail is considered, from a telco point of view, as a Call Completion Service. This allows the operator to generate revenue by forwarding a call that was destined for termination (B-party hung up, rejected etc) into a service that answers the call. At which point, they can charge the caller for this "previlege".
Let's say operator X has 100 million calls per month on its network where the called party has rejected the call or is unavailable. Assuming that:
* a chargeable block of 0.10 per minute
* everyone leaves a short message that's less than one minute long
The operator stands to make $10,000,000 a month in call completion revenue. By providing a simple voicemail service. Which no-one really cares about anyways. Of course, there'd be interconnect charges from other operators, but the gist is the same.
If voicemail was removed, the operator would lose this significant chunk of revenue, just because there was nothing to complete the calls. Which is why you'll never get existing operators who already provide voicemail removing it.
Voicemail == Call Completion == Cash Cow
Where I'm working, revenue from this call completion bit contributes around 20% of the monthly voice traffic revenue.
Another fun factoid: voicemail retrieval stands at 10% of those deposited.