They didnt share info with the NSA. The whole point was that the NSA was grabbing data off of the wire without permission or knowledge. Google actually has a pretty solid track record of not rolling over every time the authorities come knocking without a warrant.
They didn't share info with the NSA, they were effectively the NSA, by having pieces of NSA inside of themselves which could gather as much private data as they could, without any notice of this being made public. Wasn't it for Snowden, we wouldn't know anything about this. Whether this was done with cooperation from Google or without, they never said in an official statement: their statements do not deny nor confirm that they collaborated. Certainly their effort to protect the privacy of their users wasn't sufficient, if we want to believe that their data ended up at the NSA without them even noticing.
Of course, you seem to think that the info streetview gathers is somehow private (its not, we're talking about public wifi beacons broadcast to the whole neighborhood),
What information is public and what is private isn't a matter for me or for LordLimecat to deliberate. It's regulators and courts that decide that, and in fact they have repeatedly fined Google in multiple countries of the world over this matter. Your statement is also incomplete, as Google collected at the time not only wifi beacons, but also traffic paylods.
and wherever you got your information has misled you: far from lying about it, Google is the one who actually dropped the news that they were accidentally collecting info.
They lied two times: once when they said that they weren't collecting payload data, and once again when they said that they had already deleted. It's true that they admitted themselves that they were lying, but only after they were imposed by public authorities to provide data that would have exposed the problem.
When did I accept Google to track
When you visited their sites and began using their services. For non-google sites, when you visited sites whose webmasters made the decision to use google analytics or adwords.
Dont like it, take it up with those sites: Theyre the ones making the decision to drop google cookies on your machine.
I did not accept any license agreement by visiting those sites. They planted cookies on my machine without any form of consent at the moment that I typed their URL on my web browser, or that I clicked an hyperlink on another website.
They are not idiots and do not spend all day smoking cigars in dark rooms trying to figure out ways to violate peoples privacy.
Whatever their intention, there's little difference for the end users: before they could have more privacy, now they have less. Objectively.
It wasn't visible in the UI because it's extremely easy to break your apps or entire phone by adjusting those settings, and giving hundreds of millions of users a convenient way to brick their own device by screwing with system process permissions is not how you build mass-market products.
Do you mean that Android doesn't have a "factory reset" option? Now this does look like a way not to build a mass-market product.
The reason you can't edit app permissions selectively is that this would be a nightmare for app designers: there are lots of permissions, so you'd have to write your app to handle all the possible combinations of permissions that the user might have deactivated.
Being able to respond to external conditions is a large part of what being an "app designer" boils down to. If you don't even bother to check the return values of the API methods you invoke, then your app is defective at best, and perhaps you should be designing something else.
What if you install a web browser, and the user accidentally or stupidly disables internet access permission?
The same thing that would happen if you use the said web browser, and the user accidentally or stupidly disables the wifi radio. Should we be afraid of this feature disappearing in future versions of Android?
Apps would just end up doing manual permission checks and re-presenting the same screen you already see at install time.
Looks like a solution. This outcome would be no worse than the current situation, so what's really bad with it?
Now I'd personally like to see an ability to apps to ask users to grant a few permissions at runtime for cases where a permission is for a truly optional subfeature of the app, or the need for it is best explained by context. Location requests would often fall into that category.
We all would like to, that's why we are protesting against Google's decision.
But permission nag dialogs can be annoying as well, so I understand why Android puts it all up front.
It's all about being able to choose what can be more annoying, a rogue application designed in an unknown country spying all of my life, or an opt-in behaviour to display a pop-up warning that I can disable if I feel that it's not useful.
Anyway, regardless of what you believe about the Android permissions model, seeing this as some kind of corporate mega-conspiracy is dumb and immature. It's a set of decisions that balance competing user interface design priorities. That's it.
Adding juvenile appellatives to the thesis you're trying to discredit doesn't make you more right. Nobody is claiming about a "conspiracy". There are clear, lawful, public steps of a for-profit company in the direction of collecting more user data and giving the user less choice about what data to share and with whom, and less knowledge about when such data is specifically being collected and by whom.
Did they require a court order before sharing every detail of people's lives with the NSA? Did they require a court order before collecting private information with their streetview cars? What about lying repeatedly when they were accused of that? When did I accept Google to track, and store idenfinitely, my browsing history, by means of invisible tracking cookies set up on most websites even though I haven't logged into *any* of their services?
In Europe whe had millions of people killed at gunpoint for the content of someone's speech. This is a very tangible problem that has to be dealt with.
This is a slippery slope fallacy: there's a sea of difference between expressing legitimate opinions and inciting people to violence against whomever.
In America, how much blood will need to be spilled in order to gain back the ability to scream "fire" in a theater, or to slander someone and harming his profession? None at all, because there's nothing to gain and much to lose from that kind of freedom. And who gets to draw a line between free speech and putting public safety at risk? It is commonly accepted on/. that screaming "fire" in a theater is unacceptable behavior, but what if someone screams "smoke" instead of "fire", or if he does that in a public square instead of a theater? A judge will get to decide, as is the case for every other supposed misbehavior.
Here in Europe, we have the *very* concrete problem that it is possible to convince people of the fact that a certain subset of them, or someone coming from the outside, is responsible for all of their problems, and thereafter get elected into positions of power with a mandate to suppress that "enemy". We have constitutions in place to prevent that, but large majorities have the power to alter them. This has already happened historically (for instance my country had 10% of its population killed because of this during WWII) and it tends to happen again every time people are experiencing economic difficulties.
Just yesterday I've heard a "leader" of a massive protest movement in my country declare to the press that "we are the slaves of Jew bankers". Hearing that on the TV, hundreds of thousands of people, with a right to vote, will be convinced of that.
I call it useless not because people cannot use it, but because it doesn't offer advantages over existing file systems. Since you're installing file system drivers anyway, you could as well format the larger partition as UDF and get large files, extended attributes, named streams, UNIX semantics, fault resilience. If you use exFAT, it's only in order to avoid headaches when interoperating with Microsoft platforms, not because of technical considerations.
Wouldn't this violate the F in FRAND? If anything, the problem is that UDF is probably patented as well. Still, UDF is a better file system than *FAT feature-wise, and perhaps the relevant patents aren't in the hands of patent trolls like Microsoft.
Win, for now. But I think that manufacturers offering SD card slots still have to support exFAT, yet another useless filesystem from Microsoft, as it's part of the relevant standard.
I'm not a shill and I am outraged, too. To me, Google don't want users to have an easy way out of the DRM-ridden, spyware-laden walled garden that they get their income from, and today they used their iron fist to make sure it doesn't happen. The fact that Apple's jails are even bleaker is no consolation.
True, but as complex as it can be, Office has always been a showcase for Microsoft's new technologies, that's why I said "not even".
Windows 3.1? You'd see its full potential with Office - truetype, common dialogs and all.
COM/ActiveX? Office became entirely based on it.
Windows NT's Unicode support? Office shipped with fonts covering the whole of it.
The innovative UI elements of Windows '95 (and long file names)? Office '95 shows how to take advantage of them.
The (in)famous banner? Office got it before MS Paint.
Perhaps it's with.NET that Microsoft began not eating their own dog food anymore, as they bolted it on Office, instead of rewriting Office in.NET.
But now with Metro, Microsoft are telling their whole community of developers that they need to make the biggest change in the history of Windows, to completely drop their proven, decades-old development tools and habits, and embrace a radically new programming paradigm and distribution channel. This requires large investments, and investments require trust, which tends to be lost when even the leader doesn't show the way.
It's fine with any touch interface, not just a phone.
Whatever the input method, I still have to see any "legacy" desktop application getting ported to Metro while maintaining the same feature set and exposing the same functionality. Not even Microsoft themselves managed to port Office, their most important asset, to Metro, yet. Even Windows 8.1 still sends you back to the desktop for many tasks, almost two years after Microsoft officially deprecated the "desktop" development.
I think that these unexplicable strings of characters that always contain the word "FreeBSD" and pop up under every slashdot article are actually used by the NSA/CIA as number stations to convey secret messages to their minions.
Sigh, I'd like to live there. Here, bike lanes do not exist. Extra-urban roads have a speed limit of 90 km/h and you have to share those with buses and trucks, because most often there's no other road at all. Not that speed limits matter, because people don't respect them anyway. The roads are of two kinds: either they're newly-built, and therefore they're designed only for motor vehicles and they're either dangerous or inaccessible for cyclists and pedestrians, or they were built for donkeys and ox-carriages, which is actually the best occurrence for cyclists. Car drivers treat bikers just like a sidewalk: they make the minimum effort to avoid them, and that's it. Occasionally they will put your life at risk for no reason: you get buses overtaking you so close that you can feel the temperature of their metal on your left shoulder, on a sunny day, with zero traffic, and on a straight road with two lanes per direction. Or people might overtake you dangerously, only to brake in front of you at the traffic light which is red. You need to listen carefully for engines' noise not only for ordinary traffic, but also to detect if there's some Michael Schumacher-wannabe that is using the state road as his own personal driving circuit assuming that there's nobody else on that road because, say, it's Sunday morning. In that case it's best to find some sheltered spot and wait there for him to arrive and pass. That's also the best thing to do in the case of clandestine horse races. Inside cities, articulated trucks run on streets that would be narrow for a car, and to respect the readers' sensitivity I'll spare them from the details of what happens when they hook some cyclist, pedestrian or motorbiker with some component of their coachwork.
The main reason why many OEMs don't do that, is that if they do, the no-evil company turns into an Oracle-Microsoft hircocervus and will strong-arm them into desisting, leveraging their market power and technical leadership.
Were that the case you'd make some effort to not be so horribly dependent on the US for strategic military support.
That's because most european countries, those with no post-colonial involvements, do not need strategic military support. The iron courtain is no more. They have no precious resources inside their boundaries. They no longer invade other countries, nor they interfere with other countries' politics, and as a result they have no enemies. The "peace missions" that once in a while they partake of are only excuses to spend public money.
The difference between the BSD license and the GPL is that it allows you to copy the code and use it under more restrictive terms. You're saying that however, if you do, then you're a zealot. So what's the advantage of the BSD license, if the GPL only harms zealots?
If a proprietary project with closed source uses the BSD licensed project but add nifty functions it is just a matter of writing similar functions of your own.
When a GNU licensed project grabs some BSD code and improves upon you can't just write code that does the same, because if you do then it is very likely that your code will end up looking very much like the GNU licensed implementation and people will find it less plausible that you didn't look at the other source.
What's the difference? If you didn't look at the original code, then the chances that your own code will look very much like the invisible implementation are the same, whether that invisible implementation is GNU or proprietary. If you did look at the original code, then you're deriving from it, and you should respect its license.
But then again they are broke and looking to tax anyone except their own voters.
Actually, they're taxing their voters like there's no tomorrow. Italy has a fiscal pressure over GDP of 54%, which makes it the most taxed state among the developed countries. In a time when families are expected to give to the State more money than they can keep, I can't see anything questionable in asking Apple to pay up, or alternatively sell their phones to the Irish.
The worst thing about Flash weren't its security implications. The problem was that Flash put islands of non-HTML in the middle of HTML pages, complicating their description, their development, their deployment, and therefore complicating the software implementations required to render them; also, increasing the time required to train people into writing web pages, and introducing the conflicts between two standards that are planned and evolve independently, yet have to intercommunicate. Often only to obtain similar results to plain HTML - especially in the post-HTML5 world.
Security problems came as a corollary of all this.
JavaScript wasn't chosen as the official language for interactive HTML pages because of technical advantages of the language itself. It was chosen because it was already standardised, it was platform-neutral, and it was already ubiquitous. Those motivations still hold, against the adoption of NaCL.
Really? and there was me thinking it was precisely so they could win a case brought against them by Oracle which they did.
You're not informed about that case, which was precisely about Oracle thinking that Google didn't have permission to make their own implementation of the Java APIs without giving them money.
The reason they went their own way has nothing to do with the GPL (only OpenJDK is GPL'd and at risk of patent suits because Oracle refuse to grant it protection) and everything to do with ensure their project couldn't have terms dictated by Oracle.
A GPL project enjoys patent protection and can have no field of use restrictions by virtue of the GPL itself. As for the fact that Google dislike the GPL, hear it from themselves.
Android doesn't use the JVM, it uses the Java language however. They've also never said they don't care about Java compatibility. You just made that bit up, because you're trolling, or stupid.
It's not them who said that. Google have always said clearly that Android development is based on the Java language. When the Oracle vs Google case was going on, it was a lot of people here on Slashdot who were saying that Android makes no use of Java the language, and that Google didn't need to copy the Sun APIs because they didn't care about compatibility with a language that they did not use, and whose ecosystem they did not take any advantage from. Not that I support Oracle's crazy stance that APIs can be copyrighted, it's just that I can't stand knee-jerk reactions to defend a company.
Slashdot Mirror
They didnt share info with the NSA. The whole point was that the NSA was grabbing data off of the wire without permission or knowledge. Google actually has a pretty solid track record of not rolling over every time the authorities come knocking without a warrant.
They didn't share info with the NSA, they were effectively the NSA, by having pieces of NSA inside of themselves which could gather as much private data as they could, without any notice of this being made public. Wasn't it for Snowden, we wouldn't know anything about this. Whether this was done with cooperation from Google or without, they never said in an official statement: their statements do not deny nor confirm that they collaborated. Certainly their effort to protect the privacy of their users wasn't sufficient, if we want to believe that their data ended up at the NSA without them even noticing.
Of course, you seem to think that the info streetview gathers is somehow private (its not, we're talking about public wifi beacons broadcast to the whole neighborhood),
What information is public and what is private isn't a matter for me or for LordLimecat to deliberate. It's regulators and courts that decide that, and in fact they have repeatedly fined Google in multiple countries of the world over this matter. Your statement is also incomplete, as Google collected at the time not only wifi beacons, but also traffic paylods.
and wherever you got your information has misled you: far from lying about it, Google is the one who actually dropped the news that they were accidentally collecting info.
They lied two times: once when they said that they weren't collecting payload data, and once again when they said that they had already deleted. It's true that they admitted themselves that they were lying, but only after they were imposed by public authorities to provide data that would have exposed the problem.
When did I accept Google to track
When you visited their sites and began using their services. For non-google sites, when you visited sites whose webmasters made the decision to use google analytics or adwords.
Dont like it, take it up with those sites: Theyre the ones making the decision to drop google cookies on your machine.
I did not accept any license agreement by visiting those sites. They planted cookies on my machine without any form of consent at the moment that I typed their URL on my web browser, or that I clicked an hyperlink on another website.
European fascists are banned in the parts of Europe that were historically subject to fascism.
Whatever their intention, there's little difference for the end users: before they could have more privacy, now they have less. Objectively.
Do you mean that Android doesn't have a "factory reset" option? Now this does look like a way not to build a mass-market product.
Being able to respond to external conditions is a large part of what being an "app designer" boils down to. If you don't even bother to check the return values of the API methods you invoke, then your app is defective at best, and perhaps you should be designing something else.
The same thing that would happen if you use the said web browser, and the user accidentally or stupidly disables the wifi radio. Should we be afraid of this feature disappearing in future versions of Android?
Looks like a solution. This outcome would be no worse than the current situation, so what's really bad with it?
We all would like to, that's why we are protesting against Google's decision.
It's all about being able to choose what can be more annoying, a rogue application designed in an unknown country spying all of my life, or an opt-in behaviour to display a pop-up warning that I can disable if I feel that it's not useful.
Adding juvenile appellatives to the thesis you're trying to discredit doesn't make you more right. Nobody is claiming about a "conspiracy". There are clear, lawful, public steps of a for-profit company in the direction of collecting more user data and giving the user less choice about what data to share and with whom, and less knowledge about when such data is specifically being collected and by whom.
Did they require a court order before sharing every detail of people's lives with the NSA? Did they require a court order before collecting private information with their streetview cars? What about lying repeatedly when they were accused of that? When did I accept Google to track, and store idenfinitely, my browsing history, by means of invisible tracking cookies set up on most websites even though I haven't logged into *any* of their services?
In Europe whe had millions of people killed at gunpoint for the content of someone's speech. This is a very tangible problem that has to be dealt with.
In America, how much blood will need to be spilled in order to gain back the ability to scream "fire" in a theater, or to slander someone and harming his profession? None at all, because there's nothing to gain and much to lose from that kind of freedom. And who gets to draw a line between free speech and putting public safety at risk? It is commonly accepted on /. that screaming "fire" in a theater is unacceptable behavior, but what if someone screams "smoke" instead of "fire", or if he does that in a public square instead of a theater? A judge will get to decide, as is the case for every other supposed misbehavior.
Here in Europe, we have the *very* concrete problem that it is possible to convince people of the fact that a certain subset of them, or someone coming from the outside, is responsible for all of their problems, and thereafter get elected into positions of power with a mandate to suppress that "enemy". We have constitutions in place to prevent that, but large majorities have the power to alter them. This has already happened historically (for instance my country had 10% of its population killed because of this during WWII) and it tends to happen again every time people are experiencing economic difficulties.
Just yesterday I've heard a "leader" of a massive protest movement in my country declare to the press that "we are the slaves of Jew bankers". Hearing that on the TV, hundreds of thousands of people, with a right to vote, will be convinced of that.
I call it useless not because people cannot use it, but because it doesn't offer advantages over existing file systems. Since you're installing file system drivers anyway, you could as well format the larger partition as UDF and get large files, extended attributes, named streams, UNIX semantics, fault resilience. If you use exFAT, it's only in order to avoid headaches when interoperating with Microsoft platforms, not because of technical considerations.
Wouldn't this violate the F in FRAND? If anything, the problem is that UDF is probably patented as well. Still, UDF is a better file system than *FAT feature-wise, and perhaps the relevant patents aren't in the hands of patent trolls like Microsoft.
Win, for now. But I think that manufacturers offering SD card slots still have to support exFAT, yet another useless filesystem from Microsoft, as it's part of the relevant standard.
I don't know, does Android support exFAT? It's part of the SDHC (or XC, I can't remember now) standard.
The patent doesn't mention the width of FAT entries. It doesn't mention FAT at all, only directory entries.
I'm not a shill and I am outraged, too. To me, Google don't want users to have an easy way out of the DRM-ridden, spyware-laden walled garden that they get their income from, and today they used their iron fist to make sure it doesn't happen. The fact that Apple's jails are even bleaker is no consolation.
Windows 3.1? You'd see its full potential with Office - truetype, common dialogs and all.
COM/ActiveX? Office became entirely based on it.
Windows NT's Unicode support? Office shipped with fonts covering the whole of it.
The innovative UI elements of Windows '95 (and long file names)? Office '95 shows how to take advantage of them.
The (in)famous banner? Office got it before MS Paint.
Perhaps it's with
But now with Metro, Microsoft are telling their whole community of developers that they need to make the biggest change in the history of Windows, to completely drop their proven, decades-old development tools and habits, and embrace a radically new programming paradigm and distribution channel. This requires large investments, and investments require trust, which tends to be lost when even the leader doesn't show the way.
It's fine with any touch interface, not just a phone.
Whatever the input method, I still have to see any "legacy" desktop application getting ported to Metro while maintaining the same feature set and exposing the same functionality. Not even Microsoft themselves managed to port Office, their most important asset, to Metro, yet. Even Windows 8.1 still sends you back to the desktop for many tasks, almost two years after Microsoft officially deprecated the "desktop" development.
I think that these unexplicable strings of characters that always contain the word "FreeBSD" and pop up under every slashdot article are actually used by the NSA/CIA as number stations to convey secret messages to their minions.
Sigh, I'd like to live there. Here, bike lanes do not exist. Extra-urban roads have a speed limit of 90 km/h and you have to share those with buses and trucks, because most often there's no other road at all. Not that speed limits matter, because people don't respect them anyway. The roads are of two kinds: either they're newly-built, and therefore they're designed only for motor vehicles and they're either dangerous or inaccessible for cyclists and pedestrians, or they were built for donkeys and ox-carriages, which is actually the best occurrence for cyclists. Car drivers treat bikers just like a sidewalk: they make the minimum effort to avoid them, and that's it. Occasionally they will put your life at risk for no reason: you get buses overtaking you so close that you can feel the temperature of their metal on your left shoulder, on a sunny day, with zero traffic, and on a straight road with two lanes per direction. Or people might overtake you dangerously, only to brake in front of you at the traffic light which is red. You need to listen carefully for engines' noise not only for ordinary traffic, but also to detect if there's some Michael Schumacher-wannabe that is using the state road as his own personal driving circuit assuming that there's nobody else on that road because, say, it's Sunday morning. In that case it's best to find some sheltered spot and wait there for him to arrive and pass. That's also the best thing to do in the case of clandestine horse races. Inside cities, articulated trucks run on streets that would be narrow for a car, and to respect the readers' sensitivity I'll spare them from the details of what happens when they hook some cyclist, pedestrian or motorbiker with some component of their coachwork.
The main reason why many OEMs don't do that, is that if they do, the no-evil company turns into an Oracle-Microsoft hircocervus and will strong-arm them into desisting, leveraging their market power and technical leadership.
That's because most european countries, those with no post-colonial involvements, do not need strategic military support. The iron courtain is no more. They have no precious resources inside their boundaries. They no longer invade other countries, nor they interfere with other countries' politics, and as a result they have no enemies. The "peace missions" that once in a while they partake of are only excuses to spend public money.
Just so the Americans can jam Galileo whenever they want with no impact on their own system.
And the converse is true. Seems fair to me.
What's the difference? If you didn't look at the original code, then the chances that your own code will look very much like the invisible implementation are the same, whether that invisible implementation is GNU or proprietary. If you did look at the original code, then you're deriving from it, and you should respect its license.
But then again they are broke and looking to tax anyone except their own voters.
Actually, they're taxing their voters like there's no tomorrow. Italy has a fiscal pressure over GDP of 54%, which makes it the most taxed state among the developed countries. In a time when families are expected to give to the State more money than they can keep, I can't see anything questionable in asking Apple to pay up, or alternatively sell their phones to the Irish.
Security problems came as a corollary of all this.
JavaScript wasn't chosen as the official language for interactive HTML pages because of technical advantages of the language itself. It was chosen because it was already standardised, it was platform-neutral, and it was already ubiquitous. Those motivations still hold, against the adoption of NaCL.
Indeed, unfortunately it's real.
JavaScript-generated content isn't good for information interchange, which is what the Web was all about, back then when MathML was designed.
Really? and there was me thinking it was precisely so they could win a case brought against them by Oracle which they did.
You're not informed about that case, which was precisely about Oracle thinking that Google didn't have permission to make their own implementation of the Java APIs without giving them money.
The reason they went their own way has nothing to do with the GPL (only OpenJDK is GPL'd and at risk of patent suits because Oracle refuse to grant it protection) and everything to do with ensure their project couldn't have terms dictated by Oracle.
A GPL project enjoys patent protection and can have no field of use restrictions by virtue of the GPL itself. As for the fact that Google dislike the GPL, hear it from themselves.
Android doesn't use the JVM, it uses the Java language however. They've also never said they don't care about Java compatibility. You just made that bit up, because you're trolling, or stupid.
It's not them who said that. Google have always said clearly that Android development is based on the Java language. When the Oracle vs Google case was going on, it was a lot of people here on Slashdot who were saying that Android makes no use of Java the language, and that Google didn't need to copy the Sun APIs because they didn't care about compatibility with a language that they did not use, and whose ecosystem they did not take any advantage from. Not that I support Oracle's crazy stance that APIs can be copyrighted, it's just that I can't stand knee-jerk reactions to defend a company.