Mod parent up! Whoever modded this comment down either hasn't investigated the matter, or sympathizes with those whose goal is the total destruction of privacy for average citizens.
A penalty that stands a chance of getting the offender's attention, rather than one that's considered simply a cost of doing business. The fine should have been higher though - perhaps an additional $90M as purely punitive damages. Companies need to learn that wilfully screwing over their customers really, really hurts their bottom line. Also, an award approaching a fifth of a billion would likely piss off enough shareholders that several heads would roll.
I don't use mobile email, and don't use Yahoo as my primary email anyway. But on the desktop Yahoo is pretty useable if you disable JavaScript. (In fact I find the non-JS version to be better than Gmail's incredibly annoying "we know what you want even though you don't think you want it" set of 'features'). You get a stupid warning on login and have to click a link to use the non-JS version. But after that, a lot of the annoying, bloated bling disappears. And as a bonus, you can have multiple emails open in multiple tabs - something the braindead JS version is incapable of.
Unfortunately, adding attachments to an email requires JavaScript. I just temporarily allow scripts for Yahoo, then revoke the permissions when I'm done.
Just stop with all the RFID bullshit on credit and debit cards! Really, is that extra few seconds taken to insert and enter a PIN such an onerous burden? People in that much of a hurry aren't likely to use that precious sliver of time to stop and smell the roses anyway.
For those worried about cell phones and the like, I suspect the new-style duds will do little or nothing to impede those signals. They're a couple of orders of magnitude higher in frequency than the current RFID payment systems, and they use far-field RF, whose intensity falls off with with the square of distance. The intensity of Near-Field Communications falls off with the cube of distance, and is more 'magnetic' than 'electro' in nature, so the shielding mechanism tends to be different.
For myself, I plan on de-activating all of my contactless payment cards by breaking the antenna loop with a drill, as soon as I can get them imaged so I know where the antenna traces are. I've already had my banks disable the feature, so in theory I shouldn't be able to make contactless payments, but that won't stop info theft via unauthorized readers.
The title of the article, (and therefore the summary), should have said "Uber Claims To Have Limited 'God View' To Improve Rider Privacy". After all, does anybody other than gullible people and fanbois really take them at their word?
...Harper is seemingly doing everything he can to keep Canadians out of Canadian jobs.
Fucking neocons.
Fucking neocons? Fucking traitors, I say. I also despair for our country under Harper's dict - er, leadership. His ultimate goal seems to be to turn Canada into America's bitch and/or the stooge of any multinational corporation wanting to bend us over and take advantage of us. We used to have a good reputation internationally and some influence on the world stage - hell, we used to have *autonomy*. Now we're increasingly sticking our nose into other countries' business at the behest of our cousins north of the border, we're a target for ISIS terrorists, and our environmental record sucks. Government scientists have government handlers to 'advise' them before they talk to the press - North Korea, anyone? We have gone downhill in so many ways and been sold out so many times under Stephen 'Brown-nose' Harper's regime, I'll be doing a dance when Canadians finally wake up come next election and give him the bum's rush.
Banks in EVERY jurisdiction carry out transactions with and pay interest on money deposited by criminals of various stripes, from tax evaders to mobsters to drug lords to terrorists. And in many cases the banksters know the provenance of those funds, and simply don't care, 'cause business is business after all. Not to mention the thefts the banks themselves commit, which are only not considered illegal via the legal legerdemain of calling them 'service fees'. So why do governments, (and by extension, their corporate masters), have such a hate on for the TPB? Yeah, I know, it's a rhetorical question, but I had to ask it.
So Pirate Bay is raided and shut down, and its founders thrown in prison, while bank CEO's are allowed to conduct business freely and in full daylight with impunity. It seems that a lot of somebodies in a lot of places consider the facilitation of file sharing a more heinous crime than the facilitation of theft, murder, gun running, etc. Gee, that disconnect wouldn't have anything at all to do with the profits of big corporations, would it?
Along came guys like Jobs, Wozniak and Gates who took on that old system and trashed it by saying to small business "you can own your system, have full control of your data, and pay for your software only once". Using this model, they defeated to old corporate giants while competing against eachother and bringing the consumer innovation and value. Now that they have become the corporate titans with near a monoply grip on the market, they have seen what the old titans saw: to keep growing your profits and keep your shareholders happy when you already have essentially all the available customers, you must find a way to get more cash out of your existing customer base.
Too bad I already posted - I SOOO want to mod you up!
...the way they price their OS upgrades make a lot of sense. Small yearly upgrade - small price.
Apple can do that because they own their hardware market. Microsoft can't even manage to own a decent-sized piece of a free-for-all hardware market, much less create their own viable hardware ecosystem.
"none of the shops I frequent don't have them." Does this mean all of the shops you frequent have them?
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what he meant. Also, Grammar Nazi says that "none" is singular, so the quote should have read "none of the shops I frequent doesn't have them".
How fast will transfer rates be when you only have one or two bars' worth of signal? If they're using a higher modulation bandwidth to get that higher data rate that's one thing; but if they're stuffing more data into the same occupied bandwidth then the Bit Error Rate could start climbing really fast once the signal level starts to drop.
You can load MP3's and M3U play lists on an IPod with Linux. Get rid of Windows/Mac and the problem goes away.
I've even pulled songs off of iPods, although I don't and wouldn't own one. People who lose their iTunes account access think they're screwed, because they don't know how to get the music off the device. I just copy the songs off for them, then use a tagger and the metadata that's already in the files to convert Apple's 'obfuscated' filenames to sensible ones.
I guess the point of the lawsuit though is that bypassing iTunes isn't necessarily obvious to the average user - Apple goes out of their way to keep you in their garden.
I was most recently using Debian, but my computer got messed up after I did an update and that SystemD thing got installed.
Yeah, Debian totally jumped the shark with Jessie. A bunch of stuff broke on my machine - I suspect it was systemd. Couldn't go back to Wheezy though - I bought a new MoBo, and Wheezy didn't even support the *wired* LAN connection out-of-the-box.
I haven't been happy with other developments, either. I used to love GNOME 2, but I tried GNOME 3 and it was like using Windows 8. It's just a bad and dumb experience.
I never even tried G3 - the screen shots and reviews were enough to keep me away. I switched to XFCE at that point, and I've been pretty happy with it. The file manager is only adequate - but then there are no really good graphical file managers in Linux, and I've learned to live with Thunar's limitations. (Dolphin came close to being as good as Windows Explorer when I dialled down the K-Bling - but that was back when you could still install a small part of KDE without getting stuck with the whole damned ugly fat-filled lot of pseudo-dependencies).
I don't know what to do at this point. I can't keep using Linux if its stability is crap, and the other major open source software is caca these days. I don't want to switch to *BSD. I don't like Windows at all. So I think maybe I'm just going to sell my computer, and buy a Mac.
Although I cringe at the thought of Apple and its walled gardens, I hear you and I feel your pain. The Linux landscape seems more homogeneous and less 'choiceful' than it did even a few years ago. But at least give Xubuntu a try before you decide to give up on Linux altogether. And FWIW, I haven't experienced any crashes at all, (fingers crossed), and my installation is as up-to-date as automatic updates can make it.
Unfortunately, Ms Fiorina isn't among the women I'd like to see hold any political office at all. Besides, what is it with businesspeople thinking their experience automatically makes them fit to govern? Sure, some 'sound business principles' are appropriate to the role. But it's the job of government to serve all of its consituents' best interests, not to make a profit come hell or high water.
Corporotocracy be damned - the people are the country's shareholders, not its employees.
A search engine is a web page. Google (without the auto-suggestions) is my home page. The first thing I do after installing a browser is remove the useless "search box", leaving nothing but the actual address bar.
Yup, me too. I go one step farther - I turn off search from the address bar. If there's text in the address bar, and the text isn't a URL, the browser should do nothing. It's called an address bar for a reason.
FF finally managed to totally jump the shark when they introduced the Australis interface. Since then I've used Pale Moon - same code base, same plugins, without all the nonsense. If all this ugly bling ensures their survival, (and their deal with Yahoo certainly counts as 'ugly bling'), then more power to them - but as long as Pale Moon keeps going strong, it really doesn't matter to me any more.
...nuclear is still completely unaffordable and only gets built with massive, and I really do mean massive subsidy.
It's a case of paying now or paying later, and with the latter option we'll be paying a ruinous rate of interest that keeps climbing. The economic consequences of AGW are already devastating in some areas of the world - as time goes on it will only get worse. As much as I dislike the nuclear option for a whole host of reasons, it may be the only thing that can save us from ourselves. So yes, I think masive subsidies are in order, if that's what it takes to get the job done.
On the one hand, I despise extortionists, and the perpetrators ought to be hung out to dry. On the other hand, the folks at Sony arguably have engaged in extortion and fraud on a few occasions in the past, so part of me feels this is simply their just desserts. If it wasn't for the inevitable collateral damage I'd be tempted to say "let 'em all kill each other and God will sort them out".
It does seem kind of unfair that nobody at Sony was ever imprisoned for the Rootkit scandal or the OtherOS clusterfuck, whereas people behind #GOP will likely serve time in jail if they are ever caught. I guess "Corporate Immunity" is just as real in law as "Diplomatic Immunity" - 'the law' just won't openly admit it.
government malfunction can be blamed on people who do not vote, and are then dissatisfied with the outcome
Funny, I was just about to say that government malfunction can be blamed on people who DO vote. Don't get me wrong - I vote. But I'm starting to feel like a sucker for doing so, 'cause the new boss is always the same as the old boss, and nothing ever changes except the facade and the window dressing.
Voting only works so long as there are truly, fundamentally, meaningfully different choices to vote for, and currently there aren't any to speak of. Sure, there are independent candidates nibbling at the frozen fringes of the political landscape. But they don't have organizations nearly big enough to take on the Repubmocrats, and they are pretty well starved right out of contention by the incumbents, who entirely control the media.
Right now, voting with our feet is the only vote that will have any impact. We need to walk away from playing the game, from the bread and circuses, from the latest piece of shiny being purveyed by the corporations who rule the world with the money and the hard work which we freely give to them. It's time to turn off the tap.
But who wants to be first? Snowden tried, and although I consider him a hero, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes right now. And really, how much support has he gotten, other than cheering from the sidelines from people like us on sites like Slashdot? Even at that, a very large percentage of Slashdot comments that are at odds with the current regime's rhetoric are posted AC. If we won't openly even speak our minds, never mind act on what we believe, what chance do we have?
As far as I'm concerned, voting is an opportunity to claim "I did my part", not a chance to actually do anything substantial. Elections are just one of the acts in the three-ring circus that governments and corporations employ to keep us distracted and divided. Other acts in that circus? The war on drugs. The war on terror. The Kardashians. The economy. Facebook. Twitter. Slashdot. And on and on and on. We are being distracted and amused unto the death of our essential freedoms and of any claim to autonomy.
Until we can get our shit together well enough to take action en masse, (or even directed inaction), we'll get more of the same crap from our 'governorations'. And arguably, we'll deserve it.
It works very well for most people. Google is popular precisely because that mode works well for most people. And virtually everyone I'm talking to right now, geek and non-geek alike, agrees Google's new search mode is shit.
Google search has been very obviously moving towards shit for several years now - the latest round of 'enhancements' is just the coliform-filled icing on a crappy cake. But what I fail to see is why they have to cripple the damn thing for people who DO have some search savvy. It seems to me they could just as easily have a default brain-dead mode for all those people searching for Kardashian gossip, AND a 'strict mode' for people who actually have a clue. It's gotten really hard to get useful results, especially with Google insisting that I must want what it thinks are synonyms for my search terms. I have to put quotes around every fucking term now - and that has its own associated problems. Plus, an 'allintext' search often produces WAY more hits than the same search without allintext. WTF?
Google search has gotten so ugly that it makes me long for Alta Vista. Even so, Yahoo search is a bad joke by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up! Whoever modded this comment down either hasn't investigated the matter, or sympathizes with those whose goal is the total destruction of privacy for average citizens.
A penalty that stands a chance of getting the offender's attention, rather than one that's considered simply a cost of doing business. The fine should have been higher though - perhaps an additional $90M as purely punitive damages. Companies need to learn that wilfully screwing over their customers really, really hurts their bottom line. Also, an award approaching a fifth of a billion would likely piss off enough shareholders that several heads would roll.
I don't use mobile email, and don't use Yahoo as my primary email anyway. But on the desktop Yahoo is pretty useable if you disable JavaScript. (In fact I find the non-JS version to be better than Gmail's incredibly annoying "we know what you want even though you don't think you want it" set of 'features'). You get a stupid warning on login and have to click a link to use the non-JS version. But after that, a lot of the annoying, bloated bling disappears. And as a bonus, you can have multiple emails open in multiple tabs - something the braindead JS version is incapable of.
Unfortunately, adding attachments to an email requires JavaScript. I just temporarily allow scripts for Yahoo, then revoke the permissions when I'm done.
Just stop with all the RFID bullshit on credit and debit cards! Really, is that extra few seconds taken to insert and enter a PIN such an onerous burden? People in that much of a hurry aren't likely to use that precious sliver of time to stop and smell the roses anyway.
For those worried about cell phones and the like, I suspect the new-style duds will do little or nothing to impede those signals. They're a couple of orders of magnitude higher in frequency than the current RFID payment systems, and they use far-field RF, whose intensity falls off with with the square of distance. The intensity of Near-Field Communications falls off with the cube of distance, and is more 'magnetic' than 'electro' in nature, so the shielding mechanism tends to be different.
For myself, I plan on de-activating all of my contactless payment cards by breaking the antenna loop with a drill, as soon as I can get them imaged so I know where the antenna traces are. I've already had my banks disable the feature, so in theory I shouldn't be able to make contactless payments, but that won't stop info theft via unauthorized readers.
And yes, I DO wear my tinfoil hat proudly...
Everbody knows that invading digital privacy across international boundaries is the job of corporations, not governments!
The title of the article, (and therefore the summary), should have said "Uber Claims To Have Limited 'God View' To Improve Rider Privacy". After all, does anybody other than gullible people and fanbois really take them at their word?
...Harper is seemingly doing everything he can to keep Canadians out of Canadian jobs.
Fucking neocons.
Fucking neocons? Fucking traitors, I say. I also despair for our country under Harper's dict - er, leadership. His ultimate goal seems to be to turn Canada into America's bitch and/or the stooge of any multinational corporation wanting to bend us over and take advantage of us. We used to have a good reputation internationally and some influence on the world stage - hell, we used to have *autonomy*. Now we're increasingly sticking our nose into other countries' business at the behest of our cousins north of the border, we're a target for ISIS terrorists, and our environmental record sucks. Government scientists have government handlers to 'advise' them before they talk to the press - North Korea, anyone? We have gone downhill in so many ways and been sold out so many times under Stephen 'Brown-nose' Harper's regime, I'll be doing a dance when Canadians finally wake up come next election and give him the bum's rush.
Banks in EVERY jurisdiction carry out transactions with and pay interest on money deposited by criminals of various stripes, from tax evaders to mobsters to drug lords to terrorists. And in many cases the banksters know the provenance of those funds, and simply don't care, 'cause business is business after all. Not to mention the thefts the banks themselves commit, which are only not considered illegal via the legal legerdemain of calling them 'service fees'. So why do governments, (and by extension, their corporate masters), have such a hate on for the TPB? Yeah, I know, it's a rhetorical question, but I had to ask it.
So Pirate Bay is raided and shut down, and its founders thrown in prison, while bank CEO's are allowed to conduct business freely and in full daylight with impunity. It seems that a lot of somebodies in a lot of places consider the facilitation of file sharing a more heinous crime than the facilitation of theft, murder, gun running, etc. Gee, that disconnect wouldn't have anything at all to do with the profits of big corporations, would it?
Along came guys like Jobs, Wozniak and Gates who took on that old system and trashed it by saying to small business "you can own your system, have full control of your data, and pay for your software only once". Using this model, they defeated to old corporate giants while competing against eachother and bringing the consumer innovation and value. Now that they have become the corporate titans with near a monoply grip on the market, they have seen what the old titans saw: to keep growing your profits and keep your shareholders happy when you already have essentially all the available customers, you must find a way to get more cash out of your existing customer base.
Too bad I already posted - I SOOO want to mod you up!
...the way they price their OS upgrades make a lot of sense. Small yearly upgrade - small price.
Apple can do that because they own their hardware market. Microsoft can't even manage to own a decent-sized piece of a free-for-all hardware market, much less create their own viable hardware ecosystem.
A great deal of work is happening at a deeper level that may not have yet surfaced. It will surface eventually, however.
I wonder if Arista also copied the 'ease of access' that Cisco provides to the NSA and others? Maybe that's patented too...
"none of the shops I frequent don't have them." Does this mean all of the shops you frequent have them?
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what he meant. Also, Grammar Nazi says that "none" is singular, so the quote should have read "none of the shops I frequent doesn't have them".
How fast will transfer rates be when you only have one or two bars' worth of signal? If they're using a higher modulation bandwidth to get that higher data rate that's one thing; but if they're stuffing more data into the same occupied bandwidth then the Bit Error Rate could start climbing really fast once the signal level starts to drop.
You can load MP3's and M3U play lists on an IPod with Linux. Get rid of Windows/Mac and the problem goes away.
I've even pulled songs off of iPods, although I don't and wouldn't own one. People who lose their iTunes account access think they're screwed, because they don't know how to get the music off the device. I just copy the songs off for them, then use a tagger and the metadata that's already in the files to convert Apple's 'obfuscated' filenames to sensible ones.
I guess the point of the lawsuit though is that bypassing iTunes isn't necessarily obvious to the average user - Apple goes out of their way to keep you in their garden.
I was most recently using Debian, but my computer got messed up after I did an update and that SystemD thing got installed.
Yeah, Debian totally jumped the shark with Jessie. A bunch of stuff broke on my machine - I suspect it was systemd. Couldn't go back to Wheezy though - I bought a new MoBo, and Wheezy didn't even support the *wired* LAN connection out-of-the-box.
I haven't been happy with other developments, either. I used to love GNOME 2, but I tried GNOME 3 and it was like using Windows 8. It's just a bad and dumb experience.
I never even tried G3 - the screen shots and reviews were enough to keep me away. I switched to XFCE at that point, and I've been pretty happy with it. The file manager is only adequate - but then there are no really good graphical file managers in Linux, and I've learned to live with Thunar's limitations. (Dolphin came close to being as good as Windows Explorer when I dialled down the K-Bling - but that was back when you could still install a small part of KDE without getting stuck with the whole damned ugly fat-filled lot of pseudo-dependencies).
I don't know what to do at this point. I can't keep using Linux if its stability is crap, and the other major open source software is caca these days. I don't want to switch to *BSD. I don't like Windows at all. So I think maybe I'm just going to sell my computer, and buy a Mac.
Although I cringe at the thought of Apple and its walled gardens, I hear you and I feel your pain. The Linux landscape seems more homogeneous and less 'choiceful' than it did even a few years ago. But at least give Xubuntu a try before you decide to give up on Linux altogether. And FWIW, I haven't experienced any crashes at all, (fingers crossed), and my installation is as up-to-date as automatic updates can make it.
Unfortunately, Ms Fiorina isn't among the women I'd like to see hold any political office at all. Besides, what is it with businesspeople thinking their experience automatically makes them fit to govern? Sure, some 'sound business principles' are appropriate to the role. But it's the job of government to serve all of its consituents' best interests, not to make a profit come hell or high water.
Corporotocracy be damned - the people are the country's shareholders, not its employees.
A search engine is a web page. Google (without the auto-suggestions) is my home page. The first thing I do after installing a browser is remove the useless "search box", leaving nothing but the actual address bar.
Yup, me too. I go one step farther - I turn off search from the address bar. If there's text in the address bar, and the text isn't a URL, the browser should do nothing. It's called an address bar for a reason.
FF finally managed to totally jump the shark when they introduced the Australis interface. Since then I've used Pale Moon - same code base, same plugins, without all the nonsense. If all this ugly bling ensures their survival, (and their deal with Yahoo certainly counts as 'ugly bling'), then more power to them - but as long as Pale Moon keeps going strong, it really doesn't matter to me any more.
...nuclear is still completely unaffordable and only gets built with massive, and I really do mean massive subsidy.
It's a case of paying now or paying later, and with the latter option we'll be paying a ruinous rate of interest that keeps climbing. The economic consequences of AGW are already devastating in some areas of the world - as time goes on it will only get worse. As much as I dislike the nuclear option for a whole host of reasons, it may be the only thing that can save us from ourselves. So yes, I think masive subsidies are in order, if that's what it takes to get the job done.
On the one hand, I despise extortionists, and the perpetrators ought to be hung out to dry. On the other hand, the folks at Sony arguably have engaged in extortion and fraud on a few occasions in the past, so part of me feels this is simply their just desserts. If it wasn't for the inevitable collateral damage I'd be tempted to say "let 'em all kill each other and God will sort them out".
It does seem kind of unfair that nobody at Sony was ever imprisoned for the Rootkit scandal or the OtherOS clusterfuck, whereas people behind #GOP will likely serve time in jail if they are ever caught. I guess "Corporate Immunity" is just as real in law as "Diplomatic Immunity" - 'the law' just won't openly admit it.
government malfunction can be blamed on people who do not vote, and are then dissatisfied with the outcome
Funny, I was just about to say that government malfunction can be blamed on people who DO vote. Don't get me wrong - I vote. But I'm starting to feel like a sucker for doing so, 'cause the new boss is always the same as the old boss, and nothing ever changes except the facade and the window dressing.
Voting only works so long as there are truly, fundamentally, meaningfully different choices to vote for, and currently there aren't any to speak of. Sure, there are independent candidates nibbling at the frozen fringes of the political landscape. But they don't have organizations nearly big enough to take on the Repubmocrats, and they are pretty well starved right out of contention by the incumbents, who entirely control the media.
Right now, voting with our feet is the only vote that will have any impact. We need to walk away from playing the game, from the bread and circuses, from the latest piece of shiny being purveyed by the corporations who rule the world with the money and the hard work which we freely give to them. It's time to turn off the tap.
But who wants to be first? Snowden tried, and although I consider him a hero, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes right now. And really, how much support has he gotten, other than cheering from the sidelines from people like us on sites like Slashdot? Even at that, a very large percentage of Slashdot comments that are at odds with the current regime's rhetoric are posted AC. If we won't openly even speak our minds, never mind act on what we believe, what chance do we have?
As far as I'm concerned, voting is an opportunity to claim "I did my part", not a chance to actually do anything substantial. Elections are just one of the acts in the three-ring circus that governments and corporations employ to keep us distracted and divided. Other acts in that circus? The war on drugs. The war on terror. The Kardashians. The economy. Facebook. Twitter. Slashdot. And on and on and on. We are being distracted and amused unto the death of our essential freedoms and of any claim to autonomy.
Until we can get our shit together well enough to take action en masse, (or even directed inaction), we'll get more of the same crap from our 'governorations'. And arguably, we'll deserve it.
This will inevitably result in more people blowing their hard-earned money...
It works very well for most people. Google is popular precisely because that mode works well for most people. And virtually everyone I'm talking to right now, geek and non-geek alike, agrees Google's new search mode is shit.
Google search has been very obviously moving towards shit for several years now - the latest round of 'enhancements' is just the coliform-filled icing on a crappy cake. But what I fail to see is why they have to cripple the damn thing for people who DO have some search savvy. It seems to me they could just as easily have a default brain-dead mode for all those people searching for Kardashian gossip, AND a 'strict mode' for people who actually have a clue. It's gotten really hard to get useful results, especially with Google insisting that I must want what it thinks are synonyms for my search terms. I have to put quotes around every fucking term now - and that has its own associated problems. Plus, an 'allintext' search often produces WAY more hits than the same search without allintext. WTF?
Google search has gotten so ugly that it makes me long for Alta Vista. Even so, Yahoo search is a bad joke by comparison.
Gah! Where are my mod points when I need them? Thanks for an informative and insightful reply.