But you're screwed if the service gets shut down, I'd reply.
The service doesn't even need to shut down. All it has to do is mutate in a non backwards-compatible way, and bang! you're screwed. It's not like you can uninstall the new cloud and roll back to the old cloud.
Apple's cloud services have been particularly poorly planned and late on deployment, at least from the desktop side of things.
So I guess that when your laptop is asleep there is part of it that is still awake and talking to the mothership.
1 - Does that mean we will have to put these in "airplane mode" when boarding a plane? 2 - Does it only connect over known networks, or is it going to be constantly touching every public wi-fi ap it finds as you drive around town? 3 - Does whatever OS is running during sleep have its own network stack that may be buggy or get out of date with regard to security certificates or DNS entries? 4 - Can other processes besides PowerNap run during sleep like this? Is there a ceiling on resource usage to prevent a runaway process from draining the battery?
I'm sure this is one of those things where details will emerge over time and with penetration testing, and I'm equally sure that paranoid folks like me will be able to turn it off. But I do worry that the average user won't have any idea that the changed nature of sleep and get into trouble because of it.
Forget about class action. Go with crowd action. Let 100,000 people file in small claims court at the same time. Assuming the courts can handle the load, I'm guessing even MS doesn't have enough lawyers to appear personally in each suit.
I agree, but it would take something pretty extraordinary to motivate that many people to file.
You could certainly streamline the process by drafting the necessary documents and posting instructions and howtos. You could even set up a legal fund whereby people who didn't want to bother filing could just contribute $5-$10 to people who do. But it would still be an uphill battle to get more than a handful of suits in play. If MS does something egregious enough to inspire a mass response, the Justice Dept. would be all over it.
It is pretty fun to think about crowdsourcing multiple lawsuits as an alternative to a single class action suit, though. It could be a very powerful weapon in the right situation.
But surely the court would be more clogged by N thousand individual cases than by a single class action with (the same) N thousand plaintiffs.
My thoughts exactly.
If you got a savvy legal team together and pre-drafted all of the necessary paperwork, shared discovery materials via web, and crowdsourced case strategy, individuals could use their own lawyers to file identical lawsuits against the company in multiple jurisdictions. What a frickin' mess that would be!
Several uses for cheap sequencing, beyond paternity:
- Identify allergens in food - Positively ID species used for meat (lots of cheap sushi isn't what it is sold as) - Discover unlicensed use of GM crops - Identify dangerous molds / fungi in ambient air
None of these is particularly attractive at $1000 a pop, but if you drop to $100 or even $10 then you will see widespread adoption.
As pointed out elsewhere, Siri is used for much more than search queries.
A few things that Apple's Siri servers know about you, besides search:
- Email or text messages composed using speech to text - Calendar appointments made or changed via Siri - Call records when the call was initiated via Siri
The trove of data they are collecting (or, let's hope, ignoring) is not trivial, and companies that don't outsource to the cloud for security/privacy reasons are correct to be very concerned about how their employees are using their iPhones.
1) P0wn the neighbors' wi-fi access points* 2) Install script that causes access point to act as a proxy for your own downloading 3) Download six or more copyrighted works via each neighbor's IP address
Within a few days, you could be the only one left in your hood with an unthrottled internet connection. Woo-hoo, no more choppy Netflix streaming during prime time! And you get a bunch of free IP to boot.
*Not illegal if they ask you, as a computer whiz, to "optimize" them.
These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that. --Mark Twain
Man, I wish I could see Mark Twain in a street fight with Charles Dickens.
Bingo. They had buzz. They had people trading invites. They had people signing up! Woo-hoo!
And them some douchebag decided to actually enforce the real names policy.
And that was it. We all looked at each other (metaphorically) and said, fuck this, it's just as bad as Facebook. Worse, actually, because if Facebook suspends your account you don't lose access to your email, calendars, docs, blogs, videos, photos, rss feeds, ad revenue, and so on.
See, people really wanted G+ to succeed when they thought that it was a social network. But then we learned that it was really an "identity service" that Google created so they could tie all your other online activity to your real name. False advertising, bait and switch -- whatever it was, it was a huge turnoff.
I hope that when they point fingers over this in Mountain View, the fingers all point at the ass-hat who thought that pseudonyms would break his precious social network.
They want everything for nothing, and will not pay their bills.
This.
Greed is what has gotten them to this sorry state, where they are basically breaking the law in a weak-minded attempt to protect their profits. Of course they aren't going to pay! They're the victims here!
I swear that if Walt Disney was alive today (let's wake him up!) you would be able to download any movie in the Studios' archive for 99 cents, and with no annoying trailers at the beginning. He realized that entertaining people was the best way to make money. The idots who are in charge now think that making money is the best way to entertain people. See the difference?
the problem is that movies are more expensive to produce than music.
With enough eyeballs, all creative works are cheap. -or- It's not the audience's problem that movies are expensive. The studio hires the talent and controls the budget. If they can't sell enough copies to pay themselves back, then they have no business making movies-for-profit in the first place.
Maybe it is possible to develop something like those yoghurts with bacteria that helps people with an unhealthy or too sterile diet keep a working digestive system but for people who need something to keep them from developing allergies instead.
How about: If your immune system has nothing to do, it gets bored and will look for other things to fight. That does include triggering (sometimes sever) immune reactions for imaginary threats like pollen, cat hair or dust. Also a well trained immune system will be a lot better at fighting real threats, than one that was never really challenged.
I thought this was the mechanism as well. At least, that's the theory I've always heard. Is this a myth?
Whether you hate immigration or labor more of course will affect your opinion of the choice, but sending the factories to Mexico is certainly the kindest thing to do for the immigrants, since they don't have to leave their families, go to a strange land, etc.
It's actually the kindest thing we can do for our corporations, since they don't have to pay US wages, obey our laws and regulations, or provide the kinds of benefits that US workers fought for and won a century ago.
Ask yourself, would I be an American if leaving your family and going to a strange land was such a bad thing? This used to be a country that people wanted to come to for things that a more important than a paycheck.
I don't know where people get the idea the US isn't competitive in manufacturing.
We may be competitive and still be an industrial force in terms of output, but at 8% of our workforce we are by no means an industrial nation. So the popular perception is that the USA has left industry behind, much as we left agriculture behind before that.
Efficiency is great, but it leaves a lot of people out of work and bitter, and that causes them to compare the past (when there were plenty of "good" manufacturing jobs) to the present (when there are very few) and assume that we must not be very competitive.
Sure, but what is it with the people that build image manipulation software also wanting to design and implement their own effing window managers?
I know GTK has been useful and all, and it's arguably better than whatever Adobe calls their pos windowing system, but wouldn't the product be better if the developers just focused on image manipulation and left the UI widgets to the OS?
Now it is possible to change text inside the bounding text box and also use certain styles! For example select a word and press a “Bold” or “Italic” button. You can also change the size, line-height and font! Not just that – meanwhile it is also possible to change the color of certain words and characters.
Bold, italic, and colors!? Is this a joke?
If only. Little-known fact: software engineers are allergic to typography.
That's just one of the reasons why Adobe can still charge $600+ for a program as shitty and bloated as Photoshop. Back in the day they locked some programmers in a room with some type designers and wouldn't let them out until they built up an immunity to each other. That sort of corporate IP is a wicked money-making machine.
First of all, I suspect that Hulu (or at least the part of Hulu not owned by Comcast) doesn't want to do this, but is being forced to do so by old media content providers who make A LOT more money from cable subscriptions than they do from advertising.
Back in the days of broadcast, TV was funded almost entirely by advertising. The more eyeballs a station or network could put in front of the screen, the more profitable they could be. Adjust profit up or down depending on the probable make-up of the audience and the cost of producing or acquiring the shows, but still a pretty simple model.
If that was where we were today, giving away shows on the interweb would be a no-brainer: worldwide audience, combined with incredibly specific knowledge of exactly who is watching.
But when cable TV came along in the 80s, and especially after deregulation in the 90s, it changed the business model for most television programming. Channels (really, the networks that own them) are now given a fee per subscriber per month by the cable companies. This could be anywhere from a few pennies to over $4 (for ESPN) per month. Per subscriber. This is where the majority of the money you pay for basic cable goes. The cable companies earn their profits from selling premium channels and renting their crappy equipment to you, and from usurious late fees and re-connect fees charged to poor folks.
On a nationwide basis (about 50 million subscribers), these fees are enough to fund a lot of crappy reality/news/sports/talk programming, and even some real Hollywood-style original series. The ads sold during these programs are important, but nowhere near as important (in most cases) as the subscription fees. Those fees are money in the bank, every month, *whether anyone actually watches or not*. You can only sell ads if someone is likely to be watching.
Now consider the fact that an decent old media company (take Fox for example) is going to own multiple different cable channels. For each one that they can convince cable companies to carry, they get paid per subscriber per month. We're talking hundred of millions of monthly income whether or not anyone actually watches.
So when they see Hulu and Netflix disrupting that profit stream, of course they freak out! Seriously, if cable subscriptions in the US drop by 50% in the next three years, its going to cause a giant sucking sound in the bank accounts of every company involved in cable television. If advertisers figure out that no one is watching the shows, same thing. And if cable companies learn that no one is watching the channel... the channel gets dropped. For all of those reasons, they will fight internet streaming tooth and nail.
You're going to see most of these media companies fail, of course, and good riddance. Anyone who thinks we need The History Channel is welcome to spend $30/mo purchasing Time/Life DVD box sets for the rest of their life.
Consider the humble wiretap: telephone conversations are unencrypted communications over semi-public networks, and yet unsophisticated callers presume them to be private. So there is a body of law designed to protect the privacy of our phone calls.
Yes, the neighborhood utility guy could tap the lines and listen in. But no company or enforcement agency could do so on a large scale without causing a huge scandal.
As tech-minded people, we all know that what happens on unecrypted wi-fi (and plain-text internet connections) is subject to interception by war-drivers, ISPs, and government-operated listening posts. And so it's hard to have any sympathy for folks who used unencrypted wi-fi and got caught by Street View's packet capture. But that doesn't mean it should be legal for organizations or governments to listen in. Just because they can, doesn't mean they should.
From the report, we know that Google started doing this in 2008, which *is* pretty late in the game for unencrypted wi-fi. Nevertheless, there was a time (say 2003ish) when it was fashionable to have unencrypted wi-fi. Not only did this ease compatibility problems, it made it easy for friends, family, and other visitors to get online quickly. It was also seen as an altruistic way to give internet to the masses. This started changing in the middle of the decade, but for whatever reasons there were clearly still quite a few unencrypted networks for gslite to sniff in 2008-2010.
Let's sum up the whole thing, "Google had not violated any laws". That's straight from the article and the FCC investigation report. Not one single law was broken, PERIOD. So how is this news? If the NYT really wants to do news about privacy rights why doesn't it put the bullshit CISPA on the front page instead of ignoring it.
To be fair, the report accuses Google of potentially violating the Wiretap Act, but because Engineer Doe won't incriminate him- or herself there is no way to prove it.
I think this is scary and completely unacceptable.
Why is it "completely unacceptable" to capture data that is being broadcast in the clear over public radio spectrum in a public space?
It's not that they captured some broadcast data, anyone can do that. It's that they systematically drove around and captured A LOT of broadcast data and correlated it to location information, with the intent that it could be mined for business purposes in the future.
It's the same reason why the health code is very strict for restaurants but not for personal kitchens. If I don't cook something correctly, I could make my family sick. But if a restaurant doesn't cook something correctly it could make hundreds of people sick.
Scale matters when it comes to the consequences of your actions.
Slashdot Mirror
But you're screwed if the service gets shut down, I'd reply.
The service doesn't even need to shut down. All it has to do is mutate in a non backwards-compatible way, and bang! you're screwed. It's not like you can uninstall the new cloud and roll back to the old cloud.
Apple's cloud services have been particularly poorly planned and late on deployment, at least from the desktop side of things.
If nuclear weapons have made war so unlikely, then why does the USA spend so much time and money fighting wars?
What massive innovation has the RIAA stifled?
Think about how easy it is to share photos and albums with your friends and family.
Now why isn't it just as easy to share music? Try to share a music track or a playlist from your phone.
Generally speaking, text, images, and video (copyrighted or not) are easily shareable via social software. But audio, not so much.
So I guess that when your laptop is asleep there is part of it that is still awake and talking to the mothership.
1 - Does that mean we will have to put these in "airplane mode" when boarding a plane?
2 - Does it only connect over known networks, or is it going to be constantly touching every public wi-fi ap it finds as you drive around town?
3 - Does whatever OS is running during sleep have its own network stack that may be buggy or get out of date with regard to security certificates or DNS entries?
4 - Can other processes besides PowerNap run during sleep like this? Is there a ceiling on resource usage to prevent a runaway process from draining the battery?
I'm sure this is one of those things where details will emerge over time and with penetration testing, and I'm equally sure that paranoid folks like me will be able to turn it off. But I do worry that the average user won't have any idea that the changed nature of sleep and get into trouble because of it.
Forget about class action. Go with crowd action. Let 100,000 people file in small claims court at the same time. Assuming the courts can handle the load, I'm guessing even MS doesn't have enough lawyers to appear personally in each suit.
I agree, but it would take something pretty extraordinary to motivate that many people to file.
You could certainly streamline the process by drafting the necessary documents and posting instructions and howtos. You could even set up a legal fund whereby people who didn't want to bother filing could just contribute $5-$10 to people who do. But it would still be an uphill battle to get more than a handful of suits in play. If MS does something egregious enough to inspire a mass response, the Justice Dept. would be all over it.
It is pretty fun to think about crowdsourcing multiple lawsuits as an alternative to a single class action suit, though. It could be a very powerful weapon in the right situation.
But surely the court would be more clogged by N thousand individual cases than by a single class action with (the same) N thousand plaintiffs.
My thoughts exactly.
If you got a savvy legal team together and pre-drafted all of the necessary paperwork, shared discovery materials via web, and crowdsourced case strategy, individuals could use their own lawyers to file identical lawsuits against the company in multiple jurisdictions. What a frickin' mess that would be!
Several uses for cheap sequencing, beyond paternity:
- Identify allergens in food
- Positively ID species used for meat (lots of cheap sushi isn't what it is sold as)
- Discover unlicensed use of GM crops
- Identify dangerous molds / fungi in ambient air
None of these is particularly attractive at $1000 a pop, but if you drop to $100 or even $10 then you will see widespread adoption.
As pointed out elsewhere, Siri is used for much more than search queries.
A few things that Apple's Siri servers know about you, besides search:
- Email or text messages composed using speech to text
- Calendar appointments made or changed via Siri
- Call records when the call was initiated via Siri
The trove of data they are collecting (or, let's hope, ignoring) is not trivial, and companies that don't outsource to the cloud for security/privacy reasons are correct to be very concerned about how their employees are using their iPhones.
Free up bandwidth in your neighborhood:
1) P0wn the neighbors' wi-fi access points*
2) Install script that causes access point to act as a proxy for your own downloading
3) Download six or more copyrighted works via each neighbor's IP address
Within a few days, you could be the only one left in your hood with an unthrottled internet connection. Woo-hoo, no more choppy Netflix streaming during prime time! And you get a bunch of free IP to boot.
*Not illegal if they ask you, as a computer whiz, to "optimize" them.
These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that. --Mark Twain
Man, I wish I could see Mark Twain in a street fight with Charles Dickens.
So lonely, people don't even bother to study it.
I see it there in iTunes, but I never bother to look at it. I guess no one else does, either?
Does it have a web front-end, or is the whole thing really trapped inside of iTunes? Because if so, that's hilarious.
Bingo. They had buzz. They had people trading invites. They had people signing up! Woo-hoo!
And them some douchebag decided to actually enforce the real names policy.
And that was it. We all looked at each other (metaphorically) and said, fuck this, it's just as bad as Facebook. Worse, actually, because if Facebook suspends your account you don't lose access to your email, calendars, docs, blogs, videos, photos, rss feeds, ad revenue, and so on.
See, people really wanted G+ to succeed when they thought that it was a social network. But then we learned that it was really an "identity service" that Google created so they could tie all your other online activity to your real name. False advertising, bait and switch -- whatever it was, it was a huge turnoff.
I hope that when they point fingers over this in Mountain View, the fingers all point at the ass-hat who thought that pseudonyms would break his precious social network.
They want everything for nothing, and will not pay their bills.
This.
Greed is what has gotten them to this sorry state, where they are basically breaking the law in a weak-minded attempt to protect their profits. Of course they aren't going to pay! They're the victims here!
I swear that if Walt Disney was alive today (let's wake him up!) you would be able to download any movie in the Studios' archive for 99 cents, and with no annoying trailers at the beginning. He realized that entertaining people was the best way to make money. The idots who are in charge now think that making money is the best way to entertain people. See the difference?
the problem is that movies are more expensive to produce than music.
With enough eyeballs, all creative works are cheap.
-or-
It's not the audience's problem that movies are expensive. The studio hires the talent and controls the budget. If they can't sell enough copies to pay themselves back, then they have no business making movies-for-profit in the first place.
Maybe it is possible to develop something like those yoghurts with bacteria that helps people with an unhealthy or too sterile diet keep a working digestive system but for people who need something to keep them from developing allergies instead.
I think they call that "camping".
How about: If your immune system has nothing to do, it gets bored and will look for other things to fight. That does include triggering (sometimes sever) immune reactions for imaginary threats like pollen, cat hair or dust. Also a well trained immune system will be a lot better at fighting real threats, than one that was never really challenged.
I thought this was the mechanism as well. At least, that's the theory I've always heard. Is this a myth?
Whether you hate immigration or labor more of course will affect your opinion of the choice, but sending the factories to Mexico is certainly the kindest thing to do for the immigrants, since they don't have to leave their families, go to a strange land, etc.
It's actually the kindest thing we can do for our corporations, since they don't have to pay US wages, obey our laws and regulations, or provide the kinds of benefits that US workers fought for and won a century ago.
Ask yourself, would I be an American if leaving your family and going to a strange land was such a bad thing? This used to be a country that people wanted to come to for things that a more important than a paycheck.
I don't know where people get the idea the US isn't competitive in manufacturing.
We may be competitive and still be an industrial force in terms of output, but at 8% of our workforce we are by no means an industrial nation. So the popular perception is that the USA has left industry behind, much as we left agriculture behind before that.
Efficiency is great, but it leaves a lot of people out of work and bitter, and that causes them to compare the past (when there were plenty of "good" manufacturing jobs) to the present (when there are very few) and assume that we must not be very competitive.
Sure, but what is it with the people that build image manipulation software also wanting to design and implement their own effing window managers?
I know GTK has been useful and all, and it's arguably better than whatever Adobe calls their pos windowing system, but wouldn't the product be better if the developers just focused on image manipulation and left the UI widgets to the OS?
Bold, italic, and colors!? Is this a joke?
If only. Little-known fact: software engineers are allergic to typography.
That's just one of the reasons why Adobe can still charge $600+ for a program as shitty and bloated as Photoshop. Back in the day they locked some programmers in a room with some type designers and wouldn't let them out until they built up an immunity to each other. That sort of corporate IP is a wicked money-making machine.
First of all, I suspect that Hulu (or at least the part of Hulu not owned by Comcast) doesn't want to do this, but is being forced to do so by old media content providers who make A LOT more money from cable subscriptions than they do from advertising.
Back in the days of broadcast, TV was funded almost entirely by advertising. The more eyeballs a station or network could put in front of the screen, the more profitable they could be. Adjust profit up or down depending on the probable make-up of the audience and the cost of producing or acquiring the shows, but still a pretty simple model.
If that was where we were today, giving away shows on the interweb would be a no-brainer: worldwide audience, combined with incredibly specific knowledge of exactly who is watching.
But when cable TV came along in the 80s, and especially after deregulation in the 90s, it changed the business model for most television programming. Channels (really, the networks that own them) are now given a fee per subscriber per month by the cable companies. This could be anywhere from a few pennies to over $4 (for ESPN) per month. Per subscriber. This is where the majority of the money you pay for basic cable goes. The cable companies earn their profits from selling premium channels and renting their crappy equipment to you, and from usurious late fees and re-connect fees charged to poor folks.
On a nationwide basis (about 50 million subscribers), these fees are enough to fund a lot of crappy reality/news/sports/talk programming, and even some real Hollywood-style original series. The ads sold during these programs are important, but nowhere near as important (in most cases) as the subscription fees. Those fees are money in the bank, every month, *whether anyone actually watches or not*. You can only sell ads if someone is likely to be watching.
Now consider the fact that an decent old media company (take Fox for example) is going to own multiple different cable channels. For each one that they can convince cable companies to carry, they get paid per subscriber per month. We're talking hundred of millions of monthly income whether or not anyone actually watches.
So when they see Hulu and Netflix disrupting that profit stream, of course they freak out! Seriously, if cable subscriptions in the US drop by 50% in the next three years, its going to cause a giant sucking sound in the bank accounts of every company involved in cable television. If advertisers figure out that no one is watching the shows, same thing. And if cable companies learn that no one is watching the channel... the channel gets dropped. For all of those reasons, they will fight internet streaming tooth and nail.
You're going to see most of these media companies fail, of course, and good riddance. Anyone who thinks we need The History Channel is welcome to spend $30/mo purchasing Time/Life DVD box sets for the rest of their life.
Consider the humble wiretap: telephone conversations are unencrypted communications over semi-public networks, and yet unsophisticated callers presume them to be private. So there is a body of law designed to protect the privacy of our phone calls.
Yes, the neighborhood utility guy could tap the lines and listen in. But no company or enforcement agency could do so on a large scale without causing a huge scandal.
As tech-minded people, we all know that what happens on unecrypted wi-fi (and plain-text internet connections) is subject to interception by war-drivers, ISPs, and government-operated listening posts. And so it's hard to have any sympathy for folks who used unencrypted wi-fi and got caught by Street View's packet capture. But that doesn't mean it should be legal for organizations or governments to listen in. Just because they can, doesn't mean they should.
From the report, we know that Google started doing this in 2008, which *is* pretty late in the game for unencrypted wi-fi. Nevertheless, there was a time (say 2003ish) when it was fashionable to have unencrypted wi-fi. Not only did this ease compatibility problems, it made it easy for friends, family, and other visitors to get online quickly. It was also seen as an altruistic way to give internet to the masses. This started changing in the middle of the decade, but for whatever reasons there were clearly still quite a few unencrypted networks for gslite to sniff in 2008-2010.
Let's sum up the whole thing, "Google had not violated any laws". That's straight from the article and the FCC investigation report. Not one single law was broken, PERIOD. So how is this news? If the NYT really wants to do news about privacy rights why doesn't it put the bullshit CISPA on the front page instead of ignoring it.
To be fair, the report accuses Google of potentially violating the Wiretap Act, but because Engineer Doe won't incriminate him- or herself there is no way to prove it.
I think this is scary and completely unacceptable.
Why is it "completely unacceptable" to capture data that is being broadcast in the clear over public radio spectrum in a public space?
It's not that they captured some broadcast data, anyone can do that. It's that they systematically drove around and captured A LOT of broadcast data and correlated it to location information, with the intent that it could be mined for business purposes in the future.
It's the same reason why the health code is very strict for restaurants but not for personal kitchens. If I don't cook something correctly, I could make my family sick. But if a restaurant doesn't cook something correctly it could make hundreds of people sick.
Scale matters when it comes to the consequences of your actions.
Bob Cringely has been saying that IBM is poised to sell off or lay off the majority of its North American workforce.
http://www.cringely.com/2012/04/by-2015-IBM-will-look-like-oracle/
So do that mean the mayor's staff will be semi-anonymous call center employees in some other country?