Suing for hate speech makes about as much sense as trying to apply RICO to completely legal activities.
Extortion is not a "completely legal activity". Furthermore neither is barratry and racketeering, both of which arguably apply in the case of patent trolls.
Because the USB connectors were designed to be less expensive than Apple connectors.
Oh I understand perfectly that it was an economic decision. They wanted to make it cheaply and it shows. I run a company that makes wire harnesses so I understand this phenomenon well. I just think it was a *bad* decision.
You seem to think you can patent an idea. You can't. It says so right in the uspto website.
Except that you can patent an idea in practice. Software patents are effectively patenting an idea. Software = Math. Math should be unpatentable as it is by definition abstract but you certainly can get a patent on software. Patent on software = patent on math = patent on idea. There is (so far) no requirement to provide working code and plenty of software patents have been approved for the last several decades without providing so much as a functional algorithm.
Lawyers today make sure that a patent is minimum 50 pages, and some run to more than 1000. The language is extremely formalized and very hard to read for untrained minds. And the issues are so specialized that the average judge would have to train several years in the particular field to understand what the invention is about.
There is an easy solution then. If the patent cannot be explained to a judge in terms they can understand then it should be denied. If the patent cannot be explained in 3 pages or less then it probably is an attempt to obfuscate the issue.
And that's apparently not even a requirement, because I have a WD USB drive that helpfully puts the WD logo on the side you're supposed to have up and the USB logo on the side which is down - exactly the opposite of the "standard" way USB cables are "supposed" to work.
On some devices it's not actually clear which way "up" is supposed to be. I'm typing this on a tower PC. It has a bunch of vertically oriented USB ports on the back because the motherboard doesn't know what kind of case it will be placed into. The only way to know what "up" is, is to figure out which wall the motherboard is mounted to. That means "up" is actually "right" or "left". It's faster to just try one direction and if it doesn't go in, flip it. Of course it seems the first way way you try it invariably is the wrong way. You'd think I'd get it right around 50% of the time but it never seems that way.
Imagine living in a country where only 3.5 percent of the population use the Internet.
That's not hard for anyone who is old enough to remember the 1980s. The internet as we know it today is a pretty recent development for most of the population. Before 1990 or so pretty much no one outside of academia had internet access.
would a charger need to current limit the power if the device tries to draw more than it can provide?
Because many chargers are connected to devices or power lines (110VAC etc) that can supply MUCH more power than the cable can handle. The wires inside a USB cable used for power are often 24 gauge which can only handle a relatively modest amount of power before they overheat. You need a charger that is smart enough to not exceed the limits of a USB cable even if the device is dumb enough to "request" that much power. Otherwise you could end up with a molten wire rather easily.
Corner cases usually. The power requirements of devices plugged into USB are a bit unpredictable so it's more complex than many realize. I agree with you though. It seems like they are adding a bunch of needless complexity to make up for some poor initial design choices.
As an example of poor design choices, it has always mystified me why they made USB a keyed connection instead of a reversible one. I'm not overly impressed with Lightning cables from Apple but one of the things Apple did right was to make it so you didn't have to fuss with worrying about which way was "up". There is no reason USB could not have been designed so that you didn't have to worry about orientation when plugging it in. It's got 4 conductors (5 in some cases) so it wouldn't exactly be rocket surgery to put enough brains into the controllers to negotiate the connection. They could have also solved it with a better designed (albeit more $) connector. Hell if they were really lazy they could have even done it by adding more wires. But instead they chose the cheapest possible route and pretend that putting the USB logo on one side of the connector somehow makes obvious (it doesn't) which way to plug it in.
The moment I plugged it into my laptop, even before plugging the iPhone in, the laptop turned off. No damage. Being naturally curious I tried it again and it was repeatable.
For some uses it does need to be secret or at least reasonably private. For others it does not. Part of what makes my fingerprint a reasonably secure means of identifying me is that very few people have access to it. It is NOT hard to copy fingerprint data and use it for purposes which the owner of that fingerprint does not approve.
It works because if someone holds a copy of your face up to a traffic officer, the traffic officer won't be fooled.
Unless the name used to match with that photo is not your name. People make fake IDs all the time. Furthermore it is quite possible for someone to use biometric data of yours for identity theft. You could even be framed for some crime using such data. My Social Security Number technically is publicly available but only a fool would believe that distributing it more widely than absolutely necessary would be a good idea. While you are correct that the secrecy requirements for biometric data are not the same as those for passwords it does not follow that there is no need for privacy for biometric data.
Some recent uses of my fingerprints in which I had no real say:
1. Passport check at CDG airport 2. Applying for a Speedpass for CA toll roads 3. Getting some papers notarized
You have quite a lot of say over all those things. 1) There is nothing forcing you to travel to Paris or if there is something actually that important forcing you to travel there, it is probably more important than your fingerprints. (like something relating to your family's well being etc) 2) You don't have to have a Speedpass and I certainly wouldn't give anyone my fingerprints to save a few bucks on toll roads. 3) I happen to be a Notary Public and there is no requirement whatsoever that you give a fingerprint to have a document notarized in most jurisdictions. (It is required for certain property transactions in some places like California) There certainly is no requirement in the state I live in so if you don't want to give up the fingerprint you do have the option of moving.
It has nothing to do with how radio works, they give no fucks, it has everything with what the user of the radio expects.
So if my buddies and I expect something stupid and irrational then the law should work in my favor? Strange notion you have there.
Laws are by and large written to apply to people, not technology.
We've been talking this entire time about how people are using this technology. That is a distinction without a difference. The court appears to have misunderstood how this technology works and are (potentially) punishing people based on an ignorant application of the law.
This has nothing to do with the technical details of the situation.
See there you are wrong. The court appears to have misunderstood how the technology works and misunderstood how it should apply under the law. The technical details are not separable from how it is used. Technology is meaningless unless it is used by a person.
- We believe that the intent was that someone who made an open radio transmission would know that it could be intercepted, so cannot expect privacy, since any radio set can pick it up. It's akin to shouting across the street. However, someone who is using a wi-fi connection would not necessarily be aware that they were exposing information.
And where the court erred is in thinking there is a difference between these two situations. An unsecured wifi base station IS making open radio transmissions. It is hardly a secret that wifi needs to be secured intentionally. EVERY wifi base station includes instructions on how to secure the base station transmissions. If the owner of the base station cannot be bothered to read those instructions then I cannot fathom how that is anyone else's fault. If you are making a radio transmission of any kind then common logic dictates that it may be intercepted by anyone with the right equipment and it is up to the person transmitting to make reasonable efforts to secure that transmission.
Now if Google was actively cracking secured wifi networks in some manner or using those open wifi connections to transmit their own data then we have a different discussion.
Common sense logic as used by non-geeks who are not fixated on literal interpretations.
Kind of hard to have a just law where you don't apply a reasonably literal interpretation.
while the non-geek would say that "communications" requires two living entities talking to each other
So by that logic if two people do anything other than talk to each other face to face then they are not communicating?
You say yourself that you need a WiFi equipped PC and some software - that's not "readily available".
What color is the sky on your planet where wifi equipped PCs and related software are not readily available? I have at least 100 wifi equipped devices (including PCs) within 50 meters of me as I type this. Heck I carry such a device with me pretty much everywhere I go.
I seriously doubt Samsung would be where they are today if Nokia had been competing with them properly in the Galaxy S era.
And your evidence for this hypothetical scenario is what exactly? Nokia and it's management haven't exactly proven to be visionaries in the smartphone market. Samsung is an extremely competent and well funded competitor and having Nokia in the mix would not make them less so. Why would Nokia succeed where Motorola, LG, HTC, Sony, and the rest have failed?
They will be protected by the clergy-penitent privilege.
I have no idea why any privileged protection should be enjoyed by clergy. Attorney-client and doctor-client and spousal privilege I understand. But clergy serve no societal purpose that is deserving of such protection. If clergy become aware of a crime then they should be required by law to provide information relating to that crime to the same degree as any other citizen.
I tentatively made the argument that I couldn't see a principled reason why defendants should be able to refuse to answer the question of whether they committed the crime or not.
Then you are an idiot. The reason that exists is so that the state cannot compel a confession from an innocent person. They sometimes manage to do this anyway but without the 5th amendment the problem would be far worse. This is hardly a secret.
I didn't see why the state shouldn't be able to make you choose between saying "Yes, I committed the murder," or "No, I didn't.
Because the state can force you to say "yes I committed the murder" even when you didn't.
Why shouldn't we also give the same rights to a third-party witness who we know is innocent?
Because the third party witness is not accused of a crime. If they do however lie on behalf of the accused then they are committing perjury and perhaps obstruction of justice which are crimes. Really, I should think this stuff was obvious...
My personal experience is the rest of the drivers on the road will still do stupid and random shit, which has a good chance of negating any of the benefits of a car on auto-pilot.
You are assuming that the self driving vehicle would be less able to deal with "stupid and random shit" than a given human. Computers can potentially have greater situational awareness and also react faster than humans. A car could communicate with other vehicles regarding position and speed and road conditions. A car can have 360 degree vision day or night, clear or foggy. A car can estimate distance to the car ahead of it to within millimeters whereas people are often wrong by dozens of meters. Cars can directly sense and respond to unusual road conditions far faster than any human (see traction control) could ever hope to.
When you have a huge fraction of your cars still being older and not using this technology, a lot of the assumptions about how this safe will be goes out the window.
Not necessarily. If a driverless system is well designed there is a good chance it will be BETTER at dealing with all the lunatics out there driving badly. We're nowhere close to that now but it's hardly inconceivable.
Why would that necessarily be any harder for a computer to handle than a person?
At which point, WTF is the point of the self driving car?
To get to the point where they actually are safer than one being actively piloted by a human. Furthermore even if they never become completely self-driving there will be a lot of very useful spin off technology that is going to come from this research. The legal framework for these cars can be updated when appropriate. That is the easiest problem with the technology since we already know how to do that.
I just don't see people actually wanting this technology, and since we'll never convert all of the cars on the road to this system
Yes people do actually want this technology. In fact I'd go so far as to say people who don't even think they want it actually do even if they don't know it yet. There already are self-parking cars, cars with automatic speed control/braking, stability control, ABS, traction control, navigation aids, drive by wire steering/braking, cruise control, and more. All those things are portions of a driverless vehicle. It's by no means a solved problem but we already rely on a host of technologies to make us better at driving than we could be unassisted.
I would dearly love to be able to get to/from work (~30 minute each way commute) without having to waste an hour every day with the non-productive task of driving. It is a huge waste of my time. It potentially solves other problems as well like helping handicapped people, reducing drunk driving, freeing up huge amounts of non-productive time and more.
We don't actually have to convert all the cars to driverless. It would potentially only take a fraction of them to be self piloting to improve road safety. I assure you that you do not really want my 94 year old grandmother behind the wheel of a car. I would welcome a self driving car to take her around. Any driverless solution will have to be robust enough to deal with unpredictable events at least as well as a human. A well designed system could have better situational awareness than any driver. My field of vision is only about 160 degrees even when I'm not distracted. A computer would have 360 vision day or night, be able to communicate with other vehicles regarding position and speed and direction, be able to react faster than any human, be far less prone to distraction, and actually obey the rules of the road. The engineering obstacles are large but so are the potential benefits.
By encrypting this inter-DC traffic it forces governments to go to Google and ask for the data.
That presumes that the NSA has not broken the encryption. Given that breaking codes is pretty much what the NSA does I wouldn't feel to comfortable trusting that Google's encryption is secure. Additionally it seems clear that the NSA already is able to force companies like Google to let them tap into their data centers whether they want to or not. It doesn't matter if the communication line is secure if they can just go get the data from the data center. To do that they can simple walk in the a national security letter which are clearly not difficult to obtain.
Google is doing their part to help with privacy.
Are they really? How much lobbying are they doing against what the NSA is up to? Are they really putting their money into protecting user privacy or is it just lip service? Are they really doing all they can? I tend to think not. Their motto might be "don't be evil" but living up to that requires far more than just doing a little encryption that likely isn't going to protect any communications anyway. As I was listening to NPR this morning they were talking about how the NSA has developed the ability to tap into pretty much any cell phone. I don't hear Google putting up much of a fuss about that. I don't see Google (or any other tech companies) on capital hill lobbying against what the NSA is doing. Given the resources Google has at their disposal and what they claim to stand for I expect more of them.
Google has not provided details on its new encryption efforts, but did say it would be 'end-to-end,' meaning that all servers and fiber-optic lines involved in delivering information will be encrypted."
Which is meaningless in the face of a subpoena or national security letter or a a wrench. Anything Google does suffers from the problem of trusting a third party. Even if Google's solution were 100% effective technologically, they still are a third party and cannot be trusted 100% to not give the keys out.
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Suing for hate speech makes about as much sense as trying to apply RICO to completely legal activities.
Extortion is not a "completely legal activity". Furthermore neither is barratry and racketeering, both of which arguably apply in the case of patent trolls.
Because the USB connectors were designed to be less expensive than Apple connectors.
Oh I understand perfectly that it was an economic decision. They wanted to make it cheaply and it shows. I run a company that makes wire harnesses so I understand this phenomenon well. I just think it was a *bad* decision.
You seem to think you can patent an idea. You can't. It says so right in the uspto website.
Except that you can patent an idea in practice. Software patents are effectively patenting an idea. Software = Math. Math should be unpatentable as it is by definition abstract but you certainly can get a patent on software. Patent on software = patent on math = patent on idea. There is (so far) no requirement to provide working code and plenty of software patents have been approved for the last several decades without providing so much as a functional algorithm.
Lawyers today make sure that a patent is minimum 50 pages, and some run to more than 1000. The language is extremely formalized and very hard to read for untrained minds. And the issues are so specialized that the average judge would have to train several years in the particular field to understand what the invention is about.
There is an easy solution then. If the patent cannot be explained to a judge in terms they can understand then it should be denied. If the patent cannot be explained in 3 pages or less then it probably is an attempt to obfuscate the issue.
And that's apparently not even a requirement, because I have a WD USB drive that helpfully puts the WD logo on the side you're supposed to have up and the USB logo on the side which is down - exactly the opposite of the "standard" way USB cables are "supposed" to work.
On some devices it's not actually clear which way "up" is supposed to be. I'm typing this on a tower PC. It has a bunch of vertically oriented USB ports on the back because the motherboard doesn't know what kind of case it will be placed into. The only way to know what "up" is, is to figure out which wall the motherboard is mounted to. That means "up" is actually "right" or "left". It's faster to just try one direction and if it doesn't go in, flip it. Of course it seems the first way way you try it invariably is the wrong way. You'd think I'd get it right around 50% of the time but it never seems that way.
Imagine living in a country where only 3.5 percent of the population use the Internet.
That's not hard for anyone who is old enough to remember the 1980s. The internet as we know it today is a pretty recent development for most of the population. Before 1990 or so pretty much no one outside of academia had internet access.
would a charger need to current limit the power if the device tries to draw more than it can provide?
Because many chargers are connected to devices or power lines (110VAC etc) that can supply MUCH more power than the cable can handle. The wires inside a USB cable used for power are often 24 gauge which can only handle a relatively modest amount of power before they overheat. You need a charger that is smart enough to not exceed the limits of a USB cable even if the device is dumb enough to "request" that much power. Otherwise you could end up with a molten wire rather easily.
Why do these solutions need to be soo complex?
Corner cases usually. The power requirements of devices plugged into USB are a bit unpredictable so it's more complex than many realize. I agree with you though. It seems like they are adding a bunch of needless complexity to make up for some poor initial design choices.
As an example of poor design choices, it has always mystified me why they made USB a keyed connection instead of a reversible one. I'm not overly impressed with Lightning cables from Apple but one of the things Apple did right was to make it so you didn't have to fuss with worrying about which way was "up". There is no reason USB could not have been designed so that you didn't have to worry about orientation when plugging it in. It's got 4 conductors (5 in some cases) so it wouldn't exactly be rocket surgery to put enough brains into the controllers to negotiate the connection. They could have also solved it with a better designed (albeit more $) connector. Hell if they were really lazy they could have even done it by adding more wires. But instead they chose the cheapest possible route and pretend that putting the USB logo on one side of the connector somehow makes obvious (it doesn't) which way to plug it in.
The moment I plugged it into my laptop, even before plugging the iPhone in, the laptop turned off. No damage. Being naturally curious I tried it again and it was repeatable.
Sounds like you are a scientist. Congratulations!
Biometric data does not have to be secret.
For some uses it does need to be secret or at least reasonably private. For others it does not. Part of what makes my fingerprint a reasonably secure means of identifying me is that very few people have access to it. It is NOT hard to copy fingerprint data and use it for purposes which the owner of that fingerprint does not approve.
It works because if someone holds a copy of your face up to a traffic officer, the traffic officer won't be fooled.
Unless the name used to match with that photo is not your name. People make fake IDs all the time. Furthermore it is quite possible for someone to use biometric data of yours for identity theft. You could even be framed for some crime using such data. My Social Security Number technically is publicly available but only a fool would believe that distributing it more widely than absolutely necessary would be a good idea. While you are correct that the secrecy requirements for biometric data are not the same as those for passwords it does not follow that there is no need for privacy for biometric data.
Some recent uses of my fingerprints in which I had no real say:
1. Passport check at CDG airport
2. Applying for a Speedpass for CA toll roads
3. Getting some papers notarized
You have quite a lot of say over all those things.
1) There is nothing forcing you to travel to Paris or if there is something actually that important forcing you to travel there, it is probably more important than your fingerprints. (like something relating to your family's well being etc)
2) You don't have to have a Speedpass and I certainly wouldn't give anyone my fingerprints to save a few bucks on toll roads.
3) I happen to be a Notary Public and there is no requirement whatsoever that you give a fingerprint to have a document notarized in most jurisdictions. (It is required for certain property transactions in some places like California) There certainly is no requirement in the state I live in so if you don't want to give up the fingerprint you do have the option of moving.
...someone to explain to me why killing people with chemical weapons is somehow worse than killing them with bullets.
eventually it will be illegal to drive without EZPass, and you will be billed for driving all over the place. All roads will be toll roads.
We already are billed for driving all over the place. It's called taxes and it requires no special equipment for your car.
It has nothing to do with how radio works, they give no fucks, it has everything with what the user of the radio expects.
So if my buddies and I expect something stupid and irrational then the law should work in my favor? Strange notion you have there.
Laws are by and large written to apply to people, not technology.
We've been talking this entire time about how people are using this technology. That is a distinction without a difference. The court appears to have misunderstood how this technology works and are (potentially) punishing people based on an ignorant application of the law.
This has nothing to do with the technical details of the situation.
See there you are wrong. The court appears to have misunderstood how the technology works and misunderstood how it should apply under the law. The technical details are not separable from how it is used. Technology is meaningless unless it is used by a person.
- We believe that the intent was that someone who made an open radio transmission would know that it could be intercepted, so cannot expect privacy, since any radio set can pick it up. It's akin to shouting across the street. However, someone who is using a wi-fi connection would not necessarily be aware that they were exposing information.
And where the court erred is in thinking there is a difference between these two situations. An unsecured wifi base station IS making open radio transmissions. It is hardly a secret that wifi needs to be secured intentionally. EVERY wifi base station includes instructions on how to secure the base station transmissions. If the owner of the base station cannot be bothered to read those instructions then I cannot fathom how that is anyone else's fault. If you are making a radio transmission of any kind then common logic dictates that it may be intercepted by anyone with the right equipment and it is up to the person transmitting to make reasonable efforts to secure that transmission.
Now if Google was actively cracking secured wifi networks in some manner or using those open wifi connections to transmit their own data then we have a different discussion.
Common sense logic as used by non-geeks who are not fixated on literal interpretations.
Kind of hard to have a just law where you don't apply a reasonably literal interpretation.
while the non-geek would say that "communications" requires two living entities talking to each other
So by that logic if two people do anything other than talk to each other face to face then they are not communicating?
You say yourself that you need a WiFi equipped PC and some software - that's not "readily available".
What color is the sky on your planet where wifi equipped PCs and related software are not readily available? I have at least 100 wifi equipped devices (including PCs) within 50 meters of me as I type this. Heck I carry such a device with me pretty much everywhere I go.
I seriously doubt Samsung would be where they are today if Nokia had been competing with them properly in the Galaxy S era.
And your evidence for this hypothetical scenario is what exactly? Nokia and it's management haven't exactly proven to be visionaries in the smartphone market. Samsung is an extremely competent and well funded competitor and having Nokia in the mix would not make them less so. Why would Nokia succeed where Motorola, LG, HTC, Sony, and the rest have failed?
Then live closer to your work.
Great solution! So when are you buying me a new house?
They will be protected by the clergy-penitent privilege.
I have no idea why any privileged protection should be enjoyed by clergy. Attorney-client and doctor-client and spousal privilege I understand. But clergy serve no societal purpose that is deserving of such protection. If clergy become aware of a crime then they should be required by law to provide information relating to that crime to the same degree as any other citizen.
I tentatively made the argument that I couldn't see a principled reason why defendants should be able to refuse to answer the question of whether they committed the crime or not.
Then you are an idiot. The reason that exists is so that the state cannot compel a confession from an innocent person. They sometimes manage to do this anyway but without the 5th amendment the problem would be far worse. This is hardly a secret.
I didn't see why the state shouldn't be able to make you choose between saying "Yes, I committed the murder," or "No, I didn't.
Because the state can force you to say "yes I committed the murder" even when you didn't.
Why shouldn't we also give the same rights to a third-party witness who we know is innocent?
Because the third party witness is not accused of a crime. If they do however lie on behalf of the accused then they are committing perjury and perhaps obstruction of justice which are crimes. Really, I should think this stuff was obvious...
Audi had this problem back in the 80's.
No they did not. Those allegations against Audi were driver error and a fradulent news report.
My personal experience is the rest of the drivers on the road will still do stupid and random shit, which has a good chance of negating any of the benefits of a car on auto-pilot.
You are assuming that the self driving vehicle would be less able to deal with "stupid and random shit" than a given human. Computers can potentially have greater situational awareness and also react faster than humans. A car could communicate with other vehicles regarding position and speed and road conditions. A car can have 360 degree vision day or night, clear or foggy. A car can estimate distance to the car ahead of it to within millimeters whereas people are often wrong by dozens of meters. Cars can directly sense and respond to unusual road conditions far faster than any human (see traction control) could ever hope to.
When you have a huge fraction of your cars still being older and not using this technology, a lot of the assumptions about how this safe will be goes out the window.
Not necessarily. If a driverless system is well designed there is a good chance it will be BETTER at dealing with all the lunatics out there driving badly. We're nowhere close to that now but it's hardly inconceivable.
Why would that necessarily be any harder for a computer to handle than a person?
At which point, WTF is the point of the self driving car?
To get to the point where they actually are safer than one being actively piloted by a human. Furthermore even if they never become completely self-driving there will be a lot of very useful spin off technology that is going to come from this research. The legal framework for these cars can be updated when appropriate. That is the easiest problem with the technology since we already know how to do that.
I just don't see people actually wanting this technology, and since we'll never convert all of the cars on the road to this system
Yes people do actually want this technology. In fact I'd go so far as to say people who don't even think they want it actually do even if they don't know it yet. There already are self-parking cars, cars with automatic speed control/braking, stability control, ABS, traction control, navigation aids, drive by wire steering/braking, cruise control, and more. All those things are portions of a driverless vehicle. It's by no means a solved problem but we already rely on a host of technologies to make us better at driving than we could be unassisted.
I would dearly love to be able to get to/from work (~30 minute each way commute) without having to waste an hour every day with the non-productive task of driving. It is a huge waste of my time. It potentially solves other problems as well like helping handicapped people, reducing drunk driving, freeing up huge amounts of non-productive time and more.
We don't actually have to convert all the cars to driverless. It would potentially only take a fraction of them to be self piloting to improve road safety. I assure you that you do not really want my 94 year old grandmother behind the wheel of a car. I would welcome a self driving car to take her around. Any driverless solution will have to be robust enough to deal with unpredictable events at least as well as a human. A well designed system could have better situational awareness than any driver. My field of vision is only about 160 degrees even when I'm not distracted. A computer would have 360 vision day or night, be able to communicate with other vehicles regarding position and speed and direction, be able to react faster than any human, be far less prone to distraction, and actually obey the rules of the road. The engineering obstacles are large but so are the potential benefits.
By encrypting this inter-DC traffic it forces governments to go to Google and ask for the data.
That presumes that the NSA has not broken the encryption. Given that breaking codes is pretty much what the NSA does I wouldn't feel to comfortable trusting that Google's encryption is secure. Additionally it seems clear that the NSA already is able to force companies like Google to let them tap into their data centers whether they want to or not. It doesn't matter if the communication line is secure if they can just go get the data from the data center. To do that they can simple walk in the a national security letter which are clearly not difficult to obtain.
Google is doing their part to help with privacy.
Are they really? How much lobbying are they doing against what the NSA is up to? Are they really putting their money into protecting user privacy or is it just lip service? Are they really doing all they can? I tend to think not. Their motto might be "don't be evil" but living up to that requires far more than just doing a little encryption that likely isn't going to protect any communications anyway. As I was listening to NPR this morning they were talking about how the NSA has developed the ability to tap into pretty much any cell phone. I don't hear Google putting up much of a fuss about that. I don't see Google (or any other tech companies) on capital hill lobbying against what the NSA is doing. Given the resources Google has at their disposal and what they claim to stand for I expect more of them.
Google has not provided details on its new encryption efforts, but did say it would be 'end-to-end,' meaning that all servers and fiber-optic lines involved in delivering information will be encrypted."
Which is meaningless in the face of a subpoena or national security letter or a a wrench. Anything Google does suffers from the problem of trusting a third party. Even if Google's solution were 100% effective technologically, they still are a third party and cannot be trusted 100% to not give the keys out.