I would assume that part of their point is their method might not completely control for location. The point of the study is to prove (not just assert) what ways google is adapting results in non-obvious ways. So they try to control for things that are fairly obviously localized, since those are "expected" differences. I think a major point is that google could offer an "unprofiled" search mode. But not only do they not offer that, they bait-and-switch by offering something that can be easily mistaken for unprofiled search but actually isn't. If google lets someone "log out" but then adapts their searches based on the profile of people who recently used the same IP address, aka them, that means that logging out didn't do what they thought it did.
And this is why tariffs are mostly bad. Frequently foreign competition wins because it is making a BETTER PRODUCT. This means by slapping a tariff on it you are hurting the competitiveness of all users of that product to reward the poor management of those that make it domestically. Sounds a lot like the government choosing winners, and particularly bad because it only works by artificially turning losers into winners. This is a long way of saying that protectionist trade policy is nearly always, in the end, self-defeating. There are reasonable interim measures to prevent dumping and market shocks (including the labor market), but straight up protectionism is basically a bad idea from an economic and security standpoint. We want interdependent economies because they increase efficiency, prevent wars, and make the world more equal.
Even the article itself is part of the problem... Where is this vast increase in funding? It doesn't exist. The summary is a patchwork of half-baked and unjustified ideas. In the U.S., large universities have been largely de-funded and become much more dependent on student fees, such that less independent research gets done. Also maybe the Nobel committee is more likely to look back because... people are living longer! If scientists have to constantly defend themselves from uneducated and not even self-consistent hit pieces like this, it's no wonder they aren't able to do as much.
Isn't this just him rejecting your patch as incomplete? It's not like you are required to edit one section at a time. Why couldn't you just open the full page for editing and then copy your edit from the page history and add the references then submitted it all together? It sounds like you are complaining that someone else didn't want to keep track of your edits for you. Since your edit stays in the page history, that doesn't really seem so strange to just revert it until the citation is added with it. Nominally you saying you just haven't had time to add the citation makes in even less likely that someone would want to put on the "citation needed" tag. Since you have the citation on hand, it should just go on in or be left out.
This seems like the real problem with wikipedia, there is not such a good system for "proposing" edits without them going live. There are guidelines for handling this process, but my impression is that they are ad-hoc so they are not uniform among different topics.
One of the goals is to eventually tie as many standards as possible to fundamental constants of nature. The meter, for example, is now defined as the distance light travels in a certain amount of time. This means that rather than having a standard for time and for length, you have a single standard, for time, and then the other is related to that by a fundamental constant of nature. One doesn't measure the speed of light anymore, one measures distances in terms light propagation time. Your water-based definition doesn't work for that because the properties of water can't be computed to high precision in terms of fundamental constants of nature. In this case the goal is to move to a mass standard that is expressed in terms of the Planck mass, which is a fundamental constant of nature. So now instead of having separate scales for mass and acceleration, and then needing to measure the G in Newton's law to relate them, there is just one scale used and the other is related by a fundamental constant since the relation of G to the Plank mass is a fundamental one.
No you can take your false equivalence and shove it. I've always thought political parties were a bad idea, and nobody is a saint, but the degree of lying and cheating that people in the current US republican party will stoop to is unacceptable in a civil society. Your one example shows your argument is hollow. The GOP was all for repealing the ACA because it sounds good in a campaign slogan but didn't do it because they have no real alternative policy, just talking points. That's a concrete promise that was broken. Then you say some random squishy crap about Obama not sticking to "hope and change". Nothing concrete. On the same issue, the democrats ran on revamping healthcare, and that's what happened. Not single-payer, but the ACA was a concrete improvement to the status quo that could be put into law at the time despite an obstructionist opposition party. One of the main motivations for the ACA was getting the healthcare part of the national economy and national debt and deficit more under control, something the GOP claims they want to do but never do. Your claim that both of these are parties saying one thing and doing another is simply false equivalence.
Wait... it seems to me that Facebook is a wildly successful social engineering experiment! But I guess I agree that maybe it should be shut down now that it has demonstrated so many are vulnerable. But then again it's a great indicator of who is or isn't vulnerable to this exploit.
Nope, that's just making things up. (This seems like typical Russian troll stuff.) Hillary Clinton violated policy in her email handling, but the investigation concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to make a case that she committed a crime. And the crime would have been about records retention, not classified info anyway. Any mishandling of classified info would have been done by her subordinates by moving material to a non-secure medium, regardless of if the email account was a state department one or not. You are just parroting made-up stuff.
Apple has a different vice: vendor lock in. That is also a user-hostile behavior. So you get to pick your poison in vendors for handset computers: one is aggressive about vendor lock in (iphone) and the other is aggressive about data collection (android). The right way forward is, as it has always been, open standards. The closest solution right now is third-party android.
I shouldn't have to use icloud as my online storage, I should be able to use any number of vendors that I can choose to trust and who are not so big that I cannot sue them if they cheat me. Or do it myself. With a server that is literally my own property. Note that this means that your idea that no "unnecessary" data is sent to apple is a polite fiction. Almost nothing that people store on icloud is "necessary" to send to apple, but they are really good at locking in their users. Also this idea that the user owns the data while someone else is holding it seems mostly inconsistent with current legal precedents, and therefore also fiction.
As pointed out in other replies, given its level of vendor lock-in, there would be trouble if Apple decided it could make even more profit by mining all that data they hold.
This is all BS. What facebook and google are doing should be illegal. They kickback ad revenue to content providers that get a lot of clicks -- then claim that their hands are clean when it turns out the provider was being fraudulent. If they are going to take money to place ads alongside the content or use that content to keep users where they can sell ads to them, then they bear responsibility for that content not being outright fraudulent. Is this messy and difficult? sure. I'm not allowed to lie to you to sell you a car, and I shouldn't be allowed to lie to you to get you to look at a commercial I'm being paid to get you to look at. What we have now is a system in which fraud-for-profit has been legalized.
Trying to get China reclassified out of developing nation status sounds fine. Trying to get to unilaterally set rates sounds tantamount to pulling out of the agreement, and so makes no sense. This seems like typical Trump administration strategy. Complain about one part of something then try to pull out of the whole thing. Maybe that works in underhanded real estate negotiations, but in international agreements it tends to just piss off the people who are trying to agree with you.
The deeper issue is that the Trump administration doesn't understand the importance of economics in national security. It is in our interest that truly developing nations do have things a bit easier, since they are less likely to become unstable and/or terrorist breeding grounds threatening global shipping lanes. This lack of understanding of the role of economics in world stability is, in fact, the source of Tillerson's comment that Trump is an idiot. Trump is willing to risk putting a major trading partner in a large-scale armed conflict if it saves the US a modest sum in international aid. It is tough to call that anything but stupid from a policy perspective.
Some of the Apple iphone television ads almost did this. They were a sneaky way of teaching users the few steps that made some feature work on the phone. I think it's pretty clear that Jobs was pushing this because once he was gone the commercials reverted back to hollow "make it seem stylish" rather than "show them the three taps that make some cool thing actually happen on a real device", and you are left to guess what the three taps are. It's a great way to create the illusion of an intuitive interface. By the 4th time you've seen the commercial, you know exactly what to do when somebody puts the phone in your hand. But to make it work you have to absolutely insist that the real experience is like the commercial, which an actual advertising person would never do.
Wait, isn't the fact that it matters what region his itunes was set to a big problem? Being available for "purchase" but only usable in certain markets or under certain conditions is the essence of an attack on what ownership itself means, which was the whole point of the first discussion. Technically if you buy a DVD in region 1, in order to watch it in region 2 you basically have to commit a felony. How is that ownership? This is only getting worse.
I've never understood why card packs where the vendor determines the rarity and value of cards aren't gambling. I think in baseball cards the vendor didn't necessarily know in advance which cards would be the most valuable, as it depended on how the players did after the cards were made/sold. But pokemon cards are basically like slot machines or lottery tickets for kids, it's borderline evil.
Everyone here is assuming that Linus has been converted by the politeness police. Maybe he is genuinely seeking an objectively better way of doing things than flaming each other on a mailing list and the baggage that creates trying to keep it from becoming abusive. There is a good argument to be made that many of the negative aspects are a symptom of the mailing list medium and related processes.
I'm thinking this is more similar to the bitkeeper situation than I thought at first. In the endgame there, the bitkeeper people started trying to exclude developers by misusing the nastier licensing clauses. Here you have ragers on one side and politeness police on the other, waging a war on the list and in the community and even in the kernel code of conduct itself as others have pointed out. Wouldn't it be awesome if Linus could come up with some novel solution so that this war would just fade away? Like git did with other source control systems.
There's a balance. Too much of either flame or light-treading can lead to problems. The most difficult situations are where there is a mismatch of culture among individuals. i.e. where remarks that are not actually offensive are mistakenly taken as such due to poor wording and because people are expecting fire or where softening the language around a critical issue leads to it being not taken seriously by those expecting more fire.
As far as this case goes specifically, I have always had the impression that Linus was a little on the flame-y side but much in the same way that all drivers in San Francisco are jerks -- if you don't drive that way you're actually more likely to cause an accident because everyone is expecting it. But honestly I don't read enough lkml to know for sure. There is a line between flame and abuse, and if that gets crossed too often then there are problems.
Nope, you have been deceived by the Apple propaganda machine. Good capacitive touchscreens, made by others, made it "easy" on the iphone. I hate that people ignore all the research that went into making capacitive touchscreens work, and just give Apple all the kudos for being the first to market with a product that used them. The simple fact is that much of the way people interact with a capacitive screen (pinch, momentum) just doesn't work well on a resistive screen, despite known examples of people trying to make it work. Yet somehow when Apple puts together the previously tried mechanics with a new display type *developed by other companies* they suddenly "invented" it all. BS. This is obvious to anybody that has a clue. Apple doesn't hold patents on capacitive touch technologies, but instead holds "design" patents (not real patents) on the form factor.
It was a well-known business model to offer cheap insurance and then drop people or charge them 10 times as much when they got sick. This isn't possible anymore under the ACA. A huge fraction of those saying "I can't get cheap insurance anymore" are people who were being ripped off and now are not. But they complain anyway.
Also, the article say that the issue is being "fixed", but it is still unclear if an app with "network state" permission has access to the BSSID or base station mac, which in many cases effectively gives coarse location. I have often wondered whether requesting "network state" permission was a sneaky way to do geolocation, but never looked into it carefully. And, once again, my next question would be whether the information available to apps with network state permission is different for LineageOS.
Yeah, this is sad. I'm not sure what idiot at Google thought it was okay to broadcast wifi state info to apps that don't have permission to access the wifi state. I can see how it might be ambiguous whether the BSSID or the base station MAC are included in "wifi state" information, but obviously if I have denied an app permission to access wifi state I didn't just mean it can't request wifi state information, really I meant that it shouldn't be given it by the OS.
Another question: What information to these broadcasts contain in LineageOS?
Slashdot Mirror
I would assume that part of their point is their method might not completely control for location. The point of the study is to prove (not just assert) what ways google is adapting results in non-obvious ways. So they try to control for things that are fairly obviously localized, since those are "expected" differences. I think a major point is that google could offer an "unprofiled" search mode. But not only do they not offer that, they bait-and-switch by offering something that can be easily mistaken for unprofiled search but actually isn't. If google lets someone "log out" but then adapts their searches based on the profile of people who recently used the same IP address, aka them, that means that logging out didn't do what they thought it did.
And this is why tariffs are mostly bad. Frequently foreign competition wins because it is making a BETTER PRODUCT. This means by slapping a tariff on it you are hurting the competitiveness of all users of that product to reward the poor management of those that make it domestically. Sounds a lot like the government choosing winners, and particularly bad because it only works by artificially turning losers into winners. This is a long way of saying that protectionist trade policy is nearly always, in the end, self-defeating. There are reasonable interim measures to prevent dumping and market shocks (including the labor market), but straight up protectionism is basically a bad idea from an economic and security standpoint. We want interdependent economies because they increase efficiency, prevent wars, and make the world more equal.
Even the article itself is part of the problem... Where is this vast increase in funding? It doesn't exist. The summary is a patchwork of half-baked and unjustified ideas. In the U.S., large universities have been largely de-funded and become much more dependent on student fees, such that less independent research gets done. Also maybe the Nobel committee is more likely to look back because... people are living longer! If scientists have to constantly defend themselves from uneducated and not even self-consistent hit pieces like this, it's no wonder they aren't able to do as much.
But does it fundamentally cost a fortune? Seems like the road to drive there would cost a lot more. I'm thinking that basic cost is not the issue.
Isn't this just him rejecting your patch as incomplete? It's not like you are required to edit one section at a time. Why couldn't you just open the full page for editing and then copy your edit from the page history and add the references then submitted it all together? It sounds like you are complaining that someone else didn't want to keep track of your edits for you. Since your edit stays in the page history, that doesn't really seem so strange to just revert it until the citation is added with it. Nominally you saying you just haven't had time to add the citation makes in even less likely that someone would want to put on the "citation needed" tag. Since you have the citation on hand, it should just go on in or be left out.
This seems like the real problem with wikipedia, there is not such a good system for "proposing" edits without them going live. There are guidelines for handling this process, but my impression is that they are ad-hoc so they are not uniform among different topics.
One of the goals is to eventually tie as many standards as possible to fundamental constants of nature. The meter, for example, is now defined as the distance light travels in a certain amount of time. This means that rather than having a standard for time and for length, you have a single standard, for time, and then the other is related to that by a fundamental constant of nature. One doesn't measure the speed of light anymore, one measures distances in terms light propagation time. Your water-based definition doesn't work for that because the properties of water can't be computed to high precision in terms of fundamental constants of nature. In this case the goal is to move to a mass standard that is expressed in terms of the Planck mass, which is a fundamental constant of nature. So now instead of having separate scales for mass and acceleration, and then needing to measure the G in Newton's law to relate them, there is just one scale used and the other is related by a fundamental constant since the relation of G to the Plank mass is a fundamental one.
No you can take your false equivalence and shove it. I've always thought political parties were a bad idea, and nobody is a saint, but the degree of lying and cheating that people in the current US republican party will stoop to is unacceptable in a civil society. Your one example shows your argument is hollow. The GOP was all for repealing the ACA because it sounds good in a campaign slogan but didn't do it because they have no real alternative policy, just talking points. That's a concrete promise that was broken. Then you say some random squishy crap about Obama not sticking to "hope and change". Nothing concrete. On the same issue, the democrats ran on revamping healthcare, and that's what happened. Not single-payer, but the ACA was a concrete improvement to the status quo that could be put into law at the time despite an obstructionist opposition party. One of the main motivations for the ACA was getting the healthcare part of the national economy and national debt and deficit more under control, something the GOP claims they want to do but never do. Your claim that both of these are parties saying one thing and doing another is simply false equivalence.
Wait... it seems to me that Facebook is a wildly successful social engineering experiment! But I guess I agree that maybe it should be shut down now that it has demonstrated so many are vulnerable. But then again it's a great indicator of who is or isn't vulnerable to this exploit.
Nope, that's just making things up. (This seems like typical Russian troll stuff.) Hillary Clinton violated policy in her email handling, but the investigation concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to make a case that she committed a crime. And the crime would have been about records retention, not classified info anyway. Any mishandling of classified info would have been done by her subordinates by moving material to a non-secure medium, regardless of if the email account was a state department one or not. You are just parroting made-up stuff.
Apple has a different vice: vendor lock in. That is also a user-hostile behavior. So you get to pick your poison in vendors for handset computers: one is aggressive about vendor lock in (iphone) and the other is aggressive about data collection (android). The right way forward is, as it has always been, open standards. The closest solution right now is third-party android.
I shouldn't have to use icloud as my online storage, I should be able to use any number of vendors that I can choose to trust and who are not so big that I cannot sue them if they cheat me. Or do it myself. With a server that is literally my own property. Note that this means that your idea that no "unnecessary" data is sent to apple is a polite fiction. Almost nothing that people store on icloud is "necessary" to send to apple, but they are really good at locking in their users. Also this idea that the user owns the data while someone else is holding it seems mostly inconsistent with current legal precedents, and therefore also fiction.
As pointed out in other replies, given its level of vendor lock-in, there would be trouble if Apple decided it could make even more profit by mining all that data they hold.
This is all BS. What facebook and google are doing should be illegal. They kickback ad revenue to content providers that get a lot of clicks -- then claim that their hands are clean when it turns out the provider was being fraudulent. If they are going to take money to place ads alongside the content or use that content to keep users where they can sell ads to them, then they bear responsibility for that content not being outright fraudulent. Is this messy and difficult? sure. I'm not allowed to lie to you to sell you a car, and I shouldn't be allowed to lie to you to get you to look at a commercial I'm being paid to get you to look at. What we have now is a system in which fraud-for-profit has been legalized.
Trying to get China reclassified out of developing nation status sounds fine. Trying to get to unilaterally set rates sounds tantamount to pulling out of the agreement, and so makes no sense. This seems like typical Trump administration strategy. Complain about one part of something then try to pull out of the whole thing. Maybe that works in underhanded real estate negotiations, but in international agreements it tends to just piss off the people who are trying to agree with you.
The deeper issue is that the Trump administration doesn't understand the importance of economics in national security. It is in our interest that truly developing nations do have things a bit easier, since they are less likely to become unstable and/or terrorist breeding grounds threatening global shipping lanes. This lack of understanding of the role of economics in world stability is, in fact, the source of Tillerson's comment that Trump is an idiot. Trump is willing to risk putting a major trading partner in a large-scale armed conflict if it saves the US a modest sum in international aid. It is tough to call that anything but stupid from a policy perspective.
Yep, Internet usage is starting to look more and more like mind control. People are starting to be controlled by their "feed".
Some of the Apple iphone television ads almost did this. They were a sneaky way of teaching users the few steps that made some feature work on the phone. I think it's pretty clear that Jobs was pushing this because once he was gone the commercials reverted back to hollow "make it seem stylish" rather than "show them the three taps that make some cool thing actually happen on a real device", and you are left to guess what the three taps are. It's a great way to create the illusion of an intuitive interface. By the 4th time you've seen the commercial, you know exactly what to do when somebody puts the phone in your hand. But to make it work you have to absolutely insist that the real experience is like the commercial, which an actual advertising person would never do.
ergo it is tough to say you actually own the copy on the DVD. Thanks!
Wait, isn't the fact that it matters what region his itunes was set to a big problem? Being available for "purchase" but only usable in certain markets or under certain conditions is the essence of an attack on what ownership itself means, which was the whole point of the first discussion. Technically if you buy a DVD in region 1, in order to watch it in region 2 you basically have to commit a felony. How is that ownership? This is only getting worse.
I've never understood why card packs where the vendor determines the rarity and value of cards aren't gambling. I think in baseball cards the vendor didn't necessarily know in advance which cards would be the most valuable, as it depended on how the players did after the cards were made/sold. But pokemon cards are basically like slot machines or lottery tickets for kids, it's borderline evil.
Everyone here is assuming that Linus has been converted by the politeness police. Maybe he is genuinely seeking an objectively better way of doing things than flaming each other on a mailing list and the baggage that creates trying to keep it from becoming abusive. There is a good argument to be made that many of the negative aspects are a symptom of the mailing list medium and related processes.
I'm thinking this is more similar to the bitkeeper situation than I thought at first. In the endgame there, the bitkeeper people started trying to exclude developers by misusing the nastier licensing clauses. Here you have ragers on one side and politeness police on the other, waging a war on the list and in the community and even in the kernel code of conduct itself as others have pointed out. Wouldn't it be awesome if Linus could come up with some novel solution so that this war would just fade away? Like git did with other source control systems.
There's a balance. Too much of either flame or light-treading can lead to problems. The most difficult situations are where there is a mismatch of culture among individuals. i.e. where remarks that are not actually offensive are mistakenly taken as such due to poor wording and because people are expecting fire or where softening the language around a critical issue leads to it being not taken seriously by those expecting more fire.
As far as this case goes specifically, I have always had the impression that Linus was a little on the flame-y side but much in the same way that all drivers in San Francisco are jerks -- if you don't drive that way you're actually more likely to cause an accident because everyone is expecting it. But honestly I don't read enough lkml to know for sure. There is a line between flame and abuse, and if that gets crossed too often then there are problems.
Nope, you have been deceived by the Apple propaganda machine. Good capacitive touchscreens, made by others, made it "easy" on the iphone. I hate that people ignore all the research that went into making capacitive touchscreens work, and just give Apple all the kudos for being the first to market with a product that used them. The simple fact is that much of the way people interact with a capacitive screen (pinch, momentum) just doesn't work well on a resistive screen, despite known examples of people trying to make it work. Yet somehow when Apple puts together the previously tried mechanics with a new display type *developed by other companies* they suddenly "invented" it all. BS. This is obvious to anybody that has a clue. Apple doesn't hold patents on capacitive touch technologies, but instead holds "design" patents (not real patents) on the form factor.
Nice strawman there. Not that your argument make any sense in the first place. You're claiming there isn't a free market for water?
It was a well-known business model to offer cheap insurance and then drop people or charge them 10 times as much when they got sick. This isn't possible anymore under the ACA. A huge fraction of those saying "I can't get cheap insurance anymore" are people who were being ripped off and now are not. But they complain anyway.
Yep. I can't see this as anything other than the first step in the DoJ becoming the Ministry of Truth.
Also, the article say that the issue is being "fixed", but it is still unclear if an app with "network state" permission has access to the BSSID or base station mac, which in many cases effectively gives coarse location. I have often wondered whether requesting "network state" permission was a sneaky way to do geolocation, but never looked into it carefully. And, once again, my next question would be whether the information available to apps with network state permission is different for LineageOS.
Yeah, this is sad. I'm not sure what idiot at Google thought it was okay to broadcast wifi state info to apps that don't have permission to access the wifi state. I can see how it might be ambiguous whether the BSSID or the base station MAC are included in "wifi state" information, but obviously if I have denied an app permission to access wifi state I didn't just mean it can't request wifi state information, really I meant that it shouldn't be given it by the OS.
Another question: What information to these broadcasts contain in LineageOS?