OK, let's go back a ways and look at the weirdest storage systems.
Mercury delay lines are a good one. Delay lines in general, actually. I recall readong once about a free-space delay line using a laser beam between Earth and a retroreflector on the moon.
The cost per message of sending junk mail through the post office is significant enough that there's an incentive for junk mailers to reduce the number of messages thay send, to the point where lists of good prospects can cost many times the actual cost of producing the mailings (which have to be printed, addressed, and physically mailed) and mailing them, because it's more profitable to send out 1000 letters to people who have responded to solicitations before than 100,000 letters to people who never even buy mail-order. Plus, the post office actually makes a profit on junk mail that subsidizes personal mail.
The result? I get maybe 4 or 5 pieces of junk mail a day, on a heavy day.
The cost per message of sending email through the internet is negligible. It is cheaper for spammers to actually pay the occasional judgement against aggressive spam fighters than to filter even well known high profile anti-spammers from their lists... let alone people who just don't want the stuff. It's cheaper for them to pay fines for violating do-not-spam lists where they exist than to use them. And they don't pay for any of the infrastructure that they're abusing.
The result? At one point I had to block several countries access to port 25 at the router because the junk mail traffic to my server was costing me $750 a month in excess traffic charges, and even just handling "HELO...MAIL FROM...RCPT TO...denied" was pushing things.
There's a barrier to entry for bloggers who do want to do legwork. They don't get the same access as reporters. Can they get into the city council meetings to report on them? Council meetings, probably, but there's lots of other places they can't.
As I said in another message: the question isn't whether bloggers will have to do the work reporters, the question is will they be allowed to?
I had to renew my domain with Network Solutions before they would LET ME transfer it, because once they sent that renewal notice they put it in "hold" status... even though it had 3 weeks left. Tucows were great about it and comped me an extra year for the year that Network Solutions forced me to re-up for.
It sounds like the insurance payout's worth more to them than a satellite with a drastically shortened lifespan, so they're using the patent as an excuse not to do the recovery.
If you read the article, the logic makes sense. The monkey is revealing a preference in the first experiment, and that changes the odds for the second experiment in a counterintuitive way.
The Power 6 CPU is not just fast, but according to this paper from IBM it's also already dual-core and includes an SMP switch to allow up to 64 cores (32 chips) to run coherently.
That is, IBM has really fast ticket agents, AND they can fit a lot of them at the ticket counter.
The small amount of parallelism in today's multi-core processors isn't all that impressive. When they have 30 or 40 cores then I'll start getting excited.
Also, if you're trying to do something that doesn't parallelise well, like flying a plane, it doesn't matter how many ticket agents you have.
The article does not say that they were able to get behind the energy management system firewall or not. Depending on the firewall and server architecture getting inside that firewall may be easy or it may be impractically hard.
By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution.
That could mean they had compromised systems on the EMS LAN, or it could mean that they had access to desktops on the corporate LAN that had been given some kind of operator access to the EMS LAN. Best practices in the industry include restricting operator access to systems behind the EMS firewall, restricting those systems access to the Internet, and requiring the operator access Internet resources from physically separate computers on a separate physical LAN than the dispatcher and operator consoles, and corporate LAN access limited to an EMS DMZ hosting reports "pushed" from the EMS LAN.
The implications of public access to email are not lost on me, and that doesn't change anything in our previous discussion, as you well know.
No, I don't know that, because you don't seem to have addressed the network effect that leads to abuse like spamming at all. Whether that's because I was making too subtle a point, or you were making to subtle a response, I don't know, but if you would prefer to avoid the issue there's nothing much I can do about it.
Google is making this public in a way that pay services do not. The only services that have been freely available in the past have been ones limited to people with a house on the market. Making it free completely changes the way it will be used, as almost anyone who has had an email account in the past decade should be able to attest to. You do use email, don't you?
Google Street View has benefits, and costs. Social benefits and social costs. Recognizing those costs isn't "Google-bashing". Pretending they don't exist, well, you seem upset when I call it what I think it is, so I won't repeat it.
The sheer classical irony of the US government both fighting the drug war and subsidizing dangerous and addictive drugs beats the simple bullet-headedness of Iraq. Plus, tobacco subsidies have staying power.
I'm just pointing out that it's a bit like saying "if you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I look at you as I pass you on the street."
If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I photograph you as I pass you in the street, and post that to the net. If you have nothing to hide, you won't mind if everyone does. If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I hack up a script with his face recognition software so that anyone can track anyone no matter where they go? If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if burglars can use this to see who's just bought a new TV, and can use this to see who's not going to be home soon?
Pretty much everyone has something to hide, legitimately.
I'll point out that totalitarian governments world-wide would laugh at this conversation in awe that a society could be so paranoid as to fear someone taking a picture of your house and putting it up on the Web with a clear and easy to use way to have it removed.
You have to know that it's being done, first. Maybe 1% of the population knows that Google's street view exists.
Right now, it's only Google's Street View. In ten years, how many will there be? How many will be real-time? How many will have the capabilities that I brought up in the first paragraph?
Once it's there, the fact that you've chosen to have your house's picture removed will draw attention from people who think that "If you have nothing to hide" why do you care?
It's a woops. It's not a "OMG Google is teh evil!!1"
Friend, I said that myself. It is, however, a whoops. And the more people do this, the more whoopses there will be. And this will be part of the precedent that determines how those whoopses are treated.
You don't go off and sue someone for invading the privacy of your your home when all they did was take a picture of your front yard.
You sue them for invading your privacy because they were trespassing and took a photo of your back yard, from private property, without your permission. The ideal result of this would be for Google to end up making some kind of modest settlement (which isn't hard, the Borings didn't demand an outrageous amount... they may not actually net anything out of 25k after legal fees) and work out a better protocol for dealing with things like this. And other companies that set up things like this will be more careful than they would otherwise be.
I'm not sure what mechanism you're proposing for discovering these issues.
I'm not proposing any mechanisms. Google's got a lot of people who are a lot better at this than me, they're just not currently motivated to do anything about it.
You're not talking about "opting out," you're talking about being allowed to remove your house's image from only one of the dozens of databases in which it exists and is made public to one degree or another.
That's right. That's what "opting out" means, in practice. That's what the Direct Marketing Association wanted people to have to do to get out of being spammed, back before the spammers proved that the DMA was toothless even among their own members.
Or were you not aware that services have been selling this service to real estate companies for years?
They're not making them public the way Google has, except in some cases for people who have actually put their home on the market, and even then they're not broadly searchable the way Google's database is. They're also not bringing the problem to public attention the way Google has.
And your analysis of the risk involved in someone's garage door being available on the Web for "searching" is...?
You're STILL mixing up separate issues. I'm not going to do that. There's two issues here:
1. What are the boundaries of what kind of things people doing things like Google need to follow. Trespassing in the course of gathering the information is probably one boundary that needs to be maintained.
Was the property marked "No Trespassing"? I did't see any signs stating that it was.
Trespassing is illegal whether the property is posted or not. If it's not clear that a property is private land, then it should be posted, but that doesn't seem to be the situation in either case.
I note they have a photo of the house on the tax assessor site.
Was it taken from private or public land?
They're just looking at deep pockets here.
They're not asking for millions. If they asked for an outrageous amount I would agree. If they asked for less it wouldn't establish the precedent that they say they're trying to establish.
My concern is the fact that anybody considers "if you have nothing to hide, then what is the problem?" as some kind of serious response to anything.
I mean, you're just asking for me to invoke Godwin's Law. You know that
But to get down to specifics:
* In the case of the Borings, the Google van went down a private road (not a public street) to photograph the Boring's backyard.
* In the case of the McKees, the Google van went onto their property (not a public street).
The fact that mistakes like these are inevitable doesn't mean that they should be dismissed. Whatever the cause of these mistakes, Google needs to deal with them and have a better policy than individual "opt out" for these cases. Not only that but there's a public interest in actually having Google pay the Borings, making sure that other companies that don't have "don't be evil" as their slogan know that if they screw up they'll have to pay for screwing up.
* The issues of having to opt-out of a relationship with every company that might want to have a relationship with you (however tentative) when the magnifying power of the Internet is involved should be obvious to everyone who has an email address.
* The effects of making previously obscure information publicly available and electronically searchable are also well known.
If we're in the Transparent Society already, well, it may be unavoidable and it may be better than the alternatives but we need to have a public dialog about how to deal with it. This article is part of that public dialog.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this comment on the story is pretty insightful:
When you start talking pre-emptively about your competitor's vapor, you're officially worried.
OK, let's go back a ways and look at the weirdest storage systems.
Mercury delay lines are a good one. Delay lines in general, actually. I recall readong once about a free-space delay line using a laser beam between Earth and a retroreflector on the moon.
CRT storage tubes are another.
It costs the USPS money to deliver it.
It costs the USPS less to deliver junk mail than the mailer paid.
It costs the USPS more to deliver personal mail than the mailer paid.
Junk mail subsidizes personal mail.
The cost per message of sending junk mail through the post office is significant enough that there's an incentive for junk mailers to reduce the number of messages thay send, to the point where lists of good prospects can cost many times the actual cost of producing the mailings (which have to be printed, addressed, and physically mailed) and mailing them, because it's more profitable to send out 1000 letters to people who have responded to solicitations before than 100,000 letters to people who never even buy mail-order. Plus, the post office actually makes a profit on junk mail that subsidizes personal mail.
The result? I get maybe 4 or 5 pieces of junk mail a day, on a heavy day.
The cost per message of sending email through the internet is negligible. It is cheaper for spammers to actually pay the occasional judgement against aggressive spam fighters than to filter even well known high profile anti-spammers from their lists... let alone people who just don't want the stuff. It's cheaper for them to pay fines for violating do-not-spam lists where they exist than to use them. And they don't pay for any of the infrastructure that they're abusing.
The result? At one point I had to block several countries access to port 25 at the router because the junk mail traffic to my server was costing me $750 a month in excess traffic charges, and even just handling "HELO...MAIL FROM...RCPT TO...denied" was pushing things.
There's a barrier to entry for bloggers who do want to do legwork. They don't get the same access as reporters. Can they get into the city council meetings to report on them? Council meetings, probably, but there's lots of other places they can't.
As I said in another message: the question isn't whether bloggers will have to do the work reporters, the question is will they be allowed to?
I mean I got an extra year (two years total) after the transfer.
I had to renew my domain with Network Solutions before they would LET ME transfer it, because once they sent that renewal notice they put it in "hold" status... even though it had 3 weeks left. Tucows were great about it and comped me an extra year for the year that Network Solutions forced me to re-up for.
It sounds like the insurance payout's worth more to them than a satellite with a drastically shortened lifespan, so they're using the patent as an excuse not to do the recovery.
Yes, we know that, the whole point of the article is that the original model may have been mistaken.
If you read the article, the logic makes sense. The monkey is revealing a preference in the first experiment, and that changes the odds for the second experiment in a counterintuitive way.
The Power 6 CPU is not just fast, but according to this paper from IBM it's also already dual-core and includes an SMP switch to allow up to 64 cores (32 chips) to run coherently.
That is, IBM has really fast ticket agents, AND they can fit a lot of them at the ticket counter.
The small amount of parallelism in today's multi-core processors isn't all that impressive. When they have 30 or 40 cores then I'll start getting excited.
Also, if you're trying to do something that doesn't parallelise well, like flying a plane, it doesn't matter how many ticket agents you have.
That could mean they had compromised systems on the EMS LAN, or it could mean that they had access to desktops on the corporate LAN that had been given some kind of operator access to the EMS LAN. Best practices in the industry include restricting operator access to systems behind the EMS firewall, restricting those systems access to the Internet, and requiring the operator access Internet resources from physically separate computers on a separate physical LAN than the dispatcher and operator consoles, and corporate LAN access limited to an EMS DMZ hosting reports "pushed" from the EMS LAN.
The implications of public access to email are not lost on me, and that doesn't change anything in our previous discussion, as you well know.
No, I don't know that, because you don't seem to have addressed the network effect that leads to abuse like spamming at all. Whether that's because I was making too subtle a point, or you were making to subtle a response, I don't know, but if you would prefer to avoid the issue there's nothing much I can do about it.
Google is making this public in a way that pay services do not. The only services that have been freely available in the past have been ones limited to people with a house on the market. Making it free completely changes the way it will be used, as almost anyone who has had an email account in the past decade should be able to attest to. You do use email, don't you?
Google Street View has benefits, and costs. Social benefits and social costs. Recognizing those costs isn't "Google-bashing". Pretending they don't exist, well, you seem upset when I call it what I think it is, so I won't repeat it.
The sheer classical irony of the US government both fighting the drug war and subsidizing dangerous and addictive drugs beats the simple bullet-headedness of Iraq. Plus, tobacco subsidies have staying power.
I'm just pointing out that it's a bit like saying "if you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I look at you as I pass you on the street."
If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I photograph you as I pass you in the street, and post that to the net. If you have nothing to hide, you won't mind if everyone does. If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I hack up a script with his face recognition software so that anyone can track anyone no matter where they go? If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if burglars can use this to see who's just bought a new TV, and can use this to see who's not going to be home soon?
Pretty much everyone has something to hide, legitimately.
I'll point out that totalitarian governments world-wide would laugh at this conversation in awe that a society could be so paranoid as to fear someone taking a picture of your house and putting it up on the Web with a clear and easy to use way to have it removed.
You have to know that it's being done, first. Maybe 1% of the population knows that Google's street view exists.
Right now, it's only Google's Street View. In ten years, how many will there be? How many will be real-time? How many will have the capabilities that I brought up in the first paragraph?
Once it's there, the fact that you've chosen to have your house's picture removed will draw attention from people who think that "If you have nothing to hide" why do you care?
It's a woops. It's not a "OMG Google is teh evil!!1"
Friend, I said that myself. It is, however, a whoops. And the more people do this, the more whoopses there will be. And this will be part of the precedent that determines how those whoopses are treated.
You don't go off and sue someone for invading the privacy of your your home when all they did was take a picture of your front yard.
You sue them for invading your privacy because they were trespassing and took a photo of your back yard, from private property, without your permission. The ideal result of this would be for Google to end up making some kind of modest settlement (which isn't hard, the Borings didn't demand an outrageous amount... they may not actually net anything out of 25k after legal fees) and work out a better protocol for dealing with things like this. And other companies that set up things like this will be more careful than they would otherwise be.
I'm not sure what mechanism you're proposing for discovering these issues.
I'm not proposing any mechanisms. Google's got a lot of people who are a lot better at this than me, they're just not currently motivated to do anything about it.
You're not talking about "opting out," you're talking about being allowed to remove your house's image from only one of the dozens of databases in which it exists and is made public to one degree or another.
That's right. That's what "opting out" means, in practice. That's what the Direct Marketing Association wanted people to have to do to get out of being spammed, back before the spammers proved that the DMA was toothless even among their own members.
Or were you not aware that services have been selling this service to real estate companies for years?
They're not making them public the way Google has, except in some cases for people who have actually put their home on the market, and even then they're not broadly searchable the way Google's database is. They're also not bringing the problem to public attention the way Google has.
And your analysis of the risk involved in someone's garage door being available on the Web for "searching" is...?
You're STILL mixing up separate issues. I'm not going to do that. There's two issues here:
1. What are the boundaries of what kind of things people doing things like Google need to follow. Trespassing in the course of gathering the information is probably one boundary that needs to be maintained.
Further research reveals that classical mistake #1 is "Never march on Moscow", and #2 is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia".
The summary of this article is wrong. Apple has not filed suit, Apple has filed an objection. There is a difference!
War on drugs and tobacco subsidies.
Was the property marked "No Trespassing"? I did't see any signs stating that it was.
Trespassing is illegal whether the property is posted or not. If it's not clear that a property is private land, then it should be posted, but that doesn't seem to be the situation in either case.
I note they have a photo of the house on the tax assessor site.
Was it taken from private or public land?
They're just looking at deep pockets here.
They're not asking for millions. If they asked for an outrageous amount I would agree. If they asked for less it wouldn't establish the precedent that they say they're trying to establish.
I'm just left stunned. What's the concern here?
My concern is the fact that anybody considers "if you have nothing to hide, then what is the problem?" as some kind of serious response to anything.
I mean, you're just asking for me to invoke Godwin's Law. You know that
But to get down to specifics:
* In the case of the Borings, the Google van went down a private road (not a public street) to photograph the Boring's backyard.
* In the case of the McKees, the Google van went onto their property (not a public street).
The fact that mistakes like these are inevitable doesn't mean that they should be dismissed. Whatever the cause of these mistakes, Google needs to deal with them and have a better policy than individual "opt out" for these cases. Not only that but there's a public interest in actually having Google pay the Borings, making sure that other companies that don't have "don't be evil" as their slogan know that if they screw up they'll have to pay for screwing up.
* The issues of having to opt-out of a relationship with every company that might want to have a relationship with you (however tentative) when the magnifying power of the Internet is involved should be obvious to everyone who has an email address.
* The effects of making previously obscure information publicly available and electronically searchable are also well known.
If we're in the Transparent Society already, well, it may be unavoidable and it may be better than the alternatives but we need to have a public dialog about how to deal with it. This article is part of that public dialog.
Um, we're talking about games like "Postal" here? Don't they come pre-goatse'd?
Shedding is still too explicit. How about "rightsizing"?
Wouldn't Death be familiar with that gambit by now?