I use Google's services, but not their products. Why? Because I avoid using any products that behave like and carry ToS like services. I avoid using products that introduce new classes of security holes.
I have watched Google Update's Firefox extensions launch remotely provided software and install it without my approval, for example... the same kind of behavior in Microsoft's HTML control that led me to ban IE and Outlook at our site over ten years ago. My doubts over Microsoft's security were well-founded then: shortly after I did this the first "cross zone" exploits and associated worms and other malware that took advantage of them came out.
As for the ToS...
11. Software updates
11.1 The Software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the Services and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. You agree to receive such updates (and permit Google to deliver these to you) as part of your use of the Services.
That kind of restriction is fine for a service that's running on their computers, but if your software is running on my computer I reserve the right to keep using an older version or NOT apply a patch if I believe that's in my best interest. A web browser running on my computer isn't a service. I'm sure this boilerplate comes from Google's services side, and their legal beagles just copied and pasted it over from that side, and I'm sure they'll fix it... but until they do, I'm not going to agree to it.
Writing some software and releasing it freely for other people to use it, *is* a political gesture: the only "pragmatical" thing to do with one's own work is to keep it for oneself, or sell it to others for a fee.
Have you ever sold software? There's nothing "pragmatic" about it. It's hard work, harder than writing the software in the first place. If the purpose of writing the software is to make money, that's one thing, but most of the software I've written I've written because I needed to solve a problem and if I didn't write the software it wouldn't get solved.
When you're actually using the software, giving it away is pragmatic: because if other people like it you get BETTER software back, from them. They use it, fix it, send you the code. If you're writing the software because you actually need it, rather than because you're creating it as a kind of art, then keeping it to yourself is a political statement... not a pragmatic one... because it just means you have to do all the work on updating and improving it yourself.
The problem is that GNU is becoming just as hurtful to the movement as those proprietary vendors once were.
Becoming?
Deliberately putting proprietary extensions in GCC to discourage people from using non-GPL compilers? There used to be several independent C compilers, but they couldn't compile code written for GCC because of all the GCC extensions like the short-circuit "?:" (you could leave the middle expression out) they didn't support. GCC has moved away from that kind of nonsense to a certain degree, now it's done its job.
Deliberately developing incompatible extended versions of languages Stallman didn't like, like the Tcl vs Guile debacle.
RMS was strongly anti-Linux for a time, until it was obvious that Hurd was doomed.
they do not see that what they've accomplished is inseparable from the ideology in which they believed.
A lot of us were involved in free and open software and technologies long before Stallman had his freakout over Emacs.
The first open operating system platform was the Software Tools virtual OS, which provided a free (as in beer and as in speech) and open platform for developing UNIX-like software on any OS. And it came out of AT&T Bell Laboratories.
GNU is just the radical wing of a vast ecosystem of free and open tools produced by people of many different opinions and, yes, even ideologies. If "We just want to help people use good stuff" is an ideology.
I last had an actual office of my own maybe 15 years ago. When we moved into cubicles one of the first things I did was bet headphones so I could listen to music when shout-into-speakerphone-man next to me started answering his voice mail on his speakerphone. One day my laptop cratered and I had to go borrow an empty office to repair it... the prattle from the next cubicle was so loud and distracting I couldn't even concentrate on installing Windows.
This was my first thought too. Unfriending them on FB won't eliminate the conflict of interest, it will simply make it harder for an opposing lawyer to discover it.
I don't think "open source hardware" is really that much like "open source software" unless you've got matter duplicators (like in Ralph Williams' story "Business as Usual, During Alterations"). It's more like publishing plans in Popular Mechanics or Howto books.
Been there, done that, applied the Preparation H, won't go there again.
I've still got (and read) books I bought 30-40 years ago. DRMed content is lucky to survive five years before the company decides keeping the magic servers up isn't profitable and you're unable to migrate the content to the next version of the platform... if there is one.
Yeh, it doesn't have the fancy screen, it's a bit like a late '90s PDA with a bigger screen, but I read ebooks on a late '90s PDA with a 160x160 display for several years.
If there was ever a case for a PSA, this is one...
"Hello, I'm the president of Facebook, and I am complete idiot. It never occurred to me that ordinary people might actually use the Internet for anything other than entertainment, and so might have real life medical conditions that I would be broadcasting to all their friends without even so much as asking them. Honest, I get my secretary to do all that stuff for me, I forgot not everyone has teams of enablers to take care of the little stuff..."
One of the reasons I switched back to PalmOS from Pocket PC was that my Jornada, even with the fat battery, couldn't go a long weekend of light use, or a weekend being used as a bookreader, without running flat. The iPaq was even worse.
Surely a lot of people read books in bed and would have no trouble putting their reader into a cradle before rolling over and going to sleep?
* fall asleep reading. * just plain forget. * spending the night away from home, forgot the cradle. * camping. Yes, somehow it's nicer to read a book on the top of a mountain....
If they didn't want to be prosecuted, they shouldn't have waved back to that kid in the supermarket who thought their hat looked funny.
I'm not saying the anti-abortion cranks SHOULDN'T have been prosecuted... I was all awash with schadenfreude over it myself... I'm saying that it was not the results any of them who thought RICO was just peachy was what they intended.
If you don't think this kind of decision is a problem, then you're suffering from a failure of imagination. Because this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to people suddenly discovering that yes, the law really DOES mean what it says.
You don't see a problem with laws being created just in case you need something to pin on an alleged perpetrator?
I'll bet that the people in favor of RICO never expected it would get applied to anti-abortion protesters. I suspect a good many of them WERE anti-abortion protesters.
The more bad laws out there, the more the state can "legitimately" arrest you for "driving while black", or "young", or "geeky", or "activist", or fill-in-the-blank. The more people end up ignoring real laws because they can't keep track of which ones are just there for entrapment purposes.
Because the law of unintended consequences isn't going to get repealed.
The ISS operates at a relatively low orbit, even for LEO... for example the Iridium constellation is about twice the ISS' altitude (760km vs 350km). They'd have to find a mission that's within the 400km range of the system, and that has room and power to spare.
Not to mention, what websites do you go to now that "aren't readable?" name 3.
I'll cut you a deal and name one. Slashdot Beta.
Slashdot light, with all the beta web 2.0 crap peeled off, is a classic 1998 website and infinitely superior to what Taco's turning it into. Worse, they've broken all the internal links so the only way you can avoid the image spam is through the home page. The story link from the comment takes you to a kind of "Web 1.5" version.
And Slashdot Beta is less "web 2.0" than most of the sites linked to.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Google's services, but not their products. Why? Because I avoid using any products that behave like and carry ToS like services. I avoid using products that introduce new classes of security holes.
I have watched Google Update's Firefox extensions launch remotely provided software and install it without my approval, for example... the same kind of behavior in Microsoft's HTML control that led me to ban IE and Outlook at our site over ten years ago. My doubts over Microsoft's security were well-founded then: shortly after I did this the first "cross zone" exploits and associated worms and other malware that took advantage of them came out.
As for the ToS...
That kind of restriction is fine for a service that's running on their computers, but if your software is running on my computer I reserve the right to keep using an older version or NOT apply a patch if I believe that's in my best interest. A web browser running on my computer isn't a service. I'm sure this boilerplate comes from Google's services side, and their legal beagles just copied and pasted it over from that side, and I'm sure they'll fix it... but until they do, I'm not going to agree to it.
Writing some software and releasing it freely for other people to use it, *is* a political gesture: the only "pragmatical" thing to do with one's own work is to keep it for oneself, or sell it to others for a fee.
Have you ever sold software? There's nothing "pragmatic" about it. It's hard work, harder than writing the software in the first place. If the purpose of writing the software is to make money, that's one thing, but most of the software I've written I've written because I needed to solve a problem and if I didn't write the software it wouldn't get solved.
When you're actually using the software, giving it away is pragmatic: because if other people like it you get BETTER software back, from them. They use it, fix it, send you the code. If you're writing the software because you actually need it, rather than because you're creating it as a kind of art, then keeping it to yourself is a political statement... not a pragmatic one... because it just means you have to do all the work on updating and improving it yourself.
Oooh. Pragmatic Smalltalk looks dead sexy.
The problem is that GNU is becoming just as hurtful to the movement as those proprietary vendors once were.
Becoming?
Deliberately putting proprietary extensions in GCC to discourage people from using non-GPL compilers? There used to be several independent C compilers, but they couldn't compile code written for GCC because of all the GCC extensions like the short-circuit "?:" (you could leave the middle expression out) they didn't support. GCC has moved away from that kind of nonsense to a certain degree, now it's done its job.
Deliberately developing incompatible extended versions of languages Stallman didn't like, like the Tcl vs Guile debacle.
RMS was strongly anti-Linux for a time, until it was obvious that Hurd was doomed.
This is not a new problem.
You don't need approval from FSF or RMS to call your software free and open. There was open software before Stallman had his hissy fit over Emacs.
they do not see that what they've accomplished is inseparable from the ideology in which they believed.
A lot of us were involved in free and open software and technologies long before Stallman had his freakout over Emacs.
The first open operating system platform was the Software Tools virtual OS, which provided a free (as in beer and as in speech) and open platform for developing UNIX-like software on any OS. And it came out of AT&T Bell Laboratories.
GNU is just the radical wing of a vast ecosystem of free and open tools produced by people of many different opinions and, yes, even ideologies. If "We just want to help people use good stuff" is an ideology.
Sigh. I miss GNUstep too.
I last had an actual office of my own maybe 15 years ago. When we moved into cubicles one of the first things I did was bet headphones so I could listen to music when shout-into-speakerphone-man next to me started answering his voice mail on his speakerphone. One day my laptop cratered and I had to go borrow an empty office to repair it... the prattle from the next cubicle was so loud and distracting I couldn't even concentrate on installing Windows.
Your boss is on crack.
Plus the DRMed versions cost about 3-4 times as much as the exact same books non-DRMed. What's up with that?
This was my first thought too. Unfriending them on FB won't eliminate the conflict of interest, it will simply make it harder for an opposing lawyer to discover it.
Yo, listen up, installing software is like giving a brother the pink slip to your ride.
Security is like sex. Once you're penetrated you're ****ed.
When you install software, you're having unsafe sex.
Don't do it lightly.
I'm reading Asimov's SF January 2010 edition right now.
I don't think "open source hardware" is really that much like "open source software" unless you've got matter duplicators (like in Ralph Williams' story "Business as Usual, During Alterations"). It's more like publishing plans in Popular Mechanics or Howto books.
Been there, done that, applied the Preparation H, won't go there again.
I've still got (and read) books I bought 30-40 years ago. DRMed content is lucky to survive five years before the company decides keeping the magic servers up isn't profitable and you're unable to migrate the content to the next version of the platform... if there is one.
How about $90?
Yeh, it doesn't have the fancy screen, it's a bit like a late '90s PDA with a bigger screen, but I read ebooks on a late '90s PDA with a 160x160 display for several years.
If there was ever a case for a PSA, this is one...
"Hello, I'm the president of Facebook, and I am complete idiot. It never occurred to me that ordinary people might actually use the Internet for anything other than entertainment, and so might have real life medical conditions that I would be broadcasting to all their friends without even so much as asking them. Honest, I get my secretary to do all that stuff for me, I forgot not everyone has teams of enablers to take care of the little stuff..."
And all this time we thought Google wanted companies to trust them for their business applications.
I guess he's basically saying, putting anything that actually matters into Google Apps is something you shouldn't be doing.
One of the reasons I switched back to PalmOS from Pocket PC was that my Jornada, even with the fat battery, couldn't go a long weekend of light use, or a weekend being used as a bookreader, without running flat. The iPaq was even worse.
Surely a lot of people read books in bed and would have no trouble putting their reader into a cradle before rolling over and going to sleep?
* fall asleep reading. ...
* just plain forget.
* spending the night away from home, forgot the cradle.
* camping. Yes, somehow it's nicer to read a book on the top of a mountain.
Apple doesn't make anything that doesn't get them at least 30% margins.
If they didn't want to be prosecuted, they shouldn't have waved back to that kid in the supermarket who thought their hat looked funny.
I'm not saying the anti-abortion cranks SHOULDN'T have been prosecuted... I was all awash with schadenfreude over it myself... I'm saying that it was not the results any of them who thought RICO was just peachy was what they intended.
If you don't think this kind of decision is a problem, then you're suffering from a failure of imagination. Because this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to people suddenly discovering that yes, the law really DOES mean what it says.
You don't see a problem with laws being created just in case you need something to pin on an alleged perpetrator?
I'll bet that the people in favor of RICO never expected it would get applied to anti-abortion protesters. I suspect a good many of them WERE anti-abortion protesters.
The more bad laws out there, the more the state can "legitimately" arrest you for "driving while black", or "young", or "geeky", or "activist", or fill-in-the-blank. The more people end up ignoring real laws because they can't keep track of which ones are just there for entrapment purposes.
Because the law of unintended consequences isn't going to get repealed.
The ISS operates at a relatively low orbit, even for LEO... for example the Iridium constellation is about twice the ISS' altitude (760km vs 350km). They'd have to find a mission that's within the 400km range of the system, and that has room and power to spare.
My post has links to security models of all 3 smart phone platforms.
You obviously didn't read any of them. For one example, here's the data security model for Symbian:
This is exactly the same as on a desktop, and even MORE open than what's being complained about in this story.
Not to mention, what websites do you go to now that "aren't readable?" name 3.
I'll cut you a deal and name one. Slashdot Beta.
Slashdot light, with all the beta web 2.0 crap peeled off, is a classic 1998 website and infinitely superior to what Taco's turning it into. Worse, they've broken all the internal links so the only way you can avoid the image spam is through the home page. The story link from the comment takes you to a kind of "Web 1.5" version.
And Slashdot Beta is less "web 2.0" than most of the sites linked to.